Day Dreams

A penniless dreamer striding out of a whistle-stop town, his sweetheart’s ribbon still warm in his pocket, enters a succession of hallucinated Americas: first a Coney Island of impossible jobs—ice man, animal doctor, theater extra—each collapsing into slapstick avalanches; then a hallucinated metropolis of ticker-tape and sudden wealth, where a stray horseshoe becomes a bank presidency overnight; finally a delirious South Seas exile, complete with cannibal monarchs and a wedding that turns into a three-ring apocalypse. Every episode is folded inside Keaton’s stone-face mask, so the gags feel like postcards from a sleep that keeps waking itself up. The film’s real subject is not courtship but vertigo—the vertigo of a nation that believes you can dream your way up the social ladder while the ladder is being sawn off behind you. When the boy finally rockets home via mailbag express train, the triumph is less economic than ontological: he has learned that love, like cinema, is only possible when you admit the dream is rigged and jump anyway.