“THANKS FOR YOUR HEART, BART.” I loved Barton Fink from the very first shot, where the yellow(ed) wallpaper becomes the site of horror. Here are some thoughts on why this movie completely works for me in every moment (whereas The Big Lebowski, for example, is smarter and perhaps more essential, yet sloppier–they’re both totally awesome).

First of all, Sean Collins is right as usual in saying that this is a horror movie. In fact, it’s very close to an exercise in writing “If the movie of The Shining were funny.” It’s also a horror-comedy beating up on the idea that art is ethics, which is intensely awesome and right. Sean’s review is fantastic and touches on several aspects I don’t talk about here. I don’t think I disagree with anything he says.

The hotel wallpaper is such a great starting image, basically because it’s not what Sean calls the “monumental” horror image, something there which shouldn’t be there–think of the twin girls in The Shining, or the wicker man in eponymous. (Argh, it’s been years since I read Sean’s fantastic essay, so if he incorporates this concept I apologize.) Instead, the horror of the wallpaper is the horror of something which really should be there in a cultural or ordinary-experience sense, something expected… and yet, in some other, emotional or metaphysical sense, still shouldn’t–something which still isn’t right. The normal course of the world is disruption.

And there are tons of other horror motifs throughout the movie–the use of music and sound effects, for example, is totally horror, and so is the hideous sticky dew of the peeling wallpaper. And in some sense you can say that the whole point of the movie is that even if you think you might be in a satire–and how awful is that, as a realization?–it’s still even worse, because you’re really in a horror flick. That I think is a fairly profound statement; and true.

More stuff about this movie…. I realize that I’m basically not rational about it, because it happened to employ one very specific symbol which shook my heart. Barton is a NYC playwright who gets hijacked by Hollywood. He checks into an adorably stereotypical hotel, with outlandish jungle palms and a knowing desk clerk and a duelling-scarred elevator man. (I really liked how this movie employed stereotypes without ever considering itself superior to them. Cliches are fun… and not random; they hook into some real anxieties here, even while being desperately overdone.) He goes up to his room. He sits down at his typewriter. He looks up.

And then he sees this photograph.

It’s a picture of a pretty young lady sitting on a beach, looking out at the sea.

I can’t even tell you what this thing means to me. It is so close to my own personal map of longing, of what George Orwell in 1984 calls “the Golden Country”… of the shores of Sans-Souci. It’s what King Haggard means in The Last Unicorn when he says, about unicorns, “The first time I saw them, I thought I was going to die.”

The moment I saw that photo I pretty much knew I was in thrall to this movie. And in fact, that photo turns out to be really important, used in really smart and complex thematic ways. (Check it out in the final scenes with Charlie Meadows, for example–his head is right up against the picture frame. And of course the finale uses this photo in a way I loved, even though I don’t really understand it.)

There are probably other things I could say. I loved the exploration of a specifically left-wing Jewish horror, in which art-as-ethics suffered three distinct defeats:

1) The ethical artist really doesn’t listen; his art is self-absorption. (This is really explicit in the text–“I could tell you stories,” Charlie says at least three times, but Barton never asks about them; “You don’t listen!” Charlie yells, at last. If the movie weren’t funny this would come off as really heavy-handed, but I think the charming presentation and silly physicality–pus dripping from cotton-swabbed ears–makes it totally work. Plus the fact that the alternative presented, art-as-escapism, is equally awful!)

2) There are times when we experience moral vertigo, when “the right thing to do” is unclear, estranged, and horrifically far away. (This, and the point below, are I think big parts of why the “Bill Mayhew”/Faulkner cliche-fest is important.)

3) And after that, even when we regain some sense of morals, we still must confront radical evil–a kind of evil which makes all the talk of ethics ring hollow, where the question isn’t, “What do I do now in order to be human?” but, “Why should I keep trying to be human, or to be anything at all?”

Also, it’s funny. So nu, not as funny as The Big Lebowski (“Say what you like about National Socialism–at least it’s an ethos!”)… but still a good time at the popcorn house. And your laughter grants the movie its authority.