Alan Bilton's Silent Film Comedy and American Culture, with its remarkable breadth, depth, and scope, will be an invaluable addition to any serious film scholarship collection. Page after page reveals what can be best described as Bilton's almost obsessive, voracious mind. Philosophers, historians, sociologists, cultural and film theorists and critics, literary authors, psychiatrists, and hucksters of all stripes vie for attention along with the requisite silent films, actors, directors and producers that one would imagine should share space in a volume such as this. And, alas, therein lie the roots of my one major complaint. As an almost exhaustive compendium of the selected silent film comics, this volume holds few rivals. But as a cover-to-cover read it's frustrating. There is a busy cacophony of competing ideas in this book that distracts from and at times drowns out Bilton's original voice, which is a shame. Bilton is a marvelous writer. His sentences can be lyrical, his ideas intriguing and challenging. But he goes to such great pains to supply context, secondary sources, and conflicting, colliding points of view that the seeds of his own novel insights are smothered in the over-fertilized ground of information. In his attempts to give a full, fair airing of often clashing perspectives, Bilton instead presents a book that all too often feels cluttered and weighted down with diverse opinions.

In the introductory chapter, for instance, Bilton lays the framework for examining silent film comedy against the backdrop of an emerging mass culture of consumerism. To do so, he takes the promising approach of locating motion pictures within the broader context of the manipulations and machinations of the nascent public-relations industry as embodied by Edward Bernays, a peripatetic entrepreneur and nephew of Sigmund Freud. Bernays plays out across the pages here as a rather antihero, envisioning the mass media in general, and movies in particular, as “a tool to pacify and control the irrational and voracious unconscious of the great American public, a public which in Bernay's writing appears as a barbaric, destructive crowd” (15). However, forty-five pages later, after offering all manner of persuasive arguments, Bilton changes course, offering key arguments against this rather “simplistic” (his word) reading.

Later, Bilton asserts that the best summary of the work of Mack Sennett can be found in Raymond Durgnant's 1969 book The Crazy Mirror, which locates slapstick comedy within the plotless spirit of the absurdist Dada movement. Then, within thirty pages, he effectively undermines this, claiming that “there is narrative causality … and most acts of violence do indeed have a purpose” (65, original emphasis). He does the same with the work of Rob King, which he introduces on one page, but then quickly dispatches on the following page.

Or there is Charlie Chaplin. We are invited to consider the proliferation of the little tramp reproductions and imitations from Walter Benjamin's perspective of dehumanizing commodification, but then, no, perhaps it's more about Barthes's political idea of conditioning children for a bourgeois life. But there's the fear factor promoted by Jentsch, only to be countered by Freud's infantile stage where there is no distinction between desire and fact.

This kind of tacking back and forth, to and fro, over the course of a book becomes tiresome. It gives an impression of a sleight of hand, a purposeful misdirection to create a straw-man argument where the opponents in the debate are paradoxically the same person.

Perhaps the source of my frustration stems from my own expectations. When reading a scholarly book I tend to keep my eye out for the thread of a seamless, well-focussed thesis. Bilton, however, promises “motifs” instead of firm arguments. Where I expect a writer with the courage of interpretive convictions, he offers readings of films sprinkled with “mays” and “mights”; where I expect integrated chapters with strong through-lines, Bilton offers stitched-together essays with directives to seek out connections in other chapters, some we've already read, others still to come, like some kind of academic scavenger hunt (perhaps a fallout from half of these essays originally appearing in separate academic journals).

And yet, despite my grumbling complaints, I can't help but admit that all these noisy competing visions serve a useful purpose. Yes, I found it a bit of a muddle, but a wonderful muddle. One would be hard pressed to find in one place such a profusion of collected observations and opinions on American culture and silent film comedy. And perhaps the book functions not unlike Bilton's beloved Sigmund Freud's inkblot test – you see what you wish.