It should be obvious by now that no small amount of absurd nostalgia for times predating even my parents' birth has wrapped itself tightly round my psyche, constricting pretensions of normalcy. The Great Depression looms particularly, Chaplin's heyday and existential crisis of American history. The almost four-term presidency of FDR looks up expectantly polio-addled from the face of every dime I spend, and what's more, I know I'm not alone. Octogenarians or scale-model railroad fanatics inhabit the outskirts of nearly every middle American town, recreating sunken worlds in their memories or basements, together yet alone, longing for the unattainable like some desperate passive-aggressive prayer. Why am I here, I ask myself, looking around the uncomfortable room and not knowing the answer except to say that I'm probably shedding an itchy skin by poring over Victorian photography, reading Krazy Kat cartoons, and watching film noir films where typewriters were still marvels.
Certainly there's a latent value judgement at work, something to the effect that old days were real-er, more sublime, subtly richer because life was lived more fully because horizons were finely focused because the air inhaled was either coal-black or pristine, the wind rustling leaves of trees was either ancient or newborn back when the word "civilization" meant something and nature was natural and primordial instincts were violent intoxications. What self-indulgent dreaming. Sure I know history never had such beginnings, but you try telling that to Rousseau.
The long story short: I loved Barton Fink, a movie I can't believe I hadn't seen before, especially when you consder that the Brothers Coen could shit in a jar and I'd put it on my mantle with pride. But Barton Fink tops the cake, I loved it, I loved him, John Turturro that is, the man so blinded by soggy visions of authenticity that he can't see the life swirling around him, life here represented by John Goodman's Charlie, the enigmatic storytelling everyman slash life-and-death-wielding Satan.
The movie is really just these two characters and their relationship, and the key scene is, of course, the fiery climax, of which the abridged version:
Hotel Earle. Climactic ending. Fiery. GOODMAN has just shot the two LA cops, and set the building on fire with only his chutzpah. GOODMAN returns to the room to look down on TURTURRO.
GOODMAN: Red-faced. "You dare to come here, into my home, and tell me to keep it down. Who are you? You're nothing but a tourist with a typewriter."
TURTURRO: "Why me? Why me?"
GOODMAN: "Because you don't listen!"
Pause. Long pause. TURTURRO looks up, pained.
TUTURRO: "I'm sorry."
GOODMAN: "Don't be, man."
GOODMAN bends down and strains himself, waddles shaking, to bend apart the bed bars where TURTURRO is handcuffed. GOODMAN releases him from real world eros/thanatos contraints, allowing TURTURRO to return to his comfort and start dreaming again. He imagines a woman on a beach.
Nutritional Equivalent:
Pot of good ol' home stew
It's a simple plot with a whole boatload of fun and games thrown in, stuff like the Coens' stable of character actors, visual jokes, editing trickery, fabulous sets, and caricatures of famous drunken celebrities. And the pelican that plops into the ocean at the end is just so perfect you want to hold your head between your knees and let loose one salted tear. How did they make a bird do that? Are they masters of man and beast? Is it CGI? I want to know…
The Short Stories of Bernard Malamud
Although Barton Fink was based loosely on Clifford Odets (the man behind Awake and Sing!), Barton could just as easily been an avatar of Bernard Malamud, the somewhat famous writer of short tenement fiction. You might or might not remember The Natural, the mystic Robert Redford baseball movie with the famous finale, the home run hit into the electric lights, bulbs exploding in a shower of sparks as young Redford rounds the bases, but that story was Malamud's moment in the sun, his most famous novella, and was adapted into a successful 1984 film that featured Wilford Brimley, and was partially responsible for Barry Levinson's rise to fame.
Malamud also taught creative writing at Bennington College for many years, and let me tell you that's an odd little place. I went to Bennington College once, on my way passing naturally the monumental Bennington obelisk, and found at the college gates a little round man inside a little white hut with his rather pudgy hand round the controls of a little wooden gate-arm, lowered and blocking our path. We stopped the car and got out to talk to the round man, questioning him as he repeatedly denied us college access, having us wait until my friend John, the Bennington student, could personally come and escort us round the schoolyard. I called John's campus number many times to no avail, and that's how I ended up spending much of an afternoon in a roundish man's college gatehouse. Oh yes, Bennington College is reminscent of a loony bin or prison.
The reason I mention it is that I'm reading Malamud's short stories on the toilet these days, and they're not only ideal bathroom-visit length but they're often amusingly quaint. The protagonists of the stories so far: two shoemakers, two grocers, one delicatessen owner, one unemployed actor, and a group of diner waitresses. Just as Barton Fink could only write about fishmongers on the Lower East Side, so Malamud is obsesed with cobblers in Brooklyn. At least in his early works, I'm sensing a pattern.
Nutritional Equivalent:
Small bowl of old gruely stew
In a typical story an old shoemaker goes blind trying to repair enough shoes to feed his dying wife and petulant daughter while a new, upscale competitor steals aways his customers with a fancy new neon sign, forcing him to grovel fruitlessly before his deformed, misanthropic émigré assistant. Great stuff, a real pick me up, and if anything's going to snap me out of my Great Depression wine-and-roses funk, it's more Malamud.
