The Saving Grace of Buster Keaton

The humans in the dystopian future Walter Tevis imagines in Mockingbird (1980) are at peace––the peace of drugs that have sanitized them of all the unpleasant emotions, or pleasant.
Humans are dying out, and the apocalypse is a self-chosen, self-administered, drug-induced stupor.

Books might stir up feelings, so humans have long ago given up reading and rely entirely on something like YouTube instructional videos to learn to do things. Not that they do much of anything.

Paul, one of the three narrators of Mockingbird, taught himself to read as an adult when he found a kids learn-to-read book + instructional film.

He contacts the only free intelligence in the world, an A.I. called Robert Spofforth (he's another narrator), and asks for a job teaching people to read.

Spofforth sets him instead to translate title cards in old silent movies.

(from The Little Princess, 1917)

Turns out, Paul learns a lot about being human from the silent films. Toward the end of the book (p. 242. Bantam paperback), when Paul is off drugs and full of books, he muses...

"My upbringing, like that of all the other members of my Thinkers Class, had made me into an unimaginative, self-centered, drug-addicted fool. Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living ... in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment.

"All my notions of decency were something programmed by computers and robots who themselves had been programmed by some long-dead social engineers or tyrants or fools.

"I could visualize them then, the men who had decided in some distant past what the purpose of life really was and had set up dormitories and Population Control and the dozens of inflexible, solipsistic Edicts and Mistakes and Rules....
They would have thought of themselves as grave, serious, concerned men, ––the words 'caring' and 'compassionate' would have been frequently on their lips.

"They would have looked like William Boyd or Richard Dix*, with white hair at the temples and rolled up sleeves and, possibly, pipes in their mouths, sending memos to one another across paper-and-book-piled desks, planning the perfect world for Homo sapiens,
a world from which poverty, disease, dissension, neurosis, and pain would be absent,
a world as far from the world of the films of D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson––the world of melodrama and passions and risks and excitement––as all of their powers of technology and 'compassion' could devise."

Via"Buster Keaton" by Penelope Gilliatt
scrapsfromtheloft.com/2019/11/16/buster-keaton-penelope-gilliatt


How nonchalant Keaton looks in these strenuous poses--he was all muscle.

Walter Tevis said in an interview that when he writes...

"I don’t do any outlin­ing. I don’t do any researching.
I was tempted while writing Mockingbird to start watching silent movies, you know, and see if I could pick some interesting stuff to use, and I realized that would’ve been just a dodge to avoid the type­writer. So I never research anything."

So I guess the movie stars Paul refers to are the ones Tevis knew from his own life.

*William Boyd (below, left) is a Father-Knows-Best type who played Hopalong Cassidy. Richard Dix's "standard on-screen image was that of the rugged and stalwart hero".

Buster doll...