Bilton’s study of early 20th century American culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags bypassing rational thought to express the unconscious fears, wishes and concerns of the modern age. Silent film comedy, with its childlike love of the illogical, the destructive and the anti-social, seems to suggest a form of comic revolt against the mechanisation and the uniformity of the machine age, but the book also charts how a new consumer culture sought simultaneously to tame and contain these energies, redirecting them in the service of a newly emergent mass culture. Not just a film history of the silent era, Bilton also provides a provocative and lively engagement with the origins of mass culture, tracing the origins of Hollywood’s dream factory and alongside it the roots of our own irrational, childlike, celebrity-obsessed consumer culture
Bilton raises the important paradox of slapstick: on the one hand, it serves as a subversive tool that attacks social norms, while on the other hand, as comedy, it serves an essentially conservative purpose, restraining excessive activity by redirecting its energy to humor and laughter.
More …MUSE Project Review
Alan Bilton’s recent book Silent Film Comedy and American Culture examines how film comedy emerged at a time of social and moral transition in the United States, and established itself both as escapist entertainment but also as an expression of the American collective unconscious.
More …European Journal of American Studies
