A Film Canon

In this extraordinary film, Chaplin provides two hypotheses of what it might take for the Tramp to integrate himself into everyday society and, more specifically, to achieve that self-awareness that is distinctively human. The first option involves his relationship with a suicidal millionaire and, in an extended gag, a reticent boxer, both of whom represent variations on the imposing, gargantuan foils that crowd Chaplin's early shorts, clarifying his endearing, playful attitude to those foils as a kind of infantile flirtation, the strategy of a child attempting to ingratiate itself into the adult world. As might be expected, this ultimately produces a debilitating infantilism, figured as hyperactive inebriation. A far more promising avenue is opened up by a blind flower seller, whose sensory disorientation forces her to experience the world with the same jerking hesitation as the Tramp, clearest in the analogy between his confusion of spaghetti with confetti and her confusion of a thread from her wool ball with thread from his jacket, both of which emphasise the extent to which the Tramp himself substitutes tactility for sight (and all his other senses), 'seeing' with his entire body. In this light, the sublime conclusion, in which the flower seller, having had a restorative operation, recognises the Tramp, is not only an act of self-recognition on his part - a cancellation of the funhouse mirror sequence in The Circus - but the revelation of a sensory experience previously unavailable to him. It makes sense, then, that the film should conclude with an irreducibly pregnant, ambiguous image, which not only provides a fitting conclusion to the strongest combination of comedy and pathos that I have seen to date, but underscores Chaplin's smile as the most beautiful, and melancholy, in all cinema.