Barton Fink Analysis

However, when Barton fails to produce a piece of work that adheres to the generic Hollywood structure, without the “action, adventure, wrestling” (Coen; Coen, 1991: 48.58) that the audience wants Lipnik changes character. When Fink claims that he thinks it is his best work yet, Lipnick aggressively tells Fink that “if your opinion mattered, I guess I’d resign or let you run the studio.” (Coen; Coen, 1991: 1991: 1.48.17), a clear departure from his earlier claims that the ‘writer is king’. He even calls Fink arrogant and yells: “you think you’re the only writer that can give me that Barton Fink feeling?” (Coen; Coen, 1991: 50.26) and informs Fink that he has twenty other writers who can give him the ‘Barton Fink feeling’. This shows a fundamental
Even if the studio stays true to a script, if in the final stages the audience does not like any aspects of the film they will be changed: “A million-plus screenwriters, the audience wrote that ending.” (Altman, 1992: 39.36). Even the reference to ‘a million plus screen writers’ emphasises that the writing of a script is no longer the work of an individual but a collaborative process. Although the author is never explicitly removed from the process of either film, it is regularly hinted at. In Barton Fink, Fink is told that he is replaceable, disposable. In The Player it is suggested by Larry Levy that writing is not the work of creative geniuses and that the studio should get rid of the writers and write their own scripts: “All I'm saying is I think a lot of time and money can be saved .if we came up with these stories on our own.” (Altman, 1992: 42.15) and although Griffin defends this notion, it is likely that he is doing so as if the writers were removed his job would no longer exist. In the film, David Kahane is killed by Mill in an altercation which can be seen as representing the literal death of the author. David Kahane stands up to Mill and his refusal to conform to the Hollywood system arguably gets him killed and thus one could see this as suggesting that any writer who does not agree to Hollywood’s terms is unable to survive in
The most blatant example of this is when the famous novelist and scriptwriter W.P Mayhew, whom Barton reveres as being “the finest novelist of our time” (Coen; Coen, 1991: 33.30) is revealed to be a violent alcoholic and a fraud whose secretary and lover Audrey has written the “last couple” (Coen; Coen, 1991: 1.05.37) of books for him. Barton himself however also undermines the concept of the writer as an individual genius. In her essay “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf claims that “It is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.” (Woolf, 2000: 103) Although Woolf is referring specifically to women, this suggestion is one that Fink appears to agree with wholeheartedly. The only reason he appears to have taken the job at Capitol Pictures is to fund his art: “a brief tenure in Hollywood could support you through the writing of any number of plays.” (Coen; Coen, 1991: 6.29) however this also undermines the concept of the individual author who writes for art not money. Fink chooses the dingy Earle hotel over any offered by Lipnick in order to keep himself to himself. On his first night at the hotel he makes a noise complaint about his neighbour and on a few occasions even plugs his ears with cotton wool in