by Ellen Dawson
(105). For this reason, Seldes opts to use the French name “Charlot” when referring to the universally recognized icon, since “Charlot was a figure existing only on the screen and the great critical error was in confusing him with the man whose imagination brought him to life there.”
Taking a cue from Seldes’s formulation, this chapter reframes Chaplin’s rapid rise to global celebrity status in the 1910s as the inverse of more familiar tales, most precisely as the story of a subject who transforms into an object. This object has a distinctive relationship to mass culture and is—contrary to so many invocations—not really modernist, because modernism’s antagonistic relationship to imitation in favor of originality and authenticity precludes the nearly endless imitations through which the tramp’s phenomenal life emerges, travels, and continues to depend.1 The story I tell thus begins—and ends—with a funny kind of walk.
✩★
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✩ The Charlie Chaplin Walk
“In a Chaplin film,” wrote Rudolf Arnheim in a 1929 retro-
spective celebration of the comedian’s early work, “no face, no motion of the hand is true to nature” (312). He might more aptly have said no motion of the feet. Garbed in dusty and rather gargantuan brogans, those feet can kick, most often backward, usually as a gesture of defiance or retribution, and they run forward at a decidedly quick pace. They can take a corner in geometrically intricate patterns, like a 90-degree angle balanced on one leg, replete with several skids, an occasional hop, and even, for good measure,
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a pivot on the heel. The movement of those feet is undeniably funny, perhaps most intensely when marching down (or up) a set of stairs, which the Tramp prefers to take one insouciant, halting step at a time. It hardly surprises that writers struggling to describe the Tramp’s quirky perambulations have grasped for similes—a “duck-like waddle”—or turned to alliterative play, as in “a splayfooted shuffle.” The tramp’s walk appeared to German essayist Walter Benjamin as “jerky” (340); it resembled an “angular swerve”
to philosopher Gilles Deleuze (169). In any number of critical tomes the lexicon invariably expands to include “purposeless,” “epileptic,” “dislocated,” or “staccato.” In every case, the adjective gets at a movement that flaunts its difference from alleged physiological norms, from an organic or continuous structure of movement, thus supporting Arnheim’s general estimation that in Chaplin’s early films the aesthetic drive to represent the real, largely understood as mimesis, is utterly beside the point.
It may very well be that writing about Chaplin’s walk is beside the point.
Some responses are better left to the body, a phenomenological affair thoroughly in play by early 1915, shortly after the comedian left the Keystone Company and signed a contract with the Essanay Company that included a well-publicized $10,000 signing bonus and a salary of $1,250 a week. The figures stunned a public not yet fully accustomed to the lucrative value attached to that new species, film stars. More stunning still was the contagious compulsion for imitating the Tramp, a sort of spiraling craze or odd disease, neatly encapsulated in the noun “Chaplinitis,” which Charles J.
McGuirk coined in July of that year. “Among the happy youths of the slums, or the dandies of clubdom and college,” he observed, “an imitation of a Chaplin flirt of the coat, or the funny waddle of the comedian, is considered the last word in humor” (“Chaplinitis,” Motion Picture Magazine, July 1915, 87). Of course “the last word in humor” has little to do with words, and everything to do with a mode of mimicry that defies or transcends language. For anyone who contracted a case of “Chaplinitis”—and there were multitudes, as we will see—the body becomes the site of play.
Or, the body mimics and re plays, a phenomenon that provoked a lyrical tribute from Lupino Lane in 1915, who sang the “Charlie Chaplin Walk”
in the revue Watch Your Step:
It doesn’t matter anywhere you go
Watch ’em coming out of any cinema show,
Shuffling along, they’re acting like a rabbit,
When you see Charlie Chaplin you can’t help but get the habit.
First they stumble over both their feet,
Swing their sticks then look up and down the street,
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Fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers,
All your wife’s relations and a half dozen others,
In London, Paris or New York
Ev’rybody does that Charlie Chaplin Walk!
(qtd. in Robinson 153)
“Charlie Chaplin Walk” music sheet, 1915. From the author’s collection.
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While Lane’s lyrics offer yet another simile for the Tramp’s funny walk—“acting like a rabbit”—they do so by way of describing a transnational phenomenon, a near global “habit,” something “ev’rybody does.” Nor is it a stretch to speculate that Lane “shuffled,” too, incorporating a variation of the movement in his stage performance, while his audience undoubtedly stumbled about that year to the tune of a popular fox trot, also titled “The Charlie Chaplin Walk,” as well as to a broader array of musical numbers in the United States such as “The Charlie Chaplin Glide” and “Charlie Chaplin—March Grotesque” (or to the “Charlot One Step” in France).
Whether shuffling, gliding, marching, stepping, or trotting, “Chaplinitis” was afoot by almost any account. In the summer of 1915, the numbers mounting in Cleveland, Ohio, astonished the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which announced that the city “has been getting so full of imitators of Charlie Chaplin that the management of Luna Park decided to offer a prize to the best imitator and out they flocked,” competing among themselves, if not with the thirty theaters in New York City that, according to the New York World, were also sponsoring “Charlie” amateur nights (Maland 10–11).
While organized venues were harder to come by in the trenches of the Great War, Kevin Brownlow recalls that “British soldiers with a sense of humor would cultivate Chaplin mustaches, and in prison camps, every hut had its imitators” (Hoberman 40). Female soldiers with a sense of humor imitated the Tramp with equal aplomb, or so one might glean from the marvelous impersonation performed by a female cadet in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for her off-duty colleagues in the 1918 documentary Life of a WAAC. In 1916 high school students in Madrid painted the Tramp’s iconic mustache on their faces, surprising their teachers in school one day, while the surprising fact breathlessly announced by Illustrated World in 1917, that
“Charlie Chaplin has countless impersonators in real life,” implied a mass body that defied statistical enumeration. Even so, reporter Ernest A. Dench could not resist describing the specific antics of a “Finnish sailor on shore leave” who “was hailed [ sic] before a magistrate for knocking a young woman down in Battery Park, New York, while pulling off Chaplin stunts.”
This sailor then replayed these stunts as a unique mode of legal defense:
“He demonstrated before the magistrate by kicking his left foot in the air and manipulating a pencil like a cane. The magistrate laughed and ordered the culprit’s release” (“Strange Effects of Photo-Plays on Spectators,” Illustrated World, July 1917, 788).
It seemed the funniest thing in the world was to “pull off” a few Chaplinesque stunts, a phenomenon noisily disparaged by the Illinois Congress of Mothers who convened in Chicago on 13 April 1916, where “pie, licorice,
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snakes, Charlie Chaplin, and the lard dinner pail were classified as among the evils to which childhood is heir.” “No one,” intoned the Chicago Daily Tribune,
“voiced a protest against the proposals to abolish them all” (“Point to Perils Children Face,” 14 April 1916, 12). Although these mothers restrained from describing the “atrocities committed by Mr. Chaplin’s cane,” even a cursory
glance at the thirteen Essanay films released the previous year reveal the cane’s artful capacity to initiate a teasing flirtation, to swipe, hook, crank, probe, or trip any object that enters its orbit. It can also lift a lady’s skirt, a thoroughly déclassé act that tickled Rufus, the youthful protagonist of James Agee’s last novel, A Death in the Family. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the summer of 1915, the story begins when Rufus and his father, Jay, plan a trip to the “picture show,” a proposal that prompts an immediate, and transparently repetitive, response from his mother: “ ‘He’s so nasty !’ She said, as she always did. ‘So vulgar ! With his nasty little cane; hooking up skirts and things, and that nasty little walk’ ” (11). It would be impossible, even ludi-crous, to recuperate Charlie’s antics as anything other than “vulgar,” a feature that critic Gilbert Adair aptly understood as “ubiquitous in Chaplin’s work,” as well as the “fundamental component of humor” (101) sadly effaced by other comedians’ elaboration of “clever,” “lovely,” and brilliantly polished gags (think Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd). While Adair’s primary interest lies in assessing Chaplin’s performance as resonant with the “deepest common denominator” of crude vulgarity (rather than the “lowest common denominator”), the primary interest of reporters like Helen Duey was to defend
“Chaplinitis” as “a safety valve for children’s crude sense of humor.” As she explained to readers of Woman’s Home Companion in 1917: “They imitate his funny walk with the little swinging cane, and the stiff hat topping sober face.
He is a kind of clown-hero” (“Why Do We Like Them?” 26).
Regardless of how one evaluates the propriety of such behavior, there can be little doubt that the sudden profusion of Chaplin imitators heralds an unprecedented moment in the history of early stardom. This is not to say that the penchant for imitating film stars was limited to the Tramp. The fashionable lure exerted by Mary Pickford’s “cute little short dress that goes bobbing and frou frouing just like the cute little curls,” for instance, appeared equally pervasive (“They Are All Trying to Be Mary Pickfords,” Los Angeles Times, 11 May 1915, 3:1). That such attempts “to be” like America’s Sweetheart “fills one with alarm and dismay,” “freezes your blood,” and provides a spectacle “terrible to contemplate” emerges from the tension between women who are older and noticeably more ample in girth than Pickford’s short and slender figure (3:1). Extrapolating from this example, it is reasonable to conclude that it is the flaunting of the grotesque that
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makes Chaplin impersonations both popular and pervasive. A Rabelaisian figure defined by that ill-fitting costume and irregular gestures, the Tramp proved adaptable to any and, apparently, every physiology.
Although I can only touch on the array of meanings associated with the grotesque, its most common usage refers to bizarre, fantastical, or capri-cious representations that disturb the more familiar ordering of the world.
The English term “grotesque” (as both noun and adjective) derives from the Italian “la grottesca” and “g rotesco,” which derive in turn from “grotta” (cave), an etymology that art historian Wolfgang Kayser traces to late-fifteenth-century excavations of antiquity’s ornamental paintings in Rome and to an aesthetic style “in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human beings, and where the laws of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid” (21). For Kayser, one of the most significant transformations in the historical permutations of the term occurred in the eighteenth century, when British critics grappled with the aesthetic concerns raised by the rising prominence of caricature, a representational style that jeopardized the very principle of art understood as “an imitation of beautiful nature or as its idealization.” Caricature, writes Kayser, with “its imitation of distorted and distinctly ugly reality and its exaggeration of actually existing disproportions” proved the opposite of beauty (30). At its most absurd and most unnatural, caricature became grotesque, a position of extremes surely represented by the Ziegfield Follies girls’ performance of “Those Charlie Chaplin Feet” in the summer of 1915.
These girls may have been “marring their beauty with mustaches, derby hats, big shoes, and baggy trousers,” as Chaplin recalled in his autobiography (173), but a distortion of the harmonious unity and classically streamlined bodies otherwise emblematized by these chorus girls is precisely the point.
A closely related point emerges from anthropological and historical studies of the grotesque as an experiential phenomenon that challenges cultural order of most every sort, nowhere more famously than through the festive disorder released in sixteenth-century carnivale or the saturnalian Feast of Fools. Critical studies have devoted considerable attention to these traditions as periods in which grotesque bodies—replete with protruding organs, wild animalistic leaping, and costumes flaunting sexual inversion—
cavorted in a manner that symbolically overturned the official or elite culture instituted by religious and state authorities. Perhaps most important for the present context is Mikhail Bakhtin’s recognition that these traditions of festive disorder blurred the boundary between art and life, since carnival folk culture “is by no means a purely artistic form or spectacle. . . . It
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belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play” (7). To invoke the grotesque in relation to Chaplin’s stardom, then, is not simply to acknowledge that the tramp figure disorients cultural propriety and physiological norms—a claim that could apply to most any slapstick comedian of the period. It refers rather to a phenomenology of performance that spirals off the screen and into the streets, inspiring other bodies to assume a costume, paint a mustache, manipulate a stick like a cane, or waddle about the college lawn in a manner approximating a drunken duck.
Obviously, the function of such exaggeration in physiology and gesture must be linked to the particular historical context in which it appears, and the commercialized context of a burgeoning film industry slanted, for some, the sociopolitical implications of such mass buffoonery into a vision of irrational mass complicity. Indeed, the Illinois Congress of Mothers shared an odd sort of kinship in this regard with the British modernist poet and novelist Wyndham Lewis, who attacked Chaplin as a “child-man” rather than a “small man” (an infantilizing gesture he also, intriguingly, reserved for Picasso). As literary critic David Trotter explains, the phenomenal imitations of the Tramp, and the Tramp’s propensity for playful imitation, exemplified for Lewis both “a politics and a sociology”: “The tramp’s ‘irresponsible epileptic shuffle,’ which combines ‘playfulness’ with ‘scurrilous cunning,’ was a license to his millions of admirers not to grow up, not to undertake the responsibilities of difference” (183–84). This lack of differentiation among Chaplin and his fans—the latter of whom the American avant-garde magazine Little Review referred to as a “sodden mass inclined toward protoplasmic atavism” in 1915—hints at broader concerns regarding the fetish character of commercial culture and a kind of mass delusion that disavowed the sociopolitical consequences of modernity in favor of a ritualistic immersion in the pleasure of cheap goods and amusements (Trotter 183). “Imitating a child,”
Trotter summarizes in his assessment of these critiques, “Chaplin is himself imitated: he becomes the very medium of the social reproduction of mimesis, and thus capitalism’s most valuable asset” (184).
Although Lewis had nothing to say of the many commodities that simultaneously reproduced images of the tramp, it bears stressing that the fever for all things Charlie inspired an endless array of goods: by 1916 there were Charlie dolls, Charlie ashtrays, Charlie cocktails, Charlie ties, Charlie cutouts, Charlie cigarette cases, Charlie postcards, and Charlie comic strips. One could arguably categorize these things as mimetic replications of a popular icon enabled by mass technologies of production and duplicat
ion. But they adamantly refuse the neat seriality and simulation of the “real” elsewhere
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defining the novelties, trinkets, souvenirs, and effigies circulating in a newly commercialized commercial. Far from the effigy practice that Mark Sanderberg traces in wax museums at the turn of the century, for instance, that sought to produce perfect illusions of otherwise absent or immaterial bodies, these imitations of “Charlie” herald a mode of corporeal image production that shrieks of artifice. Crudely painted figurines miniaturize the tramp’s body and magnify the scrunch of a mustache; baggy pants billow into dizzy-ing folds on stylized silhouette cutouts, while gigantic brogans point outward.
That these things jettison the illusion of naturalism or authenticity, however, may be less interesting than the fact that the production and circulation of all things Chaplin in these early years jettison an organized model of commercial distribution and exploitation. According to David Robinson, Chaplin’s most thoughtful biographer, Sydney Chaplin, Charles’s half-brother who was finishing a contract at Keystone while working as Chaplin’s manager, attempted to establish the Charles Chaplin Music Company and the Charles Chaplin Advertising Service Company in late 1915 in order to control the commercial exploitation of the various Chaplin by-products. The companies did not survive. In October of that year, Sydney received a letter from James Pershing, the man who had been appointed to run the advertising service:
We find that things pertaining to royalties are in a very chaotic state. There seems to be hundreds of people making different things under the name of Charlie Chaplin. First we have to find out where they are, what they are making, and are notifying them as fast as possible to stop or arrange with us for royalties, which is about all we can do.
