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There is this photo tightly framed between glass and frame. A girl in a bikini watches the sea while you drown in the heat of your room. The wallpaper peels off, and you climb onto the bed only to return to bend over your typewriter. It requires "Barton Fink style" to talk about a Wrestler, a giant in underpants yet capable of love. The word Capital, fade out, and now shoot: what is this brute supposed to do? It needs a villain, a child, a love. That’s what sells, not your interest in the common man.
You immerse yourself in the heat of Los Angeles and disappear. No one sees you, no one hears you, no one is what they seem to be. You wander like a possessed man, then return to stare at the fan resting on your desk. Nothing comes out of your hands. Your sensitivity has pulled a fast one on you, damn scribbler!...
It starts as a comedy, the usual Coen-style comedy, marked by nervous and dark humor as much as it can be and ends up being a j'accuse to everyday boredom, that boredom that reeks of anguish.
Barton Fink (1991) is the work of the Coens, pranksters in this post-modern drift, more loaded with symbols and interpretations. It is an external journey towards success (only potential) and an internal journey towards madness, towards illness, epicenter of the human earthquake. Everything becomes thin, intangible as time passes. Barton’s beard grows and it becomes impossible to understand. Is it all a dream or a story that finally Fink has started writing?
Everything reduced to the bone. Dry dialogues and narration made of synthesis. Laconic characters and elusive, ridiculous traits. Barton Fink seems like a creature of Cesare Pavese, both for style and troubles (and the physical resemblance between John Turturro and the last Pavese is not negligible). One of those misfits wandering the world without recognizing others and never knowing himself, abandoning himself to the only possible solution: imagining, escaping.
...Barton walks with his package under his arm. He has seen strange things, with a madman's gaze. He sits on the sand, looks up, watches a wave break on a rock, and that cursed photo of the girl in a bikini is in front of his eyes again.
« Stefano knew that this country had nothing strange, and that people lived there, day by day, and the land yielded, and the sea, like on any beach. Stefano was happy with the sea, imagining it as the fourth wall of his prison, a vast wall of colors and coolness, into which he could enter and forget the cell. » C.Pavese; The Prison.
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