A Film Canon

Girl Shy complicates Harold Lloyd's relation to urbanism, although, superficially, it would seem as if the country were more his true province than ever. There's a strong rural sensibility, evident in a series of almost stereotypically bucolic scenes, as well as the comic use made of animals (cats, dogs, pig, turtle, chickens) and natural substances (water, rocks, mud, sap), here resolutely divorced from the more mechanical, industrialised connotations that they might have for Chaplin or Keaton. Even the city, which intrudes intermittently, gravitates towards the rural, with key scenes occurring in parks and botanic gardens. Yet the mere presence of the city in a film with such an ostensibly rural focus begs further examination, justified by the final chase, in which Lloyd overcomes his boyish fear of girls to hasten to the chapel where his beloved is about to give herself away. Although this might seem to draw upon Keaton's 'trajectory-gag', it is in fact an extended version of that taxonomy of pedestrian-vehicle collision which, in Safety Last!, signified the rural-urban divide or, more accurately, the rural-urban-rural narrative trajectory. Here, however, that trajectory is transferred from narrative to spatial co-ordinates, as Lloyd's various vehicular entanglements take him from the country all the way into the heart of the city, and back out the other side. The result is a kind of mapping of the urban fringe, or even a nascent vision of suburbia, which is distinct from any modernist metropolis that I have seen to date, making room for the fantastic, hybridised space that concludes the film.