dreamdead
02-26-2009, 06:36 PM
So here is a film that demands commentary, I'm finding. This is ramblings more so than structured thoughts. Hopefully something'll take, though, and get us into a dialogue.
Chaplin's film about a man, Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin himself), marrying and murdering older women so that he and his family (an invalid wife and their young son) can survive in the post-Depression era is endlessly debatable. On the one hand Chaplin performs a small cheat in that the philosophical moral comes in the closing moments, quoted below, without any more consideration of the ideas therein.
Wars, conflict - it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!
The critique of the World Wars that's held within this statement beg for extrapolation, even if we comprehend their justification. On the other hand, the statement is a remarkable fusion of ideas and action, wherein we know that we consciously construct a rationale for national(istic) murder in other contexts, but that such an action, when performed under the context of personal survival, will be judged harshly. Now Chaplin gives us a dialogical, if somewhat sentimental, exchange through Verdoux and the newly-released-from-prison young woman. Here lies the film's clearest articulation of its epistemology, for it is considerate towards the eternal suffering and those who sublimate their own self-regard for others. Monsieur Verdoux largely only executes the bitter bourgeois, enabling the broke individuals that he meets to be given another chance at life. In that respect, the frame vaguely frames him as a Robin Hood archetype.
However, his actions can also be perceived as one based entirely around alienation. If his work environment dehumanized him that much and then cast him aside, as it did, then his reaction is a logical if extreme articulation of the alienation effect inherent to the capitalist structure. Society's beaten these people down, and they strike back by profiting from that same economic model, albeit in a perverted and villainous model of profit.
The film's also interesting in its repudiation of religion in those times. Chaplin introduces us to the Priest and while Verdoux tolerates his appeals, he is ontologically divorced from any concern over the prayers that close out the film. In his own way, he's blissfully ignoring any sense of redemption, knowing that society's constructs of good and evil contain models that he does not need to adhere to should he so choose not do. It's not because he's claiming any Nietzschean overman ideal, but rather that the social institutions themselves claim that kind of model and he's exposing the fallacies behind them.
Chaplin's film about a man, Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin himself), marrying and murdering older women so that he and his family (an invalid wife and their young son) can survive in the post-Depression era is endlessly debatable. On the one hand Chaplin performs a small cheat in that the philosophical moral comes in the closing moments, quoted below, without any more consideration of the ideas therein.
Wars, conflict - it's all business. One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!
The critique of the World Wars that's held within this statement beg for extrapolation, even if we comprehend their justification. On the other hand, the statement is a remarkable fusion of ideas and action, wherein we know that we consciously construct a rationale for national(istic) murder in other contexts, but that such an action, when performed under the context of personal survival, will be judged harshly. Now Chaplin gives us a dialogical, if somewhat sentimental, exchange through Verdoux and the newly-released-from-prison young woman. Here lies the film's clearest articulation of its epistemology, for it is considerate towards the eternal suffering and those who sublimate their own self-regard for others. Monsieur Verdoux largely only executes the bitter bourgeois, enabling the broke individuals that he meets to be given another chance at life. In that respect, the frame vaguely frames him as a Robin Hood archetype.
However, his actions can also be perceived as one based entirely around alienation. If his work environment dehumanized him that much and then cast him aside, as it did, then his reaction is a logical if extreme articulation of the alienation effect inherent to the capitalist structure. Society's beaten these people down, and they strike back by profiting from that same economic model, albeit in a perverted and villainous model of profit.
The film's also interesting in its repudiation of religion in those times. Chaplin introduces us to the Priest and while Verdoux tolerates his appeals, he is ontologically divorced from any concern over the prayers that close out the film. In his own way, he's blissfully ignoring any sense of redemption, knowing that society's constructs of good and evil contain models that he does not need to adhere to should he so choose not do. It's not because he's claiming any Nietzschean overman ideal, but rather that the social institutions themselves claim that kind of model and he's exposing the fallacies behind them.