Conversations with Ben VIII

On today's agenda: Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard

(Brace yourself. This is a long one)

Ben starts:

The fact that I need to reference Ikiru in order to explicate my take on RB itself indicates in what esteem I regard RB. I do see it as a companion to the earlier - still the greatest Kurosawa - film. In my view, RB addresses the question of the meaning of life from the same angle as IK only inside-out, for lack of better dialectical language. Front and center for both of them is the direct confrontation with death, not is some metaphorical manner; no, the real physical snuff job, with all the bodily suffering in tow. And this confrontation is the existential defining moment of how to live, what it is to be a human in touch with your humanity and not an alienated waste. The difference between the films, however, is the difference between looking inward so you can look out and looking outward so you can look in. So in IK, it is the way of death of the protagonist himself that makes him bond with others, whereas in RB it is the way of death of others that makes the protagonist find himself. Both protagonists are reborn as authentically social beings, morally committed and politically active insofar as they use their occupational positions and skills to serve the working class. But I here postpone further exploration of either the mortality-existentialism or the proto-socialism of the films. I hope you will grant me this, at least provisionally. So given this, what I want to flesh out is my view of the films as inverted twins.

Wantanabe looks inward. At the cancer in his belly. At his own personal history. At his privately lived life. He is all alone and has only his own hitherto squandered resources to draw upon, the catalytic inspiration he draws from the young girl from the office notwithstanding. This is to say, that he must be his own teacher. Such self-acquisition of wisdom can only be conducted by a relatively old person. And with the arrival of his epiphany, his enlightenment becomes real as he actually does something and becomes a leader. His rewards are obvious. Purpose, community, peace of mind, joy. Turning to RB, contrary to the title, the center of the story is, of course, the young doctor, Yasumoto. His journey, substantially the same as Wantanabe's (see above), is exactly the opposite. It is the same path but it is trod upon by the young man. The young man does not have enough experience to be his own teacher. If he is searching for the truth, he will seek out a teacher. But if he is not searching for the truth, his encounter with a teacher may or may not change his life. In this regard, there must always be a moment of inner discovery. At the beginning of RB we meet a young doctor who has laboured under the title character and has failed to seize the ethical opportunity. He remains cynical. But Yasumoto rises to the challenge and then some. As in IK, his epiphany arrives, but unlike in IK, in RB it in not private, it is public, because of and with his teacher. So as Yasumoto's enlightenment becomes real through praxis, he becomes not a leader but a follower, with great potential for leadership in the future. His rewards are those of Wantanabe.

Who makes the greater sacrifice, Wan or Yas? Another way to ask the same question: Which portrayal of enlightenment is more realistic? The easiest way to answer that for those of us located in the Judeo-Christian culture is: Which of the two is more like Jesus Christ? The winner of this contest is the character who personally suffers the most. And the winner is Wan. But stay with me, because according to Ben, the more Christ-like, the less realistic. (Do I have to develop this thesis? Christ is the ultimate hero and you know how bogus I think heroes are.) So it is Yas who is more realistic. He is more realistic precisely because he can't do it alone, he needs social relations, his development is civic in the best Latin sense of the term. He suffers publicly. Wan, on the other hand, sucks it up, in every sense of the term. His suffering is absolutely private. He's a martyr. (At the end of City Lights, Chaplin gives the little tramp public recognition by the was-blind girl [the unrealistic license in that film] in the tramp's own lifetime. Nobody knows that Wan had cancer until after his passing, the novelist-stranger and the girl from the office notwithstanding.) It's as if Jesus was invisible on the cross until his corporeal self was removed and only the dripping nails remained. Stephen Prince points out, correctly I believe, that one of the great strengths of IK is that it fundamentally avoids what Hollywood turns into an orgy - the explicit demonstration of the physical agony of the terminally ill central character. For the most part, we do not see Wan suffer physically. Prince is right but at the same time, this is the unrealistic aspect of the film. The banal truth is, Wan would have been too riddled with pain at the end to walk down the street, never mind lead a little revolution. It may surprise you to know that I am not criticizing IK for this unrealistic device. It don't criticize City Lights for its concession either. These little lies allow the film-makers to tell a much bigger truth. And IK is a greater film than RB. Yet I wanted to establish the greater realism of RB as a context for my next issue; namely, the optimistic-happy feeling of RB as distinct from the pessimistic-sorrowful tone of IK.

In earlier emails we have already addressed the desperate post-war circumstance conditioning IK. Approximately 15 years later, in 1965, RB is coming out of a time when Japan is undergoing renewed economic prosperity, full assimilation into the global capitalist system under favorable terms of trade. And Kurosawa has achieved a fair amount of international success himself. I don't have the biographical facts down, but I suspect he was at the peak of his fame and commercial clout. In short, life is a hell of a lot better than it was when half of Japan was actually dying of stomach cancer. Kurosawa can afford to indulge in the goodness of people. Hence, RB has, Monica observed, an almost Dickensian faith in good people to do good and come out all right in the end. The adoption of the orphan at the end of Rashomon rings false, or at least demands fancy interpretation. But RB is all about this kind of love. All the characters are adopting each other all over the place in every conceivable way. Plot-necessary villains aside, the best is brought out in everyone. There's a few Gift Of The Magi mix-ups, with less happy conclusions than O'Henry would have provided, but it's all good. The film is tremendously uplifting. Really, really positive man! Considering the whole show is about dealing with death, considering that the medical craft is presented as let's-be-honest-folks nothing more than palliative care - the good vibes mean so much and the film kicks high moral ass.

I have argued that RB is more realistic than IK and I have reminded us that it is much more upbeat. I now return us to the previously postponed existential and socialistic (I won't over-state it and say socialist) strands in Kurosawa's cinematic universe. IK is ostensibly the more political film. It is set in the present. It eviscerates the government bureaucracy for both its feudal vestiges and false American promises in the face of proletarian poverty. But I maintain that RB is ultimately a more political film. It's just that its politics are embedded in an ideal of a humane society. RB is a microcosmic model of a perfectly cooperative and, at bedrock, egalitarian polity. It is a sort of mini-village of morally transparent social relations. Granted, the economic basis of this unalienated little town is in no way utopian. The dependence on the state for financing and the need to extort inflated service fees from the wealthy in the real world is all too plain. Similarly, the little boy who steals rice from the hospital kitchen sends the same signal in the other direction. But the way everyone gets along in the hospital, it's like a hippy commune, except with a traditional division of labour between men and women, skilled labour and unskilled, and so on; it is, after all, a period piece. But again I say, the depiction of the hospital community is a projection of a socialistic society, attending to the hard core of existential doom of course. But isn't the best test for a system the way it helps those who are most helpless?

OK, that's a lot to read. So much for themes and content. I have a few things to say about the construction of RB, but I will go at this in a later installment. Time to sleep. By the way, in case you missed it, I like RB... very much. Thanks.

And Dan replies:

What's so profound about Ikiru, for me, is that this is a movie made by a man who still had forty years of living to do. He wasn't a young man, but Ikiru has the wisdom the we associate with age. That is, the lessens Watanable learns and way he reshapes and rededicates his life feels like the kind of signature statement you'd expect of an artist as he neared the end of his career, not as he was approaching the apex of his talents. The film is really quite remarkable in that regard alone, never mind the rest of the things (performance, cinematography, editing, score blah blah blah) that serve to emphasize its greatness.

Then, as you note, Red Beard is a young man's story, yet it is the film that marks, for many of us, the end of the Golden Age of Kurosawa. It is the sort of artistic comment you'd expect to see at the beginning of a career, a mission statement for his art, yet here he is rededicating himself to such matters just as his powers begin their slow decline into mere good-ness. It would be and interesting experiment to show these two films to someone who has never heard of Kurosawa and ask them how old they thought the filmmaker of each was. I guess it is yet more proof of the man's superior skills and expansive outlook on life that he was capable of making each film at such a point in his life.

I'm not sure if Yas makes a greater sacrifice that Wan, but I sure as hell believe he makes the more realistic conversion to the cause. Wan's conversion takes place pretty much all on his very own (once he escapes the writer and the bubbly fellow employee), and his ability to stick it out, to maintain the course of his cause while all about him conspire to make it nigh-impossible strikes me as the kind of superhuman achievement that few of us could really aspire to emulate. Yas, on the other hand, is converted through deed after deed, through an immersion into a world that wears down his arrogance and self-involvement, that pretty much dares him to remain separate and distinct from it. Further, once Yas throws himself into the fray and joins the cause, he has a network of support that would be pretty much essential for most of us who decided to dedicate our lives selflessly to greater/higher causes.

I know that we have already discussed the Chaplinesque-ness of Red Beard, and both Monica and I completely concur on Kurosawa's indebtedness to Dickens (alls that's missing is a "god bless us, every one" at the end of the poisoned child/family episode), but I'm going to say something that will be anathema to those who hold literature far above film in the pantheon of artistic endeavours. I believe that both Ikiru and Red Beard are BETTER than most of Dickens' work, because they have a more clearly enunciated understanding of the social reality of the characters. K does not rely upon artificial conventions, such as the kind of coincidence that mars the ending of Great Expectations or Oliver Twist, or the sudeen emergence of the saviour benevolent benefactor, to get his characters out of jams. Conclusions emerge out of reality in Kurosawa, and sometimes those conclusions are damned bleak (Ikiru, Ran). And even the relative optimism of Red Beard is well-earned and does not without substantial emotional and material costs to the characters.

Great commentary, by the way, Ben. This really has my wheels turning. Looking forward to plunging into part two later tonight.

Then Ben:

Had to go back and look at what I said, not in general but precisely. Because as it turns out, when I asked you to "stay with me" you didn't quite make a corner-turn with me. Frankly, I think the fault lies with my convoluted writing. I was pretty excited about RB and this excitement effected my prose.

Anyway, I never said and now do not say that Yas makes the bigger sacrifice than Wan. No, my view is the opposite and this means - in turn - that Yas is more realistic than Wan, the latter you picked up correctly. Look, Wan is a saint. I was trying to get at this with all that martyr comparison to Christ. A saint is a moral superhero, (for Christ's sake!) Yas is much more realistic. I was at pains to highlight the social leveling content of this realism (see my RB Part Two) but even without getting into this, you get at the social realism when you speak of his "conversion" and the "network" supporting it. Wan, on the other hand, has an essentially solitary epiphany.

Your biographical consideration of Kurosawa is thoughtful. All I can add is that he seems to have undergone a mid-life dark night of the soul prior to the making of Ikiru. Perhaps there was some delayed post-war trauma involved. His older brother did kill himself, right? And K would take a stab at suicide himself later on. As for sorting out a signature-statement and a mission-statement between the two films, well, I side-stepped that by thinking of the two films as twin companions, as inversions of each other. This may or may not be valid but at least I come by it honestly; i.e., I am relating them dialectically. For what it is worth, one of the favorite dialectics of the New Left (now ancient) was: the personal is political. Signature is mission?

About Dickens. I have never read one word of him. So there. (I'm a jive English teacher. There is very little literature that I have read. Most of my reading has been in non-fiction; philosophy, political theory, sociology, tit-fucking magazines.) I have a pretty good notion about "Dickensian style, themes, and period, though. For what it's worth, I have read a bit of Balzac and he is free of the 11th hour, good-guy contrivances of which you speak. I think I make your point as well when I say that RB does not go so far as O'Henry does. (Yes, I've read some of him. Why him and not Dickens I can't explain.)

Dan retorts:

I think I can explain why one over the other. O Henry generally takes about twenty minutes to read. Or, about one really good shit.

Ben's admission:

You win.

As I am writing even more than usual, I want to say that I understand that you have a life and will respond to me when the time is right for you. Indeed, this should be a standing policy.

Last dispatch, I indicated that I was done dealing with themes and content and would next address matters of construction. As it turns out, I was wrong. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I want to hammer on the red anvil some more. [Warning: Big paragraph below.]

I am using the term "socialistic" rather than "socialist" to suggest that RB has only a partial and highly mediated implication of socialist values that, admittedly, I have to unpack. Nevertheless, I maintain that I am, in fact, unpacking and not simply imposing an external rubric on the film. This is to say that I feel it is internally valid to the film to interpret it beyond the designation that is commonly applied to Kurosawa in general, "humanist." On what grounds do I argue this? On the egalitarian extent of the social leveling depicted in the context of work. In the first part of this review I acknowledged that there is still a division of labour in the hospital that has not leveled the discrepancies between men and women, skilled and unskilled. On the other hand now, the hospital is in no way a hierarchy. Initially it is hinted that Red Beard is a ball-busting tyrant. He turns out to be the farthest thing from it. Instead of a boss, he is an example. Not a ruler, a leader. As the film progresses, everyone working at the hospital is shown to be performing different but equally valuable work. And their status within the organization is revealed to be equal too. In short, the patriarchal dimension of such a Japanese hospital in the 19th Century, (patriarchy is not just the rule of men over women, it is also that of fathers over sons), is glossed over in the film in order to display a socialistic association of producers with an ideal level of solidarity. That they don't literally produce anything, that they are in a service industry (ha!), should not obscure the point. Nor should the fact that the hospital is also their residence. Given the focus of the film, this residential aspect is tantamount to the barracks at a mining site. Furthermore, this runs so deep, it applies to those residents of the hospital who do no work, the patients. The work ethic or labour orientation is so rich in RB, I would go so far as to say that the patients do work. Their job is to die. To die with dignity. I am stretching beyond the literal to the metaphoric, to be sure, but one thing is for certain. The patients have status equal to the health care staff, specifically significant, the doctors. And this is ground zero for the egalitarianism of the film. This is the large leveling. Not that everyone has to die sometime and that it is possible for anyone that death will entail horrible suffering, even medical professionals. That's a leveling of individualism that any liberal can be comfortable with. No, the leveling between the doctors and the patients is class leveling. This is true literally insofar as the doctors come from privilege and the patients from poverty. But it may and I say should be interpreted at a higher level of abstraction. Everything presented in RB carries a lot of meaning and contributes to the message but in my estimation, the defining chapter in the story is the transformation of doctor Yasamoto into the patient of the girl rescued from the whore house. This role reversal is more than some moralistic sermon about walking a mile in the other guy's shoes. And never mind the fabulous dialectics about his illness being her cure. The big news is that they are made into equals. Everything in the film resonates out from and replicates in miniature this leveling.

OK, that's enough of that, I should think. In Part Three of this review, I will discuss [1] the fight scene, [2] the flashback scene, [3] the housecall to a wealthy patient scene, and [4] just how wonderful the film looks. I am hopeful that I will have exhausted myself by then - Ben.

And Then Dan:

I like your idea that the clinic is, first of all, a socialistic enterprise, in that there is little to distinguish between the various ways that different people with a variety of skills and training provide health services at the clinic, and I'm also down with your suggestion that since they all live in the same place that the work, the clinic is sorta one big hippie commune. I am also certain that the curing of the young doctor by the damaged girl is a key to "unpacking" the film's core message; this passage falls pretty much at film's centre, and is the heart and soul of Kurosawa's film, as it is in these moments that the young doctor's socio-political AND physical cure are guaranteed.

As for the patients job being to die with dignity, that is indeed an interesting notion. Of course the doctor's job is to bear witness to the death, which carries with it the responsibility to remember the life that is lost. It adds a significance and a weight to the patient's passing that a doctor is there to record the memory, but of course the doctors at the clinic at recording much more than simply the memory of these patient's deaths, but also their entire lives. Which is why the stories that they tell of their patients (and which the patients tell of themselves, to these doctors) are also the great levellers. We see that these are people, despite their poverty and suffering, who have lead lives of no small consequence, and they are as worthy of remembrance and commemoration as any of the shoguns that Yas might have ended up cleaning up after.

Then Ben:

I want to thank you for your second paragraph and then I want to relate it to your first.

Your observation of the doctors work of bearing witness was entirely neglected by me and your treatment of it supports my thesis, so thank you. Yet, I want now to take your treatment and turn it inside-out too. You are absolutely correct that the doctors validate the lives of their patients by listening to their life stories. Red Beard has dialogue explaining to Yas explicitly that this is in their job description as far as he's concerned. But at the same time, this witness-bearing validates the lives of the doctors themselves. And they need this validation desperately. Why? Because medical science is little more than palliative care. (I've focused on the evidence of this in the film already.) The doctors cannot literally save lives but they can metaphorically save lives as they help people go gentle into that good night.

What the above interpretation shows is that the doctors and the patients need each other. But this mutual need is not merely definition-by-the-opposite, not some purely formal Yin/Yang. It is real mutual recognition, solidarity of equals, leveling. So, the curing of the doctor by the damaged girl is not just the curing of the doctor. It is not just a moment of half-leveling (hence, not really leveling at all) from the perspective of the doctor. It's not just a moralizing "walk in the other guy's shoe" on the part of the upper class. This is Sunday sermon empathy at a church from the right side of the tracks, not social equality. No, the curing of the doctor by the damaged girl is also and maybe more so the undamaging of the girl, the curing of the girl by the girl, her self-empowerment. There is dialogue to support this by the way. She tells Yas that Red Beard told her as much. So I believe it is important not to see the pivotal event in the film simply in terms of a role reversal. In fact, once you enter into the deeper dialectics of the relation, it starts to become impossible to say who is curing whom. He is her floor which becomes his ceiling and around we go. It can't be sorted out - and that's the fucking point! It's a level playing field. Sure sure, it's all about love. And later Red Beard explains to Yas that she will have to learn to spread her love to the whole hippy commune, and of course Tiny Tim is the vehicle for this. But there are politics inside that love.


The liner notes to the DVD quote Kurosawa on RB: "I wanted to make something that my audience would WANT to see, something so magnificent that people would just have to see it." With respect to this, one of the striking qualities of RB is that it truly has something for everyone. More than any other of his films that I have seen, RB provides the widest range of mini-stories and grandest variety of incidents. All of them are integrated into the central narrative with both conceptual relevance and stylistic grace. This granted, it is not always immediately obvious how certain scenes might be required beyond adding interest to the plot or nuance to the characters. In short, is everything in the film really necessary to communicate the thematic content in full? I believe so.

I have interpreted RB in terms of socialistic egalitarianism. I did so by focusing exclusively on the nature of the hospital (and its immediate environs). There are scenes which take us out of this social setting, however, yet I see these as reinforcing my interpretation negatively. That is, the ideal of the hospital is situated in the "real world" with all of its oppressions and I take the scenes that depart from the hospital to be realistic identifications of specific forces that stand in the way of egalitarian social relations. (There is even a scene in the hospital that I approach in this manner.) I don't mean to reduce the meaning of these scenes to my interpretation, by the way. I'm just trying to develop a thesis. What I am at pains to argue is that those scenes which might appear superfluous are actually vital as negations of the model being offered in the form of the hospital. The inclusion of these negations are essential if Kurosawa's vision is to be realistic. In short, these scenes demonstrate that RB is a tale for materialists and not pie-in-the-sky bleeding hearts.

The psychotic female patient attempting to murder Yas: Here is the hospital scene I mentioned parenthetically. What is the point of this? I offer that her psychosis represents the potential of the erotic to become violence that comes between equals in personal relations, to put it mildly. They are equals because at that point in the narrative Yas is on her level insofar as he has not taken on the responsibilities of being a doctor. Indeed, he is getting drunk. Besides, they originate from the same class. The (sexist?) routine of a crazy bitch coming on to a regular fellow in order to destroy him is as old as the hills. But in RB, more is at stake. Nutty sexuality undermines the potential for real friendship. Remember, for much of the scene it is unclear if she really is nuts and dangerous,and just as uncertain whether or not Yas, still resistant to his destiny, will become her renegade ally.

The recollections of the dying patient: This is a film unto itself. Of course, it is all intended to explain why this man was so loved by his community, what motivated him to be a good person in the first place. His is a tale of tragedy. And the forces behind this tragedy are two. The first is the earthquake, as materialist as a force can be. This points to the power of nature to constitute a calamity that rips people apart, in every sense of the term. Shit happens. Accidental disaster is no small challenge to social bonds. But it is the cultural dimension contextualizing the earthquake that signals the undermining of, not just a bond, but a (yes, liberal) partnership of equals; i.e, marriage. I said previously that RB does not provide a critique of patriarchy. I hold to this but at the same time, the custom in 19th Century Japan that arranged to whom a woman "belonged," is under severe scrutiny as this custom leads to the (unintentionally assisted) suicide of the man's wife.

The house call to the rich patient's house: This is a very short scene but it speaks volumes. Here the power of money is attacked outright. The wealthy class is identified as a ''tax" on the resources of the commune and therefore must be "ripped off" in return. That this is essential to the material subsistence of the hospital was set-up at the start when it was explained that the facility is pathetically under-funded by the state. In case the corrupting influence of moneyed power remains unclear to the audience, the message is driven home when Red Beard is questioned by the rich man's henchman. The latter cynically articulates the futility of medicine and on this basis ridicules any rationale for its price. Red Beard does not dispute the point, thus, turning it on its head. Yes, you cannot put a price on caring for the sick - as long as you live and work in an egalitarian society. (Also conveyed by this scene, the existential recognition of medical work as basically palliative care.)

The fight scene: Of all the scenes in RB, this one at first comes off as a throw-away for the action set, gratuitous violence however nifty. We need to tread lightly now because there is something to this but it is also incorrect and we don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water. Unlike other oppressive forces that are either mixed up with otherwise benign or even emancipatory potential, or not, but still indirectly oppressive, violence is, well, violence. The direct, immediate, real thing. Man's inhumanity to man may or may not be convincingly boiled down to violence but either way, when we get to violence we have arrived at the primal challenge to egalitarian politics. It is not gratuitous of Kurosawa to include it front and center, in the most base manner. This, again, is an expression of his materialism, his realism. Fine. Yet, there is something jive about the scene and this bogus quality undermines the scene's inclusion in the film. The fake aspect is, of course, that it is a succession of duels fought and won by our hero. And as always, I use the latter term pejoratively. That Red Beard fights with the surgical precision of, uh-huh, a surgeon, that he fights like a scientist and not an artist, that he is conducting a ruthless military campaign and not aristocratically playing at war - none of this saves the scene from being bullshit. It is bullshit because - one more time - ten guys can kick the crap out of anyone. I will admit that I took tremendous satisfaction from the scene. But it remains rubbish. And I consider it a failure of Kurosawa's vision not to have included a realistic fight scene. I can easily imagine one that supports my egalitarian interpretation of the film. Instead of going it alone, Red Beard and Yas, together, fight it out with the gang, whose numbers are reduced but who still out-number our two. The odds are against our two, and this means that rather than a heroic clean sweep we get a genuine scrap; hell, some phony drama can occur, pretending that the outcome is uncertain. Of course, this is neither here nor there because the good guys win the battle, beaten but not beaten. In other words, instead of Clint Eastwood (Yojimbo?), your basic buddy-comedy fight scene, but played completely seriously. Red Beard and Yas should have limped home with the girl they rescued, brought in a few minor wounds of their own to be licked by the rest of the hospital staff.

Ta-da. I had threatened to speak to the topic of just how wonderful the film looks, the cinematography, the sets, and so on. Count your blessings, I am all tuckered out. The review is over. Ikiru is still number one in my book, but RB is a close second. If Ikiru is coming out of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy - but not Kierkagaard and Kafka, RB is coming out of Balzac, Hugo, and (as said) Dickens -but not Horatio Alger and Disney. You said RB is in the top five. I assume the three others are The Seven Sammys, (That) Rash o' Mine, and...? Ran? Or does Ran come before Rashomon? Or is there a title I have yet to see?

And Dan:

The film certainly is about as full of wide-ranging elements as any Kurosawa. Hell, he even throws a gratuitous samurai showdown into the mix, to see if we're paying attention. I completely concur with you, by the way, that the scene is both extremely emotionally gratifying and intellectually dishonest, particularly given the tenor of what has gone before. But Christ! when Kurosawa pans across the carnage after Mifune has levelled that entire crew, I felt like I was looking at a miniature of the wounded soldiers in Atlanta scene in Gone With the Wind. The sounds of the bones being broken is later matched by the sight of these beaten deadbeats crawling around in the dust with compound fractures. Pretty damned horrifying shit. And while Red Beard gives some lip service later to how he should never have done it, that a doctor's job is to heal, not to hurt, there's no shortage of intellectual dishonesty at work there too given that he was trying to do just that (trying to protect the girl from further harm) and these soon-to-be vanquished foes were preventing him from doing so. He had little alternative--to leave the girl there, alone, would have been an even greater abrogation of his duties as a doctor, no? Still and all, the fact that he was able to clinically and surgically dispatch so many foes without suffering even a bruise is a terrible betrayal of the film's otherwise stellar realism.

The psychotic female patient also plays into some standard figures in Japanese fiction--the creepy mysterious "dark" lady, who makes regular appearances in J-Horror films these days (see The Ring or Pulse or The Grudge for contemporary examples)--but I think she's also there for another reason. I recall that Red Beard and Yas have a discussion about whether her psychosis can be attributed to her horrific upbringing (all the sexual abuse), but Red Beard retorts that many girls have suffered similarly yet they haven't turned into murderers, so this cannot be used as a reason to excuse the woman's behaviour. The whole nurture-nature thing is up for grabs at this point, but Kurosawa seems (rightly, I think) to be abandoning it as quickly as he seizes on it. After all, while it might be interesting to argue how much of each play a part in determining who were are, the truth for these doctors is that such information is not particularly useful. They cannot cure the larger disease in society; they are only able to address the symptoms in individual patients. There are clear limits on the ability of medicine alone to cure what really ails us.

As for the dying patient, I think I've already sorta dealt with that one in the previous missive, as the doctors and others who witness this now give added weight to this man's life; he has been a figure of real importance to these people, and the value off his life is AT LEAST on par with that of any of his so-called social superiors. A figure who might have died in anonymity, like those poor bastards in Thomas Gray's poem, but who will know be commemorated and revered because there were people there to lend dignity to his death and remind us of the significance of his death. He will be no desert flower blooming in isolation.


Then Finally Ben:

The fight scene. You remind me that Red Beard rationalizes it afterwards with Hippocratic guilt and this is lame. I agree. Compare it to the other occasion in the film when he has to explain his "inappropriate" behavior to Yas. I am thinking of his blackmailing of the local magistrate, which he does in order to secure funds for the woman with the three kids. This time, the rationalization is realistic and fits into my socialistic thesis because he tells Yas to remember his "immorality" and use it against him whenever he becomes arrogant. In other words, the pupil should call the teacher on hypocrisy. But even more, the new recruit to the hippy commune should call down Jumping Jack Flash whenever the need arises 'cause - that's right - it's a level playing field.

I'm still not sure what to make of the psycho chick. I tried to fit her into my thesis but she's awkward there. I think it is important, however, that we do encounter her father, who is revealed to be an uncaring outsider, a man who thinks his money will solve his problem to the point of not being a father at all. It points back to the theme of caring itself and the social relations that must be in place if people are going to be able to care for each other, or not.

Yes, you did account for the story-telling of the dying patient. Actually, you at least implicitly went further and accounted for the survivors of the dead as well. These survivors also need to be heard. Take it from me, my mother died of cancer in the Victoria hospice. The staff there had to attend to me and the rest of my family as much as my mom.

Conversations with Ben VII pt. 2: Keaton and Chaplin, the Return of the Kings of Comedy

Ben sed:

I hope this is proving beneficial for you because over here on my side of the matrix a number of issues I have been knocking around for months appear to be coming together for me. Having entered the domain of silent film, it seems as if we are arriving at a primary level, and by primary I mean brass tacks essential. ("Brass tacks." Got any vernacular etymology on that? I don't.)

I joked about your reference to Steve McQueen earlier but now I find him a useful point of departure because he is, of course, the strong, silent type and I think this type is a fertile nodal point for theoretical explication. There are many variations on this type but I think it is reasonable to suggest that leading male characters who assert themselves in a plot without using words must do so physically with their bodies.

A mid-range option, however, is mugging. Given the communicative context of silence and the (supposedly) male principle of assertiveness, mugging represents an effort to "speak" with the face. In practice, this facial talking necessitates the display of not just a lot of emotion, but emotion expressed very crudely. This sort of demonstration is associated with (supposedly) female behavior. (I can only mention the social constructivist theory of gender here.) I was trying to get at this before when I said that you were subjecting Chaplin to a macho critique.

More positively, your treatment of Keaton's physicality strikes me as a reading that aims to show that he is not caught in the limitations of the strong, silent type. The fact that we are dealing with a comedic persona is already a step in the right direction. As much as I dig as a guilty pleasure, for example, Clint Eastwood's persona in the spaghetti westerns, the ironic inversion of the John Wayne thing into an amoral near-nihilism, well, I just made my critque of it. Plainly, Keaton is hardly this strong in his silence. Yet it still makes sense to ask: At what point does physical comedy give over to bad violence?

For me, this question points to many of the issues I have been hammering at for some time; violence as pornography (not to be confused with violent pornography), the aristocratic duel, and even my beef with genre. Because I simply refuse to accept the genre called "action." It is really the treatment of violence as if is language. Hey cowboy, tongue tied? No worries, let your fists do the talking. For the fancy set, sword play is poetry in motion, and on and on. Please, don't get me wrong. I'm not a stupid PC nursery school teacher: "Now boys, use your words." I'm not saying that slapstick is bad violence. First of all, I'm using the adjective "bad" to indicate that there is also good violence. More to my purpose here, though, I am theorizing a continuum between slapstick and bad violence that is situated in the condition of silence. The strong, silent type is moving in the direction of bad violence along this continuum.

Returning to Keaton, I hear you as saying that he tends towards the other direction. I maintain that this is not fundamentally because he is in it to get laughs. A bit deeper than this, Keaton continues to communicate. He is letting his body do his talking for not only his mouth but indeed his whole non-mugging face. The deadpan is an extension of the silence that compels the athlete to use body language; pose, gesture, and sheer gymnastic animation. And, yes, all on behalf of humor too. Clearly, this is a far cry from the "action" that politically offends me.

That Keaton's persona is basically assertive in reaction to this-and-that is not trivial. You focused on the, admittedly vague, but nonetheless oppressive existential forces bearing down on him. He is, in short, a victim. Not quite. That fate befalls women. The muscular magician escapes. Would you agree that Keaton is an escape artist? So is Chaplin but not in the relatively more "manly" manner of Keaton. Silence be damned, Chaplin literally tries to talk his way out of it ("fag") or mug his way out of it ("girl", so fag again). Keaton does not try to fight his way out of it, that would point him in the other direction on the continuum. He is, after all, like Chaplin, a "little guy" (physically as well as socio-economically). All the commotion notwithstanding, neither of them seriously fights. But unlike Chaplin, he does not resort to "feminine" tactics. These are attempts to break through the silence. No, Keaton's persona accepts and works with the silence. He does not - he cannot - resort to violence, but he does take action. For Keaton, there is nothing to talk about but something to do. And he does it.

I repeat that I am not well versed with his work and I haven't studied the directing of either of them, but I am confident that I am at least scratching the surface of why cinephiles prefer Keaton to Chaplin. Keaton is seen to be more genuinely cinematic, more important - maybe not as a world historical artist - but as a film artist. The key to this is the status of silence in the work. I suppose this is often approached in technical terms, after all, silence was given at the time as a technical limitation. I am approaching it from the more general category of persona. Neither guy is "the strong, silent type". But Keaton is stronger because he is more authentically silent. Let us label this, as you did, stoical.

And Dan Sez:

You bet this is beneficial. I wouldn't keep yammering away with you if it weren't. Dialogue and dialectic are allways a great means to an end (insight).

Certainly film--and especially SILENT film--is more generous to action than words. It ain't radio, after all. Or television, as you might be wont to argue. So that may play an important part in determining why Keaton is (generally) prefered by critics over Chaplin. So too is Keaton's desire to use the camera to tell the story, and to make a study of moving pictures itself an integral part of some of his films (such as Sherlock Jr. and The Cameraman). In the latter his character "graduates" from taking photographs to shooting film, and as a result, his character emerges from one who is rather content with stasis to one who is more dynamically involved with the world. It's this sorta meta-moviemaking that is so appealing to modern cinephiles, who are (naturally) inclined to see film as an artistic progression over photography.

You're really starting to get at something fundamental about Keaton's approach that might benefit from actually digging into his work. If you are interested, once finished with Renoir, I'd be happy to pass some Keaton your way.


Then Ben:

Only five huh? I coulda sworn there were six. But I was a teenager when my father shoved the pamphlet under my nose.

It's something of a twist that we are valorizing Chaplin in light of Brechtian theory. I wonder what Brecht thought of Chaplin. My first supposition is that he liked his politics alright but disagreed with his art. Everything you object to in Chaplin I reckon Brecht would have objected to too. Even more so. You are bugged by the hack sentiment of it, the cheap effect. Brecht's aesthetic, you know, is all about the performers and the audience breaking through artifice together on behalf of higher consciousness. Tawdry appeals to the emotions were at the top of the hit list.

Personally, I respect his project but think it lacks the dialectical sophistication required to avoid turning theatre into a party cell seminar. Particularly absent in his theory is a place for mediation. But we can take comfort from the fact that in may ways he failed himself to follow his theory, which is to say that he wrote some great plays.

The Brechtian rubric under which Chaplin is presently under consideration is not aesthetic, however. Here his perspective is only secondarily artistic, if that. This is hardball for the propagandist. Even so, it remains valid to apply the rubric to art as long as we have accepted the premise that the art is intentionally committed to disseminating an ideological point of view. I think this is fair when it comes to Chaplin. So here comes my stab.

I have already called him courageous, That's what started this.

I have already said that he is not Jurgen Habermas, so he ain't the king of keenness. But he does get past moral condemnation of injustice to recognize structures of exploitation and oppression.

How much more manipulative skill can an artist have? It is precisely this that conflicts with Brecht's aesthetic theory, but as said above, the fault lies with Brecht not Chaplin.

At this point, the applicability of the rubric seems to break down. In Lenninist fashion, Brecht is addressing a marginalized (would-be) revolutionary vanguard. Chaplin is in the belly of the beast of mass commercial culture. So I don't know what to say about his judgement. But...

Being in the belly of mass commercial culture, Chaplin has to be awarded full points for his cunning. Whatever his artistic failings, it is exactly these that make him so universally accessible and phenomenally popular. He is subversive.

OK, thanks for inviting me to do that. I can't believe I am sitting here and not outside on such a beautiful day. What have you done to me Jardine?


Keaton loans from the collection. Groovy. But I feel bad about hanging on to the stuff of yours I already have 'cause I'm going to New York in a few days and I still haven't seen the Renior.

About meta-moviemaking, I can get with it... but only so far. I get pissed off pretty early with self-referential, circle-jerk hermeneutics. Or as Steely Dan sings it: "Show business kids making movies of themselves, you know they don't give a fuck about anybody else."

And Dan:

Well the nice thing about Keaton is he never takes it seriously enough to be accused of wanking off. No matter what, fun comes first with Buster.

If it is any consolation, I was out there in the glorious sunshine and it was fucking COLD, man. I was trying to shoot hoops and I could barely feel the basketball. Fortunately, I'm such a bad player that it made no difference to my game.

You say Brecht's work, by which I assume you are refering to the five requirements of truth and not his actual plays themselves, lacked the dialectical sophistication required to avoid turning theatre into a party meeting. Perhaps, though I wonder if the same couldn't be said of Chaplin or any artist, who really does need the room to be at times if not self-contradictory, at least ambiguous and difficult to pin down. Don't artists need, as Whitman argued, the philosphical room to contain those contradiction?

Well, the day is done, and so you can feel less guilty about spending time yammering away about Chaplin, Keaton and Brecht. If it is any consolation, I bet Brecht loathed Keaton.



Then Ben:

Gotcha. You make me curious, though, about his artistic pretensions. I think it is correct to say that Chaplin considered himself a capital ''A'' Artist. Are you saying that Keaton considered himself a small ''e'' entertainer?

raked the rest of the leaves and whatnot at the end of the day - in shorts. You are a wimp from the BC interior and I am a he-man from the Saskatchewan steppe. That's not cold man. And it sure ain't COLD. In your defence, I was wearing gloves.

When I said his dialectics were insufficient, I most definitely was referring to Brecht's aesthetic theory specifically and not his plays themselves. I have never thought about his plays in terms of methodology and I did mention that I think he is a great playwright. (Good poet too.) Nor was I referring to his five-point essay on telling the truth. You are confused. The aesthetic theory to which I critically referred is a third source from him. It is not something that has been inferred from his plays by me or anyone else. It is a body of theoretical writing Brecht himself did, some of it expository, some in poems. I have only a partial and mostly a second-hand familiarity with this work. So really what I was referencing is "the Brechtian model."

It is this model that I think is lacking the dialects required to embrace the theatrical contradiction; namely, allowing the audience to identify emotionally with the character's subjectivity while simultaneously enabling them to subject these characters to objective intellectual scrutiny. The plays themselves enter into this contradiction in spades (although so much depends on the particular production), but the theoretical model tries to bully its way through it. Emotional identification is rejected as bourgeois melodrama and objective scrutiny is promoted as socialist critique.

The non-correspondence between Brecht's theory and his practice is not well accounted for by a Whitmanesque body-electric singing. The problem is not that I-contain-multitudes so naturally I give off internally contradictory sparks by the hour. No, Brecht's non-correspondence is the result of what the Chinese Communist Party used to call an ultra-left error. (They sure don't make those these days.) An ultra-left error is the dogmatic dismissal of pre-revolutionary what-have-you as necessarily non-revolutionary or even anti-revolutionary. This sort of non-dialectical ''out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new'' easily leads to The Terror on the street. In artistic culture, it involves in-house book-burning and all that. Simply put, Brecht meant to short-circuit bourgeois theatrical conventions as such on behalf of socialist realism. Well guess what? Those pre-revolutionary conventions are not purely bourgeois. So don't throw out the baby with the bath water dude. Granted, it's more complicated than this. The Hegelian concept of aufhebung is so dialectical it sounds like Orwellian double-speak. It means in one process to abolish, preserve and transcend.

And Dan:

To abolish, preserve and transcend simultaneously? Sounds like a religious experience. Or death. Mebbe both.

Oh, and I freely admit to being a pussy about the cold. And I hate rain, too (most people who wear glasses share a distaste for rain). But I'm an Okanagan kid, so I can withstand heat pretty well, while also being able to swim pretty much all day long, though these days I'd settle for a warm place to hang my hammock.

Then Ben:

For Hegel, dialectical Reason, with a capital "R", or The Dialectic, with not just capitalization but also the definite article - this stands above religion; and yes, Death is given a speaking part. (Marx is not an Idealist and therefore his historical dialectic is nowhere near as comprehensive as Hegel's. Gotta love that sanity. But the definition stands.)

Conversations with Ben VII--A Silent Film Slapdown: Chaplin vs. Keaton

Ben sed:

I did notice at Cinemarati that my comment about Chaplin being the thinking man's Keaton was a source of horror for a couple of folks, you included. So I thought I would take this moment to explain my thinking. Of course, I can't promise that my explanation will provide comfort to those of you so disdainful of my statement. I would appreciate it if you would post this as I don't know how.

What does it mean to be "the thinking man's" what-have-you? I suspect that I am coming at this phrase from a different angle then B. Frazer and D. Jardine. I suppose that for them the phrase connotes an intellectualism that regards direct appeals to the emotions as alien to the given approach. The degree to which serious and deep themes are explored is actually secondary to the primary mandate of refraining from tugging at the heart-strings. According to this understanding, it surely makes no sense to refer to Chaplin as the thinking mans' Keaton. Chaplin plucks on the harp of sentiment without restraint whereas Keaton's paradigmatic stone face says it all, which is to say, nothing. Chaplin wears his heart on his sleeve. On the sleeve of Keaton you won't even catch a glimpse of his kidney.

However, I understood "the thinking man's" not in terms of whether or not feelings are blatantly exploited. Alternatively, I prioritized precisely what this definition overlooks at worst or at best relegates to secondary consideration; namely, the degree to which serious and deep themes are explored. Since we are all educated and sophisticated (aren't we?) I'll just use the good ol' shorthand for this. The meaning of life is investigated far more profoundly by Chaplin than it is by Keaton. The social, political and ethical ramifications in Chaplin - well, there are such ramifications, that's the point. These are not readily available from Keaton. An argument could be made for an implicit metaphysic in Keaton open to a brand of anarcho-existentialist anti-ontology. But we'll leave such over-interpretation to the over-educated and over-sophisticated (won't we?). Yes, that's the over-thinking man's Keaton.

It is a bad macho holdover from the Rationalism of the European Enlightenment to posit emotional engagement and intellectual inquiry in a dichotomy. This is hardly the place to develop this thesis, of course. Suffice to say that scientific objectivity or philosophic neutrality is at best partial, which is to pun, not purely impartial; and furthermore, art openly married to emotional appeals is not ipso facto to that extent intellectually shallow.

I should conclude by mentioning that nothing here addresses the comparative question of comedy between Chaplin and Keaton. I would be hard pressed to maintain that Chaplin is funnier. Or even that his humor draws as consistently on a context of pathos. I am suggesting, however, that Chaplin ultimately has more to say about the human condition and part of the reason why is that he can make you laugh... and cry. Call it: Slapstick with enough brains to talk to the heart. I called it: Thinking man's Buster Keaton.


And Dan Responds:

You have soccer fields, I have basketball courts. And school fairs. No time to comment right now, unfortunately. But, while I would never deny that Chaplin was a great artist, I do wonder about the depth of his ideas. Sure, he was a right-thinking lefty. But was he a deep-thinking lefty? I have my doubts.

Still, a peerless performer.

Keaton, on the other hand, was a far superior director. More on that later.

Then Ben:

I have to admit that I am more familiar with Chaplin than Keaton. I think I've seen The General and Go West, that's it and years ago. I should also point out that I wasn't making a distinction between performer and director, but rather looking at the issue in general. However, if pressed I suppose the performer was at the front of my mind when I said my piece and certainly I have not made a study of Keaton as a director. I do know, however, that he is regarded as superior to Chaplin as a director. This is the same sort of after-the-fact assessment that tells us, correctly I believe, that the Stones were a better rock band than the Beatles, though it didn't seem so at the time. On the other hand, the Beatles are probably the best pop band of all time. I wonder if a similar evaluation might apply to Chaplin and Keaton insofar as "pop" in music and sentimentality in cinematic narrative might be coming out of the same low-brow, gut-level, truth-zone.

Speaking of low-brow, this brings me to your observation regarding the crudity of Chaplin's politics. Bertolt Brecht wrote a pamphlet outlining six requirements for telling the truth. I remember only the first requirement. Courage. It's a vital, protracted cultural revolution that has brought us to the point of having art for art's sake. But for goodness sake, how much time have we got for it? What about the rest of the revolution? No, I would never compare Chaplin to Jurgen Habermas. I'm comparing him to Buster Keaton. And it seems to me that Charlie has more to say about real social struggles than Buster does. Isn't that the debate topic here? The not-deep-but-right-thinking-lefty vs. the not-thinking-but-better-directing-apolitico? Anyway, all I was trying to say - both in the original Hero discussion and just yesterday - is that slapstick for Chaplin is a strand in a more profound human fabric. This is not the impression I got when I looked at Keaton, admittedly long ago and in passing.

You differentiated the performer and the director. I tried to refine my position according to this differentiation. I don't mean now to retract my refinement, but I want to go back to the topic without this differentiation in mind. I want to attend to a general conception by which performer-directors may legitimately be interpreted, and even more so for triple-threats like Chaplin and Keaton who are writer-performer-directors. The holistic category I have in mind is: persona.

I am going to grossly oversimplify but I do believe my reductionism does get to the essence of the problem. Simply put, then, the competition is between mugging and deadpan. Just as white is the presence of all colours and black is the presence of none, mugging is the presentation of all passions and deadpan is their absolute absence. Both of these are caricatures or personas or masks even to the nth degree. Chaplin splashes paint everywhere. Keaton is a blank canvas. If we weren't dealing with silent personas, Chaplin would utter every conceivable expression, (just as much exasperated fury as tear-jerking sentimentality), and Keaton would consistently speak in a monotone.

Now, according to pure-theory dialectics, neither one of these is better or worse, truer or falser. But according to materialist dialectics, Chaplin has the upper hand because his position is realistic. Again, these are fantastic, farcical, slapstick men. In this respect, both are equally unrealistic. I am at a different level of abstraction, that of persona. Chaplin's persona is the realistic positing of the emotive human being. Keaton's persona is the negation of this - and is only realistic (and funny, maybe funnier) with an implied Chaplinesque persona as it's ground.

"The thinking man's" is perhaps too ambiguous or even misleading to apply to this realistic, humanistically prior ground. Insofar as this is the case, I am happy to retract my original statement. But I maintain that Chaplin is "deeper" than Keaton for all the reasons I have given. For me, the final proof of this is his greater popularity - I know, I know, what kind of snob am I? - especially with children.

And Dan:

Again, with no time to comment because I must develop myself professionally, while Keaton was indeed often stone faced, he was not exclusively so. There are many great moments in his films where the facade cracks and he gives into the the extreme emotion of the moment, and I'd argue those films are all the more powerful for it. More importantly, he did an awful lot of self-expression through his body, which was certainly a marvel of circus magnitude. He did shit on camera that only (here we go again) Jackie Chan could rival. And more interestingly, he filmed many of these moments in ways that were innovative and interesting. If you wanna get a handle on Keaton, you need to see Sherlock Jr., which is probably his signature statement about the role of the artist in art, and vice versa.

Still, to what purpose, you might well ask? What was his larger message?


[Birds Sing. Rivers Run. Time Passes.l Dan Continues...]

Okay, I'm running on fumes and trying my best to make sense of the series of random thoughts rifling through my head, but after looking at everything that has come rambling through me, I reckon that when I think of Buster Keaton, I am struck by his stillness, his zen-like calm. The energy and tension in his films are dependent primarily upon contrasting Keaton's cool with a world going rapidly and inexorably to a comic Hell. That probably means he isn't all that far removed from someone like Steve McQueen, whose persona was built upon the same sort very American rugged individualism and cooler than cool demeanor. What does distance Keaton from McQueen the fact that most of his characters are somewhat oafish and awkward, existing on the edges of society, and like Chaplin's tramp, unwelcome in "polite society." However, while you can see the social conscience working (sometimes a bit too blatantly and clumsily) in Chaplin's work, Keaton is pretty clearly an existentialist, for whom questions of politics and policy are considered in the vaguest of ways as forces operating against him in the same way that a hurricane might.

Most of Keaton's pictures were set outdoors, which certainly allowed him to show off his tremendous athleticism in some pretty awe-inspiring settings, but it also allowed old Stone Face to emphasize the vast difference between wee Buster and the big ass world he moves through. While Keaton observes the world that is determined to screw him over, he is biding his time, trying to survey the lay of the land so as to find the best way to get what is coming to him. Fools rush in, and all that. Keaton bides his time, then strikes when it is most apropos. Storms may strike, avalanches may thunder down, waterfalls might await to swallow you up, but remain vigilantly observant and you will see there is always a way out. So his films are often about trying to forge your way in a hostile world, where the elements (and I believe those elements of nature are intended to by, to some extent, symbolic) may conspire to make it nearly impossible for the little guy to endure. Yet he does.

Keaton the director/writer is known for his mechanical aptitude and studious precision on the film set; the gadgets and gizmos of filmmaking really fascinated him. Even though the world he moves through appears uninterested and implacable, Keaton's characters, often victims who are initially quite inept (whether physically or socially) and unable to gain entrance into world they desire, are determined to find a way into this world nonetheless, often through the machinery that originally tries to exclude him. So, while his apparently blank face allows us to initially project onto it our own thoughts/feelings, you quickly see the wheels are always turning with Buster. Still, one must wonder, does this make his characters vehicles of social change or merely tiny atomic units bouncing around the universe?

Well, while looking for meaning in Keaton's work, I noticed that the machinery of his work—the gears and sprockets of the camera, the translucent wonder that is film—is also often and important part of Keaton's attempt to find his place in the world. In two of his best films, Sherlock Jr. and The Cameraman, Keaton studies the role that film plays in constructing our reality, and the part it plays in helping an artist like himself understand the world. Sherlock Jr, the film Woody Allen cited as a key influence on his Purple Rose of Cairo, presents the world of film as a dreamscape wherein Keaton's character (a projectionist) finds himself at first totally out of his depth, but who is ultimately able to tear the fabric that separates dream and reality, and find truth in one through the other. Clearly, this is a signature statement of sorts, as Keaton conveys the central role of art in shaping our perceptions of reality and our understanding of Truth. Still, this presents art as a private and personal concern, and not something that operates in the public realm as an agent of social relevance and even change.


Okay. Well. Part of the reason for Keaton's controlled facial expression is that he does not cry out for our sympathy, but rather attempts to bend to the forces around him until he can find a way to bend around them and achieve his subversive goals. It is therefore quite important that most of Keaton's characters are, like Chaplin's tramp, downtrodden, or at the very least, honest working men, generally quite inept and awkward in society, and that their success in the face of adversity is usually at the expense of the respectable world that seeks to keep them where they belong. Still, the criticism that Keaton, unlike Chaplin, was not able to develop in his film a world view that included an awareness of the social, economic and political forces that held these sorts of characters in their place, is probably valid, in that Keaton's interests were more vaguely existential. And as you suggested in Kurosawa's films, this is a fine place to start, in that you can get up a mighty good rant at the injustices of the world via an existentialist outlook but it is only when one moves beyond that to construct a vision of a humane alternative that you can lay claim to creating art that has affects and engages the real world. I would like to point out that there are moments of social awareness in Keaton's work—such as the comic attack on racism in one of his shorts, Neighbors, wherein he is accidentally half-black faced, which results in his character suddenly becoming the victim of most unwelcome agitation from a cop who subsequently ignores Keaton when he turns white-side-round. However, it is true that he falls far short of Chaplin in this regard. Still, all too often in Chaplin you have evidence of his short-circuiting of thoughtfulness in favour of cheap sentiment. And while I completely concur with you that we have created a false dichotomy between intelligence and emotion, and that is not only possible but entirely desirable to both think AND feel deeply, there is a difference between touching on strong emotions and manipulating them through shopworn devices. It is precisely this lack of sentimentality and reliance on easy emotion that helps to give Keaton's films a more modern sensibility and feel than some of Chaplin's more maudlin efforts.

And, again, this is not to deny the importance of conveying honest and powerful emotions, as I would argue that Keaton does a pretty decent job of this when it is necessary and appropriate. Keaton can work in that ball park. For instance, when he starts to strangle his girlfriend, whom he has just risked life and limb to rescue in The General, then stops and gives he a big kiss, or earlier in the same film, when we are given the shot of a forlorn, romantically-rejected Keaton sitting on train's crossbar, rising and falling, mirroring character's emotional state, as it slowly leaves the station, I'd argue that Keaton is doing a fine job of engaging us emotionally. That his character is PRIMARILY stoic does not mean that he is exclusively so, and indeed I think that he holds off from showing emotion for so long makes his eventual expression thereof all the more effective and memorable.

So, I doubt that this will affect your belief that Chaplin is a thinking man's Keaton, but I figured I owed Buster what little defense I could muster up.
I can tell you're sincere. You used a bigger font.

Then Ben Agen (redux):

First of all, I found your essay very educational, so thanks for that. It has shown me that I really don't know shit about Keaton and I am an asshole for pretending that I do. More's the better, you have made me want to study his films. With no false modesty, however, I have to say that I whipped up a darn provocative position for a pretender. Also, in my defense, I was defending myself in the first place. Remember, I felt that I had been misunderstood. The "thinking man's" phrase is past even heuristic utility at this point and we should put it to rest. I already admitted that it was misleading if not inappropriate. And of course both Chaplin and Keaton are geniuses of the art. So what is the debate about at bedrock?

I've got to have some politics. You say that Chaplin's politics are blatant. I say they are courageous. You say that his social conscience is intellectually clumsy and emotionally manipulative. I say it's direct and honest. You treat him like he's irritatingly politically correct. I remember that the U.S. State Department effectively deported him from the country. We've had conversations wherein we both bemoan the fact that cinema today is so much propaganda for the system. Modern Times is STILL a fucking radical film! Today. Right now. This minute. My father took me to see Chaplin when I was a kid. His autobiography was around the house, (never read it). So I'm prejudiced. Thinking man's, schminking man's. Better director, better performer, better screenwriter - whatever. MORE IMPORTANT ARTIST. And Dan, even though you are the cinephile and I am the ideologue, I believe that if you read between the lines of your essay, you will hear yourself agreeing with me.

Speaking of reading between the lines, I'm all for it. When I announce that I must have politics, I don't want to give the impression that I expect to be presented with a manifesto everytime I look at the screen, or even that manifestos are the best way to be political, or even that art must always be politically saturated. No, all I want is enough historical perspective or social engagement or ethical concern or realist epistemology or materialist ontology or whatever - to seize as an Archimdean point for political potential. The film doesn't have to preach. It has to have enough substance to afford political interpretation. This is what I meant, for example, when I said that I was trying to unpack Red Beard. It's not that RB is reducible to the socialistic content I adumbrated. It's rather that this interpretation is producible from the film. The same goes for the critique of supposedly apolitical movies that are actually ad campaigns for the ruling class. This actuality must be unpacked. (These days the stuff pretty much jumps out of the suitcase on its own. That's "pre-fascist shit," to quote my pop, yet again.)

In regard to Keaton, you take a preliminary step towards doing a little unpacking yourself. That is what especially inspires me to study his work. It sounds like Sherlock Jr. investigates a cognitive problematic with considerable finesse, although you also indicate that it doesn't locate epistemological confusion within a moral whirlwind, like Rashomon, or technological options in a genuine social context, like Camera Buff. Still, I will sit down and shut up for philosophic exploration even if I can't figure out if it is revolutionary or counter-revolutionary.

You analyze Keaton's deadpan. Even though I am not an example of it myself, I do understand the power of the not-said. However, in the real world, dialectical opposites are asymmetrical. That's why the contradiction is dynamic. The imbalance is in motion and creates change. The not-said in and of itself is meaningless. Empty silence. It draws its power from the history of the said and the not-yet said or potential to-be-said in the future. You say that Keaton's persona is primarily that of the stoic. I realize that you are using this term in a colloquial manner but even so I want to point out the historic fact that Stoicism was a philosophic outlook developed and adopted by slaves. Whatever emancipatory potential it may have, it ultimately rests on somebody else speaking out before you can break out of your chains.

Alright, let me get this straight. Buster Keaton is the thinking man's... Steve McQueen?

And Finally Dan:

Yeah, when I use the term stoic, I do so in a colloquial sense, but I am also convinced that there is deep emotion (and thought) behind the mask, as I've tried to suggest in the examples I offered up. I believe that Buster was instructed to be a stone face by his dear old vaudevillian dad, who convinced him that it was the best way to wring a laugh out of an audience. But when Keaton moved away from vaudeville and into film, I think he continued to see the value because of the tension it creates--when IS this guy going to blow? And I believe that Keaton's physical comedy is the expression of that pent up frustration/tension, and that is a primary reason why it is so damned explosive and remarkable. The body speaks in ways that the face is not allowed. And, like I said, there are some terribly moving and tender moments in Keaton. And they feel earned.

Also, I do not intend to denigrate Chaplin. The man was a rare genius; wildly popular and remarkably daring. A peerless movie performer.

Oh, and by the way, I did a little research. Turns out there are five difficulties for writing the truth, according to Brecht.

Courage
Keenness
Skill
Judgment
Cunning

Brecht says: "Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons. These are formidable problems for writers living under Fascism, but they exist also for those writers who have fled or been exiled; they exist even for writers working in countries where civil liberty prevails."

Damned interesting stuff. Wanna take a stab at applying that to Chaplin's work?