Zambelli

Somewhere in the middle of Michael Bay's latest self-indulgent piece of movie dung, I found myself thinking of Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" and the scene in which Alex is strapped to a chair, his head immobilized, his eyes forced open, and film clips of murder, rape and Nazi crimes are projected onto the movie screen until he finds himself unable to take any more, sickness overcomes him and he cries out for the torture to stop.

I cried too, but my projectionist wouldn't stop the movie for me.

"You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise god!"

I see the movie as a self-parody of the writers. In the movie, Fink is an acclaimed Broadway writer, although it's clearly obvious to us that his plays are crap. He claims to be writing for the common people, but he doesn't even socially interact with other people - he admits that at the end of the film when he cries in despair over his loneliness.

Basically, Barton Fink is a highly overrated writer, who tells us cliched stories about writers' suffering, and how misery is the only "true inspiration" that writers have. What is his misery? That he's stuck in a hotel? That seems to be the reasoning behind John Goodman's climactic final appearance - he is really just laughing at Fink and looking down at him. Fink doesn't know real suffering, he's really just full of sh*t. Fink's arogance is fueled by the Hollywood producers, in an obvious exeggarated parody of The Writer as The Ultimate Creator. In fact, Fink plays along with this idea. This is illustrated in several scenes. In one of them he sees his own lousy script appear in the Bible instead of the Genesis (the most important part of the Bible, obviously). In the dancing scene, he gets into a fight with a bunch of guys and then shouts out how he's misunderstood and mistreated although he is better than everyone else because he is The Creator! "I create! Can't you understand?"

I can understand the theories about Barton Fink as a modern version of Dante's Inferno, but taking into consideration that this script was written *while* the Coens were experiencing writer's block on another script ("Miller's Crossing"), I think the idea about Fink being a self-parody of The Writer makes even more sense.