The Anatomy of Harpo Marx

By Wayne Koestenbaum

The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is a luxuriant, detailed play-by-play account of Harpo Marx’s physical movements as captured on screen. Wayne Koestenbaum guides us through the thirteen Marx Brothers films, from The Cocoanuts in 1929 to Love Happy in 1950, to focus on Harpo’s chief and yet heretofore unexplored attribute—his profound and contradictory corporeality. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo’s body—its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, "cute" pathos, and more. In a virtuosic performance, Koestenbaum’s text moves gracefully from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing, and provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Feb 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780520951983

Wayne Koestenbaum

Wayne Koestenbaum is a distinguished professor of English, French, and comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. His twenty books include Camp Marmalade, Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Humiliation, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. For more information, visit waynekoestenbaum.com.

Book preview

Early Ecstatic Emptiness

I

The Holy Fool Flees Language’s Stink Bomb

THE COCOANUTS (1929)

He was attached to sounds and because of his attachment could not let sounds be just sounds. He needed to attach himself to the emptiness, to the silence. — JOHN CAGE, Silence

I

ENTRANCE At the studios of Paramount Pictures in Astoria, Long Island, in his first scene, his first major film, 1929, six years before the Third Reich passed the Nuremberg Laws, Harpo enters honking. Honk honk. Pause. Honk honk. Lemming-like, he pursues a woman who doesn’t realize that a kook is shadowing her. What does Harpo want? He wants to honk, copy, play, irritate, smash, point, lean, and rest. He wants to find a double, to be useless, to recognize, and to be recognized. He wants to greet the void. He wants to go blank. Or maybe he wants nothing.

PILLOW BOOKS Originally I intended to write a book about Harpo’s relation to history and literature. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Hegel. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Marx. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Stein. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Hitler.

Then I drafted a novella, The Pillow Book of Harpo Marx. The narrator, Harpo, was a queer Jewish masseur who lived in Variety Springs, New York, and whose grandparents had starred in vaudeville with Sophie Tucker.

Then I decided I didn’t want to waste Harpo’s name on a novella. So I set out to write the book you are now holding—a blow-by-blow annotation of Harpo’s onscreen actions. My aim? Assemblage. Homage. Imitation. Transcription. Dilation.

Last night I dreamt that my typewriter’s ribbon expatriated from the machine and curled onto the floor. Dreams are evidence I can’t omit from my pillow book.

This opening chapter has the fewest pictures. At first I didn’t realize how pleasurable it was to interrupt the movie and seize proof that Harpo was god-like, exemplary, in danger of vanishing if I didn’t capture him. I won’t go back now and resee The Cocoanuts and grab more pictures; I won’t doctor my experimental anatomization of Harpo’s anti-melancholy body, whose materiality suffuses me with physical contentment, as if I were rocking the infant universe to sleep. When I first fell in love with Harpo, it wasn’t, however, his contentment that struck me; I was moved by his hyperkinesis. Other actors handled plot doldrums, while, in the corner, Harpo, unregarded, unspeaking, busied himself with rapid oscillations of head, eye, and hand, self-pleasuring vibrations that sometimes struck sparks in other players, though, mostly, Harpo’s butterfly gyrations woke no one else to his centrality. I, as viewer, was responsible for granting him primacy; and I could do so only by slowing him down and giving words to these muscular mutations, these gestures of mouth-opening and wrist-bending that were, on the surface, merely funny but, below the surface, were uncannily empty. The idiosyncrasy—Harpo’s nod, or cavern-mouth, or mica-eyes—appeared fleeting and subverbal; and I developed a need to convince strangers that Harpo’s hyperkinetic emptiness had metaphysical dimensions.

CONCENTRATION, ABSTRACTION, SERIALITY Harpo is the silent brother. Could he really talk? Yes, but never onscreen. Later, I’ll explain why.

The Marx Brothers had a stage career (vaudeville, Broadway) before their act immigrated to Hollywood; I will limit my attentions to Harpo’s film embodiment.

Watching his screen adventures, I don’t laugh; I concentrate. Concentration is a sadly dwindling cultural resource; opportunities to pay attention— even going overboard and fastening monomaniacally to a single object— deserve advocacy.

Art, whether visual or literary, may choose to operate in serial fashion, composing its tricks by lining up similarly timed or similarly spaced modules. In Harpo’s performances, one gag, or incremental piece of comic business, follows another. His gestures obey a mysterious nonlogic of mere adjacency. The schtick’s fragments stack up like cubes or buttons—impropriety’s rosary-beads. His performances, like the ocean’s, are abstract. We observe the ebb, but we don’t expect an explanation.

Behaving as a serial artist, Harpo lines up his self’s pieces, one by one, in a row: he gathers comic bits into a transparent assemblage, hieratic as Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, but without didactic baggage. The seeming continuity of Harpo’s performances disguises their origin in separable flashes of comic perception. Walter Benjamin described the art of Charlie Chaplin in similar terms: Each single movement he makes is composed of a succession of staccato bits of movement. In a different context, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, attuned to pieces, theorized an ego’s tendency to be in bits.

Sequentially, bit by bit, this book will point to Harpo’s screen gestures. My procedure courts overthoroughness, and therefore stupefaction—an interminability I consider Novocain. As Andy Warhol filmed a man sleeping, and called it Sleep, I want to commit media-heist, to steal a man from his native silence and transplant him into words, if only for the pleasure of taking illusory possession of a physical self-sureness that can never be mine.

The Marx Brothers were not part of my star-infatuated childhood; I fell in love with Harpo only recently. Without foreknowledge, I found myself hypnotized by the curly-wigged man who stared erratically, with a glazed expression, in a direction that was neither toward nor away from the other; his gaze seemed to evade reciprocity, yet also to invite response. Harpo, I discovered, moved more quickly, and more elusively, than I could account for. If I slowed down the film, his gestures could unfold under a different planetary dispensation. I wanted to figure out how he put together cuteness from scratch, and how he coined, with tools of no one else’s devising, a grammar of adorability, affection, stupefaction, giddiness, sleepiness, shock, and other category-defying moods. I wanted, above all, to figure out how he seduced me into relinquishing my own thoughts, for a few years, to concentrate, instead, on his gestures, which didn’t need my annotations. Harpo made thirteen films; because my goal is homage and replication, I’ve written thirteen chapters. Anatomizing rather than synthesizing, I bed down with entropy and disarray.

FAMILY CHARACTERISTICS The Marx Brothers film career officially begins with The Cocoanuts (1929). I take 1929 personally: my mother was born in 1930, my father in 1928. Though my father is certainly a talker, and a master of esoteric words and abstract concepts, in my childhood he was often silent—either sulking, or bitter, or contemplative, or outshouted. I interpreted his silence as a comforting antidote to my mother’s explosiveness, although now I can conceive that her liveliness and candor offered a different kind of comfort, a tactile realm of figuration, a warm materiality, apart from the bodiless void of my father’s abstraction. But when I was growing up, I felt sad that my mother didn’t decode or translate my father’s muteness, and I idealized (and blamed myself for) his gloom, passivity, or nonreactivity, as if we four children had conspired to deprive him of speech.

In Harpo’s first scene, I glimpse his major gimmicks. I note his rouged lips; his thirst; his appetite; his laziness; his musicality; his whistling; his marveling relation to words as material objects; his plug hat’s height and élan; his pants, not as ragged or droopy as in later films; his belt, not connected to the function of upholding pants; his gaze, riveted to any passing woman; his bulbous taxi horn, phallically protruding, and providing protest or emphasis; his willingness to fight against women rather than merely to romance them; his cheerful distaste for regular channels of communication; his large eyes, rapt, like a painter’s or bird-watcher’s, seizing transitory visitations. Harpo’s eyes are bigger than a regular person’s. That is an anatomical fact I can’t prove. His eyes, which tend to brighten and pop, dramatize the attempt to recognize (or to seek recognition from) another person. Harpo’s bug eyes do more than beseech: they attest, grip, sign, declare, accuse, renounce, and mourn.

DEADNESS I offer verbal attunement to a dead man—a man already dead (or abstracted) when alive. We consider his stupefaction funny. By misinterpreting deadness, we wound him; we misread his incapacity as a joke, and we admire his fanatically precise reassembly of woundedness into action.

Bullied, Harpo fled school during second grade and never returned. His onscreen silence rebukes an America that refused him an education. Shouldn’t a New York City truant officer have knocked on his family’s door, 179 East 93rd Street, and demanded that little Arthur—pronounced Ahtha—go back to school? In his act’s staccato periodicity, I hear a percussive, repeated complaint, unspecified in content and in addressee. He is rebuking himself for failing to speak, rebuking others for speaking, and rebuking the social contract for ignoring his existence. Watching, we, too, become wounded. Stars mar us; we receive vicarious illumination, but they outshine and therefore humiliate us by reminding us of our nugatory status as nonparticipants in screen existence. Let’s revise the public discourse that considers us vultures, feeding on celebrity carrion; stars damage us by colonizing our consciousness and by persuading us that being cinema-worthy is the only way to shine. I will concentrate on moments when Harpo’s eyes shine, as if they were trying to articulate a desire on the threshold of awareness.

BIRTH ORDER Harpo is the second brother. (So am I.) Actually, Harpo is the third brother. The very first Marx child, Manfred, died as an infant. (I, too, am the third child: my oldest sibling was stillborn.)

After Manfred came Leonard, a.k.a. Chico, in 1887. Chico is the wheeler-and-dealer, the charming gambler and schemer, the dolt with a stereotypical Italian accent.

In 1888, Adolph was born. He later changed his name to Arthur. We know him, however, as Harpo, the silent one.

In 1890, Minnie Marx gave birth to Julius Henry, who grew into Groucho. Loudmouth with a cigar and painted mustache, he is the most educated of the brothers, and the most celebrated. Deposing Groucho from vocal sovereignty might have been Harpo’s covert aim.

The youngest child, Herbert, born in 1901, ended up as Zeppo, the conventionally handsome, matinee-idol brother, the straight man, the only plausible love-interest.

I’ll ignore the second-to-youngest, Gummo, who doesn’t appear in films.

I have two brothers, one sister. Maybe one day I’ll write about sisters. But my subject here is brothers, or the sensation of losing identity amid fraternal haze.

DUCK-MOUTH Harpo, in his first scene, juts out his lips to compose an indignant chute, like a piggybank slot, or a vacuum-cleaner attachment: I call this mannerism duck-mouth, or chute-mouth. I will often mention it—because it attracts me, and because it confuses me, and because its repetition (again and again the duck-mouth) might have comforted him. He doesn’t want to be a duck, but he seems to realize that duck-mouth brings results. Harpo is a pragmatist, though the fruits of his actions are often ephemeral—trifles like satisfaction, attention, recognition, surfeit, stasis, excess, magnification.

As soon as Chico says, We sent you a telegram, Harpo faces forward, greeting the Broadway audience, the camera, or some offscreen presence. Seismic processes—gravity, time, sequence—transpire without intervention; we needn’t manually turn causality’s wheel. Harpo proposes liberation from the need to push reality into prescriptive, fixed formations.

CONSUMING THE INEDIBLE Harpo sits on the couch. Beside him, at attention, gazing upward to the ceiling, and not looking at Harpo, stands a hotel porter in white tux jacket. Harpo removes one of its silver buttons, holds it at a distance to identify its nature, polishes it, and pops it in his mouth. He turns toward the camera, smiles, and nods: tastes good. The experiment succeeded. Eating a button, he violates dietary laws, and ingests the forbidden, the inedible: Judaism calls it treif. Harpo plucks another button, chews it, and wipes his mouth with the stooge’s bow-tie. Sacrilege intensifies: loafing on the couch, Harpo rests an ankle in the lackey’s hand. The poor guy, demoted to furniture, ignores the insult and stands stiffly at attention, forced to obey a fool.

Groucho calls Harpo a groundhog. Button-eating has turned him into an animal, an escapee from a Kafka story. Becoming an animal (or, as theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it, becoming-animal) is a laudable human tendency. Harpo may, in fact, represent a semi-utopian condition of permanent ascent into animality, a variety of exalted consciousness.

All this talk of exaltation shouldn’t make you forget that my topic is a dead man. I began writing about Harpo in the months after the death of my favorite singer, the soprano Anna Moffo, who is famous for having a voice of unusual voluptuousness and lightness, and also famous for having lost that voice prematurely. She died on March 10, 2006. The word anatomy, in the title, accidentally refigures her name: Anatomy is Anna to Me.

HARPO’S EMPTINESS Emptying myself, I try to become as erased and vigilant as Harpo, who, sitting on the couch while Chico and Groucho talk, maintains a spy’s posture, eyes attuned to ambient frequencies. The porter tries to take Harpo’s suitcase. Harpo, thinking himself robbed, fights back. In the scuffle, the suitcase opens and proves to be empty, like Harpo’s wordless mind. His blankness lacks presuppositions and forbids reciprocation. If you don’t interfere with Harpo, and you satisfy his oral needs (give him coat buttons to chew, and ink to drink), he will be a glad groundhog; but if you thwart him, he will bop you over the head with his honker, a subaltern’s scepter, providing a merely playpen sovereignty.

The title’s cocoanuts refers to the Marx Brothers, whose Jewish nuts, their testicles, their masculinities, have a suspect, pigmented, tropical undertone; but the fruity title especially applies to Harpo, a sweet nothing with a hollow noggin that promises a forbidden medley of milk and meat.

EXCOMMUNICATION: THE THIRD LETTER Harpo, baby monster, sits on the desk and methodically tears up mail. Excommunication delights him. Advocating witless increase, magnification for magnification’s sake, Harpo is overjoyed to repeat the same action: reach into the mail cubicle, retrieve a letter, rip it up, remove another letter, rip it up. His eyes flash as he probes the postal beehive; his other, unoccupied hand hangs suspended, conducting a phantom orchestra. Enthralling, the speed and efficiency of Harpo’s reverse factory, an assembly line that destroys rather than produces. His gaze pivots between letters and Groucho, to whom the mail-destroying feat is a potlatch obediently offered.

When a hotel employee hands Groucho a telegram (actually, a bill), Harpo intercepts and shreds it. Harpo, bookkeeper, performs his favorite function, erasure, canceling debt in medias res. If asked to perform a three-part task, he skips the middle step. If ordered to deliver a message, he destroys it.

Comedy’s rhythm: do anything, however trivial, three times. Make a motion; repeat it; repeat it again. Harpo’s eyes flash when he tears the third letter. The first two gestures are exploratory. With the third letter, he moves from experiment to ecstasy. Like an anteater examining its prey, or like an absorbed infant contemplating a rattle, Harpo glances at the letter-about-to-be-delivered. By ripping it up, he reenacts the destruction of his own voice. Toward his voicelessness—as toward the letters he aggressively destroys— he exhibits no pity, no chagrin. We might consider language’s disappearance a nightmare, but Harpo finds it Lethean.

RATIOCINATION IS FUNNY Harpo sees what resembles a potato but is actually a sponge; he prongs it with a pen, as if with a fork, and chews experimentally, slowly, quizzically. (We can see him think. For our sake, he exaggerates ratiocination, and turns it into a joke.) With Butoh-precise gestures, he spreads paste on the sponge and drinks the ink from the jar, a mock-teacup. Fussy Harpo examines a bouquet before choosing the ideal blossom to eat, and almost cracks up at his own preposterousness.

THE INSTANT OF EYE CONTACT WITH THE VIEWER Note Harpo’s distended, glowing, mesmerized eyes, peering, out their corners, toward the camera. His gaze, no longer shy about confronting us, implies: I know that you see my misbehavior. I like being caught. Harpo recognizes the viewer recognizing him. After bliss, an attack of autohypnosis seizes him and shuts down pleasure; glazed eyes, turning away from the camera, sever our momentary bond.

HARPO WANTS MORE OF THE SAME Harpo defines appetite eccentrically. Give me more of the same. Let me keep biting. Aesthetic process—creating and receiving—also obeys this accretive motion.

When the phone rings, Chico answers it, and Harpo makes musical mischief by ink-stamping any available surface: each time the stamp concussively strikes, it produces a different pitch. Sometimes he hits the bell’s bull’s-eye, inadvertently calling a hotel maid: Did you ring, sir? she says, saluting, and then, with each accidental ring, another girl appears. Seeing the first maid arrests Harpo: he has discovered a magic switch but doesn’t understand the cause-effect relation between bell and Being. And thus Harpo is entitled to live in the entranced gap between cause and effect, off samsara’s wheel.

WAVING GOOD-BYE TO SOMEONE WHO CAN NO LONGER SEE YOU Harpo doesn’t mind being rejected. He waves good-bye to the girls, already out of sight. A Harpo trademark: waving to someone who can no longer see you. He acts chummy with the void. His wave dignifies the useless communication, the for-nothing. Demonstrating a pointless, antiutilitarian beauty, he puts effort and artistry into a motion unseen by companions. Thus Harpo, an autoerotic autocrat, denies that affectionate actions need recipients.

KINESIS PRECEDES THINKING Move, then think. Act, then contemplate. Obey the body’s innate intelligence, its wish to move. Writing is kinetic. These sentences obey my movement-based desire to concentrate on a vanished subject.

Chico and Harpo take turns spinning around a crook—played by Cyril Ring, who also appeared in Bette Davis’s Mr. Skeffington and Barbara Stanwyck’s The Lady Eve and Judy Garland’s Babes in Arms. (Hollywood intertextuality is important: kabbalah-like, it confirms cinematic kismet.) Men aren’t supposed to dance together, but Harpo’s kinetic momentum prevents the comrade from understanding the act’s compromising nature.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying that Arthur Marx—the real Harpo—was queer. I’m not saying anything about the sexuality of the real Arthur Marx. How could I? (Oh, I could say a few things: he was happily married to actress Susan Fleming. They wed in 1936, when Harpo was forty-six years old. His closest friend was the theater critic and Algonquin Round Table wit Alexander Woollcott, who happened to be queer, and who happened to be, as Groucho put it, in love with Harpo in a nice way—a relationship about which there has been a certain amount of intriguing though ungrounded speculation.) Nor am I saying anything about what Harpo, the character, wants. Harpo, onscreen, is a fiction. And fictions don’t have desires. They have actions. Harpo’s actions I choose to take queerly. Don’t accuse me of outing anybody! I’ve never outed anyone in my life. I’m simply watching Harpo dance with a man.

TURN A SHAME WORD (BUM) INTO A REPEATABLE MUSICAL OBJECT Cyril—bully, snob, Gentile—calls Harpo a bum. Come, Penelope, let’s get away from this . . . bum. Tramp. Rear end. The word bum, though it stuns and shames, provides ammunition. Here is a word that Harpo can handle—a juicy, containable morpheme, an almost onomatopoeic syllable, whose low, corporeal sound reinforces its sense. Again he mouths the word: bum. It may mean nothing to him, but it offers a pretext for testing out repetition, for moving his lips, for enunciating. Bum—insult—turns into kernel of song. Harpo mouths the word to Chico, who provides sound. And as bum repeats—bum, bum, bum—it accretes into a rhythm, an abstract pattern. Chico sings and Harpo mimes bum-bum-bum while exiting, Harpo holding a phantom flute and audibly whistling. (Words may be out of bounds, but nonverbal noises are kosher.)

I’VE ACCOMPLISHED ANOTHER TRANSFORMATION Pleasure, for Harpo, lies in transformation for transformation’s sake. Why not be thrifty, and make use of every inanimate scrap? (Gertrude Stein’s credo: Use everything.) Harpo takes part in the grand tradition of art (from Marcel Duchamp to John Cage to Dieter Roth, and beyond) that recycles—or transubstantiates—debris.

At the hotel’s registration desk, Harpo sniffs the telephone, scrutinizes it, tries to interpret it, to cozy up to it, as if it were human. Then he chews the phone and looks toward the camera; his eyes, alight with pleasure, signify it tastes good or else I’ve accomplished another transformation; I’ve metamorphosed phone into food. The ink jar, like a precious thurible, glistens; pinkie in air, he drinks. Harpo’s face, a scientist’s, evaluates. With a receptivity to the strangeness of the ordinary as radical as Thoreau’s or Wittgenstein’s, Harpo treats existence as a sequence of experiments, none fatal. He puts down the ink jar, smiles, and nods. Job well done, another foodstuff pilfered, another item of garbage transformed into treasure.

When Chico enters, Harpo’s face remains immobile—arrested by panic—but his alert eyes try to figure out whether the universe is sanely functioning. Hyperawareness of atmospheric dangers is an opportunist’s, a paranoid’s, or a traumatized soul’s—a shtetl mentality, transmuted to Paramount.

THE SWITCH TRICK One of Harpo’s trademarks is the switch trick—instead of giving his hand to someone who wants to shake it, Harpo offers a leg. The detective unconsciously grasps the leg and then angrily thrusts it away when he realizes the ruse. This trick always satisfies Harpo. It gives him a chance to rest his leg. It eroticizes the handshake’s masculine formality. It amplifies the offering. It confuses the enemy. It stuns—stops—time. It stymies the equivalence, the fake parity, of hand and hand. It interrupts grammar.

Everyone accepts Harpo’s thigh, because the switch trick happens quickly and unexpectedly, and because it lacks apparent logic. Why protect yourself against a nonsense assault? The switch trick blends aggression and intimacy, and proposes substitution as an aesthetic category. Notice the pleasure that hits when one thing replaces another. You expect a fist. You receive, instead, a flower.

THROWING A GOOKIE The detective (played by Basil Ruysdael, a basso who sang in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète with Enrico Caruso at the Metropolitan Opera) recognizes Harpo’s face, and flashes a wanted criminal photo. Reciprocating, Harpo throws him a Gookie. In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, he calls this trademark expression throwing a Gookie: crossed eyes, bloated cheeks, protruding tongue. The gesture originated in cruelty. Mr. Gehrke, in Harpo’s childhood, was an ordinary man who rolled cigars in a store window. Imitating Mr. Gehrke’s expression of rapt, foolish absorption in a task, Harpo stood in front of the window and yelled, Gookie!—the Yorkville pronunciation of Gehrke. Onstage, the Gookie was a crowd-pleaser. With this trick, he could stimulate a restless vaudeville audience. Onscreen, the Gookie safeguards Harpo’s identity by making him monstrous. Gookie rhymes with two other treats: cookie and nookie. Harpo flashes a Gookie to freeze the villain, as the Medusa’s head turned the viewer to stone. The Gookie, snake-haired, recapitulates the excited stiffness of the penis it wants to embody, or to avoid, or to cut off. (So said Freud—controversially, charismatically.) The Gookie has an affinity with castration, but I can’t make the connection foolproof.

HARPO ACTS EASILY OFFENDED Harpo playfully fingers Chico’s knish-like face. Chico slaps away the exploring hand— leave me alone! Offended, Harpo gives duck-mouth, pushes Chico, and wheels fists into the fight position. (Twice, at the moment a slug is expected, Harpo surprises by kicking Chico’s rear.) Not genuinely angry, Harpo enjoys stepping onto the assembly line of taking offense, a comprehensible sequence: he protrudes lips, kicks Chico, greases comedy’s wheels, advances to the next bit of business, and defends his own chivalric honor. His formulaic set piece—being offended— offers the comfort of imitable units, a Parcheesi pleasure, like Alhambra mosaics or Donald Judd shelves.

BABY-ROMANCING THE LAW: THE NOD Basil the basso-detective intervenes again, breaking up the fight. Now Harpo baby-romances the law by leaning; collapsing, Harpo pushes the horn into the law’s gut, and thereby honks. Harpo has forced the law to operate the farting noisemaker. The honker glues the guys together: they slow-dance. Harpo satisfies a wish to cuddle by turning punishment into cozy roundelay.

The basso-detective says, I’m going to keep watching—and Harpo, looking him directly in the eye, nods. Whether or not Harpo agrees, he nods. Reflex actions, mimicking compliance, protect him from the law: you can’t arrest or abuse a nodding man. Let’s take Harpo as emblem of flight from punishment and categorization, including the categories I impose on him.

Harpo steals the basso’s blazer and puts it on Chico. Harpo steals to please his family. Like Oliver Twist under Fagin’s charge, Harpo presents theft’s gleaning to an underworld boss—not to garner acclaim, but to remain securely in the position of tolerated little brother. Brotherliness has a queer energy that Walt Whitman called adhesiveness: the democratic desire to attach.

IMMUNITY TO COQUETRY Harpo may chase women, but he foils their advances: heterosexuality, for Harpo, doesn’t compute. And yet Kay Francis, the film’s vamp (soon she’ll star in George Cukor’s Girls about Town and Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise), tries to snare Harpo’s libido. They seem an unlikely match: she’s tall and not Jewish. Flirtatiously, she drops a handkerchief, but he mistakes love-gift for plunder, which he pockets. Did you see a handkerchief? she asks. He shakes his head no and mimics coquetry by acting femme, while his teeth extract a scarf from her bodice. Earlier, he played this trick on the detective, but Kay’s hankie is longer than the Law’s, and comes from a more intimate hiding place. Harpo mocks private property, puts his mouth to improper use, and interrupts other people’s insincerity. His mouth considers Kay’s hankie an abstract prize, which he hides in his pocket, an almost anatomical safe-deposit box.

WHY HARPO LOOKS DIRECTLY AT THE CAMERA Later, he will learn not to look at the camera. But now, in this primal film, he commits the sin of acknowledging our presence. Mincing, hand on hip, like Mae West, he looks directly at us. His lapse allows me to argue: Harpo, expressing a naked need-for-audience, smashes the diegesis (the technical word for everything that takes place within a film’s fictional world). And by smashing the diegesis, Harpo carves a covert for reverie and for threshold experiences beyond conventional moral accounting systems, including regimes that divide useful and useless acts, and regimes that compel us to choose sociability over introspection.

His horn, colliding with the shutting elevator door, squawks, and he steps backward, arrested, unsmiling, slack-faced. He has failed to prime his features with a signifying expression. Blankness propels him toward music-making; going blank, he relinquishes interaction. Harpo may wish to attach himself to others—especially brothers—but because he lacks speech, he will only thrive when solitary. His contemplative episodes seem like locales rather than merely moods. Consider Harpo a homesteader. Not necessarily a Zionist. (However, at his death, he bequeathed his harp to Israel. I assume that Israel accepted the gift.) Onscreen, he seems a man concerned with escape and territory; his musical solos represent benign, nonviolent flight from the demands of the Other. Harpo, despite clannish chumminess, thrives when abandoned, and when he interacts with his instrument. When I was young, I loved Charlie Chaplin because, clumsy and pallid, he invited us to watch him sulk. Harpo never sulks, and rarely feels sorry for himself, and yet he leans toward emptiness, as if hunting for an echo.

II

HARP AS HOMELAND Seriousness descends. (A rule of Harpo Existence: you can’t make music while kidding around.) Stranded, he has no companion, only a clarinet: he can shove no one else’s body into his transformation factory. He empties himself of alacrity; he needs to purge himself before he dares to perform. His grave face illustrates the pleasure of evacuated meaning. When he plays clarinet, his right cheek expands, but not the left: asymmetrical sign of effortful, onanistic pathos.

Clarinet is just a warm-up; his real instrument is the harp. His harp adventures never change, though their meanings deepen with reiteration: repetition allows us to discover what was immanent in an experience the first go-round. How can we understand Harpo’s harp playing, unless we visit every instance?

In this inaugural experiment, Harpo prepares for solo by posing as bogeyman—looking at the viewer through harp strings, and making a scary face, Hollywood’s idea of a savage. Change of mood: serious, he sits down at the harp, an instrument not