LITMIR.BIZ

      WILLING EXECUTIONERS While Chico tells him to stay put, Harpo’s eyes glaze, a somnambulist’s, hands held outward, bottom lip drooping. I’m in a trance. Passive, I’ll execute orders. (Germany’s willing executioners?) Punished for noisemaking, Harpo returns to silent immobility. I find his enchainment “cute,” but I also find it frightening. I recognize the sensation of putting the soul in the ice compartment, of pushing the pause button on consciousness, of choosing abeyance: I decide to freeze, momentarily. And I freeze this still, from a moving picture: I freeze this instant of Harpo freezing, because I want to affirm my belief in nothingness’s wish to trammel me. Chico plays the role of nothingness. He acts as cudgel and storm cloud. Harpo is the deluged ground.

      EUREKA VERSUS DUMBFOUNDEDNESS Harpo snaps fingers to signify “Eureka!” (Inspiration: I’ll get dressed up as Groucho.) The difference between Harpo’s illuminated and stumped expressions exceeds your average Joe’s. Harpo either has a thought in his head, or he doesn’t; in his blank moments, he looks bovine. Circumstances thrust him into a physical act of concentration, like taking a dump or lifting a load. Harpo’s tenacity: I admire it. Or: I vicariously experience its sedation, its ice pack. I concentrate on Harpo, and I concentrate on what it means to concentrate, and why effortful concentration strangely resembles dumbfoundedness or arrest. Walter Benjamin, ruminating on technology and spirit, valued concentration over distraction: distracted people fall prey to ideology, while concentrated people undergo tense absorption in art.

      HARPO’S HYPERACTIVITY: MY HUMORLESSNESS Hyperkinetic, Harpo wiggles; he can’t sit still. Nervously he jiggles legs, arms, and fingers to avoid immobility. Harpo inhabits antithetical states—trance and watchfulness—but his stupor involves not depression but a held, jellied condition, like aspic, or like a mind attuned to minimalist music’s repetitions. Writing about Harpo, I press my right knee against the desk’s underside to intensify concentration on his stunned, overkinetic act.

      Literalness—treating comic content as serious—either misses the point of the Marx Brothers or discovers a contrary undertone: removing Harpo’s humor, we discover historical catastrophe, or psychological states of numbness that bring welcome anesthesia and that offer room for aesthetic reparation. The still image replaces laughter with horror. Without movement, only the humiliating predicament remains.

      FREUD’S CALL FOR OVERINTERPRETATION: OVERNAMING In a footnote to a passage in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud asserts that every neurotic symptom not only permits overinterpretation but insists on it: “every neurotic symptom, even the dream, is capable of over-interpretation, indeed demands it.” A film’s details, too, cry out for overreading—a process akin to what Walter Benjamin, in a 1917 essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” calls “overnaming,” which he cites as “the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and . . . for all deliberate muteness.” I overname because I’m melancholy. But the muteness I overname—Harpo—is himself melancholy. We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death.

      Harpo’s problem is presence. He halfway solves it by sacrificing his voice. To complete the suicidal project, he needs to get rid of his body. Never forget the suicide near his act’s happy surface.

      SMACK OF ATTESTATION I call it “attestation,” proof, demonstration, the moment of pointing to a newly perceived manifestation—as when a family retainer in Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor sings, “Eccola!” announcing that the madwoman, nightgown drenched with her murdered bridegroom’s blood, has entered, ready to sing the mad scene. The chorus falls silent, beholding the freak’s extremity. Harpo, pointing, smacks reality on its back like a rediscovered friend: you’re still here.

      To mark excitement, Harpo hits, twice, the scrap of paper in his hand: his smack of attestation announces (to no one) the satisfaction of having arrived at meaning. He needs to reward himself for small tasks accomplished: instead of cash or praise, he receives wordless noise, “smack smack” on paper.

      ABHORRING DOXA The third spin of the safe’s dial activates the music. The safe, secretly a radio, plays “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Harpo, covering his ears, finds the patriotic tune physically unbearable. This silent, violent pacifist declines to spout doxa. Better to avoid political statements than to make stupid ones, or to sing obedient anthems.

      He shushes the safe—a crying baby. The dial, when turned, disengages, and the box falls apart, a dismembered body that Harpo must now disown, as in a nightmare of hit-and-run castration. (About the concept “phallus,” I refuse to apologize. It keeps coming up, especially when I talk about dismemberment, disposal, disowning, disengaging, disapproval, disgust, detritus, demeanor, derailment, digression.) Efficient killer, Harpo hurls the safe’s carcass out the window and waves “aw, raspberries” hands to signal “good riddance.”

      FLEEING THE DOUBLE Harpo’s beatific smile—job well done!—fades when he sees Groucho, or a Groucho lookalike, descending the stairs. Harpo, scooting away, runs smack into a full-length mirror. Because this scene is famous, and because it involves Harpo pretending to be Groucho, I will not offer much commentary. I prefer when Harpo relaxes into being Harpo, untroubled by wisecracker emulation.

      Harpo, shattering the mirror, dismantles the soundtrack: the last noise we hear, before total silence ensues, is the mirror breaking, its music abstract, like Pierre Boulez’s Éclat, which sounds like ego-integrity breaking into furious slivers, or like a forgotten moment in one of Francis Poulenc’s beguiling, brief pieces for piano, a repertoire often dismissed as “salon music”: in Poulenc’s “Caprice Italien,” the phrase that derails me is marked “éclatant,” lightning-like, as if the sky suffered what my mother called a “thickening,” a phlegmy cough that breaks up chest congestion.

      Harpo hides from punishment by pretending to be Groucho’s reflection. Harpo wants to erase his own presence—but also to intensify it through doubling. Harpo contains a fold, like a creased page. Eager to find ambiguous indentations in matteness, I invaginate reality by making it not simple.

      BEATS: HARPOPHILIA I call them “beats”—isolable fragments of business. Tiny gestures. Winks, pauses, offerings. Slowly watching, I stop the DVD at each beat, so I can write down Harpo’s motions—as my parents documented my older brother’s infancy. One photo my mother captioned “First Solids,” a breakthrough I’m still celebrating. I’m slowly killing myself by dividing scenes into bits, just as Harpo reneged on existence by pretending to be Groucho’s reflection. (Harpo never fell into what Lacan named the “Symbolic”: speechlessness prevents the nosedive into linguistic, father-marked life.)

      Harpophilia leads to gloom. Annotating, I’m buried alive with Harpo, the two of us motionless—the death-drive stillness of hypervigilant observation, of standing mutely near fast-talking Groucho.

      If Harpo spoke, what he would say might destroy Groucho. One brother’s silence reinforces the other brother’s unthreatened literacy and eloquence.

      COGITATORS, JAZZMEN, DOCTORS Have you ever played the game “Great Thinker” with your father—staring at him in the mirror and pretending,

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