It was all a DREAM

                                                             Sherlock Jr.  Buster Keaton

                                                        
In the scene where Keaton has stepped into the film while he was dreaming at work, all that kept seeing was him fail over and over again.  And he wasn't even ever seeking failure, he wasn't intentionally walking into situations that would lead to failure.  Although the most absurd inconvenient things kept happening while the screen kept changing scenery, he would go to sit down and fall into or off of something.  Keaton did a great job in this particular scene using self reflexive technique, it takes us to the core of his intentions in even creating this character.  From the start of the film he is working on building this series of unfortunate events of failure.  He is just a good nice man trying to do something good from the very beginning always being honest and yet no matter how hard he keeps trying he keeps getting screwed over, by the modern mechanical world.  As Gunning said in his article"Buster Keaton or the work of comedy in the age of Mechanical reproduction", "trying to make sense of a rationalized system based on irrational principles."  We watch this character have the world crash down on him time after time when he didn't deserve any of these mishaps.  Sometimes objects or people will just completely stand in our way and lead us to failure and sometimes (most all the time in this film) its not even in our control, and thats just what he was trying to get through in this film.  Its a great film on perseverance and just doing the right thing, and in time karma will come back to you in a positive way.