A Comedy Romance in Pantomime

City Lights is a sound movie in pantomime.  There's a synchronized sound-track with many sound-effects, most obviously the kazoo-speech of the worthy's dedicating the statue at the beginning of the picture, the bells ringing in the boxing-match sequence, and the shots fired in the Millionaire's house.  These are examples of what's come to be called (wrongly but almost universally) diagetic sound, sound common to the world of the fiction and the world of the audience.  Non-diagetic sound (now) designates sound that only we hear: scary mood music when someone is exploring a haunted house that seems (to them) completely silent, for example, swelling strings when two lovers are about to kiss.

In some movies we can't tell whether the sound we're hearing is part of the fictional world: usually the surprise will be that it is, that music that we think is only for us turns out to be coming from a radio or a performer we hadn't seen.  And sometimes -- maybe most famously in the 1946 version of The Killers -- there's an interplay between the diagetic and non-diagetic music, so that the Green Cat piano-player's performance of Flight of the Bumblebee strikingly interacts with the Killers-leitmotif when they enter the bar.

But (as I noticed the other day) the opposite sort of thing happens in City Lights.  As with the three-decades of silent films it mimics and closes, there's plenty of sound in the world of the film that we in the real world don't hear.  Sound movies invert the relationship of sound to world that we find in silent movies.  Not quite -- while in silent movies all we can hear is non-diagetic sound, it is true that the silent characters don't hear that sound at all.  All they hear is diagetic sound -- to use a double solecism because this is sound we don't hear.

City Lights is the real inverse, though.  We and the boxers both hear the bell; we and the robbers both hear the gun go off.  And of course we hear all the non-diagetic music that we learned to listen for from silents, if not from opera and ballet, which the characters don't.

But the Blind Girl: what she hears we don't.  She plays a record on the phonograph, but the soundtrack music doesn't change.  More significantly, in the intensely reworked scene in which the Tramp, and the audience, come to realize that she's blind, we see her respond to the slamming of a car door that we don't hear, at about 8:35 into the movie (there doesn't seem to be a good way to start just at that point in this post but you can click on this link to start it at just the right place: https://youtu.be/TkF1we_DeCQ?t=8m35s )

You'll see her react to the slamming door, but we don't hear it slam: we just see it.

I think it's important that we never hear what she's hearing.  The Tramp can see but he can also hear and we can hear with him, just as we can hear with everyone else.  We can see that she can hear but we never hear what she's hearing, which means that we focus on her bodily relation to the world, on her touch.

At the end of the movie, when she sees the Tramp for the first time, there's no reason for her to recognize him.  But she would be able to recognize his voice, and that would be the natural recognition scene. And it wouldn't work.

What matters is that she should recognize him through touch, when unknowingly she gives him the change that she failed to give him before.  Now she can see, and the days of touch are over: we can see them touch for the last time.  All of this requires that the movie be silent, be a pantomime, so that the self-presence of sound doesn't enter into it.

It's another version of Orpheus and Eurydice, that central myth in which sight overwhelms sound -- the song that Orpheus sings -- with the result that touch is banished forever.    He looks back at her and loses her forever, sees her going but will never touch her again.  The happiest version is in Purgatorio: Dante looks back at Virgil, and he's gone, and so are his sweet songs; but he can truly see Beatrice now, though touch is no longer a relevant sense in the Comedy.  City Lights isn't the saddest version, but it is an exceptionally clear exposition of that moment when the pantomime has ended.

More Purgatorio

The fire of the terrace of the lustful reverses the fires of earthly lust, purifying and undoing the sins with which those lower fires raged. Apparently, the reverse sexuality of Dante's entrance into the fire has not been noted (according to my desultory research into various commentaries, anyhow), which gives me a chance to quote and translate some more. Dante, having a body (hence still subject to bodily desire), hesitates to breach the surface of the refining fires from which the love poets have spoken to him, Arnault Daniel most recently. In Canto 27 Virgil urges him to enter into the fire, despite his physical body:

"Pon giù omai, pon giù ogne temenza;
volgiti in qua e vieni: entra sicuro!".
E io pur fermo e contra coscïenza.

Quando mi vide star pur fermo e duro,
turbato un poco disse: "Or vedi, figlio:
tra Bëatrice e te è questo muro".

Come al nome di Tisbe aperse il ciglio
Piramo in su la morte, e riguardolla,
allor che ’l gelso diventò vermiglio;

così, la mia durezza fatta solla,
mi volsi al savio duca, udendo il nome
che ne la mente sempre mi rampolla.

Ond’ei crollò la fronte e disse: "Come!
volenci star di qua?"; indi sorrise
come al fanciul si fa ch’è vinto al pome. (Purgatorio XXVII, 31-45)

"Now put away, now put away all fear:
and come this way, with trust in your safeguard"
And me just standing firm, conscience unclear.


And when he saw me standing firm and hard,
a little vexed he said, "Look here, my son,
by this sole wall from Beatrice are you barred."


As at the name of Thisbe, his life done,
Pyramus looked up at her, his body sloughed,
his blood too, the red mulberries begun;


Just so, my hardness instantly made soft,
I turned to my wise leader, my mind's chapel
a source whence always that name wells aloft.


He shook indulgent brows, and feigned to grapple
with the question: "Standing pat then, are we?"
then smiled, as at a boy won with an apple.

This is Virgil already mothering him, teasing him affectionately rather than commanding him, and the same little boy ("fanciul") will turn to Virgil as to his mother later -- to Virgil who is gone.

But here I want to note the sexuality of the lines.  Dante won't enter the fire, he feels in some sense impotent to do so: impotent with lust, paradoxically, because the lust that brought him here in Beatrice's pursuit makes him inappropriately firm and hard -- he has a human body, and so human appetites, and the fire will burn him, punish him with physical pain, as it won't the pure images who are its denizens and who love the fire and who disappear into its depths.  His conscience is unclear: he feels bodily desire.  But Virgil assures him that it's this wall that separates him from Beatrice -- and that wall is hymenal.  It's as though crossing the never broken wall of flame is to suffer the pain of regaining virginity, a shared virginity with her, the wall between them no longer an issue.  That regaining virginity means suffering a wound that reverses the loss of virginity, means suffering an anti-wound as it were, is clear in the reference to Pyramus and Thisbe.  The wall separated them, and now Pyramus stabs himself, undergoes symbolically what in the more standard, reversed course of events Thisbe would undergo.  "The wall is down" that parted them, and the result of this is not their sexual union but their union in death, which is the painful guarantee of their virginity.

Virgil sees that Beatrice will win Dante to this anti-sexuality: the reversal now is that he can only enter the fire when his hardness is made soft ("la mia durezza fatta solla"), and the sound of Beatrice's name is like an easy bribe to an innocent boy, won with an apple - not the apple of the tree of sexual knowledge and original sin, but the apple that tempts him back to childish sexual innocence, painful as that might be.