MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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an effective entrance, an effective exit . . . they are the poetry of the
theatre."
But Chaplin left himself out of his most theatrical fUm,
A
Woman oj Paris;
his tramp character is too protean to be accom–
modated by any wellmade play. Living by his wits, full of invention,
the tramp is always making himself up as he goes along, with the
fluidity and grace of his physical movement expressing his supple
identity.
If
such self-creation is a facet of city life, it's also typical of
the Jew who is trying to pass; indeed, it's a distinguishing feature of
modern life itself, when people can no longer be kept "in their
place'
because their place has been eliminated or altered beyond recogni–
tion, and they are constantly bombarded by images of alternative
lives, which make them dreamy and discontented. It's easy to forget
that in fUms like
The Bank
and
The Gold Rush
Chaplin is a great poet
of reverie; his lowly hero has lyrical dreams in which he triumphs as
a lover or a man of action. These compensatory fantasies mark him
as a man of imagination but also confirm his status as an outsider, a
social reject.
This kind of ambitious dreaming is a characteristic modern
theme, a theme of feverish aspiration inspired by images of other
lives and higher possibilities . For Dreiser's Sister Carrie, the streets,
shops and department stores of Chicago form a gallery of possibilities
undreamed of back in the small town. Don Quixote, Julien Sorel,
and Emma Bovary are uprooted by the books they read, but in the
twentieth century our fantasy lives are usually stocked with movie
material, with a galaxy of stars and easy wish-fulfUments that are
larger than life - indeed, that are a deliberate reversal of the frustra–
tions of everyday life . Eventually, movies began to make this dream
process one of their own themes. In Keaton's
Sherlock Junior
Buster
plays a projectionist who falls asleep and becomes part of the movie
he is showing, during which he performs extraordinary feats denied
to him in the more mundane story that frames this astonishing se–
quence. Chaplin's tramp gets the girl more often in dream than in
reality. Different as they are, Belmondo in
Breathless
and Woody
Allen in
Play it Again, Sam
share a dream of becoming Humphrey
Bogart. In this typical modern landscape, the comic incongruity
separates fact from fantasy, social condition from dreamy aspira–
tion.
No one has ever given a better account of the irreducible in–
dividual caught in the impersonal machinery of modern society than
Chaplin in the great first reel of
Modern Times.
Yet comedy in general
