The movie Barton
Fink (1991) is written and directed by Coen Brothers holds many
discussions ever since it aired on the white screen. The movie includes
varieties of symbolic meanings as well as hidden messages. The movie tells the
story of a writer who struggles with writing a script for Holywood. The movie
has characteristics of metafiction as it is fiction about the process of
creating fiction. Throughout the movie, the audience tries to grasp the idea of
reality because it is repeatedly broken by irrational scenes. The spaces of the
movie are different and each space contributes to the reality or unreality of
the movie.
First of all, the first scene opens up to a backstage of a
theatre in which a man is repeating the lines of the scene. The first line of
the movie is the first line of the play and it goes as; ‘’Daylight is a dream
if you lived with your eyes closed.’’ This line includes much symbolic reading
for the movie. The audience could interpret these lines as the protagonist is
in a dream, the protagonist wants to live in a dream, the protagonist is in a
dream for not realizing what is real and important, or the movie’s narrative is
a dream narrative. Every interpretation is possible when you think about the
differences between the day scenes and the night scenes of the movie. In the
day, the audience sees the protagonist with other people in which set in
believable spaces, but when the night comes, the hotel set a space where the
unreliability is dominant if it is considered that the audience only sees the
protagonist in the hotel at nights after the first time he enters it.
Second of all, with this point of view, the spaces of the
movie could be divided as the inside of the hotel and the outside of the hotel.
The most important space of the movie is the hotel room of the protagonist. As
it includes darkness, hotness, deterioration, and eventually madness; the hotel
room space contributes to the unreliability of the movie’s reality. The hotness
of the space becomes like a character that has an overwhelming effect on the
protagonist. Thus the space of the hotel room could be linked with his
next-door company Charlie and it is dictated with the sweat drops on his face
and the peeling of the wall-papers as it could be the symbol of the ear
infection of Charlie. The green and the dark yellow colors of the room add up
the aura of deterioration. The claustrophobic space of the hotel is constructed
with its narrow corridors and dark rooms. After a point in the movie, its
reliability gets questionable. As the protagonists have sex with the woman of
his dream, the audience feels like they view a dream space that has the
characteristics of a nightmare. The blood on the woman and the bloodstain on
the bed, the noises that come from far away, the dripping sound of the tap, the
blurry vision of the protagonist indicates intoxicated realities such as the
effect of alcohol or most likely a nightmare.
Third of all, images of outside spaces of the movie helps to
contribute to the reliability of the movie as it includes scenes with other
characters that have been caught up their own lives such as the lunch with the
producer, or the picnic scene with the admired writer W.P.Mayhew, the voices of
children and the people yelling turns the audience to the real world. The spaces
that the protagonist enters where he faces the authority figure, the director
Jack Lipnick, contributes to the reality of the movie as it turns our attention
to the linear narrative of the movie, that the protagonist came to Los Angeles
with a purpose and towards the end, the protagonist learns that there is a war
and what is more real than a war? However, as soon as the protagonist returns
to the hotel, the audience is faced with dark spaces again. Even authority
figures of detectives that should bring reliability to the movie are only seen
within the hotel thus it redeems their credibility. Towards the end of the
movie, the hotel looks like it is actually caught on fire and the detectives
are killed violently by Charlie and this is the last scene that makes the
audience believe that none of the things were real as the audience sees the
protagonist in his unburnt room writing insanely as if nothing happened or as
if he was wakened up from his nightmare.
Lastly, the painting that has been on the wall of the
protagonist from the beginning is set up as the last scene of the movie after
the protagonist learns that in short, he is a prisoner of the company until he
‘grows a pair’ and writes a decent movie script. Throughout the movie, whenever
Barton gets suffocated from his anxiety, from the fact that he has a deadline
or from the heat he looks at the painting and hears the sound of the ocean
waves which gives him a sense of relief thus it is not surprising to see him in
the beach as he feels overwhelmed by the realities of the life. However, the
speech between the protagonist and the woman on the beach and the pose of the
woman makes the audience believe that it was all a dream yet they can never be
sure where did it started or where did it end.
In
conclusion, the images of space in the movie make the audience question or
believe the reality of the movie. The audience enjoys a movie while witnessing
the suffering of being a writer and they wander between imagination versus
reality as the protagonist does.
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