Charlie Chaplin’s ‘A King in New York’: A Clash of Civilizations?
Ananya Dutta Gupta [Ananya Dutta Gupta teaches English at Visva Bharati. She specializes in Renaissance and early modern literature. This essay was first published in Bikshan Bulletin, 2011. She has made some editorial alterations in this version for HUG.] —————————- This is primarily a study in a particular work of Chaplin’s in the light of his own statements about his life and work. Some of these pronouncements are culled from his well-known autobiography and others from his prolific biographies. Naturally, my essay endeavours to arrive at a reading of the film that is consistent with Chaplin’s professions about his philosophy and his politics instead of seeing it as an aberration from the creative norm set by his previous work. There are two obvious presuppositions underlying this attempt: one, that the personal professions of the artist in question are sincere and authentic, and two, that they may then be used to understand the figural, hence objective, art of his cinema. It might seem a trifle naïve to look for consistency between art and life these days. We no longer read texts as faithful mirrors of the minds that formed them. We tend rather to be a little suspicious of consistency, having unconsciously learned from post-modern criticism to see postures in what earlier ages saw the self. One may still maintain that the hunt for consistency is as worthwhile in one’s rediscovery of an artist as the painstaking sleuthing for inconsistencies. However, the search for consistency would prove barren if undertaken formulaically. It would be difficult, for instance, to reconcile Chaplin’s on-screen empathy with the underprivileged of the world with his own relish for the lifestyle of the rich and the famous if it were not for the clarification afforded by Chaplin’s own characteristically ingenuous rebuttal of Somerset Maugham: This attitude of wanting to make poverty attractive for the other person is annoying. I have yet to know a poor man who has nostalgia for poverty, or who finds freedom in it. Nor could Mr. Maugham convince any poor man that celebrity and extreme wealth mean constraint. I find no constraint in wealth – on the contrary I find much freedom in it. I found poverty neither attractive nor edifying. It taught me nothing but a distortion of values, an over-rating of the virtues and graces of the rich and the so-called better classes. Wealth and celebrity, on the contrary, taught me to view the world in proper perspective, to discover that men of eminence, when I came close to them, were as deficient in their way as the rest of us. (Chaplin 267)[1] I contend it is precisely such mechanical attempts at marrying Chaplin’s immediate circumstances of life to his purported message in the film that have distorted critics’ response to A King in New York for decades. I make a somewhat paradoxical plea: first, that the film be watched for its own merits, merits that admittedly emanate from its message rather than its style, and second, that the film be watched alongside the past and best works of Chaplin, if it is to be rescued from oblivion. The history of the reception of Chaplin’s penultimate film is a history of misunderstanding. It is ironical that a film occasioned by America’s monumental misunderstanding of one of its most gifted immigrants should in turn engender and encounter comparable misunderstanding among generations of critics. It is invariably spoken of as an artistic embarrassment – a jilted immigrant’s costly slip from the pedestal of true, disinterested art into the abyss of ill-concealed meanness. Uno Asplund, for instance, summarily dismisses the film: And that [Limelight] was where Chaplin ought to have stopped. From Europe he counterattacked in blind rage with A King in New York (1957), a film, which, artistically speaking, ought never to have been made. [2] I would argue that, notwithstanding the artistic lapses, themselves excusable in view of the straitened circumstances under which the film came into being, A King in New York exudes all the mellow, genial wisdom that made its more polished predecessors enduring favourites with the same discerning critics. Chaplin’s wit is ironic and stems from a Janus-like ambivalence shorn of the myopic, egotistical bias that critics allege had gone into the making of A King in New York. John Osborne is a case in point. It is something of a surprise to find that Osborne, whose irrepressibly bitter Look Back in Anger was produced just a year before the release of A King in New York, should think of Chaplin’s film as a work of rage and bitterness. In some ways A King in New York must be his most bitter film. It is certainly the most openly personal. It is a calculated, passionate rage clenched uncomfortably into the kindness of an astounding comic personality. Like the king in his film, he has shaken the dust of the United States from his feet, and now he has turned round to kick it carefully and deliberately in their faces. Some of it is well-aimed – some is not. In fact, for such a big, easy target, a great deal of it goes fairly wide. What makes the spectacle of misused energy continually interesting is once again the technique of a unique comic artist.[3] One is struck not only by Osborne’s misapprehension of the mood of the film, but also by his failure to see in it a continuity of theme and vision with Chaplin’s earlier and greater works, particularly Modern Times. If Modern Times is prophetic in its depiction of human society so completely mechanised as to have been metamorphosed into a giant machine, then A King in New York is just as staggeringly clairvoyant in its vignettes of a society ruled by a ruthlessly intrusive and exploitative media. On 17 September 1952 Chaplin and his family sailed for Southampton from New York. A day later he learned that he was debarred from entering the US. Nearly two years would pass before Chaplin would announce his