27. The Gold Rush

June 26, 1925
United Artists
Directed by Charles Chaplin

The Gold Rush has an ambiguous status as a silent movie. After attempting to remove it from circulation in the 1930’s, Chaplin revived it in 1942 with great fanfare. He recorded an orchestral score and voiceover narration and recut the film to match the soundtrack. He then took to hunting down and destroying any other version of the film, claiming this as the director’s cut and only legitimate Gold Rush. The revival was a complete success that cemented the film’s reputation as the Great Silent Comedy in the very moment that Chaplin effectively converted it into a sound film. The Criterion DVD presents both the 1942 director’s cut sound film and a restoration of the original silent version constructed by David Gill and Kevin Brownlow in 1993. Chaplin’s assiduous quest to replace the original with the new version suggests that there is something significant in the schism of these two texts. Is it merely the act of artistic control, or was he trying to rewrite something?

One reason for the triumphant reception of the Gold Rush in 1942 was that it was lauded as a pure comedy, in contrast to the progressively more political work that Chaplin put out between 1925 and 1942 (four movies which we will visit later in this story). The most celebrated sequences are about survival, and we laugh because we are delirious with hunger. Boiling and eating a shoe, being imagined as a giant chicken, performing a dance with rolls for feet. While this is a movie about the fundamentals of survival common to all life, this is not a famine like the one currently ravaging the Volga. These people are suffering the frozen wastes of the Klondike only because they’re looking for gold.

In the end it’s not the tramp that strikes gold but his partner Big Jim. The tramp becomes rich by being in the right place, associating with the right person, and by staying alive. We never really see the Tramp make any effort to find gold. He pawns his pickaxe and wanders into local dance hall where Georgia works, selling dances and other favors to the more prosperous prospectors. Tuned to sources of money, her adoring gaze looks everywhere but at the Tramp. As he picks up a discarded photograph of Georgia, only another bum watches him. To make her boyfriend Jack as jealous as possible, Georgia finally sees the Tramp and invites him to dance, and after a perfect comedic sequence, he falls on his ass and she laughs at him.

They next meet when she and her friends chance upon his cabin, which as opposed to the savage one in those desperate first scenes, is cozy and warm. He’s clearly improved his status a little bit, and she now shows a smile and accepts his invitation in. She finds her discarded photo and flower under his pillow and looks with wonder, stunned to know the effect her beauty has had on one whom she barely considers. As she leaves, she looks affectionately on him and promises to return New Year’s Eve.

She doesn’t return, at least not until she gets the idea to go prank him, along with Jack and her girls. When she sees the elaborate design of his dinner plans her heart changes. She suddenly loses interest in the prank and tries to refuse to kiss Jack. The next day she writes an apology love note to him, but he gives it to the tramp to trick him into thinking he has won Georgia’s love, which of course works. None of this happens in the 1942 director’s cut. In that version the prank is Jack’s idea alone, and the note passed to the tramp is a different one – a straightforward apology from Georgia. A complex emotional affair has been streamlined into nonsense.

In the final scene the tramp is a millionaire, aboard a ship back to California and wearing his old clothes as a costume for a photo shoot. Georgia is aboard the steerage of the same ship, and when she sees him she gives him a full smile and defends him when he caught as a suspected stowaway. Chaplin is now in full delight – he has both money and her love. He announces their marriage and kisses her full on the mouth. Ah, but this is all still just the photo shoot, and we see it through the cameraman’s view! “You’ve spoilt the picture!” the cameraman announces.

The look on her face as this scene unfolds is mysterious, and we must remember Chaplin’s previous film A Woman in Paris, which was a study of the inscrutable expressions of the title character, as well as the fact that this movie cost about $1 million, money spent on endless takes of the same shots that Chaplin could sift through when editing. Her eyelids twitch as she closes them for this kiss. Her smile is enchanting and genuine, but it’s not the  pure joy we read in the tramp. (Of course, no one can express pure joy like Chaplin – next to him, we all look like we’re either faking it or holding back because of some psychic ache we can’t forget even in our happiest moments.)

The kiss, the various expressions on her face, and the photo comment were scrubbed from the final version, leaving an incomplete feeling as the couple merely walks off together. Did Chaplin spoil the picture with the original ambiguous ending? It’s clearly a cynical comment on marriage which is understandable given the fact that Chaplin had been forced to marry the original female lead of the picture, the 16-year old Lita Grey after he got her pregnant. It wouldn’t be fair to say it’s only about the money. Georgia’s affections are real, but her entire emotional register is governed by the marketplace. Whatever our attempts to make our life better, there is no escape from economics.

26. Stachka

April 28, 1925
Goskino
Directed by Sergei Eisenstein

Work sucks.
Work isn’t working.

It’s Sunday night and my opinion is that work sucks. I’ve been working at the same office job for seven years, where within a three meter radius of my chair sit four other people. Three of whom are in competition for a promotion with me. Even though I’ve been there longer, I think that two of them will beat me, if not all three. I can see how it plays out, and I think I am okay with not getting the job. I am fine with my wife being disappointed in me not getting it, even as I accuse her of not respecting my current job.

Advancing in my career as a means of getting more respect hasn’t been working for me, but I don’t know what else to do to get out of the trap I feel I’ve fallen into. I tried the “get good at a thing” line. I did it – I wrote four chapters for a book that was actually published this year and is now available in three different libraries. But writing is no way to a prosperous career. I know that. My favorite living writers have careers that are uncertain or unlucrative, if they have a job at all. No, my best chance is to win a promotion to a job that is only slightly different from the one I have now.

Because I know my job’s not all that bad. I work in an office, at a computer, and while I sometimes work 9, 10, 11, or even 12 hour days, those days are always punctuated by plenty of food – swordfish, salmon, tilapia, filet mignon, truffle aioli, fresh vegetables cooked and raw and a variety of fruits, not just oranges and apples but  even in the darkest depth of winter. Eggs, sausage, and potatoes every morning for breakfast. Hot dark coffee available at all times. High quality green tea. Beer and wine. Occasional travel to New York or San Francisco where I can dine at any restaurant I want.

None of this changes the fact that work sucks, but I can only barely imagine how much work must have sucked for factory workers in St. Petersburg before the revolution. Seriously, what do I know? I’m frustrated working the same job without promotion for seven years. But for workers to consider a strike in 1890’s or 1900’s Russia, things must have been a total dead end with conditions continually getting worse. You can’t just quit and find a new job. This same factory is where you work forever.

If you must work until you die, then the working conditions must change.

Finally, after all these years, there is a movie about work, for the workers. Their struggle – not man vs nature, man vs man, or man vs self, but man vs Capital. A struggle against a social relation.

But what does it matter? This movie about a radical irruption of the production of Capital is now just a DVD for your personal collection of movies on plastic or instant stream and it’s been cataloged and assigned its due place in the canon of commodities. Except that the processes of commodity production have neither neutered or assimilated it. Of all the movies in this story so far, this one presents the most problems in watching and understanding. I had been waiting to watch it with pleasurable anticipation, but I wasn’t ready for it. I had to restart the movie a few times before I could get even the most rudimentary grip on what I was seeing, and I had to watch the whole thing three times to make any sense of it. It’s maybe the most modern movie yet created. Fuck that. This is most modern thing yet created. It’s utterly bizarre.

We immediately depart from the standard of bourgeois fiction, as first exemplified by the novel, wherein the reader learns about an individual and her problems, conflicts, and journey, and then relates that journey to the reader’s own life. These are the stories you will find in every netflix queue. Here, the characters are always archetypes, and the story is mythic.

The workers work, and it sucks. But they have opportunity to talk, write, and even distribute newspapers among themselves. They share their grievances and discuss their scant options. But the micrometer is stolen and the machinist is blamed. Since Capital holds all the cards and can make whatever demand it wants, he loses his wages for the last three weeks and is fired. Facing his and his family’s immediate starvation, he commits suicide. His fellow workers decide to strike and seize the foundry.

Life on the strike begins to approach the happy state of nature. Men and women reunite. Animals and people coexist. The workers make their demands for a return to production, but the owners are determined to ignore them even as they lose money with each passing day. Neither side moves, and it wears down the solidarity of the workers. The police hires provocateurs from the lumpen-proletariat to start a fire and set off the workers. The fire department arrives to attack them with the firehose. The striking workers are blamed for this incident, and Capital calls in the army.

The ending is not a happy one. The strike is brutally crushed. The final slaughter performed by the military in the interest of preserving property and order is intercut with the slaughter of a cow – a scene of unsimulated carnage with no narrative connection to the story. After a sweeping pan of the bodies in the field, there is a quick close-up on a pair of eyes, and the words “Remember, Proletarians!”

Their action may appear to be a failure, but we must look at it more broadly than the immediate bloodbath. The strike activates the class struggle and makes a claim for power, however unsuccessful. The movie is one step forward. Eisenstein has more to show us. The thesis awaits its antithesis.

The successful one is a prophet of the next generation. The trick is to get the Lord to speak directly to you. Sometimes to do that, you must create a rule, and then break that rule.

25. Seven Chances

March 11, 1925
Metro-Goldwyn
Directed by Buster Keaton

Seven Fascinating Things about Seven Chances

1. The Color

Credits blast onto the screen in two-strip Technicolor, lime green text on a wood-brown background. Buster as James Shannon stands with a lovely woman, a puppy between them, in the door of a white picket fence. Roses are in full bloom. As the suburbs pass quickly through all the colors of the four seasons, the warm red hues of damaged film flood the frame from the left and right. He can’t get the words out to his girlfriend to tell her he loves her and wants her forever. Before we know it, the scene changes, and Buster is back at the office. The color is gone. Time has passed him by.

2. The Text

Shannon stands to inherit $7,000,000, but on condition he is married by 7:00 pm on his 27th birthday, which is today. Time is running out. It shouldn’t be a problem, but he is still unable to talk about love. The main conflict of this movie is communication gone wrong, and what follows is a series of delays caused by a general inability to communicate. When he tries to propose to his fiancee next words come out wrong and she storms off offended. Once inside, she talks about it to her mother and realizes she was too rash. She reaches for the phone to call him at work, but Shannon has knocked the phone off the hook.

What is significant about all of these communication failures to a modern audience is that they couldn’t happen anymore, and could no longer move a plot forward. It’s simply far too easy now to get a hold of anyone who’s already in your social circle. She writes him a note and gives it to a messenger with a horse, effectively sending him an old-fashioned text.

3. The New Woman

The operator Miss Smith, played by Jean Arthur, doesn’t take shit from any of the men at the office. When she takes Mary’s call, she’s reading a book. When a rejected Shannon returns to the office, he accidently opens the door to the operator’s workspace, and she glares at him while he finds he way out. The device that moves the plot forward is unreliability of modern communication, but what moves the story forward is the tremendous male anxiety at the new status of women in modernity. Since his fiancee has rejected him, Shannon is forced to find a woman to marry at a moment’s notice, with only his partner and lawyer to help. Now this shouldn’t be hard, considering that he stands to be worth seven million, but women have more options now. It’s far easier to say no, which is what the seven women that Shannon knows proceed to do, and they collectively laugh in his face. He has to start asking women he doesn’t know. Most hilarious is the hat check girl, played by Rosalind Byrne with a stone face of her own. She’s only trying to do her job, but must deal with the clueless and obnoxious Shannon. We know he’s eventually going to have to ask her. The look she gives as she shakes her head, contemptuous and tired, releases the comic tension of the first half.

4. The Driver

Having struck out with the women in his upper class social circle, he and his partners split up, each agreeing to meet at the Broad St. church at 5:00 with a bride. Shannon drives off in his roadster, and his next target is a woman not only driving, but driving the same car! The camera tracks from other vehicles driving alongside. He begins his courtship and distracted, he crashes. After a shot of the crash, the camera returns to track the woman looking behind her, and she turns her head back around just in time to swerve out of the way of a parked pickup truck. I’ve watched this four-second shot over and over in marvel. Little seems to be known about the woman who plays this role that combines both comic expression and a dazzling dangerous stunt, all of which is over and forgotten in seconds, as Buster is already after the next one.

5. The Photographic Image

His partner had the good sense to take out a newspaper advertisement (top front page) that plainly states his case. It includes a photograph of the man worth $7 million. Buster, admitting defeat, shows up to the church empty-handed and passes out on the first aisle, and by 5:00 the entire church is full of hopeful women wearing makeshift wedding gowns. They take no notice of him in the aisle until they match his picture to the photographic image in the newspaper, and the magical moment of modern reflection is made.

6. What Time Is It?

After waking and seeing the church full of women who could either devour him in affections or tear him apart, Buster makes his escape, and runs through the streets of town, trying to find how much time he still has left. His attempts to discern the time are thwarted, climaxing in a scene where he finds a clock maker’s store, and the camera pans across the storefront window, full of clocks all showing different times. Even inside the store, no clock agrees with any other, as if he has left the temporal world. Such is the vertiginous feeling of not knowing the time in a modern world ruled by the precision of the clock. The clock is perhaps even more important than the engine in differentiating the modern industrial world from the feudal one. He still has a chance, if he can get a marriage by 7. But what time is it now, can you please tell me? Is it too late for me?

7. The Indifference of the Physical World

You can see it in the chase scene, where in addition to fleeing from the mob of women, he must also flee the path of tumbling boulders. Individual people have wills of their own – they can be reasoned with and persuaded. A mob is trickier – the mass will is unlikely to change once it gets going. But the rocks cannot be reasoned with at all – they are solely the product of mechanics. Force equals Mass times Acceleration. And even crueller than the forces of gravity is the cruelty of time. What drives this movie is time’s sheer disregard for us. Time keeps moving forward despite our petty desires. Getting older is the most obvious form of the cruelty of this indifferent process. 27 an especially difficult age. Shannon finds himself back at the house he started the movie from, where time continued to pass him by, and it’s 7:02. But fuck that, they get married anyway. And lo! It’s actually 6:59. It has never been too late.

24. Der letzte Mann

December 23, 1924
UFA
Directed by F.W. Murnau

The Disorder
I had imagined that reading about the German hyperinflation of 1923, might lift my spirits. Like many others with six figures of college debt and no idea how to pay it off, I dream that such a hyperinflation may happen again. But the story of 1923 doesn’t offer much hope to the downtrodden debtor. Despite the protests from the crowd at zerohedge.com who claim that it’s immanent, or has even already begun, it’s basically impossible that any of us will be rescued from our debts by hyperinflation. Yes, the stock market is overvalued and ready for a crash, and yes, the Federal Reserve’s QE programs are completely untested experiments in free money, but the agents of Capital have many ways to deal with problems, ways that don’t endanger their own positions and don’t endanger Capital itself. Hyperinflation will only happen if Capital wants it to, and if it does happen, Capital will find a way to make sure the debtors pay. They’re probably already working on the problem.

One obvious difference between the current U.S. economy and the German economy of 1923, which is of course not mentioned by libertarian cranks contemplating America’s economic problems, is that Germany had been invaded by France and was under military occupation by January 1923, The French Occupation of the Ruhr provided a rare moment of coming together for the Germans, and the people, government, and even the military all supported a general strike. This policy overtaxed the German government, which was paying out lots of unemployment benefits and not receiving any revenue, and so they turned to printing money into oblivion.

Still, the death of the Mark could have been avoided if the government had merely raised taxes on the rich and on corporations. But Capital didn’t want that. It wasn’t the people who faced massive unpayable debts, it was the government and big businesses that had debts. The people had savings. It was in the business interest to let the Mark collapse. The people lost their savings and used their worthless notes as wallpaper while the industrialists suvived and profited as their loans were wiped out. Further, the death of the Mark betrayed the people’s faith in the republic, which was also desirable to the businesses who despised democracy and wanted nothing more than a return to autocratic rule.

Things got more desperate as 1923 progressed, culminating with the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. Hitler of course had been waiting for a moment like this one to make a march on Berlin, just like Mussolini did in Rome. National support for striking workers against the French had been awful. Fight the real enemy, the November criminals, he kept shouting. And he could tell his chance was coming. But the putsch was a total catastrophe. Hitler couldn’t get any of the rulers of Bavaria to back him, and his storm-troopers failed to capture the key buildings of Munich before reports of the incident were telegraphed to Berlin, and the army and police moved against him. Once the guns started firing, Hitler fled his men and was arrested.

There would always be more followers, and he had learned his lesson – never go against the police and army, who will always be natural right-wing allies. Hitler’s trial began in February, and instead of denying his treason, he embraced it, declaring that treason to the hated republic was the most patriotic German act possible. The trial was a national media event, and he went to jail a celebrity, and to many, a hero.

In 1924 the Mark was stabilized and the Dawes Plan flooded the country with American corporate investment. Germany was stable now, thanks to the loans flooding in from corporate America under the Dawes Plan. Der letzte Mann was filmed in 1924 and premiered on December 23^rd, three days after Hitler was released from his low-security luxury prison cell. Society may have stabilized, but this movie had been made by people in the throes of catastrophe. The film’s story is a personal catastrophe – the loss of status. of a man who works as a doorman at a fancy hotel in the city, the Atlantic, a job that brings him veneration and a sense of importance. He’s forced out of this job due to his advanced age and sent to work as a bathroom attendant, stripped of the uniform that distinguished him.

The Ego
He no longer stands proud in a resplendent uniform directing traffic, he must hand people towels – towels delivered to him by his new boss, a woman. He may hate the humiliation of working for a woman, but it’s only because his life is ruled by how the community see him, and that community is run by the women that rule the domestic sphere. When he returns to his apartment complex, it’s the women that giggle and point at his shameful loss of status. Their gossip has already informed everyone by the time he gets there. And we do see the world of women – how important women’s work is. We see them beating carpets, polishing, brushing, taking care of laundry, baking the cakes. The love bestowed is unmistakeable. Murnau films these events with even more dignity than the manly work of the hotel lobby.

With their savings wiped out, status was all anyone really had. But this is true not just for those experiencing financial disaster, but for everyone. We worry about how others see us because as far as our egos are concerned, it’s all we are – images for others that we identify with. This self-for-others is not really the real self, but a ghostly double. And so many of these images of the film’s hero, especially in the bathroom, when he is at his lowest, are only images of his reflection – his double – the self for others. In the mirror, or else viewed through a screen or glass – an image for the audience. When he first views his replacement, it’s through the great spinning glass door at the front of the hotel. – the Revolving Glass Door of Chaos.

The Unchained Camera
Previous movies in this story have featured pans on cameras riding on vehicles, but here the camera is set free in earnest. It moves around on tracks, spinning, gliding along the floors, creeping behind and rushing forward, a restless movement appropriate to the dizzy world of modern urban life. The “unchained camera” comes into its own after he comes home, his family and neighbors in the midst of a party, having no idea of his degradation. As he drinks, the camera begins to spin along with his mind, and he passes into a dream, his sleeping face dissolving into a revolving door, in front of which he stands in his uniform, as resplendent as ever. In the dream he is what he once was, young, stronger than anyone, surrounded by crowds who admire him. The camera appears to now be handheld as it takes in the crowd – the chaos of modern society is most clearly expressed through the lens of the dream.

Alienation
The movie’s title, though it was translated as “The Last Laugh” for American distribution, is “The Last Man.” Who is the last man? Is it a reference to the last man that Nietzsche speaks of in Thus Spake Zarathustra, that product of modern society who lives a meaningless life of comfort and represents the opposite of the Superman? Or is he the last man alive? As the hero is reduced to the bottom of his degradation, the movie shows us its very first title card, informing us that the story proper has ended here, but that an improbable epilogue will follow. Bertolt Brecht was surely paying attention – he would use the impossible happy ending in his epic theatre style as a device of alienation. A single title, completely unnecessary except as a stylistic device to draw attention to the act of creation involved. In the scene that follows, we learn that the degraded bathroom attendant was actually the last man to spend time with a certain millionaire, who died in the arms of the attendant. Due to the stipulations of the millionaire’s will, the attendant is now suddenly wealthy, and this final sequence is his triumph. He spends his inheritance at the same hotel, sharing his money generously. The money has given him back every bit of respect he had lost, and the ironic happy ending is complete.

And as I’m watching this movie, I get a text from my Dad that my Mom was just fired. She’s devastated. Now I need to stop the movie and call her. In 2015, the kind of community depicted in der Letzte Mann is largely gone, broken apart into wholly atomized individuals, alone, alienated, and completely responsible for all of their own problems.

23. Greed

December 4, 1924
MGM
Directed by Erich von Stroheim

In August 1923 Warren Harding died and was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge, who was free of all of the baggage of Harding’s scandals. Further, the economy was booming. Coolidge and his running mate Charles Dawes faced a democratic opponent, John W. Davis, chosen after a long deadlock at the Democratic Convention, who was just as conservative as Coolidge and offered no real alternative. It was safe to say the election was in the bag. The only liberal candidate was Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollete, who denounced both the Farmer-Labor and Communist parties and ran under his own Progressive party. This was actually one of the most successful third party runs of the 20th century, even winning a single state (his home state, Wisconsin), but there was really no hope for a leftist. The great railroad strike of 1922 had been broken and the unions were in bad shape. The Pennsylvania Coal Strike was shut down. The Red Scare had made socialism a dirty word, to say nothing of words like communism or Bolshevism. Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, was in deteriorating health for 1923 and 1924, and by the time he died in December you could be forgiven for thinking the Left itself was dead and buried in the United States, except for handfuls of dedicated socialists who kept their eyes to the movements in the Soviet Union. And anyway, unemployment was low, prices were stable, and the economy was growing. There was plenty of money to be made, spent, given away, and lost. Who needed the left at a time like this?

The 1924 election was the first to feature the use of radio as a propaganda tool. It was used by all three of the parties, but the Republican party, with more money and better organizing, made the maximum use out of it in the last weeks before the election. They bought out two radio stations and devoted them to a continuous political rally, with Charles Dawes on every night addressing the NY metro area. The night before the election, President Coolidge gave an ostensibly non-partisan address where he urged everyone to go out and vote. Broadcast by a massive network of stations, it was the first speech in history to address over 20 million people at once. Radios were still expensive – in order to get one to work you had to buy a unit, and antenna, and a battery, which would cost $100 at the least, and you had to continually tinker with all of the parts to get any reception – but they were now a serious medium that has no further need to prove itself. The radio age had arrived.

Back in the silent word of cinema, Greed had finished shooting in 1923. The picture was been made for Goldwyn, but when that studio was enveloped into the MGM conglomerate in early 1924, Erich von Stroheim found himself once again working for Irving Thalberg, his old nemesis from Universal that had forcibly stopped his productions and slashed his movies to pieces. In January Stroheim showed a rough cut to twelve friends (apostles?) that was over nine hours long. By the December premiere, it was a two-hour movie, with entire subplots were removed. It’s the first classic MGM feature and the first film discussed in the television documentary about the history of MGM, When the Lion Roars, which depicts the studio as the first large-scale industrial film factory. Greed now exists as a four-hour slideshow of production stills with some brief motion picture sequences. It’s full of pathetic scenes, but much less comprehensible than Foolish Wives, and to call it a masterpiece feels like a protest of behalf of the auteur.

The story of the film, which closely follows the source, concerns an unlicensed dentist Mac and his greedy wife, who hoards any money she gets her hands on, even the money she wins from the one time she reluctantly bet on the numbers game. Her greed destroys the marriage and both of their lives. It’s impossible for me to watch this movie and not immediately worry about money. Less so about my marriage, but this movie does emphasize the cruelties involved in marital finances. The sum of Mac’s wife’s windfall is $5,000, which accounting for inflation is roughly equal to the debt that my wife and I owe for student loans we took out to finance her education. They are currently in forbearance, but soon they shall be due. And these days, there is no place to run from problems. In Greed, when the uxoricide finally comes, Mac can run back to the goldmine, at least for a while, before he is tracked down by the man from whom he originally stole his wife. Impossible in the matrix today that extends to every point in the globe.

Such a matrix was already in construction at this time, primarily run by the telegraph, whose construction was a crucial step in delivering humanity into the service of artificially intelligent Capital. The conflict between human relations and capitalist relations is emphasized over and over. Capital is anti-human. It seeks only the accumulation of itself and to do so obeys its own set of rules which are at odds to human morality. Morality cannot withstand capital, and money will devour whatever it needs to. The extant edition of this movie, hacked apart beyond all repair and beyond any recognition, is itself a victim of the morality of capital, which puts greed above all. Society has raised Pluto to its highest throne, and we must all provide his sacrifice.

22. The Navigator

October 13, 1924
Metro-Goldwyn
Directed by Buster Keaton and Donald Crisp

Having proved himself in the mountains, against the waterfall, as well as in the relations of society, and even within his own psyche, the Navigator strands Keaton in the sea. That immortal adversary of man. But now he is set with a woman, who this time plays an actual partner. In Sherlock, Jr., the woman may have solved the mystery and closed the narrative, but in this movie she is right there at his side in the struggle, as the Kid was for Chaplin. And it’s a perfect parody of the explicitly socialist Kid, because this time it’s two rich individuals, male and female, who find themselves with a ship equipped with provisions meant to provide for the many. In a reverse fish-and-loaves scenario, the two individuals must somehow find a way to make use of the the food and shelter of the masses. How will they do it? Turns out it’s comically easy. When you’re rich, things fall into place for you. The deus ex machina is your lived experience.

The ship itself, the USAT Buford, has an interesting history. It was used for transport during the Spanish-American War and the Great War, and then after that it was used during the Red Scare to deport anarchists, communists, and other subversives. Among these esteemed passengers was American citizen Emma Goldman, who was handed over to the Soviet Union in 1920. She immediately began agitating there, fleeing west after the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921, publishing her story under the title “My Disillusionment in Russia.” Fred Gabourie, Keaton’s technical director, meaning he helped cinematically realize Keaton’s gags and stunts, was offered the ship for $2500, a deal he immediately took, and the entire movie was then built around this singular prop.

It’s not as immediately hilarious as the previous two features, but the gags are still fantastic, and one deserves special attention. The first night after our hero and the woman have boarded the ship and found themselves alone with each other, drifting aimless and clueless through the sea, they set off to their cabins for the night. After donning sailor uniforms as pajamas, the woman discovers that she shares her cabin with a frightening portrait of the captain that interferes with her ability to sleep. The only thing to do is throw it overboard, where it gets caught and dangles in front of Buster’s porthole. The portrait swings into and out of view and casts a menacing aspect through the dark at Keaton. The captain in the portrait is none other than Donald Crisp, who played Battlin’ Burrows in Broken Blossoms and is co-director of this film. It’s a marvelous moment of enunciation, where the co-director literally invades the space between Keaton and the woman he desires, frightens both of them, and provokes them into a higher pitch of comic tension.

21. Sherlock, Jr.

April 21, 1924
Metro
Directed by Buster Keaton

In Our Hospitality, our unsmiling hero must prove his ability to survive both the struggle within a mechanized society as well as in the torrent of the natural world. But not satisfied, Keaton was able to take Sherlock, Jr. up one more level into the psychic world, where the hero must navigate his own desire. This is the first great movie to make explicit the essential connection between cinema and dreaming as spaces where we come face to face with our own desires.

The first two reels take place in the waking world, but the secret world of the libido is already highlighted from the beginning.He is reading a book about how to be a detective, and the camera pulls out to show that he is actually slacking on his real job, which is sweeping the floor of a cinema. But hidden in the pile of refuse he neglects lies money – Sherlock finds a dollar (good detecting!), but then the local street tough finds an entire wallet full of cash in that same pile that the hero missed.

In the third reel he falls asleep running the projector at his day job, which leads to the famous scene where the dreaming Keaton first steps through the frame into the film. After being ejected once, he tries again successfully, only to find himself in a montage of landscapes which he must maneuver. Now if Keaton were not on the screen, this progression of images would seem rather arbitrary and make no sense. The landscapes (a quiet garden, a busy street, a mountain ledge, a desert railroad track) do not follow each other in any meaningful way. But this is exactly how the libido works. There is no organic unity to desire – the libido is inorganic, pasting together disparate elements. This was Freud’s great discovery – there is no respect for the organic where desire is concerned. it is a death drive.

After this, the camera zooms in just enough for the frame of the screen to disappear, and the dream turns into a narrative, one where all the actors of the frame story reappear. Frames of all kinds repeat, in addition to the central frame of the movie screen. Curtains, doorways, windows, mirrors that are actually doors, other escape routes that cannot be seen. Sherlock is able, along with his very able assistant, to pass between all of these with aplomb. By the time we get to the motorcycle ride, he is in full control of this dreamworld. We have all had dreams of being on a high-speed vehicle that we cannot control but which continues to go and go without crashing or stopping. Here the entire world rearranges itself to accommodate the path of the speeding motorcycle. Eventually, he does come to a stop, plunging into the lake with the girl in his arms. When he wakes, the mystery has already wrapped itself up – it was actually all pretty obvious, they just had to go to the pawnshop. He turns out to not be much of a detective, but as a dreamer he might be unbeatable.