Have you seen the story that went viral yesterday about the woman walking down the street as an extra in a 1928 Charlie Chaplin silent movie called “The Circus?” The problem is – she seems to be talking on a cell phone – and we didn’t have cell phones in 1928 – or transistor radios – or little recording devices that one could carry and hold by our ear as we spoke into them.
Here’s a link, if you haven’t seen the film itself. If this one isn’t enough for you, or doesn’t work for some reason, just Google or Bing “Time Traveler Chaplin” and you will spring loose a barrel of viewing options for the same brief clip.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4392185/time-traveler-caught-on-tape/
What is this all about? Who really knows, but since we are heading into Halloween weekend, this is as good a time as any to consider the phenomenon.
Forget all the impossibilities for a moment. Here’s my take on what my eyes see: The woman definitely appears to be talking into a device that she holds firmly to her left ear. At the end of the brief segment she is shown in the film, she even stops and turns obliquely to the camera at her left. You can still see her lips moving.
What my head tells me: No way she’s talking into a cell phone. Science wasn’t even close to anything like cell phones, portable radios, or small recorders in 1928. They had a crude hearing aid about that time, but sane people didn’t talk into them as this woman is doing. Even if it were a cell phone, which it could not be without time travel, how would a time traveler use it? There were no cell phone towers back in 1928 and, unless the time traveler were talking to someone back in the time travel ship, there was no one to talk with, anyway. Also, if this were a legitimate time traveling scientist we see, I cannot see how this particular individual could have passed the physical that would have qualified her for such a critical operation. The subject of interest here apparently is female, middle aged, and overweight. Unless the expedition were looking for someone who might blend in better, or she’s wearing a “fat suit,” I would bet on a younger, more fit timestronaut handling this job.
What I really think: I have to go back to my early psychological clinic days at Tulane Med school for this one. During my time as a member of the Tulane clinical faculty in the Department of Psychiatry & Neurology, we worked with a large population of schizophrenics in a drug and treatment studies program and most of these people lived on their own – and some were homeless when we met them.
The tag phrase for these semi-indepedent people was “ambulatory schizophrenia,” meaning simply as it sounds that all these people could get around town on their own, even if they couldn’t hold jobs or get along with others all that well.
Back in the 1960s in New Orleans, and this is probably still true, it wasn’t unusual to pass people on the street who were simply caught up in either talking to themselves or fighting with some unseen phantom adversary. On top of or preceding mental illness, alcohol and other mind-altering substances often came into play as either a foundational or contributing factor in this scenario.
When cell phones first went viral here in Houston, I now recall thinking: “This is getting to be like the old days in New Orleans. All these one-voice conversations we now have to unavoidably sample in public are like the time of epidemic street-loaded schizophrenia back in New Orleans.”
I think the mystery woman in the Chaplin film is most probably an ambulatory schizophrenic who just happened to have wandered into the street scene as an extra. As for the device she’s holding, she may even have fantasized it to be a “portable phone” so that she could stay in touch with whatever forces she felt were protecting her. (If we had the time and right to do so, I could inundate you with case stories of how that worked in the lives of some psychotic patients I knew, but confidentiality bleeds against the practice.)
Sound far-fetched? OK, then drop the schizophrenia possibility and just go with cell phone using time traveler. I can’t think of anything else it might be.
A Saturday Morning Postscript: Schizophrenics are not necessarily impaired on a number of intellectual levels. Many are quite intelligent – and certainly smart enough to have figured out years ago that it’s not talking to yourself that gets you into trouble with society so much as it is doing it in public places often enough in towns and communities that pay attention to that sort of thing. From what I saw with our Tulane patients back in the 1960s, talking with themselves on the streets of New Orleans was not a big problem unless their language or body movements brought threat to others in the immediate area.
It’s occurred to me that many schizophrenics today have quickly figured out that they may talk to themselves in public all they want these days – as long as they are holding a cell phone next to an ear.
Have a nice weekend, everybody. And make sure that cell phone is charged. You never know when you may get whisked away by a time travel service to some other era in which you are the only one there who has one.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
October 29, 2010 at 7:50 pm |
No problem, Prof Bill. The woman is obviously Tess Trueheart and she is merely using one of Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radios. Dick was way ahead of his time. He would call Chief Pat Patton on the two-way to check location of Prune Face, Flat Top, or Mumbles. Bad guys didn’t have a chance against Dick’s high tech gadgets. Back when the Funnies were Funny. BK
November 1, 2010 at 10:51 pm |
When someone is walking and talking to himself in New Orleans, someone might be walking down a street here in Reykjavik, Iceland, also talking to himself. My guess is, they are probably talking to each other.
Re. cell phones in 1928, I’m about as nutty as the next guy(?), but after a lifetime in radio & electronics, starting with crystal sets at 10, I can’t see why electromagnetic radiation should not be able to travel through time.
Thor, Reykjavik Iceland