Grant Faulkner

Buster Keaton: Go West Young Man

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We saw Buster Keaton’s Go West at the Pacific Film Archive, and the movie was not only funny, but a surprising existential commentary on our capitalist life of supposed progress and survival that rings true today.

Buster Keaton, who plays the character Friendless, turns the convention of the lone, stoic Western hero on its head—remarkably before the advent of the genre of Westerns in Hollywood (Go West was made in 1925). It’s as if Keaton is already poking fun at the likes of Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin through his farcical follies.

Although Friendless possesses the traditional characteristics of the solitary man seeking fortune and self in the brutal West, he does so with a tiny, feminine gun that’s a wonderful recurring metaphor throughout the film. He can never find the gun in his six-shooter holster, so he has to tie a string to it to pull it out. Finding it isn’t really the problem, however; the gun is powerless to do harm in such a hard, brutish world, just as Friendless in incapable of exerting himself in any effective way.

He’s a man who would do no one any harm, a simple trait that defines his beauty and all of the comedy that befalls him—knocking him down relentlessly, in fact.

He tries his hand at bronco-busting, cattle wrangling, and dairy farming, eventually forming a bond with a cow named “Brown Eyes,” who is an oddball among the cows and ostracized from the herd just as Friendless is. They form a touching bond, following each other around and helping each other in their gentle yet absurd ways. Friendless even tries to disguise Brown Eyes as a deer to save her from the slaughterhouse, but no one is tricked by the horns tied to her head.

Keaton tries to buy Brown Eyes from the hard-hearted rancher to save her from the slaughterhouse, but even his life savings come up short. Still, he ends up leading the herd of cattle through Los Angeles in what must certainly have established the chase scene in movies because he knows the rancher will be ruined if the cows don’t make it to the stockyards.

The scene in Los Angeles echoes a previous scene in New York, where Friendless tried to go before heading west. In New York, he’s unable to even walk down the sidewalk because so many people are walking in such a harried and hurried manner, like the white water rapids of a river, knocking him backward onto the rocks. The scene is hilarious, with people literally walking over Keaton as he squirms onto the street for refuge from the stampeding masses—only to be bumped by an oncoming car that also neglects to observe his existence.

You might say the movie is about stampedes, and our inability to avoid them. Interestingly, the cows and bulls seem even more sensitive and observant than the human stampede in this film–we are the mindless beasts! People are doomed in their march toward prosperity because they can’t see anything but their pocketbooks, and when they see an easy mark like Friendless, they take advantage of him as a predator kills its prey.

In the end, however, the rancher recognizes that he’d be nothing without Friendless. It’s the human bond, decency in the face of adversity, that proves most valuable. Friendless gets in the rancher’s car with Brown Eyes, both of them sitting comically in the back seat, hopefully off to a happy ending, but we can’t trust that they’ll be safe for long.

The wonderful thing about a Buster Keaton movie is the idea that haplessness is a trait that’s a treasure. His characters don’t possess guile, strength, or smarts, which make them victims in this world, but they do possess a strange yet unwavering sense of how one should live—in pursuit of the most rudimentary pleasures, without malice, trusting in a cow that’s a loyal friend of all things.

Friendship and loyalty matter after all–if only to save us from the slaughterhouses that await us.

Check out this montage from Go West accompanied by Tex Ritter:

Also, here’s the first ten minutes of the movie:

The Discomfort of Strangers

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I read The Comfort of Strangers, by Ian McEwan, as part of my exploration of travel/expat fiction; I’m interested in the overwhelming tendency of these novels to put the main character in peril because he or she is abroad. The inherent premise of the “genre” is that one somehow loses an important bit of equilibrium when traveling, or that a new country’s otherness is fundamentally threatening—so the characters seesaw back and forth between these two antagonistic forces.

The Comfort of Strangers is a textbook case for this genre. A couple on holiday, Colin and Mary, the force of their love and affection on the wane, yet eddying to and fro as with the tide, find themselves being led by a local who plans to harm them.

The duty of an author in these novels is to make sure the characters get lost—the winding streets of a place representing the winding streets of their souls. There’s an idea of a destination, but it can’t be reached. Indeed, McEwan punishes his characters, making them traipse through a city that must be Venice (the city is unnamed), in search of food when the restaurants have closed. The city is free from traffic and other signs of modern living, suggesting an older world, or a deeper and less fathomable one in the case of human desires.

To make matters worse, they’ve forgotten to bring their map along—of course! They are hapless in their capriciousness.

The reader becomes immersed in the characters’ hunger, their need for a few simple bites of food and a drink of water becoming a quest, as if they were walking across a desert. The fact that they’re on holiday—and bad things aren’t supposed to happen to you when you’re on vacation, right?—allows them to drift in aimlessness, to pause and try to figure out where they are in their disorientation (Colin even looks to the sun at one point to guide them in their treks, as if he’s out in the wilderness instead of a city).

The reader feels their passivity, their inability to take control of their environment, which makes them vulnerable. This is essentially the foundation of the travel novel: the characters have lost their moorings in this new, strange land, so birds of prey and vultures circle above them the minute they step out of their hotel.

Robert is such a bird. He takes them under his arm—literally—and under the auspices of finding them nourishment, guides them into his strange lair that he shares with his inscrutably submissive wife, Caroline.

What’s interesting in McEwan’s narration is his lack of explanation. He doesn’t probe deeply into any character, so their motivations, not to mention the essence of who they are, remain a mystery.

This approach has both good and bad effects. On the good side, it allows McEwan to keep the action moving. For example, the second time Colin and Mary encounter Robert, they are near their hotel, and given the fact that they don’t particularly like him and only want to rest and get something to eat, one wouldn’t think they would go along with him. They do, however, and the reader is forced to accept their bad decision—to trust that being on holiday has made them so passively desultory that they will go wherever a hand guides them.

The lack of explanation keeps the novel cloaked with mystery. How can we possibly understand the cruel perversities of Robert and Caroline except as living metaphors of strangeness? They are others in extremis. How can we even understand Colin and Mary? McEwan doesn’t allow it. Colin’s passivity can even be interpreted as a strange, perhaps unconscious complicity in Robert and Caroline’s murderous scheme. Does he allow the events to occur, as Robert would have us believe? Is Colin simply a naive innocent?

McEwan’s insistence on gliding on the surface of actions and characters might work well to create suspense, but in the end, it limits the novel. It’s impossible to understand the characters beyond the fact that they’re living relatively unexamined, shallow lives (because of laziness of a holiday?) and sleepwalk into their demise.

To be fair, McEwan does provide signals of the characters’ inner states. They revert to a sort of childhood, sleeping in the afternoon, lacking the energy or motivation to tidy their hotel room, becoming dependent on their hotel maid: “They came to depend on her and grew lazy with their possessions. They became incapable of looking after one another.”

Like children, they’re susceptible to trusting the wrong person.

For more on McEwan, read Notes on Saturday, by Ian McEwan and Ian McEwan’s Supposed Plagiarism.

For more of my thoughts on travel/expat novels, read Death in Venice, Death in Expat Novels.

Bugs Bunny, Postmodernism, Sadism, Nabakov, Characterization–Duck Amuck

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One of the benefits of parenthood is getting to revisit films, cartoons, and stories that have been long forgotten from childhood.

Today, we saw a matinee of Bugs Bunny cartoons, and I was struck by the variety of postmodern sensibility (that’s a high falutin’ word for this fare, and yet it’s accurate).

There’s an authorial consciousness and meta narrative that’s noticeably at play in many of the Bugs Bunny cartoons. In fact, the opening of this film started out with the well-known ending, “That’s All Folks!” which was then corrected by Bugs to say, “That’s Not All Folks!”–a phrase that included copyediting marks. So we know from the start that the narrative is all a game, that beginnings and endings (or any traditional narrative arc) shouldn’t be taken seriously, and that Bugs will always toy with our expectations.

One episode stood out spectacularly. In Duck Amuck (created in 1953), Daffy Duck is exquisitely tortured by his creator. In the course of the film the animator messes with and changes the scenery, interchanges props, replaces the soundtrack, mutes Daffy, and even erases and physically alters Daffy himself. For example, as Daffy strolls with a ukulele, singing a lazy, tropical song, he’s tossed into a variety of climates, ending up in the snow (you can almost hear the animator laughing–at Daffy and in celebration of his artistic, cruel freedom). Daffy keeps trying to live–and entertain–but he can’t maintain any constancy or control of his surroundings, or even his body.

The cartoon reminded me of Nabokov’s approach to characterization–the way he kept his character under his, or rather God’s, thumb. Torture them. Make them uncomfortable. Give them no joy. No freedom. Daffy kept attempting to liberate himself–to be a naturalistic, realistic character, in short, to serve the expectations of the audience–but he was ruthlessly denied such a life.

An interesting tension in the cartoon, in fact, is the audience’s desire to see Daffy entertain in a straightforward way and the pleasure of seeing him thwarted and frustrated.

The cartoon brought up questions of identity as well. According to Wikipedia, Chuck Jones, the
director, is asking, “Who is Daffy Duck anyway? Would you recognize him if I did this to him? What if he didn’t live in the woods? Didn’t live anywhere? What if he had no voice? No face? What if he wasn’t even a duck anymore?” He’s always Daffy, of course, even without a body or voice. Except that he’s also something else: a character, a fluid and malleable identity who, well, loses himself, as we all do, I suppose.

The cartoon ends by revealing the sadistic creator, Bugs Bunny, who appropriately says, “Ain’t I a stinker?” Yes, he is a stinker–especially since he says this with no remorse. It’s a funny little line that says so much. Many postmodern narratives could be summed up with this line, in fact. Yes, Bugs, you’re a stinker.

Wes Anderson: Prop as Character

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What interests me most about Wes Anderson is that his stories seem to originate from his props—the story serves the prop, in other words, instead of the prop serving the story, as is the usual tendency.

It’s an interesting place to begin a story. Kundera admired Broch’s definition of character through gesture, but this is entirely different: the definition of character through obsessive attachment to an object. Anderson is a fetishist, and all of his characters follow suit.

In the Darjeeling Limited, the prop that plays the starring role is an exquisite collection of suitcases (designed by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, with “suitcase wildlife drawings” by Eric Anderson). The luggage (and the baggage they represent) are the legacy of the three sons’ father. The supporting cast includes an expensive leather belt, ornate loafers, the father’s glasses, with a cameo by the dad’s razor.

As the main characters disembark the train for their first spiritual experience of the journey, they get sidetracked at the market to buy, well, props. Even the shoes they buy are more prop than footwear. Even the snake they buy–and later mourn when it’s taken away, as a child mourns a lost toy–is nothing more than a prop, something to carry, something which their life flows into.

All of these objects are beautiful, works of art in their way, fanciful and surprising, as the story is—as the film is as well. Anderson’s frames are similar to his props in their preciousness and stylization. Everything is so well staged, even the unexpected—his characters move through life as if between a dressing room and a fashion ad. They’re conscious of always being watched, and watching themselves, which is why they need some damn good props.

As A.O. Scott wrote in the Times, Anderson’s “frames are, once again, stuffed with carefully placed curiosities, both human and inanimate; his story wanders from whimsy to melancholy; his taste in music, clothes, cars and accessories remains eccentric and impeccable.”

Of course, getting rid of the props, ditching the style, is the key to happiness (at least the Buddhists would say this), and the three brothers in the film, after their spiritual journey, their attempt to be “brothers like we used to be,” to “say yes to everything,” leave the prized suitcases behind in a dramatic ending that might be called a Buddhist chase scene.

I wish he’d make a sequel starring the luggage that has been left behind. As much as I enjoy his kooky, singular vision, I sometimes can’t help but think that the guy is too damn cool, even when he’s on a spiritual journey. He can’t take off his sunglasses. He doesn’t know how, or if, people can be people without their affectations, obsessions, and fetishes.

Edward Albee: Peter and Jerry

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I just saw Edward Albee’s “Peter and Jerry at Second Stage in New York City. The play pairs “The Zoo Story,” his first play (written in 1958), with “Homelife,” a companion piece written six years ago.

Two phrases struck me from the New York Times review of the play. Albee chronicles “the feral soul beneath civilized skins,” and he is “a chronicler of life as erosion.” It’s the feral soul beneath civilized skins that is the most compelling theme—a theme that stabs most of us who are living professional, relatively conventional lives. What have we lost in our pursuit of happiness in this modern world?

The play excavates the soul of Peter, an executive with a textbook publishing house in Manhattan, who is a tweedy man of upper middle-class decency and complacency. He’s comfortable in his complacency, and is quite willing to sail through life without examining it, but both plays force him into the most uncomfortable territory.

In the opening act, “Homelife,” his wife Ann opens the play with the line,“We should talk.” Peter, immersed in a book, doesn’t hear her, immediately setting the frame for the play—people listen, and connect, very little to one another, despite the intensity of their loneliness.

Peter hasn’t realized this yet, however. He says to Ann during their meandering Sunday afternoon discussion/argument that he thought they made a bargain, to each other or even before they met, to live life as if it were “a smooth voyage on a safe ship … a pleasant journey, all the way through.” A life without great joys, but without great disturbances either. Implicit in this statement is the belief that this life is possible.

Albee begs to disagree—for an animal lurks within all of us, and the animal’s appetite can leap out urgently and voraciously.

Sexual metaphors and dysfunction define the tradeoff both Peter and Ann have made to live this smooth life.

Ann announces she has been thinking of having both breasts prophylactically “hacked off”—a statement that could be read as an urge to shock, to get attention from a husband who tends to lose himself while reading or sleeping or being. She wants to get them hacked off in order to prevent getting breast cancer—a preventive treatment of sorts—as if cutting away at your body (and/or soul) in order to “live” is a worthwhile, logical bargain. At the same time, Peter worries that his penis is shrinking, or that he’s becoming “uncircumcised,” recounting observations of his dick as if it were something apart from him.

He’s so polite that he struggles to even say the word “penis” at times, so Ann interrupts him to impatiently blurt, “dick, cock,” as a reminder to him of less clinical, and perhaps more accurate, words.

In fact, Ann mentions that she wishes their lovemaking were more animalistic or just not quite so nice. She states it both as a random thought and something that’s been gnawing at her for years. Again, it’s the paradox of a comfortable life: sex is fine, even good, between them, but it’s not truly satisfying. Still, it doesn’t seem as if either of them, especially Peter, would truly know how to explore “not nice” lovemaking. A smooth passage gets boring after a while it seems—we need disturbances to feel alive.

With “The Zoo Story,” Albee challenges the carefully spoken Peter—and all he represents—to a duel, forcing him into confrontation with a social outcast, Jerry, whom he meets in Central Park.

Jerry is a teasing, mocking guy who won’t let Peter go until he faces the truth about himself—in other words, Peter is effectively tortured, both verbally and then physically.

In a different way than “Homelife,” “Zoo Story” probes the seemingly inherent separation we live in. As Jerry says about his trip to the zoo, the world is a zoo, “with everyone separated by bars from everyone else, the animals for the most part from each other, and always the people from the animals.” Again, people are dubiously separated from their baser animal instincts in a world made safe with bars and barriers and living spaces that resemble cubicles.

Dallas Roberts, who played Jerry, brought a fitful, spastic urgency to the quest to find some sort of connection. He literally spit his lines out, his face flushed with fury and his eyes ravaged by the violence (or the life) he feels within himself but can’t express.

Albee offers little hope, however. For example, it’s hard to know whether living a life more closely attuned to our wild side would make us happy or simply unleash a rapacious appetite that has no bounds. His plays are meant to provide a shock of recognition that we are rather doomed to a life of erosion.

For more, check out this profile of Albee in the Times.