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by Ellen Dawson

  If there is something magnificently revealing in a reception history that mocks the linearity implied by Chaplin’s successive contracts and stages of production, then it is all the more revealing to recognize that each of the films listed above interrupts the lexicon of development and growth so often associated with narrative structure. “The curve he plots is always the same,” observed Gilbert Seldes in 1924 (105), a circular movement most transparent in films like The Adventurer (1917)—which opens with Charlie playing an ex-con evading the police and ends as he flees from the cops—

  or The Tramp (1915), in which he enters the screen as a wandering itinerant and exits walking down a country road alone, kicking his heels in the dust. Many films simply end with the Tramp’s anarchic energy “all washed up,” quite literally so in One A.M. (1916), where Charlie’s inability to negotiate the workings of a Murphy Bed finds him sinking into sleep in a watery bathtub, just in the way that he sinks into a “spirit-filled” well in the final frame of The Cure (1917). Other endings find the Tramp tossed out of the

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  house ( A Woman, 1915), crashed in an elevator ( The Floorwalker, 1916), or simply hooking his cane to the nearest automobile and skating away ( The Rink, 1916).

  Other endings hint at alternatives to the Tramp’s status as eternal mis-fit, but a closer look suggests otherwise. In the climatic finale of The Pawnshop (1916), Charlie, a menial store employee, triumphantly rescues his employer and the girl (Edna Purviance) from the villainous crook, saving the day as he hops abruptly out of an old treasure-trunk and knocks the swarthy bully on the head. The timing is impeccable. Too impeccable, in fact, so much so that the morality emanating elsewhere from melodrama’s suspenseful resolutions, as in D. W. Griffith’s race-to-the-rescue dramas where good (at long last) triumphs over evil, flattens here into a single moment. It’s a cheap imitation, one might say—hollowed of meaning and all the funnier for that. In films like The Bank and Shoulder Arms, Charlie again performs as a hero, respectively saving the banking corporation and the entire Allied forces while winning the heart of the girl. But these dreams of a happy ending, rich with the plenitude of closure and the Tramp’s integration into the community, are revealed to be just that:

  “dreams.” The Tramp wakes up alone. To be sure, Charlie’s adventures occasionally end in the company of others, whether with an impoverished immigrant girl ( The Immigrant) or with an exploited dancing girl and a mangy dog ( A Dog’s Life, 1918). Insofar as these stray waifs make strange companions, then they perfectly suit the Tramp, a figure repeatedly dis-lodged or estranged from any civilized, official, or organized world.

  Charlie’s refusal to adopt (or adapt to) any one recognizable tradition or cultural milieu has understandably generated a critical itch, an urge to explain what is meaningful about the Tramp’s resistance to meaning-making codes. “His homeland is everywhere and nowhere,” wrote Siegfried Kracauer, who assessed Charlie’s endless perambulations as liberating: “Denomination, nationality, wealth and class affiliations erect barriers between people, and only the outcast, the person on the outside, lives untrammeled by restriction” (118). The Spanish orator Francisco Ayala, however, diag-nosed Charlie as “an unmistakable product of the modern city and of modern restlessness,” as “the man who belongs to the docks, the markets, the streets” (Morris 522). But even this restless “belonging” doesn’t quite fit for the writer known as Vela, who described the Tramp as a figure “who has lost his way in this world. He lived in a different world, but one day, without realizing it, he half-opened a door and fell . . . into a world with fewer dimensions, where the mirrors cannot be stepped through, where every step is a stumble” (Morris 521).

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  Arguably the only space that relentlessly defines Chaplin’s early films is that of the frame, one with noticeably “fewer dimensions” than those of the comedian’s contemporaries. As film historian Kristin Thompson has argued, a vast array of directors operating in different national contexts in the mid-to late 1910s developed innovative plays with lighting, staging in depth, and editing techniques, among other effects, to heighten what she calls cinema’s “expressive” capacities (“International Exploration”). In sharp contrast, Chaplin rarely moved his camera, restricting the frame to what Gilberto Perez aptly terms a “demarcated” cinematic space, one that “recalls the stage not only in its integrity but in its quality of enclosure, in our sense of a demarcated area . . . within which each scene is contained” (474). Such a space is nowhere more vividly pronounced than in a scene midway through The Cure where Charlie, a wealthy gentleman who has registered at a spa to “cure” himself of alcoholism, enters a dressing room and pulls the curtains closed. The performance begins as the curtains fly open and he sashays into view in a striped bathing suit that accentuates his Lilliputian stature and knobby knees. He nods in the direction of the camera, twirling and bowing before disappearing behind the curtain, only to emerge and bow—incorporating a jaunty pirouette—once again. He then trots toward the pool where he balances on one leg, dipping the alternate foot in the water while kicking backward a bit and sprawling his arms through the air.

  This is what it looks like to pretend that one is swimming.

  Charlie’s delight in pretense equally dominates a scene in the middle of The Floorwalker, one somewhat subtler although equally lacking in tact.

  Here Charlie, a department store employee masquerading as a manager, busies himself with rearranging the “flower hats” on display in the women’s millinery department. He plucks one hat from the counter and pats down its circular base, gently pulling upright the single synthetic stalk sewn into its center. Apparently pleased with his effort, he returns it to the counter and bends over the display to fuss with another. As he works, a janitor carrying a scrub brush and watering can appears behind him and stops to light his pipe. The watering can tilts, spraying Charlie’s coattails. Moments pass.

  The water flows while Charlie remains attentive to the millinery display, shaking one leg back behind his body, then another, before reaching around to feel that his backside is drenched. At this moment he turns, grabs the watering can from the janitor, and immediately proceeds to water the

  “flower hats”—one stem after another—before casually handing the can back and drying off his hands. It would be easy to say that the category mistake of confusing flower-plumed hats with flowers, however visually similar they may be, is funny. This is true, and the scene certainly supports

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  Chaplin’s well-known capacity for what Noël Carroll calls “mimed metaphors,” the ability to make one thing look like another through gesture and performance (30–33). But the act of watering hats that look like flowers can hardly trump the humor that lies in Charlie’s insouciant response to his rather wet behind, which he doesn’t seem to notice. Or better put, his awareness emerges at the very moment it dawns on him that he could water the plants (which are really hats). He has enchanted himself with the role he is playing—the decorous manager of the store—to such a degree that he mistakes the performance for the real thing, a performance of what might be proper, and in which he does not properly succeed.

  On occasion Charlie even mistakes himself for another. In a scene from Shoulder Arms, Chaplin’s spoof of the Great War, the tramp-turned-soldier wakes up in a flooded bunk and pulls his foot above the cold water to massage it back to life. He rubs and rubs, his face reflecting grave concern. It seems he can’t feel the foot. But his fellow bunkmate can. Indeed, this very mate is awakened by the vigorous massage precisely because the foot belongs to him rather than to Charlie. An innocent mistake, perhaps, given such cold water, although the process of confusing one self with another overtly determines an earlier scene when mail from home is delivered to the trenches and Charlie—lacking a letter of his own—leans over a young soldier. His body mirrors the posture of the soldier, who is leaning just so
. As the soldier reads and scans, smiling a bit, so too does Charlie. At the very moment the soldier sighs, Charlie sighs, his shoulders identically slumped. And then he is caught in the act, so to speak, as the soldier glares and a not-so-abashed Charlie trots away. Of course, Charlie often pulls off his act without a hitch, a feat that viewers gleefully recognize even when (perhaps especially when) other characters do not. In A Night Out (1915), for instance, he plays a drunk who then masquerades as a drunk in a scene exquisitely described by James Agee:

  “Chaplin, passed out, is hauled along the sidewalk by the scruff of his coat by a staggering Ben Turpin. His toes trail; he is as supine as a sled. Turpin himself is so drunk he can hardly drag him. Chaplin comes quietly to, realizes how well he is being served by his struggling pal, and with a royally delicate gesture plucks and savors a flower” (“Comedy’s” 19).

  There is nothing natural about this. Each performance flaunts its status as performance, which is another way of saying that the Tramp’s identity is not a proper identity at all but rather a set of movements and mannerisms that could constitute an identity if only they were not so ambiguous, so unstable, and so decidedly prone to transformation. The little moments are delightfully telling. When the Tramp fights with his office mate in The Pawnshop he alters the punching movement to resemble scrubbing movements at

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  the very moment his boss enters the room, just as he suddenly shifts from boxing movements to a waltz-like glide outside the store when a cop arrives on the scene. When a cop approaches him on the street in A Dog’s Life, the brick Charlie has hefted and aimed at the “Green Lantern” pub suddenly becomes a toy he throws to the stray dog not far from his side. His rascally behavior in The Rink goes one better, if only because his deliberate (and successful) efforts to systematically trip his swarthy rival (Eric Campbell) remain perfectly in synch with his simultaneous (and successful) performance as the most graceful and courteous of gliding skaters. These seemingly minor moments reflect the major theme of many films in which Chaplin’s persona, Charlie, adopts a persona, becoming someone who masquerades as someone else: a janitor masquerading as a dentist in Laughing Gas (1914); a masher masquerading as a seductive woman in A Woman; a lowly employee masquerading as a manager in The Floorwalker; an escaped convict masquerading as a wealthy yachtsman in The Adventurer.

  The “essence” of mimetic play that uniquely characterizes the Tramp shimmers with farcical grandeur in Easy Street (1917), a film in which Charlie transforms from soup-kitchen idler to busy policeman, and exchanges his worn coat and little cane for an oversized uniform and billy club.

  Emphatically, this transformation is not another deceitful masquerade but an identity motivated by a plot that ultimately grants the itinerant-turned-policeman “star” status in the community when he clears the ghetto of Machiavellian thugs and vicious gangs, rendering the street safe for families and missionaries once again. While I agree with the many critics who endorse Easy Street as Chaplin’s most thoughtful social commentary of the 1910s, it would not do to overlook the majestic irony lurking in the climactic scene when Charlie inadvertently sits on a syringe full of dope and thus defeats his massive foes in a drug-induced delirium. The twist whereby illegal opiates enable social peace is a funny bit of incongruity. It is also perfectly congruous with the incongruities that define the Tramp’s persona: stoned on drugs, the policeman becomes something other than himself, and hence emblematic of the Tramp’s capacity to mock what we usually mean when we speak of a “character” as the fictional reflection of a singular, uni-fied self.

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  ✩ Conclusion

  A fake, an impostor, a trickster, a plagiarist: call him what you will, the tramp derides the ideal of authenticity rooted in the singular-ity of the private person, the very ideal elsewhere assuming such a vivid

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  sheen of glamour through the American film industry’s nascent star system in the course of this decade. Herein lies the secret of Charlie’s continued status as cinema’s most universally recognized icon, which both exemplifies and disorients what cultural critic Susan Stewart more recently calls the

  “abstraction” of the film star from everyday life. The fact that stars become

  “ ‘larger than life’ ” is the inevitable result, she argues, “of their medium of presentation; the representation fully effaces its referent; there is only a series of images related to each other in a chainlike, cumulative formation”

  (91). This is another way of saying that stars, by definition, are not proper subjects at all but more like objects—visual signs that accrue meaning through a process of duplication designed to entrance and deceive. Chaplin’s stardom radicalizes and thereby mocks this abstraction. To speak of Charlie Chaplin is to begin with an image, with a sign that enters the economy of exchange and signification at a remove: there is no original or authentic referent; there is only the constructed and fictional persona, the chimerical little fellow with a funny walk.

  Then again, to speak of Charlie Chaplin doesn’t quite suffice. Quite frankly, for those of us who share the habit of waddling our way out of a Chaplin film, eyes rolling, manipulating sticks as if they were canes, we experience what is otherwise tough to explain. Put in the simplest terms, we, too, become stars. Not the kind that shimmer in the heavens above, but far more profoundly the fallen kind—the kind cut free from the despair of uniqueness and the cruelty of ideals, staggering one into another on our still ungainly feet.

  N OT E

  1. Critics have devoted considerable attention to Chaplin’s lionization by avant-garde artists and thinkers. Recent work on this aspect of Chaplin’s early stardom by, respectively, Sabine Hake, Susan McCabe, Amy Sargeant, and David Trotter are especially noteworthy.

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  In the Wings

  JENNIFER M. BEAN

  Even a cursory glance at the shifting constellation of stars in the decade to come means grappling with the historical formation of a place we now call “Hollywood.” It bears mention that the initial glimmers of a nascent star system in the “picture personality” era between 1910 and 1912

  coincided with the gradual relocation of filmmaking companies and acting troupes from the industry’s predominant base in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago to the sunnier climes of Florida and New Mexico, among others, and ultimately to the settling of “film colonies” in areas around Los Angeles, often called “movie land” or “film land” by the middle part of the decade. The project of introducing this place to the public was vividly taken up by newspaper reporters such as Kitty Kelly, whose “Flickerings from Filmland” column in the Chicago Daily Tribune incorporated over twenty entries relaying her trip to the new California studios in the spring of 1915.

  After hopping aboard Carl Laemmle’s “Universal Special” in Chicago, speeding south, and witnessing the gala opening event for the newly reconstructed “Universal City,” Kelly’s itinerary spiraled outward. One day she drifted out to the Essanay Company, based in Niles, California: “a trip across the ferry, a short jaunt through an orchard blooming, poppy glowing country—and there you are in a regular cinematographic pocket.” Regaling readers with her first view of the “long, low building topped by Essanay’s familiar Indian head,” Kelly ambles about the grounds, peeping into the barn to watch “Broncho Billy” Anderson’s horse practice a few tricks, eyeing the people who “float about in make-up and flutter about in their Snakeville costumes,” and sizing up the “row of little bungalows” located

  “back of the studio” where, as player Marguerite Clayton explained to the curious reporter, “‘all the people live’” (2 April 1915, 23).

  In the mid-1910s, traveling reporter accounts of this sort not only described a place called “film land,” but also favored an innovative
rhetorical mode and a touch of whimsy designed to reflect the somewhat magical yet altogether ordinary place where “all the people live.” By the late 1910s 264

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  this place would commonly be known as “Hollywood,” and by the early 1920s as a den of iniquity. The star scandals that rocked the industry in the early 1920s, including rumors of drunken orgies, alleged rapes, mysterious murders, and any number of divorces, affected in particular the careers of the most popular comedians from the 1910s, effectively banishing Roscoe Arbuckle from the screen and diminishing the options available to Mabel Normand. Charles Chaplin survived the moral slander associated with his divorce, even as he cleaned up the Tramp icon to show a little more sentimentality, albeit not a lot more class.

  Yet as it so happens, two of the most popular stars of the 1920s lurking in the wings were comedians. One of them was an energetic young man, neither too tall nor too short but altogether average. He grew up in Nebraska, performing in amateur drama competitions and dreaming of a life on the stage. In 1913, Harold Lloyd moved with his father to California, landing a brief stint as an extra in the movies before befriending the equally energetic Hal Roach, who encouraged the boy to try his luck at comedy.

  Lloyd appeared a few times on the Keystone lot, but his ordinary appearance did little to garner the attention of Keystone supervisor Mack Sennett.

  Lloyd thus joined Roach’s fledgling company in 1915, and after practicing his new craft in over sixty one-reel shorts as “Lonesome Luke” (a pale imitation of Charlie Chaplin), Lloyd ripped off his mustache in 1917 and donned a pair of glasses. Referred to by some as the “Virtuous American,”

  Lloyd’s famous “glasses character” took shape in two-reel shorts such as From Hand to Mouth (1919), which deftly incorporates a hilarious chase scene, and High and Dizzy (1920), which showcases the comedian’s exceptional capacity for drunken perambulations (all in the best of “spirits,” of course). A growing number of fans in the late 1910s would have heard of the unstable prop that blew up in the comedian’s right hand during a still shoot for Haunted Spooks (1919), leaving him with three fingers and a pros-thetic device. This biographical tidbit enhanced tales of Lloyd’s plucky nerve behind the set, marshaling additional astonishment for his dangerous climb up the side of a twelve-story building in the climactic finale of Safety Last!