Killing Time: Charlie Chaplin and the Comic Passion of Monsieur Verdoux

Abstract

Justus Nieland (Michigan State University) offers a reading of the domestication and death of Chaplin's silent persona in his 1947 sound comedy, “Monsieur Verdoux”, and its consequent refashioning of comic feeling. In the film, the Tramp, modernity's most public person, is killed by satire, polished smooth and supplanted by an inhuman character - both a dandy and a serial killer of women. Nieland offers a reading of the transition between the silent, universal Tramp and noisy and particular Verdoux.

Public Things

“…(As Libby Anker suggested to me, the outside world under capitalism may itself be a source of aggression and not just imagined as such.) Both kinds of children experience aggression, an intensification of what begins, Winnicott says in a rather Nietzschean vein, as "muscle pleasure," the sheer pleasure of movement (which is stilled in the colonial destruction of nomadic life forms and rendered jittery in early cinema's silent films [on this last, see Nieland 2006, on Charlie Chaplin]) (Winnicott [1964(Winnicott [ ] 1987. Without…”

“…(As Libby Anker suggested to me, the outside world under capitalism may itself be a source of aggression and not just imagined as such.) Both kinds of children experience aggression, an intensification of what begins, Winnicott says in a rather Nietzschean vein, as “muscle pleasure,” the sheer pleasure of movement (which is stilled in the colonial destruction of nomadic life forms and rendered jittery in early cinema’s silent films [on this last, see Nieland 2006, on Charlie Chaplin]) (Winnicott [1964] 1987, 233). Without romancing the child, but permitting an Arendtian embrace of natality, we may say that the aggression of the timid and bold child expresses a joie de vivre that is not simple and is always already attenuated not just by the pressures of conformity to which Arendt and Winnicott, each in their own midcentury ways, paid such close attention, but also by the modern, civilized prohibition (and medication) of certain kinds of (nonpassive) aggression, even though, or perhaps because, such aggression is a fundamentally important part of any repertoire of resilience, part of the agonism that may open a third way between messianism and despair, or force a dialectic of the two.…”