The Last Laugh: Strange Humors of Cinema

Homeric Laughter in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

177 R. Barton Palmer Homeric Laughter in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Though by definition inarticulate . . . [laughter] is nonetheless a means of communication . . . . Though typically fugacious in its vocal and facial manifestations , it can also serve as a highly charged medium of personal and social relationships. Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter When gold commands, laughter vanishes. Jean Renoir, The Golden Coach Uproariously Uncomic Like many a Hollywood film, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) ends with a rapidly moving pursuit that, its object attained , unties the knot of events that constitute the narrative, resolves the plot, and permits a central revelation, which is neatly summarized by a main character, Howard (Walter Huston). For commercial films of the era, his closing speech, and the brief dialogue it prompts, constitutes a form of closure that, if not de rigueur, is deeply conventional. But Treasure’s conclusion is otherwise far from ordinary, engaging as it does with political and ethical questions customarily avoided in the typical Hollywood production and conforming to Huston’s express desire that his filmmaking engage with “broad social conditions” and so encourage viewers to “reflect upon the significant ideas about place and time” (qtd. in May 238). Treasure is an adventure story otherwise filled with 178 R. Barton Palmer exciting action. But this climactic moment involves no derring-do, no physical encounter between protagonists and antagonists contesting for possession of a fabulous treasure—sacks heavy with gold dust mined from the nearby mountains. This treasure motors the narrative, in the manner of countless fairytales, and yet the plot turns instead on Howard’s surprised realization that the gold is only apparently of unchallengeable worth and may in fact have no real value, especially for him and his partner, Curtin (Tim Holt). For the viewer, this transformation reveals that the gold is a cunningly deployed MacGuffin, a plot-motivating object that, if not here forgotten or bypassed as in Hitchcock’s films, is drained of its presumed value and displaced (at the very last moment) as a narrative goal. In an interesting correlative to this unexpected shift, the gold actually disappears, or, to be precise , reassumes a form that prevents its further possession. In the end, what was once treasure is now only dust scattered by a relentless wind. Henceforth it can and does belong to no one but the natural world whence it came and to which it returns. The climactic pursuit ends with deep irony for Howard and Curtin. In the manner of typical Hollywood protagonists, they regain what is “theirs,” but this is only to recognize at the same time the renewed and now irrevocable loss of all they had striven to possess. Finally the gold is present all around them, but it has become ungraspable and hence strangely absent. To be sure, the two men get their hands on the sacks once again, but these are now empty of the fabulous wealth they once contained. Even more strange is that human hands worked this seemingly inexplicable destruction. And so, in a typically Hustonian gesture , the characters’ success in their quest signals an unexpected form of failure. But all is not lost. Moving beyond the simple fact of loss, the film’s ending also reveals how this failure grounds a different form of understanding that comes from Howard’s productive contemplation of the fate to which chance and human weakness have delivered him and his partner. Treasure does not conclude simply with the frustration of the quest with which it began. As in many Huston films, with The Maltese Falcon (1941), Wise Blood (1979), and The Dead (1987) as perhaps the most notable examples, failure is not the outward sign of an impotence leading to paralysis and stasis that it initially seems. Failure instead energizes the renewed assertion of the self that for Huston comes to an end only with death or the complete loss of freedom of Homeric Laughter in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 179 action. The revelation of a fundamental contradiction in the treasure endorses the pointless indispensability of all that has gone before, as the plot closes by rejecting the acquisitive intention that set it into motion . This conclusion, however, clarifies what ends of greater (because immaterial) value might be pursued. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is hardly a film in which what we might broadly call the comic figures prominently. And yet, central to...