Making an American Citizen:Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and the Silent Comedies of Assimilation
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Early twentieth-century American silent cinema served to homogenize European immigrant audiences and integrate them into American culture and society. Recent debate on the role of silent film as a social institution has tended to center around its external aspects such as a low entrance fee to movie theater and minimal language barriers, which enticed immigrants to theater and introduced them to American box-office democracy and consumerism. Relatively little attention, however, was paid to "content-oriented" analysis of American silent films in terms of their assimilationist impulses except for those in the "ghetto film" that dealt explicitly with poverty and ethnic difference of the immigrant. It was also rarely the case that slapstick comedy, the single most popular movie genre during the silent film era, received critical attention from this perspective. This paper argues that Buster Keaton, who with Charlie Chaplin had been a comic giant of silent film, incorporated the immigrant subject into his slapstick comic films fragmentarily and allegorically, in some cases adopting many characteristics of the ghetto film. Unlike Chaplin's films, political and social concerns are less often directly at issue in Keaton's silent comedies such as The Cook, Neighbors, My Wife's Relations, College, Our Hospitality, and Steamboat Bill, Jr. Yet the struggles of Keaton's protagonist, as a visitor, to accommodate to an unfamiliar place, from which his funny, acrobatic gags are derived, metaphorically illustrate the hardships of the immigrants in the new land who frequented movie theaters to escape from the realities of work and tenement life. His films that often conclude with a happy ending thus convey a strong assimilationist message to immigrant audiences who projected their situations onto those portrayed by Keaton and managed to get consolation from them. Discussing Keaton's films along with selected American ghetto films and Chaplin's anti-social films like The Immigrant, In the Park, Easy Street, Modern Times, and Monsieur Verdoux, this paper explores the representations of immigrant experiences underlying his entire film oeuvre.
Abstract
Early twentieth-century American silent cinema served to homogenize European immigrant audiences and integrate them into American culture and society. Recent debate on the role of silent film as a social institution has tended to center around its external aspects such as a low entrance fee to movie theater and minimal language barriers, which enticed immigrants to theater and introduced them to American box-office democracy and consumerism. Relatively little attention, however, was paid to "content-oriented" analysis of American silent films in terms of their assimilationist impulses except for those in the "ghetto film" that dealt explicitly with poverty and ethnic difference of the immigrant. It was also rarely the case that slapstick comedy, the single most popular movie genre during the silent film era, received critical attention from this perspective. This paper argues that Buster Keaton, who with Charlie Chaplin had been a comic giant of silent film, incorporated the immigrant subject into his slapstick comic films fragmentarily and allegorically, in some cases adopting many characteristics of the ghetto film. Unlike Chaplin's films, political and social concerns are less often directly at issue in Keaton's silent comedies such as The Cook, Neighbors, My Wife's Relations, College, Our Hospitality, and Steamboat Bill, Jr. Yet the struggles of Keaton's protagonist, as a visitor, to accommodate to an unfamiliar place, from which his funny, acrobatic gags are derived, metaphorically illustrate the hardships of the immigrants in the new land who frequented movie theaters to escape from the realities of work and tenement life. His films that often conclude with a happy ending thus convey a strong assimilationist message to immigrant audiences who projected their situations onto those portrayed by Keaton and managed to get consolation from them. Discussing Keaton's films along with selected American ghetto films and Chaplin's anti-social films like The Immigrant, In the Park, Easy Street, Modern Times, and Monsieur Verdoux, this paper explores the representations of immigrant experiences underlying his entire film oeuvre.
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