Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Steamboat Bill, Jr.
1928 · Charles Reisner · Steamboat Bill, Jr. on Sightlines
A father takes his grown son to buy a hat. The son is wearing a beret, and the father wants it gone. What follows is a small comedy of fitting. Hat after hat goes onto Buster Keaton's head, each one wrong in a new way, and the face beneath them never changes. William Canfield, Sr., a steamboat captain built like a riverbank, is trying to turn his college-boy son into someone who belongs on a river. The son just stands there and receives the hats.
Keep that image in mind, because the whole film is in it. A world presses on a body, and the body doesn't seem to push back. It doesn't give way either.
Deleuze has a name for the kind of cinema this is: the action-image. In his account, most classical film runs on a circuit. A situation acts on a character, the character takes it in and reacts, and the reaction changes the situation. Perception leads to action, and action resolves things. He calls the big version of this the large form. It starts with a whole milieu, like a town, a frontier or a river economy, and lets it press until someone does something decisive. Steamboat Bill, Jr. is built on exactly that plan. River Junction is the milieu: two captains in a business rivalry, the father's rickety old boat against the rival's gleaming new one, a jail, a hospital, a main street of building fronts. Deleuze calls this surrounding situation the synsign. It is the world that encloses the hero and demands something of him.
Why bother with the vocabulary? Because it tells us what Keaton is up to. A comedian of quick gags can work anywhere. Keaton insists on the whole milieu, built for real and shot so you can see all of it, because his jokes are about the circuit itself: how a situation reaches a person, and what that person can do about it.
The hat shop is what Deleuze calls the imprint, the bond through which a place and a character mark each other. The father is the river made flesh, and he wants the river's mark on his son. Ernest Torrence plays him as a glowering mass, and his disappointment drives the first two acts. Those acts take their time. The film settles into the reunion going sour, into Willie falling for Kitty King, the daughter of his father's rival, and into the son's steady failure to measure up. A Keystone picture would have burned through all of this in ten minutes of mayhem. Keaton grew up in that grammar, which Tillie's Punctured Romance codified in 1914, and he rebuilt it. Every gag here has a cause, a place and a consequence.
Then there's the face. Keaton's famous stillness looks like the opposite of action. It isn't, quite. Following Bergson, Deleuze describes a living being as a center of indetermination. It is an interval, a small gap where a stimulus arrives and the response hasn't been chosen yet. Most screen heroes cross that gap instantly. Keaton lives in it. Willie takes in everything and shows nothing, and the laugh lives in the delay. You watch him absorb a situation, and you wait, and the world keeps moving while he decides.
When the storm hits River Junction, that interval becomes a matter of life and death. Wind machines tear at the set, building fronts fall, and Keaton is blown down the street like loose paper. Deleuze would call this the binomial: force against force, man against milieu. Keaton tilts it. The milieu is enormous and the man is slight, and his weapon isn't strength. It's placement. In the shot everyone remembers, a whole house facade topples toward him and the open attic window passes cleanly around his motionless body. He survives by standing on exactly the right square foot of ground and not moving. Here the decisive act is to hold still.
This is where film theory comes in. André Bazin argued that when the truth of an event depends on two things sharing the same space at the same moment, cutting is forbidden, because montage would turn the event into a trick. Keaton's unit reached the same conclusion on the set. The cinematographers, Bert Haines and Devereaux Jennings, frame the facade shot wide and hold it unbroken, so his whole body and its relation to the wall stay legible. The stunt was done for real, in a single take. For Deleuze the frame is a closed set, a system of information. In this frame only one piece of information matters: the wall is real, and the man is really under it. The camera works as a witness, not a magician.
Keaton had been building toward this shot for most of a decade. In Back Stage (1919), a collapsing facade spared him through an open upper window, the same mechanical idea in rough draft. In One Week (1920), a storm turned a house into an adversary. Our Hospitality (1923) set him against a real waterfall, and Sherlock Jr. (1924) dropped him from a water tower with his face unmoved. Safety Last!, made the same year as Our Hospitality, made the same deal with its audience: the danger only works if you know it isn't faked. In Steamboat Bill, Jr., all those lines meet, and the set becomes the antagonist at full scale.
What did it do to narrative? It shows that the action-image can be built around a hero who barely acts. The film's spine is a father-son story, and the storm makes it physical. A boy judged too soft for the river now has to withstand the full weight of the world his father belongs to. The comedy and the stakes are a single event, and the stunt becomes a kind of existential acting.
Once you know the history, you can feel a melancholy in all this. This was one of the last pictures Keaton made with his own independent unit under Joseph M. Schenck. It underperformed, and within months he was at MGM, a studio whose assembly-line methods had no room for his gag-first, improvised way of working. He later called the move the worst decision of his career. Sound was arriving too, since The Jazz Singer was only a year old. Charles Reisner is the credited director, but the controlling intelligence is Keaton's, and it reached its fullest form just as the conditions that made it possible were closing.
The film leaves you with a good question: what is a hero who refuses to look heroic? Watch the hat shop again with that in mind. The father keeps offering a shape, and the son wears each one with the same patient face, as if waiting to learn which world will fit him. When the wind comes, that patience is the only tool he has. Watch where he stands.
Concepts in play
- the large form of the action-image — The whole River Junction milieu (the rival steamboats, the business feud, the jail, the hospital, the street of building fronts) presses on the hero until the storm demands a physical response.
- the encompasser (synsign) — The river town is designed as a machine for comedy. The rickety boat against the gleaming new one and the town the cyclone dismantles make up a surrounding situation that calls for action.
- the imprint (empreinte) — The hat-shop sequence, where the father tries to replace his son's beret with something manlier: the river milieu, embodied in Torrence's captain, trying to stamp itself on the citified son.
- the binomial (man vs. milieu) — In the cyclone sequence the set itself becomes the antagonist. Wind machines and collapsing buildings threaten and rearrange themselves around Keaton's body.
- the interval / center of indetermination — Keaton's Great Stone Face, a fixed point that registers chaos without discharging it, and the stillness inside catastrophe on which the facade gag depends.
- the frame as closed set — Haines and Jennings use wide, stable framings that keep the whole body and its spatial relation to the set legible, most of all in the unbroken single-take facade shot that certifies space rather than commenting on it.