My first Chaplin memory was of my English teacher in Calcutta who had a giant poster of The Kid. Oddly, he didn’t have anything else framed in his house. No family photos, no other paintings, no other films. Just a Bengali calendar and a poster of Chaplin. “Is this the only photo you have in the whole house?” I remember asking. “Yes,” he replied, “Chaplin is the only family I have.” Just as he said that, his wife gave us some tea and naturally overheard. Two weeks later, he was divorced.
As is common with school things, we lost touch but I found out that he passed away some years later from drinking. The only asset he willed was his Chaplin poster to his protege.
Growing up in a very Anglicised Calcutta (now, of course, totally different with its Quest malls and Jeet and Dev blockbusters), Chaplin was a sort of invisible hero among Bengali intellectuals. A black-and-white God. There are certain things taboo among the Bengali intellectual upper middle classes (a dying but tenacious breed). You could beat them up, you could swear at their families, you could starve them or leave them penniless but you could never, ever say (and I think this still holds true) the following things: 1. Anything implying Tagore was not a genius 2. That ANY music was written after Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel and Pink Floyd 3. That every film ever is basically stolen from something Ray had already done 4. That there was any other kind of biryani than Calcutta Biryani and 5. That Charlie Chaplin was not God.
HE BECOMES WHATEVER WE WANT HIM TO BECOME
Like the rest of the world, it took years before I figured out that Charlie Chaplin was a British actor, alcoholic, a womaniser, manic-depressive and eventual Hollywood recluse. A rags-to-riches story unlike most of his movies, which remained rags-to-rags stories. They say the world is a better place with information. I’m not sure. Chaplin of the movies seemed much better than Chaplin the person. Which is why the Calcutta I grew up in, in the ’80s (and the world at large), thought Charlie Chaplin was actually a homeless lovable loitering tramp you could run into on the streets in any city. There isn’t one fan who hasn’t posed in front of a fountain or statue, secretly thinking Chaplin would jump out of nowhere, having been asleep like a hobo under Hercules or Queen Victoria. That’s the point of Chaplin’s cinema — selling us the dream that Charlie Chaplin never existed, only the character did.
The masterpieces — City Lights, The Kid, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, Gold Rush — are now nearly about a 100 years old. And in the age of social media where we forget something we’ve seen three minutes ago, there isn’t a film festival or a summer midnight open-air film screening where these movies aren’t shown. Today, if you ask anyone what Casablanca is, or who Orson Welles was, or who made Meghe Dhaka Tara, or ask them to name one movie of Billy Wilder or Mrinal Sen, “I have no idea” would be a perfectly acceptable answer. However, whatever happens with memory and knowledge (read: erased) thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., nobody in the world ever would say, “Who is Charlie Chaplin?” unless they were in a mental asylum.
Like Sherlock Holmes or Tintin, he just lives inside us, becoming whatever we want him to become. The actual Charlie Chaplin disappears when in our lives we’re all directors of our own Chaplin movie.
To his fans, Chaplin’s weren’t movies — they were/are religion. You don’t watch Chaplin, you pass him down. Father to daughter, family to family. Like a home or a value system.
Essentially because Chaplin means different things at different ages. As a child, when you see him stuck in a machine in Modern Times, you’re laughing at his follies and his prancing. As an adult, you think, oh, this is a criticism of industrialisation. The Kid, which is (and I can see critics getting mad at me for saying this) probably the greatest movie ever made, at first glance seems to be about being an idiot parent. On second watching it is about loneliness and love.
Yes, he’s falling and running and breaking the law and in the wrong place at the wrong time, but at the core, what he’s doing it for — for love, for saving a child, for money, for freedom, for a bit of his time in the sun — is all of us. We’re all that tramp.
SHOW, DON’T TELL
Some filmmakers claim some movies, now classics, would never have happened without Chaplin. Forrest Gump, Finding Nemo, Tom and Jerry, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Borat, Sholay, Dr. Strangelove, Pink Panther, Munna Bhai, anything by Woody Allen, Goopy Gyne... the list is endless.
Cinema is apparently the only universal language. So universal that, like music, Chaplin didn’t need a language. Film schools now all teach, “Show, don’t tell”. Chaplin taught film schools that. In fact, his worst work, however ironic, was later in life, when he started speaking.
When asked what made him a great comedian, Chaplin said, “I’ve spent my life understanding myself and come to no real conclusion. All the mistakes along the journey are what the public have been watching.”
All good comedians understand tragedy infinitely well to create comedy as a by-product. Chaplin was the first to show us (and in today’s India, it is a great, great lesson) that the finger needs to point at oneself, that under all the show-off and the judgements, we’re all little people with a hat and a stick and a torn suit, with no real belongings and nowhere to belong.
Once we understand that, we can, as Charlie Chaplin did, smile and walk into the sunset.
I love Charlie Chaplin because... Tell t2@abp.in
Anuvab Pal is a screenwriter, playwright, novelist and stand-up comedian.
He lives in Mumbai and New York and performs all over the world,
but, deep down, home is always Calcutta. He tweets at @AnuvabPal
