Laurel and Hardy's Comic Catastrophes by Bliss Michael;

Author:Bliss, Michael; [Bliss, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2017-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

Things Aren’t What They Seem

The Finishing Touch

Like its sound counterpart Busy Bodies, 1928’s The Finishing Touch is a film about Stan and Ollie working with tools. The difference between the films is striking, though. Where Busy Bodies accepts the world as a given, The Finishing Touch brings into question one of its prime bases: whether or not the manner in which we perceive the world gives us reliable information about it. In other words, the film is concerned with the degree of reality that we assign to the information that our senses report to us. Although this is a sophisticated concept, we shouldn’t be surprised that Stan was concerned with it since many of the films he created for Roach showed a comparable interest in using abstract concepts as the thematic basis for a film’s gags.1

As the film’s title implies, there’s an activity going on that leads to a final point at which the activity is complete. The Finishing Touch is about Stan and Ollie building a house, but it’s also a metaphor about what it means to have an initial sensory impression (a “touch” if you will) and finish it by trying to understand what the impression means. Essentially, the film is concerned with how unreliable our senses are.

Interestingly, one of the central qualities of the working relationship between Stan and Babe may very well have led to this notion. Early on in his work with Babe Hardy, Stan realized that merely expressing an idea as a running theme throughout a film didn’t completely satisfy his desire to fully investigate it. Instead, just as he became aware that what his usually brash and aggressive on-screen character needed was someone who contrasted with him (which resulted in Stan toning down his character’s rough edges), so, too, did the scripts that he was developing work better at communicating ideas if, instead of expressing them declaratively, he communicated them through what is essentially a platonic dialogue involving opposing ideas and points of view. In this film, Ollie is the empiricist. Almost always he accepts what he sees and perceives. He’s firmly convinced that he understands how reality works thanks to his trust that his senses accurately report to him what the world is like. However, these ideas are repeatedly undermined in The Finishing Touch by Stan, a disorderly rationalist who unwittingly arranges objects and performs actions in such a way as to lay perceptual traps for Ollie that without fail he falls into. The fact that Stan performs that same types of deceptive acts over and over again, and Ollie repeatedly runs afoul of them, tells us how imperfectly the two of them work together and how unlikely a reconciliation of their different views of the world is.

The film’s first title card tells us that Stan and Ollie had been in school nine years and never got out of kindergarten, which tells us something about the boys that we should already know: not only can’t they make progress, they actually regress,

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