City Lights: Charlie Chaplin Exposes the Farce of Capitalism in Crisis

In the opening scene of City Lights (1931), a statue is solemnly unveiled by authorities at a public event celebrating prosperity and peace. Speeches are made, a flag is raised, and the crowd applauds. But when the curtain is pulled back, there lies a tramp, asleep at the statue’s feet. It’s Chaplin’s character, the Tramp, abruptly awakened by the national anthem—displaced, ridiculous, but also revealing. The scene functions as the director’s statement of intent: the presence of the Tramp shatters the hypocrisy and exposes the contradiction of capitalist farce in times of crisis. While the ruling class and the agents it hires to serve them celebrate an abstract peace and prosperity, embodied in a grotesquely aestheticized statue, concrete misery appears to ridicule and expose their true intentions.

The love between the Flower Girl and the Tramp is shaped by appearances and class illusions—a tenderness marked by ideological blindness. Photo credit: film still.

It’s striking how current the film feels. Today, the same hypocrites shove “defense of democracy” in our faces, just as abstract, while stepping on everyone’s necks with the same violence that, in Chaplin’s time, led to World War II only a few years later. Sadly, in today’s world, not a single filmmaker seems able to summarize our social and historical moment with the same brilliance and clarity as Chaplin did in 1931. More than that, the scene delivers clarity, objectivity, didacticism, and humor in every gesture of the Tramp trying to get down from the statue and escape the police. All done through pantomime—the classical art of clowns, buffoons, and outcasts. The Tramp is such a character, and making him the protagonist is Chaplin’s lasting lesson for us.

Released during the capitalist crisis known as the Great Depression, City Lights is one of the most celebrated films by the English director, who wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the work. Despite the rise of sound cinema, Chaplin insisted on keeping the film silent because he believed that laughter, gestures, and images communicated more directly with audiences. The film influenced Bertolt Brecht’s theories of epic theater and Sergei Eisenstein’s ideas on cinematic form and meaning. Critics at the time were divided: some saw the film as an anachronism, others praised its beauty and emotion. Today, it is regarded as one of the greatest achievements in film history.

In Brazil, we commonly refer to Chaplin’s famous character as Carlitos, but he is a type rather than a named individual, hence the label “the Tramp”—a figure that appeared in his early short films during World War I. In City Lights, the Tramp is a man uncoopted by the system, despite enormous hardships, driven irresistibly by passion and empathy. As the protagonist, he forces the audience to see the world through the eyes of a working-class man cast out by the social order. Many may even identify with him. His social reality always lends the film a bittersweet tone.

In the plot, the Tramp falls in love with a blind young woman (Virginia Cherrill) who sells flowers on the street. Due to a series of misunderstandings—carefully constructed through the film’s minimal use of sound—she believes he is wealthy. To help her pay the rent and finance surgery to restore her sight, the Tramp tries to earn money in various ways, from menial jobs to chance encounters with an eccentric millionaire (Harry Myers), who only treats him as a friend when drunk. The story unfolds through tender moments and sharp social critique, culminating in a moving final scene where the flower girl regains her vision and finally sees who her benefactor truly is.

The Flower Girl, another character type, represents a worker blind to her social condition. Her blindness is not just physical—it’s metaphorical. She lives in a Cinderella-like fantasy, waiting to be rescued by a prince. The film ends with a moment of rupture when she regains her sight and recognizes who the Tramp truly is. Chaplin delivers a moment of pure emotion: “Can you see now?” is the final line the Tramp speaks to the Flower Girl, who recognizes him by touch, by the material. It’s also a moment of incredible class consciousness.

Another central character is the drunken Millionaire, whom the Tramp saves from a suicide attempt. The Millionaire adopts him as his best friend whenever he’s drunk, becoming generous and affectionate. But when sober, the social structure reasserts itself: the Tramp is discarded again. The oscillation between class consciousness (sobriety) and alienation (drunkenness) is key to their relationship. Here, Chaplin relies on one of Marxism’s key concepts: class conciliation is impossible. The episode is a denunciation of the illusion of class harmony, something social democracy tried to sell at the time—and unfortunately, still does. The film states that any bond between the rich and the poor is only possible when the capitalist is completely disconnected from reality. Once sober, the bourgeois returns to his place and demands that the poor man return to his.

The film also portrays labor, under capitalism, as exploitation. The Tramp tries to find work but is always pushed into humiliating or absurd situations. Work here is not dignity—it’s cruel comedy. And the little money he manages to earn comes only by chance. To help the Flower Girl pay her rent, he briefly finds work as a street sweeper, which he obviously cannot endure. Unable to follow the boss’s strict schedules, he is fired. In another moment, he tries to earn money as a boxer, stepping into the ring for a bet. The sequence became one of the most iconic in film history. Far from real sport, it depicts what we now call precarious labor.

Through the Tramp, Chaplin offers us a pedagogical figure—lucid, able to move between social classes, and capable of revealing the dysfunctions and contradictions of capitalist society. Finally, we are left with the Tramp’s conscious gaze and the understanding that, without overcoming class structures, no real transformation is possible.

City Lights portrays the decay of a system that, even in ruins, continues to fake civilization with statues, ceremonies, and speeches to “defend democracy.” With his revolutionary humor, Chaplin reminds us that laughter is a weapon, especially when it reveals the truth. It is unmissable.

City Lights is available on YouTube.