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“natural” comedian with a technical one.
The partnership was an immediate suc-
cess, starting with the two-reel short “The
Butcher Boy” (1917), and was only briefly
interrupted when Keaton was drafted
and spent part of 1918 in France, having
a good time serving in the Great War.
Keaton often credited Arbuckle with
showing him how movies worked. But
Schenck’s role was just as important.
Anita Loos recalled him as
someone who brings “forth
the aroma of a special sort
of smoked sturgeon that
came from Barney Green-
grass’s delicatessen”; and he
and his brother, Nick, who
later ran M-G-M, were cy-
nosures among the genera-
tion of Russian Jews who
dominated Hollywood for
the next half century. Joseph
Schenck was married to the film star
Norma Talmadge; many dry-eyed ob-
servers thought that he was the trophy,
and that Talmadge married him to keep
the producer in her pocket.
Keaton’s early entry into the movies,
after his almost complete isolation from
a normal childhood, meant that he was
really at home only within the world of
his own invention. One gets the impres-
sion that he mainly lived for the chore-
ography of movie moments, or “gags,”
as they were unpretentiously called,
though they were rather like Balanchine’s
work, with scene and movement and
story pressed together in one swoop of
action. Keaton was not a reader, unlike
Chaplin, who fell on Roget’s Thesaurus
with the appetite of his own Tramp eat-
ing the shoe. Sex was of absent-minded
importance for Keaton; his marriage to
Norma Talmadge’s sister Natalie, in 1921,
was apparently ceremonial and, after two
children were born, celibate, at her moth-
er’s insistence. Nor was he a family man;
after they divorced, he hated losing cus-
tody of his kids, but it isn’t clear if he
saw them much when he had them.
Around 1921, when false charges of
rape and murder devastated Arbuckle’s
career, Keaton was sympathetic, and then
smoothly moved on, making solo mov-
ies. “He lives inside the camera,” as Ar-
buckle observed. Being anti-sentimental
to the point of seeming coldhearted was
at the core of his art. “In our early suc-
cesses, we had to get sympathy to make
any story stand up,” he said once, in a
rare moment of reflection. “But the one
thing that I made sure—that I didn’t ask
for it. If the audience wanted to feel sorry
for me, that was up to them. I didn’t ask
for it in action.” Life dished it out, and
Keaton’s character just had to take it.
Critics have drawn a connection be-
tween the Arbuckle scandal and Keaton’s
short comedy “Cops” (1922), made be-
tween Arbuckle’s trials, in
which Keaton, having been
caught accidentally tossing
an anarchist bomb, is chased
across Los Angeles by hun-
dreds of police officers. This
is the kind of conjecture
that shows little understand-
ing of the way that artists
work, rather like the belief
that Picasso’s barbed-wire
portraits of Dora Maar, in
the nineteen-forties, are protests against
the Occupation, rather than a product of
his own obsessive imagery. “Cops” is not
about false accusation; it’s about the
massed comic power of regimented men
in motion, uniform action in every sense.
Pure artists like Keaton work from their
own obsessions, with editorials attached
awkwardly afterward.
His first feature, no surprise, was a
movie about a movie, an ambitious par-
ody of D. W. Griffith’s legendary epic
“Intolerance” (1916), in which Keaton’s
sister-in-law Constance Talmadge had
appeared. His “Three Ages,” seven years
later, stowed together three parallel sto-
ries—one Stone Age, one Roman, and
one modern—and mocked both Grif-
fith’s cosmic ambitions and his cross-cen-
tury editing scheme. The caveman com-
edy is the same as all caveman comedies
(Keaton has a calling card inscribed on
a stone, etc.), but the Roman sequences
are done with even more panache than
Mel Brooks’s “History of the World,
Part I.” Soon, Keaton was earning a
thousand dollars a week, and becoming
so rich that he, the boy who never had
a home, built his wife a wildly extrava-
gant faux Italian villa.D
ana Stevens takes up the really big
question: What made Keaton’s solo
work seem so modern? Just as “Cops”
can be fairly called Kafkaesque in its
juxtaposition of the unfairly pursued
hero and the implacable faceless forcesof authority, there are moments through-
out “Sherlock Jr.” (1924) when Keaton
achieves the Surrealist ambition to re-
alize dreams as living action. Sequences
like the one in which Keaton seems to
step directly into the movie-house screen,
and leaps from scene to scene within
the projection in perfectly edited non
sequiturs, make the Surrealist cinema
of Buñuel and Maya Deren seem stud-
ied and gelatinous.
Stevens argues that Keaton’s art was
informed by the same social revolutions
as the European avant-garde: “The per-
vasive sense of anxiety and dislocation,
of the need to reinvent the world from
the ground up, that groups like the Sur-
realists or the Bloomsbury authors sought
to express in images and words, the human
mop-turned-filmmaker expressed in the
comic movement of his body.” But Kea-
ton also looks surreal because the Surre-
alists were feeding off the same sources
as Keaton was, in circus and vaudeville
and the music hall and stage magic. The
Cubists, the Dadaists, and the Surreal-
ists all had the sense that, as bourgeois
pieties had grown increasingly meaning-
less, the only grammar from which one
could construct a credible art was that of
farce. So those clowns and comic artists
who held down the tradition of burlesque
and nonsense comedy were, willy-nilly,
the modernist’s dream brothers.
And then, in a modernist way, Kea-
ton’s movies very often are about the
movies, which was a natural outgrowth
of his single-minded absorption in his
chosen medium. In “Sherlock Jr.,” he
plays a dreamy projectionist who falls
into his own films, and in “The Cam-
eraman” (1928) the joke is that Keaton’s
character accidentally makes newsreels
filled with camera tricks, double expo-
sures, speeded-up time, and backward
movement. Even that great cyclone scene
in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” is meant not to
provide an illusion of reality but to show
off the possibilities of artifice.
Keaton’s subject, in a larger sense, is
the growth of technology and the Amer-
ican effort to tame it. There is scarcely
a classic Keaton film of the twenties
that doesn’t involve his facing, with af-
fection or respect more often than ter-
ror, one or another modern machine:
the movie camera, the submarine, the
open roadster. Throughout “The Nav-
igator” (1924), he looks uncannily like