Читать книгу The Anatomy of Harpo Marx - Wayne Koestenbaum - Страница 11
ОглавлениеPinky, the Pointing Scapegoat, Lags Behind
DUCK SOUP (1933)
An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor.
—CERVANTES, Don Quixote
I
MAX UND MORITZ As a child with an appetite for abjection, I gobbled up Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz, an illustrated German tale (1865) about a pair of rotten mischief-making boys who end up shoved into a grain mill that pulverizes their bodies. Had my father, as a boy in Berlin, read that book? He bought me its English translation at Meyberg’s Delicatessen, which also sold miniature cheese triangles. The bodies of Max and Moritz repulsed me (they looked like lard), but I knew where they were coming from: I understood their distaste for compartmentalization.
PINKY Harpo’s name in Duck Soup—Suck Dupe?—is Pinky, which refers to pink hair we can’t see as pink (the film is black-and-white) and must believe is pink, based on the word alone. The name Pinky points to Harpo’s revolutionary (antimasculine) difference from regular color. Pinky also might mean pinking shears—or the fifth, puny finger, the pianist’s bane. When other characters address Harpo as “Pinky,” they legitimize baby talk: if they hail him as Pinky, then he must be Pinky. We say “Pinky” if we approve of Harpo’s pink nature and wish to bless him with a diminutive. Pinky never disgusts; he is to disgust what ipecac is to Mt. Parnassus.
HARPO’S RABBI DISGUISE: THE WILL TO CEASE Entering, Harpo wears (on the back of his head) a long rabbinical beard and spinning-pinwheel glasses, whose whirling circles echo our obsessive practice of getting lost in him.
A phone keeps ringing, but it’s not a phone: Harpo reaches into his pocket and pulls out an alarm clock. Smiling and nodding in self-acknowledgment, he points to his joke as a space already traversed.
Leaning back in the boss’s chair, Harpo finds another ready-made occasion to loaf. Like Stein, Warhol, or Cage, Harpo encourages arts of laziness and ease; labor-intensive process paradoxically demonstrates the will to cease.
YO-YO OF I-THOU Harpo lights a cigar with a blowtorch and then makes contrition legible: after committing a crime, he sheepishly seeks eye contact with the master. Fretful about human relationships’ tendency to fail, Harpo plays the yo-yo of I and Thou.
He cranes his neck to stare at the Carole Lombard–esque secretary, a few inches away. (She is the actress Verna Hillie, who had a bit part as bridesmaid, the year before, in the movie Madame Butterfly.) Verna and Harpo could be twins—her curly blonde hair matches his pink mop. Like a caged animal, he gazes curiously at human visitors. Each time he sees a woman, he studies—as if for the first time—what “woman” means. His eyes, a metal detector, scan her for secret weapons. Is she treif? She backs away; he follows. By taffy-pulling I-Thou relations, he defamiliarizes run-of-the-mill social intercourse.
EXPRESSIONLESS NODS: DISTRACTIBILITY Chico fake-praises Harpo, who nods quickly, blankly. He nods without expression when he wants to italicize what the other (usually, Chico) says and when he wants to beef up the brother’s credibility by diminishing his own.
Attention deficit disorder and horniness combine: distractible, Harpo looks away because there might be a girl on the horizon, and because he can only pay attention for a few seconds before another mischievous episode enthralls him. His “cute” willingness to ditch one object for another, rapidly, without qualm, makes him a fit role model for anyone wanting to prize lability, switch-hitting, instant metamorphosis—and for anyone impatient with pomposity, law, linearity, or group behavior. Of course, I’m idealizing Harpo, and making him more serious than he’d wish. Why not? I don’t plan to give up my idols, especially if they’re silent or dead and can’t contradict me.
WHY DOES HARPO LOVE TO SCISSOR? Harpo, with trusty scissors, snips loose ends from the boss’s hair, who remains unconscious of plunder. Big question: why does Harpo love to scissor? Might as well ask: Why do I love writing and interpreting? I’m driven to mess around with the fringes of others, to castrate them lightly: dolce castration, snip snip to propriety’s tassels.
Scissoring, Harpo sweetens castration, makes it nonlethal, nontraumatic. The fraught word castration flamboyantly dramatizes the stakes of Being. I can’t abandon the sexiness of symbolic castration, the term’s effectiveness as shorthand for first loss, for the hunger to invade and destroy, for a finicky, scissoring approach to borders. By taking castration seriously as aesthetic and psychological category, we acknowledge the levity of possessions, their drive to ditch location. Harpo dramatizes the wish to be a tailor, or artist, to “make nice” the edges of his dispossession.
PRAYER AS SHAME The boss proclaims disappointment in Harpo and Chico. Like drooping buds, in tandem, the heads of the losers sink: they dwell at the intersection of prayer, bashfulness, and shame. Harpo’s abasement is more convincing—perhaps because of his foolish wind up hat and his mismanaged tie, or because he savors downfall’s speedy arrival. Harpo might enjoy any emotion, as long as it strikes and departs quickly. (Are the brothers ashamed of being short?)
“I entrusted you with a mission of great importance—and you failed,” says the boss. When he says mission of great importance, the brothers’ heads rise—mechanical tropism, lifted ego, Mother loves us again. At the words you failed, down again go their heads. And at the word however (“However, I’m going to give you one last chance”) their heads rise, like a penis snapping to attention. Infinite reappeasement of the Jews! I recognize the chill of exile, and the relief (I can’t call it joy) when disapproval abates. I’ll hover on this masochistic edge between being shunned and being embraced, to enjoy the temperature mélange—like sunbathing after plunging in the sea. Mixing a cocktail of shame and relief, Harpo lingers, stunned by conjugation, on the threshold.
CUTTING FOR CUTTING’S SAKE The boss (played by Louis Calhern, who later appeared in Elizabeth Taylor’s Rhapsody and Grace Kelly’s High Society) bends down, sticking his butt in the air. Harpo, a tramp, stands behind him— as, on a subway, my hips and a stranger’s butt accidentally touch. Harpo takes scissors to male authority’s large, flat, flabby ass, facing upward like a serving tray. With gusto, our little mischief-maker from East 93rd Street leans into the task; oversized scissors in hand, the chimney sweep performs a castration mission on the elders. He gathers the boss’s jacket-tails like a pigtail, and snips them off with scissors that have grown larger since their last use. Harpo writes with scissors; he marks territory by cutting off a piece, as if he were claiming all of Italy by excerpting its Calabrian boot. Don’t ignore the provocation of Authority’s pin-striped butt, thrust backward, and Harpo’s fool-offense of dethroning the king, not because Harpo desires Authority’s rear end but because he resourcefully exploits every stray moment. In this tableau of defacement, we prize Harpo’s intrepidity, not the sharp scissors or the obscene butt; we prize his shameless and full-bodied willingness to throw himself into the anarchic task, without fear of retribution—like the time I threw a water balloon in my seventh-grade math teacher’s open window. I considered him a “fag,” and courted him, covertly, through a balloon’s illegible, wet graffiti. Harpo and I may not qualify as political revolutionaries, but we seek the thrill of demotion: cutting for cutting’s sake.
BINGO-EYES MOVING LEFT AND RIGHT Who slugged Harpo? Batty bingo-eyes oscillate; tongue protrudes. Lacking gravity, he stumbles behind Chico’s peanut-vending cart and, like an anhedonic somnambulist staring at death’s bull’s-eye, Harpo pockets handful after handful of nuts while his head wiggles. Peanuts are merely the pretext: he loves to steal. Before Chico can bite a hot dog, Harpo clips it with scissors and then awaits a verdict. Does he expect a spanking or a smile? He tucks the scissors back into his pants, beside his taxi-horn, which looks like a syringe, a bulb, a phallus, or an enema. I’ll enlarge the list of comparisons. Harpo’s horn resembles a lekythos—a flask for storing the libations that survivors in Greek tragedies poured on thirsty graves. Harpo’s three bulbs (udders, enemas, phalli) constitute a belt-level castration chemistry set, a compensatory tool kit. Any future scapegoating will find him equipped. He’ll convert emergency into an occasion for pranksterism—for Nietzschean, philosophically motivated mischief. Harpo pushes outward his scapegoated status, the way an uncircumcised penis-head pokes through foreskin.
Harpo, responsive to rebuke, scans the horizon, his shifty gaze teetering between Chico and the unseeable outside, off-camera: a restless desire to travel, beyond confining scenes, toward thought’s periphery.
SCAPEGOATING When questioned by Chico, Harpo acts like a kid who hasn’t done homework, or who doesn’t understand the local dialect, or who lives in a country where open-mindedness is a crime: pivoting eyes brand him as guillotine-worthy. Without explanation or apology, without nodding yes or no, staring poker-faced and mirthless, Harpo hands his leg to Chico. The leg trick, responding to an unanswerable question, fills the test’s blank with a nonsensical mark that neuters the Grand Inquisitor.
Victim-seeking, Harpo strides—his piggy-bank mouth a platypus bill of mock-outrage—toward the other vendor (a dumb sop played by Edgar Kennedy) and bumps into him. Kennedy sells lemonade. Kennedy will go down in history as “king of the slow burn.” I like the fact that his name is Kennedy. I like the fact that a funny Marx picks on a slow-burning Kennedy.
“BUTT” AS CATEGORY Harpo unconditionally loves Chico but also quickly takes offense; at the first sign of disrespect, Harpo slides into fisticuffs, swinging his right arm, warming up for a slug, and then delivering a buttkick instead. His lower lip juts out, impersonating pique. Chico says, “Up the stairs this time, no downstairs” (don’t kick my ass): he acknowledges Harpo’s buttward transgression. I make a big deal out of the occasions when straight men acknowledge “butt” as category.
LIMP SHYSTER HANDS Harpo’s limp hands flamboyantly advertise indifference to standard opinions of how men should behave. Harpo’s hands, a shyster’s, refuse masculinity: he offers slapped knuckles, silenced fingers. And he flaunts these rebuffed tools: engines of reprisal. By hanging flogged hands out to dry, Harpo sends Kennedy a shame valentine.
YARMULKE PEANUT CUP With ever-ready scissors, Harpo snips Kennedy’s pocket, creating a yarmulke-shaped cup for pilfered peanuts. The cap-cup also resembles a diaphragm or condom. In the man’s trousers Harpo finds a vagina, an opening, and snips it away to create a portable amphora. I will explain, in subsequent chapters, why “vagina” is an important conceptual part of Harpo’s armature; here, suffice it to say that Harpo creates a little yarmulke-shaped vagina because he is nondogmatic. Like Chaplin’s tramp, or a Pentateuchal exile, Harpo is adept at constructing tent-like enclosures in dire circumstances.
EXCHANGING HATS: WATER SPORTS Kennedy’s and Harpo’s hats fall to the ground. Harpo watches him carefully pick up the wrong hat. Our hero engenders hat confusion because he wants the other toy, the forbidden possession. (Hat exchange has queer pedigree: the Elizabeth Bishop poem “Exchanging Hats” features an “unfunny uncle” who tries on a lady’s hat.) Kennedy realizes that hats have been exchanged; Harpo nods briefly to propose restitution. But as he hands over the proper hat, Harpo drops it and looks tauntingly at his victim.
I argue: humiliation is reversible. You think it goes in one fixed direction—from you to me—but I can flip its trajectory. We can trade humiliation, like baseball cards.
Water sports begin. Harpo uses his horn as turkey-baster vacuum, to suck lemonade out of the open vat, and then tucks the engorged horn into his belt. Harpo suggestively leans into Kennedy, two groins dry-rubbing: pressure sends water spuming into Kennedy’s face. Harpo seems happy to escalate prankishness and to humiliate a Gentile. Kennedy, stumped, laughs, and Harpo catches on, mouth wide open in a rictus of hilarity, mockery disguised as comity. Laughter is an excuse to touch the enemy’s shoulder. Intimacy requires two steps. Step one: laugh with the other. Step two: touch the other.
While Harpo laughs, Kennedy reverses the horn; he points its spigot downward and squeezes the bulb, which sends liquid flooding Harpo’s pants. Sudden emission stuns him, but he still touches Kennedy. (The first time Harpo appeared in vaudeville, he wet his pants onstage. His mother had forced him to perform, to fill a gap in the fraternal act—the Nightingales, a singing group. Don’t forget stage fright’s primacy: Harpo began his career by pissing himself in public.) He moves away, whistling, from the shame puddle, and lifts his feet gingerly, to disavow mess. Faux urination brings out the piss-and-testicles innuendo of the rival carts: Kennedy sells lemonade, Chico sells nuts.
LOOK AT MY HOLOCAUST! Harpo sticks Kennedy’s hat in the glass case’s peanut-roasting fire. The fire, a holocaust, horrifies, though Harpo has reversed the atrocity vector: Jew persecutes Irishman, neighbor immigrant, hardscrabble guy trying to sell his way to security. Harpo taps Kennedy, whistles, and points to the flame: Look at my holocaust! The pointing thumb (hitchhiker’s gesture) expresses pride: see my achieved trickery. Also the thumb disperses humiliation, directs it elsewhere, toward the scapegoat. The formal name for pointing, in linguistics, is deixis. Children learn that pointing is rude, yet, like a teacher, I point to Harpo, himself a pointer.
Harpo’s prankster nature relies on a mobile gaze. Briefly he looks toward the camera, away from hat and Kennedy: Harpo wants to ascertain that we witnessed the crime. At Kennedy’s fiery martyrdom, Harpo warms his hands, as the frame grows black.
I LIKE SAYING “CASTRATION” Groucho, at his desk, writes with a long quill. Harpo’s horn, a codpiece, sticks out of his pants. Compare endowments: horn, pen. Which communicative machine is bigger? To equalize, Harpo scissors the feather and then smiles, as if blind to crime.
Voiceless Harpo eagerly spreads castration around; he spills it onto others. He doesn’t consider castration a problem. Remember: I like saying “castration,” a useful critical toy.
HARPO’S TATTOOS “Who are you?” asks Groucho. Harpo shows an arm tattooed with a self-portrait. (Jewish law forbids tattoos.) Groucho says he doesn’t go for modern art; he asks for an old master. Harpo, excited, shows the other arm’s tattoo—a woman in a bikini—and undulates the image. Groucho asks for her phone number: it’s tattooed on Harpo’s abdominals. (Tattooed numbers point to the Holocaust.) Harpo, flashing flesh, grins with unseemly width—proud of virtuosity, or pleased to comply. His gesture—lifting up his shirt—recalls my mother ducking into the bathroom with my father to discuss private disease worries.
“Where do you live?” asks Groucho, and Harpo responds by spreading open his shirt, as if for heart surgery, to show on his chest a fantasy home—a doghouse, domicile for the loyal and languageless. Dominating the screen, he looks directly at us. (Added treat: we see Groucho’s thinning hair.) Harpo shows us his doghouse: come in! This sudden invitation—revealed stigmata—doesn’t embarrass us; instead, we note his mocking mastery of home-sweet-home values.
Groucho miaows. In surreal puncture, a dog pokes its head out from Harpo’s painted chest. Kafka predicted Harpo’s literalist compliance. In the penal colony, Harpo is the drilled-on, human page—or else a stripper who offers his body as the customer’s sketchpad.
Groucho wants to one-up Harpo: “Bet you don’t have a picture of my grandfather.” With an excited nod, Harpo thrusts off his overcoat and lifts up his shirt, as if ready to receive injection. Groucho reluctantly confronts Harpo’s exhibitionism—imminent “mooning.” Perhaps the final tattoo—Grandpa’s image— was inscribed on Harpo’s buttocks. Genealogy goes back to the butt. He tries to flash it, though Groucho aborts the unveiling.
HARPO’S EXITING SALUTE, ITS MELANCHOLY PROWESS Harpo’s palm of farewell, as he hastily exits, may be a clown tradition, but it also alludes to the Führer’s salute, to Sicilian gestures, to kiss-offs, papal blessings, mysterious Christ-like manifestations, and to sign language. (The gesture, half good-bye, half fuck-you, combines vendetta-provoking rage and cheerful farewell.) Speechlessness is humiliating, a denigration that Harpo’s good cheer unwrites. I’m haunted by his upraised hand, its generosity, its willingness to communicate—even if it expresses nothing personal or specific. Harpo’s exit anticipates Chaplin’s late film Limelight, a clown’s melancholy departure. Obsolescence is exile: Harpo, ashamed of untimeliness, hides his face.
Immediately, Zeppo enters, half his hat missing. Harpo, exiting, scissored it. Deletion is his signature. He despoils not because he has found a use for fragments but because it suits him to deprive people of their endowments. Zeppo angrily throws down his fragmented hat, as if he were Gregor Samsa’s father, a patriarch disgusted by the buggy son, cowering and loafing in his fecal bed. Zeppo, assimilated, disowns Harpo’s ethnic freakishness.
LOAFING AS LABORING A few moments later, Harpo metamorphoses into dedicated chauffeur. Groucho enters the carriage, secretly composed of two separate vehicles; Harpo drives away on the sidecar, a motorbike—as if unaware that he left Groucho behind. By ignoring the job’s purpose, Harpo enacts Michel de Certeau’s concept of la perruque (the wig)—a worker’s revolutionary technique of goofing off, stealing company time for private creative forays that have nothing to do with paid labor.
Like a Solomonic surgeon splitting conjoined twins, Harpo divides hats, cars—to differentiate himself from the fraternal horde, to proclaim unlikeness. Arduous, to assemble a self so that a brother can recognize me, consider me legible: “That’s Pinky, the lazy one.”
STARING AT A ZONE HALF-AUDIENCE, HALF-NOTHINGNESS Harpo looks at Groucho and then at the camera. He should be paying full attention to Groucho: but Harpo needs to balance his bossy brother’s words with what can be gleaned only by staring blankly at a zone half-audience and half-nothingness. Harpo peers straight ahead, toward a hidden explanation. Attentiveness displaces its purported object: Harpo methodically looks elsewhere, a ghostly nonlocation.
THE MOM-MOUTH When the lemonade vendor reappears, Harpo points excitedly: his wide-open mouth resembles my mother’s in a 1959 photo. She knelt on the floor. Infant, I lay, stomach downward, on the bed, and smiled enthusiastically, with implausible, thrilled width. She imitated my smile: I call it the “Mom-mouth.” Stretched-open lips compress eyes into excited slits, mirroring but misrepresenting.
Again, Harpo produces the too-wide smile, comic Greek mask, Mom-mouth, a mother’s face replicating an infant’s, a face of repetition and ruse and mimicry, a face not at one with underlying emotion—the mouth, open as if to bite an apple; the eyes, distorted, condensed by the mouth’s excessive distension. Keeping the mouth open in simulated joy might lead to jaw cramp. (Oral sex ache?)
KRISTALLNACHT PREVIEW I must avoid the word then. The “then” of sequence. This happened, then that happened. The word then implies that history is a stepladder rather than a chronology-defying inundation. I’m not arguing for predestination, simply for inklings, foreshadowings that appear when we view earlier artifacts in hindsight.
Harpo puts Kennedy’s straw boater in the flame vitrine. Kennedy tips over the cart, and Harpo stands like a victim on Kristallnacht beside his wrecked shop. Harpo apprehends catastrophe, imploding around him; step-by-step causality gives way to maddening simultaneity. He might be silenced by the din of the too much—too many events, too many brothers.
JEW POLLUTES HOLY WATER Pants rolled above knees, Harpo climbs onto Kennedy’s lemonade vat, jumps in, and stomps, as if bike-riding or grape-crushing. Please observe the sequence. (1) Seeking recognition, Harpo looks at us with wide-open Mom-mask of fixed, unmodulated enthusiasm. He wants us—vaudeville audience, eyewitnesses, jury—to see his prank. Recognize my wickedness, cuteness, violence, spinning-in-place. Recognize my mania so that it can cease. (2) He beams at Kennedy’s misery. Harpo’s face remains Mom-frozen in parodic, heightened excitement. I call his face uncontainable because I can’t contain it in words and it can’t withstand its bottled-up pressure, and so the expression freezes in a stylized ideogram of “excitement.” The face “erects” itself, refuses to be calmed, divided, or divined. (3) Leg motion stops. Harpo’s smile diminishes. Kennedy bows his head in shame and distress, hand on bald pate, and Harpo splashes water (baptism?) on him: blasphemous Jew pollutes holy water. Kennedy’s Job-like sorrow accords recognition to Harpo, stops his frenzied motion and dampens his joy. (Suddenly I remember not finding sufficient acknowledgment in Prague that Kafka had lived there and that his sisters had died in concentration camps.) My accretive method might be madness.
II
“SHUSHING” AS FRATERNAL GLUE: DISOBEDIENT LITERALISM Harpo zealously absorbs the command, “Be quiet,” initiated by others, and then sends it back. You told me to shut up. Rebound: now I’ll tell you to shut up. “Shut up,” a familial structure, nestles him: he belongs to a cozy Cosa Nostra of “shushing.”
As Harpo and Chico approach stalwart Margaret Dumont’s house, Harpo ostentatiously shushes the void. He imitates Chico, originator of the “Shush!” patrol. Noisily Harpo plucks his check, snaps his finger, and falls back into fake compliance.
“Ring the bell,” says Chico. Harpo, smiling literalist, removes a bell-and-clapper from his pocket and athletically rings it: I’ve followed your commandment to the letter and thereby disobeyed its aim. Chico scolds him, and unsmiling Harpo reorients by touching his hat. When commanded “Push the button,” Harpo flirtatiously pushes a low button on Chico’s jacket—as if playing around with their shared omphalos.
Can all four brothers be appreciated at the same time? Is every brother equally loved? The youngest child at Passover asks the question. Why can’t everyone ask? Cain wins; Abel loses. Don’t demean this issue by calling it sibling rivalry. Call it, instead, international relations.
THE LAG Harpo lags behind. He remains loyal to the gesture of a moment earlier. Tenacious, slow, he pledges allegiance to the passé.
Shushing, Chico puts his fingers to his lips, a gesture that Harpo imitates. The moment passes. Chico stops shushing, and moves on to the next idea, the next urgency—talking policy with sexy Vera Marcal (actress Raquel Torres, born in Mexico, and star of The Sea Bat and So This Is Africa). Harpo, however, clings to the earlier gesture; refusing progress, he presses a finger to his lips—an instant after Chico stopped. Pleasurable palpation is the finger’s goal. Harpo remains attached to a gesture he’d performed at first merely as obedience. Harpo’s slowness indicates morality. I wish to assert the ethical upstandingness of Harpo’s loyalty to the bit of stage business that Chico has bequeathed him but has now abandoned. Finger against lips is Chico’s gift, the inheritance of two seconds ago. Chico converses with a cover girl, while Harpo, incapable of conversation, must maintain involvement, instead, with his finger.
WILLING EXECUTIONERS While Chico tells him to stay put, Harpo’s eyes glaze, a somnambulist’s, hands held outward, bottom lip drooping. I’m in a trance. Passive, I’ll execute orders. (Germany’s willing executioners?) Punished for noisemaking, Harpo returns to silent immobility. I find his enchainment “cute,” but I also find it frightening. I recognize the sensation of putting the soul in the ice compartment, of pushing the pause button on consciousness, of choosing abeyance: I decide to freeze, momentarily. And I freeze this still, from a moving picture: I freeze this instant of Harpo freezing, because I want to affirm my belief in nothingness’s wish to trammel me. Chico plays the role of nothingness. He acts as cudgel and storm cloud. Harpo is the deluged ground.
EUREKA VERSUS DUMBFOUNDEDNESS Harpo snaps fingers to signify “Eureka!” (Inspiration: I’ll get dressed up as Groucho.) The difference between Harpo’s illuminated and stumped expressions exceeds your average Joe’s. Harpo either has a thought in his head, or he doesn’t; in his blank moments, he looks bovine. Circumstances thrust him into a physical act of concentration, like taking a dump or lifting a load. Harpo’s tenacity: I admire it. Or: I vicariously experience its sedation, its ice pack. I concentrate on Harpo, and I concentrate on what it means to concentrate, and why effortful concentration strangely resembles dumbfoundedness or arrest. Walter Benjamin, ruminating on technology and spirit, valued concentration over distraction: distracted people fall prey to ideology, while concentrated people undergo tense absorption in art.
HARPO’S HYPERACTIVITY: MY HUMORLESSNESS Hyperkinetic, Harpo wiggles; he can’t sit still. Nervously he jiggles legs, arms, and fingers to avoid immobility. Harpo inhabits antithetical states—trance and watchfulness—but his stupor involves not depression but a held, jellied condition, like aspic, or like a mind attuned to minimalist music’s repetitions. Writing about Harpo, I press my right knee against the desk’s underside to intensify concentration on his stunned, overkinetic act.
Literalness—treating comic content as serious—either misses the point of the Marx Brothers or discovers a contrary undertone: removing Harpo’s humor, we discover historical catastrophe, or psychological states of numbness that bring welcome anesthesia and that offer room for aesthetic reparation. The still image replaces laughter with horror. Without movement, only the humiliating predicament remains.
FREUD’S CALL FOR OVERINTERPRETATION: OVERNAMING In a footnote to a passage in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud asserts that every neurotic symptom not only permits overinterpretation but insists on it: “every neurotic symptom, even the dream, is capable of over-interpretation, indeed demands it.” A film’s details, too, cry out for overreading—a process akin to what Walter Benjamin, in a 1917 essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” calls “overnaming,” which he cites as “the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and . . . for all deliberate muteness.” I overname because I’m melancholy. But the muteness I overname—Harpo—is himself melancholy. We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death.
Harpo’s problem is presence. He halfway solves it by sacrificing his voice. To complete the suicidal project, he needs to get rid of his body. Never forget the suicide near his act’s happy surface.
SMACK OF ATTESTATION I call it “attestation,” proof, demonstration, the moment of pointing to a newly perceived manifestation—as when a family retainer in Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor sings, “Eccola!” announcing that the madwoman, nightgown drenched with her murdered bridegroom’s blood, has entered, ready to sing the mad scene. The chorus falls silent, beholding the freak’s extremity. Harpo, pointing, smacks reality on its back like a rediscovered friend: you’re still here.
To mark excitement, Harpo hits, twice, the scrap of paper in his hand: his smack of attestation announces (to no one) the satisfaction of having arrived at meaning. He needs to reward himself for small tasks accomplished: instead of cash or praise, he receives wordless noise, “smack smack” on paper.
ABHORRING DOXA The third spin of the safe’s dial activates the music. The safe, secretly a radio, plays “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Harpo, covering his ears, finds the patriotic tune physically unbearable. This silent, violent pacifist declines to spout doxa. Better to avoid political statements than to make stupid ones, or to sing obedient anthems.
He shushes the safe—a crying baby. The dial, when turned, disengages, and the box falls apart, a dismembered body that Harpo must now disown, as in a nightmare of hit-and-run castration. (About the concept “phallus,” I refuse to apologize. It keeps coming up, especially when I talk about dismemberment, disposal, disowning, disengaging, disapproval, disgust, detritus, demeanor, derailment, digression.) Efficient killer, Harpo hurls the safe’s carcass out the window and waves “aw, raspberries” hands to signal “good riddance.”
FLEEING THE DOUBLE Harpo’s beatific smile—job well done!—fades when he sees Groucho, or a Groucho lookalike, descending the stairs. Harpo, scooting away, runs smack into a full-length mirror. Because this scene is famous, and because it involves Harpo pretending to be Groucho, I will not offer much commentary. I prefer when Harpo relaxes into being Harpo, untroubled by wisecracker emulation.
Harpo, shattering the mirror, dismantles the soundtrack: the last noise we hear, before total silence ensues, is the mirror breaking, its music abstract, like Pierre Boulez’s Éclat, which sounds like ego-integrity breaking into furious slivers, or like a forgotten moment in one of Francis Poulenc’s beguiling, brief pieces for piano, a repertoire often dismissed as “salon music”: in Poulenc’s “Caprice Italien,” the phrase that derails me is marked “éclatant,” lightning-like, as if the sky suffered what my mother called a “thickening,” a phlegmy cough that breaks up chest congestion.
Harpo hides from punishment by pretending to be Groucho’s reflection. Harpo wants to erase his own presence—but also to intensify it through doubling. Harpo contains a fold, like a creased page. Eager to find ambiguous indentations in matteness, I invaginate reality by making it not simple.
BEATS: HARPOPHILIA I call them “beats”—isolable fragments of business. Tiny gestures. Winks, pauses, offerings. Slowly watching, I stop the DVD at each beat, so I can write down Harpo’s motions—as my parents documented my older brother’s infancy. One photo my mother captioned “First Solids,” a breakthrough I’m still celebrating. I’m slowly killing myself by dividing scenes into bits, just as Harpo reneged on existence by pretending to be Groucho’s reflection. (Harpo never fell into what Lacan named the “Symbolic”: speechlessness prevents the nosedive into linguistic, father-marked life.)
Harpophilia leads to gloom. Annotating, I’m buried alive with Harpo, the two of us motionless—the death-drive stillness of hypervigilant observation, of standing mutely near fast-talking Groucho.
If Harpo spoke, what he would say might destroy Groucho. One brother’s silence reinforces the other brother’s unthreatened literacy and eloquence.
COGITATORS, JAZZMEN, DOCTORS Have you ever played the game “Great Thinker” with your father—staring at him in the mirror and pretending, like him, to be a cogitator? Some of us consider “thinking” a hair shirt; we relish logic’s stoppage. My father, in a Buick station wagon, told me, shortly after the Vietnam War, about physics and philosophy, their unheralded interpenetration.
Facing each other, Groucho and Harpo shimmy, an off-color joust, their jazzy motions sped-up—escalation to a full-scale dance number, quoted from vaudeville. Their ability to parody each other’s fake joy reveals a disturbing overabundance of animal spirits, mustered for assimilation and aggressive camouflage. Hands raised in hallelujah pantomime verge on minstrelsy. Their white hospital scrubs are fit for Bedlam or Bellevue. Jewish doctors? Freaky twins photographed by Diane Arbus?
REMOVAL GAME As marching soldiers pass, Harpo rhythmically scissors off their plumes, one by one, and then conks the final man’s head with a mallet. Harpo’s attitude toward military conformity: snip off the plume’s paintbrush-pigtail, but express neither joy nor vengefulness. Be businesslike, an efficient craftsman, coldly scissoring. (Clip bellicose pubes with a barber’s sangfroid.) Harpo concentrates on a meaningless task—a compulsive removal game—to exempt himself from presence and to demilitarize onward-rushers.
FLEEING THE DIEGESIS United, the Marxes play banjo. In one telltale moment, almost unnoticeable, Harpo’s Einstein eyes kindly flash toward the viewer: he nearly steps out of character to smile upon his creation and to bless the brotherly endeavor. I highlight this instant of Harpo’s eyes lifting beyond the “diegesis,” into communion with the viewer or himself, because the ability to rise above schtick (and to observe it) gives him an omniscient aura. Diegesis sounds poisonous, like “digitalis”; primal, like “Genesis”; and predestined, like “genetics.” I want to rescue Harpo from the diegesis, his captivity by the film’s restrictions—as if there were a place beyond the valley of the diegesis where we could huddle together and discuss impersonation’s onerousness.
TEXTURE, BESTIALITY In one twin bed, a woman lies alone. In the other bed, Harpo snuggles a horse. He chooses horse over woman; he prefers texture to conversation. Consider him a god of palpation, of fingers reading the braille of the tangible world—bedspread, tablecloth, overalls, work shirt, grass blade, wood grain. Harpo’s willingness to pursue bestiality—even if only as a joke—wins me over, and leads me to appoint him ambassador of a principle I hold dear: regression can be its own reward. Not always a reward: in Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, the surfer-angelic-blond Timothy Treadwell (who resembles Klaus Kinski) thinks he can be boyfriends with grizzly bears, who end up eating him alive.
ZEPPO’S HANDSOMENESS AS RESONANT ADJACENCY Axiom: male handsomeness, when in the neighborhood of male not-handsomeness, sets up vibrations. Handsomeness summons overtones in nearby pitches. Musical relationships, like familial ones, depend on subterranean sympathies— electricities that fire without conscious prompting. For example: Zeppo (the handsome, unfunny brother), standing near the others, provokes, in me, a series of pestering, irreverent thoughts: how does Zeppo’s handsomeness, like tannins in wine, change the Marxian bouquet? Are the brothers jealous of Zeppo’s good looks? Is Harpo trying to upstage Zeppo’s handsomeness rather than Groucho’s verbal ferocity? Must I insist that Harpo upstages? Maybe he is just trying to thumb a ride on the conjugal Ark, or squat in Sodom.
SHEER AMAZEMENT AS PATH THROUGH EXISTENCE In a close-up of Harpo aiming a gun, his tongue sticks out, and his bug eyes exceed rational purpose. He looks like a man falling asleep on the job, a man we adore for derelict behavior, for sliding. Can warfare be cute? A bullet, skidding by his hat, reverses it. Confused, he touches the cap to verify its presence. Eyes rise, lower lip droops: by enacting shock, he puts down roots in the world. Harpo feeds us this piece of counsel: express amazement, and thereby lay claim to existence. I admire Harpo’s dumbness, his dazed passivity: I seek his advice. Sitting with my father in the bloated Buick station wagon, I received lessons on how to structure time.
DUMBFOUNDMENT AS FANE Keats, in “Ode to Psyche,” wants to build a “fane” (a temple or shrine) for Psyche, his goddess; and the word fane, which he rhymes with pain, cuts me to the quick. “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind, / Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain . . .” Fane, the archaic, odd word, invokes a speechless locale, not visualizable, open only to the dreamer. Harpo’s dumbfoundment—zero mind, mouth agape—is my fane; and dumbfoundment is Harpo’s fane, too, the nook where he can escape the duties of the diegesis (warfare, bookkeeping, sociability, gamesmanship). In the word fane, utopian tendencies hide; Harpo is my fane, and I am his priest, temporarily. I love to bolster the cases of dubitable divinities.
ESCALATION AS IDENTITY Harpo enters the hideout house. “Send two more women,” says Groucho in his radio broadcast. Harpo puts up three fingers: send three. Harpo always escalates. Escalation, like lust for girls, makes him legible: and so, through pantomime, he will advertise himself as he who asks for mindless escalation. Shamelessly he buries a passive hand in his trousers while watching Zeppo’s activity. Must I prove that Harpo demonstrates masturbatory virtues, or that his sexuality is rudimentary?
SHUSHING THE BOMB A bomb drops: Harpo shushes it. Battles and brothers are noises Harpo must stop. Someone, a few scenes ago, told Harpo to shut up. The command impressed him, and he keeps spilling it onto others. He shushes anything in his vicinity: muteness virally spreads.
Shushing the bomb, Harpo stares forward, finger to lips. Marxian humor aims to avoid the emotional consequences of standing on extermination’s brink. Harpo occupies the vantage point of the archangel Michael in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Michael, conversing with Adam on a hill above history, predicts original sin’s consequences, as if the future were geographically surveyable. Omniscient, Harpo levitates above the sine and cosine undulations of history’s dialectical waltz: he keeps secrets too awful, too encompassing, for brothers or audiences to hear.
HARPO MAKES “THINKING” VISIBLE AND THUS EROTICIZABLE Drawing lots, Chico loses. Harpo smiles and points: he understands, a split second before the others, that Chico will be “It.” Thinking, as a physiological process, is attractive: I can eroticize thinking, or isolate it as a “beat” or “blip” of duration. Thus Harpo’s visible pondering is “smarter” than Groucho’s rodomontade. We can see the gears of thought move in Harpo’s face and upraised hand: reasoning makes an impression on his features, and because pantomime renders cogitation conspicuous, I can attach myself to it with a quasi-sexual urgency.
INTELLIGENCE, DANGEROUS, MUST BE LOCKED UP Saluting, scissors raised like a rifle, Harpo stumbles (pushed by brothers) into the ammunition closet. Inside, he throws a lit cigar (he doesn’t like its taste) onto a keg, which explodes into fireworks. Groucho misinterprets Harpo’s frightened banging on the locked door as enemy gunfire, so he says, “We’ll barricade the rear”—natch, Harpo invades from the rear, or else Groucho, anal-phobic, singles out the rear as the vulnerable zone. (Only after someone shoots Groucho’s ass does Harpo manage to exit the curio-cabinet of explosives.)
Fireworks exploding in the locked closet are visual signs of Harpo’s pent-up articulateness and hyperexcitement—intelligence detonating randomly in a locked void, mind self-sabotaging, its scattershot illuminations lacking aim or cause. “They shut me up in Prose,” Emily Dickinson declared; conventional society—the “They”—couldn’t guess that her mind was a ticking bomb. Harpo’s brothers, authoritarian, lock up Harpo’s bomb-inclinations, his powder-keg fancies. I don’t need to invoke suicide bombers to convey the seriousness, for Harpo, of caged Being, of mind-as-ammunition. Thinking, a horrifying process, resembles not an Elysian meditation but a bullet ricocheting in a locked closet.
URIAH HEEP Groucho’s head is stuck in a vase, on which Harpo paints mustache and eyebrows. Now the loudmouth undergoes an imprisonment that equals the mute’s ordeal in the detonating closet: each Marx must stay in his legibly labeled box. Harpo, satisfied with the painted urn, rubs hands together. The gesture recalls unctuous Uriah Heep in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: Uriah, figure of the Jewish usurer, enjoys exponential economic accumulation, based not on real objects or real labor but on money, an abstraction. When Harpo rubs hands together in delight, he parodically circulates the Uriah Heep stereotype, but he also cites Lady Macbeth, the most famous hand washer in the history of Western Civ. Her motives for stain removal were many: Harpo might be masturbatory, but he is never murderous.
THE COVERT POLITICAL NECESSITY OF CLAIMING THAT HARPO IS BUTT-CENTERED Harpo’s hands push Margaret Dumont’s rear; and when she protests, he points to her butt, as if its amplitude had been the instigator. Why assert that Harpo—or his character—is butt-centered? Because thereby I vindicate him, associate him with pleasure and punishment (their necessary entwinement), and link him to forces that speech sequesters in lunacy’s domain. Asserting Harpo’s butt-centeredness returns me to a critical stance I once occupied, a theoretical position derived from theorist Guy Hocquenghem’s 1972 book Homosexual Desire, which proposed that we might escape repressive structures if we focus on the ass rather than the potentially procreative genitals. Courtesy of the anus, we can imagine, Marxist-style, a path away from family and state. I no longer live in that conceptual universe, but I admit affinity with the punished, and with the bodily site where punishment primally occurs: the rear. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in her essay “A Poem Is Being Written,” proposed a connection between poetry’s line breaks and the masochistic pleasure of being spanked. Pointing out cinematic butt, I make a formalist—not merely a prurient—gesture. When I mention butt, I’m behaving as a critic, an abstract thinker, an aesthetic assessor.
PERCUSSIVENESS AS PLEASURE As each soldier enters the Marxian hideaway, Harpo lifts the entrant’s helmet and bops his skull with a brick, as, earlier, he’d methodically scissored off their upright plumes. What pleasure the repeated bop—a xylophone’s—gives him!
Harpo softens existence’s percussiveness—the click, bang, thud, or thwack of impact that self makes when it butts against world. (Must self and world be antithetical?) Attack turns into smile; skull-and-bones turns into pillow. Harpo neutralizes Being’s violence—the trauma of encounter between will and world. (I like playing pick-up-sticks on Schopenhauer’s grave.) I glorify and dilate Harpo’s percussiveness by dividing his performances into beats; and yet, he also represents an escape from the hammer-stroke of consciousness.
In eighth grade I wrote a short story about a starstruck kid who attempted suicide. I found its title, “Tomorrow’s Sun May Never Rise,” in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, which my father, alert to borrowing’s inevitability, suggested that I consult. My mother, whose specialty was language, proofread the story. After my teacher returned it with a good mark, I foolishly gave my only copy to a curious classmate, a girl who either lost or discarded the maudlin manuscript: failed transmission. Her last name, Germanic, sounded like “rum balls.” A few years later, she made out with my best friend; proud yet appalled, he told me about her aggressive tongue. I’m not sure how Harpo’s percussiveness enters this paragraph.
