Chaplinesque

"Nothing fails like success," said successful Chaplin. "I mean by that, that money never satisfied a spiritual or intellectual need. . . I doubt whether a rich man ever has a real friend. . . . I always understand poor artists; rich ones always seem to me a contradiction in terms."

David A. Gerstein's Essays on Chaplin's life, films, and views

  Charlie Chaplin is one of the actors for whom early films (especially silent film) were a natural medium for communicating with an audience. From 1915's The Tramp to 1936's Modern Times, Chaplin was one of the most popular movie stars in the world. Chaplin (along with Buster Keaton) defined silent comedy with a redemptive grace that lifted it above simple slapstick.
  Chaplin's "little tramp" character developed from a boorish ne'er-do-well to an iconic hero of the disenfranchised but upbeat. Chaplin's productive period overlapped with the beginnings of the Great Depression, and may have contributed somewhat to the tramp's popularity. Chaplin's tramp was the down-and-out before it was de rigueur, and embodied an ability to rebound from a thousand humiliations to succeed, usually involving getting the girl.
  Chaplin the man had no problem getting the girl in life, which was in itself a problem. He set the stage for expensive, messy, and dutifully reported celebrity divorces with his divorce from Lita Grey (originally cast as his romantic interest in The Gold Rush, but after their relationship began the role was recast). The settlement was a then-record $825,000, and the newspapers had a field day with various sorts of penny-dreadful stories and satire. The 1992 film starring Robert Downey Jr. as Chaplin concentrates heavily on Chaplin's personal affairs, including three under-eighteen brides and various flings. It is possible to reduce anyone to this level with some yield, but in Chaplin's case the on-screen persona dominated his own in the popular mind. While he was at the zenith of his fame, his indiscretions were overlooked, but later he would be subject to spurious paternity suits and finally barred from the United States during the Red Scare due to his potential Communist ties.
  But that is not why Chaplin is worth our time; he is most important methinks as a symbol for both underdogs and absurd heroes; the first who finally gets his due, or the second who gets his due while slyly straddling the divide between status quo and chaos (or comedy). When Chaplin actually spoke in his movies (as he did in 1940's The Great Dictator, where he played both the poor worker and the Adolf Hitler character) he finally gives the absurd/abject everyman a voice striking in its basic humble humanism:

The way of life can be beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls -- has barricaded the world with hate -- has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
[full-text of the speech]

Chaplin presents an ethic echoed in his short story Rhythm: A story of men in macabre movement. It is almost a purely absurdist piece, about an officer commanding a firing squad who forgets why on a very existential level. It is a critique of military bureaucracy just as Dictator was a critique of totalitarian government; they both show the headway one sensitive, sane & absurd person can make against an unyielding and inhuman system. As Gerstein says in the essay about Chaplin and the social order, Chaplin probably felt

the contrast between his real-world high-society self and how, trapped in that self and admittedly fascinated by its environment, Chaplin may have mainly let out his feelings about class in fiction, through his films.

The underlying feelings did not elude contemporary writers, however, and Hart Crane captured something of it in his poem Chaplinesque:

We will make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Excerpts from Literary Critics on Chaplinesque
I would consider Crane's poem to be judgement of Chaplin's work on the basis of where it finds value. The "fine collapses are not lies": there is a blessedness to the absurd being that frees them from the game and smirks, and allows them to hear and help the "infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing," as T.S. Eliot would have it (the two works are linked in the criticism linked to above). Use the comments on this post to discuss the poem if I am missing the boat.


Random (i.e. more modern) Chaplin stuff -
Excerpt from Aesop Rock's song Daylight, off his CD Labor Days
[as best I can transcribe]

Ok - lift me to activism chain, activate street sweep
Plug in deteriorating zenith of Pendragon
I hack swords wars for the morbid spreading of mad men madly gospel
Sick in your lincoln log cabin and Charlie Chaplin waddle

Ad campaign from the early 80's using Chaplin's character for IBM, to soften its unfeeling big-business image