Consumerism and Its Discontents: Harold Lloyd and the Anxieties of Capitalism

Abstract

Any discussion of the transition from slapstick excess to narrative coherence and the subsequent sublimation of slapstick’s anarchic tendencies inevitably leads one to Harold Lloyd, the archetypal boy next door, fresh-faced, neat, bespectacled — in Lloyd’s words, ‘a regular fellow’, and certainly the least grotesque or transgressive of the great screen clowns.’ The very normality of Lloyd’s persona allows his movies to deploy romance not as farce but rather as the central engine of the narrative; you feel he could be a sweetheart, a husband, in ways that, say, Chaplin’s Tramp or Arbuckle’s man-child simply could not. Nor is this the only shift in the early history of slapstick; while Sennett’s early movies appealed to the immigrant’s view of the US as intrinsically violent and incomprehensible, Lloyd’s movies reflected the concerns of his middleclass audience: getting out and moving on, the boundless optimism of upward mobility. The happy endings and sunny disposition of Lloyd’s work have thus been read by a range of critics (including Frank Krutnik and Peter Krämer) as a genteel repression of the anarchic tendencies of slapstick comedy, their broad physicality kept beneath the surface until key moments in the narrative: the great set-pieces of Lloyd’s work (Krutnik, 2003, pp. 43–54, 52–72).