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  • Groucho, Harpo, and Narrative Theory
  • Lisa Zunshine (bio)

In the famous "mirror scene" of the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933), Pinky (Harpo), dressed and made up as Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho), pretends to be Firefly's reflection, imitating his gestures across the frame of a missing mirror. Pinky is a foreign spy (as is Chicolini, played by Chico), sent in to [End Page 141] steal Freedonia's war plans. By unmasking him, Firefly, Freedonia's new leader, would protect his country's interests. Pinky, however, is uncannily good at matching Firefly's every move, including those moves that originate behind the frame of the mirror and thus ought to be impossible to match (Figures 1 and 2). So Pinky keeps foiling Firefly's plans to catch him, until Chicolini, also dressed as Firefly, rushes into the frame, and the spies' game is up. Pinky escapes, and Chicolini is put on trial.


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Figure 1.

Firefly and Pinky I


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Figure 2.

Firefly and Pinky II

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Pinky's flawless imitation of Firefly's moves that originate beyond Pinky's field of vision seems to be a good example of what James Phelan describes in his target essay for this special issue as "probable impossibility or implausibility." In a film that does not otherwise feature any magical events, Pinky suddenly seems to possess telepathic powers. How do viewers explain to themselves this "deviation from probability"?

In his study of the Marx Brothers, Maurice Charney has observed that the mirror scene feels "like a dream sequence." Its setup "depends very much on a feeling of strangeness and separation from the realities of daily, waking life. The [brothers] move about effortlessly like sleepwalkers" (31). Whether or not it actually is a dream (Groucho's? Harpo's?), its sleepwalking quality may go some way toward explaining its bending of everyday rules.

Another (related) explanation is that the Marx Brothers movies are absurd, and audiences know it. They come to expect all kinds of nonsensical things to happen once Groucho steps and Chico and Harpo tumble onto the stage. Even those viewers of Duck Soup who have never heard of the Marx Brothers before presumably will have a chance to form an intuitive sense of the film's genre by the time they get to the mirror scene, and thus may know that violation of expectations is integral to their enjoyment of this scene.

Now, "absurd" does not mean "arbitrary," and there are all kinds of constraints on what violations are allowed to take place in slapstick comedies, but this is a separate topic, and I will not deal with it in this essay.1 Instead I will suggest that explanations that evoke the film's genre (e.g., absurd, slapstick, nonsense, dreamlike bending of reality) do not fully account for the viewers' acceptance of Pinky's impossible feat of mindreading. These explanations do align with the classical model of narrative communication that Phelan takes to task in his target essay, which means that it is a good occasion to test the usefulness of the alternative model that he proposes, one grounded in the rhetorical view of narrative communication. Can the rhetorical model—one that considers interaction between characters an important channel of communication with viewers (readers, in Phelan's essay)—further elucidate viewers' reaction to the mirror scene?

The classical model, as Phelan explains, was proposed by Seymour Chatman in Story and Discourse (1978), and it focuses on the interactions between real/implied author, the narrator, and the real/implied reader. The applicability of the narratological categories to the study of film has been a subject of debate. Some theorists contend that these categories are [End Page 143] rendered meaningless by representational parameters unique to cinematic storytelling,2 whereas others maintain that mediality affects "narrative in a number of important ways, but on a level of specific representations only," and that, in general, "narrativity can be constituted in equal measure in all textual and visual media" (Fludernik, Towards 353). The present essay leans toward Fludernik's view, because I believe that certain features of the Marx Brothers films (e.g...

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