Thursday, March 01, 2007
"For a Day or a Lifetime"
I opined earlier that "Barton Fink" sometimes had the feel of a horror film, and that's because of the atmosphere of Hotel Earle. Was it supposed to be an Overlook Hotel, a place that drove its inhabitants to varying degrees of madness? Any thoughts on the repeated themes with the pipes and heat/fire?
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9 comments:
No, the Hotel Earle doesn’t drive its inhabitants mad like the Overlook Hotel does. The inhabitants are already mad. And I don’t think Fink goes mad.
I was planning on putting up a post about the peeling wallpaper and the sticky fluids that ooze from it and the other sort of sexual creepy elements of the Hotel. This might be a good place to consider them.
Maybe Fink doesn't go mad, but I thought the hotel kept him from writing with its constant, creepy distractions ...
Or maybe, as we discussed, the guy couldn't write.
I didn't really understand the film, but I think I understood it enought to say that Fink is clearly mad. The fire episode couldn't have actually happened. And other things at the hotel didn't make sense. It makes me wonder what the hotel would have been like had he seen it accurately.
And, no, I don't think the hotel made him crazy. But it didn't help.
I think you have to accept (a) the thought that he is mad or (b) the reality of the supernatural or (c) a and b, for the movie to make any sense worth making.
Interesting. I hadn't considered either of those.
No, I think your categories are too rigid. The mode at work here is not realism, so we are not left to choose between Fink imagining the fire—madness—and the hotel actually busting into flames—supernatural intervention. Instead, we have an episode of abstraction that doesn’t conform to our usual ideas of cause and effect. The analogy isn’t very good, but the best comparison I can think of right off is with magical realism. There you might, for instance, get a fantastical explanation in lieu of a more pedestrian but socially awkward one such as having a teenage girl get carried away by birds instead of admitting that she left the village because she was pregnant.
The bell on the desk that kept ringing and ringing was the first bit that helped set us up for the more dramatic abstractions later.
Back to Fink. At the end of the film, Fink is quite sane and quite aware of how his world has collapsed in on him and very aware of how alone he is. Next up for him might be depression, alcoholism, or both. Although his egotism is crushed, I don’t think he understands his own role in bringing himself to this low.
Rick, your explanation reminds me of when it rained frogs in Magnolia. I fucking loved that, even though I disliked the film as a whole, because the point seemed to be that all this shit was happening in the film, like in life, but then — son of a bitch! — it started RAINING FROGS, and when its starts raining frogs, nothing else really matters, does it? Not your divorce, not your drug problem, not your money problem. All bets are off. Frogs are falling from the fucking sky. There is new sense to be made of the world.
(I have no idea if that's what "Magnolia" was supposed to mean. That's what it meant to me)
Driftwood, great point about the bell. Great point. The bell sets the audience up for a stretching of reality.
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