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Understanding McLuhan
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Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso
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07107_Field_TCUM T672.txt
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1996-04-10
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16 lines
integral man. This is the formula for helpless incompetence. On
the street, in social situations, on the assembly line, the worker
continues his compulsive twitchings with an imaginary wrench.
But the mime of this Chaplin film and others is precisely that of
the robot, the mechanical doll whose deep pathos it is to
approximate so closely to the condition of human life. Chaplin,
in all his work, did a puppetlike ballet of the Cyrano de Bergerac
kind. In order to capture this puppetlike pathos, Chaplin (a
devotee of ballet and personal friend of Pavlova) adopted from
the first the foot postures of classical ballet. Thus he could
have the aura of Spectre de la Rose shimmering around his
clown getup. From the British music hall, his first training
ground, with a sure touch of genius he took images like that of
Mr. Charles Pooter, the haunting figure of a nobody. This
shoddy-genteel image he invested with an envelope of fairy
romance by means of adherence to the classic ballet postures.