Chaplin's, The Kid
Stephen M. Weissman
Like Moses among the bullrushes Oedipus on the mountainside, or Snow White in her Disneyland forest, Charlie Chaplin's The Kid is a tale whose underlying archetype has enthralled audiences of all ages: the abandoned child found in the wilderness. But unlike his more privileged mythological predecessors, who at least had the good fortune to be deposited in lush, natural surroundings, Chaplin's cast-off child is discovered among, the ignoble detritus of modern society. A garbage-strewn alley in the seedy Red Light District in Los Angeles' Chinatown of the 1920s serves as the shooting location, re-creating a mean street from Chaplin's feral boyhood in the slums of South London.
Ambling down the alley, taking his daily constitutional while deftly ducking the flying garbage heaved by householders from the tenement windows above, the Little Tramp appears. With fastidiously impeccable manners, he slips off his walking gloves before selecting a cigarette butt from his smoking case, an old sardine can. Pausing to note the worn condition of those shabby fingerless gloves, he tosses them away with the cavalier panache of a gentleman of leisure with a dozen other pairs of handwear at his immediate disposal. Just as he is about to surrender himself to the joys of his first smoke of the day, his tranquillity is shattered by earsplitting distress signals from the squalling infant who has been abandoned on the garbage heap, plaintively demanding to be heard by someone, anyone.
Taking one glance at that miserable child, streetwise Charlie instinctively looks up as if to quiz both the refuse-throwing householders and the heavens above as to just exactly where this baby has come from. But before he can even begin to explore that question, a rapid-fire series of comic interactions with a neighborhood cop firmly establishes Charlie's predicament of mistaken paternal identity: like it or not, once he demonstrates his better nature by resisting his impulse to toss the unwanted baby down the nearest sewer, the kid is his for life. What follows is a series of picaresque father-son adventures for this flotsam pair of castoffs from the Industrial Revolution in this comedy that Chaplin introduces in his opening title card as " a picture with a smile-perhaps a tear."
Perhaps! As the lights go up, one look at the picture show audience reveals that there hasn't been a dry eye in the house. But what is so startling about Chaplin's comedy of fathering a lost baby is the fact that he first conceived and immediately began to shoot this film barely two weeks after the death of his own three-day-old, firstborn infant son. Having turned his personal pain to such a creative purpose, he gets us to break bread with him and take communion with his grief and loss.
By chancing upon a universal form-the myth of the lost child-to express his bereavement, Chaplin succeeds in inviting the whole gang in. Chinese peasants, Bantu tribesmen, European intellectuals, Cockney tradesmen, and all the "kids" of the world can and do receive Charlie's pantomime tale with empathy. My own three-year-old daughter calls the film Tarley Taplin and the Baby. It is the only supposedly "grown-up" video we own that she watches with the same wide-eyed fascination that she otherwise reserves for Pinocchio and Snow White-her other two "lost child" favorites.
But to say that grief-stricken Chaplin accidentally stumbled on the lost kid myth is to suggest a fluky happenstance that is clearly the counterpart of his Little Tramp's nimblest pratfalls. If ballet is in Charlie's bones, the schmaltzy nostalgia of bittersweet loss already was in Chaplin's soul-long before his bereavement over his firstborn child. Periodically left to fend for himself by his own alcoholic father and psychotic mother, Charlie already knew what being an abandoned kid was all about-living on the streets, dodging the bobbies and orphanage authorities, scavenging to survive.
While losing his son undoubtedly reawakened those old boyhood memories, their artistic rendering took place with Charlie's heart, not his head. And the idea probably succeeds because it is largely unconscious rather than self-conscious autobiography.
A few days after his personal tragedy, tough-minded Cockney Charlie, the professional actor who had clawed his way out of the slums, zipped up his pain and got on with it. Back at the studio it was business as usual: having put recent events behind him, he set out to make his latest comedy with its hilarious motif of lost-and-found gag sequences-castoff cigarette butts, gloves, clothes, furniture, kids, and so forth. Taking the lowbrow slapstick route, he quarried for bits and shticks, not archetypes and myths. But funny things can happen on that low road to comedy, just as they do on the high road to tragedy.
Just as Oedipus and Laius--father and son--encounter each other by chance at one of life's crossroads, so Charlie the fatherless kid and Chaplin the childless father accidentally meet in a London lane. Unlike their ancient predecessors, whose hearts are filled with mistrust and hate, Charlie Chaplin and the lost child are filled with yearning and affection. And so their tale is a bittersweet ballad of love and loss. Griminess is next to Godliness in a comic universe where the disinherited can inherit the earth.
Published in Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Edited by Joseph H. Smith, M.D. & William Kerrigan, Ph.D. Copyright 1987, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
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