Pinky, the Pointing Scapegoat, Lags Behind
DUCK SOUP (1933)
An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor.
—CERVANTES, Don Quixote
I
MAX UND MORITZ As a child with an appetite for abjection, I gobbled up Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz, an illustrated German tale (1865) about a pair of rotten mischief-making boys who end up shoved into a grain mill that pulverizes their bodies. Had my father, as a boy in Berlin, read that book? He bought me its English translation at Meyberg’s Delicatessen, which also sold miniature cheese triangles. The bodies of Max and Moritz repulsed me (they looked like lard), but I knew where they were coming from: I understood their distaste for compartmentalization.
PINKY Harpo’s name in Duck Soup—Suck Dupe?—is Pinky, which refers to pink hair we can’t see as pink (the film is black-and-white) and must believe is pink, based on the word alone. The name Pinky points to Harpo’s revolutionary (antimasculine) difference from regular color. Pinky also might mean pinking shears—or the fifth, puny finger, the pianist’s bane. When other characters address Harpo as “Pinky,” they legitimize baby talk: if they hail him as Pinky, then he must be Pinky. We say “Pinky” if we approve of Harpo’s pink nature and wish to bless him with a diminutive. Pinky never disgusts; he is to disgust what ipecac is to Mt. Parnassus.
HARPO’S RABBI DISGUISE: THE WILL TO CEASE Entering, Harpo wears (on the back of his head) a long rabbinical beard and spinning-pinwheel glasses, whose whirling circles echo our obsessive practice of getting lost in him.
A phone keeps ringing, but it’s not a phone: Harpo reaches into his pocket and pulls out an alarm clock. Smiling and nodding in self-acknowledgment, he points to his joke as a space already traversed.
Leaning back in the boss’s chair, Harpo finds another ready-made occasion to loaf. Like Stein, Warhol, or Cage, Harpo encourages arts of laziness and ease; labor-intensive process paradoxically demonstrates the will to cease.
YO-YO OF I-THOU Harpo lights a cigar with a blowtorch and then makes contrition legible: after committing a crime, he sheepishly seeks eye contact with the master. Fretful about human relationships’ tendency to fail, Harpo plays the yo-yo of I and Thou.
He cranes his neck to stare at the Carole Lombard–esque secretary, a few inches away. (She is the actress Verna Hillie, who had a bit part as bridesmaid, the year before, in the movie Madame Butterfly.) Verna and Harpo could be twins—her curly blonde hair matches his pink mop. Like a caged animal, he gazes curiously at human visitors. Each time he sees a woman, he studies—as if for the first time—what “woman” means. His eyes, a metal detector, scan her for secret weapons. Is she treif? She backs away; he follows. By taffy-pulling I-Thou relations, he defamiliarizes run-of-the-mill social intercourse.
EXPRESSIONLESS NODS: DISTRACTIBILITY Chico fake-praises Harpo, who nods quickly, blankly. He nods without expression when he wants to italicize what the other (usually, Chico) says and when he wants to beef up the brother’s credibility by diminishing his own.
Attention deficit disorder and horniness combine: distractible, Harpo looks away because there might be a girl on the horizon, and because he can only pay attention for a few seconds before another mischievous episode enthralls him. His “cute” willingness to ditch one object for another, rapidly, without qualm, makes him a fit role model for anyone wanting to prize lability, switch-hitting, instant metamorphosis—and for anyone impatient with pomposity, law, linearity, or group behavior. Of course, I’m idealizing Harpo, and making him more serious than he’d wish. Why not? I don’t plan to give up my idols, especially if they’re silent or dead and can’t contradict me.
WHY DOES HARPO LOVE TO SCISSOR? Harpo, with trusty scissors, snips loose ends from the boss’s hair, who remains unconscious of plunder. Big question: why does Harpo love to scissor? Might as well ask: Why do I love writing and interpreting? I’m driven to mess around with the fringes of others, to castrate them lightly: dolce castration, snip snip to propriety’s tassels.
Scissoring, Harpo sweetens castration, makes it nonlethal, nontraumatic. The fraught word castration flamboyantly dramatizes the stakes of Being. I can’t abandon the sexiness of symbolic castration, the term’s effectiveness as shorthand for first loss, for the hunger to invade and destroy, for a finicky, scissoring approach to borders. By taking castration seriously as aesthetic and psychological category, we acknowledge the levity of possessions, their drive to ditch location. Harpo dramatizes the wish to be a tailor, or artist, to “make nice” the edges of his dispossession.
PRAYER AS SHAME The boss proclaims disappointment in Harpo and Chico. Like drooping buds, in tandem, the heads of the losers sink: they dwell at the intersection of prayer, bashfulness, and shame. Harpo’s abasement is more convincing—perhaps because of his foolish wind up hat and his mismanaged tie, or because he savors downfall’s speedy arrival. Harpo might enjoy any emotion, as long as it strikes and departs quickly. (Are the brothers ashamed of being short?)
“I entrusted you with a mission of great importance—and you failed,” says the boss. When he says mission of great importance, the brothers’ heads rise—mechanical tropism, lifted ego, Mother loves us again. At the words you failed, down again go their heads. And at the word however (“However, I’m going to give you one last chance”) their heads rise, like a penis snapping to attention. Infinite reappeasement of the Jews! I recognize the chill of exile, and the relief (I can’t call it joy) when disapproval abates. I’ll hover on this masochistic edge between being shunned and being embraced, to enjoy the temperature mélange—like sunbathing after plunging in the sea. Mixing a cocktail of shame and relief, Harpo lingers, stunned by conjugation, on the threshold.
CUTTING FOR CUTTING’S SAKE The boss (played by Louis Calhern, who later appeared in Elizabeth Taylor’s Rhapsody and Grace Kelly’s High Society) bends down, sticking his butt in the air. Harpo, a tramp, stands behind him— as, on a subway, my hips and a stranger’s butt accidentally touch. Harpo takes scissors to male authority’s large, flat, flabby ass, facing upward like a serving tray. With gusto, our little mischief-maker from East 93rd Street leans into the task; oversized scissors in hand, the chimney sweep performs a castration mission on the elders. He gathers the boss’s jacket-tails like a pigtail, and snips them off with scissors that have grown larger since their last use. Harpo writes with scissors; he marks territory by cutting off a piece, as if he were claiming all of Italy by excerpting its Calabrian boot. Don’t ignore the provocation of Authority’s pin-striped butt, thrust backward, and Harpo’s fool-offense of dethroning the king, not because Harpo desires Authority’s rear end but because he resourcefully exploits every stray moment. In this tableau of defacement, we prize Harpo’s intrepidity, not the sharp scissors or the obscene butt; we prize his shameless and full-bodied willingness to throw himself into the anarchic task, without fear of retribution—like the time I threw a water balloon in my seventh-grade math teacher’s open window. I considered him a “fag,” and courted him, covertly, through a balloon’s illegible, wet graffiti. Harpo and I may not qualify as political revolutionaries, but we seek the thrill