FILM CHRONICLE
381
from this point on, there would always be on each side a clear
intent
in regard to the other. The society, seeing in the individual both an
indispensable instrument and a constant danger, would find it necessary
to take a more and more active and organized interest in all his concerns.
And the individual would be forced thereby to assume a position: he
would have to be for or against the society, and his decision in this regard
would immediately become the determining factor in his life and the
defining element of his character. The margin in which the Tramp had
managed to survive and carry on his life, on however small a scale, was
becoming narrower; at length it would disappear.
This had an immediate effect on Chaplin. The impact of his art,
its comic point, has always come in large measure from his insistence
on pushing everything to its extreme. He creates his movie world by
a process of logical extension (this is of course true of most satire), and
he has an unfailing instinct in the selection of precisely those leading
elements that will bear extension. (In this he is helped rather than
hindered by a certain simplicity in his conception of political and social
problems.) From the moment that he could no longer define society
(in its logical extreme) by its indifference to the individual, then, for
his purposes, the position of the Tramp became questionable, for the
Tramp and his society, despite the instability and tenuousness of their
relations, were aesthetically inseparable.
The change begins to appear in
Modern Times,
made during the
depression. In the factory's treatment of the Tramp there is neither
accident nor innocence; the factory is a living, malevolent organism
bent on putting the Tramp to certain specific uses. An atmosphere of
personal and intended viciousness appears-in the inescapable, nagging
voice of authority over the public-address system, or in the terrible
experiment with the feeding machine-and this viciousness is a new
thing in Chaplin's movies, residing as it does neither in individual human
beings nor in the mechanical imperviousness of mere organization, but
in a system that has acquired personality. The Tramp can still keep
his innocence-he is put in jail because of a political demonstration
that takes place
around
him, while he himself is not involved and does
not understand what is happening-and in the end he can still escape
from the system and disappear down the road. But he cannot circum–
vent the system or turn it to his own account, and there are ominous
signs that the situation will soon be beyond his powers of adjustment.
In this movie more than ever before, one is kept aware of his ultimate
helplessness; certainly he never seems so
little
a man as when he finds his
arms still twitching after the hours of tightening an endless series of the
same two bolts.
The end comes in
The Great Dictator,
where the whole·mechanism
of society is brought to bear against the Tramp in a deliberate effort to
