Silent Film Comedy and American Culture

Abstract

Alan Bilton's Silent Film Comedy and American Culture brings to mind Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery's observation that film history is not a simple empiricist history. They quote the American historian Charles Beard to remind us that, at best, film history must always remain a subjective ideological history: “Whatever acts of purification the historian may perform he yet remains human, a creature of time, place, circumstance, interests, predilections, culture.”1 Allen and Gomery divide the field of film history into four major areas, representing the major avenues of film historical investigation: Aesthetic film history deals with the history of the cinema as an art form; Technological film history involves the study of the origins and development of the technology that makes possible the creation and presentation of movies; Economic film history concerns who pays for movies and how and why they are made; Social film history is concerned principally with three questions: (1) Who made films and why? (2) Who saw films, how, and why? (3) What was seen, how and, why?2 The title of Bilton's first chapter is “Introducing America's Silent Film Comedy: Clowns, Conformity, Consumerism” and confirms what the title of his book already suggested, namely that Bilton adheres mostly to the social approach to film history with some minor attention to the economic approach. This selective approach is perhaps the book's strongest aspect and its greatest weakness in that it avoids a whole set of questions concerning the aesthetic and technological categories of film history.In his analysis of the relationship between silent comedies and the development of practical capitalism and consumerism in the U.S. during the turn of the twentieth century, Bilton relies heavily on the work of Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who was one of Hoover's key speechwriters, as well as one of the most important architects of Western consumer culture. Bilton proposes that slapstick movies, with their use of destruction, comically uninhibited lust, illogical gags, and absurdist anarchy, provide a test case for Bernays's theories, which for the first time applied psychoanalysis to explain economic and cultural phenomena. Bilton aims to explore whether such manic energies can be absorbed and tamed by the system, or whether instead they illuminate the essential irrationality of consumer culture and the transformation of civic duty into boundless desire. Bilton quotes Rob King's study of the Keystone Film Company, which states that the “timeless” age of silent comedy can only be understood in terms of “a shift from a producer to a consumer economy” (29). Thus, Bilton claims that one should read all slapstick comedy as a form of collective anxiety dream.Bilton raises the important paradox of slapstick: on the one hand, it serves as a subversive tool that attacks social norms, while on the other hand, as comedy, it serves an essentially conservative purpose, restraining excessive activity by redirecting its energy to humor and laughter. This issue is very crucial to all humor study and is probably one of the preeminent unsolved questions regarding humor and its effects on society and politics. Analyzing Keaton and Chaplin's films, which are rich in satirical and subversive gags, could suggest a broader approach to this issue and might expose the dichotomy, which leads to the above-mentioned paradox as an oversimplified attitude. The context of the gag may be the key to understanding whether it is subversive or submissive.Bilton's narrow focus on the social perspective enables him to encapsulate the entire oeuvre of the seven most iconic and popular silent comedians: Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Rosco “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon. He observes that Sennett's movies should be read “not as absurd Dada provocation, but rather as a cock-eyed reflection of the immigrant experience, its kicks, knocks and scums” (48). Or as he sums it up: “If the key theme of a Demille picture is the Cinderella theme, Sennett's films remain stubbornly ugly sisters: grimy, grotty, redolent of the dirt under the audience's fingernails that Demille was so committed to scrubbing out” (59).For Bilton, Chaplin is the ultimate seismograph of time (i.e., zeitgeist) of the mechanical era and is defined as “the exemplar of a nascent machine-body for a new machine-age” (99). Bilton supports his argument using Fernand Léger's iconic image of Chaplin in his short avant-garde film La Ballet Mechanique (1924) where the Tramp is transformed into jerky cubist animation, when the bodily and the mechanical become virtually inseparable. Along these lines, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is described as the “perfect representative of an age of gluttony and conspicuous consumption, the ravenous hunger of the market place” (114). Chaplin's most common props and sets are machines and their derivatives (statues, models, mannequins, toys, etc.), to the point that the border between people and objects is erased; meanwhile, Arbuckle's most reliable prop is food.One of the more interesting points of Bilton's analysis occurs when he applies his approach to Mabel Normand and the notion of the female clown. Through her films, Bilton explores the theoretical idea of the changing role of the New Woman in the early part of the twentieth century: “‘woman as sign’ and ‘woman as a token of exchange’”(139).Bilton tries to encapsulate Harold Lloyd's comedy as the ultimate expression of the anxieties of capitalism by focusing on one of his best achievements, Safety Last (1923). Bilton notes that the fact that Harold's character is a department store salesperson underscores the role of consumerism. Here he misses an opportunity to explore this theme and film against Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), and Keaton's Cops (1922) and One Week (1920). Such a comparative analysis could enhance his argument and show the uniqueness of each of these artists.Bilton writes that “it is Buster Keaton who most completely inhabits and exemplifies the machine age…. No other comedian of the period seems so aware of the essentially mechanical nature of the medium, its specifically machine-made possibilities and absurdities” (175). This observation is productive and accurate; however, failing to compare Keaton to Chaplin from this perspective in order to fully understand the meaning of this statement and the specialty of each of the two artists is another missed opportunity. Chaplin's work, especially the unique and sophisticated way he dealt with sound, was very much a result of his awareness of the mechanical nature of the medium.3Bilton quotes Gilbert Adair regarding the equivocal experience of watching a silent film today: “On the one hand the images feel incredibly young, with film-makers working out the possibilities of the medium for the very first time. On the other hand, however, the images appear incredibly, ineffably old” (192). Bilton suggests that of all of the great auteurs of the dead language of silent film, Keaton seems to have understood this duality most clearly. I believe that awareness of this tension between primitive, vital new medium and vanishing dying medium could provide important insight into many silent films toward the late 1920s, as the medium reached its climax.Bilton ends his survey by focusing on Harry Langdon and his “repetition-compulsion” about World War I. Using Jean Laplanche's concept of afterwardness, Bilton raises the apparent paradox of portraying World War I as comedy and describes how deferred meanings or effects can be understood to be activated only by a second occurrence of meaningful events. He argues that what in many ways distinguished Langdon's silent comedies was his ability to reveal the war's absurdity by revisiting the trenches and the expressions of the shell-shocked.In conclusion, Bilton's social approach highlights some aspects relevant for cultural studies and is particularly valuable for its contribution to humor studies. This approach allows Bilton to focus on a number of themes relevant to the social changes and developments of American society at the beginning of the twentieth century; what is more, it allows him to explore the reflection of these themes and their influence on the silent comedy and its major artists. I believe that incorporating other approaches, such as the aesthetic, technological, and economic, could enrich this analysis.Bilton's choice to focus on seven comedians and to structure the book around this idea implies a hidden assumption of what constitutes an auteur-oriented approach. There is no reference or treatment of the differences between these auteurs. Are these artists all equally auteurs? Are the differences between them only thematic or is there more that differentiates them than simply their gender and their external form/appearance? What does it mean for them to be comedians? Are we dealing with them just as clowns or actors? Or maybe one should also refer to the fact that some of them were only performers and others also writers, directors, and producers? Writing about cinema should relate to many aspects of the process of filmmaking. It is impossible to focus only on one of the categorizations that Allen and Gomery suggest. In spite of these flaws, the book gives an interesting overview and provides some insights into slapstick, one of silent cinema's greatest and most popular art forms; indeed, slapstick has proven to be an important contribution of American culture to the art of cinema, and remains as one of the greatest contributions of American cinema to today's culture.