Wallpaper with a View: Barton Fink as Graduate and Precursor

Maciej Stroiński

Abstract

Stroiński offers a new interpretation of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Barton Fink (1991), which is polemical towards a postmodern intertextual perspective. To Stroiński, the key to the interpretation of the film is the concept of self-creative subjectivity; it has been mothballed by post-modernism as a relic of modernism but is enthusiastically revived in the works of Agata Bielik-Robson. In non-subjectoclastic (the term coined by Adam Lipszyc) terms, Barton Fink appears to be the author in progress, whose evolution corresponds with poetic Bildung, as demonstrated by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence. The self-creation of the subject, or a streak of self-transformations, leads to the ambivalent ending when you must lose to - at the same time - gain. When depicting the final stage of creative Bildung, Stroiński departs from the ’’Gnostic” interpretation of Bloom. If Bloom allows for a final ”ceasefire” and realization, it must be temporary and uncertain. Stroiński follows the intuition of Christopher Lasch when he sees the possibility of a lasting truce in a fortunate generational exchange.