“You’re just a tourist with a typewriter, Barton. I live here.”

Barton Fink is a movie born out of the writer’s block — or, at the very least, burnout — that Joel and Ethan Coen experienced while writing Miller’s Crossing. They processed their own conflicting feelings about writing by writing a separate film about them; in it, the protagonist struggles with many of the same issues that they were grappling with.

But, in two key ways, Barton Fink isn’t just a traditional art-imitates-life story about a struggling artist who overcomes his hang-ups to create something great, as written by struggling artists. First, the film subverts expectations — Barton Fink decidedly does not create something great in the end. And, the script crafts characters that seem as if they are the physical embodiment of various facets of the protagonist’s inner struggle, rather than stock characters that simply would make sense to exist in his world.

Writer’s block is a curious thing to write about as a source of conflict for a character, because it’s a silent, internal enemy; Barton Fink solves for that by externalizing this internal struggle in characters that express many of its nuances in their worldviews.

Many of the primary supporting characters seem to be born from one of the many conflicting neurotic monologues of Barton Fink’s inner voice. By witnessing Barton engaged in interpersonal conflict with characters that reflect these ideas, we come to understand his inner turmoil in greater depth than we ever could’ve otherwise.

It’s a creative approach to a character study.

At one point, Barton tells another character, “I feel like a fraud, sitting here staring at this paper.” He fears that maybe he only had one good idea in him, and that he’ll never write anything good again. This fear seems to be embodied by the character of acclaimed, alcoholic author W.P. Mayhew — a writer idolized by Fink, who turns out to be a total fraud whose screenplays have all been ghostwritten by Mayhew’s girlfriend, Audrey. Mayhew is seen ragingly drunk in almost all of his scenes; “when he can’t write, he drinks,” Audrey confides in Fink.

Fraudulence in the entertainment industry at large is a fear explored heavily in Barton Fink, too; the character of Hollywood studio chief Jack Lipnick represents it. “The point is, I run this dump and I don’t know the technical mumbo-jumbo,” he proudly proclaims when he first meets Barton. Later, when he invites Barton over to his mansion to hear him pitch a story that Fink hasn’t even thought about, he accepts without question Fink’s lie about secrecy being part of his creative process. There’s a bit of nihilism to the worldview represented in these characters and their conversations. They reflect the deep doubt that percolates to the surface when a writer feels like they have nothing to say, and that no one would actually understand and fully appreciate it even if they thought that they did.

This theme of fraudulence comes to a head — pardon the relevant pun — when Fink faces off against the movie’s primary villain: the sensitive, loudmouthed insurance salesman Charlie Meadows, who compliments Fink early on in their relationship by saying,

“You’ve got a head on your shoulders. What is it they say? Where there’s a head, there’s a hope?”

It is later revealed that Charlie’s preferred method of murder is decapitation, and one of his final insults, hurled at Fink during a burst of violence, is “you think you know about pain? You think I made your life hell? Take a look around this dump. You’re just a tourist with a typewriter, Barton. I live here.”

The character of Charlie represents, for Fink, much more than surface-level feelings of fraudulence. His dialogue in the end cuts deep enough to take away hope in much the same way that he takes away the heads that he says represents it. Charlie is the last layer of the the metaphorical onion of doubt and insecurity that Fink experiences — he is the inner voice that screams inside of the privileged white-collar artist: you are a fraud writing about something you know nothing about, and not only is it fake… it’s insulting and exploitative. He lives in pain; the writer exploits it for his own gain.

It’s no wonder, then, after being faced with these horribly disappointing characters — each representative of his own doubts about his artistic career — that Barton ends his journey sitting absentmindedly on a beach, unsure of what to do next, a symbol of hopelessness by his side (in a box)…

and a captivating image of beauty (a woman) ahead of him… whom he can’t quite connect with… a source of inspiration that entrances him but remains out of his reach.