The Anatomy of Harpo Marx. Wayne Koestenbaum
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Vietnam War, about physics and philosophy, their unheralded interpenetration.
Facing each other, Groucho and Harpo shimmy, an off-color joust, their jazzy motions sped-up—escalation to a full-scale dance number, quoted from vaudeville. Their ability to parody each other’s fake joy reveals a disturbing overabundance of animal spirits, mustered for assimilation and aggressive camouflage. Hands raised in hallelujah pantomime verge on minstrelsy. Their white hospital scrubs are fit for Bedlam or Bellevue. Jewish doctors? Freaky twins photographed by Diane Arbus?
REMOVAL GAME As marching soldiers pass, Harpo rhythmically scissors off their plumes, one by one, and then conks the final man’s head with a mallet. Harpo’s attitude toward military conformity: snip off the plume’s paintbrush-pigtail, but express neither joy nor vengefulness. Be businesslike, an efficient craftsman, coldly scissoring. (Clip bellicose pubes with a barber’s sangfroid.) Harpo concentrates on a meaningless task—a compulsive removal game—to exempt himself from presence and to demilitarize onward-rushers.
FLEEING THE DIEGESIS United, the Marxes play banjo. In one telltale moment, almost unnoticeable, Harpo’s Einstein eyes kindly flash toward the viewer: he nearly steps out of character to smile upon his creation and to bless the brotherly endeavor. I highlight this instant of Harpo’s eyes lifting beyond the “diegesis,” into communion with the viewer or himself, because the ability to rise above schtick (and to observe it) gives him an omniscient aura. Diegesis sounds poisonous, like “digitalis”; primal, like “Genesis”; and predestined, like “genetics.” I want to rescue Harpo from the diegesis, his captivity by the film’s restrictions—as if there were a place beyond the valley of the diegesis where we could huddle together and discuss impersonation’s onerousness.
TEXTURE, BESTIALITY In one twin bed, a woman lies alone. In the other bed, Harpo snuggles a horse. He chooses horse over woman; he prefers texture to conversation. Consider him a god of palpation, of fingers reading the braille of the tangible world—bedspread, tablecloth, overalls, work shirt, grass blade, wood grain. Harpo’s willingness to pursue bestiality—even if only as a joke—wins me over, and leads me to appoint him ambassador of a principle I hold dear: regression can be its own reward. Not always a reward: in Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, the surfer-angelic-blond Timothy Treadwell (who resembles Klaus Kinski) thinks he can be boyfriends with grizzly bears, who end up eating him alive.
ZEPPO’S HANDSOMENESS AS RESONANT ADJACENCY Axiom: male handsomeness, when in the neighborhood of male not-handsomeness, sets up vibrations. Handsomeness summons overtones in nearby pitches. Musical relationships, like familial ones, depend on subterranean sympathies— electricities that fire without conscious prompting. For example: Zeppo (the handsome, unfunny brother), standing near the others, provokes, in me, a series of pestering, irreverent thoughts: how does Zeppo’s handsomeness, like tannins in wine, change the Marxian bouquet? Are the brothers jealous of Zeppo’s good looks? Is Harpo trying to upstage Zeppo’s handsomeness rather than Groucho’s verbal ferocity? Must I insist that Harpo upstages? Maybe he is just trying to thumb a ride on the conjugal Ark, or squat in Sodom.
SHEER AMAZEMENT AS PATH THROUGH EXISTENCE In a close-up of Harpo aiming a gun, his tongue sticks out, and his bug eyes exceed rational purpose. He looks like a man falling asleep on the job, a man we adore for derelict behavior, for sliding. Can warfare be cute? A bullet, skidding by his hat, reverses it. Confused, he touches the cap to verify its presence. Eyes rise, lower lip droops: by enacting shock, he puts down roots in the world. Harpo feeds us this piece of counsel: express amazement, and thereby lay claim to existence. I admire Harpo’s dumbness, his dazed passivity: I seek his advice. Sitting with my father in the bloated Buick station wagon, I received lessons on how to structure time.
DUMBFOUNDMENT AS FANE Keats, in “Ode to Psyche,” wants to build a “fane” (a temple or shrine) for Psyche, his goddess; and the word fane, which he rhymes with pain, cuts me to the quick. “Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane / In some untrodden region of my mind, / Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain . . .” Fane, the archaic, odd word, invokes a speechless locale, not visualizable, open only to the dreamer. Harpo’s dumbfoundment—zero mind, mouth agape—is my fane; and dumbfoundment is Harpo’s fane, too, the nook where he can escape the duties of the diegesis (warfare, bookkeeping, sociability, gamesmanship). In the word fane, utopian tendencies hide; Harpo is my fane, and I am his priest, temporarily. I love to bolster the cases of dubitable divinities.
ESCALATION AS IDENTITY Harpo enters the hideout house. “Send two more women,” says Groucho in his radio broadcast. Harpo puts up three fingers: send three. Harpo always escalates. Escalation, like lust for girls, makes him legible: and so, through pantomime, he will advertise himself as he who asks for mindless escalation. Shamelessly he buries a passive hand in his trousers while watching Zeppo’s activity. Must I prove that Harpo demonstrates masturbatory virtues, or that his sexuality is rudimentary?
SHUSHING THE BOMB A bomb drops: Harpo shushes it. Battles and brothers are noises Harpo must stop. Someone, a few scenes ago, told Harpo to shut up. The command impressed him, and he keeps spilling it onto others. He shushes anything in his vicinity: muteness virally spreads.
Shushing the bomb, Harpo stares forward, finger to lips. Marxian humor aims to avoid the emotional consequences of standing on extermination’s brink. Harpo occupies the vantage point of the archangel Michael in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Michael, conversing with Adam on a hill above history, predicts original sin’s consequences, as if the future were geographically surveyable. Omniscient, Harpo levitates above the sine and cosine undulations of history’s dialectical waltz: he keeps secrets too awful, too encompassing, for brothers or audiences to hear.
HARPO MAKES “THINKING” VISIBLE AND THUS EROTICIZABLE Drawing lots, Chico loses. Harpo smiles and points: he understands, a split second before the others, that Chico will be “It.” Thinking, as a physiological process, is attractive: I can eroticize thinking, or isolate it as a “beat” or “blip” of duration. Thus Harpo’s visible pondering is “smarter” than Groucho’s rodomontade. We can see the gears of thought move in Harpo’s face and upraised hand: reasoning makes an impression on his features, and because pantomime renders cogitation conspicuous, I can attach myself to it with a quasi-sexual urgency.
INTELLIGENCE, DANGEROUS, MUST BE LOCKED UP Saluting, scissors raised like a rifle, Harpo stumbles (pushed by brothers) into the ammunition closet. Inside, he throws a lit cigar (he doesn’t like its taste) onto a keg, which explodes into fireworks. Groucho misinterprets Harpo’s frightened banging on the locked door as enemy gunfire, so he says, “We’ll barricade the rear”—natch, Harpo invades from the rear, or else Groucho, anal-phobic, singles out the rear as the vulnerable zone. (Only after someone shoots Groucho’s ass does Harpo manage to exit the curio-cabinet of explosives.)
Fireworks exploding in the locked closet are visual signs of Harpo’s pent-up articulateness and hyperexcitement—intelligence detonating randomly in a locked void, mind self-sabotaging, its scattershot illuminations lacking aim or cause. “They shut me up in Prose,” Emily Dickinson declared; conventional society—the “They”—couldn’t guess that her mind was a ticking bomb. Harpo’s brothers, authoritarian, lock up Harpo’s bomb-inclinations, his powder-keg fancies. I don’t need to invoke suicide bombers to convey the seriousness, for Harpo, of caged Being, of mind-as-ammunition. Thinking, a horrifying process, resembles not an Elysian meditation but a bullet ricocheting in a locked closet.
URIAH HEEP Groucho’s head is stuck in a vase, on which Harpo paints mustache and eyebrows. Now the loudmouth undergoes an imprisonment that equals the mute’s ordeal in the detonating closet: each Marx must stay in his legibly labeled box. Harpo, satisfied