Charlie Chaplin and Aristotle: The Mechanics of Ending City Lights

Abstract

Charlie Chaplin and Aristotle:The Mechanics of Ending City Lights Roy Glassberg In the words of film critic Roger Ebert, "The last scene of City Lights is justly famous as one of the great emotional moments in the movies."1 What accounts for its success? In the course of what follows I will suggest that a pair of structural elements—reversal and recognition, first described by Aristotle—underlie the scene, and account in large measure for its emotive power. The scene is available for viewing on the internet by searching on "City Lights last scene." For those who have not seen the film, I offer the following recap. The Little Tramp (Chaplin's character) falls in love with a blind flower girl (played by Virginia Cherrill), who mistakenly believes he's rich. He also becomes entangled with an alcoholic millionaire (Harry Myers) whom he saves from suicide. When drunk, the millionaire regards the tramp as his best friend, but doesn't remember him when sober. After a night on the town, the millionaire gives the tramp cash for an operation to repair the blind girl's eyes. The tramp gets the money to the girl, but the millionaire, now sober, accuses him of having stolen it. The tramp is arrested and sent to prison. Time passes. In the final scene, we see the tramp, newly released, his clothing in tatters, shuffling dejectedly down a busy city street. He is harassed by a pair of newsboys, one with a peashooter. Observing the fracas is the flower girl. Her eyesight restored, she is now the proprietress of an upscale flower shop and watches the tramp and the boys from her window. She of course hasn't seen the tramp before, and is amused. The tramp turns, sees the flower girl in the window, and is transfixed. "I've made a conquest," she says laughingly to her assistant. Playful, believing [End Page 492] that what the tramp wants is a flower, she exits her shop and offers him a rose and a coin. The tramp shyly takes the flower but is reluctant to accept the coin. The girl takes his hand to place the money in it, and something changes. Her fingers trace the back of his hand and up the arm of his jacket to his face. "You?" she asks. He nods in agreement. "You can see now," he says. "Yes, I can see now," she answers. At the close, we see the tramp smiling, the rose pressed to his cheek, with the flower girl gently pressing his other hand to her chest. So then, what is the source of the last scene's power? For critic James Agee, its strength lies in its acting. He praises Chaplin's and Cherrill's performances as being "the greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid."2 The brilliance of its acting notwithstanding, I would like to suggest another cause for the scene's success, a strategy described some twenty-three hundred years ago by Aristotle in his Poetics: the concurrence of reversal and recognition. The Poetics, in large measure, describes the methods that Aristotle found successful in the theater of his time. Thus he writes in chapter 6 that "the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy [are] Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes."3 Aristotle's remarks on comedy are for the most part lost, but I submit that the emotive powers of reversal and recognition function in comedy as well. Concerning reversal of the situation, Aristotle offers us the example of the messenger in Oedipus Tyrannus, who comes bearing good news that proves disastrous. "Recognition," Aristotle tells us, "is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune. The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation" (A, p. 41). I submit that the emotive power of the ending of City Lights arises in large measure from the employment of these elements. Consider the final action once again. The flower girl exits her shop to give a rose and a coin to a person who, to her, is merely...