2) Barton Fink
Some filmmakers, perhaps most popularly Christopher Nolan, seem to make all their movies about their relationships with movies. For Nolan, it’s comparing movies to experiences like dreams, or magic tricks, or false memories. For someone like Martin Scorsese, every movie is a conversation with film history, of which he has a reputedly encyclopedic knowledge. The Coen brothers are more subtle in their conversation with movie history, at least with the movies that have influenced them, such as those by Alfred Hitchcock and Preston Sturges.
Barton Fink is perhaps the Coens’ most abstract movie, taking their taste for mythic storytelling to new heights while combining it with their typical absurd humor and punchy dialogue. Through the titular character played by John Turturro, the movie seems to be a kind of journey recreating the impressions of a new writer navigating the strange waters of the Hollywood studio system. The bizarreness of such a place is bewitching yet bewildering to an awkward writer like Barton, and it’s tempting to consider how much of these impressions of Hollywood correlate with the Coens’ own experience of the industry, which would paint a picture of alienation and impatience with social nonsense that could explain their tendency to remain at an arm’s length from it all.
Continue reading on the next page…