Buster Keaton wrote, starred in, and directed movies when the movies were still in awe of themselves and their very gift for movement. Keaton's kinesis happened also to coincide with the crisis of mimesis in other narrative forms, the growing doubt about story's responsibility toward that "real" world which cinema had so recently learned to simulate and resee. The art of duplication had turned dubious. In the process it had also turned in on itself to discover why. Perhaps the most analytically disposed of all the silent film-makers outside the Russian school, certainly among American directors, Buster Keaton was quick to avail himself of film's position at the fountainhead of modernism. As the period's greatest exegete, Hugh Kenner, points out, the epoch of literary modernism was still in the process of arriving when film emerged as a narrative art, and movies could therefore readily indulge themselves in modernism's reflexive vantage: "Keaton's great creative period was 1921–1927, the age of Ulysses and 'The Hollow Men.' In being his own subject he was equally Joyce's and Eliot's contemporary." Indeed, some of Keaton's finest films "might almost be subtitled portraits of the artist as a young man, with a complexity of symbolic displacement hardly to be matched by the auto-inspection of earlier craftsmen." These movies are also portraits of their art form as a young medium. Near in time to the genesis of their form, Keaton's films frequently convert that proximity into subject by foregrounding in the narrative a fascination with their own origins, wittily intent to differentiate the screen image from its predecessors in drama, plastic art, still photography, even mirror reflection. This explains the critical truism that Keaton is a "film-maker's film-maker," his a "pure cinema"; yet while obsessing over their own formal properties, Keaton's films are often guided by self-interrogation toward a larger question about the relation of art to technology, dream to machine. (pp. 348-49)

[Cinematic self-definition is] richly explicit and extensive in Keaton's minor masterpiece of 1924, Sherlock Jr. … When its hero jumps before our incredulous eyes through a two-dimensional nickelodeon screen into the inner sanctum of cinematic space, we are spectacularly taken aback by Keaton's epistemological modernity and critical wit. In a single leap of reflexive faith, his film enters upon, and its hero with it, an inquest into its own constitution and—because it is all a dream—into the vexed connection between cinematic art and the unconscious. (p. 349)

Theatrical rather than sculptural precursors, however, are … invoked in Sherlock Jr. It is historically as well as theoretically fitting that the screen through which Keaton makes his inconceivable dive into the inverted looking-glass space of film should be bordered by folds of drapery, the exaggerated bulk of pillars and proscenium arch, and of course the orchestral chasm of a theatrical auditorium turned movie palace. A vaudeville stage comedian who discovered his true acrobatic and visual genius with the coming of film was in a perfect position to celebrate the newfound freedom of projected drama as part of the weave and texture of his dramatic narratives. The decor of this crucial theatrical set for Sherlock Jr. thus visualizes before us in architectural hybrid the line of succession from staged to filmed comedy, layer upon flanking layer back toward the screen's tabula rasa, revealed behind the parted stage curtain just before the start of "Hearts and Pearls." Of course all we have to do is imagine ourselves half a century before the proliferation of the urban triplex theaters with their stacked or staggered, featureless spaces and their functionless floor-to-ceiling drapes, slit conveniently down the middle; imagine ourselves as the original audience of Keaton's movie, probably watching it just past a former vaudeville stage's pit, proscenium, and looped velvet curtains—and we catch at once the planned match of concentricity. Keaton gave his original spectators the nearest equivalent he could devise of the Elizabethan play-within-the-play and its theatrical progeny, and gave it with the same twin intent behind the Renaissance model: to comment on theater as art and, or so as, to probe more knowingly, through the theatricalization of motive, the minds of dramatic characters. (pp. 350-51)

If Sherlock Jr. is, as critical consensus has it, an "essay" as much as a story …, then its thesis as well as its plot derives from [the] melding in Keaton's imagination of comparative aesthetics—screen as against stage art, for instance—with a complementary sense of film's abiding bond to dream. (pp. 351-52)

[Sherlock Jr. is so deeply rooted in] technological self-acknowledgement, as linked to the engineering of our dreams, that it has its protagonist investigate screen space by plunging into it, as if, like Alice's looking-glass, the screen suddenly went "all soft like gauze." The impossible leads us to posit the primal, to know whereof we see. Inside a movie whose mechanical origins are taken at first for granted, we journey, by a demented leap through the impenetrable, birthward toward an exhaustive encounter with film's generative logic, first things first. Within a manufactured film "reality" our hero moves from homo fictus to the even more disorienting status of homo incisus, cut or edited man. He takes leave of both his senses and his tenses by a lunge into a spliced reality where time and space are relative. Though before we took cuts for granted, unconsciously providing them with their sequential mortar, now we see editing for the arbitrary phenomenon it is at base. As one locale shoves another from the screen, Buster is here, now there, subject to the bludgeoning illogicality of that very principle of cutting, constructive disjunction, upon which all film narrative is founded.

But one fact needs to be repeated about this dizzying but definitive initiation into screen space, a fact which Keaton stresses with consummate economy: Buster must first fall asleep to make this possible. It is all a dream, sprung from the very springs of the "dream machine." (p. 352)

Only with the frames of Sherlock Jr. and "Hearts and Pearls" thus locked into identity are we ready for Buster's admission to the rigidly delimited premises of the film within, the first interior he will see as a bona fide "insider." The only film that now exists visibly for us, and that therefore exists at all as perceptual narrative, is the one Buster has invaded. We have surrendered in a slow inward tracking shot our ironic distance from the hero's confounding initiation, and are prepared to credit him as a screen image. Crucially, he has been able to enter the illusory deeps of the screen, not in propria persona as Buster but only en role as his fantasized self, the celebrated detective knocking at what we take to be the same door earlier closed to him. But then this is, of course, how all of us enter the fictive confines of film, not as ourselves but by matching our lives and fantasies with the larger-than-life images before us, as Buster had earlier superimposed his own friends and foes, from the safe vantage of the projection room, upon the human images of "Hearts and Pearls." If we were ever able, in our own clothes, at our own human scale, to enter the infinitely deceptive vertical flatland of a movie universe, we might suffer just as summarily from its alien logic and unearthly laws. Instead we must keep the dream objectified as art, and Buster's miraculous ability to do otherwise, even for a furious few moments, is a comic aberration meant to expose as incredible its own foolhardy illusion.

It is important to note too, that Buster is twice repulsed by the screen world before gaining entry, in ways which emphasize his dual unsuitedness, first heroic and then ontological, to its sphere of action. To start with he is booted out into the orchestra pit by the villain of "Hearts and Pearls," who is also, by superimposition after the first scene, the former villain of his real-life misadventures, and upon attempted reentry he finds himself violently at variance with the nature of screen space. The parable is double. Still as Buster, he has no more chance of victory over a disreputable nemesis in a fiction than in life. And still a living man, with weight and girth, he has no credentials for the insatiable engulfments of time and terrain which are the stuff of film narrative. Even when his twin initiation is over, first by physical humiliation and then by a bout of mechanical editing that schools him even more gruelingly in screen rules, he must still pay the price of selfhood to purchase the sureties of fiction, must die or dissolve from man into manufactured role in order ultimately to ford the torrent of discrete scenes here used to flood the unbridgeable crevasse dividing life from the lifelike, the world from its virtual presence in a cinematic apparition. (pp. 356-57)

Not for nothing—but rather to induce this next-to-nothing, the cinematic phantom—does Buster go to sleep leaning on an idle second projector in the booth, while the first one spins away at its business of transmitting "Hearts and Pearls."… The machine upon which Buster rests and soon sleeps, as upon an upright electronic pillow, projects not a coherent manufactured narrative but instead the imposition of his own unconscious fantasies upon the preternaturally receptive plot of the film actually being shown to the theater audience. The second unlit projector therefore becomes the true dream machine, and out of the seething unconscious of its dozing operator is raised from latency the most eloquent "symbolic displacement" … in all of Keaton's cinematic artistry. The emergent Buster Jr. is a supple and transparent celluloid automaton, an ocular robot from the unconscious who will soon be cavorting with Olympian assurance through the gnarled garden of machines and mechanized obstacles that await him within the screen's purely visual universe. By analogy with the term "android," we might call this mechanical counterfeit a "celluloid," a specter visibly punned into presence not just as an arbitrarily twinned shape but as a symbol of any actor's summons to being as a screen image. Cinema as dream projection and cinema as mechanical product meet, as nowhere so clearly before or since, in a human icon compact of both unconscious cause and technological effect.

Objectified and sent forth into his own dream, an incomparable physical actor has removed himself one step from his medium to meditate on his very status as a filmic mirage. We are about to go through the cinema's looking-glass, that is, with the only creature, a secondhand entity mechanically devised, who is properly constituted to inhabit (speaking in a metaphor to which I am now ready to be bound) its framed space, a creature mysteriously "there" but depthless, like a mere, sheer mirror image. Our realization that persons and objects on screen are simply flat pretenses of depth, however, does not always supervene in the act of viewing. Buster Jr., before becoming Sherlock Jr., is delivered into this world by a process of what we might call reverse superimposition, and is, like all screen images though more candidly, as thin as the celluloid through which light projects him. Before reaching the screen he is what all film figures are while still in the projection booth, no more substantial than the film that holds and discloses them. But even here, though inescapably transparent, the illusion of Buster Jr. lulls us into a sense of a certain roundedness, however innocent his image may be of density or specific gravity. When we stare ourselves into fictive acquiescence in a theater, if we do not go so far as to posit hypnotically a stagelike presence for our heroes and heroines, what I think we feel about the impossibility of stepping through the screen frame into the movie is not so much that the screen would stop us, as that once through it there would be nothing there to inhabit or accost but unbodied illuminations.

And so the viewing imagination is gripped by perhaps the ultimate illusory myth of cinematic manifestation: that screen people are closer to sculptures in light than to a veneer of reflection. We know we cannot touch them, yet when Buster does so it causes more of a rent in our aesthetic common sense than a tear in the white sheet of screen, which is not intuited by us in the midst of our voyeurism as an opaque scrim so much as a bordering and a threshold. Just as idiom has us looking not on a mirror, or at it, but in or into it—as if it were a reflecting pool with depth as well as surface, where our watery doubles float or sink away—the subtlest illusion of movie space is that the screen is a frame, not a plane, past which is recess and perspective, though nothing quite palpable within. When Sherlock in costume spruces up before and then steps through that huge assumed mirror, the allegory of his access to even deeper reaches of the fictional world is staged to perfection precisely because he does not break a giant pane of glass to effect the joke. A shape of light, he steps through to a world that is all cast shadows upon a background of brightness, however three-dimensional these shapes conspire to appear.

This, then, is what is also confessed in the projection booth beyond the obvious visual coding of the dream self breaking free. In that masterfully layered statement, image over and above image over and above star and director both, we see Keaton the conceptual artist and self-consciously speculative moviemaker, represented by proxy as Buster the projectionist and purveyor of comic film, generate by a second mirage of creative technology Buster the protean mechanical presence, Keaton the celluloid image. This subsidiary creature is soon, of course, to undergo a second metamorphosis into character, and by becoming Sherlock Jr. to begin acting out the fantasies of his controlling twin as if they were his own, those subjective dreams of superhuman prowess released like himself into the paradoxical objectivity of screen life. Alice, back from her second wonderland on the other side of the mirror, was onto something at the end. And if the Red King was her fantasist all along, not she his, then he offers us a paradigm of the quintessential film director, dreaming before our eyes, with improbable presumption and authority, the dreams of others and our own. (pp. 363-65)

When the groundbreaking Keaton movies of the early twenties and such later Chaplin classics as City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) managed to lift their heads above the immediate turmoil of comic narrative to consider their own innate automatism, overt self-consciousness was born. These lithe and wily films of the silent era come down to us not just as modern artifacts but as modernist documents, self-contemplative and anything but naïve about their birthright in an age of industrial extremity. They are comedies of mechanization that know how cinema itself emerged as an emancipating new engine tooled to restore us to ourselves, our image and our dreams. Cinema is thus acknowledged in many of its own early products, and never more brilliantly than in Sherlock Jr., as an unprecedented ars ex machina, expanding the freehold of dream either by exiling all harsh or inhospitable technologies or, in its early slapstick plots, foiling them face-on with the more flexible inventiveness of soul and body. The success of the cliché "dream machine" was clinched from the date of coinage by its oxymoronic tenor, for it catches that subsuming paradox of all cinematic art. Mechanical counterfeit had gone deeper than ever dreamed, to dream itself. Though no one has yet invented a cybernetic device to simulate the functions of the unconscious mind, long before any computer started thinking cinema had offered us a machine that not only reproduced the surface of our lives but—just at a time when human history most direly desired such an escape clause—a machine that could also, and without threat to the spirit's autonomy, do our dreaming for us if we so chose. (pp. 366-67)