Mercer County Library Blog: Mimes' Jokesta's Paradise

Press release from the Mercer County Library Blog:

January 22, 2021

It often seems as if we are living in an age
of near-infinite distraction; we multitask constantly and rarely focus our
attention on one thing at a time. “Put down that stupid phone and look at
me when I speak to you!” every parent across the country is saying to offspring
of all ages right now (probably).“Wait...wut?” those same offspring are (also probably) answering, meaning parents’ll just
have to repeat themselves. Again. {Heavy
sigh.}

Is there nothing
we can do to focus ourselves?

My wife and I just finished watching the
second seasons of a Belgian mystery series called Professor T., which my wife
somehow heard about—I’m not sure how; she told
me, but at the time I was busy looking at my iPod and retweeting a hilarious picture of a dog wearing a
Christmas sweater and fake antlers! LOL!!! But I was listening to her, really!

Anyroad, both of us got hooked from episode
one of season one. Being a subtitled Belgian TV series, Professor T. forces you
to drop all else and pay attention to it because its characters speak a
language other than English (some combination of Flemish, German, French, and a
version of that Ubbi
Dubbi language they used to speak on the kids show Zoom, I think),
and thus requires you to look at the screen to read the subtitles and do nothing else the whole time, lest you
miss an important plot point because you were, say, retweeting a picture of a
sweatered dog with antlers, LOL.

For some reason, if I’m watching an
English-language TV show or movie, I feel as though I can get away with not
giving it my full attention and sneak peeks at my iPod because I can just
listen to the dialog, which should be enough to get the gist, right? And let’s
face it: That dog photo isn’t going to retweet itself; and the last time I
looked, it had been retweeted only 14,000 times...but what if my 12 followers haven’t seen one of
those thousands of previous retweets? It’s a chance I can’t take; it’s my job to keep those 12 followers informed
re: the latest in fashionable dogwear, even if 11 of them are probably bots.

But the truth is, even when the show or movie
is in English, you miss a ton of dialog and, O, I’m gonna say, TWO tons of
important character interaction and other visuals when you allow the iPod’s
Siren Song to lure your attention away from the TV screen. Yes, it is true
that, thanks to modern video recording technology, you can easily go back and
rewatch those 5 minutes you missed because you weren’t really paying attention
the first time around, but is there anything that more effectively kills the tension of a suspenseful movie than
having to interrupt the flow of it to re-watch a scene that your wife is now
loudly sighing through because she paid
attention the first time and when
will you ever learn that if you would just
put your stupid iPod down and pay attention you’d have heard the dialog too and that, dear reader, is why I
will NOT be sharing that hilarious picture of the antlered dog with her. That’ll teach her.

Know what else is nearly as good as a
subtitled foreign show at getting you to focus your full attention on the
screen? A silent film. In a silent film, the visuals are it—they are all you have; they are
the story so you can't watch a silent film and simultaneously be looking at
funny dogs on your iPod and kid yourself that you’re not really missing
anything because you’re “listening”. First of all, you’re not listening. Second: It’s a silent film: There’s not really much
to listen to. Third: You are, in
fact, missing everything.

Buster Keaton is the gold standard of silent
film-era visual, physical comedy. This is not to throw shade at such other
luminaries as Chaplin, Lloyd, and Arbuckle. It’s just that the combination of
Keaton’s deadpan mug (he was known as The Great Stone Face for good reason)
with the frenetic athleticism of his lithe, muscular body (at one point in the
Keaton film I will discuss more fully below—The
Cameraman—Keaton takes off his shirt and you can clearly see there is not
an ounce of fat on his body and, man,
is he ever rocking some awesome six-pack abs!) makes for some hilarious
contrasts. And it’s not just that Keaton’s visage is impassive; he has what can only be described as resting sad-clown
face, a default look of long-suffering melancholy.

When I noticed the Criterion Collection
edition of Keaton’s The Cameraman sitting on the New DVDs
shelf at the Hopewell Branch library I
knew I had to take it out. I had never seen that particular Keaton film, but I
remembered having seen, decades ago, Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (also
available on DVD at the
library) on the big screen in a double feature with Chaplin’s Modern Times and being amazed at how
funny, innovative, and fresh both films were. [Background: As an impecunious
grad student in NYC, I discovered that the Thalia movie theater 20 blocks from
campus—which qualifies as within walking distance if you’re poor enough—showed
double features of classic films for a mere five bucks. I saw many great films
there that I would otherwise never have been able to see on a big screen. The
Thalia, alas, closed in 1987. For those of you trying to run the figures at
home, if you came up with “The author of this post is really old,” then your math is correct. Be sure to show your work.

So I knew I had to check out The Cameraman.

I was not disappointed.

Bear with me as I once again focus on Keaton’s
amazing athleticism by highlighting the hilarious physical comedy of the
roughly 4-minute sequence of scenes in The
Cameraman that begins with Buster awaiting a phone call from his love
interest. We see him struggling to break open a “Bank for Dimes” (he’ll need money for that date) and, consequently,
accidentally wreaking havoc on his surroundings (this would become a staple of
future movie comedies, from the Marx Brothers to The Three Stooges to Abbott
and Costello, but no one who came after did it better than Buster Keaton);
running down and up numerous flights of stairs, overshooting his floor each
way; engaging in face-first pratfalls in which he makes zero effort to break his fall (they had to have hurt!), yet popping right back up onto his feet as
though nothing had happened; and finally engaging in an all-out sprint to meet
his love who is still jabbering away on the phone with him (or so she thinks),
until she hangs up when she realizes he’s no longer on the line. She then turns
and is confronted with Buster’s stone-faced corporeal self standing behind her
for he has run all the way from the lobby of his own boarding house to the
lobby of hers.

As with the whole movie, this series of scenes
contains many nice, subtle touches that add to the comedy. In his zeal to get
to the phone, Buster accidentally knocks down the landlady, takes the phone receiver
in hand and as soon as he hears his love is available for a date, takes off
toward the front door, receiver still in hand. Of course, he rips the receiver
from the wall and stands there a beat, receiver in hand, then tosses it to the
landlady, tips his hat, and bolts for the exit.

This is comic performance—and precision
timing—at its best. Mere description doesn’t do it justice. So don’t just take
my word for it: Watch the scenes.

The whole film has the same level of quality
and, yes, many of the gags may seem old hat now because they were relentlessly
plagiarized in later films...shot for shot, in fact, in some cases. And there
are a few good reasons for that; one of which is: They are incredibly funny,
well-choreographed scenes so why not reuse them? And also, more tragically,
Keaton fell out of favor with the suits at MGM (who didn’t understand his
genius) and was summarily let go in the early 1930s...only to be hired back as
a gag writer for later films by, e.g., the Marx Brothers and Red Skelton. His
own films having fallen into obscurity, Keaton had no problem recycling some of
his greatest set pieces for the comedies of others. The documentary that
accompanies the Criterion edition of The
Cameraman includes side-by-sides of Keaton’s version of a gag and the later
ones that he enabled others, such as Red Skelton, to do in their films. The
“new” takes are virtually identical.

The documentary, So Funny It Hurt: Buster Keaton & MGM, details just how poorly
he was understood by the micromanagers at MGM. The chapter of Keaton’s
autobiography that is included in the booklet that accompanies the Criterion
DVD also makes the case; in fact, the excerpt is titled: “The Worst Mistake of
My Life”—that mistake being Keaton’s decision to sign with MGM in 1928. Keaton
has kind words for “boy wonder” producer Irving Thalberg, whose “genius” Keaton
repeatedly acknowledges; but Thalberg simply would not allow Keaton to follow
his usual process of going into his projects with a mere outline of a script and improvising (not, however, the same as merely “winging”) his gags as he thought
of them. No one, Keaton claims, laughed longer and harder at the result of this
process than Thalberg himself. But the MGM style, rigidly enforced, was to have
every detail of a script worked out
and written up before filming began. A detail from the documentary that rivals
the humor of Keaton’s film itself is the shot of the script in which the
scriptwriter throws up his hands and calls one visual gag impossible to
describe, as if to say, “Yes, I know you MGM bean-counters want me to describe this, but it just can’t be
done, I tells ya!” The Cameraman was
Keaton’s first film for MGM and he was able, through a series of unique
circumstances, to finagle a way of doing the film his way, using his usual improvisational style, but it would be the
last time he would be allowed to do so.

The result of that process, though silent,
“speaks” (if you’ll pardon the pun) for itself. The Cameraman is an obvious work of comic genius. And it reminds us
that we should put down our iPhones and our iPods for an hour-and-a-half and
watch every film, every show, with undivided attention. The rewards for doing
so are manifest and manifold.

Selected Keaton DVDs Available at MCLS

Buster Keaton Collection. Three films made by Buster Keaton for
MGM. The Cameraman and Spite Marriage are silent films with
musical scores. Free and Easy is
Keaton's first talkie.

Steamboat Bill, Jr. A college student
is forced by his crusty father to learn the ropes of riverboating during a feud
between his father and a rival.

College. Ronald fights for the heart
of his beloved coed, Mary. Ronald tries his hand as a baseball player, soda
jerk, waiter, coxswain, and track star to win her love.

-Tom G. at Hopewell

____

*Yes, I know “Gangsta’s Paradise is by Coolio,
not Busta Rhymes. But I can’t help it: I like puns.

This press release was produced by the Mercer County Library Blog. The views expressed are the author's own.