Barton Fink (1991)
My mother was the first person in her family of farm workers to attend university, where she got a degree in art history. When I was born, she realized her curator job didn’t pay well enough to feed a child, and she managed to find a job as an accountant, which she worked at for the rest of her life before retiring. She spent my whole childhood trying to discourage me from considering art-related activities as viable careers while simultaneously being the only source of art I had access to in our tiny rural town, through the music she played while she cooked and I did my homework and in the movies she rented for us to watch together every weekend.
When I was 13, I told her that I’d started a poetry workshop at school and that I decided to upgrade my class notebook margin doodles to actual, deliberate attempts at drawing. Her response to this was renting Barton Fink to watch that weekend. I can only assume the intention was to make me feel dread at the opposition earnest art was met with, at the idea of being so entrenched in your stories that it blinded you to the dangers of the world, at leaving your working-class family bereft (ambiguously dead) because you were deluded enough to think your creations would be good enough to make a difference.
Unfortunately for her, it didn’t work as intended: I didn’t become a professional artist, but I went into what might be one of the most unemployable fields of study in academia these days, experienced some fairly violent worldly realities, and picked up schizo-affective thought patterns in the process. And I am, in fact, unemployed, so in that regard she was right about all of it. Fortunately for me, my art was decent enough at some point to have some savings from commission work, and approximately five people are willing to listen to the stories I have to tell.
So when I argue with her on the phone from the psych ward or the homeless shelter about how I need to get a real job to get real help to be a real adult, I still turn to Barton Fink (perhaps counterintuitively, but only perhaps) to feel less hopeless about my life and write overly verbose reviews for it on the internet, where I don't need to grow out of believing in the power of fiction to find value in my thoughts.
I am, somewhat predictably, extremely protective of this guy who is a little too limp-wristed for the working class and also too working class to make highbrow art, a little too worried about the alcoholics and the cries for help next door to shit out profitable screenplays on a strict schedule, who sounds a little…, a guy who can only talk about suffering through fiction, who thinks that these accounts of things that are too sickening to look at in the eye directly should be treated with the same dignity as the real thing because they are also a real thing, who gets told to man up, to grow up, because the real working class are people dying for the country. And are they wrong? Is he truly awake at last, or still dreaming? After all, he offered soft-spoken recognition to his hotel neighbor, and it might have painted a target on his family’s back. Audrey trusted Barton enough to tell him she was the ghostwriter behind most of Mayhew’s novels because he was the only one to offer an ear to a secretary and not just her wealthy male employer, but when he called her for help with his script, he awoke to a corpse. He tried to celebrate his own work with a dance, and he was told he had no right to these songs. The only work he can ever do for the people who need it happens in his head.
They will not produce his film scripts until he writes about wrestling the right way: big men, physically and mentally, partake in regulated violence both in front of and behind the camera. Because it’s not the poor boys in the real wrestling ring and on the front lines making a difference, nor the fishmongers down on Fulton Street, still singing past the violence, still hoping to hear back from their child who longed for and feared skipping town and now won’t be allowed to come home until he grows up a little. It’s obviously not the cuckoo Jewish fags on Broadway, all of them annoying bloodsuckers that will loiter around your lights and disfigure your moneymaker mug. It’s the film producers in decorated uniforms that point to where the money goes both in Hollywood and in the military that have the means to make fiction a reality. It’s them that make the difference when they turn others’ suffering into best-selling glory.
Life looks so violently solid in the light of day after the sweet deniability of night. But if you can direct the light of fact with the mask of fiction, it can illuminate the truth without blinding the audience. Cover your eyes from the sun: that’s a real woman at a real beach just as much as it is a picture in Barton’s hotel room and the title of his new script. Cover your eyes from the sun: sweat and gasoline are not all that different. Cover your eyes from the sun: our lives are the only story ever worth telling, and they’re all fruity scripts about suffering that will never be produced. The way we serve the common man is our head, which we can’t trade in for a new one. Our severed head, separated from the living body, can be conveniently packaged and passed on to someone else like a story that will always be meaningful, even when it needs to stay locked away lest the violence it reveals gets too unbearable to look at.
Is a dream more real than a sleep-deprived psychotic breakdown? Is reality something more than the sum of our perceptions? All stories are someone asking you to believe them, and you do.
The life of the mind is no stranger to the life of the body. If you don’t open the box, your story is as important as the violence of a severed head, and the violent reality of a severed head is as real as your story.
The common man is a hotel clerk and an antisemitic cop. The common man is a ghostwriting secretary and a frustrated artist. The common man is a struggling wrestler and anti-intellectual cannon fodder. The common man is an insurance salesman and a serial killer. The common man is a tourist with a typewriter and a prisoner who wants to get off the merry-go-round. The common man is a victim and an accomplice. The common man remembers the shame of transactional humiliation when he’s at the other end of it. The common man’s struggle for existence cannot quite quell their longing for something higher. The common man could tell you some stories.
If it’s not the build they hate, it’s the personality: the common men always have something in common.