The walls, as they say, have ears and Barton is the infection. Barton is a character who willingly deafens himself to the world he's trying to write about, in his grandiose, self-centred effort to write.Īt the film's crescendo, in the heat of the burning hotel, Charlie - now revealed as Mundt - removes the cotton wool stopped from his ear, and there flows down his cheek a thick, pearlescent fluid, unmistakably like that of the wallpaper paste in the Earle. Barton, when he knuckles down and gets to writing in earnest, plugs his own ears with cotton wool to block out any distracting, ambient noise. Charlie is a character who consistently offers a receptive ear to people who, in their turn, disregard him. He goes to see a doctor on Barton's advice, and upon removing the wool from his ear, receives a consultation that offers him no help. In the middle of the movie, Charlie contracts an ear infection, which he plugs up with a bud of cotton wool. He's certainly an entry in the canon of ambiguously supernatural, quasi-demonic figures from the Coens' filmography, like Leonard Smalls from Raising Arizona, or Sherriff Cooley from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? One of the most common interpretations of Barton Fink is that the Hotel Earle is Hell and that Charlie Meadows/Karl Mundt is the Devil (this was actually the main thing I knew about it before I pressed "play.") We're given indications to the effect that Charlie and the hotel are, in some sense, the same entity he's attuned to everything that goes on within its confines, able to hear what other guests get up to as though he was in the same room ("something about the pipes"). If I really wanted to push this line of interpretation into extra credit territory, I'd point to another recurring bit of imagery with which the wallpaper intersects that of ears, and earplugs.Įars, in Barton Fink, are an erogenous region. This is the same scene where Barton confesses to Charlie just how much difficulty he's having with his script writer's block is elliptically associated with emasculation and erectile dysfunction. And sure enough, in the next scene that Turturro and Goodman share, there's a shot dominated by a peeling strand of wallpaper, drooping and dripping over the room like a flaccid willy. Barton, embodied by Turturro as an anxious, skinny, grown schoolboy dressed in ill-fitting clothes, spends the movie being dominated by the whims and sentiments of men more virile and forceful than himself. When Charlie pins Barton in a misguided effort to show him the principles of wrestling, he apologetically comments that "I am well-endowed, physically." Which, of all the ways to phrase the sentiment "I am physically strong," that sure is one of them. This reading of the wallpaper is reinforced later on. The idea of looking for sexual subtext in textually innocuous objects emerges naturally from the premise. This is, after all, a movie about a writer with aspirations towards the lofty and the high-brow, trying to smuggle his notion of artistry into a Hollywood genre movie (in 1941, no less, a time when the Hays Code was at its most stringent). Coffee?" Obviously, this is a quick joke, one that the film doesn't stress, poking fun at the loudmouthed man's-man who's dimly aware of Freudian symbolism as a thing that 20th-century writers do, but who doesn't understand it or care to try.īut I think that joke primes the viewer to start looking for dicks in the film's visual schema. That's not a sexual thing although you're the writer, you'd know more about that. Lipnick says to Barton, in the course of his rambling, motor-mouthed train of thought: "I don't mean my dick is bigger than yours. Prior to the first time we see the wallpaper peel, there's the scene where Barton meets Jack Lipnick (the studio head played by Michael Lerner). This isn't even (just) me having a dirty imagination. The audience for an R-rated art film can be reasonably expected to draw certain associations when presented with the image of a trail of pearlescent goo, slowly crawling down the wall of a shabby hotel bedroom. I mean, at the very least, the Coens and DP Roger Deakins definitely knew what they were doing with the shot where Barton presses it back into place, and a viscous bead of wallpaper paste runs down the seam in the wall. The peeling wallpaper is a Freudian thing.
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