She says something, but her voice is lost in the crash of the surf. Barton cups a hand to his ear. Barton shrugs and shakes his head. She nods and sits down on the sand several paces away from him, facing the water but looking back over her shoulder at Barton. Are you in pictures? She laughs. She turns away to look out at the sea. Facing the ocean. Barton sits in the middle foreground, back to us, the box in the sand next to him. The bathing beauty sits, back to us, in the middle background.
The surf pounds. His wandering off, singing, and drinking represent his attempt to escape his miserable existence, a manic defence against his sadness and inability to write. Fink will find himself increasingly wanting to escape, but in a different way: through fantasy.
He often stares at the picture, admiring the beauty of the woman and the scene. This is his conception of heaven: those waves washing on the shore are his relief from the fiery hell of Hollywood, with its capitalistic degrading of creativity for profit.
The sea! The aspiring writer who has sold his soul to Hollywood tries to escape to the heaven of fantasy. I find this to be a simplistic interpretation of a much more complex character. Charlie has a raging fire of pain in him, but he has a lot of good, too.
It is assumed that he is a serial killer, that he kills Audrey out of a rage of sexual jealousy because Fink has chosen beautiful her over fat Charlie as his Muse and his lover. If so, why not kill Fink instead? Their homoerotic wrestling suggests Charlie has wanted Fink , so his betrayal with Audrey should make Charlie want to kill him instead. If killing her was meant to get revenge on Fink by hurting him—traumatizing him—why help him dispose of the body afterwards, in an attempt to protect him from the cops?
For all we know, Mayhew —in an uncharacteristic moment of sobriety—could have sneaked in the hotel and killed her. I find it ironically fitting that Charlie, whom I equate with communism, would—in the eyes of the Hollywood liberal that distributes films like this—symbolize Satan. The one time we see Charlie actually kill people is in the scene in the burning hallway in the hotel.
After all, he casually enters his room, one surrounded by flames, instead of fleeing the scene of the crime. The final scene of Fink with the beauty at the beach can only be fantasy. It is absurdly improbable that a woman in real life, identical to the girl in the picture, would assume the exact same pose, too. Are the cuts on his face from mosquito bites, or are they from him having too harshly scratched itches from imagined bites? Mosquitoes breed in swamps—this is a desert.
His hallucination comes from reading the first chapter of Genesis. Bare Ruined Choirs , as noted above, gets its title from a Shakespeare quote. I find the insights of Wilfred R. Bion useful for this purpose. Only beta-elements are available for whatever activity takes the place of thinking and beta elements are suitable for evacuation—perhaps through the agency of projective identification.
The burning hotel and the picture Fink has a conversation with are two of his bizarre objects, hallucinations that indicate his growing psychotic break with reality. Raw sensory data were never invested with meaning, to become thought. Unprocessed beta elements thus become bizarre objects. The most important characteristic is [his] hatred of any new development in the personality as if the new development were a rival to be destroyed.
His accelerating psychosis is propelled by the traumatic incidents that disappoint or shock him. Other rejected beta elements for Fink would be the realization of the rise of fascism in Europe and the hell his fellow Jews would be suffering there. The point is that all that is hateful to narcissistic Fink, hateful things inside himself, all those things are projected onto the world.
He unconsciously considers himself too perfect to have any faults of his own, so he projects them onto other people, real or imagined. Also, he considers himself too perfect to introject anything from the outside world, to learn anything, so he rejects the beta elements.
A few weeks ago I sat down and watched Barton Fink and I found it not only a great film but it also got me thinking about symbolism. Barton Fink is a film by the wonderful Coen Brothers about a writer who experience trouble writing after moving to Hollywood. The movie criticizes Hollywood and the studio system at the like, but ultimately the film is really about anything, there is no deeper meaning or message, which is very interesting to me.
It's a great film and uses a lot symbolism in relation to some reoccurring themes including Fascism, Broadway and Hollywood, Writing, Slavery, "the common man" and Religion.
Ultimately the film is a tease for film nerds like me who enjoy reading a little too deeply into films, as I was watching it I was sure that there was a message that they were trying to express but there isn't and I actually like it for that. It's like a friendly trick they played on you, but you don't mind cause you see the funny side and ultimately you had fun.
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