Larger-than-life controversial new non-fiction: Fatty Arbuckle, William S Burroughs and Iranian cinema

From 1920s Hollywood to a cult American literary figure to the recent history of Iranian cinema, controversy connects this week’s non-fiction picks, writes Saul Austerlitz.

Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle is the subject of a new book on his dramatic fall from grace. Hulton Archive / Getty Images

The silent-comedy star Fatty Arbuckle was drummed out of Hollywood after being falsely accused of raping an aspiring starlet during a wild party at a hotel. In his carefully researched Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, The Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood, Greg Merritt artfully explodes the mythology that has congealed around this much-discussed but misremembered 1920s scandal.

Arbuckle was an enormously popular film comedian, his short films running second only to Charlie Chaplin in box-office receipts at his high-water mark. Rappe and Arbuckle were alone in his hotel room for only a short time during a party at the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco in September 1921. When Arbuckle emerged, Rappe was “in great pain and barely conscious”. After belated medical treatment, Rappe died a few days later of a ruptured bladder. Arbuckle was arrested and charged with murder on the basis of hazy and contradictory evidence.

“I think it is wrong to ruin a man before he is heard,” argued Arbuckle’s frequent co-star Buster Keaton, but he was judged guilty before ever setting foot in a courtroom. “Guilty? The law says a man is not guilty until he is proven so,” Arbuckle told reporters before the start of the second trial (there would be three in total). “But, my friend, let a man once be arrested and charged with a crime; let his name go broadcast in those first, cruel stories, regardless of fact, and he is branded guilty …”

On flimsy evidence and copious innuendo, Arbuckle was subjected to three gruelling trials, after the first two juries deadlocked on the charges. At the close of the third, the jury saw fit to release a statement, arguing that “Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him.” The court of public opinion felt otherwise. The star, who had seven films playing in theatres the week of Rappe’s death, was abruptly banned from future acting – after his acquittal.

Merritt argues that the accusations have caused Arbuckle’s comedic work to be unjustly ignored. But the film critic James Agee was not wrong in leaving Arbuckle out of his silent-comedy pantheon. Funny as he occasionally was, Arbuckle was no match artistically for Chaplin, Keaton or Harold Lloyd.

Like Arbuckle’s, the life of William S Burroughs was irreparably marked by an act of violence. Unlike Arbuckle, Burroughs is still remembered for something other than the doomed game of William Tell that he played with his wife Joan Vollmer in September 1951. The Mexican novelist and critic Jorge Garcia-Robles’ The Stray Bullet: William S Burroughs in Mexico concerns the author of Naked Lunch’s brief interlude in the country after fleeing the United States over an outstanding warrant. Mexico itself was merely an afterthought: “The major motivation behind Burroughs’s residence in Mexico was not Mexico but ­Burroughs.”

Burroughs would eventually travel to Paris, London and Tangier, but his journeys had little effect on his writing, or his thrill-seeking: “Immobile traveller William S Burroughs never budged an inch from where he stood, even if his body had been transported great distances.” Arriving in Mexico City with his wife and two children in tow (strange to think of him as a family man), Burroughs carried his pistol around town, travelled around Latin America with his lover Lewis Marker and worked on a quasi-fictional memoir of his heroin addiction that would eventually be published as Junky. Garcia-Robles, who has translated Jack Kerouac and Burroughs into Spanish, is never particularly critical of Burroughs, even after killing his wife during a foolish party game gone terribly awry. The immobile traveller could not be expected to journey very far.

Garcia-Robles goes so far as to absolve Burroughs entirely of any guilt over his wife’s death, speculating that Joan, who had been addicted to Benzedrine and booze, was driven by an unstoppable urge to die, and that her husband, who could seemingly read her mind, “fervently wished that the bullet would penetrate her forehead”.

“Burroughs would not have been able to think, write, or paint, as he thought, wrote, and painted,” Garcia-Robles says, “without having gone through the terrible experience of Joan’s death.” Joan is only an accessory to her husband’s artistic growth, a harsh but necessary object lesson on the way to immortality – a rather heartless conclusion to what had been a fairly sympathetic portrayal of Vollmer. The author may feel that “the gods know how to run this world”, but one suspects that Joan’s mother, who told Burroughs’ parents “I hope Bill Burroughs goes to hell and stays there”, and Joan’s children, left permanently motherless, might have concluded otherwise.

On the opposing end of the cinematic spectrum from Arbuckle’s raucous comedy, the moral code of Iranian cinema prevented women from appearing on screen unveiled – even in domestic scenes. (Foreign roles also required the veil, although it was allowed to be accompanied by a hat.) For a time, the Iranian film industry insisted on casting men in drag for female roles – an outgrowth of the traditional Iranian passion plays known as ta’ziyya. During the 1979 revolution, 180 of the country’s 256 movie theatres were destroyed, but the local film industry perversely flourished, buoyed to international prominence by virtue of the religious strictures imposed.

Conflict and Development in Iranian Film, edited by Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab and Kamran Tattalof, is only a haphazard introduction to a rich subject. Jafar Panahi, perhaps the most significant Iranian filmmaker of the past decade, and undoubtedly the most controversial, hardly merits a mention here.

The Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami’s films like The Wind Will Carry Us and Taste of Cherry are, as Yasco Horsman argues in his essay The Sound of Frogs at Night, scrupulous in their desire to withhold. Narratives remain unresolved, characters stay off-screen, burning questions go unanswered. Horsman states that “Kiarostami’s car window shots, with their double framings and their almost total absence of counter-shots, frustrate audiences’ expectations in this regard. Therefore they provoke a strong desire to see that which remains off-screen.” The desire to see around the edges of the screen is, perhaps, a political one, a reminder of all that goes unsaid, and unseen, in contemporary Iranian society.

Perhaps the most eye-opening essay for non-Iranian readers is Niloofar Niknam’s study of the female heroines of Iranian television serials. Battling a never-ending array of cruel father figures, “the stories tell us that women are not to overcome these antagonists by reversing their power relations, but by fighting against the antagonistic acts, within a patriarchal framework”. The system may be struggled with, but never questioned.

Saul Austerlitz is the author of the forthcoming Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community