City Lights

In City Lights, we see our humanity in the patterns we fall into, the patterning of mishap, error, ignorance, and ineptitude, the mistakes we make and then make again. Comedy is in the mechanistic habits and tendencies of bodies and distracted minds -- and the disappointment is in the learning, the breaking of the pattern. All things happen in pairs, all moments of dissonance harmonized with a twin, a repetition. Charlie Chaplain is trapped in a loop of behaviors and movements, a circuit that disappears only when he sees it. He is in a perpetual state of ignorance and revelation of his self's ironic situation in the world, and perception of that pattern is what sets him free again and again.

It is significant then that it is not the Blind Girl's 'seeing' of Chaplain that allows her to actually recognize him, it is the repetition of a physical gesture, her hand on his. The gesture returns her to an emotional state, and is a moment of pattern recognition, like Chaplain has engaged in throughout the movie. In this moment the body knows what the eyes do not. The bodily habits we struggle to break again and again, bring us together, our bodies calling out for a response, company, harmony in another.