Movie-Link Madness: "Wall-E" and "The General"

For those of you who've followed this blog from the beginning, you might know my undying love for Buster Keaton's 1926 masterpiece The General, and my ire for the popularity surrounding Pixar's worst yet most-lauded film Wall-E (2008).

Everybody says the same thing when I ask them why they like Wall-E: "Oh, for them to evoke so much emotion without saying anything is nothing short of remarkable!" This is a quote for people who have never tried writing a screenplay. And a quote for people who haven't met Old Stone Face.

Old Stone Face is the affectionate nickname for Buster Keaton, who wrote, produced, directed, and starred in The General, a 1926 silent romantic comedy about a disgraced train engineer who must thwart the entire Union army in order to rescue his beloved Annabel Lee. Keaton narrowly escapes death in one gleefully elaborate set-piece after another, and the film culminates in a climactic train-derailment, and of course, the reunion of the two sweethearts. And there are no words.

Sounds a lot like Wall-E, except nobody praises The General because it's silent. Now, first pet-peeve: Wall-E is not silent. It's filled with pontificating talking heads who beat into our terribly deflated skulls that being green is good and being fat is bad! Second pet-peeve: Pixar is supposed to be the studio that doesn't fill its films with pop-culture references and therefore instantly date its films, unlike their rival DreamWorks, but make no mistake-- Wall-E is a proud product of the environmentally-obsessed wanning years of the Bush administration. I agree, Wall-E is adorable, but they should've left out all of the humans. Oh, and he shouldn't have magically come back to life with a kiss at the end of the film. That's ok in Sleeping Beauty, where you're clearly within the realms of fantasy, but Wall-E begged us to take it as serious sci-fi.

But I digress. Where was I? Old Stone Face. Buster Keaton got his nickname in the vaudeville business, when he realized that he got bigger laughs when he didn't guffaw at his own jokes. When he transfered to film, his weary, determined, super-serious visage never changed, and he's all the more hilarious for it.

No, wait, that wasn't the point, either. Oh, yes, now I remember. People don't praise The General for its being silent because everybody who should know something about making movies knows that its never the dialogue which pulls on the audience's heartstrings. Ever! Your favorite rom-com does not get you to love it by talking. A movie is (or at least should be) a series of scenes in which characters do, and in order to make it more realistic, they usually need to talk. To take away dialogue and remain emotionally weighty is not to do something extraordinary. In fact, it tends to clarify one's narrative vision. The best films can still be understood when muted.

So. The unstoppable freight-train of unlicensed praise for Wall-E rolls on while The General remains unpraised (or rather unknown) by contemporary audiences. If you're still reading, I'm sure you're either nodding your head in agreement or sharpening your axe.

--Serge