The anatomy of Harpo Marx / Wayne Koestenbaum.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Koestenbaum, Wayne.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Marx, Harpo, 1888-1964.

Marx, Harpo.

Motion picture actors and actresses--United States--Biography.

Motion picture actors and actresses.

United States.

Comedians--United States--Biography.

Comedians.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

ix, 299 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2012.

Summary:

The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is a luxuriant, detailed, and intimate play-by-play account of Harpo Marx's physical movements as captured on screen. Wayne Koestenbaum guides us through the thirteen Marx Brothers films, from The Cocoanuts in 1929 to Love Happy in 1949, to focus on Harpo's chief and yet heretofore unexplored attribute-his profound and contradictory corporeality. Koestenbaum celebrates the astonishing range of Harpo's body - its kinks, sexual multiplicities, somnolence, Jewishness, "cute" pathos, and more. In a virtuosic performance, Koestenbaum's text moves gracefully from insightful analysis to cultural critique to autobiographical musing and provides Harpo with a host of odd bedfellows, including Walter Benjamin and Barbra Streisand. Koestenbaum contextualizes the fiIms in relation to the rise and defeat of Nazism: about Harpo's mock death in the film Room Service, Koestenbaum remarks, "Even in jest, a dead Jewish body in 1938, a stake in his vampire heart, is not a joke. Even a fake dead Jew is real." By paying enamored attention to Harpo's silent body, its rebellions and shocks, its surprises and pauses, Koestenbaum turns Harpo into a vocal wonder. Book jacket.

Contents:

Early ecstatic emptiness. The holy fool flees language's stinkbomb: The cocoanuts (1929)

Pinky, the pointing scapegoat, lags behind: Duck soup (1933)

The mad mohel's goo-goo eyes of monomaniacal attunement: A night at the opera

Poppy power, or, the thick-enough art of zombie dumbfoundment: Animal crackers (1930)

Later astonishments. Fake dead Jew as cute zoo-idiot: Room service (1938)

Pass Punchy's humiliated buddy huddle: At the circus (1939)

Freeze Rusty's anal rage in a cozy void: Go west (1940)

Lonely wacky's incremental lines of flight: The big store (1941)

The bubble-blowing demarcator tickles totality: A night in Casablanca (1946)

Bulge, glaze, pause, shock; or, the bushy-haired ragpicker's burnt offering: Love happy (1950)

The idiot tumbles back to the beginning of time. The undeliverable ice of pinky's mom-mouth: Horse feathers (1932)

The kippering, bopping, shushing, bear-hugging, beard-pulling bustle: Monkey business (1931)

The pretzel glimmer-eye of stuffy's stuttering surge: A day at the races.

ISBN:

9780520269002

0520269004

9780520269019

0520269012

OCLC:

732318577