Barton Fink, the titular character of Joel and Ethan Coen's 1991 film, is a screenwriter stricken with writer's block.

The impossible author's roommate in the seedy Hollywood hotel turns out to be the originator of the creepy noises that keep the writer from writing.

The affable insurance salesman is a serial killer who decapitates his victims.

The intellectual who imagines that his mission is to improve the situation of mankind should not have gone into the cinema business: What he is offered in the world of scenery around his office in terms of fatal materiality, devilishly simply knitted and therefore inextricable plot, makes him completely mindless.

Figurations of metaphysical principles are the two main characters,

Patrick Bahners

Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".

  • Follow I follow

Goodman had played an escaped convict in Raising Arizona, the brothers' second film, in 1987, and in the meantime he had become a television star with the series Roseanne.

His murderous character in "Barton Fink" bears a name that speaks in the most uncanny sense of the word: Karl Mundt.

He comes from a world of primal orality that in every respect precedes the sphere of writing.

In the sitcom "Roseanne," Goodman is the father of a family eking out a living by aggregating the low wages of working class America.

The patriarch's violence is civilized and defused, transformed into symbolic co-rule because the man cannot feed his own alone.

He shows himself to be able to cope with all the adversities of life with a humorous saying,

Simple people, but kind-hearted: Barton Fink imagines the audience and staff of his plays like the Conners, the "common man".

That the affability stolen from the monarchs of old Europe by deadly traveling salesman Mundt hides abysses of malevolence is a lesson that could only truly shock a made-up ghostwriter of the enslaved people.

The spectacle of Goodman's play lies beyond the allegorical wallpaper patterns of Coen's fables: in the excess of physical presence.

Goodman's physicality flips into its opposite.

You can imagine it without it, and it's still there: history, myth, legend, rumor - audible inspiration, in the whisper, in the howl, in the sigh, in the suddenly broken tone of life-threatening sentimentality.

Goodman is a distinctive voice actor in countless animated films and in the Coen film "The Hudsucker Proxy" from the off he reads the newsreel text about the hula hoop - identified in the credits as Karl Mundt.

As a gigantic narrator who is always on the verge of stopping and then has to say what is on his mind, Goodman has left his mark on the collaborative arts of cinema and television.

In "Treme," David Simon's series about post-Katrina New Orleans, he is the historian of the washed-away urban society, the collector of oral history who meets a cultured television reporter from England with the aggression of the Vietnam veteran Walter Sobchak from the Coen film The Big Lebowski goes off and ends up turning his violence against himself.

And in Danny McBride's comedy series The Righteous Gemstones, about a dynasty of televangelists, he's the patriarch you dread because you think he might start preaching the good news at any second.

Today John Goodman celebrates his seventieth birthday.