Today Philip Kennicott published in the Washington Post this review of the new three-volume, seven-DVD set of the major works of silent slapstick star Harold Lloyd. While it's good to see the underappreciated Lloyd get some appreciation under almost any circumstances, I want to protest not so much Kennicott's overblown statement that Lloyd's movies epitomize "the last, regnant, unalloyed era of Whiteness" as the implications Kennicott draws from them.
Kennicott mentions the caricatural depictions of a Chinese man, a Jew and blacks in Lloyd's movies and says that these stereotypes prevent Lloyd's films from being "universal." This strikes me as an extremely facile assessment. Why, for instance, did Kennicott choose only race as a category? ("Chinese" refers to nationality; Judaism is a religion.) And why not break it down further? Why not say that only white men can identify with Harold Lloyd? Or only white men born in Nebraska in 1893 and named Harold Lloyd? Why not keep going, in fact, until each of us can identify only with movies that are about us and which we ourselves write, direct and star in? To be precise, the racial and ethnic caricatures in his movies suggest that Lloyd didn't think of these groups as members of his target audience. That's an entirely different matter from saying that members of those groups, as individuals, couldn't therefore identify with him. "Caricature" can't have anything to do with it—the frantic comic idiom of Lloyd's movies makes everyone (except "the girl") look ridiculous.
What makes Lloyd's films universal is primarily the slapstick itself (and secondarily the comic plots). The great African-American comedian Bert Williams said in 1918, "One of the funniest sights in the world is a man whose hat has been knocked in or ruined by being blown off—provided, of course, it be the other fellow's hat! . . . This is human nature." Williams didn't say, "This is African-American nature," he said "human nature," and he was right. The logical extension of Kennicott's comments would be a thoroughly committee-ized form of art (which would seek to represent among the characters every conceivable category in a way every member of that category would find inoffensive) premised on the total narcissistic solipsism of the audience. Clowns like Lloyd and Williams have always known better than this.
Article comments
1 - David Wester
Slapstick does seem to have a universal funniness to it. Gracelessness is timeless.
2 - Alan Dale
The uncooperativeness of the physical world, including our own bodies, knows no boundaries.
3 - Tan The Man
Slapstick is universal. You're right. One can also mention that the films were made at a time when racial stereotypes ran everywhere. Onecan't judge a man whose entire world "thought" the same thing. Cultural relativity is a must.
4 - Alan Dale
Yes. I think Kennicott's view is a very literal-minded one, totally divorced from historical context. His review reads like something a kid would write in a cultural sensitivity class to please the teacher.
5 - Joanie
I was attempting to post on this for several days...the release of the collection, that is. I knew you'd like it (having emailed back and forth about Lloyd and Keaton, etc.) and didn't get a chance to do so. I'm glad you've mentioned it, though.
YAY! Lloyd on DVD! As for other people's opinions about his work, pshaw! Unnecessary. We know what we think of him.
6 - Victor Lana
One of my favorite all-time film moments is when Lloyd is hanging off the hands of a clock on the wall of a skyscraper. Sheer genius. I don't know about the other stuff, but it is plain funny.
7 - Alan Dale
Favorite Lloyd moments would have to include the gag with the suitcase and the car in the short Get Out and Get Under, the giant tearing the balcony off the building in Why Worry?, the little jig in The Freshman, eating a powder puff he thinks is a cookie the girl has baked in For Heaven's Sake, and climbing up the tree then falling down it in The Kid Brother (described beautifully by Walter Kerr in his classic work of critical history The Silent Clowns). Plus I love the way he delivers the dialogue in The Cat's Paw and in the first half of Preston Sturges's The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.
8 - Jamal Sledge
Hey Alan,
Being a huge film geek and African American, I must say I find Philip Kennicott's racial observation to be outright silly. (Reading it reminds me that the art of film criticism is at an all time low.) I don't even think Armond White -- who is famous for his race-based criticism to film -- would be narrow-minded to Lloyd's work simply because its style of painting particular ethnic/racial groups reflected a certain era of thinking. The caricatures never get in the way when watching Lloyd. Kennicott gives one the impression that Lloyd was a distant comedic cousin to D.W. Griffith! Absurd. Maybe Kennicott should watch the penultimate scene in Preston Struges' "Sullivan's Travels" where the Joel McCrea character was hit with the epiphany that comedy is the genre that can appeal and uplift anyone universally, regardless of race, nationality or ethnicity.
9 - Alan Dale
I agree, Jamal: silly and worse. Kennicott's attitude, reflecting the dead-white-male critique of western civilizaton that has infected the study of the humanities in the universities, is so limiting--for the very minorities it supposedly speaks on behalf of. It's downright insulting, the assumption that anyone's imagination is so narrow he can't identify with a work that doesn't present a "positive" literal image of himself (in contemporary terms, of course). The liberated mind freely ranging through the span of history means nothing to the politically correct. Why should we squeeze ourselves into these censors' cages just because we happen to be Chinese or Jewish or black or whatever? (My mother is Jewish and she loves Harold Lloyd--but then she was born in Nebraska so maybe that explains it.)
TCM is having a Harold Lloyd festival this Sunday starting at 8:00 pm. They're showing Safety Last!, Girl Shy, Grandma's Boy, The Freshman, Why Worry? (my personal favorite of his features), and Speedy, plus a number of shorts.
10 - lionel libson
When critics such as Kennicott attempt to categorize ethic/racial groups and their sensibilities, he is guilty of the very stereotyping he attacks...we are either human or we're not. Lumping people into a homogeneous mass is foolish. Believing that culture is valid only in terms of one's "identity" is idiotic. I am well-read, Jewish, middle class, and can assert that there are virtually no Jews in great literature(Shylock, maybe Fagin)...yet I've managed to recognize myself in the characters depicted, from Huck Finn to Studs Lonigan...what's wrong with me?
11 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment. I'm with you, of course, on filtering culture through what is currently meant by "identity." I'm not with you on the lack of Jews in great literature, though: the works of Issac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth have made up any deficit in that department, I think.
12 - lionel libson
I was born in the late thirties, and "missed" the Jewish writers you cited. Sholem Aleichem and Itzhak Peretz were the Yiddish icons of my youth. More importantly for me, Shakespeare, Twain,O'Casey, the Greek playwrights touched universal chords.
Trained as an artist/photographer, I was aware, early on, that the finest art emerged from cultural borrowing--Van Gogh and Japanese prints, Picasso and African sculpture, etc. El Greco was NOT Spanish, Durer of Hungarian descent. The best artists recognize no borders, wear no ethnic tags.
As a "red-diaper" baby with Bolshevik parents, I see Kennicott, et al, as heirs to the McCarthy red scare era. Stay within ill-conceived cultural guidelines or risk censure.