Last time this blog did such pairings Barton Fink's counterpart was The Shining and the similarities are both deep and obvious: hotel, writing, typewriters, and in the background subtext, Nazis and WW II. Pairing Fink with Clockwork bring out the theme of violence and cinema in interesting ways. Most obvious is the link between Alex's "treatment" (torture) through cinema and Barton's viewing of the wrestling picture dailies ("I will destroy him!"). Although Barton does not have his eyes clamped open, the look of existential dread on his face is priceless (only a truly un-self-aware philistine could be so spiritually ambushed by the vulgarity of wrestling movies). The Nazi subtext is imported by Kubrick into his adaptation of Burgess's novel through his use of Goebbels/Riefenstahl propaganda footage. It would be interesting to work out how each film deals with the philistinism (or in the case of Alex, something like anti-philistinism) of their respective protagonists. Perhaps it would be useful to think of Barton and Charlie as Alex divided over two characters (in much the same way the Coens divided the real-life Dude over Jeff Lebowski and Walter).
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