64 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY31, 2022
BOOKS
SILENT TREATMENT
The case for Buster Keaton.
BYADAMGOPNIK
C
ritics like to create causes. If a pair
of new Grover Cleveland biogra-
phies appears, we say that, with the pros-
pect of a President returning to win a
second term after having been defeated
at the end of his first, who else would
interest us more than the only President
who has? In reality, the biographers
started their work back when, and now
is when the biographies just happen to
be ready. And so it is with the appear-
ance of two significant new books about
the silent-film comedian Buster Keaton.
We start to search for his contemporary
relevance—the influence of silent-com-
edy short subjects on TikTok?—when
the reason is that two good writers began
writing on the subject a while ago, and
now their books are here.
The truth is that Keaton’s prominence
has receded, probably irretrievably, from
where it stood half a century ago—a time
when, if you were passionate about mov-
ies, you wore either the white rose of Kea-
ton or the red rose of Chaplin and quar-
relled fiercely with anyone on the other
side. In Bertolucci’s wonderful movie
about the Paris revolt of May, 1968, “The
Dreamers,” two student radicals, French
and American, nearly come to blows over
the relative merits of Charlie and Buster:
“Keaton is a real filmmaker. Chaplin, all
he cares about is his own performance,
his own ego!” “That’s bullshit!” “That’s
not bullshit!” Meanwhile, Janis Joplin
growls on the stereo behind them.
In a weird way, the terms of the quar-
rel derived from the German Enlight-
enment philosopher Gotthold Lessing’s
search for the “essence” of each art form:
poetry does time, sculpture does space,
and so on. To the Keaton lovers, Chap-
lin was staginess, and therefore senti-
mentality, while Keaton was cinema—
he moved like the moving pictures.
Chaplin’s set pieces could easily fit onto
a music-hall stage: the dance of the din-
ner rolls in “The Gold Rush” and the
boxing match in “City Lights” were both
born there imaginatively, and could have
been transposed there. But Keaton’s set
pieces could be made only with a cam-
era. When he employs a vast and empty
Yankee Stadium as a background for the
private pantomime of a ballgame, in “The
Cameraman,” or when he plays every
part in a vaudeville theatre (including
the testy society wives, the orchestra
members, and the stagehands), in “The
Play House,” these things could not even
be imagined without the movies to imag-
ine them in. The Keaton who created
the shipboard bits in “The Navigator” or
the dream scene in “Sherlock Jr.” was a
true filmmaker rather than a film-taker,
a molder of moving sequences rather
than someone who pointed the camera
at a stage set. (One could make similar
claims for the superior cinematic instincts
of Harold Lloyd, who tended to get
dragged into these arguments in much
the same way that the Kinks get dragged
into arguments about the Beatles and
the Stones—though Lloyd, like Ray Da-
vies, was such a specialized taste that he
could only extend, not end, an argument
over the virtues of the other two.)
Take the long sequence toward the
end of “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” (1928), in
which Keaton, playing an effete, Bos-
ton-educated heir who rejoins his fa-
ther, a short-tempered Southern steam-
boat captain, gets caught in a cyclone
that pulverizes a small town. The epi-
sode is breathtaking in its audacity and
poetry, an unexampled work of pure
special-effects ballet. The houses ex-
plode, in a thousand shards of wood, as
Keaton wanders among them. The mo-
ment when the façade of a house falls
on Keaton, who is saved by a well-placed
attic window, has been “memed” as the
Being anti-sentimental, even coldhearted, was at the core of Keaton’s comic art. very image of a narrow escape. But it is
ILLUSTRATION BY AGOSTINO IACURCI
