Charlie Chaplin's Dog

The first time I saw a Charlie Chaplin film, I was a temporary college drop-out, age 18, and was crashing, as we used to say, with an elementary school friend enrolled at Brandeis University. The campus held a weekly outdoor film screening, and I got to see “Modern Times,” Chaplin’s brilliantly funny 1936 film about industrialization, poverty, love, and resilience. The movie utterly inspired me as an artist and an activist, and I wrote a pompous letter to my parents making all kinds of declarations about my future.

Ever since, Charlie Chaplin has been one of my artistic and humanistic touchstones, to whom I return for inspiration every couple of years. His empathy for the working poor, his unabashed scorn for cops and for the pretensions of wealth, his endless take-downs of macho masculinity, his sweet sentimentality as a music composer, and his balletic beauty as a performer, add up to make his movies timelessly relevant, bittersweet, and hilarious.

I was delighted to learn, therefore, that the MAX streaming service (formerly HBO Max) is keeping alive the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) network, which can be accessed at the bottom of the MAX app. Classic film literacy is as important, in my estimation — perhaps more important — than classic book literacy, and Charlie Chaplin tops the list.

I took a chance last night and watched his short silent from 1918, “A Dog’s Life.” The risk was not that I wouldn’t like the movie (I’ve seen it before), but that it would break my heart, because my wife and I just lost our sweet dog, Elsie, two weeks ago, and her presence — rather, her absence — is EVERYWHERE. Still, I trusted that Charlie Chaplin would make me feel more the blessings of the dog-human relationship than the sorrow of our loss.

So he did. And how.

Just as the cops won’t leave the Tramp alone in his movies, within four years after making “A Dog’s Life,” Chaplin was being investigated by the FBI, which accumulated a dossier of over 1,600 pages in the course of more than half a century of scrutiny and harassment that ultimately drove him out of the United States.

Amazing, isn’t it, what fascists consider to be communistic and dangerous? Amazing, isn’t it, how that mentality hasn’t changed one iota in a hundred years?

And amazing it was to watch the tube for half an hour and not view a single murder or stabbing and not a single advertisement for META or AI or other products of our ever-increasingly alienated, isolating, frivolous culture. Charlie Chaplin, miraculously, makes me feel that I’m still part of the world.

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The wonderful new edition of ALTE: Getting Old Together will be published at our website on July 15th. The theme is “Disguise,” and if you have artwork or writings on that theme that you’d like to submit, do it this weekend! Send to: altetogether@gmail.com.