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There's a deep fury at the heart of Mack Sennett's comedy -- a savage indignation that's almost Swiftian in its intensity
and scope. I think it's a key to his artistic achievement and to his personal tragedy.
These thoughts are prompted by my first viewing of a large body of his Keystone comedies, courtesy of "The Slapstick
Encyclopedia". Most silent film buffs are probably long familiar with this miraculous collection, but to me it has been
a recent revelation.
The common wisdom about the Keystones is that they are wonderfully surreal and energetic but crude -- too crude to support
the more complex and sophisticated visions of the many comic geniuses who moved on from Keystone to greater achievements .
. . Chaplin and Arbuckle among them. In fact the Keystones are anything but crude, with a complexity and sophistication all
their own. They serve a singular vision, however -- Sennett's vision -- and could not accommodate any other.
Sennett's vision is fueled by passionate hatred -- of authority, of convention, of any accepted wisdom. This included
most especially hatred of pretension in cinema itself -- and for Sennett this mainly focussed on hatred of the pretensions
of his mentor D. W. Griffith and hatred of the star system. Hatred of the star system is what relegated Sennett to the sidelines
of the industry -- because the star system, harnessed and controlled by the studio moguls, is what came to define cinema in
the Twenties. It is said that Sennett was cheap, and that this is what prevented him from holding on to the great stars he
helped develop. But I think Sennett's revulsion at stars and their demands, financial and psychological, sprang from a deeper
source. He saw the trend of things in Hollywood and wanted no part of it. Eventually Hollywood, and the great stars he nurtured,
wanted no part of him.
Sennett's commitment to anarchy had an element of nihilism, of self-destructiveness, to it. He strikes me as a man who
could trust in no one and nothing, and so could believe in no one and nothing. But he had the courage of his unbelief, and
so could create for us a universe where everything is subject to question, nothing is taken for granted. It's a universe worth
exploring -- a place to re-examine all assumptions -- but it's a cold place, too, with a chill that Nietzche would have found
congenial.
The price to be paid for lingering in such a universe is steep for an artist. In Sennett's case this price included the
betrayal and loss of Mabel Normand -- who had to be sacrificed because she was just too perfect for him . . . beautiful, brilliant,
forgiving. Sennett had to fuck one of her best friends on the eve of their wedding to destroy their relationship -- it's hard
to imagine an act any less brutal and ugly which would have driven the freewheeling Mabel away. It's also hard to imagine
that Sennett could have done such a thing for any other reason than perverse compulsion.
Yet what miracles Sennett conjured out of his perverse compulsions. Watching the Keystones is like breathing pure oxygen.
Who doesn't take intense satisfaction in Sennett's send-ups of Griffith's last-minute-rescue melodramas? What makes them powerful
is that Sennett knew how Griffith achieved his effects and duplicated them, sometimes exceeded them, minus the pious aura
of Griffith's sentimentality and moralizing. The action climax of "Teddy At the Throttle" is a piece of pure cinema
that rivals anything Griffith ever accomplished -- but in the Keystone version we experience it purely . . . there is nothing
at stake but the sheer plastic beauty of the thing.
The pathetic posturings of Mack Swain as a matinee idol in "A Movie Star" are still familiar to us, via the
Academy Award acceptance speeches of current idols. Indeed. the Keystones remain a vital and illuminating critique of Hollywood
cinema -- which has not changed as much since the era of the Keystones as we might like to believe.
To me, the most resonant and heartbreaking Keystone included in "The Slapstick Encyclopedia" is "Mabel's
Dramatic Career". It bears an uncanny resemblance to, or perhaps constitutes a subconscious preview of, the personal
relationship between Mack and Mabel. Mack himself plays a fickle lover who vows fidelity to Mabel, is diverted from his love
by a domineering mother, then betrays Mabel for a feckless beauty -- only to find that Mabel has become a movie star, beyond
his reach. Sennett knew exactly what he was doing when he drove Mabel away, drove Chaplin away, drove Arbuckle away. He probably
also knew what he would lose in the process. But he couldn't help himself. He was faithful to the emptiness at the center
of his own heart -- and that emptiness made a space in which all of us could question our own certainties, visit a landscape
where unimagined possibilities violate an unconscious complacency.
"The Slapstick Encyclopedia" includes a Keystone directed by Roscoe Arbuckle, starring him and Mabel Normand,
"Fatty and Mabel Adrift" -- the last film they made for Sennett in California not long before Arbuckle defected
to Paramount and Normand to Goldwyn. It's a very curious work. It is relentlessly "directed", in just about every
style then available to a director. It begins with a tone of rural lyricism of the kind Griffith mined in "True Heart
Susie" and "The Romance Of Happy Valley". It veers into poetic expressionism -- sometimes achieving impressive
effects in that vein, as in the exquisite moment when Arbuckle's shadow kisses the sleeping Mabel. It then climaxes in a a
frenzy of classical Keystone action -- involving policemen driving motor boats. It includes images of deadpan surrealism --
of the sort we would see again in the Comiques.
I would describe this last mode as images of great oddity filmed with matter-of-fact documentary sang-froid. This would
include here the images of the cottage adrift on the open sea and the scene of Roscoe and Mabel floating about the flooded
cottage on twin beds. Images of unmoored houses, or houses casually and easily destroyed, would reappear often in Keaton's
work.
What's astonishing about the film is that Arbuckle seems in full command of each mode he essays. What's unsettling about
it is that he simply can't make up his mind which style he wants to favor.
Perhaps it was Keaton, perhaps it was his own truest inclination, which led Arbuckle to settle on deadpan surrealism as
the dominant mode of the Comiques. Both Keaton and Arbuckle carried it into their later work -- as we can see in "The
Iron Mule", a short also included here, directed by Arbuckle under a pseudonym after the scandal. Nominally a vehicle
for Al St. John, it eschews character development almost entirely in favor of pure slapstick and balletic mechanical effects,
involving a train (the same train constructed for Keaton's "Our Hospitality".) It is a film of great visual and
plastic beauty -- clearly the work of a master of the medium.
"Fatty and Mabel Adrift" is also infused with a sweetness and hopefulness and gentleness that departs radically
from the general tone of the Keystones.
By the evidence of "The Slapstick Encyclopedia", Sennett's fury ran out of steam in the Twenties. The pace of
the gags and their execution slowed, despite some energetic passages that recall the old days. At the same time, the simple
story premises of the early Keystones gave way to narratives that tended towards the incoherent and illegible. The exhilarating
super-charged anarchy of the Keystone style is replaced by a kind of dispirited messiness -- which may well have mirrored
the state of Sennett's own psyche at the time. "Circus Days", though, is a wonderful exception to the rule. Though
marred by some cheesy special effects, the film is one of the most beautiful and cheerfully lunatic of all silent two-reel
comedies.
The languor and minimalism which increasingly characterized the Langdon shorts made under his banner must have struck
Sennett as a spectacular violation of his method, and their success with the public as an almost personal affront. He was
probably happy to see Langdon depart, as so many had before him. There remains something heroic in Sennett's obstinacy --
and perhaps he knew on some level, as we know now, that the Keystones would endure as a permanent vindication of his inviolable
pig-headedness.
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