Sound & Space: Vestiges of Theatre

Silent comedy is one of the clearest examples of theatre’s rebirth on screen, especially considering its confluence of commedia dell’arte, vaudeville, and minstrelsy. As such, the most striking visual technique is always the acting itself, especially physical comedy like slapstick- another vestige of clowns and jesters, commedia dell’arte and (panto)mime, it presents renewed purpose for established conventions. Mime is probably the most kindred performance art to silent comedy, but silence is no longer simply farcical; it is worldbuilding. Buskers need not relay protracted, possibly feature-length, narratives; street mime performers, much like clowns, are not necessarily confined within the bounds of reality. Cinematic and theatrical performances must still be grounded in some reality, in exigency. Every scene and every action tells a story or the film risks losing direction- whereas buskers are always already directionless- at least in the eyes of the audience. In this sense, this may be the strongest affinity between mimes and silent comedy: standing at the arbitrary border between “civilized” and “barbaric” activity. Their affinity is of course the very function of clowning, but the lack of sound redirects attention from funny voices and silly sounds to how one takes up space. Clowns and mimes wear costumes so anyone can look the part, but how does one block the part? Especially without the crux of sound?Mabel’s Strange Predicament begs the question: why would they not simply throw this clown out the building, or at least send him to his room? Easy Street ponders: what is so different about the derelict and the drunks? As his earliest production of the Tramp, Chaplin’s slapstick in Normand’s picture presents his visual ingenuity at its most juvenile; whereas the opening of Easy Street alone- as well as his character’s name- is blunter with his dereliction and vagrancy- his unbelonging. Through blocking and mise-en-scène, or blocking as a process of mise-en-scène like in theatre, Normand and Chaplin, her mentee, deftly demonstrate how well-crafted silent comedies theatrically utlize the bodies on screen to achieve the post-climax catharsis that the film score will later command in talkies. Chaplin’s performance, especially in Easy Street, epitomizes how a carried tradition of mime undergirds this musicality.

Mabel

Normand’s form borrows more from the stage than Chaplin’s, with the grand lobby as the centerpiece of production despite only existing in the first fifth of the narrative. Technical limitations in camera movement already lends early cinema a stage(d) quality- viewers can fully imagine and digest sonic ambience through visual repitition, as kineographic tableaux vivants- but Normand’s direction of the background characters to visually reflect the foreground’s tone in this lobby is what turns the entire set into an anthropomorphic soundstage. It is not just a matter of how many bodies are present in the background- which, albeit, does lend a visual ambience in lieu of the aural- but also how they move around the set; a lobby lends itself to hustle and bustle. Cutting in and out of the lobby several times, the background not only fills with more people but more of them are entering and exiting- going upstairs and downstairs and outside and outback. They are almost calling to Chaplin like a bad kid looking for trouble, whence both the diegetic sound and nondiegetic score in a talkie would swell to simulate the most excitement. 

Not a conventional structure, the global point of no return roughly arrives- the elderly lady across the hall reporting Mabel’s dog to the manager just before Chaplin wanders upstairs with Mabel locked outside her room- when the opening image comes full circle: Mabel brings contraband into the building, which inexplicably attracts this man-child from the lobby. Grabbing a dog’s tail is a very childlike but all-too-common impulse, even among adults; one can almost hear the impact just considering it. Drunk, though, this impulse can become as involuntary as the Tramp’s erection in the first scene. Not only are both ineractions between the three characters merely 15 seconds long before Mabel storms off in disgust, but their blocking is exactly the same! Mabel, on the left, faces the camera; Dog, middle, faces the stairs; Chaplin is far-right, facing them, now sitting down. Anthropomorphized principles of geometric mise-en-scène; Mabel’s conflict is voyeurism, including her nosey neighbor who is also the dog’s conflict (upstairs), while the Tramp’s conflict is lust. 

The three characters are symbolically tied together like an antagonistic chorus, signalling a shift in narrative locus: a new verse. First, Mabel goes outside with Dog and her lover; then, she goes upstairs with Dog while Lover and the Tramp search for her; finally, but not really, Lover makes both Dog and the Tramp disappear within the same sequence. After he pulls Mabel and Dog from under the elderly man’s bed, Dog is never to be seen again; similarly, after the Tramp proposes to Mabel, Lover shoves him down the hallway where he promptly disappears around the corner. The opening image was Mabel and her two predicaments- two taboos in such a civlized establishment- while the closing image is her unknown lover, perhaps fiancé. After the narrative separates Mabel from her conflicts, her lover provides an outro for the denoument, and the audience never learns what happened to the rest of the conflictual opening image.

Mabel’s Strange Predicament was that she did not have a man, the final cut literally interrupting Lover’s cathartic sigh, which one cannot help but hear. 

Where’s Dog??

How the elderly lady perceives Dog is how Mabel perceives the Tramp: Unbelonging. This is made even more comedic once acknowledging that Dog is much more mannerly than the Tramp; if the lady was upset by the noise caused by Dog (visualized by the crosscutting between their rooms- divided by the hallway- exposing her as the same bitter old lady from talkies set in apartments, banging on their ceilings with brooms) then Chaplin is an even louder nuisance than a barking dog. Why, then, does the dog randomly disappear in the neighbor’s apartment whereas the Tramp at least has the dignity of a proper exit? The same reason that Chaplin includes the other vagrant in Hope Mission at the beginning of Easy Street then quickly discards him. The Tramp seems to require a referent- a character even farther outside the bounds of civilized conduct than he. Dog may have better manners, but he is still a dog after all. Doug can hardly even stand nor sit up straight- or at all- for the Lord! It is natural then that when the Tramp has a moment of vulnerability with the Father and the choir girl, Edna- while the other clergyman struggles to keep the drunk awake- the camera focuses solely on Charlie and his moment of revelation: he almost steals the tithes, but decides the better of it. The revelatory music that drew him to the church symbolically carries him out through his own actions.

He carries this new ‘power’ with him throughout the film, but we never see if the same happens for Doug. It is implied that he is still somewhere out there stuck in his dereliction. His final image was blacking out drunk on a priest’s shoulder while the Tramp- the vagrant who entered the house of the Lord last, late, lackadaisacal- greatly surpasses his piety; similarly, in Normand’s picture, Dog’s last image was Lover pushing him out of frame, out of the narrative. These characters are but narrative objects/devices used solely to delineate Chaplin’s positionality. Whereas his figurative existence is but a noisy predicament in Normand’s narrative, in his own film he is the embodiment of the will to overcome predicaments without hesitation: hope. As such, he includes many such narrative devices as foils to his positionality and purpose; he relates to them all, beginning with Dog and Doug, through mime. 

The most important visual motif here is that thin barrier, the physical threshold between Here and There- the door, the window, the manhole, the street- beyond which anything can happen. The Derelict’s motif is the amalgamation of Here and There. He carries hope and courage with him all the way from the missionary to the Easy Street precinct where he becomes an officer after much trepidation- pacing in front of a door- then promptly defeats Eric the Tough by bashing his head into the glass pane of a gas lamp on the sidewalk. Eric somehow awakens and flees police custody to go home and abuse his wife; the Derelict finally notices when Eric hurls a plate through two windows and hits the elderly man in the apartment across the street, stopping him yet again by dumping furniture out the window. In retaliation, the Easy Street thugs kidnap Edna and lock her in the backroom of the underground bar; they then kidnap the Derelict after knocking him out and drop him down the manhole into the backroom. Considering Chaplin’s window hopping gag during the second battle with Eric, it is apparent that Chaplin hones in on what Professor Paul Kowalski claimed in CTPR 290 as the basis of cinematic narrative: “watching people walk in and out of rooms.” 

If the grand lobby is the centerpiece of Normand’s production- reflected not just through symbolic mise-en-scène (blocking) but also whereby the center of conflict finds itself- then the bar must be Chaplin’s. Whereas Mabel situates its audience within the ambience of an apartment building- the lobby, the courtyard, the rooms and connecting corridors- Easy Street situates its audience within the entire town, reflecting the Derelict’s vagrancy. Why, then, is the bar so narratively isolated (and convenient) compared to the lobby- a necessary and central element to the apartment building setting? Reading these texts rhetorically- that is, judging how well the final image “answers” the problem of the first image- it is obvious that they fall very cleanly into the mainstream imperative of early American cinema: preserving the sacral institutions of White heterosexuality and the nuclear family. Normand’s final image is her lover’s cathartic sigh, while Chaplin’s is his and Edna’s procession into The New Mission. One could certainly argue that the mission of both films was to (in some sense) critique the union of alcohol and dereliction.

The Tramp devolves more into unacceptable behavior the more he drinks in Mabel while no one is actually seen drinking in Easy Street, despite the thugs’ behavior being much more barbaric. Returning to a rhetorical reading, The New Mission’s location is extremely important: right above the (assumedly former) underground bar! The missionaries have visually replaced the bar that was never fully visualized within the mise-en-scène of the town nor Easy Street. This symbolic repression returns to the first image of this and Normand’s film: we never see why or how Chaplin becomes a derelict; he just is. There is always already dereliction in comparison to virtue, “barbarism” to “civilization.” By accident or by design, like most early American cinema, they present (rather vapid) motifs about the thin lines between love and abuse, abuse and dereliction, and overcoming the latter with the former. Chaplin simply embodies the elision of these various acts through the comedy of alcohol and its noisy effects, something all-too-timely in the 20s.