Herman Cain as the flaneur out of Charles Baudelaire’s Paris. Men in the crowd, struggling with boredom and the consequences of eternal return.Charlie Chaplin in Mr. Verdoux and Herman Cain, figures, somewhat comic, but whose humor is curiously out of place in modernity.Marginal figures who are being eroded by modernity.
Chaplin has always been an aspiring flaneur, finally fully realized in Mr. Verdoux. Chaplin’s natural habit has always been in the public spaces of the urban setting. In Modern Times, he was an aspiring flaneur, like Cain, a marginal figure, but lacking the suave and polish that the authentic could bathe in, namely the flaneur’s seamless encounters with his female counterpart in the prostitute, which served to expose the gendered dimensions of urban mobility. By Verdoux, Chaplin is simply a murderer of women, whom he regards as ordinary decorative commodities, as the flaneur with women, especially prostitutes of whom there are more than they know what to do with, except use them, or in turn convert them into profit as Chaplin does, and Cain is just an example of the organisation of mobility by categories, distinctions, of social -economic class.
---Walter Benjamin...The Arcades Project asks how a mythic dream consciousness, such as the longing for dream fulfillment in the commodity or the idea of love satisfied in prostitution or the desire for human union through imperialism, can be rattled, forced to wake up from the wishful thinking it indulges. Perhaps assertion simply of the actuality of commercial brutality would suffice. Perhaps boredom in the end would finally force a change, through being unsustainable. Marx had characterised Second Empire history in France, in Hegel’s terms, as ‘grey on grey’: history without events; development whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar. But boredom also induces sleep. The yawn is the gesture of both....Read More:http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/waltbenj/yarcades.html image:http://billsmovieemporium.wordpress.com/category/charles-chaplin/
The flaneur is the compulsive observer of modern life, the scholar of it, but is always on the margins,an outsider, distracted, and fragmented by the experience. The flaneur is almost always bourgeois origin, or at least determined will to claim those roots, but he stands outside of class; that is, he can never truly participate in bourgeois social life or, let alone the social life of the masses.As if the isolation offers the temptation for potential perversions. Cain is the type who could mingle, interact superficially with a crowd, wow a throng, but never totally merge with it….
---The comedy of Chaplin’s satire in Verdoux, by contrast, is urgent and atonal, pained and implicated in the world. Cruel and melancholic, this passion is more reminiscent of the comic nihilist Benjamin once dubbed the “destructive character,” who has the “consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong.”...Disoriented and disorienting, obscure but obstinately signifying, this grainy voice is heard whenever Chaplin, modernity’s most famous mime, rolls his cultivated English r’s in a queer French body, or in Verdoux’s repeated, and repeatedly absurd, locution that would stand in, impossibly, for the mother tongue: “Ooh, Lah, Lah!” It is, I would suggest, the doubled voice of Chaplin the melancholic, for whom the Chaplinesque ego itself becomes the lost object. And it is the alienated voice of Chaplin the political exile, who speaks bereft of home and country, and whose mournful dislocation we hear in the film’s inaugural voiceover, its dissonant voice-offs, and in Verdoux’s last, biting speeches. Verdoux’s noisy satire is as particular as Chaplin’s silent clowning was putatively universal because it is founded in the funniness of the foreigner, who provokes laughter through obtrusive exteriority, comedy through dissent, and dissent through the excessive congruence of satire....Read More:http://www.js-modcult.bham.ac.uk/articles/issue4_nieland.pdf image:http://www.doctormacro.com/Movie%20Summaries/M/Monsieur%20Verdoux.htm
Baudelaire was always fascinated by the ambiguities, absorbed in the risk, and pleasures of modern urban living. The flaneur was in a sense above the law, and beyong bourgeois values which meant a distancing from modern city living and becoming the critical observer of modernity. So, Baudelaire was an early antagonist to mass culture rallying all the ambivalence he could to growing consumer culture. In the identity of the flaneur, Baudelaire identified a figure, an archetype who could confront commodification and avoid being negated by it.A fascination in, but really a separation from a crowd. Baudelaire said flanerie is an exercise in connaisseurship, in expert looking, and the expertise of the flaneur was in dominating, organizing and categorizing it, while maintaining objective distance. Observer status.
---The circumstance of the new is perhaps nowhere better illuminated than in the figure of the flaneur. His thirst for the new is quenched by the crowd, which appears self-impelled and endowed with a soul of its own. In fact, this collective is nothing but appearance. This ‘crowd,’ in which the flaneur takes delight, is just the empty mold with which, seventy years later, the Volksgemeinschaft ‘people’s community’ was cast. The flaneur who so prides himself on his alertness, on his nonconformity, was in this respect also ahead of his contemporaries: he was the first to fall victim to an ignis fatuus that since that time has blinded many millions.. Dreams might be able to be read, which is to say interpreted as wish-symbols which, made conscious, could then be striven after in reality. However, dreams can also be too seductive, countering activity. Doesn’t Freud say that the dream is a trick to keep us sleeping?--- Read More:http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/waltbenj/yarcades.html image:http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-31/politics/30341093_1_herman-cain-sexual-harassment-politico
Cain’s quest for the new is the seed of his demise. The fallacy is that the crowd , the mass, has a soul; but that is simply an illusion, anempty form with no content. Virtual. And to play the role of the non-conformist resides in the residue of his own misconceptions and issues of identity…..
ADDENDUM:
Some pieces develop lines of inquiry from the “Work of Art” essay, such as his posthumous notes on Charlie Chaplin, in which Benjamin suggests that the slapstick actor’s genius lies in his physical mimicry of the “dialectical structure of film”: just as film confers the illusion of continuity upon a sequence of discrete images, Chaplin’s body language synthesizes “a succession of staccato bits of movements”. At other times, Benjamin takes a wholly different tack, as in his recollection of how the first telephone in his childhood home disrupted the cozy space of bourgeois privacy….Read More:http://www.rossmbenjamin.com/26.php
---Chaplin’s responses – that he sympathized with Russia during the war, that he had no “political persuasions whatsoever,” that he was not nationalistic but rather considered himself a “citizen of the world,” that Verdoux was a tragic symptom of the “cancerous conditions” of nation in times of the catastro
and that these catastrophes are systemic – fell on largely unsympathetic ears.34 And Chaplin so responded with his own violence, aggressively marketing the national release of the film with the publicity slogan, “Chaplin Changes! Can You?,” a formulation that insists on the temporal incommensurablity of the film and its public.--- Read More:http://www.js-modcult.bham.ac.uk/articles/issue4_nieland.pdf
Read More:http://www.walterbenjaminportbou.cat/sites/all/files/quintana_eng.pdf
Edgar Allan Poe ( A Man in the Crowd )…Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing. With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street….
Constantin Guys.---What is original in Benjamin is his claim that politics as grandiose theatre, rather than as debate, was not just one of the trappings of fascism, but fascism in essence. In the films of Leni Riefenstahl, as well as in newsreels exhibited in every theatre in the land, the German masses were offered images of themselves as their leaders called upon them to be. Fascism used the power of the art of the past - what Benjamin calls "auratic art" - plus the multiplying power of the new postauratic media, particularly cinema, to create its new fascist citizens. For ordinary Germans, the only identity on show was a fascist identity in fascist costume and fascist postures of domination or obedience. Benjamin's analysis of fascism as theatre raises many questions. Is politics as spectacle really the heart of German fascism, rather than ressentiment and dreams of historical retribution? ...Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/jan/20/history.society image:http://learningcommunityfall2009.blogspot.com/2011/09/chapter-10-flaneur-phenomenon.html
…This latter is one of the principal thoroughfares of the city, and had been very much crowded during the whole day. But, as the darkness came on, the throng momently increased; and, by the time the lamps were well lighted, two dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door. At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion. I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without.
At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance….
---This first type of scholar, the flâneur, is someone who wanders aimlessly around urban spaces, observing and appreciating the scenery and architecture of the city. The flâneur does not look for famous landmarks that attract tourists and visitors, but is rather attracted to the details and minutae of urban life: For the masses as well as the flâneur, glossy enameled corporate nameplates are as good a wall-decoration as an oil painting is for the homebody sitting in his living room, or even better; the fire walls are their desks, the newspaper kiosk their library, letterboxes their bronze statuettes, benches their boudoir, and the café terrace the bay window from which they can look down on their property.” Read More:http://www.epoche.ucsb.edu/Beaver06.pdf image:http://exileonmoanstreet.blogspot.com/2011/10/nobodys-gonna-make-herman-cain-talk.html
…By far the greater number of those who went by had a satisfied, business-like demeanor, and seemed to be thinking only of making their way through the press. Their brows were knit, and their eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no symptom of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on. Others, still a numerous class, were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around. When impeded in their progress, these people suddenly ceased muttering; but redoubled their gesticulations, and awaited, with an absent and overdone smile upon their lips, the course of the persons impeding them. If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers, and appeared overwhelmed with confusion. There was nothing very distinctive about these two large classes beyond what I have noted. Their habiliments belonged to that order which is pointedly termed the decent. They were undoubtedly noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers–the Eupatrids and the common-places of society-men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own–conducting business upon their own responsibility. They did not greatly excite my attention. Read More:http://www.online-literature.com/poe/2198/a
The Marrriage of Maria Braun.----For Fassbinder, the multifarious nature of cultural oppression “becomes such a normal condition that it is no longer expressed as oppression, but as adapting or conforming; that is as something natural and necessary” (Thomsen 137). Christian Braad Thomsen thinks Fassbinder’s “women’s films” bring to light how subjects unconsciously internalise and transfer their own feelings of domination onto themselves and to others, ...Read More:http://widescreenjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/21/26 image:http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/rmiah/entry/the_marriage_of
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