(Originally posted at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat by Sean T. Collins.)
The 13 Days of Halloween: Day 4
10. Barton Fink, dir. Joel & Ethan Coen
“I’m having some trouble getting started.”
So says our hero, and so says me. I always find that the beginning of a piece is the hardest part to write. Once you’ve got your beginning, all your decisions are pretty much made for you--that introductory section contains their seeds. And that’s the pressure of writing the beginning in the first place: You know that this is the most important part, that this will dictate where you can go and what you can do when you get there.
Shall we test this theory? Please let’s do: The beginning of Barton Fink consists of a close-up of wallpaper, then the prolonged and precipitous descent of a stage weight.
Staring and sinking--yes, that’s pretty much how it goes from there on in.
Barton Fink is a very, very frightening film. Yet for all that it’s rarely classified as horror. Perhaps this is because writers, when reflecting on the movie, find it difficult to get past the fact that it mirrors nightmares almost too personal to their profession to achieve the universality necessary for great horror. It is, after all, a movie about writer’s block. But to paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola, this film is not about writer’s block--this film is writer’s block. It’s as if the Coen Brothers managed to crack open their title character’s brain and infect the entire world of the film with its ossified contents. Like writer’s block itself, the movie is slow, sticky, with random intrusions of the disturbing and absurd. Everything drips--the temperamental wallpaper in the Hotel Earle, the infected ear of Barton’s next-room neighbor Charlie, Barton’s hands during his bathroom meeting with his idol Bill Mayhew, Charlie’s mouth as he reacts to an unpleasant discovery in Barton’s room. The camera, too, seems tacky and tensile, tracking in and out lugubriously like a strand of old chewing gum pulled from someone’s mouth. Barton stares at his wallpaper, his ceiling, his bathroom floor, his typewriter, the pages he's writing on--stares and stares, and the camera just worms right into whatever he's looking at. Sounds--a bell, a mosquito, the hotel room doors, the noises of neighbors--cling to the ear like clothes to the body on a humid day. Even the music oozes, with eerie strings playing endless notes as piano chords trickle down around them.
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