Silent Film Comedy and American Culture

This absorbing study of early 20th Century American Culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags expressing the unconscious wishes and fears of the modern age, in a way that foreshadows the concerns of our own celebrity-obsessed consumer culture. Bilton's study of early 20th century American culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags bypassing rational thought to express the unconscious fears, wishes and concerns of the modern age. Silent film comedy, with its childlike love of the illogical, the destructive and the anti-social, seems to suggest a form of comic revolt against the mechanisation and the uniformity of the machine age, but the book also charts how a new consumer culture sought simultaneously to tame and contain these energies, redirecting them in the service of a newly emergent mass culture. Not just a film history of the silent era, Bilton also provides a provocative and lively engagement with the origins of mass culture, tracing the origins of Hollywood's dream factory and alongside it the roots of our own irrational, childlike, celebrity-obsessed consumer culture Front Matter....Pages i-viii A Brief Chronology of Silent Film Comedy....Pages 1-12 Introducing American Silent Film Comedy: Clowns, Conformity, Consumerism....Pages 13-32 A Convention of Crazy Bugs: Mack Sennett and the US’s Immigrant Unconscious....Pages 33-77 Accelerated Bodies and Jumping Jacks: Automata, Mannequins and Toys in the Films of Charlie Chaplin....Pages 78-110 Nobody Loves a Fat Man: Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle and Conspicuous Consumption in the US of the 1920s....Pages 111-136 Dizzy Doras and Big-Eyed Beauties: Mabel Normand and the Notion of the Female Clown....Pages 137-154 Consumerism and Its Discontents: Harold Lloyd and the Anxieties of Capitalism....Pages 155-174 Buster Keaton and the American South: The First Things and the Last....Pages 175-194 The Shell-Shocked Silents: Langdon, Repetition-Compulsion and the First World War....Pages 195-216 Conclusion....Pages 217-222 Back Matter....Pages 223-244 An introduction to silent film comedy and American culture: clowns, conformity, consumerism -- A convention of crazy bugs: Mack Sennett and America's immigrant unconscious -- Accelerated bodies and jumping jacks: automata, mannequins and toys in the films of Charlie Chaplin -- Nobody loves a fat man: conspicuous consumption and the case of Fatty Arbuckle in 1920's America -- Dizzy Doras and big-eyed beauties: Mabel Normand and the notion of the female clown in American silent film -- Consumerism and its discontents: Harold Lloyd and the anxieties of capitalism -- Buster Keaton and the south: the first things and the last -- Sleepwalkers on parade: the shell-shocked silence of Harry Langdon -- Conclusion