The Gold Rush, Silent Film Comedy, and Chaplin’s Oeuvre: A Reconsideration
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For Charles Chaplin, the comic world provided the means to examine the serious world of human needs and societal structures. Before Chaplin, no one had demonstrated that physical comedy on film could be simultaneously hilariously funny, emotionally passionate, and pointedly intellectual. And unlike other pioneering directors, Chaplin advanced the art by making all consciousness of the medium disappear so completely that the audience concentrates on the photographic subject rather than the filmic process. Chaplin’s movies are thus interesting not for their form but for their content—specifically, for his brilliant characterization, through the exquisite art of mime, of the little tramp who is totally at odds with the world around him. The Gold Rush was only Chaplin’s second long film about the Tramp. Yet it became a comic epic—epic in a thematic sense as well as a spatial or geographic one. For, in an instance of aesthetic telescoping, Chaplin pointedly chose to make a movie about a late-nineteenthcentury gold rush in the middle of the madly moneymaking 1920s. In doing so, he more or less announced his theme, which is the film’s consistent indictment of what the pursuit of the material does to the human animal: it makes him an inhuman animal. The quest for gold perverts nearly all human relationships in The Gold Rush, which ever endeavors seriocomically to contrast material and spiritual pursuits, the merely physical or corporeal with the sublimely soulful. Moreover, Chaplin deliberately chose to have the world-beloved Tramp fall in love with, and finally win, a prostitute, in an American movie comedy—
Abstract
For Charles Chaplin, the comic world provided the means to examine the serious world of human needs and societal structures. Before Chaplin, no one had demonstrated that physical comedy on film could be simultaneously hilariously funny, emotionally passionate, and pointedly intellectual. And unlike other pioneering directors, Chaplin advanced the art by making all consciousness of the medium disappear so completely that the audience concentrates on the photographic subject rather than the filmic process. Chaplin’s movies are thus interesting not for their form but for their content—specifically, for his brilliant characterization, through the exquisite art of mime, of the little tramp who is totally at odds with the world around him. The Gold Rush was only Chaplin’s second long film about the Tramp. Yet it became a comic epic—epic in a thematic sense as well as a spatial or geographic one. For, in an instance of aesthetic telescoping, Chaplin pointedly chose to make a movie about a late-nineteenthcentury gold rush in the middle of the madly moneymaking 1920s. In doing so, he more or less announced his theme, which is the film’s consistent indictment of what the pursuit of the material does to the human animal: it makes him an inhuman animal. The quest for gold perverts nearly all human relationships in The Gold Rush, which ever endeavors seriocomically to contrast material and spiritual pursuits, the merely physical or corporeal with the sublimely soulful. Moreover, Chaplin deliberately chose to have the world-beloved Tramp fall in love with, and finally win, a prostitute, in an American movie comedy—
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