The Scene of Encounter in City Lights: Setting Up the Plot and Themes

Extract

[...] After a brief hesitation, the vagabond chooses a flower. Here, the plans alternate between the vendor's always smiling face and the vagabond who seems pleasantly surprised by this encounter. So far, we are in a classic scene of encounter and seduction between two strangers. Then an essential element in this scene appears: the vendor drops the flower, the vagabond picks it up and is about to attach it to his lapel when he notices that she is feeling her way on the ground in search of the flower; he then understands that she is blind. [...]

[...] The vagabond gives a coin to the florist. Next, a visibly wealthy man (he is dressed in a suit and topped with a top hat) gets into the car parked in front of them and starts the engine; the vendor shouts that he has forgotten to take his change. The vagabond then understands that the vendor has taken him for another, a wealthy man. Thus, in this scene, the visual contrast between the vagabond and the man with whom the florist has confused him is blatant: their respective outfits reveal their difference in social status. [...]

[...] However, a certain social reflection emerges from this situation: it is because she does not see him that the young vendor is charmed by the vagabond, since she takes him for a rich man. The rest of the film will then play on this contrast between illusion and reality, between what the characters imagine and what they discover later; deprived of sight, the vagabond becomes someone else in the young florist's imagination. Ultimately, the film questions us about the dialectic between love and appearances: is the young woman's attraction to the vagabond more "true" since she does not see him? [...]

[...] This gesture is equivalent to a rejection, as unconscious of the vagabond by the florist. This meeting scene is thus representative of the entire film, which multiplies gags while the protagonist is a destitute character accumulating misfortunes and rejected by all. On the other hand, the relationship between the vagabond and the florist, since it is based on a misunderstanding and the absence of sight, is paradoxical. From the outset, the meeting seems particularly sincere since sight is absent from the vendor's attitude. [...]

[...] Subsequently, his attraction to the young woman is reinforced when he sits on the wall to observe her. The misunderstanding, at the heart of the plot, is based on the young vendor's blindness, who only trusts her other senses to interpret what is happening to her. Chaplin uses a certain tour de force here, that of making the idea of wealth understood without resorting to sight (the signs of wealth are above all visible); here, it's by the sound of a door slamming when the vagabond gets out that the florist deduces that he is rich, and then confuses him with the man who gets back into the car since the door slams again. [...]