These two disparate aspects of modernity have a contradictory and imbalanced effect on the human sensorium. The former, similar to that of shell shock, overloads the sensory-motor and excites the impulses, meanwhile, the latter numbs these senses to the point of oblivion. Yet, in another way, Chaplin is also the exception. He is able to endure and transcend these experiences via the mimetic faculty alive in his performance mode. Chaplin is not traumatised by the hyper-stimuli and responds to it in a (comical slapstick) manner that is guided by his mimetic sensibility; likewise, he is also able to uncover stimuli in the mechanical ‘dead’ time of the Taylor factory. In effect, Chaplin’s body and performance become a kind of therapeutic vortex through which the shocks and traumas of modernity are absorbed and, later, absolved. This essay, as it has already begun to do so, will first explore the esoteric concept of mimesis and its existence in human performative acts, such as acting. These concepts will then form the framework through which an analysis of Chaplin’s 1916 short Behind the Screen (The Bewildered Stage Hand) will be conducted. Such an analysis aims to reveal how a kind of mimetic acting, like the one that Chaplin adopts, is the most effective form of acting. Here's access to the film via YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJp1JD8O1aA
The human performance of mimesis, as Laleen Jayamanne explicates, involves a certain difference; a difference located in a constitutive agon between an emerging sense of “self” and the other, posited as nature.[2] What do these broad terms of ‘self’ and ‘other’/‘nature’ really denote in this context? Is it ‘nature’ as in the human nature of one’s intrinsic bodily impulses? And ‘self’ as in the conscious and reflective ‘ego’ or identity, akin to sociability, that one presents to oneself and the world? If so, then this mimetic mode of performance imbues within itself the ongoing conflict of unabashedly succumbing to one’s instinctual impulses (i.e. libido, eros, thanatos) and society’s prescribed remedy for them. This performance mode permits the actor to delve into his character and consider which behaviours and (impulse-)responses are universal and which are individualistic. This exercise will come to expose, on a larger scale, the societal forces that dominate the milieu in which the character resides, illuminating the kinds of impulses and responses that are socially pious, and those that are deemed as deviant.
Benjamin writes that the mimetic faculty has its genesis in the compulsion to “become and behave like something else.”[3] This description is key to pinpointing the appearance of a mimetic performance. Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf explain that “mimesis originally denoted a physical action … with attention turning repeatedly to the gestural;”[4] emphasis is placed upon the exteriority of the other, of the other’s bodily attributes and behaviours as being the entry point into its interior life. This is pertinent to Chaplin’s Tramp persona, who possesses the iconic lateral duck-miming walk, thick moustache, and peculiar costuming of baggy pants, oversized shoes, tight blazer, cane and derby hat. Chaplin himself even acknowledged, in his autobiography, the mimetic metamorphosis that costuming and other exterior physical transfigurations can bring:
“[In] my get-up … I wanted everything to be a contradiction … I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage he was fully born.”[5]
By all means, the exterior set-up affects the actor’s-character’s movements, gestures and overall presence on screen. His response to internal impulses and stimuli can only be expressed through the physicality of his character’s prescribed body. Jennie Lightweis-Goff notes the continual relevance and applicability of this exteriority-towards-interiority mimesis in contemporary film as she remarks how “Nicole Kidman wears elaborate prosthetics to look as much like Virginia Woolf as possible in The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) and Phillip Seymour Hoffman is filmed in an elaborate trench system to make him look as short as Truman Capote in Capote (Bennett Miller, 2005).”[6] This ties in with the notion of copy and contact, whereby the two are “different moments of the one process of sensing.”[7] This process endows Chaplin to “live as neither subject nor object of history but as both, at one and the same time.”[8] The mimetic faculty sees Chaplin lose his own form and being, and acquire attributes of the (human or non-human) object in which he was initially imitating on a superficial level. This subject-object configuration along with Chaplin’s affinity with the child-clown figure empowers him to respond to stimuli and his internal impulses in unusual ways that give birth to comedy and slapstick.
In the scene of Behind the Screen where the other stage hands come to invite Chaplin (as David, the ‘assistant’) and his superior, Goliath (the virtual stage hand), to join in their workers strike, a medium shot captures Goliath napping on his stool in the centre of the frame and Chaplin hammering rampantly away in the far left. The workers seamlessly walk into the frame from their last scene, and Chaplin (with hammer still in hand) and Goliath shift their attention to the mob. An intertitle of “Are you with us?” is flashed across the screen, and the pair respond to it by spastically striking a defiant pose. The mob then exit the frame, walking towards the right hand side of the camera. What follows is a mimetically charged spasm/protest-dance by Chaplin that concludes with a side view pose reminiscent of the communists’ hammer and sickle symbol. Next, Chaplin dances/stamps from the left of the screen to the right, making wild gestures with his hammer before hitting the cap off Goliath’s head and abruptly falling onto the impeccably placed stool behind him. The scene is then briefly paused as the film cuts to a scene of a girl, in the lunchroom, crawling out of her hiding place among the unused props. It returns to Chaplin and Goliath in the exact same positions as the film had left them. The producer walks on to thank the pair for staying but Goliath pushes Chaplin away before he can accept his congratulatory handshake. The scene is then disturbed again by another cut to the girl, this time dressing up as a boy. Coming back to Chaplin, he is ordered by Goliath to continue setting up.
This scene is continuously affected by the inflows and outflows of bodies, which change the spatial dimension and sparseness of the shot. And apart from the parallel montage edits, it plays out in one long take with the camera being immobile in its shot scale, angle and movement. Chaplin’s pivotal evocation of the communist hammer and sickle seems to be predominantly stimulated by the other workers’ decision to strike, and ironically, after turning them down, his movements begin to mimetically assume a protesting style and spirit. Chaplin dances in a manner that’s akin to marching, stamping the ground with the full weight of his small body and gesturing wildly for an anonymous political movement. Moreover, the background music with its diegesis sound effects adds to the faintly comedic yet forceful tone of his movements. These movements are, of course, only the first step in Chaplin’s mimesis; what culminates is the pie throwing fight and chase between Chaplin and Goliath. The pie sequence begins as a harmless rehearsal of a new comedy sketch with the pair as stand-in actors, but through the simulated violent slapstick that Chaplin is ordered to engage in (as well as the earlier mimetically charged evocation of the communist struggle), he starts to fight back. Chaplin abandons all reservation and expresses both the oppression that he’s suffered from Goliath as well as the repression of his impulses (necessary for the completion of his work). Chaplin lets all of his child-like clown tendencies upsurge, creating havoc throughout the studio. A hilarious slapstick gag arises when Goliath’s pies constantly miss Chaplin’s face and instead hit the unexpected faces of actors performing a regal drama in the next soundstage. Chaplin’s revenge is further supplemented by the narrative twist of the strikers planting a bomb underneath the tramp door, of which Goliath falls into when he pushes Chaplin into its lever.
One other noteworthy example of the mimetic prowess in Chaplin’s performance is in the scene where he notices the charming boy. Chaplin becomes all flustered at the sight of him and imitates the affectations of a nervous little girl. It is as though Chaplin, due to his mimetic sensibility, already knew her anatomical gender despite her masculine outer appearance. The two gently peck each other like rabbits, but then Goliath catches them and, thinking the girl is a boy, mocks them by prancing around and insinuating Chaplin’s non-hetero-normative, homoerotic allegiances. This passing gesture by Goliath has relevance to the controversy surrounding the historical reception of Chaplin’s body and (mimetic) performance. Rather than perform as a desexualised comic clown, Chaplin aggressively performed his comic play with sexuality and anality, to the point where the National Board of Censorship (USA) in 1915 was forced to denounce his “suggestive wriggling.”[9] Such openness to the possibilities of the body’s sexual impulses is just another symptom of human mimesis.
Chaplin’s mimetic mode of performance and the freedom that it renders is at the heart of his appeal to modernist audiences. He is empowered enough to endure and respond to the hyper-stimuli of modernity in a way that engages and enthrals his neural synaptic networks, drawing on all the senses that the stimulus arouses. And even without external stimuli, Chaplin is adept at exploring his pre-existing internal impulses and seeing them reach their mimetically enhanced conclusions. This performance mode comes to reveal the societal forces that dominate the milieu in which the character resides, illuminating the kinds of responses-impulses that are accepted and privileged, and those that aren’t. Therefore, it is the most effective form of acting with regards to an examination of society. Again considering the aforementioned examples of contemporary mimetic acting, Kidman along with her co-stars Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep use their acting to highlight society’s perceptions of mental instability, likewise, Hoffman’s metamorphosis comes to reveal the homophobia rampant in Capote’s society. Mimesis, however, in Chaplin’s peculiar case just happens to create comedy and slapstick. His behaviour is in contrast to that of the other characters who are unable to negotiate between the hyper-stimuli of modernity and their bodily impulses.
This essay has argued that a performance mode, which engages with the process of mimesis, is the most effective form of acting when it comes to an examination of the constraining forces of a particular milieu. It has adopted Chaplin’s performance in Behind the Screen as a sample through which divergent concepts of mimesis and modernity are explicated. Chaplin’s mimesis sanctions his body to become a kind of therapeutic vortex through which the shocks and traumas of modernity are absorbed and, later, absolved. This, in effect, was a part of his appeal to modernist audiences, allowing them to vicariously experience the perils of the period from a safe distance afar.
Bibliography
Behind the Screen. Dir. Charles Chaplin. 1916.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘On the Mimetic Faculty.’ in Reflections, Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken Books. 1986.
Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography. New York: Penguin. 1964.
Demers, Michael. ‘Mimesis.’ http://www.michaeldemers.com/mimesis.htm. Last accessed: 07/09/09.
Jayamanne, Laleen. ‘A Slapstick Time: Mimetic Convulsion. Convulsive Knowing.’ in Towards Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2001.
Lightweis-Goff, Jennie. ‘Sins of Commitment: Adorno, Chaplin and Mimesis.’ http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/40/adorno-chaplin-mimesis.html. Last accessed: 07/09/09.
Taussig, Michael. ‘The Eye as Organ of Tactility: The Optical Unconscious.’ in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. 1993.
[1] Laleen Jayamanne, ‘A Slapstick Time: Mimetic Convulsion, Convulsive Knowing,’ in Towards Cinema and Its Double: Cross-Cultural Mimesis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 182.
[2] Laleen Jayamanne, op. cit.
[3] Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’ in Reflections, Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, New York: Schocken Books, 1986, p. 333.
[4] Laleen Jayamanne, p. 182.
[5] Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography, New York: Penguin, 1964, p. 154.
[6] Jennie Lightweis-Goff, ‘Sins of Commitment: Adorno, Chaplin and Mimesis,’ http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/40/adorno-chaplin-mimesis.html, last accessed: 07/09/09.
[7] Michael Taussig, ‘The Eye as Organ of Tactility: The Optical Unconscious,’ in Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 21.
[8] Michael Demers, ‘Mimesis,’ http://www.michaeldemers.com/mimesis.htm, last accessed: 07/09/09.
[9] Jennie Lightweis-Goff, op. cit.
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