9	VISUAL INTERLUDE III

The Great Stone Face: Buster Keaton,
Semi-Detached

At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name.

Henry David Thoreau, “Walking”

An audience will laugh at things happening to you, and they certainly wouldn’t laugh if it happened to them.

Buster Keaton

KEATON IN CONTEXT

The most striking 1920s forays into semi-detachment occurred not on paper but on celluloid. Alongside Cather’s Greenwich Village world of writers and publishers, a new kind of storytelling had begun to flourish in Manhattan. One Monday in March 1917, Buster Keaton walked into Fatty Arbuckle’s third-floor studio at 318 East 48th Street; a half hour later, he was pratfalling with a molasses bucket in The Butcher Boy. Within five years, Keaton, master of gags that played on his character’s intermittent obliviousness to the world around him, was bringing the experience of partial absorption in virtual worlds off the page and onto the flickering screen. Keaton tackled problems that resembled those Cather had wrestled with: What would it mean to lose myself inside an artwork? Can I find some way to dwell in the actual, but simultaneously let my thoughts and sensations drift away into a vividly realized space that seems real despite being wholly made up? Within the moving pictures—not just a new technology but a wholly new form that could be mimetic in ways shaped by both the narrative and the visual arts that preceded it—such questions began to register in unexpected and often wildly funny ways.

What sets Keaton’s genius apart from his comic peers is the peculiar, remarkable way that he manages to cycle in and out of awareness of his surroundings. For example, early on in Seven Chances (1924) the shy, reclusive Buster is seated on a bench rehearsing a marriage proposal (Fig. 9.1a).¹ While rehearsing, he is in his element: passionate, expressive (privately extroverted we might say) because he knows he is in no danger of being heard by the woman he loves, but is too shy to speak to. Only this particular practice session turns into the real thing when the intended herself accidentally wanders into the scene, hears his proposal (rehearsal no longer), and accepts it (Fig. 9.1b).

The event is akin to the moment in Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes when Madeline dreams of Porphyro, only to wake and realize that he is no dream. It was only in solitude—in a dream, a rehearsal, a fantasy world—that Buster could bring himself to say what he has now accidentally said in his beloved’s presence. By itself the rehearsal is hammy (deliberately so), by itself the moment of acceptance is merely sweet. The distinctive brilliance lies in the way that Buster comes back into sync with a world that has changed while he was off in the virtual space that a rehearsal or a work of art can create.²

While this is in some sense a form of dramatic irony, the audience is not raised above Buster by its capacity to grasp what he has missed. It is his Everyman quality that predominates: who hasn’t been caught similarly semi-oblivious to actual surroundings? Northrop Frye finds comedy’s generic essence in this sort of volta—bashfulness overcome without agency, the universe conspiring to do what characters themselves cannot accomplish. Yet classing Keaton’s films as comedy pure and simple would mean overlooking the persistent slippage between intent and action in his world, the space that opens up between what Buster intends and what occurs, between the actual facts of his world and what he imagines is going on.

Anyone who has watched the hapless Sherlock Jr. wander out of his job as film projectionist and into the world of the film that he has been projecting knows how real fantasy worlds are to Keaton.³ The scene-shifting Sherlock Jr. and Buster’s absent-minded proposal in Seven Chances both present audiences with an alter ego whose inner life is not quite aligned with the actual world through which he unpredictably moves. This kind of here-and-gone flickering is more than an ephemeron—what we might call the trope of disattending Buster. In this context, Andre Gaudreault’s concept of the cultural series proves a helpful way of tracing Buster Keaton’s playful inversion and deformation of the film, theater, and vaudeville antecedents that make up his professional milieu. His films’ slippery formal devices bespeak a complex and subtle awareness of what his films may have meant to his audiences: the films themselves explore the question of what kind of experience it was to watch a Keaton film. In fact, a crucial and often overlooked aspect of Keaton’s screen style is his capacity to suggest (as in that accidental proposal scene) his semi-detachment from the actual social and physical world through which he moves.

FIGURE 9.1 A/B. A practice proposal becomes real when overheard. Keaton 1925, Seven Chances.

The jump here from Cather’s fiction to Keaton’s film follows from the introduction’s hypothesis that semi-detachment is an aesthetic mode that has long implicitly shaped the making of various kinds of narrative art. In chapters 4 and 5 (provincial and experimental novel) and in chapters 7 and 8 (speculative fiction and Cather’s modernism), semi-detachment looked like primarily a fictional problem. Henry James’s experiments with the half-absence of the consciousness of characters, the shifting relationship between actual events (“dramatic”) and inward experiences (“representational”) in Cather become extended mediations on the empty house of fiction, a resonant chamber filled with overtones and echoes. Later, Wells’s influential forays into half-discernible other worlds make the novel’s ownership of the problem seem almost absolute.

The prior two interludes were careful to grant the importance of the space between visual and textual arts. The first (chapter 3) confronted the problem of the “double distance” encoded in paintings that explored their own status both as material objects and as representations of a virtual world beyond that mere materiality. In making sense of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, it stressed the gap that opened up between the narrative possibilities encoded in prose fiction and the immediate sensational impact of a painting—a gap that may have been minimized by painters like Ford Madox Brown in his meditations on the capacity of history painting, but was visible enough to prompt visceral and vicious responses such as Dickens’s to Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents. Similarly, the second visual interlude (chapter 6) focused on the use that William Morris made of magic lanterns and photographs in the new design project, positing the separability of what Morris himself called the “epical” and the “ornamental”: a palpable tension between thinking about Kelmscott books as temporally extended “tales” and as spatially defined ornamental objects.

Both chapters suggested ways in which the conceptual gap between visual and textual arts remained up for debate; moreover, the site where that debate went on was frequently the artworks themselves. Both Dickens’s attack on Millais and George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë’s suspicion of the magic lantern’s tendency to offer “succession without sequence” underscore the implicit logic of rivalry. If Middlemarch locates a “magic panorama” as the antithesis of what a novel’s virtuous sequentiality has to offer, elsewhere in the public realm were visual artists who thought of the disjuncture between lantern shows and novels in profoundly different ways. This project generally is committed to tracing that sort of implicit tussle about how one might represent states of aesthetic semi-detachment by visual or textual means. That commitment to seeing semi-detachment as both an intellectual puzzle and a formal challenge explains my move from Wells and post-Wells speculative fiction to the more canonically modernist forays of Cather’s fiction. It also explains why this final chapter examines a storytelling form that is heir to both novels and the visual arts: the movies.

REPERTOIRES, BURLESQUES, AND PORKPIE HATS

Rapid-fire inventions saw lantern shows giving way to actualités and nickelodeons in the 1890s, and then into a worldwide story picture industry by World War I. Once the motion-picture industry had demonstrated the commercial as well as the formal potential of rapidly flickering pictures in the dark, the rules that governed the relationship between visual and textual art forms entered a period of rapid change. Scholars have argued and will continue to argue about the nuances of cinema’s arrival: from the notion of an art that arrived fully developed, bursting out of Athena’s head, to those who trace its roots back to late Victorian theater, to the lantern-show tradition of the late nineteenth century, or even to such collateral kin as the realist novel, narrative poem, and Victorian historical painting.4 Debate also rages as to when the “cinema of attractions” gave way to “story pictures” and how complete that break was.⁵

For the purposes of this chapter’s turn to Buster Keaton (born Joseph Frank Keaton in 1896 into a traveling stage family and nicknamed Buster early in life for his energetic pratfalls), the crucial historical point is the immense opportunities for full-length feature films in post–World War I (or post Birth of a Nation) America. The timing was perfect for Keaton to turn his vaudeville training and eager experimentation with camera tricks and special effects into distinctive comic films that borrowed narrative arc and a marital finale from the romantic feature films of the day without giving up the sheer sensory appeal of his stunts and gags. Having gotten his start in comic shorts by Fatty Arbuckle, Keaton was able by age twenty-four to start making his own two-reel comedic shorts (including The Boat, One Week, The Playhouse, Cops, and The Electric House) and (thanks to professional and personal ties with Joseph Schenck) between 1923 and 1928 at least six brilliant features: Our Hospitality, The Navigator, Sherlock Jr., Seven Chances, The General, and Steamboat Bill Jr.6

Andre Gaudreault has recently argued that the best way to avoid teleological and reductively retrospective readings of narrative film is by looking back to the “cultural series” within which any given work locates itself. The cultural series that Gaudreault sees stretching backward behind any given movie, establishing its generic and formal presumptions, bears a revealing relationship to what Charles Tilly has labeled “repertoires of collective interaction”: the various forms of plausible political action that are available in a given culture at a given moment.⁷ Practitioners are always consciously inventing and developing their own distinctive styles, along with their variant forms, with reference to a cultural milieu that allows for and rewards certain kinds of variations. Given that interplay between setting and artwork, we can learn a lot about the parameters of style as a concept by watching the rise and fall of a particular artist, whose efforts range from rough to polished and whose reception not only alters through his career but also alters the nature of each subsequent work.

Gaudreault’s proposal helps clarify what is most distinctive about Keaton’s film.⁸ Beginning an account of Buster Keaton’s style with the ideas of “cultural series” and “repertoires of coactive interaction” makes particular sense because Keaton’s own account of his early vaudeville and filmmaking days stresses one word: burlesque. Critics have picked up on Keaton’s parodic impulse in short films like The Frozen North, his spoof Western, but by Keaton’s own lights everything he did was tinged with this kind of burlesque: each stage door gag, each cross-dressing routine, right down to the moment in Go West when the resolutely antisentimental Keaton gamely tries to turn his deadpan into a smile (Fig. 9.2a)—via a gesture lifted from an actress from the world of melodrama, Lillian Gish (Fig. 9.2b). Keaton strove to master publicly accepted norms and mores, not in order to conform to them strictly, but in order to play on them parodically, satirically. This is not simply hilarity grounded in mockery: for every overt rip-off, like that faux-Gish facial gesture, there are a hundred minute gestures Buster has stolen from everyday life, copying the way an awkward man enters a room or fumbles for the telephone.⁹ Even something as seemingly arcane as his choice of hat sheds light on how he positioned himself against what had come before.

The jauntiness of those hats is certainly part of what sanctioned Keaton’s famous deadpan expression while still allowing him to signal—with plausible deniability—his own desire to be stylish. Circa 1920, “fashion films” were the rage, serials filled seats by guaranteeing “a new Worth gown for every sequence” and the “it” that Clara Bow self-evidently had was constituted rather than concealed by the monotonous mutability of her look. Slightly harder to spot was a complementary norm for male stars of the days: a signature look (Arbuckle’s bowler, Lloyd’s boater, and Chaplin’s bowler/cane).¹⁰ As a result, beginning with the very first comic short Keaton made with Fatty Arbuckle, his porkpie was present and in cinematic play.

FIGURE 9.2 A/B. “Burlesque”: the sincerest form of flattery. Lillian Gish in Griffith 1919, Broken Blossoms; Keaton 1925, Go West.

An early scene from Our Hospitality condenses some key Keaton ideas about the power of the right porkpie. The Buster character is riding south in 1830 (on a comical early train) to claim a family inheritance when chances to sit beside a beautiful young lady, whose acquaintance he has yet to make.11 He is, initially, attired in a hat suitable to the day but it keeps getting smashed onto and over his eyes by the bouncing railway carriage (Fig 9.3a). Finally, he rescues the situation by pulling a (pre-flattened) porkpie out of an enormous carpet bag, in order to adapt and survive (Fig. 9.3b and c).

Scenes like this one lend themselves very readily to a generally accepted Keaton myth that we might label “Porkpie Buster,” a role into which Keaton, with his loving wife Eleanor’s collusion, was essentially trapped in the final four decades of his life.¹² However, a few things about this shot help us to think about the role that the porkpie plays in establishing Buster’s relationship with his milieu. First, Keaton’s comic camerawork relies on full frontal shots that skillfully avoid any overt acknowledgement of the performer’s reliance on his audience, but that nonetheless give that audience the pleasure of an overt gaze.13 Second, Keaton employs self-conscious iteration. He never redoes a gag within the same scene or indeed within the same film, but he is sure to exploit the joke from every angle.¹⁴

FIGURE 9.3 A/B/C. Love blooms only when Buster replaces the rigid, oversized stovepipe hat with a flexible, pre-crushed porkpie. Keaton 1923, Our Hospitality.

Finally, and crucially, this scene underscores how persistently Keaton’s comedy depends both on incongruity and on adaptability. The scene depends upon the comical height of the hats he has managed to shed—only a minute before this scene he is shown back in New York, clad in an absurdly oversized mad-hatter topper meant to signify the rigid fashions of the 1830s life that he is escaping by heading down south. His switch to a porkpie thus strikes the perennial note of style in Keaton: that it is for the younger generation to signal to one another, while the older generation counts instead on fixed reliable markers: the old have icons, we youth have flexible signaling systems.

Arbuckle, Lloyd, and Chaplin keep determinedly propagating their straightforward reactions to the exigencies and indignities of life: Arbuckle’s response was to clown (until offstage accusations destroyed him), Lloyd’s to flirt and flex his way through to the promise of a happily procreative ending, Chaplin (and no wonder he was Samuel Beckett’s first choice as a clown for Film) to remain an untouched perhaps untouchable bit of grit in the machine, a little seed that will neither break nor germinate. Keaton aims higher and lower at once. He is not the life of the party, but he is also not external to the machinery of life—the hexagonal or even octagonal peg in the round hole. In Keaton, we can feel the desire to get along—coupled with the knowledge that trying may be the one bit of real freedom you have, that there’s no more real play left in store if things do turn out “right” (there are more than a dozen Keaton variations on the hyper accelerated married/babies/doomed to tedium ending that is the norm for a 1920s story-film).15

Hence the emblematic greatness of the porkpie, as in this scene: by being pre-crumpled, the porkpie enables Buster not to be squashed. The porkpie against the train canopy is a flexuous response to a mutable environment, one that preserves an iota of individuality within that jiggling canopied train carriage. To go on wearing that same hat indefinitely, however, would indicate not flexibility but fossilization. What is novel the first time becomes, when iterated, novelty’s antithesis. This problem of novelty within seriality is also emblematized and explored in an amazing Steamboat Bill Jr. scene, which turns on the fact that Buster is not able to identify himself to his father after a long absence by the simple semiotic expedient of wearing a white carnation to the train station (everyone at the station has a white carnation on, so the father inadvertently claims an absurd number of unsuitable candidates as his son). What audiences learn from those multiple identical carnations is that straightforward, unmistakable denotation will always let you down, forcing you to fall back on difficult to decipher codes: the empire of connotation.

The white carnation scene is only one instance of Keaton’s perennial awareness—perennial concern, really—with the moment when the stylish hardens into the iconic (when a Keaton hat becomes the Keaton hat). At such moments—the dangers of putting on a uniform are a perennial trope in Keaton films—youth’s advantage over the old disappears. Youth in Keaton will not simply prevail over the calcified parents; it will prevail by way of its flexibility and mutability. If denotation by way of a rigid archaic sign like a white carnation is out, however, what takes its place as a useful signifier? Logical enough to suppose that Steamboat Bill Jr. would turn with a sigh of relief (like that which accompanies the hat switch in Our Hospitality) to a comfortable and stylish porkpie. That is not what happens. In fact, there is a delightfully hammy moment (Figs. 9.4a, b, and c) where we see young Buster being fitted with a porkpie—and rapidly rejecting it, with a reproving roll of the eye.

At moments like this (they crop up in every Keaton movie) the danger of hardening into one’s own iconic identity is marked as every bit as dangerous as any parental fiat. This is Buster reflecting on what it means that his porkpie can flatten itself into mere denotation, can become a merely iconic white carnation. The series of carnation jokes and the rapid-fire catalogue of hats in the mirror would be impossible without Keaton’s having thought about such moments of self-fashioning as turning on the discrepancy between appearance and essence; the very gap that allows his films to show audiences both the world as it is, and as it seems to Buster.

BEYOND THE CABIN, THE OCEAN

Keaton has rightly been praised for his fluid stunts and dazzling special effects. In short films and long, Buster is alert to every open window (he will plunge through it), every rope looped on the ground (his foot will snag in it). He exploits (which is to say, succumbs to) every possibility of his surroundings: seated in front of the handlebars of a speeding motorcycle (in Sherlock Jr.), it is inevitable he will end up steering from there; a railway tie in his hand (in The General) must end up serving as the unexpectedly perfect lever to knock other ties off the track in front of his speeding train.¹⁶ Buster’s incredible fluidity always translates into vulnerability to an onrushing modern world.

On the other hand, that same vulnerability eventually gets transformed into a serendipitous mastery of his world: in both College and Steamboat Bill Jr., the rousing finale involves Buster returning to sites where he stumbled and turning the exact agents of ignominy into tools for a dazzling triumph. This eventual mastery of his environment is the aspect of Keaton’s genius that his four most prominent recent critics have emphasized. Henry Jenkins traces this rubber-legged high jinks back to vaudeville, while Gunning stresses Keaton’s role as a twitching, virtually invisible animalcule inside a mechanized and hence scarily clockwork universe. Gilberto Perez traces the ways that Keaton the “bewildered equlibrist” struggles to fit into this environment (both technologically and socially) as a way of warding off loneliness, while Noel Carroll reads Keaton’s decision to set several films at the beginning of the Industrial Age as a nostalgic recursion to a world in which automaticity was not the rule of the day.17

FIGURE 9.4 A/B/C. The only constant is mutability: this time, donning the porkpie is as frightful a prospect to Buster as a Chaplin-style bowler hat. Keaton 1928, Steamboat Bill Jr.

That account of Keaton’s recipe for success, however, is not comprehensive. It is worth paying more attention than critics usually accord to Buster’s intermittent absences from his ambient world: his failures, his disengagements, the moments when his wheels are spinning without his being able to move forward. To see Keaton’s humor simply as the capacity to fit his body into any situation, no matter how absurd or impossible—to become the situation—would define the performance Buster gives as nothing but surface, as if he were a pure cipher put up on stage in order to do what the “Comedic system” demands of him.¹⁸ Buster is neither the master of his universe, nor purely set adrift on its ebbs and flows, nor tracked smoothly into its whirring cogs. He is endowed with partially visible desires and thoughts, difficult but not impossible to express in a world that he partially understands, partially finds flabbergasting. It is true that Keaton’s stunting ability (along with his mastery of innovative camera tricks like the transparent garage in Sherlock Jr.) gives him a Felix the Cat-like ability to turn his body as well as his environs into comedic props.19 However, scenes like that inadvertent (yet intended) proposal in Seven Chances—or many of Buster’s inadvertent triumphs during the railway chase scenes in The General—finally rely less on sheer physical brilliance than on his audience’s wondering what is going on within semi-detached Buster.

Thinking of Keaton as the conscious, burlesquing inheritor of a cultural series with roots both in vaudeville and the cinema of attractions helps to clarify his most important formal innovations. In that satiric vein, Keaton’s films frequently work through versions of what in Sherlock Jr. becomes the “entering another world” routine: Buster finds himself both sleeping in a projection booth and running capers as a dapper detective. Even in less schematic films, the doubleness is always present—the gap between where Buster thinks he is and where the audience knows he is. Many versions of this routine feature theater prominently, including The Playhouse and an interlude in Steamboat Bill Jr. when Buster wanders into in a theater during a storm. There is also Buster in The General as the engineer who no sooner drops his head to stoke his engine than he steams into enemy territory without noticing it. In a 1921 two-reeler, The Boat, he is the earnest homemaker who only remembers to hang a picture on his wall when the wall is actually the hull of a boat (Fig. 9.5a), so that hanging the picture also involves poking a hole in the boat’s side and letting in the ocean (Fig. 9.5b).²⁰

This is a joke that Keaton heightens by zooming in on the painting that Buster has been hammering into the boat’s side. It is an oceanscape, and Buster’s first reaction when the water starts pouring through is to check the painted waves, as if it were the painting that had suddenly come to life and started leaking. Keaton’s burlesque runs deep here: he is playing with the fact that the same rule applies to narrative film that Gallagher sees applying to the experience of reading fiction. Viewing a film entails a conscious decision to grant the plausibility of what you know is imaginary: in this scene, that juxtaposition of the actual and the virtual setting of the film (Buster is on a boat, and on the ocean, and looking at a picture) is a sly commentary on the fact that his audience is looking up at Buster and his antics—but also looking at the play of light on a white screen in a darkened room. When you get right down to it, where is that water coming from, anyway?

FIGURE 9.5 A/B. Might be a dream, might be painted water: Buster is not sure how to square the actual world with his sense of reality. Keaton 1921, The Boat.

Einstein’s relativistic point about frames of reference—that there is no saying that any one frame is “at rest” in an absolute sense, only that it is at rest relative to another frame—may not seem a major concern for 1920s Hollywood. It is noteworthy nonetheless that Keaton made liberal use of boat and train voyages, and that he frequently unfurled gags that depended upon the fact that a character may feel securely at rest inside such a speeding vehicle, only to discover that the external frame of reference has changed radically. Keaton responds to one frame, but we the audience are always aware of another running just behind—the ocean that lurks behind that punctured wall is not so different from the extra dimension spectrally present in H. G. Wells stories like “The Plattner Story.”21

The ocean painting that causes the actual ocean to enter the boat in The Boat is a lapidary example of this problem of overlapping, conceptually incompatible worlds, but Keaton’s The General is a dizzying collection of variants on this same basic problem of conflicting frames of reference, or doubled worlds. There is no way to grasp one’s world completely—because that seemingly complete world is itself always also only a limited frame of reference in motion through a larger world. So not only do audiences see Buster going from loyal train engineer to traitor without knowing it (when he crosses the Union lines), they also see him furiously shoveling sand onto a railway track in order to free the passage of a train—but a train that had already departed while his back was turned. Or uncoupling a pesky train car that has been hitched in front of his engine, so as to speed his engine ahead and leave the car behind. But because he decouples when the train is moving downhill, the audience sees gravity move that decoupled car right back in front of Buster.

What all such moments suggest is how consciously Keaton is exploring what it means to have to conceive of oneself as occupying more than one world simultaneously; to acknowledge, that is, that the domain one inhabits may permit a sense of mastery in one way, and yet also suddenly reveal itself to be part of a larger domain (the sea, the world where one’s beloved can actually overhear one’s rehearsal) that one has not been attending to at all. This series of gags is reminiscent of the pamphlet in Melville’s Pierre, which explores two incompatible but equally valid ways of measuring time while on a long ocean voyage: “chronometricals and horologicals,” pick your frame, and pick the timescale that goes with it.

Critics who have remarked on the sense of doubleness in Keaton generally agree in attributing it to Keaton’s being caught between two different generic/formal systems.²² By my account, rather than being shaped by his being caught between two poles (free farce on one side, scripted tame comedy on the other), Keaton’s films knowingly explore the ways that the world is always threatening to change. They themselves generate and explore the problem inside which they appear to be trapped (I thought this bench was a solitary outdoor space, but it turns out to be a site for unplanned assignations). Keaton’s art is not trapped between two modes; rather it explores the perpetually timely problem of finding oneself trapped between modes—or rather, the problem of inhabiting rival modes, the impossibility of mastering all one’s frames of reference at once.

Keaton’s comedy does not push audiences, however, to root for him in a heroic struggle against that oppressive outer world. Buster is less existential resistor than a vaguely stymied subaltern: he wants nothing more than to reconcile his “chronometricals and horologicals.” From James Agee’s famous early appreciation through Dwight Macdonald’s various encomia in the 1970s up to Michael North’s recent Machine-Age Comedy, critics have emphasized the mechanical nature of the outside world in Keaton—not just the perennial struggle against industry but also the way that even nature itself turns into a vast impersonal and antagonistic machine. That reading, however, risks underplaying how heroically Buster strives not to defeat but to get along with that mechanical onslaught.23 Watching his incomplete adjustment, audiences grow aware of their own sometimes successful and sometimes failed efforts to slide into their allotted slots.²⁴

Chaplin gins up the pathos by presenting himself as a still point in a changing world; Harold Lloyd is so well adjusted to his environment we can sometimes forget which is the environment and which is Harold Lloyd. Unlike both Chaplin and Lloyd, Keaton films rest neither on rebellion nor conformity, but on imperfect alignment: Buster would succumb in an instant, if he could just figure out how.²⁵ In fact, the most memorable pieces of Keaton humor are founded on what might be called partial obliviousness. That is, his success derives from the implicit parallel that exists between Buster—semi-detached participant in the world that whirs around him—and his audiences, who find themselves partially drawn into the world of Buster’s escapades. The elaborately self-referential setup of Sherlock Jr. brings this question of audience implication explicitly to the fore. But the accidental proposal in Seven Chances, too, is just one of a thousand telling moments that underscores Buster’s flickering semi-detachment from the film-world around him.

CONCLUSION: STONE-FACE
STYLE AND SEMI-DETACHABLE REPERTOIRES

Marcel Proust’s “On Flaubert’s Style” praises Flaubert for “rendering . . . his vision without in the meanwhile any note of humor or touch of sensibility.”²⁶ Proust seems to be praising Flaubert for impersonality. Yet he goes on to argue that what he calls “the subjectivism of Flaubert” comprises the quintessence of his style: a subjectivism constituted by the withholding of sensibility. Proust’s praise for Flaubert is like Agee’s praise for Keaton’s lack of sentiment. I like to imagine Proust praising Keaton in just the same way, pointing as evidence to Keaton’s 1920’s moniker, “The Great Stone Face.” From that face, any trace of sensibility has been expelled (hence Agee can call it “anti-sentimental”), and yet in it, as in Flaubert’s prose, subjectivity appears in its purest form. A face that audiences loved for (not despite) its blankness, which offered them both a recognizable comic persona, complete with trademark hat, and Everyman (that could be me).27 “An audience will laugh at things happening to you, and they certainly wouldn’t laugh if it happened to them.”²⁸

Proust attributes Flaubert’s greatness to the use that he makes of “blanks,” by which he means gaps between scenes. Blanks within Keaton films are a worthy subject for a whole dissertation of their own: as far as a cultural series goes, he has not garnered the recognition he deserves for his obliteration of the bombastic Griffith intertitle, until only the barest few remain, virtually all functioning as gags (like an intertitle lasting for exactly ten seconds that appears for no reason in the middle of The Boat reading, “Ten seconds later”).²⁹ But the real analogy when it comes to blanks is the one Keaton drops right into the middle of the screen: his own immobilized visage. Keaton’s comedy depends on viewers seeing what Keaton doesn’t see, which allows them to enjoy his reactions to his own reduced perceptual range.³⁰ A crucial component of the comedy, then, is the moment of adjustment: the camera lingers on his (almost) immobile stone face, letting them delight in his rediscovery of his true relationship to the world around him.³¹

This book as a whole has aimed to explore how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artworks attempt to represent, convey, or simply to instigate within their audiences an experience. As Martin Jay argues, that word has long served as a crucial touchstone for those who argue for the relative priority of conceptual (a priori) and sensible (or a posteriori) ways of grasping the world: between those who emphasize the intellectual forms that shape whatever we encounter in the world out there, and those who emphasize or value the empirical “real.” Accounts of the filmmaking of this era have emphasized the sensible side of film: John Dewey’s 1934 phrase “that delightful perception which is aesthetic experience” might sum up the way in which critics have treated comic films by Keaton and his peers as vehicles for heightening the apperception of the world, for reveling in physicality by way of absurd antics that heighten our awareness of its tactile haecceity.32 This chapter’s reading of Keaton’s hats and his stone face as devices that mark the interface between an intrusive world and a self struggling to get back into better alignment with its environment rejects the idea that “delightful perception” alone can constitute aesthetic experience. Instead, that experience depends on a mixture of perception and conceptualization: in the Kantian terms discussed earlier in this book, both reception and reflection.

Even the most blatant of physical pratfalls rely on the moment of realization—shared albeit imperfectly between actor and audience—that the world has gone subtly wrong. If dirt is matter out of place, comedy arises from the struggle, in those everyday ineffectual ways audiences know all too well, to put matter back into place.

This is a point underscored in Keaton’s film by the attention paid to Buster’s intermittent and unreliable comprehension of what is going on around him. Buster’s way of locating himself within “worlds not realized” or at least worlds only imperfectly realized makes an implicit comparison: audience members too move about in a world that usually spares them the embarrassing knowledge of the yawning differences in perception between themselves and those whose world they putatively share, but that occasionally reveals how embarrassingly out of touch they have become. The postmodern critical accounts that single out the leap that Sherlock Jr. takes into filmic space underestimate the persistent complexity of the ways that Keaton characters essentially move in and out of touch with the world around them. It is not that Sherlock doesn’t jump; it is just that such jumps are prefigured in every Keaton film: the startled leap Buster takes on that bench when his proposal is overheard is also a leap between worlds, in its own way.

Take the way that Buster’s stone face functions in the final shot of Sherlock Jr. Although the whole film’s comic conceit is about a character who can fall asleep and dream himself into a role in a film, the final shot in Sherlock Jr. returns that oneiric fantasy back into a world in which the ways that we dream ourselves into films are not fantastical but shockingly, unexpectedly everyday. In wooing and winning the girl he adores, Buster’s character (Figs. 9.6 and 9.7) is explicitly cued by the film he gazes at, gazes at along with us, the audience: he holds his beloved, he kisses, as he sees the hero kissing, then finally he turns to the screen to view the result of that kiss—ex nihilo, or ex osculo, a pair of babies appear. In that sense he is immersed, mimicking the shared aesthetic form in order to live his life.

The shot ends with a dissolve into a happy couple with their brand new twin babies, the logical conclusion of his having won the girl. The film’s final shot is a barely discernible twitch on the great stone face, as he realizes the longer-term implications of the replicable performance he has both watched and taken part in. Whether we are meant to imagine audiences, too, walking out of the theater holding hands, embracing, wedding, and giving birth is never stipulated. If they do leave with such thoughts, however, it is in part because Buster up on the screen has shown them the imperfect, partial ligatures that bind them to what they watch.

Buster’s rapid oscillation between clown and leading-man attests to Keaton’s keen perception of his audience’s sense of their own semi-detachment, the ways in which they too are never quite sure of where they stand with regard to their own social habitus, the ways in which they know that being a fall guy or a hero is mainly a question of timing and sheer dumb luck. Chaplin is forever Chaplin; Lloyd is the guy next door; but Keaton, Keaton is me, half attuned and half adrift. In watching Keaton within his world, moviegoers know what it is to be dissevered from his world, caught up in a dream-space—and know also what it means to come out of that illusory separation with a jolt.

Admiring audiences probably do not, like Buster in the final scene of Sherlock Jr., take kissing cues directly from the movies. Unlike Madeline in Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes,” they do not wake to find their dream lover has stepped out of a dream and into their actuality. Like Buster, however, they struggle to align their own surroundings with the images they see up there on the screen, which both do and do not belong to their own lives. Keaton—proposing by accident, flipping through hats, or looking to the screen for cues on how to hug, kiss, and reproduce—reminds viewers that they persistently dream and recover their footing. Like him, his audiences live semi-detached lives; like him, they daydream and partially lose themselves at the movies, undergoing what Henry James refers to as “disguised and repaired losses” and “insidious recoveries.” What remains to viewers is recognition of their own semi-detachment, their capacity to make sense of the world by recognizing the imperfect, partial, and mediated nature of their attachment to his world—and to their own.

FIGURE 9.6 A/B/C. Taking cues: Gazing out through a window, Buster strives to align his actions with those he sees on screen. Keaton 1924, Sherlock Jr.

FIGURE 9.7 A/B/C. When cues go awry: The film’s telegraphic logic and sequential jumps always threaten Buster’s effort to align himself with what he sees. Keaton 1924, Sherlock Jr (final shot).