Charles Chaplin | City Lights / 1931

a burlesque and a romance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Chaplin (screenwriter and director) City Lights / 1931

 

I had not seen Charles Chaplin’s City Lights since my college days at the University of Wisconsin, and might not have watched it again before my death had it not, quite unexpectedly it seemed to me, wound up on two the major LGBTQ+ film lists, that broad-ranging list of films “Any and All LGBTQ+ Film”" compiled by Beryl Parkey on Letterboxd and Matthew Floyd’s more carefully curated list “Homosexuality in Pre-Stonewall Cinema” connected with Mubi.

     For those who have missed my previous explanations of how I gathered up the hundreds of titles reviewed in these pages, I repeat that when I began collecting titles for the all-inclusive My Queer Cinema volumes, I selected from various lists already in existence such as the two listed above as well as numerous others on the internet and elsewhere, from the several critical studies I’ve mentioned in my introductions, from my own history of cinema viewing and writing, and from personal suggestions of friends and acquaintances. No matter how doubtful I have been about certain titles I’ve found listed, I have been careful to revisit all films given the possibility that when I first saw these films I simply was not alert to the coded or minor LGBTQ characters and incidences.

      A substantial number of the titles I’ve found on various lists simply didn’t appear to me to be credibly representative of LGBTQ influence or even interest after seeing the films again. Although I have included many films that others have complained about as not containing LGBTQ material, I am convinced that given the carefulness with which I have approached all films that I can substantiate—at least to my satisfaction—my final choices. But it is my logical and careful analysis of each film that assures me of those I finally included. And, as I said, a great number of films seen by others to be of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender and/or transsexual interest simply did not pass the test.

     To my wonderment, City Lights most certainly did pass my queer test. How could I have missed such obvious gay allusions, I had to ask myself? Of course, I was young and maybe not even sexually out of the closet at the time I first saw this film. And I wasn’t looking primarily for gay content. Still, I spotted the gay content of great many films long before I was at work of these volumes and wrote fairly coherently about it. Indeed, the fact that I missed that content in one of Chaplin’s major works provides an excellent example, I now realize, of another way in which coding works in motion pictures.

    Many films, as I have argued elsewhere, are coded in a manner that the gay content works underneath the heterosexual narrative, hidden to those not looking for or not having the visual and verbal language to recognize the cues. In other films, however, the gay aspects are so openly exposed and function so nicely simultaneously with the normative heterosexual story that we simply don’t read them as being seriously queer and perceive them simply as oddities of plot or comic overstatements. In City Lights the central story, a romance, concerns the Tramp’s love for a blind flower seller (Virginia Cherrill) and the major plot is motivated by his attempts to demonstrate his love for her by helping her to financially survive and by paying her travels to a doctor who will cure her blindness, even if the cure might, in fact, ends their relationship when she discovers who he truly is. Nonetheless, the Tramp succeeds in accomplishing both her personal well-being and her eye surgery and cure.

      The problem is how to make his help credible, how to find a way to make a totally penniless street person find enough money in order to pay for his would-be lover’s needs. Obviously, one way is to simply put him to work. And at one point in the story that is precisely what the plot does, as he goes to work as a street cleaner with a few comic devices attached, including the appearance of a small herd of horses which he avoids following up his broom with and waste cannister only to be faced by an elephant. But to put the Tramp to work for too long a period would be to destroy is character. If the man can easily make money enough to pay his lover’s rent, than how can we justify his role in life, a down-and-out street person who simply cannot find employment. Chaplin makes sure that he is quickly fired.

      There is always a temporary job involving great dangers as in Modern Times, and for this film the writer and director calls up that world when the Tramp is encouraged to play at being a boxer, sharing the take with another boxer who will pretend to knock him out. Of course, in the Tramp’s world nothing goes as planned, and when the other boxer runs off, Chaplin’s character is forced to face a real boxer at great danger in a series of wonderfully pantomimed dances where the Tramp attempts to hide from the real thing behind the referee and attempts to outwit the other boxer with sudden hits like a pop-up jack-in-the-box. It works as humor, but his character again demands that he lose the bout. To win would turn the loser into an unidentifiable other being who is not in this film.

     And indeed, although both of these sequences have some memorable moments, they represent the weakest and least essential moments of the film. They simply make sure that he attempts to make other choices before the more direct approach he takes.

    The only way to truly find money, obviously, is to somehow get the character involved with a wealthy man who’s willing to give him the cash; and that takes a kind of relationship that is nearly impossible and totally illogical—although it happens in several of Chaplin’s films—given that the dirt of the street naturally corrodes the oil of wealth.

      In Chaplin’s clever thinking the dirty street person must be made interesting to the wealthy man in a proper tuxedo by introducing a situation straight out of burlesque, an accidental coupling of two men from completely different backgrounds who become something more than mere friends, despite the fact that that word will be used to officially designate their relationship.

     Indeed, the Tramp almost as often as he behaves as man who loves women is forced in order to survive to also play the courtier to powerful men. One of the first things Chaplin’s Tramp does when he faces trouble or men of violence is to play the weakling, a kind of sissy and a flirt, offering up, so it seems, his entire body as a form of amelioration.

     In City Lights he does precisely that when he meets up with the “real” boxer he is supposed to face in the ring, as he suddenly purses his mouth, blinks his eyes, and weaves his head in a posture of sexual enticement, almost begging the brute for just a little love. Indeed, he plays the sissy so successfully and the other boxer decides to undress for the bout behind a pulled curtain. Chaplin does this time and again throughout his films, suddenly turning coy and behaving in a sissified manner when challenged without an easy exit.

      In a world in which he is entirely dependent upon others, he seems to recognize that no matter what he does, those in power will have their way with him no whatever his personal desires. Accordingly, the Tramp becomes the great assimilator, a reality that Chaplin makes clear in the very first scene of the movie where even the public statues of Peace and Prosperity, about to be unveiled become just such a sexual force. Waking up on the lap of the female mother of the marble male statues to Peace and Prosperity, he is immediately jabbed in the ass by Prosperity with a raised sword. In short, he is publicly fucked, A moment later, when he escapes the sword, he is immediately rimmed by the same figure as his ass falls back upon the sculpture’s face before he winds up with his butt being goosed by Peace’s open hand. The pliable beggar has no choice but to be sexually available to all.

     He soon meets the drunken eccentric millionaire (Harry Myers) whose wife has evidently just left him. Feeling he has nothing left to live for, he attempts suicide in the melodramatic fashion of burlesque, placing a rope tied to a rock which he plans to throw into the ocean taking his own body with it. The kind and loving Tramp attempts to prevent it, nearly drowning himself in the process. But in that action of saving the man’s life he becomes this drunken rich man’s “best friend,” (a term now often used in gay films to suggest someone other than what it seems to suggest) as he hugs and kisses the Tramp with thanks, the two of them looking very much—even the policeman who encounters them hinting that he two sees them as such, two homosexuals hiding out of the dark pier to make out.

     The millionaire not only insists on taking his new friend out on an elaborate “date” to a night club wherein various comic disasters are enacted, but demands he come home to live with him, even offering him his car as he might lure a new girlfriend.

      With nowhere to really sleep and no will of his own, what can a Tramp do but to take advantage of the food, drink, and good times he’s being offered? The two quite naturally in this comical gay myth end up together in bed.

       The only necessary interruptions to this seemingly “perfect relationship” occur when the symbol of order and propriety, the man’s valet, will not full permit the friendship to blossom and when the wealthy man utterly forgets his odd “friend” the moment he becomes sober. This is the way the plot assures its ordinary viewers that it’s not really serious and that what you have just seen is a comic fluke. You might also argue that our eccentric millionaire was the original closeted gay type who continually argues after a night of gay sex, “I drank so much last night that I can’t remember a thing,” a figure who William Friedkin’s Boys in the Band know quite well.

      Fortunately, the eccentric millionaire doesn’t wait long to fill up with alcohol again and when he reencounters the Tramp takes him back into his arms, to a party, and to bed.

     No one in their right mind perceives this as a real sexual relationship. This is merely a comic burlesque-like routine that conveniently introduces our hero to a source of finances so that he might win over his true female love. And the comic relationship also must come to an end for the Tramp’s story to come to its logical close. At the very moment when the Tramp, handed a thousand dollars by his friend, is so joyful that he hugs and kisses his friend as the millionaire had previously done to him, the wealthy man pulls back in some disgust. And in just a few frames, the Tramp falls out of his good graces from being a bosom buddy—who, in fact, saves the millionaire from real thieves—to a position where all involved claim he is a robber who has stolen the money he intends to present to his blind love.

      Chaplin’s character escapes so that he might hand over the loot, but of necessity is arrested and imprisoned, the entire comic second “plot” having come to an end so that normative heterosexuality may prevail. The Tramp must pay for playing the “gay” man about town.

       By film’s end, full heterosexuality has been restored and his true love finally even recognized and possibly accepted, as the former blind woman recognizes the hands of the man who has helped her “to see,” including the reality she is now facing.

      Yet Chaplin wisely does not follow through with a reunion or even a heterosexual kiss. As a man of the streets, owned by everybody, to be recognized and taken in would be to destroy the man destined to live as an outsider, to turn him from the permanent figure of gentrified disgrace into someone of societal value and therefore end the life of Chaplin’s persona. If his comic homosexual adventure must end nowhere, so must his dramatic heterosexual fantasy, leaving him an asexual being waddling down the highway to his next series of adventures. If Charlie belongs to everybody, he must also belong to no one.

 

Los Angeles, January 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).