A Film Canon

 

 

By Way Out West, Laurel and Hardy have become a single entity - or, alternatively, perfected their homosocial marriage - taking on the quality of a clumsy contraption, held together with rope and a mule, and containing various domestic accoutrements, most notably the clothesline against which they camp out. As with Sons Of The Desert, this domestic conglomeration subverts American manhood, here expressed in terms of the rugged individualist, or lone rider, with which they are generically and mistakenly identified by the inhabitants of Brushwood City - especially the sheriff, who recommends that they leave town on the next coach. In this light, the film's defining moment comes with their rendition of "On The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine" in perfect harmony, part of a more general tendency to imbue their confusion of each other's words, bodies and trajectories with an unprecedented elegance, that approaches a kind of sympathetic choreography, clearest when they spontaneously break into complementary dances, but also in an unconscious parallelism, or symmetry, to their movements. It makes sense, then, that the 'bad' woman should be a seductress whose advances simply bounce off Hardy, making him seem more childlike than ever, and that the 'good' woman should become something of a surrogate daughter, as if to suggest that their idiosyncratic arrangement not only provides a compromise between masculinity and domesticity, but between masculinity and a family.