An Anti-Space Film: Barton Fink

Barton Fink, which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, is a highly successful film noir that brings heavy criticism to Hollywood's inner structure and art circle by taking the “anti-space”(!) theme as a background. It is also the masterpiece of Joel and Ethan Coen, known as the Coen Brothers, co-creating many productions in the following years. Barton Fink is at the same time a heavy criticism, a black satire, and a dark comedy focused on the literary, cinematic, and artistic universe. The Coen Brothers wrote the script in three weeks, inspired by the troubles they had in Hollywood while shooting their previous movie (Miller's Crossing).

The plot of the movie is briefly as follows: Barton Fink, a young screenwriter who had limited success in New York's literary and artistic circles, and who glowed up on Broadway, caught the attention of Hollywood. Screenwriter Barton Fink, who accepted the hard-to-refuse offer and moved to California to work in Hollywood and settled in a run-down hotel, is now at the service of the movie industry, but at the same time, he is faced with the terrible facts behind the glittering world of Hollywood reflected on the screen. The depressing Hotel Earle where he has settled is the first of those dreadful facts. The hotel contains a nightmarish monotonous array of rooms, closed corridors whose walls are covered with dull and shoddy sweating, paper, monotonous and lonely hotel rooms hosting mysterious and troubled guests every night, permeable walls with voices of a strange frenzy of weird people and a dark and mundane decor filled with nightmares that destroy all inspiration.

Just as it is shown in the movie, while reflecting the spaces belonging to Hollywood producers, how luxury, splendor, wealth, and architectural potentiality are wasted spitefully, recklessly, and lavishly; likewise, the fictional monotony, carelessness, cheapness, contempt, and misery in industrial buildings that lead to spiritual collapse are also described with the same skill. Therefore, the Hollywood facts presented to us by the Coen Brothers instill horror and trepidation both in our architectural thinking and the movie heroes. In other words, everything that is wrong to do in regard to architecture can be found in a solid artistic criticism hidden under the masterfully written sequences in the Barton Fink movie. When we consider it in this sense, to give a name to the architecture, we found there: “antispace” would undoubtedly be the most correct term. 

Keywords: Architecture in Cinema, anti-space, anti-architect, broadway, barton Fink, clifford Odets, cannes Film Festival, coen Brothers, ethan Coen, hollywood, hotel Earle, joel Coen, john Turturro, john Goodman, judy Davis, miller's Crossing, palme d'Or, psychosexual, W. P. Mayhew, william Faulkner.