turning the sissy into
history
by Douglas Messerli
Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle (screenwriter and
director) The Bell Boy / 1918
Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton are bell boys
and elevator operators, along with other roles as necessary, at the Elk’s Head Hotel,
which offers “third-rate service at first-class prices.” For the guests leaving
the hotel, they are lucky to be sped off with their luggage, and for newcomers
there is no service when someone like the manicurist Cutie Cuticle arrives,
when both men vie for her attentions, gathering in her room just to make
certain she’s comfy. When the impatient desk clerk, Al St. John, cannot find
his bell boys, he himself makes a visit to her room, where he doesn’t find the
boys—who having hidden beyond door, exit the moment he enters with him seeing
them—but is perfectly satisfied to get a glimpse of the new hotel guest.
Arbuckle’s The Bell Boy is filled with various comic skits that
are played out often as if Arbuckle and particularly Keaton were cartoon
figures. The Century Film Project critic, “popegrutch,” describes the
work as having “the heady atmosphere of a live-action cartoon, where anything
can happen, and the characters seem to be made of unbreakable plastic.”
At
various moments one or the other discovers himself with a head trapped in a
vise between the floor of the elevator and lobby wall, atop the famed Elk horns
that adorn the high-ceilinged lobby, upon a wood see-saw that sends him into
eternal space, or, late in the film, thrown from room to room like a rag doll
in a bank shoot-out between cops and robbers. Some of these scenes are quite
funny, but just as many are meaninglessly messy and violent, particularly the
overlong bank scenes wherein at the moment Keaton and St. John arrive to
pretend to be robbing the bank, real bank robbers have already entered the bank
to seriously undertake the task. Fatty, hoping to pretend to be the hero
actually turns out to be a real hero, with the help of his co-workers, capturing
the villains and turning them over to the police. He wins Cutie at the end, but
St. John and Keaton get the rewards of endless friendship.
The most fascinating set of scenes of this near-feature film concern the
sudden appearance in the lobby where Fatty and Keaton are cleaning the floor of
a man with an extraordinarily long and full beard that reminds Keaton of either
the devil or Rasputin. Both men are terrified of him, until finally he finally
takes off is hat—revealing he has no horns—and sashays across the room with
such a mincing swish of the hips that Fatty cannot resist a quick “fairy” dance
behind his back. A moment later both men and guest are playing patty cake
behind the desk with a great deal of zeal and even some apparent delight.
When
they finally discover that he has entered the hotel only to get a shave, Fatty
suddenly becomes a barber who provides more surreal-like surprises that even
Bugs Bunny might not have imagined, first doing over the man to look like
General Grant. A few moments later he’s turned him into Abraham Lincoln, and
finally, on a comic war-time note, converting him into the Kaiser Wilhelm. He
begins further restitution, but suddenly is interrupted by other events which
take the film many scenes further before he reenters the tonsorial parlor to
find the man steaming beneath hot towels. We can hardly wait to see who he has
transformed him into this time, but Cutie enters before we can witness the
magic. And we finally catch a glimpse of him as a now beardless effeminate man who’s
absolutely delighted by Cutie’s manicurial” talents.
This character (performed by Charles Dudley), much like Percy Dovewing
in Arbuckle’s His Wife’s Mistakes—a film in which Arbuckle also
demonstrated his barbering talents—has no other purpose except to make people
laugh. He is not in search of a wife or secretly involved with a woman that
might hope to demonstrate that underneath his queer behavior he is truly ready
for conversion. Yet he too is converted, but into several significant figures,
one of whom may have been bisexual, Lincoln—although that would not have
generally been known or suspected at the time when this film was made. In that
sense, accordingly, he, along with Percy, is one of the first full gay figures
in film. Yes, he is a stereotype, but like Percy is much more fully explored
than the momentary sissies of earlier films or the men in drag in a large
number of early 20th-century works, who may as well have been, and often
portrayed as being heterosexuals with a gift for mimicry. Dudley’s character is
indubitably homosexual, entirely unashamed and open about his behavior. And he
is given more time and variation in this role than in any previous US film, and
all other international films outside of Filibus (1915), The Wings
(1916), and Different from the Others, a year later.
If
he is mocked, it is clear that he also loved and respected, in part because in
his queerness his audiences find him interesting and entertaining. As Henri
Bergson suggests, people laugh most often as a
communal moral force, laughing at individuals unaware of their own vices which
the group recognizes. In this case a man behaving in manner that the society
has asserted symbolizes his sexual “difference” is a kind of mockery, but the
very process of the laughter releases the tension between the two sets of
values, allowing us to see the morally different or “corrupt” being as one of
us, a human who can come to know and correct his own oddities. It is the
opposite of hate, which involves fear that oneself might share the same vice
and be similarly punished.
The
fact, however, that the homosexual cannot “correct his own oddities,” that he
or she is not capable of conversion, ultimately turns the laughter into
something close to hate. The form in which such expression takes place is drama
and tragedy as opposed to comedy, precisely what separates works such as
Arbuckle’s and Richard Oswald’s 1919 film Different from the Others
wherein the central character is not mocked but blackmailed and brought to
justice as an immoral force. That transformation, in fact, is very close to
what happened to cinema when Joseph Breen refused comedy the possibility of
portraying the “pansy” or the “sissy” character in such works. By the mid-1930s
and far into the present day, gays, when represented, became instead the
subject of tragedies and dark dramas, where instead of as in comedy, as Bergson
argued, where the inflexibility is punished by laughter, it was punished by
individual suffering and death.
In
1918, however, up until 1934, when the comic trope of gay stereotypical
behavior was banned, laughter demonstrated the flexibility of the human and
helped the society as a whole, according to Bergson, “to obtain a greater
elasticity and a better sociability of its members.” For all we may hate the
sissy as a type, and for all the limitations put upon the characters of gay men
portrayed as pansies, it was not a representation of societal hate. Disdain
perhaps, even disapproval to a certain degree, but sissies such as the bearded
visitor to Arbuckle’s barbershop were still respected guests, folk whom one
could make over into significant figures of history, good and bad.
If they were different, they were still one of
us. And like all of us, they were basically funny in their mannerisms.
It
is only when people began to understand that such behavior was not always a
mannerism but an expression of the real self that they gradually begin to perceive
and recognize the true differences between people of LGBTQ sexualities and the
mass generality—a subject of some future sexual historian—of heterosexuals.
Los Angeles, March 2, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March
2023).
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