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Notes
1. Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, p. 62.
2. Callahan, “Buster Keaton,” in Senses of Cinema.
3. Chaplin lived out his life in prosperity, while Keaton's career basically ended with the failure of What—No Beer? (Edward Sedgwick) in 1933. After this time, he struggled with drunkenness and barely eked out a living. Thanks to the largess of Chaplin who gave him a role performing with him in 1952, Keaton's career underwent a moderate revival until his death in 1966.
4. Chaplin's genius consists in constructing the figure of the Little Tramp as a purely comic figure. The temptation to make a social outcast pathetic is almost insurmountable, but Chaplin succumbs to it only on rare occasions in his films—and he quickly regains his bearings and returns the Little Tramp to the domain of comedy.
5. The Little Tramp's attempts to dump the child that he finds on the street are extremely significant for Chaplin's creation of the Little Tramp. His ability to display a complete lack of concern for the welfare of an abandoned child is essential to the comedy of this figure. If he were caring and affectionate at all times, we could not laugh at his plight. The coldness of the Little Tramp in The Kid is difficult for Chaplin to sustain in later films, but its decline represents a decline in the comic potential of the Little Tramp.
6. It is evident that Limelight functions as Chaplin's farewell to Hollywood and to the cinema as such. The death of Calvero and his symbolic replacement with Thereza the ballet dancer indicates Chaplin's own symbolic death as a comic performer. When he returns in A King in New York (Charlie Chaplin, 1957), it is primarily to launch an attack against the political and cultural situation in the United States that precipitated his exile.
7. Chaplin films the final routine in Calvero's act differently from the first two. While we see the first two routines, the film cuts to the audience at the benefit laughing enthusiastically with approval. During the third routine, Chaplin provides no reverse shot of the audience until the routine concludes. As a result, the spectator has no idea whether or not Calvero is succeeding or bombing with the audience, which contributes to the sense of tension during the routine. It also adds to the sense of triumph when the routine concludes and Chaplin shows the cheering crowd.
8. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics, pp. 184–185.
9. For the classic account of the role that the exception plays in constituting the state as a whole, see Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.
10. The speech at the end of Monsieur Verdoux is less dogmatic and more politically daring, though it ultimately suffers from the same vision that hampers the speech in The Great Dictator. After his condemnation for murder, Verdoux claims,
As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces? And done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison.
Here, the call for universal inclusion remains implicit in the critique of the development of large-scale weapons like the atomic bomb, which had only recently been used.
11. Keaton's belonging to the social order extends to his relationship to the setting. While Chaplin is always alienated from the setting, Keaton is intimately involved in it and creates his comedy out of the world to which be belongs. According to Robert Knopf, “In Keaton's films, the world itself is an integral part of the show, and consequently the world embraces the illogic of his vaudeville comedy rather than serving merely as a background for it” (Knopf, The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton, p. 82).
12. The ending of The General represents a case of Keaton quoting himself in an earlier film, Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925). In this film, James Shannon (Buster Keaton) spends the entire running time attempting to marry Mary Jones (Ruth Dwyer). In the end, the marriage finally takes place at her house, but as he prepares the kiss Mary for the first time, a series of other people intervene to congratulate them and thereby interrupt the kiss. The film ends with James looking exasperated and still unable to kiss his new bride. This version of failure emerging out of excess is even more insightful than what The General shows. Here, it is marriage itself that is the barrier to romantic contact.
13. Battling Butler simply concludes with Butler winning the affection of the Mountain Girl and her family. This unambiguous triumph at the end separates Keaton's comic successes—Navigator (Donald Crisp and Buster Keaton, 1924), Battling Butler, and College (James Horne and Buster Keaton, 1927)—from his greatest masterpieces, such as Sherlock, Jr. and The General.
14. Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925) also relies on racist stereotypes of black characters and the fear of miscegenation for some of its comedy.
15. The problem is that one cannot simply dismiss Keaton's racist films as comic failures. Neighbors represents his most racist short film: not only does he appear in black face, but he uses black characters in a completely stereotypical way. Nonetheless, the comic sequences in which he tries to rescue the neighbor whom he loves from her house and to escape her father's wrath are among the highlights in all of his shorts.
16. I should add that even though Chaplin himself never performs in blackface, he does appear in a film in which others are in blackface. This is a 1915 short entitled A Night in the Show that he directed.
17. See Bergson, “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” in Comedy.
18. Alan Bilton argues that Keaton even transforms nature into a machine to make clear that it too can malfunction, stating,
Keaton's films portray the natural world as just another enormous machine, a vast organic engine prone both to over heating and to breaking down—which is one of the reasons why there are so many storms, cyclones and floods in his work (Bilton, Silent Film Comedy and American Culture, p. 183).
Keaton focuses so intently on the machine not because he has faith in the possibility of technological successes but because he knows that technology will inevitably fail. If nature is also a machine, then it can fail as well, which forces us to think of nature's problems as in some sense self-inflicted. This approach leads Jennifer Fay to consider Keaton a filmmaker of climatology. See Fay, “Buster Keaton's Climate Change,” in Modernism/Modernity.
19. Deleuze does not isolate the difference between Chaplin and Keaton in their attitude toward the machine. He begins with the claim that Keaton, in contrast to Chaplin, is the only filmmaker to translate burlesque to what Deleuze calls the large form, the form that focuses on a vast situation and requires a significant action to change the situation. The burlesque action is typically inadequate to do so, but Keaton defies this limitation. He manages to resolve a shipwreck or escape a deadly storm through comic acts, whereas such situations typically require the actions of, say, a western hero like John Wayne.
20. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 176.
21. This is not to say that Keaton's incredible stunts are successful solely due to contingent factors. It is certainly Keaton's skill at a stunt man that enables him to perform the numerous stunts that he does. But in the diegesis of the films, his skill is rarely shown to be responsible for his success. It is always some contingent element—a house falling just the right way, a rival tripping at an opportune time, a log appearing just when he needs it, and so on.
22. The danger involved in the stunt of having the side of an actual house fall on top of Keaton with just the open window missing his body prompted the stunt coordinator for Steamboat Bill, Jr. to refuse to continue to work on the film if Keaton insisted on performing the stunt. Keaton preferred to execute the stunt as planned without the assistance of the stunt coordinator for the rest of the film.
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Todd McGowan
Todd McGowan is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Vermont, where he teaches film studies. His books include Out of Time: Desire in Atemporal Cinema, The Impossible David Lynch, and The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan, among other works.