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This
Collapsing of Boundaries: Fiction and Reality in Robert
Coover’s “The Phantom of the Movie Palace” and Buster
Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr.
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Nina Zehr
Daemen College
Amherst, NY
While
discussing his admiration for Buster Keaton’s work in his 1927
silent film, Sherlock, Jr., Robert Coover observes that:
Most filmmakers
are unabashed tricksters, bunkoing their gullible audiences with
their cunning optical hocus-pocus, not least among their wiles
the illusion of the frame . . . . But in his famous
frame-within-a-frame sequence in Sherlock Junior,
[Buster] Keaton [hangs] the frame in the light, and moreover he
disturbs its integrity, jumping in and out of it, challenging
not only its reality but the reality of the world in which it,
in another frame, exists. ("Phantom" 69)
The sequence Coover refers to depicts a
movie projectionist, played by Keaton, who falls asleep while
projecting a film and dreams that he has entered it; fiction and
reality merge as a real character exists within a fictional
context. Coover pays homage to Keaton’s movie, and this sequence
in particular, in his short story “The Phantom of the Movie
Palace,” exploring the theme of fiction and reality colliding
using many of the same techniques that Keaton employed.
The parallels between Coover’s
story and Keaton’s film are both literal and figurative; the
stories are similar not only in their plot and characterization,
but also in their experimentation with and twisting of the
notion of reality. Literally, both stories portray a
projectionist whose notion of reality becomes skewed as he
becomes trapped in a movie. More importantly, however, both
stories refashion our ideas of reality by disturbing the
traditional boundaries between the two. Keaton intertwines the
real world with a fictitious one in his film, as does Coover in
his story. Just as Coover’s main character “projects two, three,
even several [films] at a time, creating his own split-screen
effects, montages, superimpositions . . . [or] slid[es] two or more
projected images across each other like brushstrokes, painting
each with the other” Coover combines elements from several
different genres to expose their artifice, and then places a
real character (the projectionist) in an artificial world to
project a new image of reality for the reader (“Phantom” 22).
Observing the direct
relationships between “The Phantom of the Movie Palace” and
Sherlock, Jr. makes Coover’s parody evident, which is
important to understand before considering the effect both works
have on the viewer. Coover describes the projectionist’s
experience within the film in Sherlock, Jr.: “[The
projectionist] goes ‘in [to the movie]’ but ends up outside. The
background then goes through a series of rapid cuts while he
suffers continuity: He sits on a bench, finds himself sprawling
on a city sidewalk, stands and starts to walk and nearly falls
over a cliff” ("Sherlock" 70). In “The
Phantom of the Movie Palace,” the projectionist is similarly
disoriented as elements shift and disappear: “[A]t the head of
the stairs he feels a cold draft: he leans over and sweeps the
space with his hand: The stairs are gone” (32). Not only does Coover place his projectionist in an environment where objects
are constantly shifting, but he also illustrates explicitly that
the projectionist is now within the movies, not just within some
sort of parallel universe. For example, early in the story
(before the projectionist crosses over into a fictional world,)
he projects a film that contains an orphan girl with “holes in
her underwear. Or perhaps those are just water spots—it’s an old
film” (17). After the projectionist has entered the film world,
he sees a “glimpse of water-spotted underwear on the ladder
above him as he starts to climb. Or are those holes?” (33). By
showing that a character that once only existed on film is now
coexisting with the projectionist, Coover leaves little doubt
that the projectionist now exists in the film world. As Thomas
E. Kennedy points out, “the projectionist’s existence mixes with
the films, [and] is lost in the films” (76). The inversion of the projectionist’s observations about the
orphan’s underwear (when he first notices “holes . . . [or] just
water spots” and later first thinks of them as water spots,
“[o]r are those holes?”) also suggests an inversion of the two
worlds—the projectionist’s very thoughts are turned around in
this new place. Clearly, Coover’s projectionist now exists
within film just as Keaton’s projectionist does in Sherlock,
Jr.; Coover uses the text to make his meaning (and the
connection to the film) explicit.
Another correlation between “The Phantom
of the Movie Palace” and Sherlock, Jr. is that each
projectionist’s experience within film takes place in a dream.
Keaton’s projectionist falls asleep, enters the film world, and
awakens at the film’s conclusion. Although the dream is not as
explicit in “The Phantom of the Movie Palace,” with the viewer
never actually seeing Coover’s projectionist fall asleep,
several elements in the text suggest that the projectionist may
be dreaming, or is at least experiencing a dream-like state. The
story is clearly divided into two sections by a break in the
text: “And then . . . THE NEXT DAY . . . as the old titles would say,
back when time wore a white hat, galloping along heroically from
horizon to horizon, it happens. The realization of his worst
desires” (25). Although the text’s meaning isn’t interrupted,
the words on the page are literally separated by a white space,
suggesting a kind of shift; this place in the story marks the
switch from the real world to the world of the movies. In
addition, as the projectionist wanders through this confusing
fictional world, “his movements thicken as in a dream” (30). The
absurdity of events adds to the feeling of unreality, while the
quick movement from situation to situation also suggests a
dream-like state, making the connection between Keaton’s film
and Coover’s story more apparent.
However, the dream quickly turns to a
nightmare, and Coover constructs his hero’s reaction to that
nightmare just as Keaton constructs his in Sherlock, Jr.
In his article about Keaton’s movie, Coover notes: “What
persists throughout this film of rapid metamorphic changes and
ceaseless pratfalls is the comedian’s reassuring resilience, his
good-natured humility and stony dignity, his ongoing chin-up
presence in an absurd and unfair world” ("Phantom" 70). The projectionist in Sherlock, Jr.
remains composed despite the bizarre nature of events, and
Coover’s projectionist displays a similar positive attitude in
the midst of chaos. He retreats into fantasy, ironically using
the same cliché formulas from the films that seem to be causing
his problems in the first place to comfort himself: “And now our
story takes us down this shadowed path, he murmurs to himself,
feeling like a rookie cop, walking his first beat and trying to
keep his chin up” (“Phantom” 28). Coover’s projectionist becomes increasingly Keatonesque as he
tries to maintain his composure. As silhouettes appear above him
and disappear when he tries to look at them, “he commences to
whistle a little tune” (“Phantom” 29).
By trying to keep calm in the face of the adversity, Coover’s
projectionist becomes an extension of Keaton’s projectionist,
illustrating a dimension of Sherlock, Jr. that Coover
clearly admired.
Of course, Coover does not admire all
films, and, fittingly, used his story to criticize the artifice
of popular cinema. He mentions in his article on Sherlock, Jr.
that: “It took the great European innovators of the early
sixties to lure me back again to a medium I thought too shaped
by formula and money” (Writers 69). Coover
goes on to describe “the magic of silent film . . . suggestive of
life itself” and calls Buster Keaton “maybe the best and truest
of . . . all [realists]” (69). Clearly, Coover sees Sherlock, Jr.
as a departure from standard films, and echoed its structure in
“The Phantom of the Movie Palace” to expose generic movies for
what he considers them to be, “too shaped by formula and money”
(69).
Coover illustrates the monotony of formula
in the story by beginning the story with an incredible
hodgepodge of clips from virtually every standard genre of films
from the 1950’s: the alien invasion film, the gangster flick,
the romance, the horror film (13-15). Jackson I. Cope notes that
many of the stories “[offer] an encyclopedia of film reference,
but the pleasures of source hunting . . . must give way before the
realization that generic lamination, not specific films,
constitutes the main structure—what the projectionist calls
‘Purviews of Cunning Abstractions’” (139). (The term “Purviews of Cunning Abstractions” is especially
interesting; it is a play on the term “Previews of Coming
Attractions,” a categorization under which “The Phantom of the
Movie Palace” falls within the collection A Night at the
Movies, and exposes movie previews as simple overviews of
virtually the same movie.) The “generic lamination” that Cope
describes is further illustrated by the projectionist himself,
as he briefly considers breaking with the standards, but quickly
rejects the idea: “No, no, be happy with your foggy takes, your
painted backdrops and bobbing ship models, your dying heroes
spitting blood capsules, your faded ingenues in nunnery loos or
up loft ladders . . . . The miracle of artifice is miracle enough”
(“Phantom” 17). With this passage, Coover clearly conveys the sense that movies do not in fact
represent reality, and that most audiences are sentimental
enough to absorb their messages anyway, challenging his reader’s
concept of film and its influence.
Naturally, Coover’s criticism of genre
films necessitates his own break with the predictability of
genre fiction, and Coover uses this departure to communicate the
importance of originality and innovation. As the projectionist
begins to manipulate films to create new ones (just as Coover
manipulates the text), he reflects on the rebelliousness, and
importance, of his action: “He . . . feels suddenly like he’s caught
out in no-man’s-land on a high trapeze with pie on his face, but
he can’t stop . . . . He knows there’s something corrupt, maybe even
dangerous, about this collapsing of boundaries, but it’s also
liberating, augmenting his film library exponentially. And it is
also necessary” (23). Coover emphasizes the importance, and the
necessity, of experimentation, of breaking with formula,
and of remembering that film is, after all, fiction.
Although the theme of money is less
pervasive than that of formula, Coover briefly mentions it
toward the end of the story, combining it with the condemnation
of formula. As the projectionist is waiting to be executed
alongside many stock film characters, “[a] voice on the public
address system is...describing them all as . . . ‘abominable
parvenus of iconic transactions’” (35-36). Although the phrase
“parvenus of iconic transactions” seems literally meaningless,
it suggests that the characters in the auditorium (movie stars)
have sold out, trading their integrity for fame. (The phrase
also, like “Purviews of Cunning Abstractions,” echoes “Previews
of Coming Attractions,” illustrating once again Coover’s
technique of twisting meaning and language to create something
new.)
More important than the criticism of
formulaic films, however, is the “collapsing of boundaries”
(“Phantom” 23) between the fictional
world and the real world, an idea that Sherlock, Jr. and
“The Phantom of the Movie Palace” both explore, which provides
the audience with a new view of what constitutes reality. Does
the imaginary world become a reality for those who immerse
themselves in it? Keaton and Coover suggest that it might by
juxtaposing real life with the fantasy world of film.
Coover once said: “The world itself being
a construct of fiction, I believe the fiction maker’s function
is to furnish better fictions with which we can reform our
notion of things” (149-50). Clearly, Buster
Keaton’s film gave Coover a new “notion” of the relationship
between fiction and reality, and Coover’s story is an attempt to
provide his reader with that same reformed idea, using the same
plot and even the same character that Keaton used to do
so. Just as Coover has his projectionist beheaded at the
conclusion of “The Phantom of the Movie Palace” because “it’s
all in [his] mind,” Coover also destroys his reader’s ideas
about the boundaries between fiction and reality by showing that
those boundaries sometimes only exist in our minds (36).
Doing so gives the reader a “reform[ed] notion of” fiction, and
since it does, Coover has truly served his “function” as a
fiction maker.
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