"You can see now?"
"Yes, I can see now."
City Lights
1931
87 minutes
Directed by Charles Chaplin
Written by Charles Chaplin
Music composed by Charles Chaplin
Produced by Charles Chaplin
Edited by Charles Chaplin
Starring Charles Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill
In his caring, if not exactly compassionate history of
Hollywood, provocateur par excellence
David Thomson waxes philosophical re: the imaginary schism between Charlie
Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The book, The
Big Screen, is mammoth, a 500-page monster as insightful as it is incisive,
and in glorious Thomson fashion, truth is always laced with arsenic-like argument:
with his usual gadfly affinities, Thomson paints a portrait of Chaplin as a
mean, greedy old bastard who delved ever deeper into a cavernous pit of
self-importance, while poor Keaton succumbed to alcoholism, lost his career,
and spent the latter half of his short live in a sad stupor. Because he’s such
a prodigiously talented writer and fervid cinephile, Thomson manages to lend credence
to his acidulous theory. He calls Chaplin prose and Keaton poetry, and says the
two are beyond equals. Thomson can be a raging dick, of course, but he’s a
smart raging dick. His observations of
the two are keen, of course, and he loves both, obviously, though he’s done
this Chaplin-vs-Keaton harangue thing in at least three separate books, as well
as in his entries for both Chaplin and Keaton in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film. It’s like he can’t mention one
without interrupting himself to mention the other.
Admittedly, I have also subscribed to this Chaplin v. Keaton
thing, mostly because I read Thomson during my impressionable college years,
but also because I think I needed some sort of adroit reason to vindicate why I
didn’t love Chaplin’s films. Whenever someone talked about Chaplin, and he’s
not exactly an obscure figure so he comes up a lot, I felt like I couldn’t
contribute—no one wants to hear, “Eh, I don’t love Charlie Chaplin.” That’s so
dull, it’s just asking people to hate you. So I’d be like, “Well, Keaton is
better, fuck you.” That usually placated everyone. But is Keaton better? Does one have to be better than the other? It’s
like The Godfather and The Godfather Part II: do we need to
pick one?
Maybe it’s cause I’m a frigid bastard, or unenlightened, or
uncultured, or whatever, but Chaplin’s films have always engaged me more on a
cerebral level, their technical and formal brilliance eclipsing any emotional resonance
his Little Tramp might otherwise incite. (My favorite Chaplin flick is Limelight, for what it’s worth.) Chaplin
strikes me like an arrow in my head, but he misses my heart. My friends like to
tell me I hate comedies because, given the choice, I almost always prefer
watching something dark and dour to something funny, though there are
exceptions (the Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson, Scott Pilgrim, Ingmar Bergman). With Keaton, you get an underlying
sorrow, implicit in that droopy dog look on his face, extrapolated by the
almost Sisyphean way he struggles with virtually every quotidian task. Whereas
Chaplin plays it for kicks, Keaton, you could argue, gets at something sadder
in everyday life. Maybe I gravitate to that sadness, I dunno.
I was recently talking to someone who loves Chaplin. She was
trying to convince people to watch City
Lights on Hulu before it was taken down (hooray for Hulu Plus!). Her
argument was persuasive, and her fervor certainly intrigued me. (My interactions with people are often more sociological than social.) A
few nights later I tweeted “What should I watch tonight?” and Richard Brody
told me to watch City Lights. It
seemed as if the vicissitudes of fate had spoken.
So I watched City Lights.
Of course, nothing changed. I remain in awe of, though unmoved by Chaplin’s
prodigious talents. I'm floored by Chaplin's timing--the way the tramp steps back and forth while the platform behind him lowers, his feet on the edge. And the way the world is out to get him, from the organized chaos of the party scene to his billionaire friend almost crashing the car into oncoming traffic. And his friendship with the billionaire, one of the great bromances of American cinema. The closest I came to feeling genuinely moved is when they reunite near the end, and they hug each other and hop up and down.
Movies take a byzantine path from the screen to your heart.
They’re filtered through your eyes, your ears, any academic discourse that may
have influenced the way you interpret art, any long-gestating theories that dictate
your own personal tastes. Like some old sapient French philosophers once said,
albeit with a bit more gongorism than I, you don’t really experience art
directly. You experience the aura enveloping it. Maybe it was Baudelaire, or
Baudrillard, or Benjamin, who totally isn’t French, but it was someone smart. One
of my favorite college professors explained the sublimity of art thusly: it’s
the buzz in your brain. You experience art, take it in, and it spurs
inexplicable feelings in you. Isn’t criticism just a writer trying to elucidate
the ineffable? You become immersed in movies, in the flickering projector
throwing 24 frames of luminous chaos per second on the screen. It does
something to you, changes you somehow. Then you try to write about it,
extrapolate that feeling and render it in verbiage.
But Modern Times and
City Lights don’t do that to me. And
it’s not because I’m prejudiced against silent films. When I watch, say, Metropolis, I feel something. I can
watch it, analyze it, explain why its camerawork and special effects are still
brilliant, and why its anti-fascist themes are pervasive and powerful, but,
more importantly, I feel like I’ve learned something about myself when I watch
it. All of the critic prowess I’d accrued since college (which is, admittedly, minuscule) tell me that Modern Times is a masterpiece. It’s like they’re shouting through a
megaphone: the economical way Chaplin stages his gags, the lucid cinematography,
the way he incorporates sound without completely eschewing his established
silent style—it’s all brilliant. The sound design is especially stirring, with
the workers deprived of their voices while the man on the screen bellows
commands. But when the credits roll, I still feel like the same old philistine.
Why?
I’ve struggled with this before, the appreciating something
but not liking it. What’s the proper procedure here? Am I allowed to tell
people that a movie is, by all accounts, great, and I just don’t like it? Do I
lose my critic license? I’ve come to accept, and even appreciate, that I’m not
a better critic than other people, my ideas and opinions on movies aren’t
smarter, or more erudite. I don’t have
better taste (except perhaps in bargain shopping—I’m really good at that). Very
likely the problem is with me, not Chaplin. Like one of those things girls tell
you when they break up with you—not that that’s ever happened to me.
When I watch a movie, I want to feel enlightened. I want the
movie to burn bright inside of me and brighten the dark corners. But maybe City Lights did that for me. After all, I wrote this silly blog post to help me come to terms with not loving Charlie Chaplin. That's what movies should do. Because what are movies
if not swaths of light flowing through the darkness, inundating, illuminating?
City Lights gets two ragged bowler hats, a wobbly cane, and a pair of floppy shoes out of five
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