The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (review)

In his new book, Rob King considers the development of the Keystone Film Company during the 1910s. The core of the book is divided into six thematic chapters in two broad sections: the first centers on the way the company incorporated themes from earlier popular culture such as vaudeville and slapstick; the second argues that Keystone introduced themes in its films that encouraged audiences to accept and relish class-blurring mass culture modes. King's central thesis is that Keystone can be viewed as an illumination of a prominent social shift from separate high- and popular-culture spheres to a burgeoning and inclusive mass culture.

This focus on Keystone as a reflection of such a shift leads King to link several prominent social theorists. Drawing lightly on the work of Karl Marx, Stuart Hall, and Georges Lukacs to assist with the theoretical heavy lifting, King situates Keystone along a fault line of social pressures driving turn-of-the-century US audiences toward a shift in consumption practices. For King, the Keystone Film Company's leadership managed to accurately identify and harness these sea changes for significant financial and popular success.

In the chapter "'The Fun Factory': Class, Comedy, and Popular Culture," King outlines some of the personal backgrounds of key company figures, especially Mack Sennett, who grew up in a working-class community and worked in vaudeville for years before he began work as a filmmaker. King argues that such a background heavily informed Keystone's style, which was recognizable and easily consumable for working-class audiences.

King points to such success often throughout the work, but he does also discuss Keystone's failures. In "'Made for the Masses with an Appeal to the Classes': Keystone, the Triangle Film Corporation, and the Failure of Highbrow Film Culture, 1915-1917," King highlights Triangle's purchase of Keystone and the subsequent attempt to produce genteel comedies and melodrama while adhering to the Keystone style that emphasized slapstick and making fun of middle-class audiences. Drawing from production archives as well as trade and popular reviews, King makes the case that Triangle's bid for a different kind of film, one upper-class audiences would enjoy (and pay significant money for), was one ill-fitting not only for Keystone but also for society in general. King makes the case for the lack of public acceptance of these films as a clear indicator of a trend in US culture away from "high" and "popular" culture and toward what he calls "mass culture," a conceptual category marked by an emphasis on modernity, upward mobility, and leisure.

Two general trends in this work may give the reader pause. First, King's research, though laudable in its attempt to incorporate multiple sources and methods of inquiry, can still be scattered and lacking in depth. For example, he uses close textual analysis in a few chapters as a method to explore the aesthetic style of the Keystone catalog, but such analysis is deployed unevenly in the work, leaving the reader with an unclear understanding of its relationship to other methods such as trade review or economic analysis.

Second, King relies heavily on the autobiography by Sennett throughout the book (especially in the first part). This leaves him open to critiques of sneaking a "great man" theory of history in through the back door of his otherwise deftly mobilized social history that, frankly, does not need to rely on Sennett's ego. King, to his credit, consistently seeks to interpret and manage the hyperbole he seems to suspect, but can rarely verify, is present in Sennett's own account. Such interpretation is useful, but it also lends a fuzziness to the argument and leaves the reader to view Keystone's world significantly through Sennett's eyes alone.

But these are relatively minor quibbles. King weaves together a broad range of evidence, and although he remains focused on the Keystone Film Company and its key contributors and...