I watched The General, knowing that Buster Keaton was cinema’s original sad clown but not realizing he was also its first RoboCop.

Intro

It’s cool experiencing people, places or things that are best known for not being some other person, place, or thing. Christopher Marlowe was a real person who existed, and was actually one of the most celebrated writers of his time, but today is known as “that Elizabethan-era playwright who wasn’t Shakespeare.” Brave New World is “that book about dystopia that isn’t 1984.” James Buchanan is known even to the most astute historians as “the President who wasn’t Abraham Lincoln,” and to laypeople as “we had a President named James Buchanan?” Digimon is basically the labor-induced diarrhea that sprayed out of society’s aspirational asscheeks while it was giving birth to Pokémon. Eli Manning will go down in history as “what if Peyton Manning was worse at football and looked 27% more like a Basset Hound?” It’s identity by subtraction, and it’s both hilarious and deeply depressing. Imagine only being seen in the space you’re not occupying.

But the suffering of these people/books/Eli Manning is also super fascinating, because by comparing Less Famous Thing to Very Similar Thing That is Much, Much More Famous and Probably Also Better at Sex if for No Other Reason Than Superior Confidence we can ask questions like why Less Famous Thing has been relegated to Ron Weasley status in the annals of history. In Ron Weasley’s case, the answer is obvious: because he’s a ginger, and God’s mistakes aren’t destined for greatness. But for other cases, such as Buster Keaton, and his identity as The Silent Movie Star Who Wasn’t Charlie Chaplin, we have to go deeper.

The General

When Charlie Chaplin was tearing through Hollywood as the world’s first movie star and also impregnating so many women you have to wonder if he was an r-selected species there were a bunch of other great comedic actors who were pretty fucking famous in their own right but not quite the white-hot supernova of “it literally makes no sense that women find this man attractive” charisma that The Tramp exuded. Harold Lloyd comes to mind, and Laurel and Hardy weren’t no fucking slouches, neither. But Buster Keaton’s approach to storytelling comes the closest to matching the unspoken sadness of a Chaplin movie, that imbued pathos that elevates an otherwise comedic work above entertainment and into the realm of the genuinely reflective. The neediness that characterizes all entertainers is toned down slightly, and a more human angle is given the space to breathe. And even though Chaplin’s efforts to do this simply resonated more with audiences then, and continue to now, there’s something so compellingly unromantic about how Keaton went about making us say “…huh,” and nowhere is this seen better than in The General, a movie that is both really fucking good and forever destined to be one step lower on the podium than the best of Chaplin’s output.

Tell Us What Happens in This Movie, You Miserable Jew

Alright, let’s get the fucking plot out of the way. You know, it would make my life a lot easier if you all would just anticipate whatever movie I’m going to watch next and then make sure to see it 24-36 hours before I post these things, and would it kill you to make me a sandwich while you’re at it. You know I hate the crust, and if you could cut the sandwich into triangles instead of squares I certainly wouldn’t complain. Oh, and apple slices. I like apple slices. Don’t even bother making the sandwich unless you’re going to throw me a big bowl of apple slices, too. Anyway:

In The General Buster Keaton plays a wax statue of Buster Keaton playing a train engineer named Johnnie Gray who desperately wants to enlist into the Confederate war effort after the outbreak of the Civil War because the producers of this movie thought that audiences in the 1920s would identify more with a Confederate protagonist than a Union one which is a charming fact that I am not even going to fucking touch but he gets rejected because he’s the Train Whisperer or whatever and the mustachioed seditionist responsible for enlisting him is told by his boss, a slightly older mustachioed seditionist, that Keaton’s character is more valuable to the Cause (which was sedition) as an engineer than a meat taco. Because the weight of a man’s life is inversely proportional to his willingness to prolong that life this sours the entire town on Johnnie, including Annabelle, the sweet southern flower that he desperately wants to bone, and who is also a seditionist.

Anyway, the war goes on, as wars do, and one day some Union soldiers (the unambiguous heroes who put down an insurrection) steal a train deep in Confederate territory, intending to go marauding with that motherfucker all the way back to Union lines, which is completely awesome and totally justified, because traitors have no souls and can be treated with the same contempt one would show an anal polyp that’s also really into Nickelback. Johnnie, who loves his train so much I would be concerned that he is on the spectrum if I wasn’t so indifferent as to his well-being because he threw in his lot with slaveowners, gives chase. What follows can best be described as an hour of train shenanigans.

Falling, Professionally

The connection to Chaplin’s work here is obvious – a physically unimposing, socially inept protagonist who half-seriously, half-farcically puts on airs of being well above his actual means and whose every gesture somehow turns into a Rube Goldberg machine of pratfalls, usually sweeping up the entire population of any given room into the swell and tide of his incompetence and inevitably leaving him farther away from social respectability than when he started. Johnnie Gray wants his trains, and his lady, and some semblance of standing in the South, but the motherfucker just keeps tripping on things.

Now, in terms of the quality of the tripping, this is some good fucking boobishness. Keaton – who, if I’m not mistaken (and fuck me if I’m going to look it up because I’m cooking right now and Googling this claim for confirmation would both interrupt my flow and add a layer of respectability to my writing that I have no interest in) actually got the nickname Buster specifically because he took a bruise like a champ – does all sorts of visceral shit. And I say visceral deliberately, and definitely not because it’s on my word-of-the-day calendar: unlike the pratfalls of Chaplin’s Tramp there is something painful about Johnnie Gray’s various and varied injuries. His pain ain’t cushioned by magical realism, and there’s no ameliorating unreality to his longing – whimsy never breaks his fall, the fucking ground does. This makes Keaton’s approach to slapstick fundamentally different than Chaplin’s, and compelling in its own right – The Tramp exists in a movie, with all the physical and emotional malleability of the landscape that claim entails, whereas Johnnie Gray falls and gets back up in a cold cast of reality, with all the depressing indifference that entails.

Take the stunts, for example: yes, yes, I know that Keaton had multiple attempts to pull off each stunt, I am aware that movies are not real life. But even on the successful maneuvers (using a wooden plank to bounce a second wooden plank of off train tracks right before plowing into it, throwing himself from one end of a train car to another like the whole thing is a jungle gym) there is a tension to affair. If Johnnie fucks up, it is going to hurt. Unlike a Chaplin movie, where his stunts always have an endearingly cartoonish quality to them (during the boxing sequence in City Lights they literally put a rope on Chaplin’s back so his Tramp could fly around the ring like the most terrifying hobo you ever refused to bum a dollar to) you get nothing but real-world physics challenging Keaton’s latest maneuver. This causes, bizarrely and also kind of awesomely, an action-adventure element to creep into the film, because the use of reality as a backdrop for the stunts makes the consequences of a failed maneuver realer and more harrowing than it otherwise would be.

And paradoxically, the objectively worse direction of The General as compared to Prime Chaplin, May His Name Be Exalted, Seriously he Banged Everyone actually elevates this effect. The softer lighting, use of different depths of field, the goddamn chiaroscuro that add so much emotional richness to Chaplin’s pathos-infused brand of comedy is replaced with a more workmanlike approach in The General. Part of this is probably because they were filming on a fucking train and you don’t have time to look up the word chiaroscuro when you’re afraid of accidentally running over an extra, or God forbid a producer, but I really think in part it’s also a reflection of Keaton’s nearly mean outlook on the world – there isn’t a hidden romance, however eternally it may taunt us from its sad remove, undergirding and softening the work here, like there is in a Chaplin movie. Shit’s filmed more like we’re seeing everything through the eyes of an indifferent God: flat lighting, flat angles, just the camera kind of showing us Johnnie Gray’s latest faceplant, the universe of Keaton’s imagination perilously unconcerned with whether or not he gets back up.

Part of the Plan

And this is the source of Chaplin’s enduring popularity, especially as contrasted with Keaton’s: as humans we like unity. Make everything part of the plan, and even if the plan is depressing as hell we’ll still take comfort in how organized the sadness is. The Tramp encounters pitfalls physical, socioeconomic, emotional, you name it, but they’re all folded into the same narrative thrust, this weird kind of reassurance that comes from the fact that, well, life might suck, but at least it sucks consistently and predictably, like Tim Duncan’s per-36 averages. It’s its own kind of world-building, really: just like Middle Earth has its own rules, as does The Simpsons, a Chaplin movie impresses upon you from the world go the standards of engagement that it will be following between any two people in its otherwise darkly surrealist depiction of the world. We are, paradoxically, always better equipped to deal with the realities of a difficult home from the reliability of that same home coherently realized.

But Keaton throws away these unities, and I don’t think it’s from ignorance or indifference. It’s not that he doesn’t understand how you’re “supposed” to unify a story, I think he just doesn’t want to. Dude was fucking punk! Instead of inculcating discomfort in the audience by building for them a coherent framework on which to render a classic depiction of pathos why not fuck with the framework itself and leave everybody completely destabilized. It’s digging a layer deeper into the notion of audience engagement. If Keaton were alive today he’d probably have a loft in Los Angeles and produce surrealist paintings by covering his naked body in paint and throwing himself at a canvas. Dude challenged the medium itself which, considering the medium was still in its fucking infancy when he did it is pretty much double points for the effort!

I mean, one of the last shots of any train in the movie is the Texas trying to cross a flaming bridge and, in a completely static shot, just fucking collapsing through the bottom of the bridge and into the river below. There’s no cinema magic here; the filmmakers just crashed a fucking train into a river, and then held on that image for an… interestingly long time. Is it funny, because Johnnie’s pursuers ate shit? is it tragic, because people died? is it action-adventure-turn-your-brain-off, because a train crashed through a flaming bridge? It’s questions like these that make it hard for the audience to settle into that intuitive appreciation of a movie, where you’re swaying to beats explicit and implicit and not even fully realizing it. Instead you’re left with this weird feeling of discomfort, like the movie is almost holding you at a remove of its own, daring you to make a judgement on what you just saw. Not a great way to invoke the unities of storytelling and take the audience on a coherent trip down Emotion Avenue, but that love of incongruity and discomfort, damning though it may have been for box office dominance, was the hallmark of Keaton’s brilliant imagination.

The End

Damn, that got all reflective towards the end. I even did that thing where I end with a STATEMENT MOST POWERFUL rather than a fart joke. I might actually, literally, have to do MacGruber next. We shall see!