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Lynch’s surrealism, on the other hand, is woozy and curdled, imbued with a narcotic melancholy. In a moment of farcical surrealism, the studio boss of Capitol Pictures, provoked by the Pearl Harbour attacks, claims to be waiting for an Army reserve commission, outfitted in a colonel’s uniform – belonging to the studio. His sleep pattern is irregular, often interrupted (frequently by a buzzing mosquito).Īs an effect everything becomes marred in uncertainty, especially towards the film’s end when events become increasingly odd. At no point do we see him drifting off into a deep slumber. Surrealism’s preoccupation with the subconscious, and the gulf between dreams and reality, is writ large in Barton Fink’s implied insomnia. The Coens’ surrealism is subdued and painterly, revealing itself slowly, its commentary on the grotesque side of Hollywood multifaceted and studious. “Right now, the contents of your head are the property of Capitol Pictures,” says an assistant to Fink. Barton Fink’s 1940s Hollywood is callous and opportunistic. At one point, it becomes engulfed in flames, as fellow resident Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) runs amok with a shotgun. Life at Hotel Earle is hell – quite literally. Fink’s only respite is the incongruous painting of a woman by the beach, neatly referenced again at the film’s end. The décor is opulent, though grimy and depressing it is entirely empty. The loneliness and anonymity of being an underappreciated Hollywood screenwriter is darkly detailed by Fink’s lodgings: the dilapidated Hotel Earle, replete with aging bellboys and peeling wallpaper. His position in the ranks of Hollywood screenwriters troubles him – he claims he’ll become distanced from “the common man” and a sense of realness.
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With his towering haircut, not unlike Henry Spencer’s in Lynch’s own Eraserhead (1977), Barton Fink-portrayed by John Turturro-is assigned the job of writing a “wrestling picture”. Surrealism seems the most appropriate way of understanding such an ugly phenomenon, since both are so far removed from the real. It is a nauseating self-mythologizing culture, ridden with tacky artifice.
#Surrealism warped reality tv#
Certainly, nothing is more flashy or self-congratulatory than Hollywood and the Oscars the fantastically sycophantic TV hosts on the red carpet submitting to glitzy falseness. Yet, in the worlds that the Coens and Lynch create, the only meaningful way in which to satirise the Hollywood film industry is through surrealism to make it seem alien and perverse, ungrounded in reality, underlining the inscrutable actions and motivations of studio bosses and executives. Is-as both films allude to-surrealism the only way to satirise the shallowness and excess of Hollywood? Something like Billy Wilder’s classic Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a Hollywood satire played like a blackly comic film noir, a more straightforward offering than Lynch’s work and the Coens.
#Surrealism warped reality movie#
They are wilfully ambiguous, bizarre, and scathing accounts of the sinister machinations of the Hollywood movie industry. However, their narratives are corrupted and warped, littered with symbolism. The films cover arguably well-worn subjects: Barton Fink concerns a playwright struggling to maintain his integrity when he is hired as a screenwriter for a Hollywood film studio Mulholland Drive, relatively speaking, focuses on an aspiring actress attempting to break into movies. But, the strongest element of surrealism is the tension between dreams and reality. It is perhaps unwise to cite Wikipedia’s definition of surrealism but, nevertheless, it is worth considering in relation to the Coen Brothers’ intensely strange Barton Fink (1991) and David Lynch’s hallucinogenic masterpiece Mulholland Drive (2001) – two surrealist satires of the Hollywood machine.Īccording to Wikipedia, works of surrealism feature “the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur”, all of which appear in both films.