Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses ed. by Lawrence Howe, James E. Caron, Benjamin Click

Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses offers a retrospective of Charlie Chaplin’s most discussed films and comments on the film-maker’s aims, employing a wide variety of philosophical and rhetorical theories. Approaching this book, I was not sure what a new collection of essays on Chaplin hoped to add to such a well-established canon. Would the book pursue many perspectives and risk imposing theoretical agendas on the films arbitrarily? Or would the collection happen upon a new way of articulating that timeless something in Chaplin—the something we have always known about his work but have not often enough heard said? Refocusing Chaplin does both. The title is misleading because the book is really a broad homage to and critique of Chaplin; its organizing principle is its lack of a uniform thematic focus. Yet the collection gradually zooms in on a clear and admiring picture of Chaplin’s achievement, culminating in a pitch-perfect tribute to Chaplin’s important understanding of silence.

The book’s introduction frames the project in the context of film history, suggesting that (but not indicating how) this collection will newly address why Chaplin has inspired such “enduring fascination” (xvi). As a whole, the book embraces the question from all sides, although no single essay seems to answer it directly. The first selection, “Chaplin’s ‘Charlie’ as Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Everyman,” surveys Chaplin’s physical achievements in his films. The author and book’s co-editor James E. Caron lists three main expressions of Chaplin’s physical persona: “clumsy fool, eironic trickster, and comic acrobat,” noting that “bodily intelligence furthers the understanding of the mystery of comic laughter” (1). Caron’s attempt to bridge this survey with a “phenomenological account of consciousness” is compelling if ambitious. In his words, “comic laughter . . . is an important manifestation of encountering the unknowable”; the slapstick performer is both fool and philosopher, embodying “disorder” and “unknowing,” and in so doing “bringing us closer to the mystery of what makes people laugh” (20).

The book’s second essay, Lisa Stein Haven’s “Chaplin and the Static Image,” exhibits Chaplin in exotic or international contexts, showcasing images from My Trip Abroad and the article in Woman’s Home Companion, “A Comedian Sees the World” (25). Through these images, Haven discusses Chaplin’s commercial aims (41). This niche research, while laudable, confirms that Chaplin is more exciting as a man of the moving image and perhaps harder to “pin down” in his static portraits. The third chapter, Cynthia J. Miller’s “A Heart of Gold,” attempts to show the empowered side of Chaplin’s vaudeville women and ballerinas. The essay contains lively sections of analysis, revealing the author’s genuine delight in the fanfare and spectacle of films from The Gold Rush (1925) and Limelight (1952) to Monsieur Verdoux (1947), while slightly overstating her argument. Miller’s conclusion is that Chaplin achieves comedy by defying the stereotype of the promiscuous showgirl, reversing a demeaned and objectified posture in favor of confident and even dominant (if still meagerly clad) female companions to the Tramp.

A similar thesis resurfaces in the next essay, on masculinity, by Lawrence Howe (58). Howe’s “American Masculinity and the Gendered Humor of Chaplin’s Little Tramp” is more incisive than its title. The argument has a lovely and fresh simplicity, and one wonders whether, in this case, the theoretical frame is really necessary. Howe explains, “The Tramp embodies many of the attributes that men feared and, in response, ridiculed in others” (62). Yet Howe’s thesis has a comic ending. Though the essay’s critical lens seems to ignore the Tramp’s basic levity and cheer, however temporarily dampened through the different obstacles he faces, it successfully shows the levity of gender itself, describing how lightly the Tramp wears the semiotics of gender—like quick-change costumes (78). For Howe, Chaplin effectively ridicules fearful, mainstream masculinity and not the supposed weaknesses embodied in the Tramp. The Tramp wins, says Howe, because he is not afraid to be the things (unemployed, effeminate, marginalized, etc.) that so many men fear.

Here, one begins to see the editorial logic behind the book’s structure—from body to icon, from icon to gender, and from gender to machine. Following Howe, A. Bowdoin Van Riper’s “In the Shadow of Machines” focuses on Modern Times (1936) (as did Howe’s essay in part) and uses vivid description to celebrate important moments in these films. Again, the more the authors seem to genuinely enjoy Chaplin’s work, the more the prose itself seems to dance. Van Riper builds a many-layered argument with both historical and political stakes, stepping away from a direct focus on Chaplin’s films more so than the other contributors. Interweaving the history of American technological advances as he goes, Van Riper offers a solid and ultimately apolitical study of the complex role of machines in Chaplin’s films. In another study of Modern Times, Randall L. Gann pairs deconstruction and Marxism to show Chaplin’s incongruous melding of the historical (Marxism) and the ahistorical (deconstruction). Though establishing the theoretical basis for his argument takes up most of his space, the juxtaposition has resonance: in brief, for Gann, laughter is a “disruption” and therefore outside of time, whereas the Tramp’s social plight is very much in time and a result of the social pressures of history (118).

The book’s final four essays broaden the scope of Chaplin’s achievement, beginning with Rachel Joseph’s study of his “presence,” which blurs the lines between Chaplin the man and the characters he plays. Joseph’s conclusion is psychoanalytic: a oneness is achieved, not only between Chaplin and his characters but also between the Tramp persona and his companions; Limelight’s Calvero and his ballerina serve as the prime example (138). (Notably, Joseph’s essay is the only one to directly address Chaplin’s most pervasive and perhaps most powerful cinematic theme, compassion.) Marco Grosoli’s “The Paradox of the Dictator” continues, unwittingly, the theme of oneness through a study of “second-order mimesis”—mimesis as paradox, something The Great Dictator (1940) most overtly embodies. Grosoli closes with a narrative illustration of his point, as described in a biographical recollection from Theodor Adorno about meeting Chaplin at a social function. Adorno begins to shake hands with a man who has an iron claw in place of a fist, and, observing this, Chaplin is quick to take in the humor, as well as the layers of philosophical meaning, in this “real” instance of bodily confusion. In this moment, reality and theory paradoxically fold into one (159–60). This uncanny ending makes the essay’s theoretical ambitions more palatable overall, though Grosoli resists an optimistic reading of their import, noting for instance that Limelight portrays “social transcendence” but also, and “more importantly,” it portrays “the lack of social transcendence” (156).

Aner Preminger’s penultimate essay on Chaplin’s “Silent Requiem” offers helpful historical background for appreciating the collection’s final essay, which stands out for its well-reasoned positivity. Preminger’s chronological overview of Chaplin’s films from silent films to partly silent films to talkies is a good marker, too, of what the book has been doing all along—attempting to appreciate Chaplin’s accomplishments in light of their social, historical, and artistic significance. But what is their lasting significance? Benjamin Click finally answers this question very simply: “beauty and unity” (192). Click studies the central juxtaposition between the barber and Hynkel (i.e., Hitler) in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, dismissing scholars’ disappointment with the subdued barber (206). For Click, Hynkel and the barber reveal Chaplin’s embrace of the whole picture, the high and the low, “the beautiful (the barber) and the ugly (Hynkel)” (193). Silence and sound are similarly juxtaposed through these counterparts: the barber is a descendent of the pantomimic Tramp, and Hynkel shouts in a jarring, comic gibberish, vaguely resembling German. Sound is cacophonous; silence is heroic. Click reminds us of Chaplin’s maxim: “Where words leave off, gesture begins” (207). Thus, Chaplin’s “beauty and unity” are also present in the artistic success of their opposites. In Click’s words, “The film represents unification without totalizing. Furthermore, Chaplin delivers that praise [of silence] in the film’s most beautiful use of sound” (207). Click calls this Chaplin’s “sound statement on silence,” noting, poignantly, that The Great Dictator closes with these three spoken phrases: “unite,” “look up,” and “listen” (208–9). A bit like Chaplin’s Tramp, the prose in Refocusing Chaplin at first juggles its critical apparatuses with wobbly uncertainty or mechanical stiffness. Yet it eventually finds balance and ends on an uplifting and quite graceful note.