My focusing question is “why is Barton’s play named ‘Bare Ruined Choirs’?”
BRCs is a phrase from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73″, and the use of it as the title of the main character’s play in Barton Fink caught my eye because it’s got to be a colossal Coen-style joke on Barton. All through the movie, Barton drones on and on about his desire to write plays “of, for, and about the common man,” and this play in no exception; fishmongers living in a tenement building in Brooklyn send their young son out to take on the world. Barton seems oblivious to the fact that his title is pretentious if not downright puzzling. I know from my undergraduate Shakespeare class that sonnets in the sixteenth century were written and circulated among the court elite to curry favor, so even in the context in which the poem was written it was not of, by, or for anything connected to the common man. Also, (again, from the old Shakespeare class) that particular phrase is usually interpreted as a reference to the monasteries that were seized by Henry 8th during the Reformation and were standing empty during Shakespeare’s time, making it harder to imagine why Barton thinks this is a good title for the first play he writes for his populist movement.
Right now, my best guess is that Barton Fink has more in common with “Sonnet 73″ than is apparent on the surface. I’m playing with the idea that the movie is a cinematic version of the sonnet, postmodernist-style.
i am not much of a coen brother fan but i can see how someone may be attracted to their style of films. they are corky and they make you think a lot about what goes on. so much you find yourself losing what is happeing present scene, but stilll thinking about what was going on the past scene. As for Bare Ruined Choirs, maybe it has something to do with the common man in a sense of; thought i had something but it’s like you said “downright puzzling”