matrixschmatrix wrote:but I feel as though the movie allows the audience's identification with Verdoux to be almost total, and makes no effort to make one feel the evil of what he does at any point, such that the effect is that his speech at the end seems aimed at actually excusing his murders as petty change rather than integrating them into a murderous society.
No, it doesn't. The point of this is plain and commonsensical. Society has become so bad that it loses the moral authority to condemn even something as obviously bad as murdering women for their money. It's this state that Chaplin wishes to address, not say that murdering people isn't as bad as all that. In your quickness to find fault, you've missed the point of the criticism entirely: that when the murder of women for money seems like "petty change," we've reached a bad state indeed. How you managed to construe that as an excuse rather than itself the criticism, I don't know.
matrixschmatrix wrote:Kind Hearts, for instance, never actually makes Louis a likable figure, as one is privy to his internal monologue and it's obvious he's a more or less complete sociopath- we identify him because he's smart and charming and because his impetus has a certain rough justice, but there's never any attempt to make us think he has a secret heart of gold. Then too, at least one of his victims is clearly a total innocent, and by the end of the movie it seems entirely possible that he will murder Edith as well- the central irony being that his sociopathy and charm are actually the perfect combination for a truly aristocratic man. There is never any particular effort to distance one from Verdoux, and as movies generally don't seem to condemn murdering unpleasant people (see Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda) and unless one assumes that the sentimental scenes are meant to be played ironically, there's nothing to disrupt the portrait of a multiple murderer who's really an ok guy and even lovable.
Why ought we to dislike Verdoux? Kind Hearts and Coronets is more acerbic and withering, but that's it. Verdoux presumes you've already figured out that murdering women is a bad thing, so it doesn't really see the need to make
that its criticism. This is not a movie that wants to handhold your conscience about that bit. But more to the point, Verdoux is a more highly pitched comic film than Kind Hearts. Verdoux isn't psychologized, but the film does put him through the ringer. His impossible-to-destroy American wife is his penance, as it were, and we find his failures just as hysterical as his successes. On top of it, it's long been a comic (and pastoral) technique to make villains, rogues, and other usually unsavory people the most amusing, entertaining, and likeable of the bunch. This is itself an enjoyable bit of moral upending.
But the crucial fact is this: is he likeable
because he murders, or for other things? I'd say it's the latter: we like him for the same reason we like other Chaplin figures: the charm, the improbable elegance even in the most fiendish or dire circumstances, the artistic way he carries off even banal things, the irrepressibly light way he carries himself, his sense of joy. It's the same reason we like the thief and multiple bigamist MacHeath in
The Begger's Opera: not because he commits this or that crime, but because of the attitude he maintains in the face of it.
The pastoral figure works best when we identify with him, hence it doesn't make any aesthetic sense to distance us from Verdoux, especially if he is meant to be a vehicle for a wider criticism (rather than the movie turning its criticisms onto him, as in Kind Hearts).
matrixschmatrix wrote:The logic of black comedy would seem to insist that Verdoux does not intend the viewer to take the sentimental scenes with his family and The Girl seriously- after all, he is a totally unrepentant murderer- but I recall nothing within those scenes to differentiate them from the similar, totally unironic uses of them in Chaplin's other work, and it's not a movie that is generally particularly subtle in its effects.
Of course you're meant to take them seriously. As I said earlier: "[the movie is] allowing the emotions raised by certain implied criticisms (of poverty and various social problems) to be funneled into the final encompassing criticism of the final speech in which conceptions of justice are shown to be perverse and themselves misdirected." The film takes care to weave real emotions into itself so that, when the criticisms come out in force at the end, we've been prepared for it and find our release in it. And we see that Verdoux knows what he's talking about: he's a murderer, a clown, a rogue, but he understands pain and he understands injustice all the same, and thus can find an ironic elevation. The lowest figure becomes the condemner from a height (isn't Verdoux even sitting higher than everyone else?), a fine irony. Without a current of real feeling behind this, the irony of this elevation loses its sharpened point and its seriousness. Irony is not a repudiation of the direct meaning in favour of the indirect one (that's sarcasm); it's a state in which both sides are true, but true in a way we don't expect.
matrixschmatrix wrote: Then too, Verdoux never seems to me to be an impoverished or truly desperate man- he seems rather distinctly bourgeois, acting out of terrified fear of allowing his class status to drop rather than practical necessity (as Ignatiy himself points out, Verdoux's wife feels that the money he 'earns' is less needed than his presence.)
This is what makes it
funny. True impoverishment and desperation would make this a tragic rather than comic pastoral. The humour is in how lightly and faux-elegantly he carries off the most heinous things. Treating the low as high is a central comic irony, and Chaplin had been mining it his whole career (the tramp is always trying to work some kind of bourgeois elegance into his down-and-out actions--like salting his shoe ever so carefully and eating it with table manners totally out of keeping with the situation ).
