Charlie Chaplin was amazing on the silver screen, but there was a lot more to his life than that. Both sides feature in the 1992 movie Chaplin, starring lookalike Robert Downey, Jr., based on Chaplin's autobiography.
Charlie Chaplin was amazing on the silver screen, but there was a lot more to his life than that. Both sides feature in the 1992 movie Chaplin, starring lookalike Robert Downey, Jr., based on Chaplin's autobiography.
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The part that stuck in my mind back when I saw that film on VHS was where he's in a bedroom with a fourteen-year-old (?) girl and it's implied that they're about to have sex. From across the room she's acceptable to him, but up close he doesn't seem to be feeling it. She says, "Charlie, what's wrong?" He mutters, "I need some more, ahem, you just need lip rouge." She hesitates a moment. Is he serious? Yes. "It's over there," he says. She fetches it. The camera moves in to fill the screen with the lipstick being applied. Ick, now I recall a movie where Steve Martin can't feel sexy toward his wife until she puts lipstick around her nostils.
I've never liked lipstick, from as far back as I can remember, from when I was a little boy. The idea of it has always nauseated me, just to see it-- the texture, the smell. One of the plays I made sound for at Mendocino Theater Company in the 2000s had a scene of several over-made-up middle-aged women sitting on folding chairs, legs crossed, wiggling their shoes. It was a rehearsal. The director of the company at the time, Doug Warner, was near me. I don't remember what I said, but it might have been a question about the fright-mask level of makeup they all had on; was that intentional? Doug said, "I think they look kinda /hot/." I said, "Are you kidding." He said, "No."
Young women in offices and on sales floors now use less makeup than they used to but they have whole sleeves and calves of tattoos, and metal ornaments stuck through holes not only in the flesh of their ears but in their cheeks and noses and lips. Or a whole zipper of earrings across the length of an eyebrow. I went in for lab work today and the technician who drew blood had one arm covered with tattooed outlines of fruit, vines, a cowboy boot, maybe to color in later... They can do what they want, of course; it's their body. I don't like it, but it's not up to me. But here's what I just noticed: none of any of those rather extreme levels of self mutilation are anywhere near as creepy to me as Charlie Chaplin quietly instructing that girl to put lipstick on.
Later on when that same actor played Iron Man I had an uncomfortable feeling whenever he was in a scene with Gwyneth Paltrow. I think my memory mixed her with the girl in the Chaplin movie. I liked that they eventually gave her superpowers of her own. Iron Man didn't have a superpower. He just had a flying suit. My favorite superhero is a tie between Jessica Jones and Daredevil.
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