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movies under the auspices of Will Hays. “The massive system could not permit unregulated individual massiveness,” writes historian Neda Ulady of the star. “The individual had to fit, neatly and thinly, into a regulated slot”
(Ulady 163). The scapegoating of a fat man became the bedrock of a modern culture industry.
This perception of the relationship linking Arbuckle’s stardom to his body has nonetheless produced complex critical problems. The portrait of Arbuckle that we have inherited from star profiles and news reports, as well as from some later scholarship, is simply that of a creature of fascinating excess—whether sympathetically evoked as, for example, the “Falstaff of the screen”; or condemned, after 1921, as an impotent rapist; or even, finally, theorized as a metonymy for the movies’ “low” cultural origins. Yet none of this enables us to come to grips with what film scholar J. P. Telotte has astutely described as the “pattern of escape” in Arbuckle’s career, his efforts to transcend the implications of his size in his screen performances, to resist the comic type to which his body condemned him (Telotte). Nor do we necessarily understand why he became one of the most acclaimed comic talents of his era, the “best comedian on the screen” according to Paramount head Adolph Zukor (Neibaur 25). At his peak, Arbuckle was paid the highest salary of any actor at the time. In the years between leaving the legendary Keystone Film Company in late 1916 and shifting to feature-length comedies for Paramount in 1919, he not only commanded his own studio, the Comique Film Corporation, but also enjoyed full artistic control of his films, which he wrote, directed, and starred in. This success was not achieved simply by being fat.
What needs to be insisted upon, rather, is the way that Arbuckle’s stardom drew energy from some of the founding tensions within the formation of early American mass culture, and, in particular, the ambiguous role of the body within that constellation. Thus, whereas other scholars have theorized early stardom chiefly as a form of epistemology—whether as an expansion of the kind of knowledge available about film actors (deCordova) or as the discursive construction of a “realness” associated with daring performers and their athletic stunts (Bean “Technologies”)—this chapter situates Arbuckle’s meaning within the dynamics of cinema’s emergence as a cross-class culture industry. As identified by Max Weber, those dynamics required the declassification of cultural categories, a mixing and hybridiz-ing of genres and meanings capable of producing a diversified appeal (Weber 937). Arbuckle himself thus became a hybrid figure, a sign of the liquidation of cultural categories that was at once the condition of his success and a focus of the eventual scandal. Arbuckle’s body may have been
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key to his star identity, but it represented only one pole in a complex dialectic of cultural meanings, of bodily presence and absence, that defined his stardom as a component of the new mass culture.
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✩ Fatty versus Roscoe: The Body as Comic Signifier
“Fatty”—rather than sidestepping Arbuckle’s problematic
moniker, why not begin with it? Arbuckle hated the nickname and would politely correct fans who used it: “I’ve got a name, you know,” was supposedly his response (Young 33). Yet the label “Fatty,” and its variable prominence in discourse on the comedian, also offers insight into the changing parameters of Arbuckle’s stardom. On the Keystone lot, for instance, the nickname was rarely used; instead, he was variously known as Roscoe, Bucky, or, after graduating to directing, Chief. Mabel Normand teasingly dubbed him “Big Otto” after the elephant at the Selig zoo, while Charlie Murray mysteriously christened him “My Child, the Fat” (Young 33). Within trade journals and fan magazines, meanwhile, Arbuckle’s screen name charted a very clear evolution in tandem with his emergent stardom. Initially, after joining Keystone in the spring of 1913, he was little more than a category, commonly referred to as the “fat boy” or the “Keystone fat boy”; for example, “the fat boy . . . appears in this,” from Moving Picture World’s synopsis of Keystone’s June release, Passions, He Had Three (“Comments on the Films,” 7 June 1913, 1033). Soon, there was a short-lived attempt to personalize him as “the fat boy, Bob” (in publicity for For the Love of Mabel and A Noise from the Deep); but, by the fall of 1913, his screen personality had coalesced around the moniker “Fatty,” which began appearing in the title of his movies with the September release of Fatty’s Day Off. Within a few months, magazines also began using the comedian’s real name, particularly in profiles celebrating his performative virtuosity: “Roscoe Arbuckle, the
‘heavy’ comedian with Keystone, is one of the most nimble footed men in the world” (“Doings at Los Angeles,” Moving Picture World, 30 May 1914, 1248). This use of “Roscoe” became especially common after he started directing his own comedies (his first was Barnyard Flirtations, March 1914).
Indeed, star profiles focusing on his achievements as a filmmaker—rather than solely as a performer—were conspicuous for almost never using the nickname “Fatty”: “Mr. Arbuckle is one of the greatest of comedy directors”
or “Roscoe Arbuckle, now . . . the most prolific and reliable director in Sennett’s college of clowns” (“Plays and Players,” Photoplay December 1915, 160;
“The Shadow Stage,” Photoplay May 1916, 109). By the time of his first Comique release, The Butcher Boy (April 1917), newspaper ads billed him as
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“Roscoe (‘Fatty’) Arbuckle,” relegating his established nickname to a paren-thetical addendum, offset by scare quotes (Neibaur 32).
In an enormously suggestive reading of star discourses during the 1910s, Jennifer M. Bean has argued that the emergence of the star system entailed a shift in audience fascination along the axis of production, from the mechanical base of the cinematic apparatus to the body of the star; thus,
“the player’s body supersede[d] the body of the machine” as the foundation of the industry’s appeal (a process that she sees exemplified in the acrobatic derring-do of early serial queens like Pearl White and Helen Holmes) (Bean,
“Technologies” 21). Yet the evolution of language traced through Arbuckle’s name suggests that this development was more inconsistent in practice, and that a fascination with the body could be complicated by pressures seeking to locate a star’s meaning elsewhere. “Fatty” Arbuckle may have been fat; still, a significant trajectory of his star discourse labored to resist such physicality, to assert his identity as “Roscoe,” and to seek alternate, less immediately carnal, meanings for comic stardom. For Arbuckle, this meant defining his comic talent not simply in terms of his onscreen slapstick performances but also through his behind-the-camera abilities as a director, a redefinition of comic “authorship” with lasting implications for how later silent comedians would be (and still are) evaluated. As a 1915
New York Telegraph profile put it, Arbuckle’s “high pedestal in laugh film-ology” did not merely reflect his extraordinary girth, but had been achieved
“by reason of his brain as well as his weight-ridden physique,” both through his “act[ing] foolish before the camera” and through “the success of many of the films in which he does not appear . . . but has directed” (Rapf 342).
Body versus brain, performance versus direction, “Fatty” versus “Roscoe”: these were the contradictory coordinates from which would emerge new parameters for comic stardom.
It is part of the wager of the present argument that this tension articulates conflicting cultural registers within the context of early-twentieth-century America. The distinction separating Arbuckle’s star identity between (clown’s) body and (artist’s) brain corresponded to broader, well-established cultural hierarchies that had long differentiated the “embodied”
realm of popular, working-class sensationalism from a more “sacralized”
aesthetic of g
enteel transcendence. As a number of historians have suggested, those distinctions had first emerged in the late nineteenth century when America’s genteel middle class sought to maintain social and cultural order by segregating “high” from “low” culture: a process of sacralization took place, endowing genteel aesthetics with quasi-spiritual status while actively denigrating the tastes and practices of the lower orders (DiMaggio;
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Levine). During roughly the same period, however, the rapid growth of cheap commercial amusements supported an opposed idiom of popular sensationalism that emphasized materiality and corporeality, not transcendence, and that observers came to interpret as a response to the depriva-tions of working-class life.1 From the belly laugh of variety entertainment to the “blood and thunder” scenes of cheap melodrama, from the thrills of the amusement park ride to the physical contact of knockabout comedy, popular forms reflected a hunger for intense bodily stimulation that, for genteel taste, was the very definition of vulgarity. To be both “body” and
“brain,” clown and artist, was, from this perspective, necessarily to conflate cultural registers—a productive and, as it would prove, dangerous position.
At one time praised for inaugurating a “higher standard” of slapstick, Arbuckle would eventually be condemned as an interloping vulgarian, “the result of ignorance and too much money,” to quote the post-scandal indictment of comedy director Henry Lehrman (“Miss Rappe’s Fiancé Threatens Vengeance,” New York Times, 13 September 1921, 2).
Still, it was simply as a rotund clown that Arbuckle began his film career, first in two brief stints at Selig in 1909 and early 1913, before joining the Keystone Film Company in April of the latter year. When Arbuckle first arrived at Keystone, the resident “fat” comic was Fred Mace; following the latter’s departure for Majestic in May, Arbuckle quickly took over his mantle. “I had been there four weeks, when Fred Mace left Keystone, and I was taken to fill the vacancy,” Arbuckle explained in a 1914 interview (George A. Posner,
“Roscoe Arbuckle of the Keystone Company,” Motion Pictures, September 1914, n.p.). His identity as the “fat boy” was swiftly established in his earliest Keystone appearances, many of which surely fueled the studio’s growing reputation for intensely physical farce. His debut film, The Gangsters, was criticized as “a little rough for presentation in some houses,” while his subsequent picture, Help! Help! Hydrophobia, was described as simply “a series of wild happenings” (see Moving Picture World, 31 May 1913, 922; Moving Picture World, 7 June 1913, 1033). It was also during these early months that Arbuckle was apocryphally the recipient of the first-ever pie in the face, in his ninth Keystone film, A Noise from the Deep, in June 1913 (Young 40–41; Oderman 64). Whether or not the comic pie in fact originates here, the heav-ing of pastries certainly attracted critics’ notice (“It begins with throwing pies,” noted one review), as did a subsequent pie fight in the October release, A Quiet Little Wedding (“a lemon meringue pie battle ensues”) ( Moving Picture World, 26 July 1913, 430; Moving Picture World, 23 October 1913, 422).
Other early Arbuckle pictures meanwhile saw the “fat boy” falling around in drag ( Peeping Pete, June 1913), dangling from telephone wires ( Mother’s Boy,
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September 1913), and running around in torn-up pants ( Fatty Joins the Force, November 1913, in which he again receives a pie in the face).
The purely physical focus of these early films inevitably wedded Arbuckle’s screen persona to the popular logic of spectacular, rough-and-tumble bodies.2 This was, of course, characteristic of slapstick, which commonly defined comic identity through bodily particularity (other performers’ nicknames of the 1910s included “Baldy” Belmont, “Shorty”
Hamilton, “Skinny” Dee Lampton, and “Slim” Summerville). But, crucially, it was not enough to make him a star. If, as Richard deCordova has argued, the emergence of a star system involved a “marked expansion of the type of knowledge that could be produced about the player,” then, in the case of Arbuckle, this would require going beyond that which was most obviously knowable in the comedian’s identity—namely, his fat (deCordova 98). It would mean transcending the physicality that dictated his early knockabout roles and a significant “disembodying” of his persona. Fatty’s stardom entailed a redefinition of slapstick that ultimately emerged not through a discourse of physicality but through its refutation.
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✩ Comedian versus Director:
Strategies of Respectability
To understand Arbuckle’s ascent, it is necessary first to place it within a series of major transformations in film comedy’s cultural status in the mid-1910s, each establishing dilemmas that Arbuckle—like all comedians of his generation—had to confront. During this period, for instance, slapstick’s dominant format had remained the one- or two-reel short, placing the genre out of step with an industry increasingly geared to multiple-reel (or “feature”) dramas. Feature production between 1913 and 1914
increased in America more than 500 percent, from 56 features of four reels or more to well over 300 (Singer 80); yet, during the same period, production of multiple-reel slapstick failed to develop beyond an occasional novelty, such as the Ramo Company’s three-reel This Is the Life (1914) or Keystone’s more celebrated six-reel experiment, Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914). Of course, one of the reasons for the emergence of the dramatic feature film, in America as elsewhere, was its cultural prestige; but here, too, slapstick countered prevailing trends, widely regarded as a throwback to the movies’ dis-reputable, nickelodeon-era past. Throughout the decade, Moving Picture World and its leading critic, Epes Winthrop Sargent, consistently called for an evolution in screen comedy from the physical humor of “water throwing and senseless chases” toward more sophisticated fare appealing to audiences
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of “more discriminating taste” (“The Photoplaywright,” 12 April 1913, 157).
“Slapstick must be taboo” was the frank declaration of one such editorial in 1919 (Neale and Krutnik 110). Such gentrifying attitudes were even shared by many of the era’s leading comedians, who offered numerous pronouncements declaring their support for what was variously termed “higher,”
“sophisticated,” or just “clean” comedy. Upon arriving in Fort Lee, New Jersey, at the end of 1915 to establish a new Keystone unit, Arbuckle himself boldly asserted that “my ideas are along the newer lines of screen comedy,”
adding as a statement of intent: “I believe in comedy that makes you think, and I believe that the time has come to put it on—and that’s what I am going to do” (Young 127). In a later interview, Arbuckle restated his intent in more explicitly moral terms: “I shall produce nothing that will offend the proprieties, whether applied to children or grown-ups. . . . My pictures are turned out with clean hands and therefore with a clear conscience which, like virtue, is its own reward” (“Clean Pictures That Will Please Children, Arbuckle’s Aim,” Motion Picture News, 12 May 1917, 2999).
Arbuckle’s attempt to define a “newer line” of comedy was thus no unique effort in the mid-1910s, although his comedies, like Charlie Chaplin’s, arguably provide notable landmarks. More significant than the shared intent, however, were the varied directions in which these ambitions led different comedians. An unmistakably “low” physical clown, Arbuckle was also a filmmaker who innovated a range of distinctive strategies for “clean” comedy; in consequence, his films offer rich testimony to the dilemmas and contradictions wrought by a modern mass culture predicated in part on the gentrification of popular forms. The following paragraphs point to three ways in which Arbuckle’s later work at Keystone can be related to an awareness of questions of cultural status: narrative form, comic persona, and visual style.3
1. Slapstick and Narrative Form: In what has been among
the most influential historical accounts of screen comedy’s development during the 1910s, Henry Jenkins’s What Made Pistachio Nuts? (1992) identifies two distinct, socially defined comic aesthetics in turn-of-the-century America—a genteel tradition of “thoughtful laughter” (associated with classical narrative values and exemplified in film by Sidney Drew’s “situation” comedies), and the popular sensationalism of the “new humor” (associated with vaudeville and exemplified in film by Keystone-style slapstick). Efforts to refine screen comedy during the 1910s, Jenkins argues, need to be understood as a series of attempts to negotiate between these traditions, to merge the gag-based immediacy of the new humor with the greater respectability and narrative complexity of the “thoughtful laughter” tradition, ultimately
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yielding the classic slapstick features of the 1920s as an ideal synthesis (Jenkins 26–58).
Such a vision of mediation between class-based comic tastes is not false to the historical record; to be sure, many filmmakers of the time evidently considered narrative the royal road to comic refinement. In 1924, for instance, Buster Keaton expressed the view that “flivvers, pie throwing, and bathing girls” were passé, arguing that “comic situations have taken the place of these veteran laugh getters” (Neale and Krutnik 120, emphasis added).
The question, though, remains: Was this the road that Arbuckle pursued?
Certainly, there is evidence that Arbuckle’s quest for “clean” comedy entailed various narrative elaborations. Arbuckle’s growing status as a Keystone director witnessed a few early experiments with the plot-driven formulas of situation comedy, notably in the marital mix-ups of That Little Band of Gold (March 1915), a two-reel film praised in the trade press as “genuine comedy rather than farce . . . delightful to those weary of knockdown slapstick” ( Moving Picture World, 13 March 1915, 1615); and, by the beginning of the following year, Arbuckle’s experimental bent culminated in the production of He Did and He Didn’t (January 1916), the comedian’s first film as head of Keystone’s Fort Lee unit, and arguably the most sophisticated narrative-driven comedy in the studio’s entire filmography. Whereas previous Keystone films generally based their plots in the realm of physical action alone, He Did and He Didn’t makes use of two distinct narrative registers in order to foreground character psychology. The basic situation concerns the romantic misunderstandings that arise between a doctor (Arbuckle) and his wife (Mabel Normand) when her former boyfriend stops by for dinner. Although the story appears to be conveyed from an objective narrational perspective throughout, the closing moments reveal the entire action of the film’s second half to have been a “shared” dream between the two male protagonists.