35 Years Later, Barton Fink Has Freakish New Relevance

More than any other subject matter, writers writing about writing can veer off into navel-gazing irrelevance. The world doesn’t need more stories about 20-something Brooklynites trying to make it with only a pen and a dream, unless those stories are bold enough to throw some evil robots in at the halfway mark.

Barton Fink doesn’t quite do that, but when the Coen brothers’ black comedy came out 35 years ago today, it certainly veered in a direction that’s all but impossible for first-time viewers to predict. And while a writer writing about writers writing about writing threatens to become downright somnambulant, it’s a movie worth looking back on now that so many self-proclaimed creators are trying to skip past the writing process entirely.

It’s 1941, and Barton Fink is a New York playwright fresh off a hit. He reluctantly heads to Hollywood to make big bucks while he’s a hot commodity, but he can’t wrap his head around his first assignment. As Fink struggles to bash out a simple wrestling movie in a rundown hotel staffed entirely by Steve Buscemi, he befriends his neighbor, roving insurance salesman Charlie Meadows (John Goodman). Fink encounters interesting characters on his Hollywood journey, like a profane producer with little regard for his craft and a Faulkner-like alcoholic played by a pitch-perfect John Mahoney. But it’s his relationship with Meadows, which encompasses drinkin’, wrasslin’, and a whole lot more, that forms the movie’s bizarre core.

Written when the Coens were struggling to finish Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink can superficially be interpreted as being about writer’s block, but that’s just the first of its many alienating layers. Released five years before Fargo catapulted the Coens into the mainstream, Barton Fink lost a lot of money and faded into the depths of their filmography; it’s no obscurity, but it’s not something the average viewer is likely to fire up after plowing through No Country for Old Men, either. We won’t spoil how the film’s conventional first hour gives way to a nightmarish second half, but Joel Coen once suggested that he and his brother were teasing critics with Barton Fink’s layers of symbolism and allusions, and it’s not hard to see what he meant.

What is clear is that Fink is a ruthless caricature of the self-important writer, one who drones on and on about how his work is meant to make art accessible to the common man despite spending most of the movie talking over the one common man he meets. Fink is contemptuous of the Hollywood system, and there are moments where you can see why, but ultimately, he’s the one who can’t earn his fat paycheck by completing a simple B-movie. When he finally manages to write his script, he ignores his instructions and delivers an unusable echo of the play that might be the only good idea he’ll ever have.

The preening, ineffectual artist would be skewered by the Coens again in Hail Caesar, and one of many ideas they throw at the wall here is the question of whether stories have real intellectual value, or whether they’re all just wrestling pictures designed to make a buck and pass some time. Barton Fink has been interpreted as a commentary on everything from the feeling of being trapped in your own mind to how the world sleepwalked into WWII, so let’s throw one more idea atop the teetering pile: when Fink opines on what art should be, it’s hard not to think of the irritating lectures we’re hearing today.

That writing can be seen as a noble calling while also being fundamentally worthless is not a new contradiction; everyone loves going to the movies, but no one loves the thought of their child trying to become a screenwriter. Today, though, as Amazon is flooded with LLM-written books, publishers stumble into LLM controversies, and even fanfic communities argue about LLMs, the gap is increasingly pernicious. Hollywood is toying with AI too, and one gets the sense that, for all his blustering talk of valuing writers, Fink’s boss would replace them all with machines in a heartbeat. As LLM boosters have helpfully explained, the ability to write is so emotionally and culturally valuable that we must forcibly strip it of all financial value.

With a little help from communities like r/WritingWithAI, you can now use AI plot and character generators and wrap the end product in an AI cover, all of which is supposedly done, in an echo of Fink’s ironic words, for the common man. How else are we supposed to make such an esoteric art accessible? But as Fink finally discovers, there’s only ever been one secret to writing: you have to sit your ass down and do it.

And so it’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Barton as he tortures himself with delusions of grandeur. He’s been told his work can change the world, but he’s a writer who doesn’t understand or even like people, and to say that limits his range turns out to be an understatement. Commercially and artistically, a story is only worth what someone gets out of it. We’ll still be talking about Barton Fink in another 35 years, and Hollywood’s many proverbial wrestling movies can give us a little joy, too. But no matter how many factories are built to bypass the typewriter, all their so-called stories will fall by the wayside in a hurry.

Barton Fink is available on YouTube.