Non Fiction
Issue #1
Buster Keaton: Fear is a Man's Best Friend
A convincing argument holds that silent cinema is the most purely cinematic of all visual forms. Without dialogue, its power becomes based around vivid images -of people, surroundings, and faces - and no face in silent cinema provides as vivid an image as that of Buster Keaton. He wears cinema’s greatest mask, a blank black and white canvas of mouth, hair and eyes. Keaton’s features become the background on which one can mount any number of interpreted emotions, as though they were a mirror for the viewer’s own face. Yet despite this non-specificity of appearance, the body of work Keaton produced between 1920 and 1928 (20 short films and 10 features) provides as direct a reflection of a singular artistic vision as to be found anywhere in 20th century popular culture.
A particularly skewed perspective on the universe permeates Keaton’s films. They offer a world in which stability has no meaning, where relentless and random forces rage endlessly around the hapless victims of humanity. They also possess a truly bizarre element, a crack through which reality can frequently slip into the realm of nightmare or dream. A strong sense of the surreal permeates single images in Keaton’s films. In Daydreams Buster strolls on the spot within a ship’s revolving waterwheel, while in Steamboat Bill Jr. he walks into the face of a hurricane. In haunting moments like these, Keaton’s isolated figure possesses a chilling remoteness, communicating an inexplicably strong sense of loneliness. Keaton’s world is one without trust, in which one is forced to fend for oneself. Ever present is the sense that life is uncertain to such an extent that not only one’s personal circumstances, but the very nature of reality itself, can constantly change.
It is Keaton’s masterful 1924 feature Sherlock Jnr which most comprehensively extinguishes these barriers between reality and fantasy. In the character of a dozing film projectionist, Buster steps out of his sleeping body as his dream self makes its way through the aisle of the darkened theatre and steps up into the screen. Barely 20 years into the existence of the cinematic medium, Keaton was painstakingly examining the form’s limitations whilst at the same time exploding its possibilities. In questioning the artifice of presenting depth on a flat screen, Keaton simultaneously pushes the very limits to which that artifice can be made to seem wholly real. The illusion remains utterly convincing.
The result of such invention is that the determinedly workmanlike Keaton, who bore no pretensions to artistic achievement, has traditionally attracted critical attention from all manner of surrealists. Keaton was Samuel Beckett’s first choice to play Lucky in Waiting for Godot. (Cut to Keaton’s barn – Beckett bursts in, fat cigar in hand – “Baby, it’s the role you were born to play!” Keaton remains intent on his model railway set. His wife reads all his scripts for him. She didn’t understand a word of Waiting for Godot. Beckett disappears in a chain of Keaton’s cigarette smoke.) In 1965, Keaton starred in Beckett’s only foray into screenwriting, the short piece Film. The same year he appeared in the beach party movie, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. To work was, for Keaton, the most important thing.
In his short The Goat, Keaton joins a crowd surrounding a billboard. As he jostles among them, straining to see, the crowd rapidly disperses and the subject of their attention is revealed – Buster is left staring at a wanted poster of his own face. In Convict 13, Buster is knocked out cold on a golf course and, while he is unconscious, an escaped convict swaps their clothes. Buster wakes up to find himself in a prisoner’s uniform, under arrest. Arriving at jail, a guard notes his number and Buster is informed he is to be hanged that afternoon. The Goat and Convict 13 share the same stark fear that can be found in the music of The Carter Family and their song ‘Worried Man Blues’ – “I went across the river and I lay down to sleep/When I woke up, there was shackles on my feet.” Cultural critic Greil Marcus writes, “You would have to go a long way to match that as an image of the devil in the dream, or as the plain symbol of a land whose profound optimism ensures that disaster must be incomprehensible. There is no protest in the song, no revolt, only an absolute, almost supernatural loneliness.” Similarly Keaton’s response to his shifting circumstances is rarely one of resistance but of a non-questioning pragmatism; to first accept one’s situation and to then adapt oneself as best one can. To see the same supernatural loneliness of which Greil Marcus writes, you need only stare into Buster Keaton’s eyes. “It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.”
Keaton’s nightmare vision knows no bounds – it can veer from the everyday to the dementedly bizarre. In The Love Nest, Buster is stranded in a rowboat at sea. Coming across a giant wooden board floating on the desolate ocean, Buster does not pause to question its being there, but perches on the top with his fishing rod in hand. The board is bedecked with a huge number ‘3’. As Buster fishes, we cut to a naval ship on firing practise. We see it demolish targets ‘1’ and ‘2’ before firing on number ‘3’. The only escape is for Buster to wake and find the whole thing was a dream. But really that proves no escape at all. In Keaton’s universe, reality and nightmarish dream become blurred at every step. Earlier in the film, Buster sits in the lonely hold of a ship staring wistfully through the porthole. The captain passes by long enough to give Buster a glance, reach over and pull the painting of a porthole from the wall. Appearances remain ceaselessly deceptive.
Just as no faith can be placed in the real, so can no sanctuary be found in the temporal, in the last resort of faith in fate. Keaton’s bad luck knows no limits, and to place faith in the benevolent possibilities of good fortune and chance leads to no security. In The Goat, a down and out Buster sees a passing man pick a horseshoe from the ground, kiss it for luck, and toss it over his shoulder. Next the man picks a wallet full of money from the sidewalk floor. Seeing this, Buster scrambles through garbage to find the abandoned horseshoe – he kisses it repeatedly then throws it far over his shoulder. The horseshoe hits a cop square in the face. The cop comes running and the chase is on.
Buster’s chase continues eternally. Perhaps the most enduring image of all is Cops, where Buster upsets the policeman’s parade with his inadvertent brandishing of an anarchist’s bomb. Hence his pursuit through the city by an endless black wave of police. Ten years ago these films would materialise like ghosts out of Channel 4’s afternoon scheduling and in the midst of daytime television their effort could be starker than ever. Now the 21st century finds them in HMV, efficiently packaged as the 6 DVD Buster Keaton Chronicles. And somewhere the scene plays itself forever – Buster ahead of the black-uniformed hordes, who seem to be constantly moving in without getting any closer. The hapless protagonist remains somehow in the lead – not by fortune, not by fate – but by the random tilt of the universe for a single and endless moment in time.