City Lights: Five ScenesANDREW H. MILLER

The comic exploits the capacity of a man to be both himself and someone else at the same time.

— Charles Baudelaire

S c e n e O n e . A city intersection. A monument to “Peace and Pros­perity” is being unveiled in a grand ceremony consisting of several orations delivered through wax paper stretched across combs—or so it seems. Perhaps the speakers have swallowed kazoos. In any case, the unintelligible noise issuing from their mouths announces that this will be a silent movie. The talkies were sweeping America’s theaters as Chaplin filmed, and City Lights was his tendentious response. The covering augustly removed from the monument, we discover the Tramp settled in the stone lap of the central statue, asleep; disturbed into life, he realizes that he has a huge audience and starts to per­form, impaling his rear end on a stone sword (the first of many bits of homoerotic business), tying a shoe, doffing his hat, and so on. As the audience and police grow more visibly unhappy—this pan­tomime is not what they came to see—the Tramp clambers over the palings behind the monument and the scene ends.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sc e n e Tw o . A city street. Having endured some raillery from newspaper boys and ignored a large sign announcing “Danger,” the Tramp is arrested by another, less monumental statue: a nude on dis­play behind a gallery window. Seduced, he veils his seduction with occasional glances at a third yet smaller statue to one side and with judicious movements backward and forward, a connoisseur judging just the right distance to appreciate the sculptors aesthetic achieve­ment. Although there is no audience other than himself and the un­seeing statue, the Tramp is performing again, as he will perform

34

The Tramp as Connoisseur

almost uninterruptedly through the film. The range of attitudes he will display is remarkable: soured annoyance, blank innocence, clam­my-handed embarrassment, desperate pusillanimity, whinging terror, servile fastidiousness, eyebrow-arched hauteur, radiant joy, clear­eyed resignation. Chaplin acts at acting, performing the role of some­one continually performing for himself. Others—the newspaper boys, the hoist operator, and, later, the butler and the boxers—may wander in to watch, but they aren’t truly needed.

We see him perform: the camera is situated behind the statue, at an impossible depth in the shallow display window, filming the Tramp as he faces us. Traffic passes behind him on a brilliantly lit city street, directed by a policeman; the cars look like cars on a movie screen. (Maybe they are cars on a movie screen: it does look like stock footage.) And, indeed, the mise-en-scene studiously mirrors our situation: a rectangular window gives upon a constructed space framed by a curtain. Unseen, we see the Tramp see the unseeing nude. We eavesdrop with our eyes.

Looking toward us, then, rocking backward and forward, the Tramp steps on to and off of a delivery hoist door behind him,

36 ♦ RARITAN

rhythmically escaping disaster as it opens and closes on the sidewalk, somehow synchronized to his movements. City Lights isn’t much concerned with left or right or up or down, but before and behind are matters of improbably grand importance, ontological and episte­mological. The concepts of behind and front and depth are studied throughout the movie. Our vulnerability to depth, and especially to what is behind us, is a recurrent preoccupation. That sounds preten­tious. (City Lights, with the rhythm of comedy, invites and deflates pretentions.) But the action of the film repeatedly turns on charac­ters’ blindness to and ignorance of what is behind them. The soigne woman cannot see the cigar onto which her derriere descends; the boxer cannot see the Tramp dancing behind him; the millionaire can­not see the burglar who, blackjack in hand, is about to clock him. Trap doors open behind them all. They don’t have eyes in the backs of their heads. Neither do we, of course. But for us, at least, as we watch the film we can be confident that nothing of importance is happening behind us; everything that matters is in front, up there, if only we watch. (The depth of our world has been mechanically col­lapsed, as the depth of the screen has been mechanically increased.) And, though the Tramp is in the daylight and we are in the dark, we can see what he does not: the trap door opening behind him. If the film’s first scene suggested that this film would be about the birth of an unappreciated performer within an assertively wordless medium, this scene lets us know that this performer will be our downtrodden, perpetually exposed cicerone on a tour of that medium. He’ll show for us the possibilities of film as it draws on the limits and capacities of our senses, and the vulnerabilities those limits create.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sc e n e T h r e e . A city corner. The scene starts with an image of flowers which then dissolves into a close-up of a flower girl’s face, thus identifying her fragile beauty with theirs; and that shot then dis­solves to a middle-distance shot of the girl seated on a ledge by a sidewalk. Her gaze wanders out, unfocused, into the middle distance; she looks like someone whose portrait is being painted. It dawns on

A N D R E W H. M I L L E R ♦ 3 7

us that she’s blind. Behind her on the street corner are palings like those over which we’ve seen the Tramp climb; she’ll be associated with bars and screens, restraints of one sort or another, throughout the film.

A few moments later the Tramp arrives, and she stops him by asking whether he’d buy a flower. Still acting the connoisseur, he chooses one rose over another, and then, accidentally, knocks it to the ground. “Did you pick it up, sir?” she asks. As if in answer, he holds the rose out to her, a little exasperated at her inability to see what is right in front of her eyes. Then we watch him realize what we have already realized, and—in a gesture at once ordinary and sublime— transfer the flower to his right hand and tip his hat to her with his left. This is simply what men did when hats were worn and they saw and recognized someone in public. To this point, he had not truly seen her, had not recognized her; now, seeing that she cannot see, he has. But what is it for a man to tip his hat to a blind person? It’s true that the Tramp could still be acting, playing the decent gentleman as he earlier played the connoisseur. (This, more or less, is what Camus suggests in The Fall, where the protagonist tips his hat to the blind man he helps across the street.) But the Tramp has not needed an audience before and does not have one here. If he is acting it is in a redemption of acting, for in tipping his hat to her, recognizing her, he acknowledges what there is to acknowledge: that in her blindness she bears everyone’s limitations and is worthy of respect for carrying them mildly and openly. She makes his blindness, and ours, visible. The contrast could not be greater: in a dark room, in front of a movie screen, we see everything that matters, all that is in front of and all that is behind these characters. There is nothing we do not see, while she sees nothing. It is in the wide realm of the flower girl’s blind­ness, then, that the Tramp’s grace will find its field; he acts within her blindness, just as Chaplin acts within the voicelessness of the movie. Her blindness and beauty, like the muteness and beauty of the movie, give direction and purpose to their performances. (Chaplin’s actions, the Tramp’s actions, are gratuitous, full of grace, providing for us beyond our needs. The traditional contrast with Buster Keaton

Rich and Poor

is stark. Chaplin and the Tramp supplement reality; Keaton and his characters scour it.)

The Tramp has been acting in character since he first woke up, but now, before the blindness of this beautiful woman, he is dis­armed, abashed, and unperforming. She has stripped him of his act and he is for the moment passive and exposed. That passivity might have rewards is immediately pressed upon him by the extraordinary act that follows: there, on a public street corner, the girl lays her hand upon his breast, her sensitive fingers feeling up his coat as she draws close to him and inserts the flower stem into his buttonhole. (She’ll repeat this movement at the end of the movie when, now sighted, she needs to identify him. It is by touch, not sight or sound, that she knows him.) Breathless for a long moment, he finally swallows hard and pays her.

However, as he does so, a rich man rounds the corner unseen behind him; the camera pans slightly to join the two men together, rich and poor; the rich man enters a limousine and leaves. The flower girl calls out to the Tramp, believing that it was he who entered the limousine, so rich as to be careless of his change. Realizing her

A N D R E W H. M I L L E R ♦ 3 9

mistake and tender of her disability, the Tramp tiptoes around the comer from which the rich man came, out of our sight and into his desires. For it is at this moment, from the blind girl’s misrecogni- tion, that the Tramp learns what he wants: he wants to be the man whom this girl wants.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sc e n e F o u r . Evening, a dark river embankment. A man in evening dress descends steps toward the river, suitcase in hand. From the suitcase he takes a rope and stone. He’s evidently dis­traught. As he works with these objects, the Tramp descends and, having flourished his handkerchief over a bench, sits to smell his rose. The distraught man pauses, looks over at the Tramp as if to re­assure himself that he will not get in his way, and continues. Now, across several intercut shots, the Tramp slowly realizes what it is that this large, tuxedoed person is doing in front of him, noose around his neck, stone at his feet, river by his side. The Tramp first tries to talk him out of it, but—unsurprisingly in this movie—words have no effect, so he tries to stop him physically. In the course of the ensuing comic business, the Tramp is first tied to the millionaire, bound up with him and then, somehow, exchanged for him, noosed alone, and flung into the river. Twice in one day the Tramp finds himself in the place of a wealthy man. Saved at last, the millionaire declares the Tramp his friend for life, embraces him, takes him home, and ushers him into his world—a world like that of the flower girl’s dreams. A chance encounter between rich and poor shapes this second plot no less than it shapes the first. From this moment on, the millionaire will alternately recognize the Tramp as his savior (when drunk, by night) and fail to recognize him (when sober, by day): the truth dawns and fades over and over again. (The movie works the pun: “Dawn awak­ens a different man,” we’re told at one point.)

Dawning, or realization, is a natural topic for the movies; it is what we continually do as we watch. The Tramp s slow realization, as he sits in the dark gazing at the millionaire fiddling with the rope, that he’s watching a suicide parallels what we do as we sit in the dark

Rich and Poor

A N D R E W H. M I L L E R ♦ 4 1

watching the movie. We gather a sequence of actions under a con­cept—more plainly, we figure out what to name what we see and how to characterize it. Does the Tramp deceive the flower girl? Is that the right word to describe his actions across the course of the movie? Or is some other word, some other concept, more true to the actions gathered together here for us on this strip of celluloid? Helps, perhaps? Perforins for? Novels, or realistic novels at least, are much more garrulous with their advice about how we are to understand them; they demand a different kind of interpretive work than film. Watching movies as they unspool on the screen, our first task is to recognize what is before our eyes and not be blind to it.

So both the girl and the millionaire misrecognize the Tramp, do not see who he is—the idea being, I take it, that, among rich and poor alike, the unfolding of days and nights is an unending sequence of dawnings, of recognitions and realizations, expressed in different ways by different people on different occasions. The limits of our perception may be overcome for now, but they are not to be over­come once and for all. What Chaplin has realized—forced by the coming of talkies—is that the silence of the silent movie can serve as an acknowledgment of our limits. (At this moment, when talking has just become an option, silence appears at once a lack and, for Chap­lin, a new opportunity. So perhaps it’s best to say that this is not a silent movie but a movie pointedly without speech. It is a movie par­tially defined by what it is not: it is not a talkie.) More than that, how­ever, the movie is a demonstration of inventiveness and good will in the face of these limits, as the Tramp performs his acts imaginatively in the girl’s darkness. City Lights imagines the human condition of limitation—embodied by the limitations of our vision—in the face of a competing ambition—embodied by the talkie—to transcend those limits. The pretentions toward a complete or perfect rendering of reality are misguided; recognizing our partial perception of the world, in and out of the movie theater, is essential to human happi­ness, concentrated here in the human capacity for love.

And so, in each plot of City Lights, we see Chaplin occupying two roles. By night (or with the days first cocktail, perhaps poured in

4 2 • R A R I T A N

the early afternoon), the Tramp is at ease in the world of the wealthy, but as dawn comes he is expelled from that gaudy paradise and put back on the streets. He oscillates between one role and the other. But with the girl he is wealthy and poor at once: wealthy as she perceives him, poor as we perceive him. His roles are doubled not by time but by perspective. In the plot with the girl, he is tramp and gentleman, one person in two roles, in two worlds at once. This is one source of the movie s pathos and of its comedy.

Of course, in presenting Chaplins figure as at once millionaire and tramp, the movie is slyly recalling Chaplin s own status as person and character, star and role, millionaire and tramp. Consider the number of films that depend on an actors sustaining the sense of be­ing misrecognized, taken as someone else, or living the life of some­one else even while remaining him or herself. North by Northwest is one famous and ingenious example. Continually taken to be George Kaplan, Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) must continually proclaim himself; he repeatedly insists that he is not someone else. As Stanley Cavell has pointed out, the Hitchcockian irony is that George Kaplan in fact does not exist; he is no one, invented by the CIA as a dummy figure in a cat and mouse game with the coolly villainous Philip Van- damm (James Mason). Which is to say that Roger Thornhill is him­self or no one—he is mistaken for no one. But at the same time, Roger Thornhill is always Cary Grant, who also, in a different sense, can be mistaken for no one. It is as if Hitchcock were to say that, while being no one comes readily enough, and being one person, ex­actly yourself, can seem an achievement, being two people (and one of them Cary Grant) is a dream.

Movie stars exhilarate not simply because they give apparently effortless expression to the human capacities that we share with them, but also because they seem to transcend those capacities. In­habiting a role, they are two people at once, and in this way escape singularity. Of course, you might say the same thing about actors on stage. But if tonight Meryl Streep is Arkadina on stage in a produc­tion of Chekhovs The Seagull, tomorrow—or tonight in another city—someone else will enter that role. But no one else will ever be

The Tramp Transfixed

Clarissa Vaughn, Streep s screen role in The Hours. As Erwin Panof- sky put it long ago, “the character in film.. .lives and dies with the ac­tor.” On the screen two people live as one: Streep and Vaughn. And on the page? Who is Clarissa Vaughn in Michael Cunninghams nov­el, from which the film was made? No one.

♦ ♦ ♦

Sc en e Fi v e . A city street. The mise-en-scene of this final scene again reproduces that of our moviegoing experience: we sit behind the flower girl who herself sits at the window of her flower shop. She opened it while the Tramp was in jail for the apparent theft of the money which has paid for an operation to have her vision restored. The statue from the shop window has come to life, fully clothed, and looks out at the street scene, as if at a movie being screened for her entertainment. The Tramp appears before her and is again mocked by the newspaper boys. When, after she sees him shuffle toward her, see her, and become transfixed by the sight of her, seeing; after she herself laughingly scoffs at him, imagining that she has made a con­quest of him; after she comes around the window to offer him first a

coin and then a flower; when, after all this, she touches him, she knows: this Tramp, mocked by boys and scorned by her, his trousers ripped and his handkerchief loose, is her dream, her savior, the man who has somehow paid for her to have her sight restored, who has made her see.

Chaplin gives us the face of the Tramp, in unbearable expectan­cy, terror and desire equally evident. His face defines what he sees. But Chaplin does not then give us the girls face: there is no final re­action shot of her. And so, as the film critic William Rothman has pointed out, what she feels is left for us to say. The responsibility is given to us to put words to what is before our eyes, to say what it is that we see. What do we see? That the girl sees him as he is. But what is he—what is she seeing? Not the rich man she fantasized about. But not a poor man, either. She is seeing a man with riches other than those she imagined: a person capable of playing a role. She sees a single body adept at enacting dreams. And we’re asked: is that enough?

Copyright of Raritan is the property of Rutgers University, Raritan and its content may not becopied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder'sexpress written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles forindividual use.