Charlie Chaplin in the 21st Century
The Enduring Effectiveness of Films by Comedy's Greatest Master
Feb 16, 2009
With his centennial as a filmmaker looming, Chaplin enjoys a comfortable status atop the list of American cinema's finest comic performers. Within the film community this cachet extends to his abilities as a writer, director, composer, social critic, and businessman. In sum total, it is the picture of an icon. Yet Chaplin's staying power is especially surprising given his choice of subject matter. To understand why modern audiences routinely laugh when Chaplin appears on-screen (indeed, to understand why there is still an audience for Chaplin at all) it may be necessary to revise our model for viewing film history.
Charlie Chaplin - The Consummate Comedian
It is impossible to separate Chaplin from the comic genres. While he brought a new effectiveness to the blending of melodrama and humor, in each of his films the priority given to comedy is clear. At first glance this might seem to run counter to the likelihood of any sort of lasting impact beyond the pioneering of technique. Comedy often grows dated in the span of a generation, as any child who has found their parents' jokes wholly unfunny can attest to. Additionally, film form continues to evolve, perhaps at no time more rapidly than in its earliest days. These facts reveal why comic filmmaking has remained a viable medium but make Chaplin's enduring success even more unlikely.
Compared to other film comedians Chaplin was arguably only marginally more original in his thinking, more daring in his choices, more proficient in his technique. Besides all this, Chaplin possessed a special understanding of comedy and the dual nature of its language; verbal humor tends to date itself faster than visual humor, and the importance of silence in Chaplin's comic storytelling cannot be overstated. For the same reason, Chaplin was among the first international Hollywood stars, seen by viewers around the world when language barriers were not yet an issue in determining their moviegoing habits.
Next to silence, simplicity may account for much of Chaplin's endurance. Uncomplicated narratives, such as the accidental success of a lone prospector (The Gold Rush, 1925), or the efforts of a poor man to indulge the woman he loves (City Lights, 1931) are far more likely to be well received across the generations than are the complex, idiosyncratic plots of so many contemporary comedies, full of novel twists and hooks. Their elemental strength is evinced in the countless instances of Chaplin's scenarios being appropriated by other filmmakers, whether as homage, plagiarism, or something in between.
Chaplin as Artist
What these explanations lack is the reason for it to come as such a surprise that Chaplin's films endure so completely. One hundred years stands as a remarkable lifespan for a body of work in the cinema, and yet one would hardly remark at being asked to consider the merits of a 500-year old painting (da Vinci's Mona Lisa) or to admire a statue dating from 100 BC (the Venus de Milo). It seems clear that here we are once again confronted with the prejudice against new media. But as the new becomes the recent, it is reasonable to ask if a film like City Lights might be rightly considered an example of great art. Until it passes from the recent to the antique, it will remain too early to render a definitive judgment but for the time being it will suffice to say that City Lights, which Chaplin regarded with pride as his masterpiece, bears some similarities to the great art of the distant past in being the product of a cultural ideology and the work of a master practitioner.
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