Even when Lipnick himself turns up in a colonel’s uniform and starts spouting patriotic rhetoric (“Don’t you know there’s a war on?!”), Barton remains firmly in his own head. (“Minsk, if you want to go all the way back,” offers studio-boss Lipnick, underlining the connection from Hollywood to New York to Eastern Europe.) He’s a Jew ignoring the Holocaust, writing self-important nonsense while his people are slaughtered by the millions. So, Barton, it seems, is a self-involved Jewish playwright who gets lost in Hollywood as World War II rages in The Old Country. The Jews who run the studio call each other “kike” and constantly cut each other down, while the (German and Italian) detectives who come around in Act III are decidedly more ominous in their dealings with Fink. People bring it up all the time, and never in a favorable light.

And the movie hangs together as far as that goes, but then there is the question of Barton’s Jewishness.

'Barton is a delusional, self-involved playwright lost in Hollywood, utterly oblivious to the world situation as he struggles to write a B-movie. I had a lot of fun analyzing the film but one part I never would have gotten were the WW2 themes. He hears people having sex in the next room and the wallpaper starts to fall, pressing the damp wallpaper back against the wall leads to semen like glue oozing from behind the paper. It's not pretty and it doesn't produce the best work.One of my favorite aspects is Barton thinking about sex. They don't meet until the final mix of the film when music, dialogue and sound effects are all mixed together, at which point each team fights to be louder. But the standard approach in the industry is to handle sound effects and music separately. Since Barton Fink Skip and I have spotted almost all of Joel and Ethan's films together. The music and sound effects were so integrated that when the score to Barton Fink was released on CD along with that of Fargo, I included some of Skip's sound design on the album. Or I'd have a high violin line, referencing the mosquito, while Skip would play low submarine groans coming from the hotel. Skip might have a mosquito pestering Barton in his hotel room while I'd play dark mystery with bass trombones. And in many scenes we worked together to divide up the sonic spectrum. I played the short piano theme for the Coens and they liked it immediately.Įventually Skip and I spotted the film together, deciding along with the Coens which areas of the film would be played with music and which with effects. But I felt there was an essential immaturity, a childlike naivete that music could express. We see him advocate for the importance of the Common Man and the Life Of The Mind. We see him courted by a Hollywood studio. I did feel there was an important aspect to Barton's character that could be communicated with music. But they wanted me to read the script in case I had some musical ideas. The plan was to feature Skip Lievsay's sound effects rather than music. When Joel and Ethan Coen brought me the script to Barton Fink, they said they weren't sure it would need any score. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

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