The Action Scene: The Systems Logic of "Steamboat Bill, Jr."

In the film’s climax, Buster Keaton’s interest in systems and the embattled nature of existence reaches new heights of self-reflexivity.
Jonah Jeng

The Action Scene is a column exploring the construction of action set pieces, but it also considers “scene” in the sense of field or area: “action” as a genre and mode that spans different cultures and historical periods. By examining these two levels in tandem—one oriented toward aesthetic expression, the other toward broader contexts and concepts—this series aims to deepen appreciation for and spark discussion about action cinema. 

There is a moment during the climax of Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) that captures an essential element of Buster Keaton’s brand of comedy. Buffeted by hurricane-force gales that are ripping apart the town around him, Keaton seeks cover in an empty theater (I will be conflating actor and character in this piece because the Keaton persona is so consistent across his films that individual roles become practically irrelevant). As he dashes indoors, his foot snags a length of rope, causing him to plop onto the floor. Fumbling about irritably, he kicks loose the rope, but this motion dislodges an attached sandbag in the rafters, which drops squarely onto his head. He falls again in a daze and, upon staggering to his feet, sees what looks like a lake behind him. He makes a run for the water only to discover that the “lake” is in fact a trompe l’oeil backdrop, which ripples idly as he slides down its painted surface. 

In this segment, a bare bones premise—Keaton looks for shelter in a theater—yields a parade of mishaps. With Keaton, things don’t go wrong just once but five, ten, twenty times. The exact number is arbitrary (the number of pratfalls could’ve been halved with no change to the overarching plot), but the result always seems to feel like more—more than is needed to get the (narrative) point across, more for the sake of more. Film scholar Tom Gunning would consider this theater scene an offshoot of “cinema of attractions,” a form of early cinema in which storytelling was less important than providing the viewer with a string of sensational sights. From an entertainment standpoint, this approach makes sense. Audiences came to watch Keaton perform stunts-heavy slapstick, so the more, the merrier. That said, as Keaton gets bombarded again and again by an arbitrarily extended series of adversities, this arbitrariness takes on the air of calculation, of hardship artificially—and sadistically—prolonged rather than emerging “organically” from the story world. The foregrounding of artifice is, to a degree, part and parcel of “cinema of attractions”: spectacular moments tend to take us “out” of a story, making us ask “how did they do that?” That said, Keaton’s systematic victimization here feels positively Sisyphean, lending his films the pathos of little people buffeted by forces beyond their control.

This sense of existential bombardment, played out in the multiplication of gags across the film’s runtime, manifests also in the film’s construction of space. Consider how, in the first shot of the theater segment, we see the rope already dangling on the right side of the frame, and, on the left, the painted backdrop. By establishing the presence and relative spatial positions of these props ahead of time, the film gives the impression of a carefully calibrated mise-en-scène, one in which all parts are in place well before they become relevant. Relatedly, the film—like with many of Keaton’s other works—tends to have gags unfold within a single shot, directing and re-directing our attention to different elements that were there all along but are narratively “activated” only when Keaton interacts with them. After the guy is knocked down by the sandbag, our eyes are on him as he staggers to his feet; it is only after he attempts to dive into the “lake” that we are asked to notice the backdrop. The way the scene repeatedly shifts our focus to previously overlooked image elements broadens our awareness of the filmic space. We come to sense that all elements in the mise-en-scène—and the diegetic world in general—are potential obstacles for our embattled hero, seemingly conspiring to make his life as difficult as possible.

The refusal to cut during gags reinforces the sense of a spatial and mechanistic relationship between props, objects, and the entire physical setting of the film. All are framed as being part of the same system, an impression that is redoubled by the typically wide framing of the shots, which allow both the full workings of an onscreen mechanism and Keaton’s subjection to it to remain in clear view. When our hero attempts to clamber over a fence, not realizing he’s grabbed onto a swinging gate rather than a stabler section, we see the gate blown wide open with him on it, such that his climb ends up bringing him back where he started. The use of a single static shot lets us appreciate the apparatus of the gated fence and the way its specific structure thwarts Keaton’s search for safe harbor. Furthermore, this moment, among many others, involves a touch of dramatic irony: we see that Keaton’s plan won’t work a beat or two before he does, thereby reinforcing our impression of an encompassing system that structures and overdetermines the fate of the entrapped. 

On one level, to note the film’s mechanistic synergy is simply to appreciate the film’s choreography. Even as compounding mishaps convey ever more chaos, the meticulous orchestration of elements continually reminds us of the extensive planning and coordination that went into the sequence’s design. One of the chief joys of a Keaton film is precisely to witness a well-oiled machine, to see real-world contingency defied again and again by an increasingly improbable string of domino-like cause-and-effect, near-misses, and seeming coincidences. The lengthier takes and wider shots enhance appreciation of the film’s achievements, allowing a stunt to unfold in “real” time and “real” space sans “cheats” like cutaways or obscurantist framing. At the same time, however, the fact that the choreography is clearly choreographed intensifies the sense of the character’s embroilment in a cosmic joke. From his perspective, the misfortunes are simply a part of life, but, looking in from the outside, we see that his troubles are by design. The backstage scene, in having a literal apparatus of stagecraft be that which trips him up, seems to be a winking acknowledgment of his circumstances.

In his famous analysis of the Tiller Girls, a late-nineteenth century dance troupe, film theorist Siegfried Kracauer sees in the dancers’ mechanical and uniform movements an expression of the factory-like rationality of capitalist society, one implication of his argument being that cogs tend to reproduce the logic of the larger machine. Playing one such cog, Keaton intriguingly evokes such a microcosmic relationship in his performance. Here as elsewhere, the actor’s modus operandi is a certain measured panic, which defers full-on freak-outs by a few beats of stunned stillness and underreaction. Consider the moment when an entire hospital is uprooted by a mighty wind, leaving our convalescing hero exposed to the elements. Rather than immediately fleeing in terror, Keaton is seen lying still as a rock. The first to move is his head: via a series of halting head turns, we see telegraphed his gradual coming-to-terms with the situation’s gravity. Then, his torso: he props himself up, seemingly having decided to take action. His splayed legs have not yet moved, and, even when they eventually do, his facial expression remains hilariously flat. Watching Keaton, one becomes aware of his gestures as gestures—discrete, deliberate micro-expressions that, together, form an impression of the character’s emotional state. Because he either delays or underplays the expected response, we search his features for clues to his emotion, picking up on every little movement that the actor makes—an incremental tilt of the head, a slight furrowing of the brow, a marginal quickening of the steps. In other words, Keaton’s performance itself ends up seeming like it’s assembled from parts, a miniature version of the machinery to which he is in thrall.

All these observations about Keaton’s comedy—the proliferation of gags, the mechanization of both space and performance—can be seen throughout his oeuvre. What sets the climax of Steamboat Bill, Jr. apart is the figure of the wind, which is responsible for virtually every obstacle our hero faces. Like with the backstage mise-en-abyme, the wind functions as a metaphor for Keaton’s plight of being battered not just by this or that material obstacle but their collective orchestration by some invisible force. Foregrounded here, however, is the fact that we cannot see the wind either. In this scene (of which the backstage segment is itself a part), it becomes difficult to pretend that we are watching Keaton solely “from the outside,” safely laughing at his misfortune. What has become explicit is the reality that behind any tangible system are forces that defy apprehension. Even though swinging fences, frothing waters, and toppling buildings are visible to us, the absent presence of the wind suggests that what we see are mere effects of larger, ungraspable phenomena: the off-screen wind machines, for one, but also the entire apparatus of Hollywood production that made the film possible; the society within which we and the film are embedded; and even the big cosmic question mark of our place in the universe. In this moment, we experience a new level of kinship with Keaton. All of us are mere detritus, caught in a storm.

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