Film Analysis: Modern Times By Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times represented the ‘machine-age’ culture as an undermining condition of the modern society. The first shot of the film shows a large clock with the second hand moving quickly around. The symbolism is very evident with saying people live under the judgment of measured time. The need to constantly hurry, strain with deadlines, other plans, and to keep up and not get lost in huge crowds. Almost saying that being late to work would cost you your job, and with the Great Depression occurring years prior, it would not be wise to lose a job. Chaplin depicts the modern city as a fast-paced new society in which your freedom becomes scarce and the workers lose everything while the government controls everything. However, perseverance and self-reliance can be all you need during these new modern times.
The Modern City is seen as a progressive metropolis that is always moving and always trying to improve itself. In Modern Times, it was depicted as continuous movement, little to no breaks, and the government not seeing what this “modern way of working” was doing to their factory workers. “It [Modern Times] depicts New York as a modern city of industrial Taylorist production and Fordist consumption” (Alsayyad, 2006: 27). Chaplin embodies both Taylorism and Fordism as major developments to modern times in this film. Fordism was represented in the first few factory scenes. Men were shown working on assembly lines for the new mass production system. Taylorism was seen during the beginning of the film, and actually throughout all of Chaplin’s work efforts. Small jobs that would seem quite easy, however when no one teaches you properly you will always go wrong. The workers being affected the most were the lower class. They were tossed around, treated poorly, almost like guinea pigs for certain matters. Chaplin makes the difference between social classes very prominent during the duration of the film, using comical moments to cover over the real fear of the modern city and the strain to be perfect in fear of losing yourself or your job. He also was able to communicate modernity, a contemporary state with new civilized ideas generated for succession, through his own comedy. But not only was Chaplin trying to be funny, he was really making fun of the government, authority officials, and all of the new technology that was starting to be used.
Just after the film’s opening intertitle, “The story of industry, of individual enterprise - humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness” - the opening shot appears on the screen and it is a group sheep is being herded. There is one black sheep in the mix of all the white, which is the first hint of the outcast role that Chaplin is to play. Then a faded overlap transition shot occurs and we see workers filing off the subway and headed towards the factory. Just as sheep herd and listen to their masters, so do humans, almost representing the ‘modern’ human losing their freedom. And with loosing their freedom, they lose everything. Chaplin, as the one black sheep, is evidently representing the human condition in modern times, but we see him as a helpless being. Even as imaginative and engaging Chaplin is, he lacks self-determination and ultimately signifies failure in the modern society.
While Chaplin’s character is constantly failing, running around, getting caught up with authority figures, he does not get a break until halfway through the film. There is a scene where Chaplin and his co-star, Paulette Goddard, are both a mess and chose to sit on a patch of grass along the curb of a suburban house. Witnessing a giddy, middle-class wife say goodbye to her husband, Chaplin and Goddard make fun of her for a moment before dreaming of a better life for themselves. A life where they had fruit growing from just outside the windows and fresh milk from a cow’s utter outside the kitchen door. Dreaming is all these two characters can do because they know they will never have anything real like that. Once they leave their dream state, they will still be on the curb, in shaggy clothing, hungry and jobless, and still on the run from the trouble they can never seem to escape from, even if it is what they have to do to survive. However, they always find time for a smile and to push forward, under the current circumstances.
Aside from the scene mentioned above that held symbolism for social classes, there is one scene which also held a lot of meaning for unfair work. After Chaplin is released from jail, for the first time, he was given a letter to help him get work again. A medium shot of Chaplin and the sheriff in the jail changes to a fade to black with a re-opening of Chaplin’s character out on a shipyard. This is the first-time seeing Chaplin doing a job that is not in the factory, something that will supposedly be calmer for him. Working in the shipyard can be associated to older times, just like the factory is associated with more modern times. An inexperienced Chaplin is thrown into work with little detail on what he is supposed to be doing, and this scene is another hint at Taylorism. He then messes up the job and we see this shot of an unfinished boat leaving the dock. A double exposure occurs where the background is a different shot that was edited in during post production and placed behind where Chaplin is standing. The background is a pre-recorded shot the unfinished boat leaving the dock. The mise en scene wants you to focus on the boat and the wood structures next to Chaplin for everything to match up and not look out of place. The shot is very well executed, especially for during the late 1930’s and without any advanced computer technology yet. After, a title card appears on the screen reading, “Determined to go back to jail” – this signifies that since Chaplin cannot work in the factory, and now cannot work in a shipyard, the only place he can go back to is the jail. He apparently does not fit in anywhere aside from there. Though, in jail, he had warmth, food, clothes, people who accepted him, and does not have to work at all, what more could he want.
What the boat scene explains is not something that Chaplin was shy towards. “By his tenth year Charles Chaplin was familiar with poverty, hunger, madness, drunkenness, and the cruelty of the poor London street and the cold impersonality of public institutions. Chaplin survived, developing self-reliance” (Robinson, 1996: 84). Chaplin wasn’t fearful with articulating how he felt about modern times and really expressed upon the tyranny of technology and society. How humankind is forced to move around within machines and unfair institutions in modern society for the underlying ideas of the so called “American Dream”. The Gamine, Goddard’s characters, is crucial and served to exemplify the human cost of the Great Depression and a person who just wants to be accepted into society. Machines were progressively replacing people at work, leaving many without money to support themselves. Through the Gamine and Chaplin’s character, The Tramp, we are shown a country that is torn apart by poverty and fear. In which people find themselves at the mercy of the world around them, with little to no control over what happens to them. The duo crash into each other many times before eventually sticking with each other, to help one another through their times of have having no food, no job, or no home to call their own.
Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film, Modern Times, is a clear example for everyone on how difficult it was for the majority to have a perfect life when everything is changing right under their feet. What was shown in the film can be represented in the 21st century today. Chaplin noted that the bigger the machine you had, the more problems you would occur. In today’s age, the smaller the appliance the better. Machines will always be taking over jobs that humans could do, but the truth always comes out in the quality of the product. Chaplin captures the misery of the lower class, the inability to understand fast-paced machines with little to no direction, and also the values of perseverance and tolerance throughout everything. With the Gamine, and the Tamp walking down a long open road at the end of the film, it represents that salvation and happiness is to be found eventually in hope, human ingenuity, and the freedom of the individually. The pair have had enough of the city life and are ready to start anew somewhere else, facing whatever it may be, together. Charlie Chaplin proves to the whole world from Modern Times that he is the greatest silent film artist ever. He is not bound by the ties of realism, and is able to create his own ideal image of the world and almost telling us that we should view it the same way. That change is good, in some aspects, but stay true to who we are and we can eventually conquer everything we set our minds to.
