In the Flesh: Barton Fink

In the sticky heat of early morning, frustrated writer Barton Fink (John Turturro) stares at his sleeping lover Audrey Taylor’s (Judy Davis) back as a mosquito lights on her and begins to feed. The parasitic insect’s whine recurs throughout Joel and Ethan Coen’s Barton Fink, driving Barton to distraction, leaving him with painful bites. It feeds on him as W. P. Mayhew (John Mahoney) feeds on Audrey, using her unacknowledged talent to sustain a writing career left hollowed out by his drinking, just as the studios feed on both Mayhew and Fink, just as America’s moneyed upper crust feed on the horse sense and instincts of the Jewish studio moguls. In the particular case of the mosquito, though, the cycle has ended. Audrey’s been murdered in her sleep; her blood is dead, her utility to the film’s other parasites dried up. And what does Fink, who in the wake of her death finally sits down and bangs out his script, glean from his suckling at her veins? A self-important rehash of the play that got him his gig in the first place. More dead blood, clotted and congealed.

“Fire, theft, and casualty aren’t just things that happen to other people,” says corn-fed insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), but on top of the workaday parasitism of the insurance industry, Charlie also preys on his customers in a more literal sense. He’s also the serial killer Karl “Madman” Mundt, who dismembers and consumes his victims, erasing the people around Barton one by one in a shadowy reflection of the writer’s halting attempts at connecting to others. No one makes anything alone, not Barton plucking stories out of his patronizing view of the gutter, not Lipnick (Michael Lerner) leaning on the Lous (John Polito) and Bartons of the world to keep Hollywood’s vast gears in motion, not even Audrey, who without Mayhew’s name might never have written for the public. The only act possible in isolation is consumption, the chewing up of one’s context, the rendering of cohesion and community into chaos and filth.

Wallpaper peeling away from the walls in wet, heavy curls. Flames unfurling from an elevator as its doors slide open. A policy case unlocks and the oiled weight of a shotgun emerges. A piece of hotel art becomes a woman (Isabelle Townsend) becomes an image again, banality folding in on itself through the lens of a mind which has actively refused to learn. “YOU. DON’T. LISTEN,” Mundt roars at Barton as the hotel burns around them. The monster’s right. Fink, like everyone around him, is locked up in his own head, endlessly reproducing his own insubstantial internality. At no point can meaning enter the process of observation and creation, because to create art is a supreme act of myopia, a belief that one’s own thoughts are important and entrancing enough to hold the attention of hundreds, or even thousands. Mosquitos drinking from corpses all the way down, forever and forever, amen.