Do you figure Fink to be a good writer? He’s a pompous ass. He wrote a play about poor working people that is popular with affluent theater goers. But he doesn’t listen. And he cannot sit down and knock out a simple morality tale for a B-movie. And he doesn’t listen. Could he actually write?
So is his decent into hell a product of the evils of Hollywood or of his own character?
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I hadn't taken it into consideration whether Fink was a good writer. Perhaps he just capitalized on writing for "the little people" at a time when those sort of stories would work well with Depression-era audiences. Funny how the furthest he could get was with another reference to fishmongers.
It's significant that he was too insufferable to listen to Meadows -- "I could tell you some stories." Fink not only ignored a "common man" who might offer fodder for his screenplay; he missed a couple of opportunities to validate his initial instinct that Meadows was nuts.
Maybe another question is whether it was Hollywood who brought him to his knees, leaving Fink so insecure about his talent, he cannot let go of his "muse" -- whatever's left of her in that box he carries to the beach.
Good question, DW. My sense is that he is not a good writer. The bits of his smash play that we hear seem melodramatic and hackneyed, although we don't hear much. But the "It's not late, it's early" line at the end of the play, meant as a piece of proletarian poetry, struck me as the kind of mayonnaise popular audiences really lap up. I think Barton himself is torn; he knows popular adulation doesn't mean anything about the true quality of his work, and yet he's vain enough to cling to it.
He doesn't live in the world of men, so he can't really tell their stories, except in platitudes and romanticized working-class cliches. His failure to listen to Meadows is key, as Christie has said. His writing is all head — no heart, no flesh.
When Meadows says, "I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND," it's not merely a brawny man's taunt to a 90-pound weakling; it's not just the triumph of brute force over intellect; it actually is the life of a mind on display — a dark, energized, focused mind (the unrestrained id?) tied to a sense of personal justice that Barton, for all his carrying-on about social justice, really can't fathom. It actually reminded me a lot of the scene in "Dead Man" where Johnny Depp's character introduces himself as William Blake, points his gun, and says "let me show you my poetry" (I don't remember the exact quote, but the idea is of words being compressed into action — and not losing the poetry for all that).
Are you misspelling my name to mock me after I told you how many people misspelled it last week? Damnit!
Oh God, sorry! I have a Christie in my class. You can call me Kym or Kimm or Khem or something, OK? Just don't be mad. Sometimes I forget my own last name has two L's.
I just watched it again. Fink’s new screenplay that launched him into such a celebratory tizzy is nothing but a knockoff of his play. Besides having the same start with the New York fishmongers, it has the same ending where he repeats the line about we will be hearing from that kid and I don’t mean a postcard. So, kc, I think you are right on the money about Fink’s craft.
“I’ll show you the life of the mind!” is certainly the climax. I had been thinking along similar lines to what you said. Fink’s image of the “common man” is highly idealized. More than once he offers up how much he admires the common working folk. The best job for him would probably be as a propaganda writer for the Communist Party, and his play does sound rather like a bit of Soviet social realist boilerplate. Such a romantic world has no room for a twisted sick mind like Meadows. Fink will never understand what hit him.
Very good with the “Dead Man” comparison. (Maybe we need to do that as a blog film.) The violence-as-art similarity has a lot to it. How about considering this issue in that context:
When Meadows is killing the cops, he is mostly in a fiery rage that is reflected in the burning walls of the hallway. One obvious read of this is the Christian one where he is the devil and he has brought the fires of hell with him. But when he shoots the second cop, he says with a tense reserve “Heil Hitler”. What is the meaning of that? The Nazis would have killed Fink not a couple of regular cops. Should we compare Meadows to the Nazis as practitioners of art through violence instead of literature? “Words compressed into action” as you have it?
I tried to comment on this last night, but my DSL went out for about 12 hours. I'll try to remember what I said.
I think Barton Fink would be a good writer if he could give the writing time to percolate. He's an artist, not a salary guy. The fact that he became a hack under pressure is not evidence that he wouldn't have come up with another critical success in a year or two.
I don't think he's an artist. I think he thinks he's an artist, and he psychs himself out of writing on deadline.
Erin, do you mean he uses his "big ideas" as an excuse for not being able to geth them on paper in a timely fashion? That was my understanding. Sort of a greatness can't be rushed type of deal. But great writers produce on deadline all the time.
I think if we were supposed to think he's a good writer, the filmmakers wouldn't have gone out of their way to show what a bad listener he is (a good writer would see Charlie's offered stories as a goldmine of material).
Yes, exactly. Like at the beginning when Garland asks him what he does for a living and he says, "I guess I try to make a difference." His pompous notion of what it is to be a writer keeps him from being able to produce.
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