On the Importance of Trivia

In her review of Charlie Chaplin's The Kid in 5001 Nights at the Movies, Pauline Kael, one of the 20th century's most important film critics, noted that "a little girl named Lita Grey (known as Lolita), later to be Chaplin's wife, appears in a dream sequence set in Heaven."

This final trivia note in her review surprised me in a way and got me thinking about the whole notion of "trivia," which we literally take to mean things of little importance. Kael does not strike me as one to include "unimportant" bits of information in her review, so her inclusion of this strange bit of information made me rethink the potential importance of what we normally call trivia.

 At first, this particular piece of trivia strikes one as slightly salacious, especially given that Kael bothers to note that the girl was known as "Lolita" (a word that, long after Chaplin's film, became associated with underage sirens), and that the "little girl" appears in a dream sequence in Heaven. Chaplin married Grey when she was just 16, just a few years after The Kid was released, and she was one of several much-younger women that he was involved with during his life. Kael's bit of trivia, then, prods us to do additional research (to see if she was actually one of his underage wives) and also seems to emerge as a kind of dig at the long-dead Chaplin, suggesting that he saw young girls as idealized dream figures, after all.

That's all well and good, but how does it help us understand the film? Why does trivia ever matter?  My students are always interested in a similar bit of salacious trivia involving Edgar Allan Poe -- the fact that he married his 13-year-old cousin. So, yes, part of it seems to revolve just around gossip-mongering and the desire for dirt. Yet trivia also humanizes our subjects, reminds us of the intersections between art and life and helps us to get to know filmmakers and authors better by examining their flaws and various obsessions. The Kid, though made in 1921, idealizes and even sentimentalizes children through the gauze of Victorian lace curtains, and Chaplin's ability to understand children affected both his work and his personal life. The Kid is a great movie, my favorite Chaplin film, mostly because of the performance of Jackie Coogan, but we can also see the danger of sentimentalizing childhood. For Chaplin, this led to a messy personal life and even potential legal troubles; in his film, his sentimentality, as Kael notes, was "often awkward, and even mawkish." The perfection of The Kid allows us to see the purity of Chaplin's vision, what he was really going for when he wasn't stumbling on these flaws.

On a more basic and intuitive level, trivia complicates our subject in ways that aren't always clear. Trivia is often strange and surprising; it makes us reexamine our assumptions. Chaplin cast his future young wife as a dream girl. So what? There may not be any clear answer, but it gives us something to think about. That's the simple beauty of trivia.