Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle | The Bell Boy / 1918

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).