In thoughts on the diminishment of the aura of the artifact at a time which tends toward mass-distribution and miniaturization of the image, the sound, the movie and the text to the dimensions of personalized entertainment devices, not as much consideration, even now, is given to the artist in the age of mechanical reproduction. The countrywide apparition of Chaplin at the start of Sunnyside is a spontaneous projection showing that at this early stage in the progression of both his career and the mass-media canon there already were as many “Chaplin”s as there were perceptions of and perspectives on him.
“Image control” is a buzzword of modern PR, but any image by its nature is ephemeral, and disperses and refracts in the way Chaplin’s personality does at the beginning of the book. Not only does the work “have a life of its own,” but the maker himself is out of his own hands.

Sunnyside is bounded by two mass sightings of celebrities; at the end, the hysterical revelation of Chaplin in people’s minds has been domesticated into the filmed vision of Pickford on screens the world over. But each appearance, like the literal if ghostly avatars of Rebecca Golod, is an emissary of the original that is walking the earth more or less independent of that original’s intent or knowledge. The electronic record atomizes personality and ramifies meaning.

Sunnyside in some ways is an act of reassembly after its subjects have largely evaporated from the public consciousness. Like Oz’s too-often-invoked man behind the curtain, the fabrications of publicity and the open-source contributions of fan idolators don’t distort their model so much as detach from it, keeping the artist’s core personality safe from a multiplicity of meanings, and sheltering the author and theorist in the very task of deploying those multiple interpretations.

The early film analyst commenting from within the book (but only so capable of measuring the tree while it’s still falling), T. H. Münsterberg, can conceive of connections formed by the audience for a work of art that is completed in the mental airspace between the intention and the reception, but not of a text morphing on its own, independent of a creator’s conscious purpose and contingent on the context of time and culture. The colloquial concept of “getting something new” from a text upon each rereading, of a work “having something to say” to successive generations, of extracting message in the light of shifting historical perspectives and social emphases and, as it were, culturing meaning in the medium of accumulated knowledge and evolving experience, is something accepted by contemporary academia and instinctually understood in mass culture, though from the vantage point of the cult of authorial intent it can seem an arbitrary attitude toward the creator and a shapeless, noncommittal approach to creativity.

The, yes, chaplain at the funeral in the book’s epilogue allows for the possibility of all narrative structure being assigned by needy human intelligence, not divine logic, and the grand designs and clockwork coincidences of Sunnyside’s major narrative orbits suggest a shape but not a coherent purpose to lives and events. The smile fixed into the infant corpse’s face is an act of supreme imposition, but Chaplin, who will restart his homelife and revise his works and legacy for the next 60 years, has an intuitive understanding of second and third acts.

Much of what is seen in Sunnyside – the transient landscapes, the once-living legends – exists only on fading celluloid and in the retinal phantoms of the collective imagination. In the churning, ahistorical psychic and physical space of America, recorded memorial most often substitutes for material monuments. A moment, as American Pulitzer-winner Edward P. Jones has proposed, is dead as soon as it passes, along with the person you were that minute and the world that person lived in; if the past is another country American media is its natural history museum, stuffed and mounted and moved on from. It is the baby’s bad timing and unrewriteable tragedy to only die once, but Chaplin is reborn and vanquished – like the fastforward sequence of as-yet unfilmed cliffhangers Gold has him envision at book’s end – every time one of the messages in genie’s bottles that are his movies and public statements and enduring scandals is reopened.

In this Chaplin is subjectively revised but not unnaturally expanded; having been distilled into those old bottles he is decompressed in a book like Sunnyside, which serves to restore the scope of a real life in an era where everyday experience is glutting our mass media yet is mostly encoded into trivia; 140 characters and precious little personality. But where spontaneous social media is opaque, Sunnyside, even in its deceptive sprawl, is selective. If patterns of event and behavior are chaotic at best, connecting them in nonsequential paths is not categorically irrational.

The storyteller Spalding Gray once said to me (and probably many others) that he was not a memoirist but a collage artist, creatively shading and repositioning memory; instructively for the case of the 800 Chaplins, he also said that the main character of his own monologues was someone his own brothers did not recognize (and that he was a stranger to himself in his brothers’ versions of the same stories). Perhaps all ordering of reality is folly, but reordering experience may unlock – or assemble – a code we can live by.