Beauty and Survival in a Rough Reality

In Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, those who appreciate beauty seem to live outside of reality, or, at the least, outside of conventional boundaries. The tramp, in particular, seems to find beauty more important than everyday life. Upon meeting the blind flower girl, however, the tramp can no longer live completely outside of reality; being attached to another person brings him into that web of convention and obligation, eventually destroying him.
The tramp’s lifestyle is a daily rejection of the limitations imposed by convention, and even reality itself. Because he lives outside these conventions, the tramp is able to sleep in the statue of figures of peace and prosperity. Because he lives within beauty in his daily life, the line between art and life is blurred. To the tramp, it does not seem inappropriate to fall asleep on the statue, because he is intimate with art and beauty. The public, however, is horrified at the prospect of being so intimate with a work of art; art is dangerous, and those who do not make it their life’s work to delve into the raw terror and beauty of art in everyday life must humbly keep their distance. As dangerous as art itself is the possibility that art is not distinct from life, as the tramp demonstrates to the public at the start of the film. The general public is unable to believe that there is art or beauty in what they pass everyday. Most people fail to notice the nude statue in the window, but Charlie Chaplin bashfully admires it. In this case the public is unable to consider the idea that something they pass on the street might be beautiful, but they are perhaps equally unable to consider nudity to be art. Similarly, most passersby overlook the flower girl and her flowers. To Charlie Chaplin, however, beauty is more important than reality. He buys a flower from the flower girl even though he does not have enough money to clothe himself well.
Once the tramp has fallen in love with the flower girl, however, he is no longer able to live outside of reality. His previously universal appreciation of beauty focuses on her, and his blissful faith in the beauty all around him transforms into a fixation on one beautiful being. Love calls him into the real world. For the sake of his love, the tramp takes a regular job, on a schedule, which means he no longer has the leisure time he had before. He cannot pause in the street to admire a statue; the routine of daily life demands something of him. Daily life demands that he render up his self. The tramp does not initially understand the sacrifice he is being called upon to make. He does not adjust to the routine, timed life that his job requires, and he is fired for being late. In an attempt to earn money for the flower girl’s rent, the tramp agrees to fight in a boxing match. Although initially the fight is fixed so that the tramp will not be fixed, the tables quickly turn, and the tramp is knocked out, still penniless. He then turns to his millionaire friend, who offers him the money, but then betrays the tramp when the police arrive. Charlie Chaplin is finally able to pay the rent for his lover, but he is taken to jail the next morning. In this sequence of events, no one intends any malice towards the tramp. But the tramp has descended from the realm of beauty and art into the rough and dangerous reality, as deadly for him as close contact with art is for the rest of the world. The tramp is continually betrayed not by one person, but by reality itself, which conspires, in its unflinching objectivity, to lead the tramp away from beauty.
When the tramp is released from jail, months later, there is little reason to believe reality has not triumphed. The tramp shuffles dejectedly along the street, barely able to lift his eyes from the ground, unable to defend himself from the newsboys he admonished with so much confidence at the start of the film. He is so desperate for any shred of beauty that he scrambles to pick up a wilted flower from the gutter. In the moment that his eyes meet those of the flower girl, the flower crumbles in his hands. The grin that breaks over his face is jarring, hideous, and grief-stricken. When the girl fails to recognize him, and even laughs at him, he rushes away. He cannot bear this final disappointment: to be betrayed even by love and beauty, to see how they have failed when introduced to reality. When the flower girl recognizes him by his hands, and says, “Yes, I can see now,” there is nothing more to be said. They can both see what reality has done to their beauty.
The tramp had built his life in beauty, defying all conventions by placing beauty above all else. But when beauty becomes for him a specific individual, the blind flower girl, rather than a universal ideal, his love forces him to concede to conventional reality. Betrayed by reality, the tramp has lost his ability to see beauty in daily life, and so he can no longer live in constant appreciation. Given the continued evidence of reality’s harsh universality in the film, the failure of beauty in the film seems inevitable. Beauty cannot survive in our rough reality, or, if it does, we must give it a new name, one that describes in one breath the beauty and the pain of the smile on the tramp’s face in the final scene.