Hip Chaplin

Superficial Notes on Charlie

Abstract

Mailer’s “The White Negro” describes the hipster in terms that evoke Chaplin’s rebellious, skeptical, and even psychopathic Tramp character. The Tramp evolves from the anarchic and cruel misfit of the early shorts, to the hapless but conscientious social outsider of his later shorts and early features, and finally to the Tramp’s transfiguration into the amoral, nihilistic, and infinitely cool serial killer, Henri Verdoux. Throughout this development, Chaplin’s onscreen persona prototypically embodies existentialist postwar hipster psyche that Mailer’s essay investigates.