In the past, “common people” (whatever that means) were not sociopaths like Goodman. But as J. Reid Meloy has been saying since 1983, we’ve entered a time in which low levels of empathy and high levels of anxiety are normal, therefore sociopaths are ordinary.
“Yes, absolutely, in some sense it’s about the art vs. life, real vs. ideal, etc.”
In a very specific sense, it’s about the idealization of life interfering with the experience of life. It is to Clifford Odets’s version of the Group Theater what Sullivan’s Travels was to Capra’s It’s a Wonderful LIfe.
-In the past, “common people” (whatever that means) were not sociopaths-
Difficult assertion to prove . . . and the fact that history is rife with atrocities suggests otherwise.
You’ve misunderstood my point.
The point is not that a sociopath comes from some other background than that of a “common person.” The point is that sociopathology was not a common enough trait to be considered normative and therefore a defining trait of the “common person.”
Atrocities might be devised and engineered by sociopaths, but the crowd that gets caught up in a violent act is not necessarily composed of sociopaths. Not every Nazi was a sociopath, either. Thus, defining sociopathology as a normative trait in ordinary people is new. The newness of it is precisely what J. Reid Meloy was getting at.
The true unfounded assertion is not that the “common person” is something other than a sociopath. Rather, it is that there is even such a thing as the common person.
When people talk about the traits of the “common person,” they are usually defining other people based on a series of assumptions which are purely inductive. That’s Barton Fink’s problem, but it’s a problem many other people share — politicians, talking heads, even certain people on this thread.
Me and my arrow
-Atrocities might be devised and engineered by sociopaths, but the crowd that gets caught up in a violent act is not necessarily composed of sociopaths. Not every Nazi was a sociopath, either. Thus, defining sociopathology as a normative trait in ordinary people is new.-
Well, yes, but strictly speaking there’s a important difference between describing behavior as “sociopathic” and diagnosing a personality as having what is now generally known as “antisocial personality disorder.” So, while it may be accurate to say that not all Nazis would meet the diagnostic criteria for the personality disorder, it’s certainly still accurate to describe the Holocaust as sociopathic behavior (if anything this would strike me as understatement) without necessarily essentializing this to be personality trait of each individual person comprising the group.
The main point of the film, as with most of the Coens’ output, would seem to be that pretty art direction, pretty cinematography, and a lot of style-y flourishes minus any real content can pull the wool over the eyes of a lot of people.
Sorry to dredge up a six-month-old thread, but I can’t believe that that was the last word on Barton Fink.
I don’t mind, Roscoe, if you say you consider the Coen Brothers’ films to be overly stylized. Nor is there anything wrong with complaining that you feel they lack content. But when you say that the “main point” of the films is to deliberately obscure their own lack of content, and that those who disagree with you have had “the wool” pulled over their eyes by the Coen Brothers, then you’re making ad hominem pronouncements worthy of talk radio. Whatever I might think of the Coen Brothers’ least interesting films, it’s clear they were trying rather hard to make good movies in each case.
As if directors and writers who went over screenplays and scenes painstakingly before making a film were simply performing a magic trick that needed to be denounced publicly by someone like yourself.
Matt Parks:
I’m not sure what your strikethrough’s about, though I hope it was a formatting error and not intended to be an uncivil assertion of your own correctness.
Still, I find it reductive to suggest that all Nazis exhibited sociopathic behavior, particularly when we now know that a number of reluctant young people were bullied into becoming Nazi soldiers. Composer Hans Werner Henze, for example, who was enlisted by his father in an effort to force his effeminate son into becoming more masculine. After the war, and after Mussolini, Henze, who had been gay all his life, immediately left Germany and became an Italian citizen. He has lived there ever since.
If you doubt Hitler’s bullying of ordinary citizens even until the end of WWII, then consider the term Wolf Children and its history.
“I’m not sure what your strikethrough’s about”
Yes, it’s misformatting because the site has changed the way it handles certain characters between when I typed that and now.
“I find it reductive to suggest that all Nazis exhibited sociopathic behavior”
Of course it’s reductive to describe a group en mass. Nevertheless, the mass actions of the Nazi Germany led to genocide, which requires a sort of cultural sociopathology. If we’re talking about individuals, then yes, of course the individual case is relevant. If we’re talking about mass psychology, it isn’t.
My original point, to which you responded, was that vast numbers of ordinary people really have become clinical sociopaths, and that that condition should now be considered normative rather than pathological (if you believe J. Reid Meloy’s preface to The Psychopathic Mind).
In turn, I was responding to a point about the so-called common man being inclined to sociopathology as a personal response to the torture of daily drudgery, in which VL cited the Nazis in a way I felt was unnecessary.
Thus the original point of comparison had to with the individual, not The Mass Psychology of Fascism, or even Rumor, Fear and The Madness of Crowds (both relevant books today, but not in terms of what had been said here).
It’s a shame that admins changed the site’s formatting but don’t allow us to edit posts that are old enough to have been affected.
Haven’t seen the movie in a while but another Nazi reference is the two cops, one Italian and one German, harassing Fink (Jew)
I think the “Heil Hitler” line is delivered with sadness, it’s seems like it’s also suggesting that the detectives anti-semitism has brought this fate upon him. I think Barton is being saved by his neighbor from those 2 cops.,
We’re probably unduly belaboring an unimportant point, but . . .
“if you believe J. Reid Meloy’s preface to The Psychopathic Mind”
I don’t, but I understand your point. Here’s what was actually written, though:
Tibber: “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.)”
Vladi: “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.”
VL: “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.”
“Thus the original point of comparison had to with the individual, not”
If you look at the above, actually all the references prior to your statement “In the past, “common people” (whatever that means) were not sociopaths like Goodman” are about groups, not individuals, so I’m not sure that the claim you were disputing was actually ever made. Part of the confusion is one needs to decide exactly what the Coens intended with Charlie. Do the Coens intend Charlie to represent qualities of every “common man” individually? I don’t think so. “The common man” is really an abstract ideal held by Fink, not a real person or persons at all. Charlie is populism gone awry.
What I’m saying is, without appropriate information, there’s no way to make that determination on an individual basis one way or the other.
I’d like to return to this Coens’ masterpiece, as I think just a little has been said about the meaning of the film.
First of all, let me quote some interesting ideas expressed on the film.
The best summary of different interpretations I have found in Davey Morrison’s article The life of the mind and the circles of hell , including the comments on the dual personality Barton/Charlie, the Expressionists’ influences, the elevator man resembling the boatman of the River Styx and some extended analysis of the Hell interpretation.
Then, there is Todd Alcott’s take on the film and his very interesting idea on the meaning of the shoes
Finally, I have found this forum’s discussion from Rob Ager’s website – post number 20 with all the similarities listed between Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski, especially between the two characters played by John Goodman, but not limited to the characters’ comparison.
So, let me add a few other thoughts. The interpretation of hotel Earle as Hell is quite solid, confirmed also by Barton’s consecutive stepping in Charlie’s bigger shoes (his feet loose in them) and then leaving his own shoes outside the room when he finally starts to write vigorously. But I have the feeling that the Hell is in Barton’s own head, confirmed by the closed space of the room – he can’t open the window when he first enters the room and there is this view through the window of a wall. And of course, we don’t see anything outside the hotel except the sea on the first entrance. Plus there are two windows and here is what the word Barton means according to Wikipedia – “Barton is an archaic English word meaning lands of the manor or meadow”
On Nebuchadnezzar references. Sure we have the Jew Lou Breeze being virtually a slave to Lipnick and we have the Jew Barton – is Barton Daniel who must interpret Lipnick’s (i.e. Hollywood’s) dream? And he of course fails. And Barton remains slave at the end of the film on the grounds of his contract. All this on the background of WWII seems to make sense.
And the frame of the movie – the downwards movements on the stage at the beginning and the sea gull falling at the end. And the introducing words by the actor at the beginning like saying it all:
“I’m blowin’ out of here, blowin’ for
good. I’m kissin’ it all goodbye,
these four stinkin’ walls, the six
flights up, the el that roars by at
three A.M. like a castiron wind.
Kiss ‘em goodbye for me, Maury!
I’ll miss ’em – like hell I will!”
Matt Parks
-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.-Yes, absolutely, in some sense it’s about the art vs. life, real vs. ideal, etc.