“Utopian and Cynical Elements”: Chaplin, Cinema, and Weimar Critical Theory
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This essay seeks to challenge the postwar marginalization of Charlie Chaplin’s films within the canon of film theory by arguing for their crucial significance as complex meditations on the precariousness of utopian desire. I suggest, first, that Chaplin’s corpus was vital in the gestation of the ambivalent approach to mass culture that characterized Weimar Critical Theory; secondly, that the juncture between Chaplin and Weimar thought owed much to a shared tendency to view the utopian potential of modernity as something that rebounds from within the very forces of capitalist reification; and lastly, that in both Chaplin and Weimar thought, the volatile interplay between reification and utopia is exponentially complicated by being processed through the relay of affective cynicism and its own ambivalent functions. These three premises are explored through the demonstration of the close interdependence between the theory of reification and the conception of the modernity of the cinematic gaze; the examination of the role of Chaplin’s affective and gestural milieu in creating possibilities of utopian fulfillment out of the re-presentation of reification; and the anatomy of the theoretical problems introduced by the ambivalent hermeneutic and political function of cynicism/kynicism as both anti-utopian and anti-reifying strategy. I conclude with a reading of Chaplin’s The Kid (1921) as a paradigmatic instance of Chaplin’s function as the exponent of an abyssal dialectic wherein the conflicting forces of utopia/reification and cynicism/kynicism are kept in permanent suspension, “at a standstill.”