The key moment in Seven Chances is thus the previously mentioned procession of the brides, in which the film moves from what had been mostly genteel comedy into pure farce. This deep focus shot is the moment in which the sexual forces driving the film completely are turned on their head.[1] In the first half, the women are objects toward a goal—their names appear on a list, but their actual personalities and characterizations are unimportant. Keaton subverts this instead turning himself into the object of desire, but this because of his money than his own personality—he becomes a means to an end than an actual end. As Mowes notes about this shot, “Railing, arch, enclosures, and held within them a stationary figure who passively waiting, but now a man rather than a woman—all the elements proclaim that a great reversal has come.”[2] The slapstick that will follow is thus more than just a transition of comedy but a subversive commentary on class and capitalism by reversing the form of comedy. For Jimmy, the object in the first half is not marriage but money, disdained in the genteel comedy, and in the second half not money but marriage (to Mary), a tradition upheld by genteel comedy. But this is the opposite for the universe he inhabits in the two sections of the film. When the citizens of the town are made aware that there is money involved, chaos ensues so much that it seems the entire community is warped into a slapstick tradition. Before this moment, it appeared that this town was a model of genteel traditions and social upstanding, but the capital greed suddenly changes everything, sending bride after bride from all shapes, sizes, and classes. The humor loses all tradition of narrative-driven realism in favor of “lowering” these once genteel characters into the humor of the working class by exposing the genteel women’s true desire. [3]
What follows then, includes truly some of Keaton’s most pure slapstick gags. More than Keaton’s
other feature films, the second half strictly coheres to the principles of the
slapstick chase, with almost any other narrative elements completely
eliminated. Knopf writes, “The majority of the remainder of the film is made up
of a chase so vast—on such a large physical and spatial scale and so greatly
exceeding the narrative requirements—that it nearly consumes the narrative
altogether.”[4] As Jimmy learns that Mary
has accepted his proposal, he must flee from the hoards of women and make it
back to her home. At this point, one must wonder had Keaton seen the Edwin S.
Porter comedy How a French Nobleman Got a
Wife Through the New York Herald Personal Columns (1904), which has
striking similarities to this second half. However, it remains a structural
similarity only—Keaton’s gags are more elaborate and simply more fantastical
than anything Porter even came close to. The brides are not a dozen but in the
hundreds, and the chase includes multiple vehicles, swarms of bees, giant
cranes, and most famously, an avalanche of boulders. The boulders are perhaps
the complete perfection of the slapstick comedy—where Keaton was once
originally running from women with motivations, they are replaced by concrete,
unstoppable objects of chaos, as they solely act as spectacle. As Mowes notes, “They
become the perfect visual symbols of pure, idolized comic threat…an ultimate
symbol of all the evasions and runnings and bare survivals of all comic
heroes.”[5] And that is not even to
speak of where exactly this gigantic hill is even in relation to the film’s
central narrative space it originally set up—the film almost enters a
dreamscape logic in order to reach the film’s apex of pure slapstick, moving as
far away from the film’s initial humor as possible.
[1]Mowes
notes that the shot is the 216th out of 424 shots, almost exactly in
the middle of the film. Mowes, Keaton, 142.
[2]Ibid.,
143.
[3]Mowes
makes an argument regarding the gender reversals at play here as well. Ibid.,
154-155.
[4]Knopf,
The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton,
94.
[5]Mowes,
Keaton, 150.
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