Sherry Chandler » Lutz on The Little Tramp
Lutz on The Little Tramp
Chaplin’s tramp…is a dreamer and an honest seeker of happiness, not an anarchist threat to the social order. Chaplin’s vagabond slacker is an image, in fact, of a better way to live. He skewers bourgeois pretension, and part of the fun is always to see how the Tramp manages to live the good life with no means. The romantic freedom that the Little Tramp represents may be no closer to any person’s actual reality than is the threat of criminality run rampant [in the public perception of the tramp], but it serves as a reminder that the agreed-upon goods and values of society always threaten to ensnare and foil happiness as much as they enable its pursuit.
— Tom Lutz, from Doing Nothing (FSG, 2006), p. 167
I guess the Little Tramp wasn’t too worried about retirement (or “what’s going to become of me in old age?”) or health insurance for his children. I guess that’s the appeal, after all, but I must confess that as a child I found Chaplin films more sad than funny. (The Marx Brothers, by contrast, were too mean.) It was only as I got older that I began to see the Bugs Bunny flavor of the things.
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1 Comment
1. Brooks Carver replies at 15th August 2006, 7:33 am :
Sherry,
I love Chaplin. I have met the Little Tramp and “he is me.”
Brooks
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