I was riding up the elevator at the Jane Hotel in New York and remarked to the elevator bellhop guy that I was looking forward to the hallways breaking into flames. He looked concerned and expressed his wish that such an event wouldn’t happen. I realized that he hadn’t seen the movie and that it might be a good idea to come back (to the hotel) and screen the Coen Brother’s Barton Fink and brief the staff more thoroughly on the cinematic antecedents of their current abode. The hallways and rooms all exude that Barton Fink feeling. I laughed when I saw the inscription on the hotel’s business cards, “Check in for a day, stay for a lifetime.” The same inscription as appears on the stationary in Barton’s room. Everyone is dressed in the red caps and uniforms, and I swear I saw someone disappear down a trap door behind the vintage reception desk. My lecture would be based on Joseph Campbell’s ideas on the mythological journey, and a paradigm I’ve applied to hundreds of films. So, this is for The Jane, and happy to discuss further at your new Café Gitane, next time I come to stay. (Shoes lining the hallways might be a nice touch.)

Barton Fink starts in the Ordinary World where the character and the situation are defined. Problems and conflicts are already waiting to be activated. What is at stake that commands our attention? We first meet Barton Fink backstage at the premiere of his play. He acts superior and cynical of his own success. We hear the electric winch as the curtain descends and we move to a tony New York restaurant where sycophants toast the “triumph of the common man.” 

The next stage is the Call to Adventure. The hero must set out on a quest to save the tribe. The call may be conscious or unconscious but is significant and demands a response. A pager summons Fink to the bar where his agent tells him of an offer to write scripts in Hollywood. He is reluctant but his agent reminds him: The common man will still be here when you get back.

This leads to a Refusal of the Call, which is predicated by our fear of change. It’s difficult to exchange the known for the unknown. There is a danger involved that forces the hero to overcome their fear and violate the limits of their knowledge. The first stage of transcendence that may lead to cosmic wisdom. In Fink’s case he arrives at the Earle Hotel in Hollywood. He externally accepts the call but his internal struggles will soon rise to the surface. In the classic myth a Mentor usually appears at this point of departure to guide the hero in their search. This muse may be in the form of a person or it can be an inner voice. Ludnick, the Capitol Pictures executive, initiates Fink into the world of writing wrestling pictures and thanks him “for his heart.” Other mentors, mostly of the ‘fallen’ variety, in the form of Charlie Meadows and W.P. Mayhew, are soon to arrive.

Stage Five is the Crossing of the First Threshold. What Campbell refers to as, “The entrance to the zone of magnified Power.” The die has been cast. There is no turning back as the hero enters the terra incognito. This descent into the depths of the psyche is played out as Fink sits in his hotel room and wrestles with ‘the life of the mind.’ Meadows tells him three times he is the common man and has stories to tell. Fink doesn’t listen. He is indoctrinated into the madness of Hollywood, and his own psyche as represented by the people he meets.

This period of initiation is described by Campbell as “the perilous journey into the darkness by descending either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, the hero soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolical figures.” The endless corridors, peeling wallpaper, oppressive heat, shoes in the hallway, strange noises and visitations make up the “dream landscape of curiously ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials”, that Campbell describes. This is the sixth stage and the midpoint of the death and rebirth transformation Fink has embarked upon. Will he survive or has he already sold his soul?

The Approach to the Inmost Cave is the next step. This is a stage of preparation wherein the hero gets ready to confront the demons and the darkness. Fink will turn to the Goddess in the form of Audrey, Mayhew’s secretary. She agrees to help him write the simple morality play the studio is paying him for. It’s with her he loses his innocence as he finds out she has written Mayhew’s books. She seduces him, and he discovers her murdered body next to him in his hotel bed the following morning.

Stage Eight, The Supreme Ordeal. The death of the ego. The hero confronts their greatest fears and is literally or metaphorically reborn. Fink has crossed the border and can never return to his former self. At this point we know Fink’s journey is unlikely to result in redemption. There is a negative and positive side to every archetype, and Fink now turns to his neighbour, Charlie Meadows, aka serial killer, Mad Man Munt, to help him destroy the evidence. The next stage is Reward-Seizing the Sword, wherein the hero experiences a wider consciousness, a sharpened perception of the essence of things. In the positive journey it is distinguished by a gift that symbolizes a realization of divinity, an elixir that provides knowledge, enlightenment, insight, and self-realization. In Fink’s case, he receives a packaged box from Charlie who tells him it contains his life possessions.

Stage Ten, The Road Back. The need to escape from the lower depths of the psyche, which is purely a symbolic world, and re-establish themselves in the known world with their newfound wisdom. Often the hero has to relinquish the vestiges of their former self before the journey is successfully completed. Fink suddenly begins to write and the mysterious box that sits on his hotel desk appears to be the source of inspiration. He also has to deal with the detectives who are investigating Audrey’s disappearance and who reveal Charlie’s true identity.

The road back inevitably leads to the eleventh stage, Resurrection. The final confrontation with the dark forces that threaten the stability of the newly formed self: the shadow. If the hero loses the battle, traditional to the tragic plot, then the resurrection happens through the catharsis experienced by the audience who recognize themselves in the hero’s failure. 

“I’ll show you the life of the mind”, Charlie hollers as he marches down the Earle Hotel’s hallway that has erupted into flames. He has emerged from Fink’s psyche to show him the true mind of the common man and the hell contained within. Whether it is the fascism in Hollywood, or Europe, as people get ready for war. Fink’s illusions are now shattered and his pact with the devil is finally realized.

The journey is completed with The Return with the Elixir. The immediate circle of death and rebirth is closed and a new journey will begin. At the end, Fink has sold his soul, Capitol Pictures owns the contents of his head, and will pay for his silence. He is left on the beach with the box containing the muse’s head. A lost soul condemned to exile in the palace of dreams. Fink bound himself to his own ego and the world destroyed him.

So if you’re in New York, check out the Jane. An original hotel inspired by an original film. And in my experience, I checked in for a lifetime but only stayed a day. Or two. Might have been three.

Collages, models, graphic novels, board games, (including Scienopoly) wood carvings, knitting and sewing, fashion designs, journals and haikus. Letters, playing cards, graffiti, installations, dioramas, stuffed animals, sculptures, drawings, furniture, sketches and papier-mâché. Polaroids, photo albums, posters, puppet shows, pastels, paintings, protests, pottery, poetry, plays, postcards and photographs. Diaries, storyboards, screenplays, short stories, novellas and live performances. Remixes, songs, essays, confessionals, comics, websites, videos, video games and slideshows. Blogs, Facebook experiments, bouquets of white feathers, porcelain oranges, and so much more. The first assignments have arrived from the Film on the Future course and I see nothing but nostalgic and progressive pollination creating fresh gardens on fertile soil. A phalanx of green shrubs and flowering trees reaching towards the digital horizon of the virtual desert. The world is changing and is being changed. What has happened is happening again. Everyone misses Elmer’s glue. And comic books. And Etch a Sketch. There is a definite bloom on the desert rose. Everybody is an artist. Art exists in everyone. (With the usual suspects habitually absent, leaving their absence a mystery.)

Screened Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker last week. This week I’m showing Luis Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. My final film festival is eco videos at Lucky Bar. Then a blizzard of marking, a feverish round of faculty and related parties, many Hobo tasks to attend to, endless meetings with students, coffee with TA’s and significant others, a rapid current of emails, and then there’s all the stuff that’s really going on. I am feeling very grateful for my circumstances. I remain confident that everything that is happening is actually happening, and that all of the creative juice, and all the chance and meaningful encounters, will enlighten me as to what it all means. Why is it so great that people are gluing things together and making videos and writing about the childhood disease that drove them to the edge of despair? What do we learn about love and desire from Bunuel, or from the brilliant cinematography of Vittorio Storaro in The Conformist, or the dream sequence in Stalker? Why teach Sunshine and The Fountain when there are so many films to choose from? These are a few of the questions that I will never, or really want to, know the answers to. I am in constant and restless search of more mysteries, having given up on solutions long before I remember.

Most mornings I have a coffee and walk down to the duck pond with Sophie, my Tibetan Lion dog. The sky is steel gray. The trees are naked and vulnerable. The wind is sharp. The yellow grass is defeated. The squirrels are stoned. The blue herons are hypnotized. The deer are lost. The crows are scheming. The ducks are as amusing as always.  I’ve been immersed in the same four Dylan songs for the last four walks. “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Born in Time”, “Cross the Green Mountain”, and “I’m Not There (1956)”. My Sophie stroll mediation and a voyage that takes me through an emotional range I would compare to reading Dostoevsky’s four great novels. Or Notes from Underground, Tropic of Cancer, Dharma Bums, Hunger, Mysteries, Catcher in the Rye, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Hamlet, The Red Book, Endymion, Letters to a Young Poet, Last Exit To Brooklyn, Under The Volcano, Journey to the End of Night, Steppenwolf, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Leaves of Grass; to name a narrow margin. All works distinguished by their brazen honesty and raw exposure. Their one continuous feeling and vibration sustained from start to finish. “I’m Not There (1956)” is an entire sorrowful world unto itself, and is presently the most articulate and truthful depiction of angst and lost love I’ve ever heard. (I’ve sometimes wondered if the 1956 affix is an inference to Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl”, which was published that year.) I’m aware that I can’t stay in this realm forever and try to surrender to being completely immersed in the walking dream now. All in all, a pleasant excursion and an opportunity to mark trees and sniff grass before driving through the drowning rain forest to an office overflowing with artistic adventures. How do you grade a porcelain orange, or puppet show, or graffiti, or spaceships made from papier-mache? An interesting question and one I will answer, one mystery at a time.

“Did you listen to the words?” Bob Dylan                                                                        

“I didn’t need to man.” John Lennon

I was swept up in Barack Obama’s election and all the hope and optimism that was in the air and that was articulated with the proclamation of “Yes we can.” Around this time I was approached by a student and filmmaker, Jamie Tanner, who had made a beautiful and disturbing video about the effect of fish farms on our indigenous salmon stocks, and who asked me to write some words to reinforce his images and interviews. Jamie’s film and my original text can be found at: Yes We Can – A Salmon’s Testimony. This is for our friends, the salmon.

We are silent by nature. We believe, if we believe at all, that our actions speak louder than words. Our story transcends all recorded history. For millions of years we have followed the same path. We have been programmed to survive. We have been designed to adapt. If we could speak, if our movements were translated into syllables, our mantra would be similar to your own. Yes we can. Yes we can continue our journey from the fresh water pools and streams to the salty oceans and seas. Yes we can continue to provide nourishment for the bears and the forests, sustenance for humans and all living species. Yes we can overcome the dams, the pesticides, the logging, the floods and fires, the commercial and sports fishing, the global warming and the pollution, the majestic eagles and the hungry killer whales. Yes we can continue to chart the treacherous incline back to our birthplace where we willingly give our lives so our eggs can be given a slim chance to perpetuate our legacy. And yes, we will fight to the end but always go calmly, for in death no new fate befalls us.

We have never, not once, deviated from our mythology. No salmon has ever willingly left the path that nature has so clearly defined. We have been celebrated for our perseverance and self-sacrifice. For our consistency and our courage. We have been elevated to symbols of wisdom and rejuvenation. Hinduism and the Vedas, Celts and Druids, Jews and Syrians, Christians and Buddhists, Orpheus and the Fisher King, Haida and indigenous people from all the worlds’ tribes, past and present, have relied on us to feed them with our bodies and our purpose. Yes we can is the message that we helped inspire by our steadfast mission to keep our place in the chain of life. Yes we can is our silent murmur as we punish our battered bodies through currents and rocks enroute to our holy land, our mecca, our shallow graves where new life will begin again. We are survivors. We are adapters. We are determined. We have faced every challenge of every millennium. Only of late has there been whispers of doubt and hesitation. Only recently has there been a question of Can we?, casting an ominous shadow over our symbolic actions.

Even our worst enemies love us in their own way. Like the honeybee and the tiger, we will be missed, and we will be mourned, when we are gone. Many of our fellow travelers will likely be soon to follow, and before long all mythologies will retreat back into the silent void from which they sprang. One last parched skeleton placed facing upstream as a gesture for hope and rebirth. Yes we can was the sincere objective behind the efforts of those who worried about our demise and built farms in order to ensure our survival. But from these farms came an adversary unlike any we had faced before. A sea lice that is capable of a destructive force that stymies our journey’s blueprint. We are hopeful that our protectors and our predators, those who have come to rely on us, and those who have come to love and respect us, are starting a dialogue, are building the science, performing the research, creating a consensus, taking the actions that will come to our defense. We have never asked for anything. We are silent by nature. Our story transcends all recorded history. We will persist in our life’s journey and we will embody, Yes we can, until we can’t. We are the wild salmon.