Chaplin's America

Between Dream and Illusion

Morgane Jourdren

• Publisher: Presses universitaires de Rennes
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9791041306046
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts

Undoubtedly, there is a subversive side to Chaplin's work. Some scenes are apt to be considered as signs of Chaplin's intention to ridicule mainstream American society and debunk the myth of American exceptionalism. However, historical and political approaches do not really account for the complexity and the depth of Chaplin's work. Ironically enough, Chaplin's films may well be not so much about the American Dream as about a dream of another kind, less tangible and more ethereal. Far beyond the socio-economic or comic aspects it is traditionally associated with, there emerges from Chaplin's work a more philosophical and metaphysical dimension, a genuine Weltanschauung. God, if He has ever existed, is at best an absentee Landlord and yet, in the midst of universal chaos, there still arises a dream of that remnant of Terra Incognita within all of us, which takes on the colors of a prelapsarian world free from the contradictions of existence here below.

Table of contents

• Introductory pages
• Table of contents
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One. America and the American Dream in the Work of Charlie Chaplin
• Part Two. Of the Unheimlichkeit or Unsettling Strangeness of the World
• Part Three. Of Dreams and Attitudes Towards Life
• Conclusion
• Filmography
• Selected Bibliography
• Table of Illustrations