Musick Hund Guest Blogger Comments:
The Shining and Barton Fink
OK, this is pretty obvious, in fact I'm almost inclined to claim that Fink is the result of Joel and Ethan shining The Shining through the prism of their own peculiar cinematic and existential obsessions. In any case, it's certainly the closest thing to a horror movie in the Coens oeuvre. Furthermore, Kubrickian ambiguity is literalized grotesquely throughout, but especially in the exchange between Barton and the beautiful woman on the beach who notices that he is clutching a box that may or may not contain someone's head:
Woman: What's in the box?
Barton: I don't know.
Woman: Isn't it yours?
Barton: I don't know.
But even more importantly, I think the hotels in both movies represent America. In The Shining it is America writ large, the haunted genocidal landscape of manifest destiny always lurking on the edges of each frame. In Barton Fink, it's the America of Meadows/Munt, the sticky theater floor of mass society, whose reality eludes Barton's earnest and empty idealism.
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