Chaplin’s Big Moment
Look at the beauty in this moment. Look at the way it cuts to the core of cinema’s ability to use perspective to speak to human emotion. Look at the beauty of The Tramp, the penniless hobo who acts as if he’s a gentleman dilettante. The beauty of his dancer-like movements and clear expressions, and the beauty of The Tramp himself: emotionally sentient, self-effacing, curious, slightly feminine, always in the moment. The Dickensian Clown. Look at the moment at the end of his creator Charlie Chaplin’s favorite of his own features, City Lights (1931), and what it has to say about the act of looking at someone. Look at this film about the consequences of not seeing other people honestly and humanely and the simultaneously beautiful and terrifying final moment as a radical statement about love and social class.
I won’t expound here on why Chaplin still matters or why new audiences should be encouraged to discover him or why I specifically think Chaplin is great because it would simply be much too long. There are countless texts on Chaplin you could seek out that go into depth about his history, his troubles, his gifts, his methods, his achievements, his shameful treatment by the US, his vindication or his legacy. This piece is simply about the final images of City Lights and their power.
The Tramp has been mistaken for a wealthy man by a blind girl who sells flowers on city sidewalks. He’s been aiding her with money given to him by a frivolous rich socialite who indulges The Tramp as a dear companion whenever he gets drunk, but fails to recognize him sober. In both cases, The Tramp’s predicament depends on being misidentified by those unable or unwilling to see him for who he is.
The stinging implication of this situation is that the Flower Girl can’t see him simply because she’s blind. The Rich Man’s blindness is metaphorical and existential. He can see just fine, but in the overprivileged, overindulged world of his existence, people are only who his money tells them they are. As Chaplin sees it, the gifts human beings are given for sensing the world are cheapened and squandered by the wealthy.
The Tramp is wrongly accused of theft when the Rich Man comes to and he escapes the authorities with the money handed to him during one of the Rich Man’s drunken benders. The Tramp gives the money to the Flower Girl, with whom he’s fallen hopelessly in love, so she can get an operation restoring her sight. Then he turns himself in to the police and goes to jail.
Virginia Charrell, billed as “A Blind Girl,” in the opening titles, a despecification that somehow works
When he gets out of jail, he looks to be in even worse shape than before - not like the jaunty Tramp we’re used to, but now truly ragged, broken and withdrawn. He sees the woman again, who now owns her own shop and has had her sight restored. Just the touch of his hand tells her that he’s the man who took care of her and made her new life possible. What happens next could be called the greatest cinematic metaphor for the human predicament ever captured.
In this moment, her fantasy about who he is or who he could be is destroyed, and his freedom within that fantasy to be imagined as a man of high status, a provider, a winner, dies along with it. Some say it’s a happy ending because their relationship can now proceed on more honest terms. But I can’t help reading it as a note of total internal terror for them both.
She too, is deeply in love. She’s never seen her male benefactor and has no idea of the sacrifice he made for her. Her savior loses his chance to get himself out of poverty, and then his physical freedom as he goes to jail. It's at that moment that the human impulse towards fantasy as emotional processing or escape is gaslit by the horror at the exposure of his psychological nakedness.
Discovery. Flower at chest.
When she touches his hand and realizes who he is, she must now really see him for the first time. She must look upon him as he is, because the fantasy is over. It's a moment of incredible emotional violence - because the carefully nurtured image of her object of affection was misapplied and it gets torn to shreds almost instantaneously.
In a stroke of genius, the film’s last shot is not of She who comes to terms with the shattering reality of the man standing in front of her, but of He, the imagined object of affection, realizing all of this. The Tramp hides his mouth behind his hand, clutching the flower she’s given him. His expression is almost childlike, as if he’s been caught misbehaving by a stern mother. It speaks of the way we can regress to a kind of emotional childishness when we’re most vulnerable.
Realization. Flower at lips.
As he’s laid psychologically and emotionally naked in front of the woman he put off telling the truth to, so too is Chaplin The Artist, prostrating himself naked in front of the audience. In both instances, it’s as if he’s saying, “This is what I am. I am nothing other than what you see before you. You can no longer see me in any other way.” Being that Chaplin grew up in absolute wretched poverty, this is like a statement of his classbound allegiance.
He’s been called a Marxist filmmaker for the idea put forth in much of his filmography that workers and peasants have the moral high ground. But revealing the origin of the man as THIS kind of poor person - not the befuddled, cane-twirling, hat-tipping, goofy interloper, but an actual individual of no means whom polite societies pretend they don’t see - is a perfect synthesis of the exposures of the both The Tramp and Chaplin.
No filmmaker has given us such insight into what it is to be poor, how poverty actually feels, without ever coming off as maudlin, as Chaplin.
I’ve only just noticed that the final shots of two characters in the very end don’t match. In the moment when The Tramp sees himself being seen, the flower that the Girl handed him is near his mouth, before it’s lowered to reveal the terror in his grin. But the reverse angle taken from over Chaplin’s shoulder shows him holding the flower down by his chest. Considering the perfectionist rigor with which Chaplin filmed, it’s unlikely this was a simple oversight.
Chaplin had final cut along with all the time and resources from the studio he needed to get everything exactly as he wanted it. He would spend weeks or even months on a single sequence. As a director, his relentlessness and his censure of the crew and the other actors were regarded as a kind of tyranny. It’s hard to believe this error in continuity could have gotten away from him, in what had to be his most poured-over moment as a filmmaker. Though very easily lost in the swell of emotion, this lapse actually adds to the sense of disorientation in the scene. Movies show us only what their makers choose, and as emotionally true as they can be, they too are ultimately fantasies in which we can hide.
This is the moment.
It ends on that note. The music continues past the fade from Chaplin's honest fear, through a "The End" intertitle card, to total black - as if the potency of this emotional revelation is too strong to contain an image. The music swells as it spills past the film itself, into the void of bottomless personal anxiety. Chaplin knew the power of the materials he was playing with. They’re corrosive. They threaten to crack the world of appearances. This emotional spillover is why I tend to read this ending as terrifying rather than hopeful.
The last moment of this film is THE VERY END. No possible moment can exist beyond it. We’ve just been given a blueprint for a new way of seeing others. As a remedy for the source of all violence in the world - the snap in our consciousness when we realize we’re not seeing other people or ourselves for what they are - this radically abrupt moment of universal humanity is where the story MUST end.
You meet a potential mate for the first time. Maybe you were drinking heavily, or the room was dark at the party. Or it's an internet-initiated meetup and you've not seen the person in the flesh. Their mask slips. Their defenses come down. It's a violent experience when someone learns instantaneously whether or not you fit within the coordinates of their fantasy. I don't use the word, "fantasy," in a cheap way, nor do I use the word, "violent," in an overt way. At its core, Love’s great danger is revealed here as the acceptance of a person for fitting within the parameters of a particular role we need them to play (so I use the word, "fantasy"). We misidentify each other willingly and it leads to what Freud called the only real emotion - Anxiety.
Nothing is more lethal than being loved for filling out the parameters of an ideal.
City Lights is a deceptively simple movie, though its level of sophistication is almost mystifying. The viewer can be enraptured, which makes it trickier to notice the intricacy of what Chaplin is doing. The finesse of making this all look so simple is what accounts for that deception. Chaplin knew that simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication.
To be this brave. To say, “Here I am. You are seeing all that I am before you and nothing else. I can't be anything other than what you are looking at. I am exposed to you - outside of the coordinates of your idealization. You are now actually "seeing" me, and I’m seeing you. I am risking everything in eliminating this gulf. Because we are fragile, complex beings. You must love me as I am, because I can't be anything other than this. I can't give you anything other than this. And this should be enough.”
I should be enough.
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