Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times

The Work of Life in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility

Carl Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000519556
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book looks at Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece, Modern Times (1936), through the lens of film aesthetics, structure, and post-modern perspective.

The naïve Tramp character of Modern Times is often seen as the embodiment of a revolutionary reaction to his age. However, this study of the film shows that it is not only difficult but also impossible to accept the long-established critical reception of Chaplin's film and its characters in our own "Post-modern Times." Drawing from extensive research and bringing post-modern context to the film through a comparative analysis of Todd Phillips's Joker (2019), the book introduces how exhilarating a comprehensive study of film can be for engaged viewers.

Illustrating that a detailed filmic reading of Modern Times can be a guide, or an extended case study, for analysing culture, this book will be of interest to students and teachers in film studies, literary studies, and the visual arts.

1

Work

DOI: 10.4324/9780429323317-1

The first image in Modern Times is of a clock ticking. It touches on the absurd—the experience of watching a recording of time as it passes in a film that is called Modern Times, which can only be modern now, after the fact, because of its title. The present spectator of Modern Times is never contemporary with the time of the film’s creation—Modern Times is historical time from the point of view of where the spectator is now. In Walter Benjamin’s sense, its “modernity” is experienced as “inauthentic.”¹ The opening images are almost nostalgic. Their silence is mute—they say: this was what it was like; these were modern times:

A factory worker …

… CHARLIE CHAPLIN

A gamin …

… PAULETTE GODDARD

And if that isn’t clear enough, we have a whole story set down before us which proves, in the end, to be not only a comedy but also something else altogether—a documentary—something to evoke more than laughter; “to add another dimension to my films,” Chaplin asserts, “besides that of comedy” (My Autobiography 4). Poverty is more than laughter in Chaplin’s “modern times”; “This attitude of wanting to make poverty attractive for the other person is annoying. I have yet to know a poor man who has nostalgia for poverty, or who finds freedom in it” (Chaplin in My Autobiography 267).

“Modern Times. A story of industry, of individual enterprise—humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness” its title card reads—the alleged human condition of its day. Its “story” will be documented from the standpoint of its two main characters—the Tramp and the “gamine”—and not solely from the Tramp’s viewpoint. Indeed, as Chaplin’s biographer David Robinson points out, “the scenes of the Gamin’s troubles before her meeting the Tramp are among the very rare instances in Chaplin’s films … where there is an independent secondary and parallel line of action running alongside the narrative of the Tramp’s misadventures” (Chaplin: His Life and Art 459). The “gamine’s” story, however, is not secondary to the film: her role as a main, rather than incidental character is what adds another dimension to Chaplin’s art “besides that of comedy.”

The audience is looking at a work of art which depicts the Tramp looking at life. But he’s doing so in a work of art. Both experiences—the audience’s and the Tramp’s—are unsettling; displacing—almost like “Being in the wrong place,” as Viktor Shklovsky puts it, “not recognizing things—this is the eternal topic of art” (Shklovsky 358).² The film and its story is prospective. The spectator—like the Tramp—never knows what to expect:

they go inadvertently into a theatre or they look up and see something that they feel, they’re in the mood, and they would like to see—and I think—they go in. And it’s all by chance. They don’t know what they’re going to see beforehand.

(Charlie Chaplin: Interviews 114)

Times change; in the making of the film, “modern” becomes “historical,” then emblematic of its age—“classic.” But it is the “times” that are modern, and not the Tramp, since “modern” means “a person who advocates or practices a departure from traditional styles or values.” The Tramp of Modern Times is emphatically not that; however, it remains to be seen—he does become very briefly “modern” in a very specific way at the end of the film. And even though the title puts the march of time—of which Chaplin is acutely aware—in plain view from the outset (the clock advances from the opening scene), the audience is not ready nor is it prepared for the Tramp’s transformation at the end of the film. Shklovsky’s point is proven true in Todd Phillips’ film, Joker, when Arthur Fleck, in the Wayne Theatre, is looking at the “same” work of art—Modern Times—in retrospect, laughing with the audiences’ laughter—becoming part of it—this wannabe “joker” of post-modern times. In Modern Times, more than anything else, it is the recorded salesman of the feeding machine who serves as an agent—a meme—of the displacement and disembodiment of the age.

The film opens with an image of pre-modern times, of agrarian society, of herded sheep. Modern Times is no longer the world of the shepherd; Modern Times is the world of the Capitalist boss, the age of mechanized, industrialized society, in which human workers rush to the factory like sheep to the shearing pens.

The opening images of the “crusading” masses (the original provisional titles for the film were “The Masses” and/or “The Commonwealth”) beg the question of the conditions of the “pursuit of happiness”, but these images serve to establish the ethos of the film, and how we are to watch and see “modern times”—that is, in historical context. The opening montage of herded sheep (with one black sheep among them) fading into factory workers exiting a subway, entering a factory and punching timecards is an image that stands out in the opening few moments of the movie, which looks and feels like a documentary or short parody of a propaganda film. It is an image that establishes Chaplin’s trope. The Tramp, another black sheep, will ground the brutal truth of the film—sheep, like workers, do what they are told, and black sheep have little or no value or use beyond their bodies—their wool cannot be dyed in any colour other than its own.

So, the Tramp as a worker is already meat for the grinder in Modern Times. The metaphor of herded sheep extends to the workers on the assembly line, where we first recognize Chaplin’s Tramp in his role as an incompetent factory worker; and the assembly line itself becomes a metaphor for film, since film and assembly lines consist of a series of interchangeable “parts” (scenes, episodes constructed of still images) assembled in a sequence that add up producing a final product—in this case—the “whole” film Modern Times. In an extended conceit, every scene in the film is a microcosm of “modern times”; moreover, every gag is a metaphor for its overall narrative—its “message”—and when the audience’s attention is made to shift, the gag—the joke—is revealed.

Here, we put our finger on the joke that the opening scene constructs. Chaplin is showing us Henry Ford’s America because Modern Times is that America—Modern Times is the factory—“modern times” is the assembly line; “modern times” is industrialization, standardization, efficiency—the dehumanizing bureaucratization of all experience. But he is also critiquing Ford’s America by parodying life in the factory as a place where work is reduced to a caricature of its most meaninglessly repeated actions. This is what is at once comical and terrifying about the first character we see in Modern Times: the Capitalist president-boss. He is seen busying himself with a puzzle, gets bored with it and then picks up the newspaper featuring his “funnies.” His “reading” of the newspaper, which features a Tarzan comic on its back page, visible to the audience, is the joke and anticipates the action that ensues; the crucial moment in this opening scene is the shift of the president’s attention. His intellectual grasp of the world shifts, first from the puzzle (of life), then to the purported objective, broad, “factual” newspaper reportage of the times (which we know to be heavily coloured by the ideology of the day), and finally to the subjective, reductionist, clichéd comic strip. The Tarzan comic that concludes the newspaper represents a reductionist vision of human relationships; the shift in the boss’s attention from puzzle of the world to the “objective reality” of the news to clichéd reality of the comic strip. Modern Times is structured around shifts from the hard objective reality of life in the industrial age to its clichéd, comic reality—and the agent of this transformation is the factory. It is constructed by shifts in our perception of the familiar and the predictable expectations in and about everyday life dominated by productive work, to the unexpected comic failures of ineptitude in the face of conformity. Modern Times, then, documents the mechanization of the public realm—the standardization of human behaviour and interaction through industrialization for the sake of efficiency and profit—and the comic farce this reductionist version of human relationships produces for the audience (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The president with his Tarzan comic

The Capitalist-owner boss’s function is singular: to increase the speed of the means of production at all costs. But the Tramp can’t escape the assembly line that he seems to have put his faith in—he has a hard time keeping up with his own body.

The order imposed on the workers on the assembly line as well as the absurd order forced on the Tramp by the inventor of the mechanical feeding machine will become the subject of a problem—of conflict—that each episode in Modern Times will expound upon and that the Tramp reacts to and embodies in his life within “modern times.” These early, opening scenes foreground the many gags that Chaplin introduces throughout the film, especially in its semi-final act in the café which features the last employment of the Tramp as a singing waiter, where Chaplin gives himself a voice—a language. The Tramp’s transformation at the end of Modern Times is the apocalypse of “his” time, and then, he will move on, but in doing so, he will enter post-modern time—time after Modern Times—with the gamine.³ Chaplin will never again use the Tramp as a character—he truly is a child of his age who can speak only in tongues in the coming post-modern world of “talkies.”

The “busyness” of the factory assembly line is immediately countered with the sedate interior of the factory boss’s impersonal office. His authority looms everywhere—even the sacrosanct privacy of the washroom to which the Tramp escapes to have an unauthorized smoke-break is subject to his surveillance—and he exercises it with detached and disinterested demands. Ironically, his authoritarian demands belie the fact that he is also a nervous wreck without his drugs. On the one hand, the mechanization of the factory, with its assembly lines and commoditized time, is embedded in his language—his directives are mostly commands with numbers—more speed begets more production—directives which are mediated by screens on which he appears as an imposing projection, echoing those of the recorded salesman of the feeding machine. On the other hand, he is human. Time seems to weigh on him like a burden. He first appears to us ingesting pills that his secretary brings to him. His role in life is confined to just one: increase the speed and rate of creating products by controlling the means of production which dominate his assembly line workers.

And this is where we encounter the Tramp in his first role in Modern Times. He will fulfil many other roles before reaching that final tableaux he is famous for: walking off towards the horizon on a divided highway with the gamine. Industrialized, mechanized and standardized modern experience—Modern Times⁴—will fracture his identity. His pursuit of happiness in this modern life of mechanical reproducibility will cause him to become a mental patient, a criminal, a shipyard worker, a night watchman and, finally, a singing waiter. He will fail at all these roles as the roles will constantly fail him. On the other hand, his fate is that of the Tramp—a homeless man who belongs nowhere—a role he resumes upon release from the asylum.⁵

According to Chaplin, it was a combination of a meeting with Paulette Goddard and a visit to Detroit (“Motor City”) that inspired the making of Modern Times:

Paulette struck me as being somewhat of a gamine.⁶ This would be a wonderful quality for me to get on screen. I could imagine us meeting in a crowded patrol wagon, the tramp and his gamine, and the tramp being very gallant and offering her his seat. This was the basis on which I could build plot and sundry gags.

Then I remembered an interview I had with a bright young reporter on the New York World. Hearing that I was visiting Detroit, he had told me of the factory-belt system there—a harrowing story of big industry luring healthy young men off farms who, after four or five years at the belt system, became nervous wrecks.

It was that conversation that gave me the idea for Modern Times.

(377–378)

Clearly, Chaplin’s “shirtless” turbine operator who obeys—even salutes—his “president” is a reference to a lost time. This worker, taken “off farms,” is condemned to crunch the numbers his employer feeds him. And Chaplin’s choice of the feminine “gamine” for the role that Paulette Goddard will play cannot be overstated—it is central to what will become a redeeming love story:

A remarkable and revealing note by Chaplin on the characterization in Modern Times shows that he did not intend the Tramp and the Waif—“the Gamin” as she was called, though in later years Chaplin was inclined to correct this to “Gamine”—as either rebels or victims. They were rather spiritual escapees from a world in which he saw no other hope.

(Robinson 459)

Moreover, the meaning of Chaplin’s Modern Times becomes painfully clear as it catches up with the couple in the end, especially the “gamine”: “Look into the faces of the masses in our large cities and you will see harassed, defeated souls and in the eyes of most of them weary despair”: “nervous wrecks” (A Comedian Sees the World 135).

The image, idea and initial presentation of the “Billows Feeding Machine” is the singular event that stands out at the beginning of Modern Times.⁷ Its sole purpose and design is the elimination of “unproductive” time and the factory worker’s lunch hour in particular. The sales pitch: “Don’t stop for lunch. Be ahead of your competitor. The Billows feeding machine will eliminate the lunch hour, increase your production and decrease your overhead.” Chaplin here stages a perversion of the most basic human need and function in order to reveal the mechanized and indifferent reality of modern times epitomized by the “Corporation.” And by building the scene around a basic human need and a foundational social ritual—breaking bread together—he draws our attention to the human condition: individuals with the same needs strap the Tramp into the feeding machine—individuals operate it—and operate the system that abuses. When it breaks down, it is the assistant—an individual—who tries to repair the dehumanizing device, showing more care towards the machine than he does the individual, the Tramp who is violated by it. It is clear that the mechanical feeding machine is more than the symbol of these times, but actually the mechanized and vicious embodiment of them; and this is terrifyingly shown by the absent mechanical salesman, whose recording one of the already “defeated—[disembodied]—souls” dressed all in black plays for the boss: a tedious and monotonous voice recording speaks for the absent salesman/inventor. Another way to see this image of a dis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• Preface: the art of seeing Page
• 1 Work
• 2 Life
• 3 A comedian sees the world
• Postscript: meanwhile
• Works cited
• Index