Dr Lisa Mullen

ljm203@cam.ac.uk

‘Like a slow meteor’: the political aesthetics of street walking in the work of Chaplin and Orwell

This paper is a work in progress, and represents some preliminary thoughts about representations of movement
and statis in depictions of homelessness in Chaplin’s films and Orwell’s memoir Down and Out in Paris and
London. I am exploring how their shared emphasis on jerky and clumsy movement stages for the viewer or reader
an aesthetic encounter which calls upon the haptics and affects of embodiment; I tentatively suggest, however, that
in each, this tends towards a somewhat different ideological position or outcome. My interest in this topic has
arisen from some work I am completing on a book about Orwell and the body. I argue there that, throughout
Orwell’s work, it is the body which is the receptacle for political truth – and the body which is lethally traduced by
bad ideology and bad epistemology. In the paper that follows, I have chosen to focus more on Chaplin, but I will be
happy to discuss Orwell in more detail during the seminar.

The biographical connections between Orwell and Chaplin are at best tangential, but both men
were interested in how politics, and especially the politics of poverty, could be expressed through
the body, and through art. They arrived at this position from different directions; while Chaplin
had experienced real hardship as a boy in Kennington, South London, Orwell was an old
Etonian always guiltily conscious of his privilege; though he had attended that elite school on a
scholarship and was hard up for most of his life, he chose to take to the streets partly as a
journalistic experiment, and partly as an ethical penance for the disgust and snobbery he had
been taught to feel when regarding the poverty around him. While Orwell’s art moved in search
of hard truths to knock against, Chaplin’s films moved away from hardship, despite centring it
thematically in his films; his mobile, adaptable Little Tramp uses abjection and precarity as a
means of forging a new accommodation with modernity.

It’s not clear if Chaplin ever read, or was aware of Orwell’s work, but we know that Orwell was a
fan of Chaplin’s films. In a book of personal recollections compiled and published in 1984,
Orwell’s nephew Henry Dakin remembers staying with him for three months in London in the
early part of the Second World War (no date is given, but it must have been between 1941 and
1943), and being dragged along to a screening of The Gold Rush (1925), which Orwell considered
an unmissable treat:

‘Eric [Orwell’s given name] thought that it was all very funny. He guffawed with laughter,
more than anyone else in the place. I remember we seemed to pay an enormous amount of
money to get in, and I thought it was hardly worth the price, but Eric was very impressed.
And he’d seen the film already. It wasn’t his first time. In fact it was him who said, ‘We
must go along and see this, Hen – very, very good.’ He thought a lot of Charlie Chaplin.’
(Wadhams, p. 129)

Orwell’s interest in Chaplin’s work at this time had perhaps been revived by his admiration for
The Great Dictator, which he reviewed for Time and Tide in December 1940. This film, ‘simply as a
film’, he wrote, ‘has very great faults. Although it is good at almost every level it exists at so
many levels that it has no more unity than one finds, for instance, in a pantomime. Some of the
early scenes are simply the old Chaplin of the two-reelers of thirty years ago, bowler hat,
shuffling walk, and all.’ This, Orwell considers no bad thing; but on the other hand, the scenes of
the poor Jewish barber in the ghetto he finds to be ‘sentimental comedy with a tendency to break
into farce’ while the scenes between the two dictators, Hynkel and Napaloni are ‘the lowest kind
of slapstick’. And all the while film pursues – rather clumsily, in Orwell’s opinion - ‘a quite
serious political “message”’ (CW, XII, p. 314). The reason that the film succeeds, however, is
down to ‘Chaplin’s peculiar gift’, his ‘power to stand for a sort of concentrated essence of the
common man, of the ineradicable belief in decency that exists in the hearts of ordinary people.’
(p. 315)

Orwell’s use of the word ‘decency’ here constitutes the highest praise possible; within Orwell’s
personal political lexicon, ‘decency’ betokens the utmost moral and ethical rectitude, and
crucially, it is always located, not in ideology, but in the visceral, embodied reality of material
existence. ‘No wonder’, he goes on to muse, ‘that Hitler, from the moment he came to power,
has banned Chaplin’s films in Germany! The resemblance between the two men (almost twins, it
is interesting to remember) is ludicrous, especially the wooden movements of their arms.’ (p.
315) This peculiar style of movement Orwell also sees reflected in Chaplin’s distinctive film
aesthetic: ‘Chaplin never seems to have profited by certain modern advances of technique, so
that all his films have a kind of jerkiness, an impression of being tied together with bits of string,’
he notes.

Orwell was not the last critic to be fascinated by the jerkiness, clumsiness, and wooden-ness of
Chaplin’s Little Tramp character, though others have argued that the ‘jerkiness’ is not simply an
artefact of an old-fashioned style. Tom Gunning, in his essay ‘Chaplin and the Body of
Modernity,’ argues that Chaplin’s body is prototypically modernist, even in his earliest shorts; it is
a body ‘in process, in transformation, an incomplete body able to merge with other bodies – or
other things – and create new bodies, grotesques that are part human, part something else,
exceeding our categories of knowledge and extending our experience.’ (p. 243). As Gunning puts
it, Chaplin’s work ‘laughed the world into a new physical realm’ by presenting a body which
‘seems at points to disaggregate itself, with limbs operating independently of each other, or to
merge with other bodies and create new creatures’. Chaplin, he writes, ‘slides up and down the
great chain of being, achieving a plastic ontology in which inanimate objects become bodily
appendages, and the body itself suddenly seems inert.’

For me, this observation about the body of modernity being dismembered and then
prosthetically reanimated ineluctably recalls the time Theodor Adorno met Chaplin at a party in
California. This is how Adorno tells it.

While Chaplin stood next to me, one of the guests was taking his leave early. Unlike
Chaplin, I extended my hand to him a bit absent-mindedly, and, almost instantly, started
violently back. The man was one of the lead actors from The Best Years of Our Lives, a film
famous shortly after the war; he lost a hand during the war, and in its place bore
practicable claws made of iron. When I shook his right hand and felt it return the pressure,
I was extremely startled, but sensed immediately that I could not reveal my shock to the
injured man at any price. In a split second I transformed my frightened expression into an
obliging grimace that must have been far ghastlier. The actor had hardly moved away when
Chaplin was already playing the scene back. All the laughter he brings about is so near to
cruelty; solely in such proximity to cruelty does it find its legitimation and its element of
the salvational. (1996, p. 60)

Adorno, let us remember, is profoundly alienated and unsettled by his enforced exile in America;
he has come to see films and mass culture, with their inbuilt brutality and cruelty, as precursors
to authoritarianism. In contrast, Charlie Chaplin, another European with a foreigner’s eye for the
overwrought semantic procedures of both Hollywood and capitalism, has chosen to translate
them into a sharp-edged comedy which, as Adorno astutely notices, is never exactly comfortable.
And then, there is the figure of Harold Russell, the Oscar-winning war veteran (and amputee)
whose name seems to escape Adorno, but whose public profile and metal prosthetics embodied
in the public imagination the cruel violence of war and its uncanny aftermath.

Adorno tells the story generously, emphasising his own cack-handedness, in order to make a
point about Chaplin’s art, which he says, manifests a truth about human nature which is generally
only accessible to children and dreamers. Yet this truth is emphatically not sentimental. He says
of Chaplin ‘his powerful, explosive and quick-witted agility recalls a predator ready to pounce. …
There is something about the empirical Chaplin that suggests not that he is a victim but rather,
menacingly, that he would seek victims, pounce on them, tear them apart.’ (Adorno 1996, p. 59)

The undertow of violence which Adorno experiences contrasts with the more common
accusation that Chaplin’s films are sentimental, and sanction a reactionary resistance to political
change by aestheticizing poverty. In his autobiography, Chaplin took issue explicitly with W.
Somerset Maugham’s ‘annoying’ suggestion that he ‘suffer[ed] from a nostalgia of the slum’ and
looked back on ‘the freedom of his struggling youth, with its poverty and bitter privation, with a
longing which knows that it can never be satisfied’ (quoted. in Chaplin 1964, p. 290). Chaplin
seems to find Maugham’s reference to freedom particularly galling: ‘I have yet to know a poor
man who has nostalgia for poverty, or who finds freedom in it […] I find no constraint in wealth
- on the contrary I find much freedom in it.’ (1964, p. 291)

Chaplin’s personal introduction to the dialectic of American comfort-discomfort (the same

dialectic which so troubled Adorno in 1951’s Minima Moralia) had happened three decades
earlier. When he first arrived in New York, in 1913, he had been struck by the stark contrasts to
be found on the streets:

Those magnificent houses on Fifth Avenue were not homes but monuments of success.
Its opulent towering buildings and fashionable shops seemed a ruthless reminder of how
inadequate I was. I took long walks across the city towards the slum district, passing
through the park in Madison Square, where derelict old gargoyles sat on benches in a
despairing stupor, staring at their feet. Then I moved on to Third and Second Avenues.
Here poverty was callous, bitter and cynical, a sprawling, yelling, laughing, crying poverty
piling around doorways, on fire escapes and spewing about the streets. It was all very
depressing and made me want to hurry back to Broadway. (Chaplin 1964, p. 128)

If walking the streets brought him into abrupt contact with ugliness, once he moved into the
plush interiors to which his professional success had given him access, he was fascinated and
consoled. Recalling a stay at the Astor Hotel, he writes:

‘Passing through the lobby with all its gilt and plush did something to me emotionally, so
that when I reached my room I felt I wanted to weep. I stayed in it over an hour,
inspecting the bathroom with its elaborate plumbing fixtures and testing its generous flush
of hot and cold water. How beautiful and reassuring its luxury.’ (1964, p. 143).

We might contrast this with Adorno’s infamous horror, expressed in Minima Moralia at the
outrageous lightness and airiness of American bathrooms. More seriously, we may note that,
while Chaplin luxuriated in these elaborate modern conveniences, Adorno worried that
interactions with the ‘unresting jerkiness’ of a technologised thingworld – its windows that must
be shoved open, its self-closing doors, its cars which turn drivers murderous with their
indifference to others – would bring human subjects steadily closer to the baked-in brutality of
the fascistic mindset.
Chaplin’s tramp persona, in contrast both to Adorno and to the actor himself, is at home in the
modern street, where navigates surefootedly through and across lanes of traffic, pedestrian
crowds, and the different layers of society. In City Lights, we watch in delight as he instinctively
steps off and on to a trap door which opens and closes unexpectedly in the pavement; likewise,
he can be a convincing hero both to the drunken millionaire whose life he saves and to the blind
flower girl he falls in love with. Yet once inside a mansion or a nightclub, he is noticeably and
immediately embarrassed by clumsy mishaps and pratfalls. Indeed, I would suggest that two
antithetical notions of physical agency are spatially organised in Chaplin’s films, defined by the
movement of the body into and out of the street, and mapped on to the dialectic of
public/private space which is experienced and encoded differently by people experiencing
homelessness. Chaplin’s interior clumsiness exists in opposition to his plasmatic adaptability
outside – his slippery shoes find unreliable purchase in the interior surfaces of shops, cabins, and
factories, but his jerky, bowlegged gait equips him to ‘come walking’ securely into the public
cityscape, carrying what he needs – his affective impact, his ideological focality, his semantic
liberty – with him as he goes.

The ability to ‘come walking’ is a Kierkegaardian idea. Long before arriving in Los Angeles,
Adorno had taken a philosophical interest in how Chaplin’s jerky, more-than-human
embodiment operated on city spaces in uncanny ways. In ‘Kierkegaard Prophesies Chaplin’
(1930), he quotes a passage from the Danish theologian’s early work Repetition, in which he
describes a comic actor called Beckmann - the star of farces at the Königstädter Theatre in
Berlin – as a man whose sheer physical presence seems to conjure an entire phantasmagoria
through movement, without the need for scenery, props or cast.

‘He does not just walk, he comes walking. To come walking is something completely
different, and with this ingenious action he sets the whole scene. He does not just
represent an itinerant apprentice lad, he can walk into a scene as this character in such a
way that one experiences everything. One glimpses the smiling village from the dust of the
country road, hears the sounds of its peaceful activity, sees the footpath that runs down
along the pond and how it swings off by the blacksmith’s shop, when one sees
[Beckmann] come walking with a little bundle on his back, his staff in his hand, carefree
and indefatigable. He can come walking into a scene followed by invisible street urchins.’
(quoted in Adorno, 1996, p. 58)

It’s easy to see why, for Adorno, this description ‘evokes, with the mild fidelity of a
daguerreotype, that of the Chaplin who was to come’; but Adorno goes much further, gathering
into this uncannily layered presencing the gigantic forces of the solar system itself:

The one who comes walking is Chaplin, who brushes against the world like a slow meteor
even where 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 hat that so become him. The invisible tail of street
urchins is the comet's tail through which the earth cuts almost unawares. (1996, p. 58)

Almost unawares – except for the photographic spectre which one of the urchins becomes:

When one recalls the scene in The Gold Rush where Chaplin, like a ghostly photograph in a
lively film, comes walking into the gold mining town and disappears crawling into a cabin,
it is as if his figure, suddenly recognized by Kierkegaard, populated the cityscape of 1840
like staffage; from this background the star only now has finally emerged (1996, p. 58).
The surreality of this passage depends on the baffling astronomical comparison between Chaplin
and a ‘slow meteor’; even allowing for Adorno’s unscientific elision of meteors and comets, the
image is startling. A shooting star hangs in the sky, apparently suspended in slow motion from an
earthly point of view, despite hurtling through space. Our brush-past encounter with the trail left
by this alien force confronts us with a dialectic of stillness and motion.

This brings us back to Orwell. For him, the most notable aspect of his experience of living as a
tramp in London was the terrible toil and effort entailed by laws which forbade vagrants to stay
still, forcing them to walk incessantly and pointlessly from place to place, while getting nowhere.
Unlike Chaplin’s Tramp, whose body responds balletically whenever it is put in motion by an
outside force, Orwell’s companions embody this futility directly, and express it through their gait.
Describing one homeless man, Bozo – a pavement artist – Orwell describes how he ‘limped
slowly, with a queer crablike gait, half sideways, dragging his smashed foot behind him’ DOPL,
p. 146). Yet Bozo is different from other vagrants Orwell meets. He is animated by a recalcitrant
energy which is both political – Orwell is fascinated by Bozo’s resistance to legal stuctures, and
to paid labour – and aesthetic. Like Adorno, Bozo finds an image of this political aesthetic in the
sky:

As we were crossing the bridge he stopped in one of the alcoves to rest. He fell silent for a
minute or two, and to my surprise I saw that he was looking at the stars. He touched my
arm and pointed to the sky with his stick.
‘Say, will you look at Aldebaran! Look at the colour. Like a – great blood orange!’
From the way he spoke he might have been an art critic in a picture gallery. I was
astonished. I confessed that I did not know which Aldebaran was – indeed, I had never
even noticed that the stars were of different colours. Bozo began to give me some
elementary hints on astronomy, pointing out the chief constellations. He seemed
concerned at my ignorance. I said to him, surprised, ‘You seem to know a lot about stars.'
‘Not a great lot. I know a bit, though. I got two letters from the Astronomer Royal
thanking me for writing about meteors. Now and again I go out at night and watch for
meteors. The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes.’ (DOPL, p. 146)

Orwell’s astonishment at Bozo’s utterance is founded partly on his unexpected knowledge of

astronomy, but also on his discursive access to the demeanour of ‘an art critic in a picture
gallery’. Bozo is, we should remember, an artist himself – one who takes considerable pride in
the creations he chalks on to the very fabric of the streets. It is not clear whether Bozo compares
the stars to art, or if it is Orwell who makes the connection, but this seems to me an irresistibly
Adornian moment, where some remainder of a lost truth about natural life, outside of the
reification of commodity culture, is made accessible through engagement with art. As Adorno
writes in Aesthetic Theory, ‘Involuntarily and unconsciously, the observer enters into a contract
with the work, agreeing to submit to it on condition that it speak. In the pledged receptivity of
the observer, pure self-abandonment – that moment of free exhalation in nature – survives.’
(1997, p73)

What, then, is our contract with Chaplin’s films – films in which speaking (even after the advent
of sound) is resisted, and the artifice of the studio is never far from the viewer’s consciousness?
A tentative answer may be found in the opening scene of City Lights, where a statue representing
‘Peace and Prosperity’ is unveiled to reveal the slumbering figure of the Tramp curled up in its
lap. Chaplin awakes and leaps into recalcitrant life, animating both the scene and the sentiment
with an individuated vigour which overturns the structures of class and wealth, replacing them
with something slippery and agile. There is no appeal to icy astral bodies or a pristine nature
here; rather, Chaplin deftly transposes one kind of art for another – superannuated statuary
replaced by the liveliness of cinema. For me, this is where his films depart from the political
melancholy so central both to Orwell and to Adorno. Perhaps Chaplin does not need to yearn
for a pre-capitalist nature, lost forever; equipped with his jerky, pliable body, he comes walking
through the studio, and the streets, trailing a savage new modernity – baffling, chaotic, liberating
– in his wake.

Works cited

Adorno, Theodor, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1984.

–– ‘Chaplin in Malibu’, Neue Rundschau, Vol. 3, 1964. Trans. John MacKay. Reprinted in Chaplin
Times Two, Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996) 57-61.
–– ‘Kierkegaard prophesies Chaplin’ Frankfurter Zeitung, May 22, 1930. Trans. John MacKay.
Reprinted in Chaplin Times Two, Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996) 57-61.
Chaplin, Charles, My Autobiography (London: Bodley Head, 1964).
Gunning, Tom, ‘Chaplin and the Body of Modernity’, Early Popular Visual Culture 8 (Aug. 2010):
237-45.
Orwell, George, Down and Out in Paris and London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984)
–– ‘Film review: The Great Dictator’ Time and Tide, 21 December 1940. Complete Works Vol.
12 pp. 313-15.
Wadhams Stephen (ed.), Remembering Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).