”…the one who comes walking is Chaplin who brushes against the world like a slow meteor even when he seems to be at rest; The imaginary landscape that he brings along is the meteor’s aura which gathers here in the quiet noise of the village into transparent peace while he strolls on with the cane and that so becomes him.” (Theodor Adorno on Chaplin).
Adorno’s admiration of Chaplin was based partly on his publicness of modern privation, and narratives of emptiness and void among abundance and plenty. And Chaplin’s realization that these themes in exile were highly volatile and not to be confused with the illusion of a final resting place. The culmination is to be located in ”Monsieur Verdoux” from 1947, a black comedy set in the Great Depression where Chaplin is an unchained beast of middle class optimism. The tramps temporal being is killed off in favor of an alter-ego , a slave to materialism who exhibits the same pathologies as mass war killers.
Chaplin, Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
Chaplin expressed catastrophies as systematic and inevitable. Whereas the tramp was socially inadaptable, Monsieur Verdoux is seamlessly adaptable, the first cousin and Jekyll-Hyde relation to the tramp’s political alienation and critical melancholy. Monsieur Verdoux had attained the bourgeoisie and was determined to break his fall at any cost.
The culture Industries were seen by intellectuals like Adorno (1903-1969) as an enlightenment of mass deception in which the whole world is made to pass through its filter. The pervasiveness of this model of mass entertainment would in itself constitute culture. In particular he viewed the comedic arts as a false sense of liberation masking a blind conformity to a cruel social order. The ability of the mass media to create ”subjective realities” were thought by Adorno to abandon any notion that we create our own worlds through through our choices and the exercise of free-will. He called the mechanism a ”jargon of authenticity’‘. Despairingly, he termed his critical theories ”messages in a bottle” which held that a truly committed art, skirts the issue of politics in order to have a transformative effect. ”Artworks exercise a practical effect, if they do so at all, not by haranguing but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness; in any case agitative effects dissipate rapidly”.
The push towards a ”monotonously frequent advice to be happy’‘ strongly echoes the Orwell’s 1984 where the superficial veneer of happy and pleasant is grounded in no real aesthetic comportment and is unable to resist. A mind numbing repetition of modern life, emotionally frozen individuals barely above the level of groomed, trained and obedient dogs in a human kennel responding to cues like a Skinner box experiment were Adorno’s greatest fears of the culture industries intentions of exerting a form of mass illusion on individuals. Its ”don’t worry be happy” and have a good day! 7/24 with Walmart greeters at a convenient location near you. check local listings.
Adorno felt Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux to be a masterpiece of cinema. A bleak, grim and pessimistic commentary on a ”Brave New World”where the protagonist, an unemployed banker marries and kills wealthy widows to support his family.”Incessant and spontaneous change in Chaplin: this is utopia of an existence that would be free of the burden of being-ones-self. This lady killer was schizophrenic.” Julius Nieland, author of Feeling Modern added, ” the laughter provoked by Chaplin’s strategic depersonalization in Monsieur Verdoux is modern insofar as it shares what we might call the ambiguity of modernist ecstasy, where the self’s incessant untimeliness always courts both madness and liberation”.
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