The plot maneuvers Willie into holing up at the Kid's house (when Willie arrives there and the Kid says there's no one else at home, Willie's faster-than-thought response is to put on a ski mask and pull out a gun) and Willie does start responding to him, though in burnt-out character. And the movie manages to keep the Kid weird without trying too hard; he's believably unaware of his own strangeness in the way kids are because of gaps in their socialization and their lack of experience. There's pathos, of course, but it's so odd--the Kid giving Willie a blood-stained hand-carved wooden pickle for Christmas, for instance, or Willie repairing the Kid's Advent calendar that he ate his way through in a drunken stupor, putting candy corn and aspirin in where the missing chocolate was--that it doesn't disrupt your sense that this is a work of irony, that the real and the ideal are being kept in their respective corners.
I began thinking of Charlie Chaplin in his great, early days, most evident in the Mutual shorts of 1916-1917, in which he gloried in his freedom as an unassimilable outsider without worrying about whether his audience approved of him. This is when he embraced his standing as an ironic protagonist, and was truly heroic, a defiant archetype for the entire world. But by the time he made his sentimental feature The Kid (1921), in which the Tramp character raises an abandoned infant boy, he had gone soft, seeking sympathy as a protector of dogs, orphans, and later, most famously, the blind girl of City Lights (1931).
As a result, The Kid is an invertebrate version of Oliver Twist. In Dickens the child's inherent goodness and that of his protectors has allegorical significance: Oliver is the Christian soul that cannot be corrupted by any temptations or trials. Chaplin, intellectually underequipped for his pretensions, plays the same story for direct sentiment without the allegorical structure and it must have felt antique even on its release. There's one good moment, however, when the Tramp first finds the baby and having failed to pass it off fiddles with a storm grate at his feet, clearly thinking, That'd take care of the problem. Bad Santa is full of jokes so raw you can't believe you're hearing them in the mall (and many of them far more sexual than Chaplin ever was). It's the Tramp-and-kid movie that Chaplin didn't have the nerve to make.
Article comments
1 - Al Barger
Really outstanding and thoughtful analysis, Alan. It's definitely got me thinking backwards through the Chaplin movies.
I tend to think of irony as a subset of humor, but your explanation of it doesn't seem to imply that at all. Most intriguing.
2 - Alan Dale
Thanks for the comment. Irony has a lot of overlap with comedy, esp., I think because it works by incongruity, which is one of the main tools of comedy. Double Indemnity is a classic American example of the wrong man for the wrong job with the wrong outcome model of irony, is an ironic version of a tragic situation, and feels like a nightmare while it's happening, but when I think about it afterwards I always feel that I'm laughing with Billy Wilder at MacMurray's foolishness. Irony is also on a continuum with satire: irony is the more reticent, mysterious end, satire the more explicit end. Irony can also be grouped with comedy over the issue of the protagonist's status with respect to the audience: in irony and comedy we tend to look down at him whereas in tragedy and romance we look up at him. It's all pretty fluid, though--all the genres are constantly spilling over into each other. Makes it more interesting to think about.
3 - Eric Olsen
Thanks as always Alan, the book looks very impressive, feel free to link it from Amazon.
4 - Frantic Freddie
NO THANKS!