Beyond the physical similarities inherent in the comparison of Plato’s Cave to a cinema, there are pertinent metaphoric similarities.
Like Plato’s prisoners, a cinema audience (under the best circumstances) is aware only of the images that pass in front of their eyes. These images represent a notion of reality, not reality itself. The reality of a motion picture is buried beneath many layers of artifice. It is incumbent upon the artists involved in the cinematic process to manipulate these facets of artificiality into as cogent a representation of reality as possible: Shadow - Visual images captured on celluloid (or, unfortunately, video), projected a twenty-four frames per second (fire), of actors (puppets) performing calculated actions. Consider the added artifices of dialog, sound effects, music, and visual effects – all constructed for the purpose of manipulating a captive audience into accepting the sum-total of this construct as something approaching reality. The trick is this: Is an audience expected to accept this “reality” only within the boundaries of the movie theater, or is the audience, once unfettered, expected to
walk away from the theater with a sense of the noumenal reality at the core the
illusion? One suspects that the serious filmmaker has expectations of the latter.
In the case of enigmatic Barton Fink, the Coen Brothers seem to explore the
idea that commercial filmmaking is largely empty of any underlying reality
beyond the conceit of superficial entertainment. The device of the of the insulated
Fink character is an ineffectual cog in the film industry machine: He is unsuccessful
at writing entertaining pabulum because he feels it is intellectually beneath him and
his more “meaningful” work about the so-called common man is a stilted representation of that particular reality, since Fink seems to have no experiential frame of reference. It is only through the manipulations of the Meadows/Mundt character that Fink is dragged through a hell in which he learns to feel, rather than simply affect feelings.
The film is also fraught with symbolic flourishes regarding the rise of fascism and
anti-Semitism, among other things. The name “Fink,” for instance, might indicate a passive complicity in the murders committed by Meadows/Mundt - who says, “Heil
Hitler” as he kills a detective. And then there is the mysterious painting of the
girl at the beach. The possibility with this image is that it indicates a prescient look
at the coming war and the end of
is given more weight when we see a photograph of Meadows/Mundt inserted into
the corner of the painting’s frame. Perhaps Meadows/Mundt’s pyromaniacal destruction of the decaying hotel and his self-immolation is also indicative of the rise and fall of fascism, although it may also be seen as the destruction of the self-limiting cocoon in which Fink has surrounded himself. This, ultimately, is part-and-parcel of the theoretical dynamic which underlies the allegory of the Cave: That the a meaningful understanding of Reality can only be achieved when the audience/individual is unfettered from the cocoon, the cave, the artifice.