Barton Fink - Genre

Genre

The Coens are known for making films that defy simple classification. Although they refer to their first movie, Blood Simple, as a relatively straightforward example of detective fiction, the Coens wrote their next script, Raising Arizona, without trying to fit a particular genre. They decided to write a comedy, but intentionally added dark elements to produce what Ethan calls "a pretty savage film". Their third film, Miller's Crossing, reversed this order, mixing bits of comedy into a crime film. Yet it also subverts single-genre identity by using conventions from melodrama, love stories, and political satire.

This trend of mixing movie types continued and intensified with Barton Fink; the Coens insist the film "does not belong to any genre". Ethan has described it as "a buddy movie for the '90s". It contains elements of comedy, film noir, and horror, but other film categories are present. Actor Turturro referred to it as a coming of age story, while literature professor and film analyst R. Barton Palmer calls it a Künstlerroman, highlighting the importance of the main character's evolution as a writer. Critic Donald Lyons describes the movie as "a retro-surrealist vision".

Because it crosses genres, fragments the characters' experiences, and resists straightforward narrative resolution, Barton Fink is often considered an example of postmodernist film. In his book Postmodern Hollywood, Booker says the movie renders the past with an impressionist technique, not a precise accuracy. This technique, he notes, is "typical of postmodern film, which views the past not as the prehistory of the present but as a warehouse of images to be raided for material". In his analysis of the Coens' films, Palmer calls Barton Fink a "postmodern pastiche" which closely examines how past eras have represented themselves. He compares it to The Hours, a 2002 movie about Virginia Woolf and two women who read her work. He asserts that both films, far from rejecting the importance of the past, add to our understanding of it. He quotes literary theorist Linda Hutcheon: The kind of postmodernism exhibited in these films "does not deny the existence of the past; it does question whether we can ever know that past other than through its textualizing remains".

Certain elements in Barton Fink highlight the veneer of postmodernism: the writer is unable to resolve his modernist focus on high culture with the studio's desire to create formulaic high-profit movies; the resulting collision produces a fractured story arc emblematic of postmodernism. The Coens' cinematic style is another example; when Barton and Audrey begin making love, the camera pans away to the bathroom, then moves toward the sink and down its drain. Rowell calls this a "postmodern update" of the notorious sexually suggestive image of a train entering a tunnel, used by director Alfred Hitchcock in his 1959 movie North by Northwest.