![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mabel’s Strange Predicament
Jan. 4th, 2021 08:58 amMabel Normand’s short film “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” is best remembered now as the first appearance of Charlie Chaplin’s “Tramp” character - in a more drunken and lecherous form than in his later appearances (sayeth the film description; I haven’t actually seen any of Chaplin’s Tramp films so I can’t compare).
It’s a short slapstick comedy about a girl (Normand) who gets locked out of her hotel room in her pajamas, and sneaks into the hotel room across the hall, only to hide under the bed when the gentleman staying there returns… and then to be discovered by the gentleman’s wife… at which point Mabel’s own sweetheart arrives, and jumps to exactly the same erroneous conclusion about Mabel’s presence in the gentleman’s bedroom. A battle royale ensues. The tramp weaves drunkenly in and out of the action throughout.
This is an interesting bookend to yesterday’s musings about domestic violence in silent film, because Normand’s approach is so at odds with Alice Guy Blache’s: The Ocean Waif is a drama, and the waif’s abuse by her foster father is a brutal threat, whereas “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” is a comedy and thus treats its violence comically.
I’m not sure if I have a deeper thought about this - I’m circling around the way that genre shapes the way that audiences view characters’ actions, so that you can have, say, a show like Agents of SHIELD where the heroes will do literally the exact same thing as the villains and a large part of the audience will still accept them as heroes because, you know, the narrative says so!
It’s a short slapstick comedy about a girl (Normand) who gets locked out of her hotel room in her pajamas, and sneaks into the hotel room across the hall, only to hide under the bed when the gentleman staying there returns… and then to be discovered by the gentleman’s wife… at which point Mabel’s own sweetheart arrives, and jumps to exactly the same erroneous conclusion about Mabel’s presence in the gentleman’s bedroom. A battle royale ensues. The tramp weaves drunkenly in and out of the action throughout.
This is an interesting bookend to yesterday’s musings about domestic violence in silent film, because Normand’s approach is so at odds with Alice Guy Blache’s: The Ocean Waif is a drama, and the waif’s abuse by her foster father is a brutal threat, whereas “Mabel’s Strange Predicament” is a comedy and thus treats its violence comically.
I’m not sure if I have a deeper thought about this - I’m circling around the way that genre shapes the way that audiences view characters’ actions, so that you can have, say, a show like Agents of SHIELD where the heroes will do literally the exact same thing as the villains and a large part of the audience will still accept them as heroes because, you know, the narrative says so!
