Because Barton has shed the outfit by film's end but Tom has not, Barton Fink--shot/released after but written during a bout of writer's block on Miller's Crossing--would seem the more cynical of the two, since the Coens decide in Miller's Crossing that removing a man's "union suit," as it's nicknamed, is among the more emasculating things you can do to him. (For Tom, losing one's hat is the stuff of nightmares, a castration humiliation second only to trying to get it back: "Nothin' more foolish than a man chasin' his hat," Tom snarls at his girlfriend.) And yet Barton, delivered his punishment in true Coen fashion for daring to believe in something (his art--you can practically hear the Coens sharpening their knives), emerges a nobler figure than Tom for not rejecting his heart once he finds it, as Tom does. In this sense, and while taking into account such spillovers as Tom residing in "Barton Arms" apartments, the pictures are complementary--Miller's Crossing the story of Solomon (invoked by Tom therein in an unusually self-analytical aside), Barton Fink the story of Job. I haven't visited one without the other in a decade or so, and I've watched them in tandem in upwards of forty times apiece. If Miller's Crossing isn't my favourite movie, I don't know what is, but the difference between it and Barton Fink is, as Roger Avary recently said of The Breakfast Club's relation to Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the difference between Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo. Sorry for the mouthful.

Brilliantly performed, Miller's Crossing begins with mob boss Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) defining "ethics" for town kingpin Leo (Albert Finney). It's the era of Prohibition, when throwing a boxing match is moral--"business"--and apprising people outside your inner circle of the fixed odds is not. Johnny wants Leo to give up Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) for chiselling in on his books, but Leo loves Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), Bernie's sister, and won't relinquish protection. Tom (Gabriel Byrne), Leo's voice of reason, also loves Verna (well, he sleeps with her), but feels that Johnny's getting too powerful to have such requests denied. Alas, Leo stubbornly refuses to heed Tom's advice: he and Tom eventually "go busto," Tom allies himself with Caspar, and a love triangle ensues that sets off a daisy chain of violence. No, it's not the one involving Leo, Tom, and Verna. Rather, it concerns Bernie, a stooge named Mink (Steve Buscemi), and Johnny's right-hand man, Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman).

Although The Silence of the Lambs came under attack for making its lone gay character a degenerate, Miller's Crossing, with its trio of queer shysters, managed to fly past GLAAD's radar undetected. I suspect this has to do with the depiction of 'the straight reaction': in The Silence of the Lambs, the homosexual serial killer is met with revile--there is an effort to hunt him, but not to understand him; in Miller's Crossing, gayness is treated impassively, as a fact of life. Though a gay subplot might sound subversive of the gangster genre, the Coens, as they are wont to do, have simply explicated the double-entendres of noirs past, bringing the subtext of all this criminal devotion found in Miller's Crossing's literary sources (where Blood Simple owed much to James M. Cain, this film's debt is to Dashiell Hammett, Hammett's Byzantine novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key especially) to the fore. Hell, maybe not even to the fore: I've met so-called fans of the film oblivious to Verna's motive for labelling her brother "different" and the reason Tom and Mink italicize "amigo" in conversation.

Tom himself is an equal-opportunity hater. Verna says of him, "I never met anybody who made being a son-of-a-bitch such a point of pride." Ordered, in the film's centrepiece sequence, to demonstrate his loyalty to Caspar by rubbing out Bernie, Tom, shaken by Bernie's pleas for salvation (Tom is, as Bernie hopes, a pacifist at his core), spares his sobbing mark. Tom's arc is a steeling away of his emotions--they eclipse his personal philosophy that business is business, and they get the literal best of him when Bernie, instead of skipping town as instructed, bribes Tom for silence pay. This is the film's most authentic subversion of noir: the movement--cinematically, anyway--boils down to the pursuit of redemption following a lifetime supply of transgressions; Tom sullies his own innocence in Miller's Crossing's final moments, asking "What heart?" in a rhetorical address to the man he murders in cold blood. (Shortly thereafter, he rebuffs Leo's forgiveness. ("I didn't ask for that and I don't want it. Goodbye Leo.")) Carter Burwell's richly-arranged score swells triumphantly over the closing push-in on Tom, he who has reduced himself to the last man standing. I think I latched onto Miller's Crossing as a high-school student because I interpreted the ending as a quiet protest against conformity and authority, the two "ity"s foreordained to press a teenager's buttons. Today, though, I regard the film as an ineffably sad consideration of what Thomas Wolfe termed "God's Lonely Man": "...Loneliness, far from being a curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence."

The male viewer somewhat embarrassedly commiserates with Tom for allowing his wounded pride to isolate him--and the writer, perhaps with greater shame, identifies with Barton Fink. Loosely modelled on Clifford Odets, a playwright courted and corrupted by Hollywood, Barton (Turturro again, in a virtuoso turn) is persuaded to ditch a burgeoning Broadway career for the fast buck authoring screenplays. Barton moves into the netherworld of Los Angeles, the seedy, Lynchian (like Barton's Eraserhead 'do) Hotel Earle ("complimentary shoeshines!"), where he befriends Charlie Meadows (an alternately adorable and frightening John Goodman), the "common man" in whose experience Barton purports to specialize--as opposed to, say, the lives of "Lady Higgenbottom" and "Nigel Grinch-Gibbons." It'd be easy to discount Barton as a condescending highbrow, what with his penchant for interrupting Charlie's workaday anecdotes to paternalistically extol the virtues of the great unwashed, but he has a more childlike arrogance than that, typified by how easily his worldview is shattered by the realities (or artificialities) of the movie business. Barton is shocked to discover, for example, that the Faulkner-like novelist W.P. Mayhew (John Mahoney, miles from "Frasier") is ghost-written, that anti-Semitism runs rampant out west, that mosquitoes bite the dead, and, above all, that screenwriting is hard.

Barton Fink is as stymieing as it is affecting. One of the few legitimate offshoots of David Lynch (its ethereal denouement is undercut by a curlicue similar to the mechanical bird with a worm in its mouth that neutralizes the bucolic epilogue of Lynch's Blue Velvet), it's also a work of mordant self-flagellation: the Coens evince contempt for not only their profession (the illiterate head of the studio, Lipnick (Michael Lerner, the spitting image of past-his-prime David O. Selznick), dispenses hollow industry maxims ad hoc), but artists, too. (One notes that, save the hair, Barton is a dead ringer for Joel Coen.) To read their aforementioned "hat" quote concerning Miller's Crossing--classic evasiveness on the part of the pair--is to maybe pinpoint the pathology that led to Barton's martyrdom: an abject fear of looking pretentious or, worse, the poseur. As Barton grows resigned to aspects of our existence being beyond his intellectual grasp, the Coens deliver a canny lesson to us and to Barton alike in shutting up and letting the picture speak its thousand words.

I must gloomily report that Barton Fink disappoints as a DVD; Miller's Crossing fares better, but neither disc lives up to its potential, either transfer-wise or supplementally. (In addition, the updated cover art for each leaves a lot to be desired, particularly Miller's Crossing's.) The two titles were remastered in widescreen for LaserDisc just prior to the death of the format, and that LD of Barton Fink looks far more detailed despite lacking the anamorphic encoding of the 1.66:1 DVD. Plus, it includes a full extra channel of audio: where the LD contains a phenomenal Dolby Surround track, the DVD is in squelched-sounding 2.0 stereo. The title of Barton's script ("The Burly Man") is nigh illegible, though the source print is relatively clean and outdoor scenes are satisfactorily lustrous. Miller's Crossing's letterboxed LD had mucked with the film's colour scheme (the tip-off was Tom's furniture, suddenly an intense mauve), which has been corrected for this 1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced presentation: Barry Sonnenfeld shot on Fuji stock to mute saturation and the intended effect is preserved here. Unfortunately, with the DVD's 4.0 discrete listening option, gunshots and Burwell's themes are uncommonly quiet. I wish they'd splurged for a 5.1 overhaul, for even the mid-film artillery assault is little supported by the rears or the subwoofer and therefore registers as a whimper.

Miller's Crossing's bonus material consists of talking-heads, trailers, and a brief gallery of behind-the-scenes stills. Charles de Lauzirika's "Shooting Miller's Crossing: A Conversation with Barry Sonnenfeld" (16 mins.) offers a treasure-trove of quotes from the cinematographer-turned-director. Sonnenfeld contrasts his use of the wide angle to Kubrick's and says that "handsome" films are photographed with longer lenses, thus Miller's Crossing became the first picture in the Coen canon to employ anything higher than a 21mm lens. Towards the finish, he points out an Easter egg cameo within the film (no, not Sam Raimi's) that had until now eluded me. Byrne, Harden, and Turturro materialize in 4-, 3-, and 2-minute segments, respectively, from placid interviews recorded in 1990. Unique trailers for Miller's Crossing (in 2.35:1, most inaccurately), Barton Fink, and Raising Arizona as well as the aforementioned production photos top off the DVD. The same trailers resurface on the Barton Fink platter, which furthermore consists of eight extended scenes, subtle trims that convey the Coens' aptitude for brevity. (In one, Barton's sink overflows from balls of Charlie's ear-cotton stuck in the drain.) Another small batch of production stills--in reality, there was no ceiling in Barton's hotel room--rounds out the disc.-Bill Chambers