New Review of Film and Television Studies ISSN: 1740-0309 (Print) 1740-7923 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfts20 BATTERED CHILD Peter Krämer To cite this article: Peter Krämer (2007) BATTERED CHILD, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 5:3, 253-267, DOI: 10.1080/17400300701670600 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400300701670600 Published online: 23 Nov 2007. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 100 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfts20 Download by: [Masarykova Univerzita v Brne] Date: 20 January 2017, At: 11:02 Peter Kra¨mer BATTERED CHILD Buster Keaton’s stage performance and vaudeville stardom in the early 1900s Using the meanings of Keaton’s nickname ‘Buster’ and long-standing debates about his traumatic childhood as a point of departure, this paper focuses on the comedian’s early years as a child star in American vaudeville. Promoted and widely recognized as the main attraction of the family act ‘The Three Keatons’, Keaton performed a physically extremely challenging routine, centring on mock fights with his father. The analysis of a wide range of reviews and articles in newspapers and the theatrical trade press reveals that the ludicrously exaggerated violence apparently inflicted on the child by his father was central to the audience’s enjoyment of the act. Indeed, while elements both in the performance itself (such as the boy’s happy smile) and in the publicity surrounding it (such as its emphasis on his extraordinary talent and harmonious family life) allowed spectators to dismiss the stage violence as unreal, they were also encouraged to identify with, and participate vicariously in, the father’s convincingly staged, brutal treatment of the child. The enormous success of this stage scenario of the battered child can partly be explained with reference to public debates about corporal punishment and child abuse in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America. It is easy to forget that ‘Buster’ was not the real name of the comedian universally known as Buster Keaton. The inverted commas around this nickname have long been dropped, the actual Christian names are rarely mentioned and ‘Buster’ has been accepted as just another name, an evocative and resonant name for sure, but one without any special significance that might require further investigation. However, this name is neither natural nor coincidental; instead it was fabricated and once served a precise professional function. In fact, ‘Buster’ was born Joseph Frank Keaton on 4 October 1895 in Piqua, Kansas, while his parents, the variety performers Joe and Myra Keaton, toured the rural Midwest with a medicine show. In 1901, when the Keatons managed to establish themselves as a successful act on the major urban vaudeville circuits, the parents featured the boy as the main attraction of their stage routine under the name ‘Buster’.1 This nickname New Review of Film and Television Studies Vol. 5, No. 3, December 2007, pp. 253–267 ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online ß 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/17400300701670600 254 NEW REVIEW OF FILM AND TELEVISION STUDIES served as an official label, which was attached to the boy in order to announce his special qualities to prospective employers and audiences in the world of variety entertainment. In other words, the name ‘Buster’ served as the focus of Keaton’s early star image, encapsulating his performance and his personality as a child, much like the vision of his ‘stone face’ did for the mature Keaton from the 1920s onwards. A look at the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reveals some of the meanings of the word ‘buster’ that employers and audiences would have drawn on in making sense of the label for the boy.2 Most generally, seen as a derivative of the verb ‘to bust’, ‘buster’ associates a violent act, something breaking or abruptly coming to an end. More specifically, in the 1890s, ‘buster’ was used as a term for a horse- breaker, that is, a man taming wild horses. Together with the other slang meanings of the word given by the OED (‘a roistering blade, a dashing fellow’), this usage would suggest that a buster is someone who willingly, even eagerly throws himself into violent and dangerous action, probably with an admiring audience in mind. He is without fear of harm to his body and generally skilful enough to avoid it, although occasionally he may be seriously injured. Moreover, according to yet another meaning of the word, this person is promised to be someone ‘great’, who ‘takes one’s breath away’ and ‘provokes excessive admiration and amusement’. ‘Buster’ is a particularly apt name, then, for a performer who became famous as one of the greatest acrobatic comedians of all time. Thus, when Keaton’s parents advertised their five-year-old son as ‘Buster’ in 1901, they made a promise to the readers of their advertisements: this boy’s performance would be special, and breathtakingly so; the source of this specialness would be the boy’s body, more specifically the sharp contrast between its small size and childish vulnerability on the one hand, and the physically demanding and potentially very dangerous action he would be engaged in on the other hand. That the boy’s name was indeed understood as a promise for action, which was then fulfilled by his performance, is indicated by one reviewer’s remark about ‘the efforts of ‘‘the Buster’’, who carries out his name to the letter’ by getting into acrobatic fights with his father on stage.3 Carrying out Buster’s name to the letter, there on the stage right in front of the audience, turned ‘The Three Keatons’—as the family act came to be known—into one of the greatest attractions of American vaudeville and Buster into a child star. This raises problems for commentators in more recent times, sensitized as most of them are to the issue of the abuse and commercial exploitation of children, and to the complicity of those who buy and enjoy the fruits of children’s physical labour with those who are in the business of exploiting children. Indeed, the violent nature of Buster’s performance as a child has given rise to a debate about Keaton being a victim of child abuse. For example, in 1994, two scholars proposed in Film Quarterly that Keaton’s films should be seen in the BATTERED CHILD 255 light of the abuse he suffered as a child (Sanders & Lieberfeld 1994). A group of fans, critics and family members responded with a long letter to the magazine to refute this interpretive approach and the claims about Keaton’s life it made (Tobias et al. 1995/96). The scholars saw the films both as a reflection of traumatic childhood experiences of physical abuse and as a kind of artistic therapy which allowed Keaton to come to terms with the trauma. The respondents denied that Keaton had been abused as a child and showed that some of the apparently ‘symptomatic’ features of the films were in fact generic rather than specific to Keaton. They also resented the fact that Keaton’s art was being reduced to its alleged psychological causes rather than being appreciated in its own right. In fact, these issues have been discussed in Keaton criticism and biographical literature for decades. Keaton’s first biographer Rudi Blesh based his book (published in 1966 just after Keaton’s death) on the premise that a set of fateful childhood experiences—notably an improbable series of dangerous accidents—in combination with Keaton’s early stage training and his youthful interest in engineering can explain the ups and downs of his film career and his private life (Blesh 1966). Keaton’s childhood taught him about the disastrous interventions of fate and the stoic outlook needed to cope with these interventions. So as an adult he used his performance and engineering skills to stage disasters for the screen, and he faced both these screen disasters and the disastrous developments in his private life with a stonefaced demeanour. Keaton’s second biographer Tom Dardis argued in 1979 that Keaton’s stoicism had a pathological element, and was in fact the result of the abusive treatment the boy had received from his father both on and off the stage (Dardis 1979). According to Dardis, this resulted in Keaton’s tragic inability to take charge of his own life throughout his career and most of his personal relationships, leading to the loss of his independence as a filmmaker and of his creativity in the late 1920s, to divorces and alcoholism. For Dardis, as well as for Keaton’s most recent biographer Marion Meade, Keaton’s art was effectively destroyed by childhood trauma (Meade 1995). Yet, for psychoanalyst Alice Miller (whose brief essay on Keaton was translated into English in 1990), as for Blesh and the Film Quarterly writers, Keaton’s creativity was based precisely on the necessity to come to terms with this trauma. Thus, for 40 years, biographical writers have agreed on the presence and crucial importance of traumatic experiences in Keaton’s childhood. They have disagreed on the nature of the trauma (fateful accidents or physical abuse) and the effect it had on Keaton’s career (as the very wellspring of his creativity or as the cause of his inability to sustain his work). Despite such disagreements, these writers have found it illuminating to look at Keaton’s films through the lens of his childhood. What neither these writers nor other critics have fully acknowledged is that the trauma, whose nature and effect are at the centre of this debate, was in fact carefully staged for an appreciative audience in the early 1900s.