The Heavy Bear

Chapter 4

I DECIDED THAT a Buster Keaton film marathon might help alleviate my gloomy condition. Perhaps existential comedy could trump existential angst. Perhaps Keaton’s ghost had appeared precisely to lead me back to his great work. It was worth a try. I decided to start with the shorts and proceed to the classic features of the mid-1920s. But I wouldn’t keep going to the talkies. As James Agee so beautifully expressed it, Keaton’s “dark, dead voice, though it was in keeping with the visual character, tore his intensely silent style to bits and destroyed the illusion within which he worked.”

Ideally, this marathon filmfest would take place on a grassy slope under the stars. There’d be a faint scent of salmon and river mud and wet springer spaniel on the air, and my father would still be alive. But I had long ago put away childish things, including desperate attempts to reclaim a vanished world. Even so, I was a man, like Keaton in the early 1930s, seeking escape – from Time’s winged chariot, from the inevitability of grief, from the nagging sense that everything turns to ash and dust in the end and that no amount of human creativity can divert that cold and hard trajectory. Suddenly, one dark night of the soul as I approached my fiftieth year, the world turned dangerously cold, and I could not melt the ice from my eyelids. But I was not Buster Keaton. Drinking binges leading to an ill-advised marriage to a mentally unstable nurse were not the answer for me. (They weren’t for Keaton either, as he would find out.)

Keaton’s art, however, could be an answer. Looking back, it was astonishing that I’d ever seen any of Keaton’s films as a boy. They weren’t shown in regular theatres, they weren’t often shown on TV and there was no YouTube. I must be one of the few adults of my generation, in fact, who had the revolutionary experience of seeing the young Buster Keaton in action while I was still a child myself. And just how did this happen?

It was as simple as it was unlikely. Our neighbour in 1969, Ken Atkey, worked as a Paramount film rep in Vancouver and somehow he had access to rare copies of silent movies. (Over ninety percent of the silent movies ever made have vanished, due to the deterioration of the nitrate stock with which they were made.) Mr. Atkey was the sort of man who, like Keaton, loved toy trains. Indeed, he had constructed a complicated papier mâché layout complete with mountains and tunnels and tiny figures of people and animals that took up the entire top floor of his house. Perhaps some sort of gadget involving trains woke him up every morning, as in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the 1985 film starring Paul Reubens (a kind of Keaton throwback, who American society threw back after police caught him m**********g in an adult theatre). I didn’t know. But I did know that Buster Keaton as a middle-aged man so loved toy trains that he set up a system in his Hollywood home whereby a train delivered drinks to his guests. Oh, yes, and the single most expensive shot in the entire history of silent film production occurred in Keaton’s The General, and involved the blowing up of a real engine as it crossed a trestle bridge. As critics point out, only a few of Keaton’s films do not have trains or water.

I was fond enough of trains, but not so fond that a toy set would help me forget my teaching anxiety, the increasing worldwide gap between the rich and poor, or the mysterious haunting of the September night. Perhaps watching Keaton’s entire silent oeuvre, including the late silent promotional film he made in Canada the year I was born, would help. It certainly couldn’t hurt. At least I didn’t think so.

I made my vague plans more concrete: since I did not wish to have a toy train or a robot wake me up each morning à la Pee-wee Herman, I would, every night before going to bed, watch a Keaton film. And I would keep a record of the experience, tracing how the intersection of Keaton’s life and my own might tell something true about a thinking, feeling human’s plight at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

But teaching started later that morning; “the toad, work,” as Philip Larkin called it, squatted on my life.

Ah, but don’t give up on me, Buster, I cried. I won’t let you down. “This was no playhouse,” Robert Frost writes, “but a house in earnest.” Life is funny, but there’s a reason we don’t smile about it. As Shakespeare points out, “there is nothing / either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

I vowed that I was not going to think about income-earning middle age, or the cynical, false, life-denying, pornographic, materialist world. I was going to watch The Navigator again, and retreat.