When Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Pastor, Theorized How Stupidity Enabled the Rise of the Nazis (1942)

in History, Politics | March 26th, 2025

Two days after Adolf Hitler became Chan­cel­lor of Ger­many, the Luther­an pas­tor Diet­rich Bon­ho­ef­fer took to the air­waves. Before his radio broad­cast was cut off, he warned his coun­try­men that their führer could well be a ver­führer, or mis­leader. Bon­ho­ef­fer­’s anti-Nazism last­ed until the end of his life in 1945, when he was exe­cut­ed by the regime for asso­ci­a­tion with the 20 July plot to assas­si­nate Hitler. Even while impris­oned, he kept think­ing about the ori­gins of the polit­i­cal mania that had over­tak­en Ger­many. The force of cen­tral impor­tance to Hitler’s rise was not evil, he con­clud­ed, but stu­pid­i­ty.

“Stu­pid­i­ty is a more dan­ger­ous ene­my of the good than mal­ice,” Bon­ho­ef­fer wrote in a let­ter to his co-con­spir­a­tors on the tenth anniver­sary of Hitler’s acces­sion to the chan­cel­lor­ship. “One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, pre­vent­ed by use of force. Evil always car­ries with­in itself the germ of its own sub­ver­sion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stu­pid­i­ty we are defense­less.” When pro­voked, “the stu­pid per­son, in con­trast to the mali­cious one, is utter­ly self-sat­is­fied and, being eas­i­ly irri­tat­ed, becomes dan­ger­ous by going on the attack.”

Fight­ing stu­pid­i­ty, to Bon­ho­ef­fer­’s mind, first neces­si­tates under­stand­ing it. “In essence not an intel­lec­tu­al defect but a human one,” stu­pid­i­ty can descend upon prac­ti­cal­ly any­one: “under cer­tain cir­cum­stances, peo­ple are made stu­pid or that they allow this to hap­pen to them.” And it hap­pens most notice­ably when a par­tic­u­lar fig­ure or move­ment seizes the atten­tion of the pub­lic. “Every strong upsurge of pow­er in the pub­lic sphere, be it of a polit­i­cal or of a reli­gious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stu­pid­i­ty,” he writes. Since such phe­nom­e­na could hard­ly arise with­out blind­ly obe­di­ent mass­es, it seems that “the pow­er of the one needs the stu­pid­i­ty of the oth­er.”

You can see Bon­ho­ef­fer­’s the­o­ry of stu­pid­i­ty explained in the illus­trat­ed Sprouts video above, and you can learn more about the man him­self from the doc­u­men­tary Bon­ho­ef­fer. Or, bet­ter yet, read his col­lec­tion, Let­ters and Papers from Prison. Though root­ed in his time, cul­ture, and reli­gion, his thought remains rel­e­vant wher­ev­er humans fol­low the crowd. “The fact that the stu­pid per­son is often stub­born must not blind us to the fact that he is not inde­pen­dent,” he writes, which held as true in the pub­lic squares of wartime Europe as it does on the social-media plat­forms of today. “In con­ver­sa­tion with him, one vir­tu­al­ly feels that one is deal­ing not at all with a per­son, but with slo­gans, catch­words and the like, that have tak­en pos­ses­sion of him.” What­ev­er would sur­prise Bon­ho­ef­fer about our time, he would know exact­ly what we mean when we call stu­pid peo­ple “tools.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nature of Human Stu­pid­i­ty Explained by The 48 Laws of Pow­er Author Robert Greene

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

When The Twilight Zone Imagined Fascism in America in a 1963 Episode Starring Dennis Hopper

in History, Television | March 25th, 2025

Watch through The Twi­light Zone, and you’ll find your­self spot­ting no end of famil­iar faces: Julie New­mar, Burt Reynolds, Robert Red­ford, Eliz­a­beth Mont­gomery, William Shat­ner, even Buster Keaton. The 1963 episode “He’s Alive” is at least dou­bly notable in that respect, fea­tur­ing as it does a young (but in act­ing sen­si­bil­i­ty, almost ful­ly formed) Den­nis Hop­per as Peter Vollmer, a ne’er-do-well made into an aspir­ing dic­ta­tor by none oth­er than Adolf Hitler. Played by Curt Con­way, a spe­cial­ist in doc­tors, judges, and oth­er author­i­ty fig­ures, the undead Führer offers his young dis­ci­ple instruc­tions like the above, from an ear­ly scene before his iden­ti­ty is revealed.

“How do you move a mob, Mr. Vollmer? How do you excite them? How do you make them feel as one with you?” Hitler asks. The answer, which he then pro­vides, is first to join them: “When you speak to them, speak to them as if you were a mem­ber of the mob. Speak to them in their lan­guage, on their lev­el. Make their hate your hate. If they are poor, talk to them of pover­ty. If they are afraid, talk to them of their fears. And if they are angry, Mr. Vollmer… if they are angry, give them objects for their anger. But most of all, the thing that is most of the essence, Mr. Vollmer, is that you make this mob an exten­sion of your­self.”

If accused of scape­goat­ing minori­ties, he should address the throng thus: “Should I tell you who are the minori­ties? Should I tell you? We! We are the minori­ties.” Soon, we see Peter in full neo-Nazi gear deliv­er­ing just such a harangue, thor­ough­ly Hop­per-ized in dic­tion, to a mod­est­ly attend­ed ral­ly. How could these ordi­nary-look­ing atten­dees be a minor­i­ty? “Because patri­o­tism is a minor­i­ty. Because love of coun­try is the minor­i­ty. Because to live in a free, white Amer­i­ca seems to be of a minor­i­ty opin­ion!” Though hard­ly art­ful, this rhetoric even­tu­al­ly makes him into a pop­u­lar fig­ure, albeit one whose rise is cut short when he turns to con­spir­a­cy to accel­er­ate his rise to pow­er.

And what of the spir­it of Hitler? “Where will he go next, this phan­tom from anoth­er time, this res­ur­rect­ed ghost of a pre­vi­ous night­mare?” Twi­light Zone cre­ator Rod Ser­ling asks in his episode-clos­ing mono­logue. “Any place, every place where there’s hate, where there’s prej­u­dice, where there’s big­otry.” It was against such broad social phe­nom­e­na that Ser­ling so often used his scripts to argue, and with “He’s Alive,” he made use of an unusu­al­ly vivid ide­o­log­i­cal exam­ple. A vet­er­an of the Sec­ond World War, which had end­ed less than twen­ty years ear­li­er, Ser­ling sure­ly had even fresh­er mem­o­ries of the threat of Hitler than did the gen­er­al Amer­i­can pub­lic — and under­stood even more clear­ly what could hap­pen if those mem­o­ries were to fade away.

Relat­ed con­tent:

When Rod Ser­ling Turned TV Pitch­man: See His Post-Twi­light Zone Ads for Ford, Maz­da, Gulf Oil & Smokey Bear

When 20,000 Amer­i­cans Held a Pro-Nazi Ral­ly in Madi­son Square Gar­den

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 42 ) |

Every Hidden Detail of New York’s Classic Skyscrapers: The Chrysler, Empire State & Woolworth Buildings

in Architecture, History | March 24th, 2025

Cur­rent­ly, the tallest build­ings in New York City are One World Trade Cen­ter, Cen­tral Park Tow­er, and 111 West 57th Street. All of them were com­plet­ed in the twen­ty-twen­ties, and all of them have attract­ed com­ment, some­times admir­ing, some­times bewil­dered. But none of them, fair to say, yet exude the romance of the Wool­worth Build­ing, the Chrysler Build­ing, and the Empire State Build­ing, all of which opened before World War II, and each of which once had its day as the tallest build­ing in the world. Here to explain these endur­ing “big stars of the New York City sky­line” is archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­an Tony Robins, who in the half-hour video above tells the sto­ry of all their impor­tant details, inside and out.

In fact, this video comes as the pilot episode of “Obses­sion to Detail,” a new series from Dai­ly Mail Busi­ness YouTube chan­nel. The Mail may not come right to mind as a source of archi­tec­tur­al com­men­tary, but in this case, they’ve found the right man for the job.

He knows that the Wool­worth Build­ing’s lob­by con­tains gar­goyle-like car­i­ca­tures of its archi­tect and client; that the Chrysler Build­ing once had a pri­vate club on its 66th, 67th, and 68th floors whose bar had both a paint­ing of the New York sky­line and a view of the real thing; that the 86-sto­ry Empire State Build­ing is pro­mot­ed as hav­ing 102 sto­ries only by includ­ing its unused diri­gi­ble moor­ing mast and sub-base­ments; and that what we now call Art Deco was, in its day, referred to as “the ver­ti­cal style,” in ref­er­ence to the pro­por­tions its build­ings were rapid­ly gain­ing.

An expe­ri­enced New York tour guide, Robins would be remiss if he did­n’t tell you all these facts and many more besides. It’s pre­sum­ably also part of his job to frame the process­es that gave rise (or indeed, high rise) to these sky­scrap­ers as in keep­ing with the cease­less one-upman­ship and self-pro­mo­tion that is the spir­it of his city. A par­tic­u­lar­ly illus­tra­tive episode occurred when Minoru Yamasak­i’s orig­i­nal World Trade Cen­ter went up in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, which pro­voked a response from the Empire State Build­ing in the form of a rec­tan­gu­lar addi­tion on top that would pre­serve its sta­tus as the world’s tallest build­ing. Robins has been in the game long enough to have had the chance to ask the archi­tect who designed that pro­pos­al if he was seri­ous. “Of course not,” came the reply. “This was all for pub­lic rela­tions. This is New York. This is who we are. This is what we do.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Archi­tect Demys­ti­fies the Art Deco Design of the Icon­ic Chrysler Build­ing (1930)

The Sto­ry of the Flat­iron Build­ing, “New York’s Strangest Tow­er”

An Immer­sive, Archi­tec­tur­al Tour of New York City’s Icon­ic Grand Cen­tral Ter­mi­nal

Watch the Build­ing of the Empire State Build­ing in Col­or: The Cre­ation of the Icon­ic 1930s Sky­scraper From Start to Fin­ish

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

How the World Trade Cen­ter Was Rebuilt: A Visu­al Explo­ration of a 20-Year Project

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

An Introduction to The Garden of Earthly Delights & Hieronymus Bosch’s Wildly Creative Vision

in Art, History | March 19th, 2025

Hierony­mus Bosch’s mas­ter­piece of grotes­querie, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, con­tains a young God, Adam and Eve, over­sized fruits and musi­cal instru­ments, owls, tor­tured sin­ners, some­thing called a “tree man” whose body con­tains an entire tav­ern, a defe­cat­ing avian dev­il eat­ing a human being, and “frol­ick­ing, obliv­i­ous fig­ures engaged in all sorts of car­nal plea­sures,” as art his­to­ri­an Beth Har­ris puts it in the new Smarthis­to­ry video above. Through­out its fif­teen min­utes, she and her col­league Steven Zuck­er explain as much as pos­si­ble of this jam-packed trip­tych — not that even a life­time would be long enough to under­stand it ful­ly.

“Bosch con­founds our abil­i­ty to even talk about what we see,” says Har­ris. “His imag­i­na­tion has run wild. He’s just invent­ed so many things here that we could nev­er even have thought about in our wildest imag­i­na­tions.” Zuck­er cites one art-his­to­ry the­o­ry that this trip­tych rep­re­sents Bosch’s attempt to “ele­vate the visu­al arts to the lev­el of cre­ativ­i­ty that was per­mit­ted in lit­er­a­ture.”

Even in Bosch’s late fif­teenth and ear­ly six­teenth cen­turies, writ­ers had an envi­ably free hand in choos­ing and pre­sent­ing their sub­ject mat­ter; because the direct­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive form of paint­ing, by con­trast, “had always been at the ser­vice of reli­gion, it was inher­ent­ly more con­ser­v­a­tive.”

It’s entire­ly pos­si­ble — and oth­er analy­ses pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here at Open Cul­ture have argued it – that Bosch, too, was work­ing at the ser­vice of reli­gion. But it could also be that The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, in its vast mid­dle pan­el, tells “an alter­nate sto­ry,” as Zuck­er puts it. “What if the temp­ta­tion had not tak­en place? What if Adam and Eve had remained inno­cent, and had pop­u­lat­ed the world? And so, is it pos­si­ble that what we’re see­ing is that real­i­ty, played out in Bosch’s imag­i­na­tion?” Not that such a vision would have read­i­ly been accept­ed in the artist’s own time and place — nor that his inten­tions alone could lead us to a com­plete inter­pre­ta­tion of his work. As any nov­el­ist knows, some­times your char­ac­ters sim­ply take over, and it could hard­ly have been with­in even Bosch’s pow­ers to deny the desires of a cast so teem­ing and bizarre.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Explained

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing, “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights,” Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

The Mean­ing of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Spell­bind­ing Trip­tych The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Com­plete Works: Zoom In & Explore His Sur­re­al Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

NYU Professor Answers Your Burning Questions About Authoritarianism

in Current Affairs, History | March 19th, 2025

From WIRED comes this: NYU pro­fes­sor and “author­i­tar­i­an­ism schol­ar Ruth Ben-Ghi­at joins WIRED to answer the inter­net’s burn­ing ques­tions about dic­ta­tors and fas­cism. Why do peo­ple sup­port dic­ta­tors? How do dic­ta­tors come to pow­er? What’s the dif­fer­ence between a dic­ta­tor­ship, an autoc­ra­cy, and author­i­tar­i­an­ism? What are the most com­mon per­son­al­i­ty traits found in tyrants and dic­ta­tors? Is Xi Jin­ping a dic­ta­tor? How do dic­ta­tors amass wealth? Pro­fes­sor Ben-Ghi­at answers these ques­tions and many more on Tech Sup­port: Dic­ta­tor Sup­port.” Watch the video above and pick up a copy of Ben-Ghi­at’s time­ly, best­selling book: Strong­men: Mus­soli­ni to the Present.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Are You a Fas­cist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Test Cre­at­ed to Com­bat Fas­cism (1947)

Han­nah Arendt Explains Why Democ­ra­cies Need to Safe­guard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Them­selves Against Dic­ta­tors and Their Lies

Umber­to Eco’s List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Tour of Ancient Rome’s Best Graffiti: “We Have Urinated in Our Beds … There Was No Chamber Pot” & More

in History, Writing | March 17th, 2025

Apart from the likes of bra­vo and piz­za, graf­fi­ti must be one of the first Ital­ian words that Eng­lish-speak­ers learn in every­day life. As for why the Eng­lish word comes direct­ly from the Ital­ian, per­haps it has some­thing to do with the his­to­ry of writ­ing on the walls — a his­to­ry that, in West­ern civ­i­liza­tion, stretch­es at least as far back as the time of the Roman Empire. The Fire of Learn­ing video above offers a selec­tion of trans­lat­ed pieces of the more than 11,000 pieces of ancient Roman graf­fi­ti found etched into the pre­served walls of Pom­peii: “Mar­cus loves Spe­dusa”; “Phileros is a eunuch”; “Secun­dus took a crap here” (writ­ten three times); “Atime­tus got me preg­nant”; and “On April 19th, I made bread.”

Crude though some of these may sound, the nar­ra­tor empha­sizes that “many, many of the promi­nent pieces of graf­fi­ti, espe­cial­ly in Pom­peii, are too sex­u­al or vio­lent to show here,” com­par­ing their sen­si­bil­i­ty to that of “a high-school bath­room stall.” You can read more of them at The Ancient Graf­fi­ti Project, whose archive is brows­able through cat­e­gories like “love,” “poet­ry,” “food,” and “glad­i­a­tors” (as decent a sum­ma­ry as any of life in ancient Rome).

Romans did­n’t just write on the walls — a prac­tice that seems to have been encour­aged, at least in some places — they also drew on them, as evi­denced by what you can see in the fig­ur­al graf­fi­ti sec­tion, as well as the exam­ples in the video.

Anoth­er rich archive of ancient graf­fi­ti comes from a sur­pris­ing loca­tion: the Egypt­ian pyra­mids, then as now a major tourist attrac­tion. Rather than post­ing their reviews of the attrac­tion on the inter­net, in our twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry man­ner, ancient Roman tourists wrote direct­ly on its sur­face. “I vis­it­ed and did not like any­thing except the sar­coph­a­gus,” says one inscrip­tion; “I can not read the hiero­glyph­ics,” com­plains anoth­er, in a man­ner that may sound awful­ly famil­iar these mil­len­nia lat­er. “We have uri­nat­ed in our beds,” declares anoth­er piece of writ­ing, dis­cov­ered on the door of a Pom­peii inn. “Host, I admit we should not have done this. If you ask why? There was no cham­ber pot.” Con­sid­er it con­firmed: the ancient world, too, had Airbnb guests.

Relat­ed con­tent:

High-Tech Analy­sis of Ancient Scroll Reveals Plato’s Bur­ial Site and Final Hours

Demys­ti­fy­ing the Activist Graf­fi­ti Art of Kei­th Har­ing: A Video Essay

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

Tour the World’s Street Art with Google Street Art

Big Bang Big Boom: Graf­fi­ti Stop-Motion Ani­ma­tion Cre­ative­ly Depicts the Evo­lu­tion of Life

The Only Writ­ten Eye-Wit­ness Account of Pompeii’s Destruc­tion: Hear Pliny the Younger’s Let­ters on the Mount Vesu­vius Erup­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Ancient Greeks Who Converted to Buddhism

in History, Religion | March 14th, 2025

It would hard­ly be notable to make the acquain­tance of a Greek Bud­dhist today. Despite hav­ing orig­i­nat­ed in Asia, that reli­gion — or phi­los­o­phy, or way of life, or what­ev­er you pre­fer to call it — now has adher­ents all over the world. Mod­ern-day Bud­dhists need not make an ardu­ous jour­ney in order to under­take an even more ardu­ous course of study under a rec­og­nized mas­ter; nor are the forms of Bud­dhism they prac­tice always rec­og­niz­able to the lay­man. What’s more sur­pris­ing is that the trans­plan­ta­tion into and hybridiza­tion with oth­er cul­tures that has brought about so many nov­el strains of Bud­dhism was going on even in the ancient world.

Take, for exam­ple, the “Gre­co-Bud­dhism” described in the Reli­gion for Break­fast video above, the sto­ry of which involves a vari­ety of fas­ci­nat­ing fig­ures both uni­ver­sal­ly known and rel­a­tive­ly obscure. The most famous of all of them would be Alexan­der the Great, who, as host Andrew Hen­ry puts it, “con­quered a mas­sive empire stretch­ing from Greece across cen­tral Asia all the way to the Indus Riv­er, Hel­l­eniz­ing the pop­u­la­tions along the way.”

But “the cul­tur­al exchange did­n’t just go one way,” as evi­denced by the still-new Bud­dhist reli­gion also spread­ing in the oth­er direc­tion, illus­trat­ed by pieces of text and works of art clear­ly shaped by both civ­i­liza­tion­al cur­rents.

Oth­er major play­ers in Gre­co-Bud­dhism include the philoso­pher Pyrrho of Elis, who trav­eled with Alexan­der and took ideas of the sus­pen­sion of judg­ment from Indi­a’s “gym­nosophists”; Ashoka, emper­or of the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent in the third cen­tu­ry BC, an avowed Bud­dhist who renounced vio­lence for com­pas­sion (and pros­e­ly­ti­za­tion); and King Menan­der, “the most famous Greek who con­vert­ed to Bud­dhism,” who appears as a char­ac­ter in an ear­ly Bud­dhist text. It can still be dif­fi­cult to say for sure exact­ly who believed what in that peri­od, but it’s not hard to iden­ti­fy res­o­nances between Bud­dhist prin­ci­ples, broad­ly speak­ing, and those of such wide­ly known ancient Greek schools of thought as Sto­icism. Both of those belief sys­tems now hap­pen to have a good deal of cur­ren­cy in Sil­i­con Val­ley, though what lega­cy they’ll leave to be dis­cov­ered in its ruins a cou­ple mil­len­nia from now remains to be seen.


Relat­ed con­tent:

Take Harvard’s Intro­duc­to­ry Course on Bud­dhism, One of Five World Reli­gions Class­es Offered Free Online

Learn the His­to­ry of Indi­an Phi­los­o­phy in a 62 Episode Series from The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy With­out Any Gaps: The Bud­dha, Bha­gavad-Gita, Non Vio­lence & More

One of the Old­est Bud­dhist Man­u­scripts Has Been Dig­i­tized & Put Online: Explore the Gand­hara Scroll

Breath­tak­ing­ly Detailed Tibetan Book Print­ed 40 Years Before the Guten­berg Bible

Dis­cov­er the World’s Old­est Uni­ver­si­ty, Which Opened in 427 CE, Housed 9 Mil­lion Man­u­scripts, and Then Edu­cat­ed Stu­dents for 800 Years

Con­cepts of the Hero in Greek Civ­i­liza­tion (A Free Har­vard Course)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch the Only Time Charlie Chaplin & Buster Keaton Performed Together On-Screen (1952)

in Film, History | March 13th, 2025

Char­lie Chap­lin and Buster Keaton were the two biggest com­e­dy stars of the silent era, but as it hap­pened, they nev­er shared the screen until well into the reign of sound. In fact, their col­lab­o­ra­tion did­n’t come about until 1952, the same year that Sin­gin’ in the Rain dra­ma­tized the already dis­tant-feel­ing advent of talk­ing pic­tures. That hit musi­cal deals with once-famous artists cop­ing with a chang­ing world, and so, in its own way, does Lime­light, the film that final­ly brought Chap­lin and Keaton togeth­er, deal­ing as it does with a washed-up music-hall star in the Lon­don of 1914.

A spe­cial­ist in down­trod­den pro­tag­o­nists, Chap­lin — who hap­pened to have made his own tran­si­tion from vaude­ville to motion pic­tures in 1914 — nat­u­ral­ly plays that star­ring role. Keaton appears only late in the film, as an old part­ner of Chap­lin’s char­ac­ter who takes the stage with him to per­form a duet at a ben­e­fit con­cert that promis­es the sal­va­tion of their careers. In real­i­ty, this scene had some of that same appeal for Keaton him­self, who had yet to recov­er finan­cial­ly or pro­fes­sion­al­ly after a ruinous divorce in the mid-nine­teen-thir­ties, and had been strug­gling for trac­tion on the new medi­um of tele­vi­sion.

Though Lime­light may be a sound film, and Chap­lin and Keaton’s scene may be a musi­cal num­ber, what they exe­cute togeth­er is, for all intents and pur­pos­es, a work of silent com­e­dy. Chap­lin plays the vio­lin and Keaton plays the piano, but before either of them can get a note out of their instru­ments, they must first deal with a series of tech­ni­cal mishaps and wardrobe mal­func­tions. This is in keep­ing with a theme both per­form­ers essayed over and over again in their silent hey­day: that of the human being made inept by the com­pli­ca­tions of an inhu­man world.

But of course, Chap­lin and Keaton’s char­ac­ters usu­al­ly found their ways to tri­umph at least tem­porar­i­ly over that world in the end, and so it comes to pass in Lime­light — moments before the hap­less vio­lin­ist him­self pass­es on, the vic­tim of an onstage heart attack. In the real world, both of these two icons from a bygone age had at least anoth­er act ahead of them, Chap­lin with more films to direct back in his native Eng­land and Europe, and Keaton as a kind of liv­ing leg­end for hire, called up when­ev­er Hol­ly­wood need­ed a shot of what had been redis­cov­ered — not least thanks to TV’s re-cir­cu­la­tion of old movies — as the mag­ic of silent pic­tures.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Char­lie Chap­lin & Buster Keaton Go Toe to Toe (Almost) in a Hilar­i­ous Box­ing Scene Mash Up from Their Clas­sic Silent Films

Dis­cov­er the Cin­e­mat­ic & Comedic Genius of Char­lie Chap­lin with 60+ Free Movies Online

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts

When Char­lie Chap­lin First Spoke Onscreen: How His Famous Great Dic­ta­tor Speech Came About

30 Buster Keaton Films: “The Great­est of All Com­ic Actors,” “One of the Great­est Film­mak­ers of All Time”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast