Barton Fink and the Common Man

Barton Fink is, I think, the Coen brothers' most interesting, most trying, most confounding film. It's quite ambitious, even though there are things about it that open it up to the same criticism often made of the Coens, that there work is stylish but empty, deeply unwilling or unable to mean anything.

I think people who approach it this way have a particular sort of viewing experience in mind. I think there's something to be said, as both artist and audience, for being able to walk and chew gum. The film's coolness, and its evident self consiousness (the arty mirrored images and language, particularly the ending which recapitulates the Hotel picture, the story within a story, the surrealist touches), aren't mere special effects. Without being paricularly indigestible formally, the film communicates a number of compelling ideas.

For the moment I want to speak to what is among the most obvious themes of the film, that of empathy and representation. In some significant way these are dealt with through questions simply aren't asked in the same way today. There isn't much of a question, at least posed as this film does, how one should represent the common or mass man. In part because that creature is no longer part of our vocabulary.

The Common Man of Barton Fink, and this is part of the point, is for Barton an exotic. He is today, still, but a different sort. David Brooks, for example, writing about Patio Man, might as well be writing about Peking Man. Barton doesn't listen to Charlie, is utterly irritated by him most of the time, even though he is at least superficially the perfect abstract Common Man that is Barton's subject. The film is about listening, and refusing to listen. It is a cautionary tale about using people as a means to a personal end, rather than as ends in themselves.

Every time I see the film, the line that jumps out at me is uttered by Judy Davis: 'Empathy requires understanding, Barton.' Understanding in this film appears far more elusive than Barton's ersatz understanding. The world is mad, and fickle, and unfair. That is, people are. Understanding requires pain, the pain of dealing with real, messy people. Barton's idealism is the idealism of those escaping the real world, those constructing a better world inside their heads. This is a profoundly pessimistic film, even moreso, I think, than the similarly darkhearted Miller's Crossing.

One of the reasons I like this film so much is that it genuinely confuses me. Sure, it does this with its ripe, complicated symbolism, but it also confuses with its ideas. Does this film try to prove that this life is, for all intents and purposes, hell? Is it calling the artist an arrogant, self-deluded fool? Is the artist's only choice building a levee, as Bill Mayhew has? Do people want or need a fruity story about suffering, or is a story of a big man in tights all the audience deserves?

It's wrong to confuse confusion with sloppiness. This is a fantastically well made film. Its construction shows care and thoughtfulness. Although this film can be clever in the pejorative sense, it is nonetheless, if not a plumbing of the depths of the human condition, then one of the most compelling and provocative explorations of the artist's role and responsibility I know of.