The more I know about events in an artist’s life, the more tempted I am to find them expressed in his or her work. This can go too far.
For example, I know that Buster Keaton signed a disastrous deal with MGM in 1928, trading artistic freedom for monetary security. I also know that his career, marriage and even sobriety were compromised within a few years of that deal. I’m inclined, then, to fixate on certain moments in his MGM films that might depict the artist’s inner pain, as artwork tends to do.
But is this real? Or am I simply manufacturing meaning, based on knowledge I’m bringing in from the outside?
The true hallmark of a collapsing artist isn’t brilliant expressions of pain—it’s bad art. Keaton’s second MGM feature, Spite Marriage, is one of his worst silent films. The talkies that followed are beneath him. But his first MGM silent: The Cameraman, is one of his best.
Given that, what do I make (or what can I make) of this film’s central and recurring gag: the image of Buster swept up and overwhelmed by storms? Storms of rain, or paper, or humanity—barreling over him, burying him, threatening him, carrying him away? Is this how Buster felt?
