A Film Canon

By Monsieur Verdoux, the Tramp has been entirely abstracted from his body, existing only as a collection of mannerisms and minutiae, each of which takes on a proportionate autonomy, preventing them being entirely fused with the eponymous wife-murderer through whom they manifest themselves. At a certain level, this slippage is in keeping with the primitive montage and editing, as well as Chaplin's continual awareness, if not acknowledgment, of the camera. However, it also offers a striking inversion of the Tramp's romanticism, such that the transformative power of a woman's love becomes a prelude to murder, as do Verdoux's verbose tributes to it, producing an eccentric combination of misogyny and vulnerability ("I love women, but I don't admire them") that locates the film squarely within a noir mileu; or, rather, construes the inter-war period, which is Chaplin's true province, as a precursor to that mileu, as if to clarify hard-boiled life as the result of so many attempts - including Verdoux's - to rise from the ranks of trampdom, only to discover that honest methods are futile. Hence Verdoux's repulsion at the Tramp within - epitomised by the chilling moment at which he suggests testing an untraceable poison on a Tramp, so that the body could be claimed by the state - as well as the characterisation of his murderous career - which is only pursued for the sake of his wife and children - as the mere transition between the "monotonous rhythm" of being a bank clerk, and an awakening to the "numbed confusion, the nightmare" of monopoly capitalism. It's the apocalyptic, visionary connotations of this awakening that translate Verdoux's spectrum of romantic encounters (his victims, his wife and, finally, a particular victim who seems to offer escape from the relation between the previous two) into an ethical register, such that the spectrum between good and evil is shrunk to his body - especially his hands, which act with a mind of their own, and represent the point of maximum conflation with the Tramp - and all human endeavour partakes of the confusion, chaos and demoralisation of last days.