More than fifty years have passed since critics rediscovered Buster Keaton and pronounced him the most “modern” silent film clown, a title he hasn’t shaken since. In his own day he was certainly famous but never commanded the wealth or popularity of Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, and he suffered most when talkies arrived.
It may be that later stars like Cary Grant and Paul Newman and Harrison Ford have made us more susceptible to Keaton’s model of offhand stoicism than his own audiences were. Seeking for his ghost is a fruitless business, though; for one thing, film comedy today has swung back toward the sappy, blatant slapstick that Keaton disdained. There’s some “irony” in what Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler do, but it’s irony that clamors to win the identification of the supposedly browbeaten everyman in every audience. Keaton took your average everyman and showed how majestically alone he was.
The story of his life seems in its twists and dives borrowed from his movies, survival demanding a pure lack of sentiment. There were twenty years of child stardom in vaudeville and nearly a decade making popular silent movies, followed by alcoholism, a nasty divorce, a nastier second marriage, twenty years producing a few dreadful blockbusters for MGM followed by a long series of low-budget flops, and a third lasting marriage, until his silent work was unearthed and brought him renewed recognition. “What you have to do is create a character,” he once said.
“Then the character just does his best, and there’s your comedy. No begging.” He embodied this attitude so entirely in his silent films that you can’t watch him without feeling won over, a partisan of the nonpartisan side.
The logic in his first pictures, the two-reel shorts, resembles the logic of dreams. It was an alternate reality that freed him from narrative obligations—one thing simply followed another—and allowed him to pack a staggering quantity of life’s particulars into each twenty-minute film. Five of his nineteen shorts end with or hinge on “Buster” (he gave the hero his first name in some of the two-reelers, and it stuck) being shaken awake from the contents of the movie we’ve been watching.
As opposed to the occasional dream sequence in a Chaplin film, which usually dangles like an ornament from the main storyline, Keaton’s dreams and dreamlike camera effects seem to compound the stillness and inwardness of his deadpan character. They are not a break from reality but a truer form of it.
In maybe his saddest line in Sweeney’s collection of interviews, Keaton confesses how the advent of sound ruined his appetite for playing in front of the camera: “The minute you’re not flexible that way,” i.e., not free to shoot unscripted sequences owing to rigid bosses, expensive sets, and waiting extras, “the desire to originate and ad-lib, as they call it, is gone. You’ve lost that.” The coming of sound spelled the end for Harold Lloyd, too, and a serious slowing down (and stylistic seizing up) for Chaplin, but for Keaton the arrival of the talkies has always seemed tragic, perhaps because of what it revealed about his own judgment.
Keaton wanted stories of a certain kind of innocence, and aspiration, and even mulish indifference to what might make people laugh (a hilarious film about the Civil War, for instance). His humor wasn’t a blank face that could be transferred willy-nilly to any kind of satire that might prove timely. This meant temporarily ignoring what the audience expected, and having the freedom to keep on inventing. “Anesthesia of the heart,” as Henri Bergson called it. That, after all, is the real soul of deadpan: such deep absorption in a task, or a way of being, that the audience thinks it alone can see that the whole thing’s going to hell.
