Writer's Block Movies

Recently viewing the Coen Brothers Barton Fink (1991), I recalled other writer’s block films.  First and foremost is The Shining (1980), with Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) writing the same line for hundreds of pages: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” When Wendy finds these pages, we see ten to fifteen of them formed in a way to make the whole page stand out.  We also see misspellings; for instance “all work and no play makes Jack a dull bog.”  “Bog” is a term used by Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971) for "God"!  Jack is a less than a dull God as he descends into madness and murderous rage against his family.

In Barton Fink, a writer (John Turturro) also spends time in a large phantasmagorical hotel, the Earle, and cannot produce.  The Earle may not have the creative characteristics of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, but it is menacing and its tenants, except for Barton and Charley Meadows (John Goodman), go unseen except for the shoes outside their doors.  Noises are heard from other rooms and the wall paper peals from the unexplained heat the building emanates.  The only other people we see are the less than supernatural Chet (Steve Buscemi), the clerk, and Pete (Harry Bugin), the very unanimated elevator operator.

Like Jack, Barton stays in one room to write – or, better, to stagnate.  Barton types out the first scene of a wrestling film scenario but soon finds himself staring at the wall.  On this wall is a picture of a young woman on a beach under an umbrella looking out at the sea.  While he stares, Barton hears the sound of waves crashing on the beach.  In the last scene, he will be walking on a beach and sit when a woman approaches near him and sits.  Her pose is exactly like the wall painting but without an umbrella.  Barton says to her at one point: “You ought to be in pictures.”  She is, literally, but he’s referring to the movies.

Jack Torrance one day falls asleep at his typewriter and apparently dreams that he has killed his wife and son. He bellows out and screams from his sleep until Wendy (Shelley Duval) wakes him.  Jack tells her what he dreamed and thinks he might be going insane.

Barton may not be going insane; however, the pressures to write a great script paralyze him and affect his sense of reality.  While he might not see ghosts, someone perhaps more disturbing enters his life, Charley Meadows.  Charley at first appears like the Common Man that Barton has idealized in his dramas.  Charley becomes a source of comforting companionship for Barton during his blocked writing.  His next door neighbor’s presence also brings on the first signs of the hotel getting warmer.

Barton (and the audience) never enter Charley’s room.  Moreover, Charley’s good nature hides the fact that he may be a serial killer.  We never see him kill anyone, although he’s adept at getting rid of the body of Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis), who had been killed in Barton’s bed while he was sleeping, perhaps even decapitating her, the signature of the killer, knows as Mad Man Mundt.  Charley later gives Barton a hatbox and tell him to keep it for him.  Barton later carries the box to the beach when he meets the woman.

Audrey is the mistress of a screenwriter and novelist, W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), who is loosely based on William Faulkner.  Faulkner wrote many screenplays, including To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946) and Land of the Pharaohs (1955).  His first, an uncredited work, is a movie about a wrestler starring Wallace Beery.  W.P. Mayhew, however, is alcoholic and nearly incapable of writing, letting his mistress not only pen the scripts but apparently she has written his last two novels.

This descent into madness, accompanied by heavy drinking, occurs in a few other writer’s block films. One of the earliest was The Lost Weekend (1945) starring Ray Milland, plays an alcoholic writer who falls off the wagon and goes on a four-day bender.  Despite the help of his brother and woman friend, he can’t control himself.  He searches all his old hiding places, becoming desperate at one point and tearing apart his apartment.  When he falls back in a chair, he looks up and sees the shadow of a bottle in a ceiling light fixture.  He finally succumbs to the DTs and ends up in the alcohol ward of a hospital.  Can he go any lower?  Yes.  He could he return to the ward, as many of his fellow inmates say he will.

An interesting point about the movie.  Director Billy Wilder wanted no musical soundtrack, feeling music would lessen the realism of the situation.  When shown to a test audience, they reacted with laughter at inappropriate times.  Wilder added a score and the film ended up receiving Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actor and Screenplay.

In 2004, Johnny Depp starred as troubled writer in Secret Window, like The Shining, from a novel by Stephen King.  Depp plays a mystery writer who is accused of plagiarism while simultaneously losing his grip on his family life.  Like Barton Fink, the film embodies the consciousness of its main character and soon the viewer is unsure what is really happening.  It seems as if the plagiarism charge is a manifestation of this breakdown, leading to Depp killing several people.

Lastly, there’s Adaptation (2002) directed by Spike Jonze.  Nicolas Cage plays a pair of brothers, Charlies and Donald Kaufman.  Charlie must adapt a novel for the screen and the mere fact that he has a doppelganger from the start tells the audience that we might have trouble discerning what’s really happening.  As it is, Charlie Kaufman actually wrote the screenplay, as he did for Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999).  Is Cage’s character simply crazy or does he create his imaginary brother as a means to get out of writer’s block?  An earlier screenplay by Kaufman, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), an adaptation of Chuck Barris' autobiography, in which he claims to have been a hit man for the CIA, uses a similar unsettling scheme for what is real or not in the narrative.