Politicians, charities, police, butlers and referees: none of them escape the Tramp’s mockery, dismissal and rejection in Charlie Chaplin’s City lights (1931). Yet Chaplin is not only criticizing the establishment with the Tramp’s gags and antics, but “society’s elaborate machinery of building the future … its moral, religious, social and political machinery”, as Bazin writes (2004: 152). The protagonist is in survival mode, society’s rules and conventions do not always exist for him, not only because he never learned how to obey them due to his lower class – as society has chosen for him, but also because of his free-spirited nature. Through this fresh eye to the purpose and meaning of life among fellow humans, Chaplin reinvents the use of objects (sometimes even people) (Bazin, 2004: 145), taking his critique on a mechanized society a step further.

At the opening scene, the politician and the charity lady are addressing the crowd with their “kazoo” speeches, while the lift of the vail disrupts the Tramp’s “Peace and Prosperity”; the statue seems to make a comfortable bed for him, since he manages to sleep amidst a loud ceremony. As the protagonist struggles to escape the situation, and while he is hanging from the sculpture’s sword, the American National Anthem cues and everyone abandons complains and accusations to salute. Despite his efforts, the Tramp fails to do the same, and his buttocks repeatedly insult the warfare and military attitude, the grandiose ideals and the heroic acts. The statue loses its artistic or symbolic meaning, and instead serves as a bed, a chair, a playground, a step to tie his laces and just before he abandons it, a gigantic childish gesture of mockery.

After the categorical opening against establishment at the statue inauguration, Chaplin continues questioning authority, customs and etiquette, with the Tramp: leaning against the butler - as if the latter was a lamppost, breaking all possible manners and conventions of eating, dancing and smoking at the club, rejecting the rabbit foot superstition after the boxer returns unconscious, imitating the referee during the boxing match, and deceiving the police at the millionaire’s house by opening the door and showing them the way to the Tramp himself – or rather the real criminals that inhabit mansions. The Tramp is not only finding ways to escape from every danger or precarious situation, but he always seals his exit from the rumpus with a dismissive gesture and waives goodbye to the peculiar survival modes of society.

The culmination of Chaplin’s criticism occurs at those miniscule comic moments of reinvention of the function of things: the statue-bed, the confetti-spaghetti, the whistle-hiccup that hails the taxi cub and calls the dogs, the soap-cheese, the cauliflower-boutonnière, the undergarment-knitting yarn, the boxing gloves-hand fan, the boxing bell as objection against the beating he is receiving, and later, as reignition of his will to fight back. But the deliberate misuse of sound – or better sound effects with the kazoos, the whistle, and the boxing bell – is the most powerful of his reinventions in City Lights, a roaring statement that his silent movies are still a success even without the revolutionary use of sound of the talkies. Just as the Tramp continuously deters danger, Chaplin’s comedy continues to resonate with his criticism victims to this day, because sarcasm and self-deprecation are nothing but a remedy for the hardships of life.

Filmography

Chaplin, Charlie, City Lights, 1931. Film. USA: United Artists

Bibliography

Bazin, A. (2004) ‘Charlie Chaplin’, in What is Cinema? Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 144–153.