Limelight (the movie) and the Meaning of Life (the concept)

I’m a Charlie Chaplin fan. If you want to stomp on my glasses and shove me in a locker for saying that, I don’t blame you. Even among people who watch silent comedies for fun, Chaplin is an uncool fav. Buster Keaton was undoubtedly the better filmmaker, actor and comedian. Even Harold Lloyd, a distant third in the pantheon of silent comics, bests Chaplin in athleticism and visual creativity. Chaplin’s more famous and his movies made more money, but his popular appeal came from his puppy dog charm and Dickensian sentimentality, which don’t play well in the 21st century. He’s the most enduring star of the silent era, but I don’t know many people who love the guy’s movies.

I do. I’m a sap, is the problem. The end of City Lights, The Gold Rush and The Great Dictator make my eyes well up every time I watch them, and I’ve seen them a lot. The Circus and Modern Times aren’t as emotional, but they’re comic masterpieces. I’d even put three of his later shorts, The Immigrant, A Dog’s Life and Soldier Arms among the funniest movies ever made. He has an undeniable charisma and magnetism, so much so that he’s a global icon a hundred years after his heyday. He’s Charlie fucking Chaplin. What, you’re so great?

Last August I finally watched Limelight, one of his later efforts, a very personal reflection on art, love and mortality. I tried watching it on TCM a couple of times as a teenager, but I never got through it because, frankly, it’s overlong and unfunny. But I finally checked it off the list, and it’s got good stuff. One line in particular has been rattling loudly in my brain for the last three months. It will probably stay there for the rest of my life.

Some context. From 1940 to 1952, Chaplin went through a long period of personal turmoil and professional decline. A couple of years after his third divorce, one of his mistresses, Joan Barry, sued for paternity and accused him of trafficking her across state lines “for illicit purposes.” During his court battle, he impulsively remarried, this time to an 18-year-old actress and debutante, Oona O’Neill. Oona’s father, playwright Eugene O’Neill, publicly disapproved of the match, as did the Hollywood press. Chaplin then directed his first flop, Monsieur Verdoux, a black comedy where Chaplin played a dandy serial killer. The film was protested around the country and banned in several cities and states. All the while, the FBI targeted Chaplin for real and perceived ties to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. J. Edgar Hoover investigated him, HUAC subpoenaed him and politicians called for his deportation. Finally, Chaplin was stripped of his American reentry visa during a trip to London. To reinstate it, he would have to submit to an immigration board of inquiry regarding political crimes and moral turpitude. He refused. He would not set foot in the United States for another twenty years.

Before his exile, Chaplin produced Limelight, a film that mixed his fear of aging, his passion for comedy and his desperate need for validation. He plays Calvero, a washed-up vaudeville clown living in London on the eve of World War I. He comes back to his flat after a drunken bender and smells gas leaking from the room below his. Busting down the door, he discovers a young dancer, Therezia, attempting suicide. He opens her windows, turns off the gas and drags her unconscious body upstairs. When Therezia comes to, she tells Calvero that a bout of rheumatic fever weakened her legs, destroying her dancing career and her will to live. Though Calvero has nothing much to live for himself, his rugged optimism inspires Therezia to regain her strength and return to the stage. At the same time, he finds the confidence to attempt one last comeback show and restore his ailing dignity.

As a peek into Chaplin’s psyche, Limelight is fascinating. He portrays the loss of his youth with a powerful dose of melancholy and gratitude. He suspects that if he wasn’t a millionaire movie star, his young wife wouldn’t be so devoted to him. (At one point Therezia proposes marriage to Calvero, but he comes to understand she’s really in love with a young composer and only proposed out of pity.) At one point Chaplin has “Calvero” openly admit that he can’t be the ingratiating comic he was as a younger man, that he’s too prideful and isolated from his audience. But at the film’s conclusion he puts on one last performance and it brings the house down. His audience cheers for an encore, but Calvero has a heart attack and dies behind the curtain. I have a feeling Chaplin wanted the same. One last hit, one last blockbuster, then leave the people wanting more.

He didn’t get that. Limelight was profitable in Europe, but most American theaters refused to show it. Before his death in 1977, Chaplin directed two more features, but both underperformed. He did get one last standing ovation, though, at the 1972 Academy Awards. With two decades of hindsight and years of Chaplin movies running on TV, the American public grew to love him again. He was invited to return to Los Angeles to accept an honorary Oscar. He accepted, taking his final trip to the United States. Take a look at his acceptance speech. When that room gets up for him he’s so touched, so astonished. Decades of bitterness melt away in an instant. How perfectly Hollywood.

Some more context, about me this time: I went through a really bad depressive episode this past year. I had been hanging on to my mental health by the tips of my fingernails all through the pandemic, and in the spring of 2022, when it finally felt like things were going to revert to a version of normal, it all slipped away. By June my wife insisted I get back into therapy. By July I realized I wasn’t gonna get through this without medication. I started taking an SNRI and it made me feel better than I had in years. Like a lot of depressives, I resent being dependent on medication, but I can’t deny the results. You got me, big pharma. I’m hooked on this thing called “functioning.”

Before I went back into treatment, I found myself obsessing over purpose and meaning. I felt I lacked any. I was writing, but nothing was getting produced. I felt too unskilled for charity work or political activism. My pre-pandemic community of friends and collaborators had moved on, moved away, had children, or some combination of the three. My old life was gone. I was never getting it back.

Desperate for a hit of serotonin, my brain considered a bunch of dramatic options that would change my circumstances. I need a new job. I need to volunteer. I need to travel. Should my wife and I adopt a kid? Maybe all those judgmental conservative chuds on Twitter were right, maybe life past thirty-five is empty without children.

I knew some of these options were poorly considered. (Feels like you shouldn’t medicate your depression with a baby. Feels like that’s bad.) I took some steps toward plausible options, but nothing worked. Nothing made me feel better. My life was meaningless no matter what I did.

Then I watched Limelight. At one point in the movie, Calvero asks Therezia if there was anything besides her illness that made her want to commit suicide. She says, “Oh…that and the utter futility in everything. I see it in flowers, hear it in music. All life aimless, without meaning.”

Calvero replies, “What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning. Desire is the theme of all life. It makes the rose want to be a rose, want to grow like that, and a rock want to contain itself, and remain like that.”

Hm.

“Life is a desire, not a meaning.”

Huh.

So…

“Life is a desire, not a meaning.”

Gosh.

Well.

That’s some real shit, Chuck.

It’s easy to interpret that line as a call for indulgence. Chaplin was a megalomaniac, and it would follow that he’d think life is about satisfying compulsions, not contributing to society. But pure hedonism gets tiresome after a while, and I have a feeling Chaplin knew that. Most people want more out of life than fucking hotties and getting high. (Though that’s nice sometimes.) Most people want friendship, love, beauty, the satisfaction of a job well done, the warmth that comes with being of service. Debauchery only gets you so far.

So what does the line mean? I think it means work and significance isn’t the way to measure a life. Chaplin was obviously worried about his legacy when he made Limelight, afraid that his dalliance with communism would erase his filmography from western culture. He was wrong, but even if he wasn’t, he had a pretty good run. Legacy is nice, but not many people are lucky enough to make art that lasts centuries, or enact policy that improves lives, or invent technology that reshapes civilization. Most of us just get by. We wield a little influence in our family and our workplace, but when our children’s children die, we’re forgotten. So what do the bulk of us have to live for? Meeting our desires whenever we’re able. That’s it. For me, in the depths of my depression, that was clarifying to hear.

Maybe a week after watching Limelight I started taking medication. It wasn’t some miracle cure, but I felt well enough to do work and move on. I was no longer obsessed with “meaning” because Charlie is right, meaning isn’t the animating feature of life, it’s desire. Clear your mind and ask yourself what you want. Is it within your power to grasp that? Maybe? Partly? Then figure out what needs to be done to get it. It’s really that simple. Except of course it isn't. But it kind of is. Sometimes.

Turns out, I didn’t want children. (Not now. Maybe never. I don’t know, stop bothering me.) I didn’t care about purpose, that was just a way for my depression to poke at my insecurities. I wanted experience. I’d spent over two years in my apartment for God’s sake. I want to meet new people, make new things, see parts of the world I haven’t seen before. I’m still working on how to do that. I’ll get there. I’m pretty determined when I want to be.

As to the quality of Limelight, it’s good but not great. It’s way too fucking long. Chaplin writes himself interminably talky scenes where he pontificates on life, love and show business, and devotes big stretches of screen time to boring dance numbers and hacky vaudeville bits. The film suffers from Chaplin’s pedestrian visual sense and penchant for Victorian melodrama. And Calvero’s relationship with Therezia gets nauseating when you remember Chaplin had a thing for teenagers, and that his fourth and final wife was 36 years his junior. If you like Chaplin’s work the way I do, it’s worth checking out. If you’re a normal person, skip this one until you’re fully Tramp-Pilled.

Now you want something that’ll fuck you up about life, watch Ikiru. That’s the hard stuff.