Revisiting The Kid’s pancake scene 100 years on | Little White Lies

Revis­it­ing The Kid’s pan­cake scene 100 years on

21 Jan 2021

Words by Saffron Maeve

Two people, a woman and a young child, sitting at a table and eating.
Two people, a woman and a young child, sitting at a table and eating.
Char­lie Chaplin’s debut fea­ture as a direc­tor con­tains a brief moment of lux­u­ry in a film marked by scarcity.

The idea of mea­sur­ing time in cen­turies has always made me anx­ious. There’s too much that can hap­pen in a hun­dred years: moun­tains shift; atom­ic bombs det­o­nate; angry men wage wars while heat packs into the atmos­phere like grease under a pot lid; dis­co hap­pens. How can 1901 and 1999 pos­si­bly be cat­e­gorised under the same ban­ner? How can 2001 and 2099?

It’s strange to think that a hun­dred years ago, at Carnegie Hall in New York City, a film was dropped into the pub­lic con­scious­ness, and some 99 years lat­er it fell into mine with sim­i­lar fer­vour. It’s strange to think that in that film, amid tear-yank­ing sequences of fall­en angels and des­ti­tute chil­dren, I’d be most affect­ed by a brief and innocu­ous break­fast scene. 

Char­lie Chaplin’s first fea­ture-length direc­to­r­i­al effort, The Kid, is described in its open­ing title card as a pic­ture with a smile – and per­haps, a tear.” The film is a kind of Dick­en­sian love sto­ry that fol­lows the Tramp (Chap­lin) as he rais­es an orphaned boy he finds on the street (Jack­ie Coogan, tiny and remarkable).

To get by, the Kid flings rocks through people’s win­dows and flees just as the Tramp arrives at the scene, serendip­i­tous­ly equipped with the tools to fix them. Fist­fights with neigh­bour­hood bul­lies and a vis­it from a doc­tor then lead to the damn­ing dis­cov­ery that the Tramp unof­fi­cial­ly adopt­ed his child. Some­where in between pulling schemes and becom­ing fugi­tives, they eat pan­cakes for breakfast.

A meal is rarely ever a meal in Chaplin’s world. In Mod­ern Times, a mal­func­tion­ing feed­ing machine uses cake and cobs of corn to mock indus­tri­al cap­i­tal­ism. The Gold Rush spins tragedy into com­e­dy by hav­ing the Tramp tuck into a din­ner of boiled boot and shoelace spaghet­ti. Food becomes an eye-catch­ing and mal­leable device that fore­grounds suf­fer­ing as much as it does com­e­dy. But in The Kid, pan­cakes are exact­ly what they are sup­posed to be: pure, sug­ary joy. 

The boy cooks them eager­ly, mess­i­ly spoon­ing bat­ter into the pan while tear­ing off and eat­ing bits from the stack. The Tramp mean­ders from the bed to the table, wear­ing a torn blan­ket like a giant bib. A tow­er of pil­lowy flap­jacks is flanked by a tin of Karo syrup and two tall squares of but­ter. The Kid licks his knife while the Tramp assem­bles a doughy, fist-sized bite that we nev­er get to see him eat. They sit, and pray, and in one swift cut, they’ve wiped their plates clean. 

Sad­ly, the word pan­cake’ appears approx­i­mate­ly zero times on The Kid’s Wikipedia page, or on any major sites’ analy­ses of the film. That break­fast is a small but nec­es­sary moment whose warm con­tri­bu­tions to the work are mas­sive­ly over­looked. Not only are those cakes a momen­tary exhale from the heft of get­ting by, but the very act of cook­ing and eat­ing them seam­less­ly illus­trates the Tramp and the Kid’s rela­tion­ship: not strict­ly pater­nal, some­thing more pro­nounced than friend­ship, both and nei­ther all at once. 

The lit­tle one cooks, the big­ger one reminds them to say grace before eat­ing. The big one counts the pan­cakes to make sure they have an equal num­ber; they don’t, so the big one splits one in half. They take care of each oth­er. In briefly lean­ing away from slap­stick, the film becomes all the more human – embrac­ing a domes­tic leisure rarely grant­ed to poor char­ac­ters on screen. If their forced sep­a­ra­tion is that fore­warned tear, then the pan­cake scene is the smile. 

We may be a hun­dred years removed from the Tramp and his wide-eyed child, but I can still see them with whet­ted clar­i­ty: they’re pat­ting their bel­lies and we’re there too, all con­vened in that small room, pour­ing bat­ter into hot skillets.

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