Because it crosses genres, fragments the characters' experiences, and resists straightforward narrative resolution, "Barton Fink" is often considered an example of postmodernist film. In his book "Postmodern Hollywood", Booker says the film renders the past with an impressionist technique, not a precise accuracy. This technique, he notes, is "typical of postmodern film, which views the past not as the prehistory of the present but as a warehouse of images to be raided for material". In his analysis of the Coens' films, Palmer calls "Barton Fink" a "postmodern pastiche" which closely examines how past eras have represented themselves. He compares it to "The Hours" (2002), a film about Virginia Woolf and two women who read her work. He asserts that both films, far from rejecting the importance of the past, add to our understanding of it. He quotes literary theorist Linda Hutcheon: the kind of postmodernism exhibited in these films "does not deny the "existence" of the past; it does question whether we can ever "know" that past other than through its textualizing remains".