fashion, the lines of good and evil are blurred, and the supposed hero in fact reveals himself to be deaf to the pleadings of his "common man" neighbor. By blurring the lines between reality and surreal experience, the film subverts the "simple morality tales" and "road maps" offered to Barton as easy paths for the writer to follow. However, the film-makers point out that Barton Fink is not meant to represent the Coens themselves. "Our life in Hollywood has been particularly easy," they once said. "The film isn't a personal comment." Still, universal themes of the creative process are explored throughout the film. During the picnic scene, for example, Mayhew asks Barton: "Ain't writin' peace?" Barton pauses, then says: "No, I've always found that writing comes from a great inner pain." Such exchanges led critic William Rodney Allen to call Barton Fink "an autobiography of the life of the Coens' minds, not of literal fact." Allen's comment is itself a reference to the phrase "life of the mind," used repeatedly in the film in wildly differing contexts. Fascism Several of the film's elements, including the setting at the start of World War II, have led some critics to highlight parallels to the rise of fascism at the time. For example, the detectives who visit Barton at the Hotel Earle are named "Mastrionatti" and "Deutsch" – Italian and German names, evocative of the regimes of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Their contempt for Barton is clear: "Fink. That's a Jewish name, isn't it? ... I didn't think this dump was restricted." Later, just before killing his last victim, Charlie says: "Heil Hitler". Jack Lipnick hails originally from the Belarusian capital city Minsk, which was occupied from summer 1941 by Nazi Germany, following Operation Barbarossa. "[I]t's not forcing the issue to suggest that the Holocaust hovers over Barton Fink," writes biographer Ronald Bergan. Others see a more specific message in the film, particularly Barton's obliviousness to Charlie's homicidal tendencies. Critic Roger Ebert wrote in his 1991 review that the Coens intended to create an allegory for the rise of Nazism. "They paint Fink as an ineffectual and impotent left-wing intellectual, who sells out while telling himself he is doing the right thing, who thinks he understands the 'common man' but does not understand that, for many common men, fascism had a seductive appeal." However, he goes on to say: "It would be