Barton Fink (1991)

The Coens wrote this in three weeks while they were completely stuck on Miller's Crossing, which is the most useful fact about it. It is a film about writer's block made by two people escaping their own. Barton sits in front of a typewriter for most of the running time producing one paragraph, and the movie around him gets steadily stranger, hotter and more threatening, until the hotel corridor is on fire and nobody can tell you exactly what is literal.

The joke underneath it is savage. Barton talks constantly about wanting to write for the common man, about the poetry of ordinary people, about theatre that belongs to the working man. He lives next door to an actual working man who repeatedly tries to tell him a story, and Barton talks over him every single time. He wants the common man as a subject and has no interest in him as a person. Everything that happens to him follows from that.

It is also very funny in a way that surprises people who have only heard it is difficult. Michael Lerner's studio boss is a magnificent comic creation, all hugging and shouting and instant reversals. The Coens know Hollywood absurdity cold. What makes the film unsettle you is that the comedy never stops, even when the picture has clearly turned into something else.

The film is not interested in giving you a solution and people should know that going in. The box, the hotel, the fire, the ending, none of it resolves into a single reading. The Coens made a puzzle that is genuinely about the feeling of not being able to think, and a clean answer would break it. Bring your interpretation to the chat rather than looking one up.

W.P. Mayhew, the drunk southern novelist, is a barely disguised Faulkner, who really did write for the studios and really did drink through it. Notice that his assistant Audrey is doing the actual writing. The film keeps showing you men with reputations and the invisible people producing the work.

There is a reading of the film as being about the late 1930s and early 1940s more broadly, about intellectuals who claimed to speak for ordinary people while catastrophe built up around them. The hotel is called the Earle, the year is 1941, and Charlie's rampage has language attached to it that is hard to miss. It is one reading and the film supports several.

The thing that lands hardest is smaller than any of that. Barton finally writes something, and it is good, and nobody will ever read it, and the studio owns it and will not make it. He got what he wanted at the exact moment it stopped being worth anything.