the New Pantagruel

I Don’t Want to Talk About It

by Barton Fink

here’s a part of me that doesn’t want to tell you this, even as just words on a page, even though I’m in control right now. That’s how I like it–order, structure, clear boundaries. Not the chaos and immediacy of face to face conversation. Even though you don’t know who I am.

You see, I work in the film industry. Your face just lit up! You want to know more, not just out of a need to make polite conversation–because you can tell at a glance that I’m not one for polite conversation–but because you want to know more. You need to know more. You need me to stand as your proxy and sanctify your desire to consume and be entertained. I hear that there are some people out there who hate what I do and want to give me the shovel to dig my own grave, but I’ve never met one of them. I’d like to. It’d be fun.

But you, you like the movies. You just wish they weren’t so, so, so like they are right now. Even the ones you take your family to. With the casual profanity, and the partial nudity, and the upsetting violence. But I see it behind your eyes. You like it. And you want me to tell you that it’s okay to slip your bonds of morality, for just a moment in the dark, because it’s not your fault movies are like this.

It’s mine.

But you don’t say that, do you? First you are filled with endless questions about the minutia of my working life. I copy scripts; you want to know what kind of fasteners I use. I answer the phone; no, I don’t just say “hello.” Here are my hours; here is how I take my lunch break; this is how I arrange my face when I meet someone famous.

Yes, I’m very lucky. I have met famous people. I’ve been in a van with an Oscar winner; I picked another one up from the airport–sitting in traffic, he rolled down his window to get a light from someone in the next car. Maybe it was you–if it was, I know for that minute you wanted to be me. Don’t lie. I once turned down a job assisting one director whose movie you can recite from memory and his star, who you think is hot. If I had taken the job, I would have had to wake up early to work out with them, and stay up late to do blow with them. That’s what their assistant had to do.

Which leads me to the next question you are dying to ask (and I’ve given you the perfect intro, have I not?): Is it hard to be a Christian in the film industry? What with the drugs, and the f-bombs, and the homosexuals? And there must be lying, and blasphemy, and moral decay. Oh, so you don’t want to hear any of my fun stories from set, do you? I’ve had some fucking good times with the drugs and the homosexuals and the atheists.

Let’s say, too, that I’m just like you–you’ll go along with that fiction, right? You respect whoever introduced us enough to want to believe that I am a good Christian, with integrity and moral rectitude. Now hold me in your mind schizophrenically: a good Christian, and a hedonist. Got it? Now ask me again if it’s hard to be a Christian in the movie industry. What you really want is for me to draw a line that you can stand behind so that you can know for very certain that if you were in my place, in the presence of movie stars, you would use your powers for good and be a light to the world. You need to believe that people like me are all bad, weak people and that if we were out of the picture, the moving pictures would be just as you know they could be: clean, pure, shining.

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