Let’s play spot the differences with the films Sullivan’s Travels and Barton Fink

Sullivan’s Travels | 1941 | Preston Sturges | Comedy/ Satire & Barton Fink | 1991 | Joel Coen | Psychological Thriller/ Comedy

Sullivan’s Travels

Sullivan’s Travels

Successful Hollywood film director John L. Sullivan no longer wants to create between the walls of the comedy genre. Sullivan feels drawn to the stories of the poor layer of the population who have experienced suffering and have to work hard to eat. His producers hold back the fantasies, telling Sullivan he doesn’t know what suffering is. To feel the pain of life, he disguises himself as a drifter and goes on a journey to get ideas for his upcoming film. During the trip, he meets a beautiful woman who is in Hollywood because she wants to act. Together they move on, dressing up as poor characters among the gloomy people going through life. Sullivan manages to get himself into deep trouble. He ends up in a labor camp where he is stuck with metal chains. There he finds out he wants to entertain people with comedy.

Barton Fink

Barton Fink

A Hollywood movie studio asks young New York playwright Barton Fink to write a screenplay for a B-picture about a wrestler. During his stay at the mysterious Earle hotel, he is distracted by everything going on around and in his hotel room and finds himself in deep writer’s block. Barton’s fascination with the ‘’common man’’ exacerbates his imposed task of writing a story about a wrestler who is most likely an orphan. He wants to write about the lower class, the working man, like his neighbor Charlie. An average man who works hard and is unappreciated. Barton has only Charlie in California, so he quickly begins to see him as a friend. Despite Berton’s selfish traits such as lack of listening, Charlie remains loyal to him and helps him when he is in murderous trouble. The wrestling scenario for the big screen slips past him when he sees another writer’s secretary lying dead beside him. He goes through the days in a daze. Detectives questioning him and revealing that Charlie is a serial killer literally puts his mental state under fire.

In Sullivan’s Travels, I was struck by how shallow and one-layer the story ultimately becomes by the film’s conclusion. The telling of a story about poor people experiencing many injustices and difficulties is completely wiped away because Sullivan thinks simple people like simple movies to forget their problems.

Policeman: All right, but you don’t drive that car without a license. Sullivan: Okay. Let the girl out too. She’s getting bored in there. Policeman: How does a girl fit in this picture? Sullivan: There’s always a girl in the picture. Haven’t you ever been to the movies?

In Barton Fink, the creepy hotel is what I remember most. The dripping wallpaper and the hallway with all the shoes in front of the door. Throughout the film, those images created tension and discomfort, creating dramatic irony.

Barton Fink: I don’t like to discuss works in progress. If I let the words tumble out prematurely, it changes it, and I may never get it back.

Both films used the creative treatment of actuality in fiction form because these films say a lot about the creators and their view of their artistic craft and the entertainment world they live in. The choice to tell these two stories that are not objective representations of contemporary Hollywood has hidden the context of the film in the perspective of the creators.

In the films, water enters the frame several times in various ways. Water can symbolize several things in films, but it is usually associated with sadness, despair or rejection. These three words occur at the end of the second act in both feature films.

Sullivan’s Travels

Barton Fink

Both Sullivan’s Travels and Barton Fink are different in the form in which it is portrayed on screen. For example, there are elements in Barton Fink that stem from abstract expression, such as the photo of the girl at the beach which hangs on the wall. This refers to the end when that photo comes to life in reality. In Sullivan’s Travels, the focus is on observation. Spying without being noticed. This is worked out in the form of the clothes Sullivan wears when he leaves his life of luxury behind.