Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Romie must have been eight or nine years old when we watched the silent films of Charlie Chaplin. For a month, Fridays were a venture into the wild antics of the funniest tramp to ever grace the silver screen. We buttered our popcorn, unwrapped Kit Kat bars and bright red Twizzlers, and sat down side by side on the couch with our mugs of ginger ale.

When the dark-suited, toothbrush-moustached man with the oversized oxfords walked, cane-swinging, toward the camera, we instantly laughed. We laughed at his exaggerated manners, the tilting of his bowler hat, his adjustment to his tie, his fluttering eyelashes when smitten with a girl. We laughed at his tenderness with pets and children. We admired his undaunted spirit in facing hardship. “Life is a beautiful, magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish,” Chaplin wrote in one script.

Watching black and white films for Romie was the equivalent of entering an ancient cave to find the horses, bison, and deer were suddenly animated and come to life. I worried that he would not like silent films. He had to read spoken dialogue at a pace maybe slightly faster than his reading comprehension allowed. But he loved them. Our favorite was Modern Times, the movie that critiques early 20th century factories that dehumanized people, rendering them mechanical cogs. Romie would mimic one of its famous scenes; he jerkily walked around the house pretending to tighten bolts.

Many of Chaplin’s films feel life-affirming. Off the screen, Chaplin believed in the power of humans to transcend their quarrels. He said: “The hope is this: that we shall have peace throughout the world, that we shall abolish wars and settle all international differences . . .” Chaplin’s films invite us to unite around humanitarian values where laughter counters cruelty and exploitation.

Today’s iconic Modernist poem celebrates the artist and movie icon who inspired generations of filmmakers and actors, but even more so, the man who both made us laugh at the folly of progress and urged us to embrace the tenderness of our hearts.

Chaplinesque
by Hart Crane

We make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.
We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.