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You should also read
a summary history here, and you won’t regret it.
If you want more food for thought, we have this extremely disturbing video essay:
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Then & Now, The Psychology of Racism in Jim Crow America, posted on Nov 11, 2021 When YouTube disappears this video, download it. If you don’t find this story upsetting, then you’re not emotionally developed. |
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One more, and I learned a lot from this one:
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ASU SCETL, What was the American Civil War Really About? with Allen Guelzo, posted on Apr 23, 2024 When YouTube disappears this video, download it. |
Is the Movie Pro-Confederacy? |
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Short answer: No.
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Long answer: The story here gets extremely frustrating,
simply because the Confederate setting of the story now sets nerves on edge.
Currently, a
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Unfortunately, in this country we now have a new cult of divisiveness,
exemplified by the new cult of hate radio, hate TV, and hate social.
This began to plague our country
beginning in about 1979 and it is now bearing the most unpleasant fruit.
In recent years, we have had violent thugs parading the Confederate flag and murderously smashing a car into pedestrian peace activists,
smashing into the Capitol building intent upon hanging the vice president and murdering members of Congress,
while, again, parading the Confederate flag.
In times so charged as these, even the most innocuous story about Confederates will get our alarm bells clanging.
We are on high alert, and for good reason.
We need to remember, though, that at the time The General was made
and for the next seven decades, it was not seen as political in any way.
Nobody suggested that it was, and had anybody suggested such an absurd idea, that person would have been laughed out of the room.
Our milieu has changed, and context changes perceptions.
Sometimes that is good, and sometimes, such as in the particular case of this movie, it is most unfortunate, indeed.
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Because this will be brought up (and has been brought up),
we should admit that Buster did once say,
“You can always make villains out of the Northerners, but you cannot make a villain of the South.”
That was an intelligent,
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To put it even more simply, in a comedy the lead character needs to be the little guy.
If the lead character is the big guy, the result is not a comedy.
Whether the little guy is right or wrong hardly makes any difference.
He just needs to be the little guy.
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Unfortunately, Buster’s shop talk has now been misconstrued by those who are not in his shop,
misconstrued as Confederate sympathy.
(Tom Dardis, in his truly awful book on Buster, quoted that line on
page 139 but he seems to have taken it as Buster’s political stance rather than as Buster’s narrative craft.)
What Buster did not think needed explaining now needs explaining.
The South had been quite villainous, without any doubt.
No sane person would argue otherwise.
That is hardly the whole story, for, in truth, the North had been every bit as villainous.
(Conflict resolution was not a strong point on either side, to put it mildly.)
After several years of horrendous conflict, and rather surprisingly, the South was defeated.
It is not easy, and it is seldom proper, to make a comedy at the expense of a defeated people.
Any master of narrative and story construction realizes that.
That is what Buster was talking about, and his meaning is obvious to professional writers.
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If Buster can be said to have had any Confederate sympathies,
then they were just part and parcel of his affection for all earlier Americana, the romance of American history.
A careful reading of The General does not support the view that it is on the side of the Confederacy.
The story is subtle, so subtle that Buster probably did not fully realize what he was doing,
but he was doing it all the same, at least at a subconscious level:
He showed that loyalty to the Confederate cause was a rigid dogmatic reflex, almost cult behavior.
Look at the hotheaded attitudes displayed by the Lee family; look at the attitudes of the volunteers in queue,
the attitude of Frederick Vroom’s character.
That speaks volumes.
They are not thoughtfully considering options; they are fanatics.
The Northerners are presented as being at ease with themselves, somewhat more reasonable, broadminded, and flexible.
The story becomes, in a sense, a battle of impassioned true believers versus cool-headed problem solvers.
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It looks like Johnnie is getting ready to pop the question,
hence his awkwardness during his visit to his beloved on this Friday morning.
He is oblivious to being followed by two young worshippers.
He is so focused on his goal that he doesn’t even notice the object of his affection standing right beside him.
The more his girlfriend tries to make herself accommodating, the more nervous he becomes.
Finally, it is his moment. He will ask, but more intruders burst in to march off to war.
His girlfriend sends him away to do his duty.
Within minutes, Johnnie finds himself shunned by everybody.
Not his favorite morning, is it?
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Fortunately for Buster’s narrative, and by sheerest happenstance, Fuller had been a Southerner.
That accident of history was the deciding factor in the story’s viewpoint.
Despite that viewpoint, what do we make of Johnnie, the Fuller character?
His concerns are for his locomotive (responsibility to his employer) and for his girlfriend.
As far as the Confederacy is concerned, he seems to have no interest whatsoever.
He wants to enlist only to make his girlfriend happy, not for any dedication to the cause, which seems to mean nothing to him.
In rescuing his locomotive and his girlfriend, he unwittingly wins a battle for the Confederacy.
If there’s a political message, it is not
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Why in the bloody heck does any of this need explaining?
It should be
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If I may plagiarize a statement from Dana Stevens’s new book, Camera Man (p. 136),
Buster was not making a commentary on the rightness or wrongness of either side of the conflict.
He simply found that the situation offered comic possibilities.
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Buster directed a grand total of three movies set in the south, though not a frame was shot in the south:
Our Hospitality,
The General, and
Steamboat Bill, Jr..
Though he is never judgmental, Buster does not paint a flattering picture of southern society.
He’s not bitter, but he gets close to the border of bitterness.
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With The General, Buster did something careful and thoughtful, but he has never been given credit for it,
and he never acknowledged his thinking about the story construction.
He never articulated it, probably not even to himself.
He was a history buff, enough of one to recognize that people on both sides of any conflict are just people.
The politicians (and bankers and investors and industrialists) who rule over them can make their violent decisions,
but the people at the bottom rungs of society are just people.
When a war is declared, the people fight to protect their home towns and their families and friends.
Many fight only because of the draft.
Some fight because of conditioning.
Few fight for the principles (or purported principles) of their rulers.
For this story, Buster dropped the politics entirely.
He showed both Confederates and Yankees as just people, professionals, doing their jobs to the best of their abilities,
protecting one another, engaging in fights not out of personal animosity,
but only because they are caught in a situation that is larger than they can possibly understand,
a situation that is larger than they can possibly control.
This was true to Buster’s usual preference of avoiding heroes or villains in his stories.
More to the point, in 1926, a mere six decades after the cessation of hostilities,
the topic of the Civil War was still explosive.
The acrimony left over from that war was still raw and often lethal.
It was not a widespread hostility; it was only in pockets of society, but it was real.
(It still is!)
Buster dared not make heroes or villains even if he had wanted to.
Buster also emphasized the aspect of the story that friendship or enmity is reduced to the mere color of a costume.
Both Confederate and Yankee switch uniforms when needed, and they are instantly and fatefully judged only on the dye in the fabric.
It is absurd; it is grown men behaving like four-year-old girls playing
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If you had mentioned this to Buster, he would have been somewhat exasperated.
If you had explained, in detail, what you had perceived in his story, he would have backed down and agreed,
and he would have said he had never thought of it that way before.
His thoughts about how to build a character and how to tell a story were intuitive and on autopilot in the back of his mind.
He was intensively aware of narrative technique
(which I am absolutely certain he studied from books or from a private tutor),
but he was almost entirely unconscious of narrative purpose.
He did not ponder such things.
Buster was an artist, but he did not realize it;
he thought he was just another comic trying to get laughs.
Nearly every story he told had profound meanings, subtly conveyed, but he did not realize it;
he thought he was just coming up with stories about a poor sap that audiences could snicker at.
Nearly every movie he directed/edited had a lasting value, but he did not realize it.
Though he struggled and fought mightily to make the finest movies possible,
as far as he was concerned, his movies were meant to circulate for two years or so and make some money
and then be tossed away like so much junk that had outlived its usefulness.
Buster usually portrayed the everyman, but he seemed not to know the significance of the word,
and so he laughed aloud when critics mentioned this.
He genuinely thought such scribblings were hilariously wrong.
In a February 1967 interview,
Buster’s biographer, Rudi Blesh, said something fascinating:
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Warren Bower: I suspect you put your finger on the time, at any rate, when the transition —
if that’s not too formal a word — from superb performer to an artist probably took place.
It was when he, when he recognized that he had something essential to say,
a theme to develop in almost all of his work,
in all of his movies.
Rudi Blesh: I think he did it in some cases, Warren, almost unconsciously. The development of it, when it was pointed out to him, when we were working on the book, actually amazed him. He’d say, “Yes, that picture does represent something going on a little further.” Warren Bower: Well, then, it just means that that was under the surface. He did it out —. Rudi Blesh: Yes. He did it intuitively, I think, a great deal of it. |
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Buster was far from unique in that respect.
The greatest artists probably tend to think of themselves
as mere craftsmen trying to earn a living and trying to have a little bit of fun while doing so.
When they hear intellectuals extricating deeper strands of thought from their works,
they probably find the experience genuinely funny and rather ridiculous.
Heck, even Irving Berlin would toss the scores from his Broadway musicals into the trash when the shows closed.
He didn’t think they had any value past the
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Was that too blurry?
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By EILEEN FOLEY
Women’s News Service
PHILADELPHIA — “I never
heard him tell a joke in our 26 years of marriage,” says Mrs. Buster Keaton of the man who made millions laugh with his stony-faced antics.
And they are still laughing —
through re-release of late com- ic’s silent films from the 1920’s which gave him a place in the quartet of all-time great come- dians along with Charlie Chap- lin, Harry Langdon, and Harold Lloyd.
“Buster told great anecdotes,
mostly about his days in vaude- ville — but actual gags? No, he never told a joke in his life,” said his widow. “His sense of humor was very basic and physical — half the things that happened to him were funnier than any gag. Action and reac- tion were the important things.”
Mrs. Keaton, at 47 an attrac-
tive blue-eyed brownette, was here from California to speak at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is premiering a fes- tival-series of Keaton films.
Biggest Booster
Mrs. Keaton is naturally one
of Buster’s biggest boosters — she is the first to agree with critics’ acclaim of his “native genius for physical action,” and his “timeless artistry in panto- mime.”
But both she and her hus-
band, who succumbed to lung cancer at 70 last January, were amused by philosophical inter- pretations drawn from his work — such lines as “the imperturb- able man surrendering to fate without a whimper, the un- daunted little man against the world.”
“He used to sit and giggle his
head off at some of that,” she said. “So I slipped and fell in a mud puddle — what’s the deep meaning in that,” he’d say. He was really a simple man, never conscious of hidden meanings or obscure messages.”
Buster Keaton had run
through a fortune, two marri- ages, alcoholism, and a nervous breakdown or two, and had bounced back again by the time Eleanor Keaton met him.
“He loved to play bridge,”
said the former dancer, “and his door was always open to friends and their friends in kind of a continuing private bridge club.
“But I was in and out of his
house for cards for a whole year before he ever noticed me.”
And what caused the comic,
whose unsmiling on-camera mask was his trademark, to take note? Her unsmiling face.
Pulled Boner
“I had apparently pulled a
boner at bridge, and my part- ner was being verbally abusive, and loud. I didn’t say a word, just stared him down until he ran out of breath, then I walked over to the closet, got my coat, and left.
“Buster turned to one of my
friends, said, “What was THAT” and phoned me later to invite me to a wrestling match.” She was 22 and he was 44 when they married.
“I was very mature for my age because I’d been working since I was 14,” said Mrs. Kea- ton, who was born around the corner from Graumann’s Chin- ese theater in Hollywood. |
“And Buster seemed young,
because he kept current. I guess one of the reasons his films are so good today is that he was ’way ahead of his time.”
She turned to her business
partner, Raymond Rohauer, film curator for the Gallery of Mod- ern Art in New York, who helped the Keatons secure rights to all of Buster’s old films.
“Remember Buster’s film
about the demountable house?” she asked Mr. Rohauer. “It was so funny, him trying to build the house after the villain had mixed up the box numbers. And that was before pre-fabri- cated houses were even thought of!”
Named Hens
With money from his 1957
movie biography, “The Buster Keaton Story,” the comic bought a 1½-acre “ranch,” where the couple lived, along with a St. Bernard dog, a cat, and 12 red hens which he named personally.
“He liked to garden, went for
a swim every day in our pool, and played bridge,” said his wife. “We were both in the tour- ing production of “Once Upon a Mattress,” and he did guest TV spots and commercials. Never did anyone direct him or write material for him.
“He always did that himself,
used to get in a corner of the patio and stand there making expressions and gestures. I told him it’s a good thing there are no strangers around or they’d think you were the village idiot!’
Occasionally his two sons,
from his first marriage to ac- tress Natalie Talmadge, would visit with his six grandchildren, aged 10 to 21.
Great Barbecuer
“Buster — mostly I called
him ‘Babe’ — was a great bar- becuer. He did half the cooking in the summertime,” said Mrs. Keaton, as she bit into a chicken sandwich at the Barclay. His cocktail hour consisted of two beers — his daily quota in re- cent years.
“He was completely incompe-
tent about business. I had total charge of all the money during our marriage — he never signed a check or wrote one, even. He’d either steal a $5 bill out of my wallet or else show up with palm outstretched,” she said, smiling.
“But Buster was great at mak-
ing things with his hands — said if he hadn’t been born into show business, he’d like to have been a civil engineer. His miniature railroad won a blue ribbon at Los Angeles hobby show and he loved making things with erector sets — he even built an unbelievably complicated Rube Goldberg contraption with an overhead track so his mother could have her daily shot of bourbon without ever leaving her chair.
The animated Mrs. Keaton
continued to tell of his other “in- ventions,” adding that the fro- zen-faced comic had had a lot of laughs before his death. “He was happy as a clam the last 15 or 20 years,” she said. |
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The seeming contradiction between what Buster thought he was doing
and what the rest of us could vividly see that he actually was doing is not such a baffling mystery.
The problem is more semantics than anything else.
Buster was born with the mind of a first-rate scholar but was brought up in a society of uneducated craftsmen.
He loved to read histories and mysteries and
Popular Mechanics, but not a wide range of other subjects.
When he exercised his craft, he thought through it seriously.
He understood the characters in his fictions, he gave them backgrounds and motives,
and he did so with remarkable insight.
He understood perfectly what was true to life and what was not.
To him, that was just common sense.
Those with standard or superior educations would watch his creations and immediately recognize fine art.
Buster had never been taught fine art, and so he had no idea what the others were talking about,
because it sounded like a lot of foolishness.
The terms he used and the terms his admirers used were radically different, but they meant the same things.
Though Buster had tremendous insight into people’s personalities,
he refused to be introspective, and introspection is probably a word he never heard.
I’m not much of a fan of introspection myself (it’s too close to self-absorption),
but Buster did all he could to be utterly superficial.
His entire self had to be on display on the outside. WYSIWYG.
He did not want anything within.
As insightful as he was in so many ways, he had no background in talking through the subject of insight,
and so when he ran into misunderstandings, he had not a clue how to react.
He either clammed up or acted out, or, for much of the 1930’s, he would just get drunk.
I am thumbing through his as-told-to autobiography for the first time since about 1975,
and it is a stunning document, both for the amazing stories it tells
as well as for the inadvertent stories between the lines, stories Buster did not realize he was putting in there.
There was so much he was clearly capable of pondering, but refused to,
because it would have launched him into unfamiliar territory.
And that’s a bit of a tragedy.
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Oh gawd that was a tedious read, wasn’t it?
It was even more tedious to write.
Someone else did something even more tedious.
He wrote an essay
explaining why The General was explicitly a work of white supremacy.
Terribly tedious. Terribly wrong. Terribly argued.
I can’t even bring myself to read the whole thing because it is so preposterous.
Exasperating.
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An afterthought:
When you watch the movie with Carl Davis’s music or with Gaylord Carter’s music,
or with some of the other scores,
you will recognize that they are constructed largely of medleys of Northern and Southern songs.
Personally, I love all those songs, North and South. Great music. Lovely stuff.
It does NOT follow that I like the war or the ideologies of either side,
and it certainly does NOT follow that I have any sympathy for slavery.
The war was an utter failure of diplomacy, and both sides were responsible.
When we were in kindergarten through maybe fourth grade, we sang some of these songs in school,
Northern and Southern songs, during music class, with the teacher at the upright piano.
They were fun.
They were great.
There was no ideology that came along with them.
They were just part of our birthright, and we all enjoyed them.
I was thrilled to find such collections on YouTube,
and then my blood ran cold to read the comments,
such vile sentiments as,
“Proud to be southern and not ashamed of what my ancestors fought for.
Looks like we might have to take up the musket again if things keep going down hill.”
Egad.
So many, many, many comments along those lines.
Rather than fight to revive the past, we should work to make something better for the future.
And we should make more great music, too.
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Josh Boak, “Biden bestows Medal of Honor on Union soldiers who helped hijack train in Confederate territory,”
AP Associated Press, Wednesday, 3 July 2024.
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