I'm not the real Charlie Chaplin, although people often mistake me for him. I'm actually the fictional silent movie character he created back in 1914. I have been stolen from my silent, black and white, 16 fps, celluloid home and I have been transplanted here into reality in present day Hollywood. Things are very hectic and chaotic here in the real world, and I sometimes have trouble adapting to it. In fact, I probably won't even physically talk to you when you see me since I come from silent movies and I don't like to hear the sound of my own voice. It startles me. Hearing actual real sounds is just one of the many things I'm having trouble getting used to here in these modern times. But if my quiet and old fashioned ways don't seen too strange to you then please feel free to come up to me and say hi. You can usually find me wandering around Hollywood at night."He is not who you think he is. He is not really a little tramp at all. He is not inept, uneducated, uninformed, or socially unacceptable. He is not a born underdog, deprived of opportunity by an unfeeling society. The Little Tramp is just a role. And there is nothing in him naturally - and nothing cruelly unjust in the society around him - to keep him from easily and acceptably playing any other role he wants permanetly, twenty four hours a day, for the rest of his life. He has already played just about every other role there is, and he can play them all brilliantly. If he needs to become a boxer, he becomes an extraordinarily deft one. If he wishes to put on roller skates, he becomes Nijinsky on wheels. If he wants to gamble, he is at once a shark. If he has to rescue a woman from a burning building, his skill and bravery are unexampled. If he is inducted as a soldier, he can capture the Kaiser. He can farm, lay bricks, play a violin, wait on tables, work in a factory, cope with bullies, duel as well as Fairbanks dueled, and even cure a woman of blindness. For every role he can play, the expertise is there in plain view. No barrier stands between his talents and the assumption of a role in which they might be exercised. The secret to him is that he can be anyone. But that is also is his problem. The secret is a devastating one. For the man who can, with the flick of a finger or the blink of an eye, instantly transform himself into absolutely anyone... is a man who must, in his heart, remain no one. To be able to play a role, to know that it is just a role, is to be able to see right through it. To see that it is a lie. So to be able to play every role is to be able to see through everything. To see that it's all a lie. And that leaves nothing, no way of life, no permanent commitment in which such a man can possibly believe. He can see every posture exposed as an artifice that can easily be adopted on the instant and then just as instantly dropped. Since he can impersonate everyone, he can have no person. And that means that the door to the normal world where all the less perceptive people go who are able to accept all the postures and lies and pursue them to blind profit, that world is sealed off from him. And who would wish to be a part of that world any ways? A world that can so easily be faked? And how would you even go about it? You can't believe in what you know better than. Infinitely adaptable but universally a fraud, he now has no identity to embrace, to enter whole heartedly, to feel secure about, to find rest in. That is why he is The Little Tramp. It was all that was left for him. The Little Tramp is the residue of all the boxers, bricklayers, waiters, fiddlers, factory workers, and soldiers that he has played so well. His problem was just that he knew how to play them all a little too well. Sometimes when you look at him closely you can see the dark pain filling his eyes. It is in excess to his situation at hand. It comes from the hopeless limitation of having no limitations."
--Walter Kerr, THE SILENT CLOWNS
