Because Goodman’s character is the common man, and Fink wouldn’t listen to him because of his intellectual nonsense. It fits your interpretation.
—DiB
But how does screaming, “I am the life of the mind,” fit?
Goodman’s character is supposed to be the devil. Far from the common man. Interesting you name the Lynch references because I think Lynch would tackle this very same subject 10 years later: The disillusionment with the Hollywood dream.
i’ve also read that it’s supposed to be an allegory about Nazism (which i guess would explain Goodman’s “heil Hitler” before he shoots the detective.)
The heiling of Hitler is a reference to the idea that nazis were a movement of “common men” gone psycho on a mass scale, I think.
Where are the Eraserhead references? I believe you that they’re there, but besides the hairstyle I don’t remember seeing any.
If Goodman’s character is the devil then maybe he’s referencing the Rolling Stones and is therefore the common man too.
Yeah, I think it is important to catch that bit at the start of the film where we hear a bit of Fink’s successful play. Later he recycles that bit into his screenplay—he’s just a hack who thinks of himself as some sort of genius but doesn’t really know anything about people, common man or not.
Have you read Nathanael West? That Goodman demon and fire makes a lot more sense if you think of this movie as being the Coen interpretation of West.
And the bit from Barton’s play at the beginning is being recited by John Turturro (Barton Fink) himself, suggesting a bad writer who thinks he is creating all kinds of different characters but is actually just listening to his own voice.
Also, Barton brags with Charlie about the unmapped depth and complexity of his “life of the mind”, but he is actually as vain and frightened and has mostly the same dreams (a beautiful girl at the beach) as any man, and has absolutely no clue about how really messed up the life of the mind of common men who live their entire lives in Hell can really be. This last is what Charlie points out when he runs shouting: “This is the life of the mind!!”
Fink and John Mahoney’s character Mayhew are based (though somewhat loosely) on Clifford Odets and William Faulkner, respectively, if that helps.
Saw this film yester, still thinking about it lots. This thread raises many points .
@VL. Like in The Inferno?
@Sanjuro. Rolling Stones reference? Help me out.
It’s a film of startlingly weird moments; one of my favorite is Barton’s initial conversation with Chet, who seems inordinately fond of his own name.
They’re also showing what happens to fruity, fragile, self-absorbed, ultra-literate “artsy” types when they come to Hollywood, after having departed their little precious, artsy, collegiate cocoons and ivory towers of NYC and London. ’Hollywood is a whole ’nother ballgame" the story is saying, and the sooner you get used to how it works, the better.
But ultimately Barton Fink is a comedy, to be laughed at.
I think (beside the biographical aspects of the film) the Coens were showing us a wicked, unsubtle, bitter portrait of how Hollywood functions (and always has functioned) in America: Jews churning out myths—- toothless, banal, cliched myths—- for the vast uneducated or semi-educated masses of America.
hahaha
-“I am the life of the mind!”-
It’s actually “I’ll show you the life of the mind.”
Earlier, Fink says “I gotta tell you, the life of the mind … There’s no road map for that territory … and exploring it can be painful. The kind of pain most people don’t know anything about.”
And what is the significance or meaning of those quotes for you, Matt?
The life of the mind ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Mayhew: “Me I just enjoy making things up. Yessah escape. Its when I can’t write I can’t escape myself, I want to rip my head off and run screaming down the street with my balls in a fruit pickers pail.”
Barton kept saying he was writing for the common man, when really he had utter contempt for the common man and was writing so he could transcend them. When he first meets John Goodman, he tries to open up to Barton, and Barton shuts him down with the underlying assumption that ‘The common man’ derives from his intellectual creative mind instead of the actual common man’s experience. He made every attempt up to that point to insulate himself from the common man. Goodman actually being a serial killer at the end I see as an exaggerated consequence of his contempt.
If Barton had just written the wrestling picture they wanted, he could have built up a reputation and eventually gotten to write the scripts he wanted. Instead he just disregarded what the audience wanted thinking his ideas were better: And this conceit causes him to lose any chance at creative freedom.
If you watch the film again, pay attention to how the word “HEAD” is used several times and in different context. Could be a clue.
Maybe other people have said what Jirin just did, but I think it switched on the lightbulb, if you know what I mean. So, the film is satire on pretentious artist and critics—those who would dismiss and ridicule mainstream Hollywood movies. So, when Goodman’s character says, “I’ll show you the life of the mind” and proceeds on a rampage, he’s saying screw that prententious pose, etc.
Or maybe this part of the film critiques a over-intellectual approach to making art—one that is not connected to real life?
On the other hand, the film also does seem to satirize Hollywood filmmaking, too. (My memory of the film is hazy.)
@Danger Paule
A clue to what? If you know the answer, how about spilling the beans?
-the film also does seem to satirize Hollywood filmmaking, too.-
It does, yes.
Barton doesn’t make a mistake in despising common men. He fails by believing he knows the common man and by not realizing that he, too, is very much one of them, as are all really extraordinary men, like Mayhew. The life of common men is not despicable, but terrifying, full of loneliness, despair and downright murderous madness. One of the most terrifying aspect of the life of common men is being at the mercy of their egocentric, stupid bosses (common men that think they are extraordinary, much like Barton did) and having no choice but to work for them doing absolutely boring, dumb stuff (like wrestling movies for Barton and Mayhew, and Insurance selling for Charlie), always under the fear of being fired and humiliated.
The Coen Brothers do not criticize high-brow art and they do despise mainstream unimaginative Hollywood movies. They also have a very bleak view of life and the dignity of human beings. Look at Fargo, at The Man Who Wasn’t There and to Burning After Reading. I think it’s pretty obvious that the Coen brothers believe, like plenty of artists and thinkers from all ages, that stupidity rules this world and that it makes it a pretty hellish place to live in.
Very good points in both of your last posts, VL.
Barton Fink isn’t inherently despicable, he’s simply obtuse. Nor are the Coen brothers anti-Semites promoting the tired and irrelevant conspiracy theory that Jews control Hollywood and the media, as a certain rather obtuse person has insisted in the comments above. They of all people know better.
Barton Fink’s ideas about people are simply too abstract and unintuitive; he generalizes about them without having understood them. He insults people with whom he’s trying to bond and lacks the intuition to recognize he’s dangerous.
I think of this story more as a picaresque than anything else. Fink is simply a mock hero — another vain man who blunders through the world with so many illusions that his life must fall apart before he can even catch glimpses of the world’s true savagery. In one sense, he is Don Quixote, in another, Hogarth’s rake.
However, to make every single detail fit into an allegory is an interesting idea but seems too literal. It can also render some of the film’s most resonant ambiguities too obvious. When I say “picaresque,” I’m referring to the form.
In the second paragraph above, I meant to say this:
Fink insults people with whom he’s trying to bond and lacks the intuition to recognize that Goodman’s character is dangerous.
The film did show mainstream Hollywood films as unimaginative and formulaic, but I don’t think that’s the main thing they were criticizing. It’s pretty clear to me they were satirizing the indie elitists who keep themselves in a self-congratulatory bubble. They were saying, the system forces you to sell out a bit and write schlock, but that’s just life and you have to deal with it and earn your place. You can write a film within the wrestling formula and have it be a fantastic movie. In fact, going back to the thread about artistic limitations, it’s easier to than to try to write based on an abstract idea he pulled out of thin air. Barton wasn’t willing to try because he felt superior.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say the Coens despise humanity. Sure, they see the world as an unpredictably dangerous and deeply unfair place, but the innocent and naive are portrayed very sympathetically. Horrible things happen to people that are completely beyond their control, and people do stupid and self-destructive things out of greed. But unlike some other directors I could mention, the Coens don’t damn the entire race for the worst members of it, and they don’t villainize innocence. Often the characters start out committing smaller sins and those sins propagate into larger ones, but in those cases I rarely feel like I’m supposed to despise the people committing them. Then they’ve got a lot of movies with flawed but well meaning protagonists like Raising Arizona and O Brother Where Art Thou. The Coens’ world view is very cynical, but it’s also forgiving.
@VL
He fails by believing he knows the common man and by not realizing that he, too, is very much one of them, as are all really extraordinary men, like Mayhew.
I don’t know. Isn’t part of his failure the fact that he’s so engrossed in his project that he fails to listen to or care about the people he supposedly is writing about. (Goodman’s character screams something like, “You’re problem is you don’t listen!”)
Right, Barton doesn’t listen to Charlie because he thinks he already knows everything there is to know about the common man. He thinks that common men lead lives full of romantic sadness and stoic dignity, as is evident in the little fragment from his play that is heard at the beginning of the movie. He doesn’t realize that people like Charlie, with his dull job, his loneliness and even his madness (remember the reference to Hitler: frustrated common men can become mass murderers), are the common men. And in his loneliness, despair and madness Mayhew is too a common man. As is Barton. That is what he learns by going to Hollywood and spending a time living like most common men do (in the 1930’s, that is): in a little room, trying to finish some absurd job for his tyrannical, absurd boss, while dreaming about meeting a beautiful girl at the beach.
RaySquirrel
What I got from it is the irony of a writer priding himself on working for “The Common Man” while slipping further and further into isolation, accompanied by some very heavy Eraserhead references.
So far as to John Goodman running down the hall, lighting it up in flames with his back-draft, shouting “I am the life of the mind!” I am still a little puzzled.