Скачать или смотреть Colored Charlie Chapin Ingestion and Dysfunction in Man-Machine consumption

I want to first focus on an early scene at the Electro Steel Corp. when a machine short-circuits while attempting to force-feed the Tramp. Chaplin dated this idea to 1916, a “satire on progress” in the form of a trip to the moon for the Olympic games. The Tramp might as well be the man in the moon in the factory. That the “feeding machine” gags travel well is evident in the Cuban short “Por Primera Vez” (“For the First Time”, Octavio Cortazar, 1967), in which Cubans at the cinema for the first time laugh uproariously at the segment in which the machine spins a corn cob in Charlie’s teeth. This scene reads almost like a travesty of enduring a drill in a dentist’s chair. The failed attempt to force-feed corn to this non-industrial man helps construct the film’s meta-narrative.

Chaplin’s Tramp will not become a man of corn in the sense of the critique of industrial food as developed in King Corn (Aaron Woolf, 2006): a perversion of traditional corn culture which has produced corn-fed people whose very molecular structure and thought patterns reflect the industrial foods they eat. Charlie the Tramp would eat anything put in front of him, but Chaplin the man was a vegetarian, and his critique of the machine age extended to industrial food, as this scene implies.

This scene also foreshadows later sabotage. Although the tramp is grateful for the free food, and is not trying to “monkey wrench” the feeding machine, this machine goes haywire. It may have been defective to begin with, but something here doesn’t compute: the Tramp is wired differently from the more regimented workers the machine was designed to feed. It’s almost as if the machine cannot process the Tramp’s free spirit, and blows its gaskets in the effort. There is a further foreshadowing in this scene, when the machine shoves steel nuts into his mouth. As Russ Castronovo observes, “before Chaplin is swallowed in the belly of the industrial beast, he finds the machine inside his belly.” Every time the machine tries to swallow or mechanize The Tramp, we might expect he will break down, or become like the machine. But it is the machine and factory system which breaks down, when it cannot digest Charlie’s Tramp.