by Tim Bowling
Meanwhile, in the midst of all this father-son roughhousing, which did indeed attract the unwanted attention of child welfare societies from time to time (because of his unbelievable comic talent, Buster was sometimes believed to be a midget, which helped legally and morally), the young Keaton learned the value of withholding his own expressions of mirth. He noticed that whenever he smiled or showed the audience any pleasure, they didn’t laugh as much. So, on purpose, he started looking haunted and bewildered. Over time, he realized that other comedians could derive an advantage from laughing at their own gags, but that he simply couldn’t. The public hated it when he tried. That was just fine with Keaton. He always claimed to be happiest when the folks watching him said to each other, “Look at the poor dope, wilya?”
The jury remains out – a long way out, in fact – on the relationship between Keaton’s impassive mask and the abuse he endured at the hands (and feet) of his often-drunk father. How much of Keaton’s legendary deadpan, for example, was the result of pure comic instinct and how much the result of his father’s fierce onstage instructions? If you are six years old and being pummelled for laughs, and your towering father in a bald Irish wig and sidewhiskers hisses at you, “Face! Face!” in order to keep you from showing any emotion, how does this experience, repeated night after night until it’s no longer necessary, affect your relationship to your own genuine emotions? Keaton himself always sidestepped the question. His parents loved him, he loved the stage: case closed. He would respond the same way when Joseph Schenk, his producer and friend who basically sold him out to MGM in the 1930s and effectively ruined Buster’s creative life, was criticized for having been disloyal. Buster would have none of it, even though, as an intelligent man, he knew he’d been cheated and misused by Schenk. It was simply too painful to accept the truth. Face! Face!
Even by 1950, when Buster made a cameo appearance in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard as one of the “waxworks,” the deluded Norma Desmond’s forgotten bridge players, he didn’t openly blame anyone for what had happened to his career. Face! Face! But he drank, so heavily that at one time he wound up straitjacketed in an institution. What his features showed then are not part of the legend. The experiences Keaton lived between his father’s hissing of “Face! Face!” and the two words he speaks in Sunset Boulevard – “Pass,” and then, softly, as in final and permanent defeat, “Pass” – are the truth that contributed to the particular nature of his genius.
In short, Keaton’s vision was darkly comic, almost entirely without popular sentiment of the kind found in Chaplin’s work. And the darkness, without question, was allied to the deadpan.
Of course, I knew none of this in the summer of 1969 on the neighbour’s lawn sloped like whaleback under the buttery stars as I watched, spellbound, the quick, lithe figure walk, then walk faster, then sprint and leap from one calamity to another. All I understood then was the hilarity, but some part of me must have registered the melancholy and tragic vision. Why else should Buster Keaton haunt me nearly a half-century later? Middle age, the death of loved ones, the challenge to stay positive in a world awash in cynicism, materialism and grotesque sentimentality. Who whispers “Face” to us, and what face should we reveal before we look glumly into our hand and mutter, “Pass”?
AS THE EARLY September darkness continued to melt like chocolate around the house, and the world of mortgages and bills and social noise required me once again to enter a classroom and stand at the head of it, I put on my Buster Keaton deadpan mask in order to hide my mounting anxiety, in order to keep the cornered animal from snarling and lashing out. Meanwhile, the encounter with the little comedian kept returning me to my own beginnings, as if some ur-projectionist had reversed the reel.
I spent my entire childhood in the same small bungalow, literally a stone’s throw from the banks of a great river, the wild, 850-mile-long Fraser. My immediate family – parents, two much older brothers and a slightly older sister – made a subsistence income in the salmon fishing industry. It was not as unusual a profession as vaudeville, perhaps, but it was unusual enough and afforded a certain amount of freedom from the nine-to-five rat race, which, in the 1960s and early 1970s on the west coast, didn’t seem like much of a race. Our town was gull-haunted, sleepy, steeping under the lunar changes and the persistent rains like an ever-darkening tea bag. The neighbourhood I grew up in was the most haunted, condensed part of that intensifying darkness. Within a few blocks of my house, in every direction, lay ruins of some kind: stove-in fishboats and moss-sagged net sheds along the river; a whole row of empty, condemned shops on the little main street; at least five crumbling two-storey houses from the Georgian past, abandoned after being bought up by real estate companies waiting patiently for an upturn in the economy that never seemed to approach; and, believe it or not, a mile in the opposite direction, an entire vegetable canning factory filled with silent, greasy machines just waiting for a ghostly hand from Hollywood’s silver age to set them in motion again.
My entire childhood world was a Buster Keaton film set, circa 1924. When I look back on it, and imagine the sunlight and the flowering abandoned orchards that had been planted by the pioneers who had built the abandoned houses – all those plum and pear, cherry and apple trees thriving in forgetfulness along with the untended blue-joint grass and the great coal-smoke blackberry bushes – everything quickly becomes black and white and intensely silent. When I see myself, either in memory or in the photographs so rarely taken at the time because to develop them cost money that our family couldn’t spare, I was a serious child, even in play – especially in play. As Keaton himself routinely remarked about his legendary deadpan, “I was concentrating so hard that I wasn’t even aware that I wasn’t smiling.” Between our town’s one flaking totem pole with the rain-gnawed raven, bear and raccoon, and the grey, pyramidal, granite World War I cenotaph with, ironically enough, the names of two Aboriginal soldiers engraved on the sides, I lived the five years of my greatest innocence and watched the ten years of Buster Keaton’s most inspired genius.
That the man himself, in the fall of 1964, so close to his own material death, should approach within a few miles of that perfect film set and of the infant who would perform on it seemed at once eerie and joyous. It was as if he had arrived to direct successive generations in the art of the tragic vision, and his most inspired directorial touch was to withdraw.
Fighting sleep, drinking coffee, I saw him there again, outside of the image on the screen – I saw the real man. No, I see him. He’s both young and handsome and old and drink-ravaged, and he’s looking through the complicated camera of every blue heron set up in the marsh, standing on the rusted rails of the tracks that still ran through town to the riverbank but no longer carried any trains, hovering in his huge mime’s face over the slack tide and those sleepers in the houses who, as children, would have watched his films when they first appeared, back before Hollywood had the bureaucratic bit firmly in its glittering mouth. I was not a religious man. I believed in a human fate in human hands – and yet the image of Buster Keaton on the edge of my childhood came close to a vision of God. It was right that this should be so, for what is a vision of God if it isn’t an acknowledgement of life’s gravity and an intense avowal to keep the faith? Every day in North America life is sold to us as a trivial, passing entertainment, and death as a horror whose spiritual and emotional meanings are to be avoided at all cost.
I would not buy the trivia and I could not turn my eyes from the horror. Keaton was making cold laughter out on the tracks and in the marshes, in the attic rooms of abandoned houses. He was the god of the black and white, of silence, and he was approaching even as he withdrew – like a more famous god of the human imagination, he was visible nowhere but present everywhere. No, but wait – he is visible. There he is, on the side of Mr. Atkey’s house in the summer of 1969. He is a spoiled rich boy somehow alone with a spoiled rich girl on an ocean liner somehow floating out to sea at night. And that ocean liner floats straight of
f the side of the house and onto the Fraser River, and drifts past the silt islands in the mouth where the lumber baron, H. R. MacMillan, once entertained Keaton’s even more celebrated peers, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, for pheasant-shooting parties.
There could no longer be any disbelief: Keaton was the god of time and art, and he was as cruel and merciful as the most credible of gods. I placed my bare neck on the altar. While I did not smile, my whole body prepared to laugh.
I DECIDED THAT a Buster Keaton film marathon might help alleviate my gloomy condition. Perhaps existential comedy could trump existential angst. Perhaps Keaton’s ghost had appeared precisely to lead me back to his great work. It was worth a try. I decided to start with the shorts and proceed to the classic features of the mid-1920s. But I wouldn’t keep going to the talkies. As James Agee so beautifully expressed it, Keaton’s “dark, dead voice, though it was in keeping with the visual character, tore his intensely silent style to bits and destroyed the illusion within which he worked.”
Ideally, this marathon filmfest would take place on a grassy slope under the stars. There’d be a faint scent of salmon and river mud and wet springer spaniel on the air, and my father would still be alive. But I had long ago put away childish things, including desperate attempts to reclaim a vanished world. Even so, I was a man, like Keaton in the early 1930s, seeking escape – from Time’s winged chariot, from the inevitability of grief, from the nagging sense that everything turns to ash and dust in the end and that no amount of human creativity can divert that cold and hard trajectory. Suddenly, one dark night of the soul as I approached my fiftieth year, the world turned dangerously cold, and I could not melt the ice from my eyelids. But I was not Buster Keaton. Drinking binges leading to an ill-advised marriage to a mentally unstable nurse were not the answer for me. (They weren’t for Keaton either, as he would find out.)
Keaton’s art, however, could be an answer. Looking back, it was astonishing that I’d ever seen any of Keaton’s films as a boy. They weren’t shown in regular theatres, they weren’t often shown on TV and there was no YouTube. I must be one of the few adults of my generation, in fact, who had the revolutionary experience of seeing the young Buster Keaton in action while I was still a child myself. And just how did this happen?
It was as simple as it was unlikely. Our neighbour in 1969, Ken Atkey, worked as a Paramount film rep in Vancouver and somehow he had access to rare copies of silent movies. (Over ninety percent of the silent movies ever made have vanished, due to the deterioration of the nitrate stock with which they were made.) Mr. Atkey was the sort of man who, like Keaton, loved toy trains. Indeed, he had constructed a complicated papier mâché layout complete with mountains and tunnels and tiny figures of people and animals that took up the entire top floor of his house. Perhaps some sort of gadget involving trains woke him up every morning, as in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the 1985 film starring Paul Reubens (a kind of Keaton throwback, who American society threw back after police caught him masturbating in an adult theatre). I didn’t know. But I did know that Buster Keaton as a middle-aged man so loved toy trains that he set up a system in his Hollywood home whereby a train delivered drinks to his guests. Oh, yes, and the single most expensive shot in the entire history of silent film production occurred in Keaton’s The General, and involved the blowing up of a real engine as it crossed a trestle bridge. As critics point out, only a few of Keaton’s films do not have trains or water.
I was fond enough of trains, but not so fond that a toy set would help me forget my teaching anxiety, the increasing worldwide gap between the rich and poor, or the mysterious haunting of the September night. Perhaps watching Keaton’s entire silent oeuvre, including the late silent promotional film he made in Canada the year I was born, would help. It certainly couldn’t hurt. At least I didn’t think so.
I made my vague plans more concrete: since I did not wish to have a toy train or a robot wake me up each morning à la Pee-wee Herman, I would, every night before going to bed, watch a Keaton film. And I would keep a record of the experience, tracing how the intersection of Keaton’s life and my own might tell something true about a thinking, feeling human’s plight at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
But teaching started later that morning; “the toad, work,” as Philip Larkin called it, squatted on my life.
Ah, but don’t give up on me, Buster, I cried. I won’t let you down. “This was no playhouse,” Robert Frost writes, “but a house in earnest.” Life is funny, but there’s a reason we don’t smile about it. As Shakespeare points out, “there is nothing / either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
I vowed that I was not going to think about income-earning middle age, or the cynical, false, life-denying, pornographic, materialist world. I was going to watch The Navigator again, and retreat.
THREE O’CLOCK. If anything, the world had gone even deeper into its womb. My coffee was cold, and I lacked the energy to get up off the couch and put the kettle on again. Every five minutes, despite my conviction that I would honour the little comedian’s appearance by not working that day, my heart clenched like a jellyfish poked with a stick. Responsibility. To slough it off was to slough off the very fibre of my being. I couldn’t face – “Face! Face!” – my own wild hunger. After all, those young strangers out there in the city night rightly expected a basic level of mid-life maturity from me. The low growl I kept hearing must have simply been the appetite of my childhood self that I had lost the ability to satisfy.
A clatter of trash cans suddenly broke through my self-absorption. I tensed, hoping that whoever was out in the back alley would stumble on to the next household. Even as I hoped – the way Scrooge in A Christmas Carol hopes that the spirits will just leave him alone – I realized that I needed to investigate.
The moment I opened the door and stepped outside, the neighbour’s security light turned the backyard into a World War II airfield. Shielding my eyes, I shuffled towards the alley and right into a cloud of wilderness stench. If I’d been wearing two spawned-out salmon for slippers, the smell could not have been more potent. Gagging, I continued to the edge of the alley, just in time to catch a large shape – most likely a coyote – rising from the garbage cans and turning in my direction.
It wasn’t a coyote. I shook my head and looked again. I could have sworn that . . . no, those animals didn’t prowl around the centre of Edmonton. Just then, the shape snarled, dropped a garbage can it had somehow hugged to its coat and lumbered away. On two legs, though what kind of animal besides a man . . . Cautiously, I approached the spilled garbage, only to find that both cans were in their proper place with their lids on. The rotted autumn stench had also evaporated.
Unconvincingly putting the incident down to a lack of sleep, I returned to the house and, with mounting desperation, popped another Keaton disc into the machine. Seconds turned into minutes, and the old magic of cinema soon cast its spell again.
As always, Keaton’s persona delighted me, even when the particular work didn’t quite satisfy. I watched two films: Our Hospitality and Sherlock Jr. My reaction to each film could not have been more different.
Our Hospitality, which is often cited as one of Keaton’s finest efforts, involves a tired (even in 1923) Hatfield and McCoy storyline. Buster plays a young man raised in New York who inherits a Southern estate (which turns out to be a hillbilly shack). He also inherits a long-standing feud and, when in the South, winds up being shot at and chased around by his blood enemies, who turn out to be the father and brothers of the love interest he’d made the acquaintance of on the journey down. The film’s not exactly boring, but it’s slow. The first twenty minutes involves some silly melodrama about the history of the feud, followed by one long, not very amusing joke that makes fun of how slow and rudimentary early train travel was (the film is set in the early part of the nineteenth century). For example, Buster’s dog runs along under the train all the way from New York to the South and then greets him as he disembarks. The middle p
ortion of the film is funnier. Buster finds himself in the mansion of his enemies, who can’t kill him indoors because their code of hospitality forbids it, so he conspires not to leave. As his hosts see him to the door, Buster sneaks an opportunity to toss his famous porkpie hat under a chair. Then he claims that he can’t find his hat and a search ensues. Alas, his faithful dog keeps retrieving the hat for him, and he keeps surreptitiously tossing it away. Eventually his hosts see him with the hat in his hands and the jig is up. In the end, Buster escapes from the mansion dressed as a woman (as popular a gambit in the silent film comedies as it would be for the Monty Python troupe in the 1970s), and Our Hospitality concludes with a justly famous action sequence involving Buster and his love interest (his real-life wife, Natalie Talmadge, whose two glamorous sisters were huge silent film stars) in peril on a rapidly running river.
In later years, Keaton would always happily discuss the physical risks he took in making his films. He was justifiably proud of the fact that he performed all his own stunts, which explains why there are so many long, continuous takes in his work; he wanted the audience to know he wasn’t using cheap camera tricks to avoid putting his body at risk. That’s really him in the river, hurtling at high speed towards the rapids, grabbing an overhanging branch that breaks. That’s really him going under.
And yet, while the river scene in Our Hospitality is admirable from an athletic point of view, the film is dull. Never mind that in its first week at the Capitol Theatre, a big Broadway presentation house, it equalled the box office record for the chain and nearly tied the record in hundreds of other theatres. Popularity then, as now, is no true indicator of quality. Keaton himself was disgusted that a dud MGM film he appeared in called Parlor, Bedroom and Bath greatly outgrossed a marvellous film like Sherlock Jr.