Religion and Religious Imagery in the Films of Charlie Chaplin

by Peter T. Chattaway

Copyright © 1998 by Peter T. Chattaway.
Reproduction is forbidden without permission of the author. Contact Jeffrey Overstreet at joverstreet@gmail.com.

Charles Chaplin was something of a paradox. His Little Tramp persona enjoyed great popularity around the world, a popularity attributed by many to the universal appeal of his character: he was an underdog who aspired to greater dignity than most people would expect of him, and a funny underdog at that. Yet at the same time, Chaplin - the writer/director/actor - held views uniquely his own and refused to conform to the social expectations that surrounded him.

This is particularly true of the way in which he used religious imagery in his films. Chaplin surely understood that society in general was religiously literate, and that the people who went to his films would understand the references in his films to biblical stories or religious functions. However, Chaplin used these references to serve themes that did not conform to traditional religious understanding or belief. Charlie Chaplin used images of religion and religious metaphors that his audience was familiar with, not to pamper the standard religious mood of the day - indeed, sometimes he subverted conventional religious notions - but to communicate his own philosophy, a philosophy which might best be called Humanism.

Chaplin was certainly familiar with the forms of religion. His mother had been a devout church-goer, and she took young Charles to church with her. The not uncommon "aching impatience" that Chaplin felt during the church services (Chaplin, p. 20) may be reflected in the restless shuffling of the boy in the church's congregation in Chaplin's 1923 film, The Pilgrim. Chaplin did become enthralled with the Catholic church when he got involved with a troupe of young performers known as The Eight Lancashire Lads; he was the only Protestant in the bunch, but he "liked the mysticism of it [Catholicism]" and stayed Protestant only because of his mother's "religious scruples" (Chaplin, p. 45).

Chaplin does not appear to have appreciated his mother's religious fervour, particularly since it removed her from the theatre, a world which she came to see as "false and artificial ... [where] one could so easily forget God" (Chaplin, p. 23). Chaplin's dismissal of his mother's beliefs sounds almost shockingly caustic, considering the value his films put on the human soul and its sentiments above other, more material, concerns. Learning that Chaplin was a millionaire several times over, his mother commented that he could have used his talent to save "thousands of souls," to which Chaplin replied, "I might have saved souls but not money." (Chaplin, p. 287)

Something of Chaplin's emotional detachment from the liturgical forms of religion does show up in his films. When Chaplin attends Hope Mission at the beginning of Easy Street (1917), he is clearly uncomfortable with the format of the service and the crowd of strangers that he must share the experience with; for all the good that singing hymns will do him, he holds the open hymnal in front of a nearby baby. (Julian Johnson, reviewing the film for Photoplay, said the film made for "a merry evening" but that its "opening scene, burlesquing a rescue mission, [was] not in high taste"; McDonald, p. 142.) In The Pilgrim, as an escaped convict dressed in stolen preacher's clothes, he is mistaken by the folk of Devil's Gulch as their new parson and brought to the church to deliver a sermon. The choir looks so sour and joyless when Chaplin first takes the pulpit that he mistakes it for a jury, as though its members are about to judge his guilt or innocence, whether in legal or moral terms.

Chaplin's portrayal of regular church authorities is something less than idealistic. In addition to stereotypes such as the long-bearded (and presumably old-fashioned) elder - whose beard Chaplin shakes as though it were a hand, before he realises his error - Chaplin spies an unfinished bottle of liquor in another elder's pocket and, when he must invent a telegram message to read to the same farsighted elder, he concocts the five-word message: "Am feeling much better - Lizzie." The elder breathes an unexpected sigh of relief; it appears that this elder - a man so conscientious that he will not take a business cheque from a personal friend on the Sabbath - has been living a sexual life somewhat removed from the strict Christian standard. However, these portrayals are not unsympathetic; while chiding the religious elder for his inability to live up to his own religious standards, Chaplin also seems to acknowledge a common human nature between himself and the religious people of Devil's Gulch. Indeed, the religious people of this town are made to look much better than the preacher in Police (1916), who picks Chaplin's pocket even as he tries to convert him; in The Pilgrim, however, Chaplin ends up protecting the churchfolk against a fellow ex-convict who is trying to steal their money.

Chaplin's conversion - which, in The Pilgrim, is more simply spiritual than explicitly religious - is due partly to his attraction to his landlady's daughter (Edna Purviance), a plot element that echoes a scene in Easy Street, one of Chaplin's earlier works. There, despite his discomfort with the service in Hope Mission, Chaplin stays behind afterwards to talk to Edna, her hair so brightly lit from behind that it's almost a halo; the minister joins them and eventually elicits a conversion from the tramp. In both cases, Chaplin's character is not attracted to the religious way of life by dogma or creed but by the people he meets within the religious communities.

It may appear that, in converting under the minister's aegis, Chaplin is vindicating the religious way of life, even its proselytism, as a way of correcting social ills. But is he? He goes straight from his conversion to join a police force - a secular agency - that has proven ineffective so far, and he must eventually come to Edna's rescue through the use of force, a job he fulfils most efficiently after he accidentally sits on a dope-filled syringe. Whatever message lurks here, as a doped-up cop rescues a defenceless religious worker, it is not clearly lauding any particular institution. In the next and final scene, the people who were battling Chaplin just the day before are all smiles, the rubble-strewn street has been cleaned up, and everyone happily trots off to church. The effect is artificial, imposed on the rest of the story. "Easy Street solves the social problems it presents with a deliberate, Pollyannaish hoax; the implication is that fake solutions are the only kind to be found." (Mast, p. 83) And religion, too, may be "fake" in Chaplin's scheme of things.

Chaplin appears to have envisioned a dichotomy between reason and religion, a segregated outlook that was continually challenged by the religious intellectuals that he met. In his memoirs, Chaplin expressed something resembling bewilderment that sane, reasonable people would hold to religious beliefs, even fairly vague ones. Of his friendship with Aldous Huxley in the late 1940s, Chaplin wrote: "At that time he was very much lulled in the cradle of mysticism. Frankly I liked him better as the cynical young man of the twenties." (Chaplin, p. 434) In a similar vein, he recorded that, after meeting Gandhi in London and enjoying a long, "realistic" discussion with the famous Mahatma, he was invited to stay as Gandhi and five of his followers prayed in a circle. "What a paradox, I thought, as I watched this extremely realistic man, with his astute legal mind and his profound sense of political reality, all of which seemed to vanish in a singsong chant." (Chaplin, p. 344)

(Prayer, too, was a topic ripe for "burlesquing". Chaplin offers a quick glance skyward as a bully threatens him in Easy Street, and he insists that young Jackie Coogan offer a perfunctory three-second prayer over their meal in The Kid; however, Chaplin rolls his eyes impatiently when Coogan wants to make a substantial prayer before going to bed at the lodging house. When he conforms to the people praying over afternoon tea in The Pilgrim, he accidentally sticks his nose in the dessert's icing.)

However, Chaplin did not discard religion altogether. He frequently used religious themes and images in his films to convey his ideals. His audience would have been quite literate in this iconography. Figures for the United States are very incomplete (see U.S. Bureau, pp. 389-392), but if the Canadian statistics are any indication, over 95% of the population was affiliated with a Christian denomination of some sort (Leacy, Series A164-184); in any case, Chaplin restricted his use of pop culture icons, even religious ones, to those that most people would recognise. The angels and devils dancing around in The Kid's dream sequence have little to do with biblical portrayals of powerful spiritual entities and more to do with folk tale mythology; in comedy of this sort, the vaguely stereotypical angels and devils serve a role as instantly identifiable as the unlucky number 13 or the odious limburger cheese which Chaplin lobs across the trenches in Shoulder Arms (1918).

The ideals that Chaplin wished to convey were usually frustrated by an almost self-conscious sense of reality. Shoulder Arms, his World War I comedy, ends with Chaplin capturing the Kaiser and bringing, as the intertitle informs us, "Peace on Earth - Good will to all mankind", a liberal translation of the angels' message to the shepherds when Christ was born. Unfortunately, the entire adventure turns out to have been a dream, and Chaplin is awakened to discover that he is still just a regular soldier; neither peace nor good will have actually come to mankind after all. Perhaps most famously, the paradise in The Kid's dream sequence is dealt two fatal blows: for one thing, the fact that it is, after all, just a dream; but even within that dream, demons sneak past the dozing guard into paradise and inspire thoughts of lust and jealousy in the angels, one of whom - the alter ego of a "real world" policeman - shoots Chaplin down.

The dream sequence may have been meant to convey the notion that people carry evil with them wherever they go, just as easily as they carry good, but the dream is too elaborate a set-up for such a didactic point. The same point is made more subtly and more effectively in an earlier scene, where Edna tries to break up a fight between Chaplin and the neighbourhood bully with the biblical rejoinder: "If he smites you on one cheek, offer him the other"; Chaplin responds to this by hitting the bully's cheek with a brick, thus escalating the violence.

The dream sequence may work on a different level, one that the earlier scene with Edna could not have approached. All of the characters in Chaplin's neighbourhood are portrayed in the dream sequence as angels - even the bully, the lodging house manager, and the policeman who ultimately shoots Chaplin down. The bully does not begin to harass Chaplin for flirting with his girlfriend - indeed, he seems to delight in the new relationship - until a devil whispers the word "Jealousy" into his ear. The devils themselves are faceless caricatures who appear and vanish at will, though they apparently cannot teleport directly into paradise: first they must sneak past the dozing guard at the door, and then they may move around freely. (Where they come from is never established.) Significantly, there is no God in this paradise, nor a single satanic deity to personify evil. Chaplin seems to be suggesting that human beings are naturally good, and that some external force tends to corrupt humanity even when it is in the midst of paradise. If people carry evil with them, it is somehow not as natural, rational, or human as goodness is, in Chaplin's view.

The universality of this basic goodness is central to at least one other Chaplin film, a film that (perhaps ironically) satirised a person who is infamous for his apparent lack of any redeeming qualities whatsoever: The Great Dictator, Chaplin's 1940 spoof of Adolf Hitler. The opening titles claim that any similarity between the Jewish barber (played by Chaplin) and the dictator Hynkel (also played by Chaplin) is "purely coincidental", but at film's end, Hynkel is arrested because the stormtroopers mistake him for the escaped barber, while the barber is put in front of a microphone and asked to address the troops because he has been mistaken for the dictator himself. Perhaps the similarity is not so "coincidental" to the story after all; certainly one could find an object lesson in the fact that the oppressor and the oppressed look so much alike. Glimpses of a common humanity may be peeking through a line of Hynkel's: when General Schultz abandons the fascists to side with the Jews, Hynkel moans, "Schultz, why have you forsaken me?" The line is obviously lifted from something Christ said in a moment of despair on the cross; Hynkel may betray a God complex in this scene, but it may be relevant that Christ himself was a Jew and, in this instance, quoting a Jewish scripture (Psalm 22). At the end of the film, the barber seizes the opportunity to speak in the dictator's place, and delivers a lengthy, impassioned speech on the need for reason, science, progress, democracy, kindness, and "humanity". Curiously, this Jewish barber cites "the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke", a Christian gospel and the only one that tradition ascribes to a Gentile, to the effect that "the kingdom of God is within man - not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power!"

This common humanity, and the commonness of the divine within humanity, was integral to Chaplin's own beliefs, and may be traced to his religious education under his mother, who acted out Bible stories for him (this may have inspired Chaplin's David vs. Goliath routine in The Pilgrim) and had young Chaplin in tears when she recounted the crucifixion story: "Don't you see," she told him, "how human He was; like all of us, He too suffered doubt." (Chaplin, p. 23) Chaplin was touched by Christ's "tolerant understanding of the woman who had sinned and was to be stoned by the mob"; when a despondent Edna carries her illegitimate child out of the hospital in The Kid, the image dissolves to a statue of Christ carrying his own burden, the cross, perhaps empathetically. Chaplin was also transfixed by the "love, pity and humanity" of these stories and, despite his atheism, asked the studio heads at First National on one occasion for the title role in the Life of Christ (McCabe, p. 158). In a story he pitched to Igor Stravinsky, Chaplin suggested a satire that would show the world how "cynical and conventional" its profession of Christianity had become; Stravinsky found the treatment "sacrilegious", and Chaplin dropped the idea, protesting that that had not been his intention at all (Chaplin, pp. 396-397). But Chaplin's own understanding of Christianity was hardly orthodox: instead of the standard monotheism, Chaplin expressed something approaching pantheism. "One is not required to wear the imprint of Christianity on one's forehead," he declared, "it is manifest in both saint and sinner alike; the spirit of the Holy Ghost is in everything." (Chaplin, p. 459)

Themes such as this were reinforced in Chaplin's latter, more message-driven films. In Monsieur Verdoux (1947), Chaplin plays a serial killer who argues, in court, that he is an "amateur" compared to the state-owned military machines that are designed to kill far more people than he himself ever has. Verdoux, and implicitly Chaplin too, deny God his traditional role in moral accountability. When Verdoux is sentenced to death, "he politely refuses the services of the chaplain on the grounds that his need for reconciliation is not with God but rather with man" (Hurley, p. 104). (At the time of the film's release, many theatres refused to show the theologically volatile film at the urging of the Catholic War Veterans and others; ironically, one critic would later argue that Monsieur Verdoux was "a rich theological source for understanding the many masks of evil"; McCabe, p. 216; Hurley, p. 104.)

Charlie Chaplin held to the notion that the elements of humanity could be reconciled to each other, that mankind would progress beyond its current ills. His very last words in The Great Dictator, spoken over the airwaves to his girlfriend Hannah (played by his estranged wife Paulette Goddard), are as follows:

Hannah, can you hear me? Wherever you are, look up! Look up, Hannah! The clouds are lifting! The sun is breaking through! We are coming out of the darkness into the light! We are coming into a new world - a kindlier world, where men will rise above their greed, their hate and their brutality. Look up, Hannah! The soul of man has been given wings and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow - into the light of hope. Look up, Hannah! Look up!

This does not sound like the cynical realist that comes through in much of Chaplin's autobiography; there is no great awakening to let us know that this is a dream sequence, because the characters involved are already painfully awake. As he passed into his later years, Chaplin did find the time to spell out what he held his core beliefs to be (Chaplin, p. 291):

As I grow older I am becoming more preoccupied with faith. ... To deny faith is to refute oneself and the spirit that generates all our creative forces.

My faith is in the unknown, in all that we do not understand by reason; I believe that what is beyond our comprehension is a simple fact in other dimensions, and that in the realm of the unknown there is an infinite power for good.

This belief in the human "power for good" was the vision that fuelled most of Chaplin's films, a vision that he sometimes conveyed through the use of religious imagery, for as the composer Rachmaninoff once tried to explain to Chaplin, religion plays as much on "feeling" as art does, particularly when one's art had as strong an idealistic bent as Chaplin's (Chaplin, p. 396). Chaplin was perfectly willing to use phrases from the gospels and images from well-known biblical stories because they would help him to connect with his audience; at the same time, he used these traditional images to get across a message quite distinct from the religious creed that they sprung from, a message that "humanity" was essentially good no matter what evils it committed, and that it could and would progress closer to a state of perfection without the God or gods that were central to the older creeds whose images he used.

Bibliography

Books Read:

Chaplin, Charles. My Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964.

Hurley, Neil P. Theology Through Film. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Leacy, F.H., ed. Historical Statistics of Canada (2nd ed.). Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1983.

Mast, Gerald. The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies (2nd ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979.

McCabe, John. Charlie Chaplin. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1978.

McDonald, Gerald D., etc. The Films of Charlie Chaplin. New York: Cadillac Publishing Co., 1965.

U.S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 - Part 1. Washington, DC, 1975.

Films Seen (all written & directed by Charles Chaplin):

The Count (Mutual, September 1916)

Easy Street (Mutual, January 1917)

The Immigrant (Mutual, June 1917)

A Dog's Life (First National, April 1918)

Shoulder Arms (First National, October 1918)

The Kid (First National, February 1921)

The Pilgrim (First National, February 1923)

The Great Dictator (United Artists, October 1940)