Hotel Earle. The Hotel Earle is a fictional hotel in the 1991 Coen Brothers film Barton Fink.

In the film, The Hotel Earle acts as a character and is personified with personality throughout Barton Finks stay. The hotel is not your average hotel for Hollywood. It is not the least bit luxurious and has a very dark presence, like its alive!

The hotel is very strange looking and seems to be constantly empty. The only other tenants that ever appear in the film are Barton Fink and Charlie Meadows. We occasionally see shoes in front of the other tenants doors, waiting to be taken and shined. The shoes are a ghostly representation of the other guests and you get the feeling that the Hotel Earle is a place you go to die or fade away. The hotel’s stationary even reads “A Day or a Lifetime.” The Coen’s themselves have compared the hotel to a ghost ship, a place where there is the presence of other passengers, but you never actually see them.

Barton Fink is a successful New York play writer who is offered a deal to move out to California and write scripts for the pictures. Barton is apprehensive about the idea at first because he wants to be the voice for the common man and wants his writing to reflect the same principles of a hardworking American. Barton’s common man ethic leads him to check into the Hotel Earle because it is not luxurious and will keep him in the role that he has set for himself. Barton chooses the Hotel Earle over the Beverly Hills Hotel out of modesty, feeling as if he will not last long in the new world known as Hollywood.

Barton’s room in the Hotel Earle is very simple. There is little furnishing and only a small picture on the wall of a woman staring at the beach. The room, as also the hotel itself, appears to be in ruins and has obviously seen better days. The hotel often displays the element of heat. Throughout the entire hotel, there are fans constantly swirling. Barton’s room seems to come alive when the wallpaper begins to peel off the wall from the heat. Hollywood is a hotter environment than New York, and this constant presence of heat sends Barton into a frenzy. He is constantly sweating, almost as if the room itself is torturing him. Barton finds it difficult to write a wrestling picture and the harder he tries, the more unbearable the room becomes. The hotel seems to speak to Barton as if it’s trying to say, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”  Barton’s neighbor Charlie takes on many traits of the hotel. Charlie is unkempt, overweight, and constantly sweating. He claims to be a traveling sales man and comes and goes when there is business to attend. Somehow, Charlie always ends up back at the hotel. Charlie has been living in the hotel so long he has become the environment. Ironically, the Hotel Earle burns down in the end.