Released in 1991, the Coen brothers’ fourth feature premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was greeted with enthusiastic acclaim, winning three top prizes: the Palme d’Or for Best Film as well as Best Director and Best Actor (John Turturro). No film had won this many top prizes in over forty years, a circumstance that prompted Cannes officials to introduce a new rule prohibiting any future film from winning more than two of the highest awards.
Written during a three-week ‘vacation’ from work on the script of Miller’s Crossing (which the Coens were having trouble finishing), the story of Barton Fink takes us back to 1941 Hollywood to chronicle a bizarre episode in the life of Barton Fink (Turturro), a left-wing New York playwright who wants to establish ‘a new living theatre of, about, and for the common man’. Although he has doubts about selling his talent, he is tempted by a lucrative salary to do a stint as screenwriter for a Hollywood movie studio, where Barton soon discovers he is out of his element and experiences a nightmarish bout of writer’s block.
Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Barton Fink checks into the ghostly Hotel Earle where he is greeted by pale, vaguely uncanny desk clerk, ‘Chet’ (Steve Buscemi) who ascends to meet the new guest from a trapdoor in the floor. Chet directs Barton to the sparsely furnished rented room where the writer will live and work, comforted only by the painted image of a bathing beauty hanging over his desk. The only other tenant Barton meets during his sojourn is Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), an insurance salesman with whom Barton occasionally wrestles and discusses ‘the life of the mind’. Charlie has stories he wants the writer to hear, but Barton is so pompously self-absorbed he doesn’t listen.
When Barton meets the Capitol Pictures studio boss, Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), and his assistant Lou (Jon Polito), they proclaim that ‘the writer is king at Capitol Pictures’, and promptly inform Barton that his first assignment is a ‘Wallace Beery wrestling picture’, a movie genre Barton has trouble imagining. He seeks guidance from producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub) and from W. P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), whom Barton considers the greatest novelist of the time. Unfortunately, the great novelist is an alcoholic and of little help to Barton, who in desperation turns to Mayhew’s secretary and personal assistant Audrey (Judy Davis) to help him get his wrestling picture started. Audrey, its turns out, is well suited to the task of scriptdoctoring, having ghost written much of Mayhew’s Hollywood output. She seems to have a neurotic compulsion to seduce writers and ends up sleeping with Barton.
The next morning Audrey is inexplicably dead, gruesomely murdered in Barton’s bed. Charlie, the friendly neighbour, intercedes and removes the corpse, then vanishes, saying he is going on a business trip to the head office and leaving a box with Barton for safe keeping. During Charlie’s absence, Barton is suddenly inspired to write the screenplay for the wrestling movie, completing it in a burst of creative energy. Meanwhile, police detectives visit the Hotel Earle questioning Barton about Charlie, whom they accuse of being Karl ‘Madman’ Mundt, a serial killer who decapitates his victims. Barton hurries off to a meeting with Lipnick, who angrily rejects Barton’s work as ‘fruity’ nonsense, announcing that Barton’s script will not be produced, nor will anything he writes for Capitol Pictures until he ‘grows up’ enough to comprehend that movies produced by his studio are entertainment products designed for mass consumption and maximum profit, and not to raise the social consciousness of Hollywood’s consumer audiences.
Meanwhile, the police detectives’ allegations against Charlie now prove to be true when his alter-ego returns to the hotel, which has mysteriously burst into hellish flames, violently murdering the detectives and repeatedly shouting ‘I’ll show you the life of the mind!’ After Charlie frees Barton, who had been shackled to his bed by the cops, he explains that he murdered the detectives because Barton, the champion of the common man Charlie clearly represents, had failed to ‘listen’ to him. Dazed by the absurd events that have just taken place, Barton collects the box, which Charlie now claims does not belong to him after all, leaves the Hotel Earle, which is still a raging inferno, and wanders onto a sunny beach where he sees a beautiful young woman who looks exactly like the bathing beauty in the picture that hung in his room at the Hotel Earle. ‘Are you in pictures?’ Barton innocently asks her. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she laughs, turns her back to him, and assumes exactly the same pose as the woman in the painting.
The critical response to Barton Fink was, somewhat surprisingly, very positive. Despite the fact that many considered the film, as Geoff Andrew words it, ‘perversely weird’, the critics generally had good things to say about it. Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it ‘an exhilarating original’ and considered it proof that the Coen brothers could do something ‘significant’. Rita Kempley sang her usual praises, calling Barton Fink ‘rapturously funny, strangely bittersweet, moderately horrifying’ – ‘a cineaste’s landmark on a par with [David Lynch’s] Blue Velvet’. Writing for the Daily Mail, Shaun Usher judged Barton Fink ‘a film of the decade’, but still harbored doubts about its meaning, calling it ‘a house of in-joke trump cards’ which the Coens ‘burn down, leaving the viewer to sift through the ashes for message and moral’. Searching for meaning, Roger Ebert speculated that the relationship between Barton and Charlie was ‘an emblem of the rise of Nazism’, writing that the Coens ‘paint Fink as an ineffectual and impotent left-wing intellectual, who does not understand that for many common men fascism had a seductive appeal’. Stanley Kaufmann was less impressed, writing that ‘not since Robert Altman has any American filmmaker been as overrated as this pair’. Terrence Rafferty of the New Yorker voiced the familiar complaint that Barton Fink, like all of the Coens’ films, is ‘an empty tour de force’. What Rafferty thought most ‘dismaying’ about the movie, however, was that ‘the filmmakers seem inordinately pleased with its hermetic meaninglessness’.
Much of the confusion about the meaning of Barton Fink is likely caused by the sheer complexity of its intertextual design. Previously, the Coens had limited their intertextual dialogue to a single authorial source (Cain in Blood Simple, Hammett in Miller’s Crossing). Barton Fink breaks from this pattern to borrow from a multiplicity of sources including historical accounts of old Hollywood, author biographies and a wide range of literary, cinematic and cultural sources. Many critics loved the film for the very reason that it did not serve a mass audience. A complex intertextual pastiche, it relies heavily on literary sources that might seem obscure to today’s viewer, making it difficult to see the oblique humour of the Coens’ highly referential in-joking. With Barton Fink the Coens continue to showcase their knowledge and appreciation of the American literary tradition. In addition to their main sources, which include the biographies and writings of playwright Clifford Odets and novelists William Faulkner and Nathanael West, all important literary figures in old Hollywood, they also incorporate an impressive array of other literary sources, ranging from Shakespeare to the Holy Bible. Generically, Barton Fink is a departure from films like Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing, both shaped predominantly by film noir. It is also a genre pastiche – a hybrid mix of noir, horror, surrealism and comedy. In this regard, it has been compared with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, whose story of a writer living in a haunted hotel and his descent into madness has obvious affinities with Barton’s stay at the Hotel Earle and whose signature tracking shots down long hotel corridors are mimicked by the Coens’ cinematographer Roger Deakins. Roman Polanski’s early films Repulsion and The Tenant, which like The Shining portray hotels and rented rooms as horrifying, degenerate entities corrupted by an unknown evil, have been suggested as close relatives. ‘It’s kind of a Polanski movie,’ admits Ethan. ‘It’s closer to that than anything else’ (Allen 2006: 56). Such filmic points of references notwithstanding, the most prominent and potentially meaningful sources for the Coens’ intertext are drawn from literature. If there is a way to construct meaning in Barton Fink, it must begin with an understanding of literary elements that form the basis for much of the film’s elaborate pastiche.
The Writer in Old Hollywood
Many commentators thought Barton Fink was intended as a satire on old Hollywood as a commercial trap that ensnared some of the greatest American authors of that time: William Faulkner, Clifford Odets, Nathanael West and many others. Thus Jami Bernard wrote for the New York Post that the film is ‘a vicious satire of how Hollywood grinds creative minds to pulp in the service of an audience it barely understands’. One could say, somewhat differently, that as a pastiche Barton Fink functions much like the classic Hollywood movie mill, grinding up the texts of prior talents, both literary and cinematic, combining them to create a pulp sublime that its audience barely understands. While the Coens admit that Odets and Faulkner provided models for the characterisations of both Barton and Mayhew, generally the filmmakers claim not to have done much research into the history of old Hollywood. They do, however, mention Otto Friedrich’s City of Nets (1986), a history of Hollywood during the 1940s, as an inspiration: ‘It was one of the things that started us thinking about Hollywood as a setting,’ they say, ‘but we didn’t go out and do research beyond it’ (Allen 2006: 60). Despite such claims, the setting, characters and scenes depicted in Barton Fink present an accurate, if satirically distorted, portrait of the Hollywood movie business in the classic era of the 1930s and 1940s when the major studios operated like industrial factories with the ‘mogul’ executive producer at the top of the power-pyramid and the screenwriter close to the bottom.
Another prominent literary author who worked as a scriptwriter in the Hollywood industry was Raymond Chandler, one of the Coens’ most admired writers. Although they make no specific mention of Chandler in relation to Barton Fink, many of Chandler’s thoughts on the Hollywood movie industry in the classic era apply to the predicament of the film’s central character, a playwright turned studio scriptwriter. Chandler’s best and most concise thinking on Hollywood as the ‘dream factory’ is found in his 1945 essay ‘Writers in Hollywood’, where Chandler, with measured sarcasm, shares his impressions of the old studio system and its treatment of screenwriters. As a novelist who made his living for a while as screenwriter, Chandler had first-hand experience of the Hollywood writer’s plight. He was one of many literary authors lured to Hollywood by the promise of lavish salaries offered by the major studios. Lamenting that the motion picture industry, with its vast financial resources and ‘magic techniques’, ought to produce ‘an art which is capable of making all but the very best plays look trivial and contrived, all but the very best novels verbose and imitative’, Chandler describes the movie-making process as ‘an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything more than credit-stealing and self-promotion’ (1995a: 993). The inflated egos he refers to belong mostly to the ‘mogul’ producers who fancy themselves the real creators of the motion picture because they think that the writers, knowing next to nothing about ‘making pictures’, cannot possibly know how to write them properly and thus that the producer must teach the writer how to do his job. These producers, whom Chandler dubs ‘the showmen of Hollywood’, exert absolute control over the creative process and, in Chandler’s view, ‘thereby degrade it’, As a result, argues Chandler, ‘there is no art of the screenplay, and there never will be as long as the system lasts, for it is the essence of this system that it seeks to exploit talent without permitting it the right to be a talent’, The studio system, he concludes, ‘can only destroy the talent’ (1995a: 994).
Jack Lipnick: ‘The writer is king here at Capitol Pictures!’
These Hollywood moguls who thwart literary talent imported from the East Coast intelligentsia tend to be, in Chandler’s words, ‘low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floor-walker with delusions of grandeur’ (1995a: 997). This stereotype is roundly parodied in Barton Fink with the character of Jack Lipnick, head of Capitol Pictures, who the Coens say is a composite caricature based on studio bosses Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn and Jack Warner. As portrayed by Michael Lerner, Lipnick bears a physical resemblance to Mayer, has the vulgar mouth of Cohn and the bombastic manner of Warner, who inspired the idea to have Lipnick appear at the end wearing a military uniform (which Warner was actually reported to have done). Lipnick is also a Jew (another Hollywood stereotype) who brags to Barton: ‘I’m bigger and meaner and louder than any other kike in this town.’ Stereotype or not, it is well known that many studio heads in old Hollywood were of Jewish descent, born in Central or Eastern Europe, but, anxious to assimilate into American culture, they often disavowed their heritage. Louis B. Mayer was a Russian Jew from Minsk, a fact that makes its way into the Coens’ script when Lipnick tells Barton: ‘I’m from New York myself – well, Minsk if you wanna go way back, which we won’t if you don’t mind and I ain’t askin’.’ Harry Cohn, a Jew but also openly anti-Semitic, liked to boast that the only Jewish actors he hired at Columbia Pictures played Indians, a historical anecdote parodied in Barton Fink when Barton introduces himself to producer Ben Geisler (also Jewish) who immediately asks the (obviously Jewish) Barton: ‘Ever act? We need Indians for a Norman Steele western.’ When Barton declines the offer, Geisler insists: ‘Think about it, Fink. Writers come and go; we always need Indians.’
It is also well known that these mogul producers who asserted almost dictatorial control over the artists and technicians were unbelievably ignorant of the actual movie-making process. As Lipnick admits to Barton, he is the boss of Capitol Pictures, but that doesn’t mean he understands the techniques of filmmaking, much less the aesthetics: ‘I run this dump and I don’t know the technical mumbo-jumbo. Why do I run it? I’ve got horse sense, goddamnit. Showmanship!’ In his flamboyantly bombastic style, Lipnick parodies the autocratic businessmen who ran the Hollywood studios like factories. His relationship with Barton presents a comedic version of the constant struggle between producer and writer over control of the creative product, a struggle which continues to this day in the movie industry.
One writer whose Hollywood experience epitomises the writer’s loss of control over his artistic work is William Faulkner, represented in Barton Fink by Mayhew, the alcoholic Southern novelist. The Coens admit that Faulkner was on their mind when they created the character. Actor John Mahoney was chosen for the part largely due to his physical resemblance to Faulkner. At the same time, the brothers stress that although Faulkner is the basic model, in the details Mayhew is very different. Mayhew has the same disdain as Faulkner had for Hollywood, but unlike Mayhew, Faulkner’s alcoholism did not paralyse his creativity and as a screenwriter he was continuously productive. Nevertheless, the parallels are relevant. As Raymond Chandler observes, in that early period of filmmaking ‘no part of the vast body of technical knowledge which Hollywood contains is systematically and as a matter of course made available to the new writer in a studio. They tell him to look at pictures – which is to learn architecture by staring at a house’ (1995a: 1002). This, we recall, is precisely what the producers tell Barton to do when, claiming unfamiliarity with the genre, he asks Geisler what a wrestling movie is supposed to be and is sent off to view clips of other wrestling pictures, specifically dailies of another being made at that same time, allowing the film to riff on the presentation of these genre works as idiotically, mindnumbingly and scarily repetitive. This particular scene may also allude to Faulkner, whose first assignment for MGM was to write a draft for a remake of The Champ (1931), the story of a boxer played by Wallace Beery. The follow-up, titled Flesh (1932), was to feature Beery again, this time as a wrestler. In Otto Friedrich’s account, when Sam Marx, MGM’s story editor, sent Faulkner to a projection room to watch Beery in The Champ, Faulkner reportedly watched only a few minutes of the reel then asked, ‘How do I get out of here?’ (1986: 237). Suffering a fate similar to Barton’s, Faulkner did not finish the script, which was reassigned to another screenwriter. As is the case with Barton’s failed wrestling script, many of the screenplays Faulkner worked on for MGM were never filmed. In contrast to the fictional Barton, however, the real-life Faulkner was never discouraged by such setbacks and went on to work on more than forty scripts, labouring for years as a scriptwriter under Jack Warner who bragged about ‘employing America’s best writer for peanuts’ (Woods 2000: 107).
The powerlessness of the screenwriter is further emphasised in Barton Fink by the sign on Mayhew’s studio office door announcing the title of the movie he is currently writing: ‘Slave Ship’, the title of an actual movie from 1937 directed by Tay Garnett, the script for which was an adaptation of a Faulkner story (starring Wallace Beery). Like Barton, Faulkner didn’t like working at the offices provided by the studio, preferring to live and write in cheap hotel rooms. Once, when Faulkner informed studio executive Hal Wallis he wanted to go home to Mississippi to work on a script, Wallis rudely reminded him: ‘You’re under contract and you’ll work here!’ (Friedrich 1986: 238). This incident is replayed in Barton Fink when, after deciding that Barton’s screenplay is too ‘fruity’, Lipnick informs the writer: ‘You’re under contract and you’re gonna stay that way. Anything you write will be the property of Capitol Pictures. And Capitol Pictures will not produce anything you write.’ Concluding his tirade, Lipnick tells Lou: ‘Get him out of my sight. Make sure he stays in town, though; he’s still under contract.’ In the old studio system that Capitol Pictures represents, writers were treated like slaves, presumably why Bill Mayhew is fond of singing the Stephen Foster plantation song, ‘Old Black Joe’.
The character of Lou Breeze, Lipnick’s subservient factotum, also satirises the institutionalised enslavement of studio personnel. Lou does everything his master bids from fetching coffee to reading scripts for Jack, who, as Ben Geisler tells Barton, can’t read: ‘You gotta tell it to him.’ It is reported that the semi-literate Louis B. Mayer never read scripts either; the film story had to be acted out for him by an assistant (Friedrich 1986: 16). The caricature of Lou seems to draw substantially on Otto Friedrich’s depiction of Harry Rapf, a producer who worked for Mayer at MGM. According to Friedrich, Rapf was ‘one of MGM’s embarrassments’. Like Breeze, Rapf had once owned a share of the studio but, in Friedrich’s words, ‘had been squeezed out during the reorganizational power plays of the 1920s’ (1986: 339). Before his demotion, Rapf had been a top studio manager, but was subsequently reduced to insignificance as a lower-level producer. In Barton Fink Lipnick tells Barton that Lou ‘used to have shares in the company. An ownership interest. Got bought out in the twenties – muscled out according to some. Hell, according to me. So we keep him around, he’s got family. Poor schmuck.’ Another instance of the Coens borrowing directly from Hollywood lore also concerns Rapf. Once, when Rapf had a disagreement with a director currently in Mayer’s favor, the mogul reportedly cursed his subordinate, saying: ‘You stupid kike bastard – you ought to kiss this man’s shoes – get on your knees’ (Friedrich 1986: 340). After more belittling, Mayer suddenly declared, ‘Get out of here, you’re fired, get out of your office. You had your last chance, you son of a bitch.’ When, toward the end of the movie, Lou Breeze reprimands Barton for not delivering an acceptable scenario, reminding the writer of his contractual obligations to the studio, Lipnick’s angry (and inexplicably capricious) reaction to Lou is almost a verbatim quotation of Mayer’s tirade: ‘Get down on your knees, you sonofabitch! Get down on your knees and kiss this man’s feet! – OK, get out of here. You’re fired, you understand me? Get out of my sight!’
Clifford Odets
The character of Barton Fink is based in part on Clifford Odets, a successful New York playwright in the 1930s and a member of the Group Theatre, which included Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. After initial success on New York stages, Odets went to Hollywood to write scripts so that he could raise money for his New York theatre group, still believing that ‘great audiences are waiting now to have their own experiences explained to them’ (Mottram 2000: 81). Odets was a committed left-wing intellectual who in early plays promoted a social realist aesthetic glorifying workingclass heroes. Fink’s ‘Bare Ruined Choirs’ alludes to Odets’ early play Awake and Sing! Indeed, Barton’s speech about his vision of a theatre dedicated to ‘the common man’ could have come from the mouth of Odets:
The hopes and dreams of the common man are as noble as those of any king. It’s the stuff of life – why shouldn’t it be the stuff of theatre? Goddammit! Why should that be such a hard pill to swallow? Don’t call it new theatre, Charlie, call it real theatre! Call it our theatre!
The Coens say they wrote Barton Fink with John Turturro in mind for the leading role. In preparation for the part, Turturro committed himself enthusiastically to exploring the character of Barton Fink, including reading a book on the origins of the socially engaged writers of the 1930s titled Jews Without Money, as well as Odets’ plays to get a better sense of the playwright’s speech patterns. Among these sources, the playwright’s 1940 journal The Time is Ripe is possibly the most significant. In it, Odets begins to question the efficacy of openly political art, writing that in the world of the theatre ‘leftism as understood by the Communists is impossible’. ‘Any excessive partisanship in a play defeats the very purpose of the play itself,’ he writes, and ‘an attempt to reach as broad an audience as possible should always be taken into consideration’; ‘I once thought that it would be enough to play in a small cellar,’ confesses Odets, ‘but I soon saw that those who would come to the cellar were not the ones in need of what I could say’ (1988: 15).
Furthermore, 1940 was a turning point for Odets’ writing career. After the initial success of his early plays there was widespread suspicion that his later writings for the stage betrayed the Hollywood influence, utilising situations and story motifs that mimicked popular fiction and movies. Among the left-wing intellectuals of his theatre group there was a feeling that Odets was retreating from the political arena to express a personal vision that neglected his ideological commitments. While others from the New York group went on to greater prominence, many thought Odets failed to develop after the early plays. He had already moved to Hollywood, where for two decades he enjoyed moderate success as a screenwriter. The idea of a promising New York playwright who loses his soul in Hollywood is fundamental to the story of Barton Fink, but it is clear that Odets did not inspire the Coens to homage. Although they may respect his political idealism (the film is particularly ambiguous about this), if any character represents the artistic point of view of the filmmakers, it is probably Mayhew, whose whimsical retort to Barton’s pompous speech on the artistic necessity of ‘plumbing the depths, to dredge up something from inside’ reveals an ironic detachment closer to the Coens’ sensibility: ‘Me, I just like making things up – escape.’ Barton seems intended to parody the younger Odets, in his early, ideological period, and Mayhew perhaps an older, chastened Odets, who has realised that artistic endeavors aiming for political effect must first appeal to the masses, ‘the common man’, who is the ostensible focus of Fink’s socialist art.
If the Coens’ source for the setting of old Hollywood is Friedrich’s City of Nets, and their inspiration for characterisations derived largely from biographies of Odets, Faulkner and the studio moguls, the primary source for the story of Barton Fink appears to be Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1939). More than Odets or Faulkner, whom the Coens might admire but still parody mercilessly, West appears to be the central literary influence on Barton Fink. When questioned about the influence of West, Joel claimed not to have read his fiction but mentioned that Ethan had read The Day of the Locust and West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) with great interest. As we have seen in previous chapters, the Coens typically acknowledge important influences, especially literary authors. The fact that West is mentioned only in passing is a significant omission, perhaps an act of denial consistent with Harold Bloom’s contention that authors must repress the voices of precursors who threaten to rob them of their unique creative identity. Nevertheless, a general comparison of the Coens with Nathanael West reveals key affinities. Much like the Coens, whose early films before Barton Fink had fallen well short of achieving mainstream success, West’s literary work (consisting of four published novels) received little recognition in his own lifetime. Prior to the publication of The Day of the Locust, West wrote to a friend ‘how difficult it is to go on making the effort and sacrifices necessary to produce a novel only to find nowhere any just understanding of what the book is about’ (Martin 1970: 335). In this context, another letter written to Edmund Wilson in 1939 is worth quoting:
Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the ‘schools’. My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I’m lucky to be published. And yet, I only have a desire to remedy all that before sitting down to write, once begun I do it my way […] and go on making what one critic called ‘private and unfunny jokes’. (Martin 1970: 793)
Despite praise from the best writers of his age, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett and William Carlos Williams, West’s fiction never reached a wider readership during his lifetime, remaining obscure and widely misunderstood. West’s uncontrollable urge to indulge in ‘private and unfunny jokes’ finds a contemporary parallel in the Coens’ dark humour and obscure referential in-joking, on ample display in Barton Fink. Though highly regarded by a relatively small group of critics and intellectuals, Barton Fink was considered by many the least accessible of their films to date and, as such, it epitomises the Coens’ disinterest in box-office success. In this respect, as R. Barton Palmer has written, Barton Fink provides ‘a telling comment on the Coens’ indifference to being properly understood [since] their references have proved too obscure to decode for most reviewers and commentators’ (2004: 112).
Like the other literary figures included in Barton Fink’s pastiche, West worked as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s. Lured to Hollywood in 1933 by 20th Century, who paid him several thousand dollars for the rights to his second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, West got his first scriptwriting job with Columbia Pictures, where, like Barton, the first two scripts he wrote were not filmed. West could not make a living on his novels and thus continued to work on unproduced screenplays because the studio salary supported his literary work. Like other authors who worked in the Hollywood studio system, West objected to the factory-like working conditions, complaining that ‘all the writers sit in cells in a row and the minute a typewriter stops, someone pokes his head in the door to see if you are thinking’ (Friedrich 1986: 9). For the last five years of his life (1935–1940) West labored as a scriptwriter for Republic, RKO, Universal and Columbia, but he never considered screenwriting anything more than a day job supporting his literary art.
The text by West that proves to be most essential for Barton Fink is The Day of the Locust. Set in Hollywood of the 1930s, the novel concerns a young artist named Tod Hackett, a painter classically trained at the Yale School of Fine Arts, who moves to Hollywood to work as a set designer. There he lives in a run-down apartment building and makes the acquaintance of a bizarre assortment of characters: an aging vaudeville comic and his attractive but untalented daughter who dreams of becoming a movie star, a dwarf bookmaker, a cowboy (named Earle) who works occasionally in ‘horseoperas’ and a screenwriter whose house is an exact reproduction of a Southern mansion in Biloxi, Mississippi. West’s Hollywood is not the Hollywood filled with glamour and movie celebrities. Instead, the writer depicts Tinsel Town as a provincial village filled with pensioners from the mid-West who come to sunny California seeking a few years of repose after a lifetime of labour. As West describes them, they are ‘savage and bitter, especially the middle-aged and old, and had been made so by boredom and disappointment. All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough’ (1997: 380).
The setting of The Day of the Locust is the seedy side of the ‘city of dreams’ where the cheated and betrayed looking for glamour find nothing but the dumping ground of civilisation, what West calls in the novel ‘a Sargasso of the imagination’ (1997: 326). While living and working in Hollywood as a screenwriter, West collected material for his novel from his experiences living in a low-rent apartment building off Hollywood Boulevard where, as he calls them in The Day of the Locust, an assortment of ‘screwballs and screwboxes’ lived illusory lives in the shadow of the movie studios that mass-produced the imagery of their illusions. West’s shabby apartment building in Hollywood became the basis for Tod Hackett’s residence, renamed the San Bernardino Arms, and perhaps the inspiration for the Hotel Earle. But while Tod socialises with his colourful neighbours whose strange lives he observes with detached irony, Barton remains isolated, his social contact limited to the hotel staff and his apparently friendly neighbour, Charlie Meadows. Most of the characters in Barton Fink’s storyworld are in the movie business, but they are as bizarrely caricatured as West’s human oddities. Although Tod the painter has come to Hollywood for the same reasons as Barton the writer, there is a crucial difference. Tod separates his creative art from his commercial day-job at the studio. Like West, he spends his free time collecting material for his paintings by observing the people around him. Barton, on the other hand, cannot free himself from his noble artistic calling to do what should be the simple task of writing a B-picture screenplay. Like Barton, Tod is a populist devoted to the common man. His paintings are composed of images of the common man, but Tod’s notion of the average working man is not the figure of nobility Barton imagines him to be, but instead the ‘savage and bitter’ refugees from the mid-West, whom he calls ‘the cream of America’s madmen’ (1997: 309).
In his letter to Edmund Wilson, West also laments the problematic reception of his writings, particularly by the political left wing: ‘The radical press, although I consider myself on their side, doesn’t like it, and thinks it even fascist sometimes, and the literature boys, whom I detest, detest me in turn. The highbrow press finds that I avoid the important things and the lending library touts in the daily press think me shocking’ (1997: 793). The leftist critics thought that his stories lacked sufficient attention to their ideological concerns and thus that his dark satire failed to achieve the correct political effect. In fact, West was, like Odets, a committed critic of the capitalist system; and like Odets, he distanced himself from the doctrines of American Communists and their emphasis on the class struggle. Instead, he shifted his focus to the growing threat of right-wing fascism. Unlike many of that era, West was convinced that if fascism emerged in the United States, it would not be caused by an external threat from abroad but rather from within American society itself, manifested as the angry mob depicted in The Day of the Locust, or more specifically, in the figure of the raging ‘mass man’. The violent rage that West thought could erupt in American society is enacted in Barton Fink by Charlie Meadows, a common man who feels anger and resentment toward his job as insurance salesman and because, as he finally tells Barton, his voice from below cannot be heard. The joke on Barton, as a writer who professes solidarity with the proletarian working man, is that, presented by Charlie with the opportunity of learning about the common man firsthand, through Charlie’s stories (‘stories to curl your hair’), the writer doesn’t care to listen and cannot take anyone but himself seriously. That is why, when Charlie, now ‘Madman Mundt’, returns to the Hotel Earle in a homicidal rage, he tells Barton his savage murders were the price for Barton’s refusal to listen to him; ironically, for being the kind of writer Barton had previously claimed to despise, ‘writers [who] do everything in their power to insulate themselves from the common man – from where they live, from where they trade, from where they fight and love and converse and so naturally their work suffers, and regresses into empty formalism’.
For West, the rise of fascism in America was the real threat to internal political stability, rather than the external threat of European communism thought by many in the 1930s to be the greatest menace to American national security. In his view, the disillusionment of the masses with the dehumanising effects of a culture of consumption rapidly replacing the industrial production of the capitalist economy would eventually lead to a violent revolt of the masses. In The Day of the Locust, the protagonistpainter visualises the fascist mob in a painting he is working on called ‘The Burning of Los Angeles’, described as follows:
Across the top [of the canvas], he had drawn the burning city, a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hill street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches. For the faces of its members, he was using innumerable sketches he had made of the people who come to California to die – all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. […] No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames. (1997: 387–388)
In the novel’s final chapter this vision becomes frightening reality. Standing outside Kahn’s Persian Palace Theater, a crowd has gathered, awaiting the premiere of a new movie and hoping for a glimpse of some movie-star celebrities. ‘At the sight of their movie heroes,’ writes West, ‘the crowd would turn demoniac.’ Growing restless and bored, the throng of thousands outside the movie palace suddenly transforms into the angry mob carrying bats and torches that Tod has already envisioned in ‘The Burning of Los Angeles’. ‘Then,’ Tod says to himself, ‘nothing but machine guns would stop it’ (1997: 379). Earlier Tod had questioned the prophetic vision of his painting, but refusing to give up the role of Jeremiah, he feels certain Los Angeles will end in flames. ‘He was amused,’ writes West, ‘by the strong feeling of satisfaction this dire conclusion gave him. Were all prophets of doom and destruction such happy men?’ (1997: 309).
The collective rioting of Tod’s apocalyptic vision is narrowed in Barton Fink to focus on the individual madman, Charlie ‘Mundt’ Meadows, who represents not the revolutionary ‘masses’ of the proletarian class, but the alienated, angry ‘mass man’ of a consumer-oriented capitalist society. The surreal burning of the Hotel Earle can thus be read as a variation on the ‘Burning of Los Angeles’ imagined in The Day of the Locust, as a vision of society on the brink of violent collapse. To underscore the idea that a seemingly harmless commoner such as Charlie Meadows can quickly transform into a violent fascist, the Coens incorporate two crypto-fascist police detectives, Deutsch and Mastrionotti, one German, the other Italian, representing the fascist powers that sprang up in Europe and drew America into the global apocalypse of World War II. Their openly anti-Semitic remarks confirm the fascist profile. The associations with the European fascism are further strengthened when, as Mundt is about to execute Detective Deutsch with a point-blank shotgun blast to the head, he says with casual irony, ‘Heil Hitler’.
‘I’ll show you the life of the mind!’
‘A Particular Kind of Joking’
Some would consider such a casual reference to Hitler in bad taste, a jokey reference to a particularly unfunny historical villain. Equally tasteless are Charlie’s numerous references to ‘heads’, a macabre joke that only reveals its dark punch line in the revelation that Charlie, aka Madman Mundt, is a serial killer who decapitates his victims. When Barton suggests, for instance, that Charlie see a doctor for his ear infection, Charlie responds: ‘Ah, doctors. What’s he gonna tell me? Can’t trade my head in for a new one.’ Assuring Barton he’ll overcome his writer’s block, Charlie says: ‘You’ve got a head on your shoulders. What is it they say? Where there’s a head, there’s hope.’ Barton corrects with unknowing irony: ‘Where there’s life there’s hope.’ Leaving on a business trip, Charlie informs Barton that ‘things have gotten all balled up at the Head Office’. After Charlie assists Barton in the disposal of Audrey’s dead body, he repeatedly admonishes Barton: ‘You gotta act as if nothing’s happened. Put this totally out of your head.’ When Barton panics, Charlie insists: ‘We just gotta keep our heads and we’ll figure it out.’ This tasteless joke is pushed to the limit of absurdity by its nearly constant repetition throughout the screenplay where the word ‘head’ occurs more than seventy times, achieving its final degree of intensification in Charlie’s going-away gift to Barton, the mysterious box which invites speculation that its contents might be Audrey’s head (or perhaps Mayhew’s).
Such macabre joking is very much in the spirit of West’s humour, politely described by Norman Podhoretz as a ‘particular kind of joking’ (1971: 155). Podhoretz suspects that West’s brand of cynical black humour was motivated by a deep-seated pessimism and for this reason he finds West’s grotesque humour ‘unpolitical’, arguing that it implies humanity’s striving for nobility invariably results in absurd failure (1971: 160) – a common criticism of Coen brothers movies, especially Barton Fink. Indeed, West’s self-assessment of his ‘particular kind of joking’ resonates with the Coens’ comments on their own politically incorrect humour. Of himself, West said: ‘I’m a comic writer and it seems impossible for me to handle any of the “big things” without seeming to laugh or at least smile’ (Martin 1970: 335). The Coens have made similar selfobservations, such as the following from an interview on Barton Fink: ‘It seems we’re incapable of writing a movie which, in one way or another, doesn’t get contaminated by comic elements’ (Allen 2006: 51).
The Coens’ Westian sense of humour is also apparent in their irreverent joking with the Holy Word of God set forth in the Hebrew Bible. Underscoring the apocalyptic tone that builds to a climax in the burning of the Hotel Earle, the Coens steer Barton into an unlikely intertextual detour (already adumbrated in the title of Mayhew’s novel – Nebuchadnezzar – which he presents to Barton as a ‘little entertainment’ to divert him during his ‘sojourn among the Philistines’). Searching for inspiration, the stymied writer turns to the Gideon Bible in his hotel room drawer. There, Barton comes upon the Old Testament Book of Daniel and the story of Daniel, a Hebrew wise man and spiritual advisor in to the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. The specific passage that draws Barton’s attention tells of the king’s disturbing dream, the exact contents of which the king refuses to share with his wise men, but nevertheless commands them to decipher:
And the king, Nebuchadnezzar, answered and said to the Chaldeans, I recall not my dream; if ye will not make known unto me my dream, and its interpretation, ye shall be cut in pieces, and your tents shall be made a dunghill.
Confronted with an apparently impossible task of interpretation, Daniel finds the solution in a divine vision which reveals to him both the content and meaning of the king’s dream, which Daniel interprets as a revelatory prophesy of apocalypse. In relation to Barton’s story, the reference to Daniel and his vision of apocalypse precedes Charlie’s appearance as Madman Mundt, giving special resonance to his predilection for decapitation. As it turns out, cutting people to pieces and destroying their homes is Charlie’s other job. And like the biblical king, one might say that Charlie also has a dream in need of interpretation: his story of the Common Man, which Barton is incapable of hearing and properly interpreting. The biblical reference to Nebuchadnezzar might also apply to Jack Lipnick, the ‘head’ of Capitol Pictures, who commands Barton to tell him the contents of his ‘dream’, namely, the wrestling movie he tasks Barton to write, while refusing to offer any specifics. In Lipnick’s words, ‘Wallace Beery is a wrestler. I wanna know his hopes, his dreams.’ When Barton fails to deliver the right story Lipnick sentences him to the figurative death of a writer without an audience. Lipnick’s absurdly obsequious kissing of Barton’s shoe also has a parallel in the Book of Daniel, where King Nebuchadnezzar prostrates himself before Daniel for delivering the divine prophesy. Unlike Daniel, however, Barton can satisfy neither of his rulers – not Charlie, the idealised working man he supposedly worships, and not Lipnick, the tyrannical ruler of Capitol Pictures. And with the vengeance of an Old Testament God, they both punish him.
The Fulfillment of a Prophesy
Turning once again to the reception of Barton Fink, we note that even though the film collected numerous awards and garnered high critical praise, many expressed doubt and confusion about its meaning or purpose. To reiterate Terrence Rafferty’s complaint, what is most bothersome about Barton Fink is the impression that the filmmakers were ‘inordinately pleased with its hermetic meaninglessness’. Playwright Arthur Miller responded to this complaint, writing: ‘I’m not sure there is a problem with Barton Fink. It may be perfect. Maybe I’m not supposed to be sure.’ Comparing the film with the notoriously inscrutable work of David Lynch, Miller hedged, admitting that perhaps Barton Fink was not about anything in particular, just another example of what he calls the ‘genre of mere chaos’. Nevertheless, he concludes that it is a film that ‘cannot be easily dismissed, since it might reflect the stage at which we have truly arrived – whether in our rise or our decline’ (1991). Asked about the meaning and message of Barton Fink, the Coens simply balked: ‘“That question about a larger purpose always stops us,” says Joel, who insists that “there is no larger purpose outside the story itself”’ (Johnston 1991). This lack of a larger purpose, particularly evident, even flaunted, in Barton Fink, marks the film as the product of a postmodern aesthetic, or in Miller’s phrase, ‘the stage at which we have truly arrived’. As postmodernists, the Coens take no fixed position on any issue and refuse to attribute any profound meaning to their film art. Their diffident response to such critiques might be considered an instance of what French philosopher Jean Baudrillard calls ‘the cool smile’ of the postmodernist, which no longer merely signifies ironic detachment, but instead a stance of radical indeterminacy, wary of political commitment and hence passively complicit with the dominant socio-political ideology (1998: 121). For Baudrillard the ‘cool smile’ of the postmodern parodist is ‘not the smile of critical distance’, but rather ‘the smile of collusion’, signaling indifference and passive capitulation to a dominant and insurmountable socio-economic system. Thus Baudrillard reaffirms Jameson’s condemnation of postmodern parody as ‘blank pastiche’ lacking critical purpose and thereby colluding with the aims of capitalism.
No doubt, the oft-repeated criticism that Coen films have no valid points of reference outside the world of cinema and are therefore the self-indulgent amusements is particularly salient for Barton Fink. The Coens’ reconstruction of the historical moment of Hollywood circa 1941 is fabricated, as we have seen, by raiding an extensive archive of textual sources, announcing itself as a postmodern pastiche par excellence and an illustration of Jameson’s conception of pastiche as a ‘neutral mimicry’ of fashions and styles associated with a certain time period (here the classical studio era), replacing historical reality with the history of aesthetic styles. Jameson attributes postmodernism’s loss of connection with empirical history to a nostalgic longing for an imagined past that never existed. Arguing against this reading of Barton Fink, R. Barton Palmer contends that ‘it is not the intention of the Coens to provoke some false sense of nostalgia through this kind of parody. [Their] films do not in any sense flatten out the past, eliminating the depth of its otherness for comic effect’ (2004: 106). In Palmer’s reading, Barton Fink is not located in ‘a present ever looking backward’ but in a past that is carefully reconstructed but simultaneously marked as a fictional construct with the aim of provoking a ‘historiographic curiosity about a bygone era whose depths have yet to be fully explored’ (2004: 112).
Foremost among the historical depths explored in Barton Fink is the era of classic Hollywood and the workings of the movie industry in the 1930s and 1940s. The film’s elaborate intertextuality and highly stylised visual presentation encourage reviewers to the assume that in Barton Fink historical reality has been reduced to a set of codes and fashions culled from the history of film and literature. Stylisation aside, the film does deliver a potent lampoon of Hollywood’s vulgar commercialism. However reductive it might be to say that Barton Fink is a satire on the Hollywood industrial complex, the film does render a realistic (if comically distorted) picture of the major Hollywood studios as prototypical sites of industrial manufacturing, vertically integrated systems controlled by top-down management and dedicated to the profitable mass-production of entertainment commodities. The idea that the Hollywood dream factory is based on capitalist principles of commerce is openly implied in the name of Lipnick’s movie studio: Capitol Pictures. As we have seen, Lipnick himself is a composite character based on the lives of the top business managers of classic Hollywood studios, represented as super-wealthy barons of monopoly capitalism. Here we should recall that in the 1930s and 1940s five major studios (Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., Twentieth-Century Fox and RKO) controlled a large share of the hugely profitable American movie market, and that the moguls who owned controlling shares of the studios’ stock were in charge of all major decisions concerning production. As head of Capitol Pictures, Lipnick controls every aspect of the studio’s operations. He thinks of himself as the commander-in-chief of Capitol Pictures, an image parodied by the army colonel’s uniform he wears in his final meeting with Barton, who is shocked when Lipnick dismisses his inspired wrestling scenario out-of-hand. It seems the self-absorbed writer has not heeded the producer’s warning about ‘fruitiness’: ‘This is a wrestling picture; the audience wants to see action, drama, wrestling and plenty of it.’ Capitol Pictures, in other words, produces entertainment, not art. ‘They don’t wanna see a guy wrestling with his soul,’ Lipnick explains, ‘…well, all right, a little bit, for the critics, but you make it the carrot that wags the dog.’ Aside from his hilariously mixed metaphor, Lipnick’s critique offers a succinct formula for highly profitable action movies that is still relevant today. The parody of Hollywood’s market-driven capitalism reaches its apex when Lipnick instructs his underling Lou to inform Barton that ‘the contents of your head are the property of Capitol Pictures’. The producer’s final blow to the writer’s ego comes when Lipnick takes possession of Barton’s creative identity: ‘You think you’re the only writer who can give me that Barton Fink feeling?! I got twenty writers under contract that I can ask for a Fink-type thing from.’ Hollywood owns Barton’s ‘head’ as it owns many others, any of them capable of reproducing ‘the Fink-type thing’. Like everything else in a capitalist economy, the artist’s style can be bought, duplicated and sold as a mass-marketable commodity.
Another historical depth usefully explored in Barton Fink concerns the representation of early 1940s Hollywood and the debt this representation owes to West’s The Day of the Locust. Although the Coens’ pastiche borrows substantially from biographies and writings of Clifford Odets and William Faulkner (who are made to look ridiculous), West’s novel proves a more significant source. In fact, the extent of intertextual borrowing from The Day of the Locust is such that it might be fair to consider the Coens’ screenplay a disguised adaptation of the novel. West’s central importance is evident in the Coens’ reworking of the writer’s darkly humorous vision of Hollywood as a microcosm of consumer capitalism. At the same time, the intertextual dialogue with West constitutes a substantial rereading of The Day of the Locust, correcting previously common misreadings of his work as nihilistic and validating him as an important author of the 1930s with a prophetic vision of American society. Interestingly, the Coens’ revisionary reading is affirmed by the scholarly analysis of Jonathan Veitch, whose reassessment of West’s writings counters the long-standing view that his novels are cynical and pessimistic and therefore politically suspect. Instead, Veitch discovers an undercurrent of cultural critique in West’s darkly satirical portrayal of American society, brought to expression in a style heavily influenced by the European surrealists, which Veitch calls ‘superrealism’. As its name implies, ‘superrealism’ is an excessive realism, without the depoliticised connotations generally associated with later American surrealists. In West’s hands, this ‘superrealism’ becomes a distinctly different mode of fictional representation capable of transforming the writer’s ‘particular kind of joking’ into a form of social criticism by intensifying and grotesquely distorting his vision of reality far beyond the conventional bounds of literary realism to expose the terrifying reality of the real. In an effort to deconstruct the mimetic forms of representation that constitute traditional art, West modified the surrealist dream reality to create a grotesque ‘hyper-reality’. Against the grain of his surrealist contemporaries, West refused to move beyond representation and embrace the aestheticism of pure abstraction, believing that ‘representation or similitude constitutes the sum total of what can be known’, allowing the writer to explore ‘the ways reality is constructed – literally or figuratively – under capitalist modernity’ (Veitch 1997: 22).
While West’s Communist contemporaries focused their writings on the disintegration of a production-oriented capitalist economy, West took a different view of post-Depression America enabling him to foresee the beginnings of a consumeroriented capitalism. West understood that the liberal left-wing faith in the revolutionary working class was historically out of step. The proletarian industrial workforce was rapidly being replaced by middle-class consumers thoroughly co-opted into an economy increasingly predicated on the consumption of mass-produced products. In the place of the heroic factory worker, the social figure of greatest importance is now the unheroic ‘mass man’, whose unheard voice of resentment and frustration is the harbinger of fascist reaction. As previously discussed, such a fascist scenario comes vividly to life in The Day of the Locust:
Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. […] Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. (West 1997: 381)
Anticipating the media-saturated hyper-reality of postmodernism, West depicts a world flooded by the debased, mass-marketed products of journalism and Hollywood kitsch, which displace and finally supplant the real. Tod describes the Hollywood movie industry as ‘the final dumping ground’ for detritus of American culture, a junkyard for used-up dreams. As he explains, there isn’t a dream that’s been dreamed that doesn’t sooner or later turn up in the Hollywood dump, ‘having first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath, and paint’ (1997: 326). Motion pictures are simulations par excellence, dreams that appear as the real. Indeed, the way movies are consumed and tossed aside is paradigmatic for the wider consumption of media. The contemporary world now consists of mass-mediated representations of real that have replaced reality. The older economy of industrial production based on the manufacture of material goods gives way to the production and consumption of media culture. In a world so totally mediated, we gradually lose the ability to distinguish between the real and its artificial representation.
The critique of representation West mounts in The Day of the Locust is subsumed and rearticulated in Barton Fink with the implication that much if not all of the narrative unfolds in Barton’s over-active imagination, that it is the story of a dreamer lost in his dream. With its surrealist atmosphere, notably on display in the decor of the Hotel Earle, Barton Fink invites viewers to imagine that its story could be a dream that takes place ‘in Barton’s head’. The dream trope is introduced early in the dialogue of his stage play: ‘Daylight is a dream if you’ve lived with your eyes closed,’ says Barton’s imaginary proletarian hero. From the very beginning it is suggested that Barton has lived with his eyes closed, incapable of seeing past the self-enclosing dream world of his ideologically blinkered imagination. This is illustrated by his naïve view of the working class, which he represents in his stage play as noble and heroic but of which he possesses neither genuine knowledge nor understanding. He knows them only as imaginary figures. For this reason Barton fails to recognise that Charlie Meadows is the wrestler, the ‘burly man’ of his movie script – a common man whose story begs to be told but remains unheard because Barton simply won’t listen. The distinction between reality and illusion is also put in doubt that Mundt is a manifestation of Barton’s savage unconscious. He and Charlie appear to be the only residents of the Hotel Earle, which according to the filmmakers is designed to reflect the mind of Charlie/Mundt as rotten and decaying (Allen 266: 110). ‘At the end,’ says Ethan, ‘when [Charlie] says he’s a prisoner of his own mental state, that it’s like a hell, the hotel has already taken on that infernal appearance’ (Allen 2006: 52).
At the end of the story it is made clear that Barton cannot distinguish between reality and representation. In the movie’s final scene Barton is finally confronted with the paradox of representation, namely that now the representation of the real constitutes the limit of what can be known about reality. As Barton wanders onto an empty beach, he is confronted with what appears to be the living embodiment of the bathing beauty represented in the painting that hung over his writing desk. Confused, Barton asks her if she is ‘in pictures’ and, after replying ‘Don’t be silly’, the bathing beauty casually assumes exactly the same pose as the painting. Bathing Beauty has accompanied Barton throughout his hellish ordeal as an image, the kind of cheap mass-produced representation of the real one finds in any cheap hotel room. Because the copy or representation has preceded the real, Barton can no longer distinguish between original and simulated copy. The Day of the Locust provides an analogous moment when Tod is caught in the rioting mob outside the picture palace. Stunned and injured by the sudden eruption of violence, Tod retreats into his imagination, where he resumes work on his prophetic painting ‘The Burning of Los Angeles’:
He had almost forgotten both his leg and his predicament, and to make his escape still more complete he stood on a chair and worked at the flames in an upper corner of the canvas, modeling the tongues of fire so that they licked even more avidly at a Corinthian column that held up the palmleaf roof of a nutburger stand. (West 1997: 388)
As if to remind us that their their films are never about ‘the real’ but instead the reworking of received cultural texts as a form of creative re-presentation, the Coens embed a ‘private and unfunny’ joke that only the most observant viewer will see and comprehend. When Bill Mayhew signs a copy of his novel ‘Nebuchadnezzer’ for Barton, we notice that the publisher is ‘Swain and Pappas’. Marshall Swain and George Pappas were philosophers who wrote on epistemology and metaphysics in Essays on Knowledge and Justification, a study on the limits of knowledge. If Barton Fink can be said to have any message of import beyond its story, it would appear to be the postmodern dictum that the representation of the real constitutes the limit of what can be known about reality.