Chaplin’s Satire of the Man of Means

5Of course Charlie’s most recurrent presentation of his self to society represents a parody of a role: that of the distinguished gentleman, the man about town. Chaplin was born to this role, as his father specialized in playing elegant swells with a taste for the high life in his music hall career. Chaplin calls himself Sir Cecil Seltzer when he passes himself off as this kind of gentleman in The Rink, but has a tendency to lapse into the role unconsciously throughout his films. Charlie’s taste for this role touches on one of the essential paradoxes of his character. Charlie is uneducated, a fact that often presents itself, for example, in his alarming lack of table manners or taste for off-color jokes and bodily humor. And yet, he is nearly faultless in his imitation of aristocratic habits. Charlie has the cruel mimetic skills of the gutter snipe. Who sees an aristocratic ass as clearly as a poor man?

6One of Chaplin’s finest articulations of his parody of the gentleman is his first appearance in The Kid, an example both of Charlie’s identification with the dandy and his fine skills of mimicry. The title that introduces Charlie, «his morning promenade» also introduces his state of mind, that of a well-to-do man at his leisure, out on his morning constitutional, even though Charlie actually walks through garbage-ridden back alleys. Charlie’s carriage, despite his big awkward feet, is regal. He moves with the slow pleasure of a strolling gentleman, flexing his cane, and elegantly smoking a cigarette.

7This is Charlie’s default role, the one that he always returns to, the role that allows Chaplin, child of the London streets, to send up his betters. Some critics make the mistake of associating Charlie, in his aristocratic manner, with his real self, seeing it as an expression of the dignity of soul despite the poverty of his milieu. But Charlie, in his role of the dandy, is not the real Charlie. Charlie is mocked in his role-playing just as much as anyone else in this film. We see the real Charlie in moments of love, sadness, cockiness, combativeness and empathy. The dandy role is only the one Charlie chooses to navigate the hazards of society. Charlie playing that role allows Chaplin to set up countless situations where Charlie must preserve his ludicrous sense of dignity in the midst of embarrassing situations (as the tramp does here, several times dodging trash thrown out of the windows above), a universal situation that we all respond to since it mirrors the small indignities we all suffer on a daily basis, and deserve when we pretend to be something more than we are.

8In that introductory scene from The Kid, Chaplin pauses before the camera to deliver a litany of little gestures that finely and economically inscribe the mindset of the elegant man about town. With a heightened sense of his own importance, Charlie elegantly draws a cigarette case (really an abandoned tin container) from his breast pocket and carefully chooses a cigarette from a variety of stubs he’s picked off the street. He tamps the cigarette down on his container, that key movement in the miniature dance of lighting a cigarette and, again with self-conscious elegance, returns the container to his breast pocket. He removes his gloves with care, finger by finger, as if they were the finest leather molded to the shape of his hands and not the tattered throwaways, missing several fingers, that the insert shot reveals them to be. Chaplin does this all staring straight at the camera with the vacant look of a man engaged in little rituals that have become second nature to him, a man too bored with the world to let his actual attention wander to the banal details of his actions.

9Chaplin, as Thomas Burke noted, had a knack for imitating the well-to-do. If I were to pick one impersonation out of the hundreds that sparkle in his film as being most representative of the fine filigree he brings to his imitations it would be when he assumes the role of husband and «man of the house» in Police. In that scene, the police have just collared house-thief Charlie and brought him to the home-owner, Edna. The policemen are holding Charlie by his suit collar as you might a cur by the scruff of his neck. But by this time Edna, who she thinks she has talked Charlie into abandoning his criminal ways, pretends to the police that they have accidentally arrested her husband.

10In that moment, Charlie’s transition from stray cur to man of the house-hold is really something to behold. This was a favorite moment of the very sensitive student of Chaplin, Walter Kerr, as well, and it would be hard to improve on his summary of Charlie’s transformation here:

«It is at this point that a virtual miracle takes place. With no transitions at all Charlie becomes Edna’s husband. Affable, outgoing, utterly at home, digging his hands into his pockets and flexing his knees as though he were master of his own domain and ready to get out the humidor, he is all bourgeois bonhomie, the host par excellence, eager to show his guests about and have them back soon again. No one has ever been more completely the confident man of the house6.»

11Kerr is right about there being no transition. Charlie’s transformation from criminal to respectable gent is, if such a thing is possible, as invisible as it is tangible. His muscles start to ripple with a new looseness. He kicks his legs and shakes his arms as if fastidiously arranging the nicely hung suit that he pretends to wear. He brushes off his sleeves with a natty particularity, draws a cigar from his pocket, hooks his thumbs in his waistcoat, striking the pose of the comfortable, masculine man of the house. Charlie settles into his role the way a change in the atmosphere settles into an environment. And yet the transformation is utterly complete. From mangy cur to affable host in seconds. A lesser comedian would have adopted a gruff pompous attitude of husbandly outrage. Chaplin, instead, lands on that moment after dinner, when the host – jocular, cigar in hand – leads his male guests to the pool room. Chaplin is a connoisseur of pretension, recognizing that we never enjoy our power more than in those moments where it is masked by affability, those moments where we seem not to be conscious of our power at all.

12It’s a testimony to the complexity of Chaplin’s art that even Kerr’s excellent description omits one of the best details of the transformation. As he warms to the pretense of bourgeois bonhomie Kerr describes, Charlie draws a cigar from his breast pocket and, spitting out its end (in the eye of one of the cops), rudely jostles Edna for a match, slapping her side with the back of his hand and snapping his fingers at her, before a cop saves Edna from her bewilderment by lighting Charlie’s match for him. If you’re going to play the role of the man of the house, according to Charlie, you’re going to have to be rude to your wife, even if she did just save your skin moments before. Charlie can often be disturbingly physical in his flirtatious horseplay with women but he was rarely, in his true identity, demeaning to a woman in this manner. The husband is one of the many conventional masculine roles that Charlie associates with brutish behavior. On the other hand the gesture is typical of Charlie’s tendency to presume on people’s generosity. Charlie has led a hardscrabble life and when he is provided an advantage he makes full use of it. Charlie’s gratitude has a short shelf life, especially in this earlier permutation of his character.

Chaplin’s Satires of the Working Man

13One can’t help but notice that Chaplin has a great gift for mocking figures of authority in these imitations. Putting his betters in their place is one of Charlie’s great passions. But Chaplin is an equal opportunity satirist and is just as adept at mocking the disadvantaged and the working man. The parody of the hairdresser in Behind the Screen, where Charlie arranges a bear-rug’s coiffe, is so finely realized that it represents both an ode to the fine art of barbering and, at the same time, a parody of the silly finickiness of the barber, the unctuous servility of the man of service.

14Similarly, Charlie does a nice imitation of the queasily ingratiating sales clerk when he sells Edna a pair of socks in Sunnyside, laying them out on his forearm elegantly, folding them in neat easy flips, looking away with a kind of professional calm and neutrality as he neatly tucks them into their wrapping paper. Of course, the end result of this elegant wrapping process is unconventional. Charlie arranges the socks in tissue as though they were a bouquet of flowers. Charlie’s exquisitely rendered professional mien should never be confused with actually knowing how to do the job.

15In The Rink Charlie does a nice job of imitating the self-conscious artistry of the bartender. He juggles glasses, crisscrosses the bottles from which he pours, cracks eggs and tosses them into the concoction with a single hand. He manages the whole thing as though it were a form of table top ballet, with his arms as the dancers. His face, all the while, is a study in that calm neutrality that marks the calm savvy of the seasoned professional. It’s only upon very close observation of his bartending, however, that we notice, again, Charlie really doesn’t know what he’s doing. Several things get thrown into the drink that really shouldn’t – eggshells, a nearby flower, some coffee from an urn he passes by in the kitchen. And most comically, we notice that, though he shakes the drink in the shaker with consummate bartender aplomb, only his body is in movement – the drink remains immobile. It’s a virtuosic example of form over content, a child’s view of a profession, of what’s fun about a job, devoid of any real sense of the job’s requirement. Or an aesthete’s imitation, interested only in artful form, not in the least in boring function. When Charlie sees a role he sees only a kind of dance, a ritualistic strutting. He is absolutely indifferent to the role’s actual purpose.

16All of these imitations are noteworthy for their careful study of the artistry of a profession, to the point where they represent something of an homage to that profession, a kind of rendering into dance of the profession. And, yet, all, at the same time, parody the profession, emphasizing the egotism behind the artistry, an egotism all the more comic for being so often closely linked to servility. Charlie’s as good at mocking the servant as he is the lord. Chaplin is highly sensitive to all our posing. It is significant that in his very first appearance to the world in his tramp attire, in Kid Auto Races, Charlie is mocking a form of posturing, in this case the inherently comic look people have when they think they are being filmed and try to look natural, nonchalant and suave. The tramp arrives in the world teasing us for striking poses.

17These satirical moments are immensely important in revealing just how perceptive Chaplin is, how sensitive to the slightest, most understated registering of egotism. There’s been a debate, from the moment Chaplin was first described as a «genius», as to just how smart he actually was. Artists and intellectuals trumpeted praise for Chaplin fairly early on and this recognition set off a long-lasting backlash of criticism by those who felt the intellectual celebration of Chaplin ignored the inherently base nature of the medium in which he toiled and his actual intellectual and artistic lack of sophistication. He didn’t read much, they pointed out; his spelling was atrocious and he found even writing a letter a hardship. Chaplin didn’t help matters by warming to the role of sage and studding his later interviews and films with sometimes fatuous comments characterized by artistic naiveté and intellectual pretension. But this entire debate is rendered irrelevant by any close study of Chaplin’s role-playing, which displays a razor sharp intelligence, expressed via wicked mime. Chaplin creates portrait after portrait worthy of La Rochefoucauld in their incision and subtle understanding of just how self-deluded and pleased with themselves humans can be. In his best films, Chaplin is one of the most subtle and perceptive satirists, one of the most honest voices, art has ever known.

Chaplin’s Psychology

18Chaplin’s acute satirical skills grow out of a gift for human psychology, albeit one that expresses itself via mimicry rather than through words. Chaplin is expert at getting at the way people think, spying out their little cover ups and hidden agendas. And though his satire can be cruelly honest at times, at other times he expresses great sympathy for the little strategies to which humans are reduced in their struggle to maintain their dignity. Charlie’s tendency to affect the airs of a distinguished gentleman, for example, is one long sustained joke, sympathetically rendered, that finds its humor in the comic ways humans desperately try to maintain their gravitas in the midst of embarrassing situations. One of the most emblematic gags in Chaplin’s films is the «cover up» gag, built around those moments where Charlie affects an air of dignity rendered ludicrous by the circumstances in which he finds himself.

19Examples of this kind of gag abound in Chaplin’s cinema. They are the stuff of Charlie’s everyday reality. In The Pilgrim, for example, Charlie is an escaped con with a hair-trigger fear of cops. At one point he gets involved in a chase that leads him in the direction of a policeman. Not wanting to call attention to himself, Charlie slows down his run, transitions to a little skip, starts to kick out his legs and rub his hands and to trot back and forth. In other words he tries to sell to the cop that he has just decided to engage in some light calisthenics, an idea rendered mildly ludicrous by the fact that he’s on a train platform and dressed in the minister’s garb he’s chosen for disguise.

20Similarly, in A Dog’s Life, when Charlie is caught, by a shopkeeper (played by his brother Sydney), reaching for a pastry that he aimed to steal, Charlie, in a split-second, changes his arm motion to suggest he was only swatting away a fly. Later, in the same film, Charlie rears back to throw a brick through the door of the dancehall from which he has been expelled. But just as he readies his throw Charlie becomes aware of a policeman’s presence and, ludicrously, throws the brick out in the street, encouraging his dog to go chase it, as though it was routine habit for his dog to fetch bricks.

21These gags in which Charlie tries to affect an air of normality in absurd circumstances, and under the withering gaze of some figure of authority, are essential ones in his cinema, touching, as they do, on Charlie’s sense of being out of sorts with the world, of constantly having to pretend to be normal, to fit in. Audiences, however, have never needed to be homeless or criminal, themselves, to identify with Charlie in these moments. Chaplin understands that we all feel this self-consciousness to a degree, that we all, to some extent, travel through a world that is suspicious of us, hostile to our presence, that we all have, on a daily basis, little moments of embarrassment, and turn to little asinine cover-ups to cope with those embarrassments, cover-ups that even we find comic after the fact. For Charlie these cover-ups are so routine as to represent a kind of second nature.

22And Charlie doesn’t have to be involved in a crime to engage in this kind of cover-up. In Easy Street for example, Charlie, a policeman on his beat, wants to call in for reinforcements on the street phone that connects to the police office, but can’t because he’s being carefully monitored by the bully who terrorizes the street. The situation, in which Charlie tries to make the call while under the bully’s scrutiny, allows Chaplin to employ all of his favorite nervous tics--his wandering fidgety hands; his nervous, shifting legs; the ridiculous childlike smile that he flashes in moments of intense nervousness. When he’s caught with the phone mouthpiece near his mouth, he pretends to play it like a flute; caught again he looks through it at the sky as though it were a telescope. Whether he’s on the right side or wrong side of the law, Charlie is always under threat, always being stared at suspiciously, always mistrusted.

23And we identify with this aspect of his existence. We squirm with him. Charlie embodies our own sense of self-consciousness, our own tendency to hide our actions, our sense that we have to pretend to be normal, that we don’t fit in, that others are suspicious of us. You might call him a poet of paranoia except Charlie’s sense of persecution is rarely unwarranted. Rather, Chaplin is a poet of man’s inhumanity to man. He specializes in our often pathetic means of justifying ourselves to a world hell-bent on rejecting us.

24Poor Charlie gets very few moments of unaccosted freedom in his life. In The Gold Rush Georgia discards a half torn photo of herself on the bar-room floor. Moments later Charlie comes across the photo and picks it up, hoping to keep it as a memento of his unspoken love for Georgia. But, as he picks it up, he realizes a man standing nearby is scrutinizing him, wondering what he wants with the photo or what he will do with it. Charlie, enamored of Georgia, wants desperately to hold on to the photograph but realizes he looks a bit pathetic in the eyes of the bystander, as he pockets the picture of a woman who doesn’t even know he’s alive. For the following twenty seconds or so Charlie is gripped in conflict. Every time his hand moves to tuck the picture inside his jacket, his eyes meet the man’s and he instead lapses into the pretense that the picture is just an oddity that he has come across, a bit of detritus he has no intention of keeping. Of course, Charlie needn’t concern himself with this man’s opinion; they don’t even know each other. But that’s part of the comedy of the situation, depicting, as it does, how wholly unnecessary much of our self-consciousness is, how easily cowed we are by the world. Charlie tries to indifferently toss the picture to the floor, but finds himself unable to part with it. He can’t get it into his coat, he can’t get rid of it. For awhile he uses it as a fan, his dignity allowing it that small utilitarian use. Finally, he walks past the man as though passing through a gauntlet, his look of grim determination testifying to a decision to keep the picture even in the face of the man’s silent opprobrium.

25Sigmund Freud saw Chaplin’s comedy as evidence that «the achievement of artists are intimately bound up with their childhood memories, impressions, repressions and disappointments». Chaplin, Freud writes: «Always plays himself as he was in his dismal youth. He cannot get away from those impressions and humiliations of that past period of his life7. » Chaplin’s cover up gags represent, to a great extent, a rehashing of the humiliations he experienced when he was the kind of nonentity that brought down suspicion upon itself in the streets of London. Chaplin, for example, spoke of how intimidating he had found waiters when he was poor and we have to be struck, in the context of that remark, by how many scenes, Chaplin devised around the particularly repressive air of restaurants, with their stuffy code of conduct and judgmental waiters, the second half of The Immigrant being, perhaps, the most famous example. In that film, Charlie dies a thousand deaths under the scrutiny of a bully waiter, played by Eric Campbell (it is Campbell to whom the role of the disapproving world is most often given to). Campbell cannot be convinced, no matter how much Charlie affects the air of sophisticated diner, that Charlie deserves a place in his establishment.

26Over and over again, Charlie struggles to master the rituals of dining under the oppressive eye, not only of waiters but hosts, fellow diners, women he hopes to impress, anyone who notices that Charlie doesn’t have a clue how to conduct himself at the dinner table. But, again, the humor of these gags can’t be entirely rooted in Charlie’s impoverished past as we don’t have to have a similar background to his enjoy these gags. Most of us have made our share of dining faux pas and been cowed by the absurd rituals of the upscale restaurant. Enough so, in fact, that we delight, for example, in Charlie’s insistence on eating beans with his knife and his inability to trust a fork. Our manners, and our confidence in situations where the standards are exacting, are only marginally stronger than Charlie’s.

27Chaplin’s «cover up» gags are good examples of how his satire can be as kind and empathetic as it can be cruel and honest. They reflect Chaplin’s acute sense of, and sympathy for, the indignities humans suffer and, even more touchingly, the sad and comic ways they try to cope with these indignities. La Rochefoucauld wrote that «we are never so ridiculous for the qualities we have as for those we pretend to». Chaplin’s comedy provides endless variations on this maxim. We are rarely more comic than we are when we try to hide our insufficiencies from the world or try to be something we aren’t. La Rochefoucauld also wrote that «almost all our faults are more pardonable than the means we employ to hide them8». La Rochefoucauld is often characterized as a misanthrope but there is, in his writings, an acceptance of human flaws that is refreshing and that bespeaks a great affection for humans. He only has problems with people who pretend to have no flaws. The same philosophy lies behind Chaplin’s «cover up» gags. Our inherent foolishness is never as comical as our pretense that we aren’t foolish at all. Chaplin’s enemies are the same as La Rochefoucauld’s: the pious, the self assured, those who pretend to have no faults.

28Another example of Chaplin’s gift for translating psychology into comedy, of touching on certain essential truths about the way humans operate via Charlie’s comedy, is his emphasis, throughout his films, on how humans are often crippled by consciousness and, conversely, how they often perform more ably when they have little time to think. One recurrent gag, for example, in Chaplin films is the «gaping chasm gag». In many of his films (Pay Day, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator), Charlie finds him-self dangerously close to a yawning precipice of which he is unaware. In Pay Day and City Lights, it’s an elevator shaft that he doesn’t see behind him. In The Great Dictator, Charlie blinded by a hat that has fallen before his eyes, walks out on a plank that hangs out from the roof of a tall building. In Modern Times, Charlie, skating blindfolded to impress Paulette Goddard, skates precariously close to a second floor overhang in a shopping mall where the guard rail is missing due to repairs.

29In these gags, Charlie is fine as long as he is blissfully aware of his danger. For example, in Modern Times, Charlie, skating, elegantly skirts the line of the precipice several times before he becomes aware of it. It’s as though his actions are being guided by the unseen hand of an angel. When Charlie becomes conscious of the precipice, however, his considerable skills with roller skates abandon him. Not only is he no longer capable of the graceful pirouettes we have just seen him perform, now he can barely skate at all. Unable to even stand, he falls into the manic throes typical of a first time skater. Now instead of gracefully skirting the edge of the precipice, his wild thrashings only draw him closer to the abyss from which he’s trying to escape.

30The gag touches on several psychological laws. First that ignorance is bliss, that we often move with the grace of angels when we are unaware of danger. Secondly, that consciousness is a burden. Often, fully understanding a situation only makes it more difficult for us to deal with that situation. The gag finds its echo in many of Charlie’s fight scenes. Given too long to calculate a strategy or deliver a blow in a fight, Charlie’s plans often go painfully awry. But if, in defending himself, he has little time to think and is forced to improvise, he’s well nigh indestructible. Similarly, in The Circus Charlie is the comic hit of the circus, but only when he doesn’t mean to be. When Charlie tries to be funny, he bombs, leading to the wonderful self-reflexive oddity of those scenes in the film where we are presented the spectacle of Charlie Chaplin being taught by others to be funny. Thought is often Charlie’s enemy, spontaneous action his greatest ally.

31The gag also touches on, as so many Chaplin gags do, human perversity, our tendency, when confronted with a danger, to find ourselves inexplicably drawn towards it rather than away from it. Perversity is an aspect of the human psyche in which Chaplin is something of an expert. Charlie is the embodiment of perverseness. Often it’s just at the moment where an irk-some boss apologizes to Charlie for earlier cruelties that Charlie decides to leap up and kick him in the chest. It’s often just when a girl is falling for Charlie that he will dissolve into spasmodic hijinks guaranteed to destroy any affection she might have for him. It’s often Charlie who finds moments of peace intolerable and picks a fight with a co-worker. Charlie often suggests Dostoevsky’s underground man in his tendency to favor freedom so much that he’s willing to ruin his own chances of success to maintain it.

32Itemizing the number of human foibles, frailties and pretensions Chaplin sends up, both cruelly and sympathetically, in his films is as futile as trying to itemize each of the lightning fast gestures in his physical comedy. Chaplin’s gift for psychology runs throughout his cinema and is one of the aspects of his cinema that gives it the breadth and depth of a great nineteenth-century novel. Some of Chaplin’s perceptions about human nature, like his parody of our ludicrous cover-ups, or his sense of how we are burdened by consciousness, are essential aspects of Charlie’s character, revisited in gag after gag. But the films are jam-packed with all sorts of little pithy moments that comment intricately on human nature.

33The moment in The Immigrant, for example, in which a desperately poor Charlie gets stuck paying a restaurant bill that he can’t afford because he magnanimously insisted, once too often, on paying the bill he really had no intention of covering, resonates with anyone who has vociferously offered to pick up a check while hoping, in the dark of their soul, they wouldn’t have to. We laugh at Charlie affecting the pose of an art connoisseur as he examines the statue of a nude woman in City Lights because we’ve all found circuitous ways to glimpse nudity (and would all look as comical as Charlie does if we were filmed doing so). We smile when Charlie gleefully tears his little home to pieces, in The Gold Rush, after Georgia has accepted his invitation to a party, because we all know the insane bliss of our first nervous forays into a romantic relationship meeting with success. We laugh when Charlie struts and swaggers after accidentally vanquishing an opponent in a fight, because we are conscious of our own tendency to believe in our successes, even when they are not earned or legitimate. We laugh when Charlie generously gives money to Edna Purviance’s character in The Immigrant, then surreptitiously steals some of it back because we all know how difficult it is to follow up on good intentions. We laugh when we see how thoroughly, and with what suavity, Charlie, in The Circus, trounces his competitor for Myrna’s affections, in his daydreams, because we know that we too are often ludicrously impressive in our own daydreams. We feel for Charlie when he has to perform as a clown in The Circus moments after he has found out that Myrna loves Rex, not him, because we have all had to put on faces of social ease in moments of private despair. We laugh when Charlie flinches dramatically as a policeman merely passes his hand through his hair because we all have, to some degree an instinctual fear of policemen. We privately identify with Charlie when he runs away from some fight or bit of chaos that he has instigated, regarding it from afar with a pronounced air of innocence, because we too, at times, have dodged responsibility for the messes we’ve created. We laugh in recognition when Charlie counts pancakes like so many cards in The Kid because we remember how obsessive we, too, were in apportioning treats as children.

34One of the ways Chaplin’s comedy rises above the common fare is that it is tied, in this manner, to the vagaries of the human soul. Chaplin’s films provide their audience one long lesson in self-understanding, one reminder after another to us to own up to our many foolishnesses and to accept them, by laughing at them. Chaplin was not unusually skilled in putting his observations about human nature into words. Often, in his sound films, his interviews, or his autobiography, when he discusses comic laws or the connection between comedy and psychology, he comes off as a little pompous, the ideas as familiar. But, in the mimicry that his camera catches, Chaplin can reveal us to ourselves in a way that makes us ache with the fineness and precision of his observation. He leaps to the job with the viciousness and enthusiasm of a child bent on mockery and indifferent to the cruelty of his effect. And he accomplishes the job with an accuracy that has to be, at least in part, honed from his years of privation. Chaplin had plenty of time to study, with a jaundiced eye, those who were better off than he was.

35But the accuracy of his imitations has to be due as much to Chaplin’s essential nature, that lack of humbuggery that his friend Thomas Burke noticed about him. However he conducted himself in his private life, Chaplin was an enormously honest artist in his films and he put that honesty in service to a study of human nature that is impressive in its wide range, often cruelly calling us to task for our pretense, often expressing a heart breaking sympathy for the little strategies we adopt in defense of our dignity.

36One of the reasons I suspect Chaplin critics often tend to a sociological approach when analyzing Charlie is that it may be easier for us to pity Charlie, to look at him as the disadvantaged sufferer of an unjust economy, than it is to see Charlie as a prod to our own conscience, a satire of our own weaknesses and inequities. But Chaplin’s aspirations were a great deal more ambitious than political ones. He was an astute psychologist who had a great capacity for representing, via comic satire, a vast panoply of human pretensions. We watch Chaplin for the same reason we read Leo Tolstoy or Thomas Hardy, to study someone gifted with a wealth of perception on human nature and who has a keen sense of our little lies, foibles and foolishnesses. Like Hardy or Tolstoy, Chaplin takes us to task.

37Hardy said that the purpose of his poetry was to «mortify the human sense of self-importance», and the same could easily be said of Chaplin’s cinema. Chaplin’s films makes us acutely aware of our poses and pretensions, our play-acting and absurd sense of self-importance. There is much to learn from Chaplin if we humbly accept Charlie’s guidance rather than pity him from a superior point of view. Charlie is far too universal a figure to be contained within any political view. A bank president or a bum would recognize, in Charlie, the paradoxes and contradictions of his own soul, if I’m correct in assuming that bank presidents fall in love, are jilted, make asses of themselves, and swerve manically from bravery to cowardice, just as Charlie does. There may be something consoling in thinking of Charlie only within a specific economic milieu. It saves us the difficulty of confronting just how thoroughly he has our number.