One of the snags with really great artists is that they feed the illusion that the past is comprehensible: reading Jane Austen or listening to Beethoven, I can register a different set of manners and assumptions without feeling that there’s something utterly alien going on. (Critics generally settle for the adjective “timeless”.) Watching Charlie Chaplin, on the other hand, I’m always conscious of the chasm between then and now, how different modern times are from anything that went before. I don’t think this sense of strangeness has much to do with the question of whether we find him funny or not (the idea that Chaplin isn’t funny has fallen out of fashion in recent years, and I think it’s generally recognised that some of the time he’s very funny). But leaving aside Chaplin’s astoundingly deft comic shtick, the whole emotional world of the films seems primitive and impenetrable; I have trouble swallowing the Little Tramp himself as a sympathetic character, though the audiences a century back don’t seem to have felt any ambivalence.
I’m leading up to a proposition: that Chaplin has slipped out of our grasp. [click to continue…]