Barton Fink movie analysis

Barton makes love to Audrey and the camera moves down the sink drain. As it reaches the sewer, we hear the sounds of Barton savagely killing her.

Charlie is a character in Barton's mind, a big man with a wrestler's physique as Barton struggles to complete his wrestling picture. According to Ancestry.com, :Mundt Name Meaning: nickname for someone with a big mouth or whose mouth was in some other way remarkable, from Middle High German munt ‘mouth’.nickname for a guardian or trustworthy person, from Middle High German munt ‘guardian’, ‘protector’". Barton's expression is exhilaration as he sits at his desk, luxuriously squishing his feet back and forth in his shoes, which are suddenly too big -- Charlie's shoes.

Despite his avowed concern for the common man, he keeps interrupting Charlie as he tries to tell his stories. Charlie has an infected ear, emphasizing his inability to listen. Another clue that Charlie is a figment is when he reveals to Charlie's confusion, that he could hear the couple making love in the room on the other side of Barton's room.

 Barton's fractured personality also includes confused sexuality. He becomes very uncomfortable when Charlie asks if he has a girlfriend and admits that he has never been with a woman giving the excuse that he has been too busy trying to help the common man. He has homosexual tendencies which are revealed when he learns wrestling moves from Charlie. He fixates on the woman in the picture who is unobtainable and has her back to him.

Mayhew is a successful writer that Barton initially reveres, but he becomes disillusioned when he realizes that he is abusive drunk who has sold out writing B-movie screenplays. Finally he is outraged to learn that Audrey has written his last two books.

He ends up killing Audrey and saving her head, which he considers valuable because it contained the literary genius that he lacks. Later, the newspaper headline reveals that Mayhew, who Charlie would not even know, has been murdered, confirming that it is really Barton who is a psychotic murderer having also killed has family back in New York.

His psychosis also has a religious theme when he picks up a bible and turns to a passage on Nebuchanezzer and then to the Book of Genesis where he finds the beginning two sentences of his abortive screenplay, which also is a rehash of his play. Confronted by the police detective, he suddenly warns them "Charlie is coming." His alter ego, Charlie the Common Man, avenges the Jews saying "Heil Hilter" just before blowing his head off.

At the end of the movie, he meets his fantasy woman from the picture.

He carries the unopened package, confused and denying that he knows what it contains and if it belongs to him.