“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin till it has stripped off all superstition from the past. Previous revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realize its own content. There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase.”—Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire.
“In reality there is no difference between form and content, and what Marx said about form is valid here too: it is good only in so far as it is the form of the content.” Brecht, The Three Penny Lawsuit.
A few scholars have drawn connections between The Eighteenth Brumaire and Brecht’s epic theater, most notably Martin Harries. But aside from ignoring Brecht’s own interest in and citation of Marx’s text, there is a far more striking omission in Harries’ essay: “One of Brecht's
120 Brecht, Gesammelte Werke 27, p. 1172.
theses in ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ has particular resonance here. Brecht writes of the actor: ‘At no moment must he go so far as to be wholly transformed into the character played.
The verdict: ‘he didn't act Lear, he was Lear’ would be an annihilating blow to him.’ For Marx, the verdict on Bonaparte - he didn't act Napoleon, he was Napoleon - is an annihilating blow.”121 This distinction is based on an earlier text from 1934, “Interview with an Exile,” where a far more relevant example is deployed: “The actor doesn’t have to be the man he portrays. He has to describe his character just as it would be described in a book. If Chaplin were to play Napoleon he wouldn’t even look like him; he would show objectively and critically how Napoleon would behave in the various situations the author might put him in.”122 Similar to other references to Chaplin at this time (as well as to the oft-used example of an actor playing Napoleon), references linking the actor’s technique as Brecht understood it to Chinese dramaturgy, Verfremdung and Gestus, this sentence is the closest link the playwright ever drew between Marx and Chaplin.
Regarding the former, Brecht’s particular example of Napoleon recalls the Brumaire, a text that he had read already in the early thirties, and specifically Harries’ argument about the
“annihilating blow” of becoming a character as opposed to playing one. As I have argued, it is the chiastic gap between these two positions that Marx’s text opens up, portraying Bonaparate as a bad actor, an epic re-casting produced by “contradictory tasks,” in Marx’s words, “the
confused poking about to try to win over and then to humiliate now this, now that class, turning them all equally against himself; and his uncertainty in practice forms a highly comic contrast to the peremptory and categorical style of governmental decrees, a style obediently copied from the uncle.”123 Like Chaplin and the epic actor he inspired, Marx’s text emphasizes that the more
121 Marx, Late Political Writings, p. 46.
122 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, p. 67.
123 Marx, Later Political Writings, p. 124.
automatic the imitation is, the more likely Gestus will erupt, especially in situations of confusion, humiliation and antagonism, all of which produce the comic contrast essential to that eruption’s effect.
While Brecht shared Marx’s interest in Shakespeare, hence the example from King Lear, the earlier text’s hypothetical of Chaplin playing Napoleon was not so hypothetical. As was widely reported both in the United States and in Germany, Chaplin announced several times in the late twenties and early thirties his stated ambition of making a comic biopic about the French emperor.124 Marx had already written a kind of screenplay for such a film in his Brumaire. Louis Bonaparte is, in the rhetorical acrobatics of Marx’s text, nothing other than a tramp version of his uncle, like Chaplin’s character a ridiculous imitation that undermines itself as much as it does the original model, an undermining suggested at the end of Marx’s text where the nephew’s
chicanery causes the uncle’s bust to comically “plunge to the ground.”125 The film Chaplin would make in place of his Naposleon project is even more relevant for our purposes: The Great
Dictator, like the Brumaire before it, infects the grand and pompous actor with the absurd nothingness of Gestus, which Chaplin accomplishes by playing both the Jewish barber and the dictator, Hynkel. This split between the nothingness of the outsider and the ridiculous
grotesquerie of dictator would be repeated in Brecht’s approach to the dictator in Schweik in the Second World War, where a gigantic visage of Hitler is paired with the diminutive, Chaplinesque Schweik (himself oft linked to the Tramp by Weimar critics). Brecht did not romanticize the literal-minded Schweik, but rather showed, at the play’s conclusion, the ease with which a tramp
124 Die Lichtblick-Bühne would report on Chaplin’s various attempts in July 1926 and April 1933. See also the Neue Berliner Zeitung (10/19/1926). Very little has been written about Chaplin’s Napoleon project, but there is a dossier of images and letters related to its planning on the Criterion Collection’s DVD of The Great Dictator, assembled by Chaplin archivist Cecilia Cenciarelli.
125 Marx, Later Political Writings, p. 127.
might submit to fascism. When Chaplin re-wrote his Weimar adaptation of Schweik in Hollywood he hoped that none other than Peter Lorre would play the title role.
Figures 5-6: “Charlie Chaplin plays dictators” and “Hallo, Charlie Chaplin!”
This polarity or transferability between victim and perpetrator, charlatan dictator and lumpen outcast becomes clear in two caricatures of Chaplin from the satirical magazine
Simplicissimus, in which Brecht himself occasionally published. These two images, one by the great caricaturist Karl Arnold, suggest that the script to The Great Dictator was written avant la lettre during the last desperate years of the Republic. The first image, drawn in response to the earliest reports of a Napoleon-centered film from Chaplin in 1926, shows the imagined comedy of such a film, with Chaplin in the top left panel playing the dictator in a setting not dissimilar to the recently released The Gold Rush, complete with bear. By this time Hitler was not yet the political force he would become in the early thirties, yet with the famous echo of the Tramp’s
mustache, Hitler’s growing presence would suggest to many German writers some essential continuity between the two men. In 1932 Kurt Tucholsky would write for Die Weltbühne a satirical “school essay” comparing Hitler with Goethe, describing the former: “And suddenly the Führer came. He had a mustache like Chaplin, but not funny enough by half.”126 Although journalists around the world would increasingly make this comparison as Hitler grew in infamy, only German critics like Benjamin would go further than the mustache, arguing “Chaplin shows up the comedy of Hitler’s gravity; when he acts the well-bred man, then we know how things stand with the Fuhrer. Chaplin has become the greatest comic because he has incorporated into himself the deepest fears of his contemporaries.”127 Such “fears” were double and in Arnold’s image, inspired by Chaplin’s visit to Berlin in 1931, we see the other side of the Tramp’s German resonance: as victim of both political and economic violence. Arnold’s series of increasingly brutal tableaux is introduced by an address to the visiting star: “If you look around Germany correctly you will find everywhere actors playing your role—in reality, without stage direction.” These roles are depicted in the following six images of a tramp “dismantled,” seeking work, hungry, “homeless,” at the height of his abjection assaulted as a Jew by a Nazi foot
soldier. Finally in prison Arnold does not offer a description, but the simple question of “Why?”
It is unclear to whom this question is addressed, Chaplin or Simplicissimus’s readers, but Arnold’s polemical point remains clear: the Tramp may be a fanciful fiction in American cinema, but he is alive and not so well on the streets and sidewalks of Berlin.
The ambiguity of the lumpenproletariat, its simultaneous capacity for parasitic abjection and preposterous sovereignty, became the very means by which caricaturists for Simpliccisimus, critics like Tucholsky and Benjamin and, most importantly, writers like Brecht understood and,
126 Kurt Tucholsky, “Hitler und Goethe,” Die Weltbühne (5/17/1932).
127 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 3, p. 792.
in this last case, re-functioned the Tramp. This is a re-functioning that takes part in the Marxist inheritance that Brecht would claim in the early thirties, but it is an inheritance that, as Derrida argues, one must “sort out, critique, keep close by, and allow to come back.”128 Central to this inheritance is the historico-conceptual figure of the lumpenproletariat. Stallybrass has charted out the history of this figure in the literature of the nineteenth century, arguing that the
unrepresentability of the lumpen demanded its depiction, creating “strategies through which bourgeois spectators could depict, incorporate, or distance themselves from the outcasts of the city.”129 More often than not such strategies demonized as much as they romanticized, and Marx’s own vicious rhetoric, his constant listing of the qualities of this non-group perfectly falls within this “aestheticization of the heterogeneous.”130 Stallybrass quotes another example of such aestheticization, from the nineteenth century French writer Jules Janin: “‘One day, I saw a man in rags, a terrible sight, coming into an inn in the rue Saint-Anne: his beard was long, his hair disordered, his whole body filthy. A moment later I saw him come out again well dressed, his chest laden with the crosses of two orders, an august figure, and he went off to dine with a judge.
This sudden transformation frightened me, and I thought, trembling, that it was perhaps in this way that the two extremes meet’.”131 This image allows us to link this mobile figure, never fixed as poor or rich, unproductive outcast or productive wealth-carrier, to an already familiar figure where such contradictory extremes do in fact meet—the tramp. Following Charles Musser, the tramp was already a nineteenth century anachronism by the time Chaplin converted it into at once a disgusting presence and a comic ne’er-do-well.132 The same specular dynamic Janin
128 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 109.
129 Stallybrass, p. 75.
130 Ibid, p. 82.
131 Quoted in ibid, p. 73.
132 Charles Musser, “Work, Ideology, and Chaplin’s Tramp,” Resisting Images, ed. Sklar and Musser (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1990), p. 62.
identifies in the lumpen is similarly in play with the tramp and this for reasons that are not at all coincidental: in nineteenth century United States, England and France—the three most developed industrial economies in the world—we find different names and faces for the same social
phenomenon: a non-figure that is, in a sense, always anachronistic, moving below the
progressive time of capitalism, appearing throughout the social ladder whenever things become unproductive, criminal, lazy and drunken. Most importantly, the Tramp seems to make the reality of the social itself flicker in some estranging way, undermining the firm distribution of roles, an effect already suggested in his very first appearance in the 1914 Kid Auto Races, where he, in his very interruptive presence, prevents a film crew from shooting a race. He is at once inside the social, potentially productive as worker, bourgeois or aristocrat, but is simultaneously outside it, interrupting the gestic arrangement of each of these roles. Its effects are nothing other than what we have seen in Chaplin’s own performance: the exaggerative imitation of the normal, the distracted forgetting of past and future, a body bent this way and that by contradictory social demands and a playfulness that undermines the fixity of group identification and social
representation. The Tramp’s montage of contradictory classes is already apparent in his costume, whose origin Chaplin describes in his autobiography: “…on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything a
contradiction: the pants baggy, the coat tight, the hat small and the shoes large.”133 These disproportions in size, which reflect a body-space distorted beyond social recognition, suggest another set of contradictions. Chaplin’s ensemble exists between poverty and wealth, with worn baggy pants, decrepit shoes, and penguin walk on the bottom half of his body, while the upper half has the tight, aristocratic coat and tie as well as bamboo cane and bowler hat. This last item
133 Chaplin, My Autobiography, p. 144.
offers something like a gestic synthesis of the Tramp’s antagonistic fashion choices, its history as an item of fashion first of the aristocracy, then of the middle classes, and finally of the petit-bourgeoisie revealing a diffuse legacy.134 The Tramp is social contradiction made manifest, identifiable neither with a single class position nor in any other recognizable social hierarchy.
The slapstick scene of the various social groups in 1848 France tumbling over each other is premised on this very same dynamic and shares with Chaplin the same anti-hero, drawn from society’s margins and now placed by these two Marx brothers at center stage.
If Gestus suggested a cinematic mode of performance, one based on the dialectical principle of montage, then the gestures of the lumpenproletariat entail another essential filmic quality imparted to epic theater. Recalling both Musser’s historicist analysis of Kid Auto Races and Barthes’ semiotic construction of “Chaplin-Man,” Slavoj Žižek has suggested that
“Chaplin’s comic strategy consists in variations of this fundamental motif: the Tramp
accidentally occupies a place which is not his own, which is not destined for him…”135 While Chaplin’s cinematographic approach was consistently simple even in to the sound era, offering a theatrical perspective that emphasized the performer (read: Chaplin) at the center of the frame, his conception of space within that frame was highly complex. In effect, the spectator’s gaze was focused not simply on Chaplin’s performance, but on the disjunction between its own vision and that of the other characters on screen, who either cannot see the Tramp or instead see him far too much, are shocked by his shocking presence within a genteel mise-en-scène. In Žižek’s words, the Tramp acts as an “interposition” disturbing “‘direct’ communication between the gaze and its
134 For an analysis of the bowler and its various manifestations in twentieth century art, see Wollen, “Magritte and the Bowler hat,” Paris/Manhattan (New York: Verso, 2004), p. 128. For a more thorough analysis, with special emphasis on the Tramp-Mackie connection, see Fred Robinson, The Man in the Bowler Hat: His History and Iconography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 118-119.
135 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 4.
‘proper’ object…”136 The example of the Tramp’s originary appearance in Kid Auto Races suggests the importance of this strategy as does the iconic opening of City Lights, where the Tramp inadvertently interrupts the unveiling of a statue, sleeping in its arms and then rudely intimating sexual congress with a marble sword. While this moment has been read as an instance of the Tramp’s grotesque subversion of high society, the Brechtian interpretation emphasizes not transgression, but rather the way transgression exposes blind-spots within a social space.137 This exposure is political because it is premised on making social conflicts laughable and thus thinkable, of showing spectators within the scene who double the film’s own spectators while also suggesting contrary ways of seeing and thus shaping space. In a later text entitled
“Komisches,” Brecht offers a compendium of comic moments from across the arts. Chaplin is of course well represented, with a scene referred to directly following the “V-Effect” of the Tramp eating a boot: “In The Gold Rush Chaplin appears to his best friend, who is fevered by hunger, as a great chicken whom he would like to butcher.”138 It is in that tension between ideal and social condition that defines Brecht’s understanding of the comic here, a gap that erupts cinematically as the spectator watches Big Jim watch Chaplin, whose gestures increasingly mime those of a chicken. This is funny for the same reason that Chaplin’s eating a shoe is funny, because of its alienating quality, but it is political because of the way this epic techniques formalizes a social content of degradation and desperation. This “form of the content,” to quote Brecht’s paraphrase of the Brumaire, is precisely the lumpenproletariat Gestus.
In contrast to Arnold’s caricature, there is never a clear division between victim and perpetrator because one can easily transform into the other. This is the lesson of Chaplin’s two
136 Ibid.
137 See Tom Gunning, “Chaplin and the body of modernity,” pp. 237-245 and William Paul, “Annals of Anality,”
Comedy/Cinema/Theory, edited by Horton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 109-130.
138 Brecht, Gesammelte Werke 19 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1972) p. 464.
great films of World War II, The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux, the one a realization of the earlier goal of making a comic film about Napoleon and the other a satire that reversed the direction of influence, with Brecht and a number of other Weimar exiles pointing the star in a more radical direction. While Brecht would use nonsensical sounds to emphasize the gestic way of speaking Chaplin would channel such nonsense into a hilarious take-down of Hitler’s
grandiloquent, media savvy performances. This occurs during an early scene, a rally where Hynkel screams, shouts and violently gestures in a pidgin language peppered with nonsense, grunts and random German phrases.
Figure 7: A cough interrupts Hynkel’s speech and the dictator dances to Wagner
Several things are worth noting here. First, there is the joke in which Hynkel literally gags as he shouts his vitriol, raising his fist à la a Riefenstahlian Hitler and then succumbing to coughs. Not only is his attempted stature destroyed by this coughing, but the overlap of nonsense and coughing suggests that the violence of a dictator’s speech lies less in a usually boring, often poorly worded content and more in physical and vocal gesture, which rely on certain affects to attach to their display. The coughing moment fissures this attachment and the moment when Hynkel reestablishes his previous pose is already laughably undone—through such interruption Hynkel is, according to Andre Bazin, nothing other than “Hitler’s nothingness,” a nothingness
that can only manifest as Gestus.139 But this laughter has a Brechtian bite in that it is immediately greeted with cheering, the comical disjuncture between nonsense and its reception both funny and horrifying. Hynkel silences this applause with an emphatic wave of the arm and immediately it is gone, turned off like a switch, approaching, in its medial self-consciousness, Verfremdung, and thereby suggesting Hitler’s own status as a media figure, one in tight control of his image and voice (mocked in the ridiculously genteel narration that interprets Hynkel’s hate-mongering nonsense in the most benign of ways). An even better example of such estrangement comes in the film’s second most famous scene, the dictator’s balletic dance with the globe, set to Wagner’s prelude from Lohengrin. Rather than restricting his portrayal of Hitler to the apoplectic, Chaplin, like a Brechtian Napoleon, comically reduces the dictator to a delicate
that can only manifest as Gestus.139 But this laughter has a Brechtian bite in that it is immediately greeted with cheering, the comical disjuncture between nonsense and its reception both funny and horrifying. Hynkel silences this applause with an emphatic wave of the arm and immediately it is gone, turned off like a switch, approaching, in its medial self-consciousness, Verfremdung, and thereby suggesting Hitler’s own status as a media figure, one in tight control of his image and voice (mocked in the ridiculously genteel narration that interprets Hynkel’s hate-mongering nonsense in the most benign of ways). An even better example of such estrangement comes in the film’s second most famous scene, the dictator’s balletic dance with the globe, set to Wagner’s prelude from Lohengrin. Rather than restricting his portrayal of Hitler to the apoplectic, Chaplin, like a Brechtian Napoleon, comically reduces the dictator to a delicate