You will see many, many instances of what I'm calling the multiplicity principle in Keaton's work. And you will especially see it in these astonishing, repeated sequences, and I'm talking now in a way about The General, in which we see the Keaton hero. Who sort of is steadfast but also a muddler. He keeps doing the same things. They're not really likely to help them. And then, he gets help from the outside. Keaton's jokes repeatedly depend upon the idea of accident in a certain way. And I'll come back to that in a second. So think about the multiplicity principle, the difference between entertainment and art. Again this is a principle I'll come back to, and try to illustrate with greater concreteness and greater leisure in later lectures. But I want you to be aware of these issues.So The General can be understood as a kind of culminating text in at least two ways. It's a culmination of Keaton's career. That is to say the jokes and gags that are enacted in the film recall many earlier Keaton films. And the basic character of The General is the basic character of the Keaton hero. A steadfast, unremarkable young man who perseveres in the face of catastrophic difficulties with mostly comic expectations, very small expectations of success. Who often models through almost despite himself.But I say, almost despite himself. And this is where the complexity of Keaton's vision of life comes in. Why I'm saying that Keaton moves from being merely a jokester, or being merely a great entertainer, to being an artist. His jokes embody an idea of what experience is like, and it's a very powerful, mordant, mature idea of experience. Because what happens again, and again in the small jokes, the sequence jokes in Keaton's work, especially in The General, and in the larger film, what happens again, and again, is an adventure in which a steadfast, relentless, young, hero does everything he can to accomplish his goal. And it's obvious that he's up against forces far beyond himself, that he could never-- there's an unbelievable miss mismatch between this minuscule, tiny, figure and his powers, and the forces he's fighting against.His one Keaton film called The Navigator, in which the Keaton character-- even more than with the locomotive in The General-- has to navigate an ocean liner. And he's alone on the ocean liner. And you see running up and down into the engine room, back up to the bridge, running all over the ocean liner in great difficulties. There's a wonderful film, late film made in 1928, just his last silent film called Steamboat Bill Jr. In which he dramatizes an astonishing hurricane. And a long, extended sequence in which we see him trying to escape the hurricane, trying to contend against this natural force that's so gigantic.So The General is a culmination in the sense that it gives us another version, and the richest version so far of the adventures of this kind of Keaton hero. But what makes it metaphysical or philosophically interesting is that what this joke repeatedly does, and what the structure of the whole film repeatedly says is something like this, we get through, we make it through life. We get through life mostly not because of anything we've done but because of accident. We live in a contingent universe.The idea of contingency is at the heart of Keaton's jokes. We could call them jokes about contingency. The word contingent is interesting. Remember it means libel, but not certain to occur. It means possible. It means dependent upon, subject to, conditioned by. In law you can say that something that is contingent is dependent for its effect on something that may or may not occur. As in a contingent estate or legacy. In logic, the same thing, dependent upon some condition, or upon the truth of something else. Not true a priori, not necessary.So what Keaton's jokes constantly do is they show us two things. They show us a world in which human agency matters. Because if this should schmendrick didn't keep-- that's a Jewish word for schlemazel, clown-- If this schmendrick did not keep on so steadfastly, he wouldn't survive. But he's keeping on so steadfastly still wouldn't make him survive if there weren't the intervention of mere accidents, stuff he has no control over.This one magnificent moment in One Week, for example, where he's standing at a certain place, and the house behind him falls down. And he's happens, just by accident, to be standing by the open window, and the house falls, so he doesn't get hurt. He used this joke more than once in other films because it's such a great one. But it's a perfect example of what I mean, a partial example of what I mean. Because he is not responsible for the fact that he escaped. On the other hand, because he was trying to get away from difficulties, maybe he was in that particular position because of acts of his own.So what this joke and vision says about the world is something that's true. We all love the idea that we've gotten to where we are by our own acts, by our own conscious control. The truth of the matter is that life is much more contingent than that. It's partly accident, it's partly luck. And something deeper than that. Keaton's vision of the universe is one which suggests that while the universe may screw you up sometimes, it won't always do that. The universe in Keaton's world is not angry at us, it's indifferent to us. It doesn't give a damn about us. It's not aware of us. It's too big for us.You can't come away from Keaton's films without a simultaneous sense on the importance of human action, of human agency. But also of the inadequacy of human agency. Of how contingent every experience, every adventure, every personality is. And that and that meaning, that idea of the world is a profound one, I think. So that even though Keaton is telling a joke, embedded in the joke is a kind of interpretation of life. And embedded in the film is a kind of interpretation of life. When you're looking at The General, I think you will see multiple examples of this kind of thing.Let me say one last thing, I haven't mentioned anything about the structure of the film, I'm a little out of the way there. Watch how the film is structured. It's a much more complex variation on what I said about Lonedale Operator. The film begins with him going up the track. And then, the second half of the film has him going back down the track. You may not be aware of it, but actually the film in a certain sense has its tail its mouth. When he goes up the track, he has a series of adventures. When he comes back down, he has a series of adventures that in a certain sense replicate what's happened before. The film mirrors itself in a way, repeats itself. It's incredibly elegant structure. And the elegance of the structure reminds us also-- its own way, also reminds us of this principle of contingency that's at the heart of Keaton's vision of the world.Let me conclude by reminding you again what I said earlier. When I call Keaton a philosopher, and a metaphysician and a wise person about the world, I do not at all mean to suggest that if ask Keaton to explain how we thought about the world he could do this. That that's the job of professors and literary and film critics. What I'm saying to you is that Keaton, like many great artists, had an intuitive understanding of the world. Which he expressed with greater, and greater complexity in the medium of the cinema. And in The General, we have what is ultimately a culminating instance of that.One last point about the film as a culminating example. It's not just the culmination of Keaton's career. It's a culmination of silent film as a whole. Keaton would have expected his audience to recognize the degree to which this film was a parity or a mockery of famous historical films made by D.W. Griffith. It puts down the pretentiousness and the martial valor that's celebrated in so many of the historical spectacles that Griffith and other serious directors were making at the time.And it also goes back in a certain way to the very roots of film. What was the very first narrative film? Or one of the very first? Also a film about a train robbery, called The Great Train Robbery. Well, this is about a train robbery, too. And who is the central character in this one? Really, a train is the central object, the central-- more interesting in some ways than the character himself. And there are many other ways in which the particular features of the general allude to, and in some sense summarize, the history of silent film. And all of the original audience coming to see The General would have been, of course alert to these connections. Would have been literate in these connections. Wouldn't have needed footnotes or professors to tell them about it. Because they would have lived through the history. They would have been through the history of the previous 20 years. They would have seen other Keaton films. They would have seen D.W. Griffith. They would have the history of the medium of movies in their heads when they sat down to watch The General. So that's another way in which The General is a profoundly culminating text.
Reference :
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-011-the-film-experience-fall-2013/lecture-videos-notes/lecture-2-keaton-2007/
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