By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 17, 2014
“I remain
just one thing, and one thing only – and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane that any
politician.”
- Charlie Chaplin
Modern Times is the story of a man navigating his life through the gears of the detached machine that is the American Industrial Corporation. It is the story of this man’s relentless iconoclasticism while in the face of mechanized conformity of the most extreme sense of the word. The film is also a love story, forged out of this modern mess of a society. A factory worker, who is never referred to by name because in this world names are meaningless, is forced to keep up with the unrealistic production schedule of the corporation he works for.
Modern Times explores the obscurity of the very
system that claims to be the best system for all to prosper in. This is the tragedy that economic philosopher
Karl Marx continuously warned the world about.
He worried that the Superstucture
would consume the wills of men and transform them essentially into zombie
workers, men that shed all ambition and devote themselves to the
corporation. Marx believed that the
growth of a person into a knowing and understanding member of the species would
fail if the corporate industrial complex succeeded. Marx’s dreams of human freedom and equality
sadly became broken down, rebuilt and repackaged into a form of control that
greedy mindless men held over the livelihood of their thousands of nameless,
faceless employee. 
The film
explores the monotonous daily lives of the less fortunate, but it also reveals
that the fortunate may be financially and societally better off, they are not
happier as a result. The film shows that
this system of mass production doesn’t work for pretty well all involved. People are not machines that should be
financially forced to work among machines for the so-called betterment of
humanity.
Adding
insult to injury, there is a moment in the beginning of the film where the
factory worker, our hero, after performing his mind-numbing repetitive tasks on
an assembly line, is subjected to this absurd contraption that was designed to
mechanically feed the worker while he maintains his duties on the production
line. The project fails and causes the
factory worker a great deal of humiliation and pain, a theme that runs
throughout the film, indignities that the people of this city suffer through as
they scramble to find food in the great depression of the early 1930’s.
It is rare
in the history of cinema that a film that deals with such tragedy, true as it
was then as it is today, can couple itself so magically with absurdist
comedy. The reason why this was made
possible, and has quite frankly rarely been duplicated, was because the comic
genius of Charlie Chaplin, the writer, director and star of the film. Like his contemporary, the delightful Buster
Keaton, Chaplin came from the silent era, the quiet times before the talkies of
1928 allowed the audience to hear what the characters were speaking.
Modern Times is from 1936 and is a mix of silent
and talkie cinema. Chaplin’s genius and
comedic physicality was formed, like Buster Keaton, because there was no
sound. Chaplin had to perform his
thoughts to his audience; he had to act out his ideas for all to see. It’s a unique form of communication that has
been sadly lost for the most part in modern cinema. Chaplin walked with his feet pointed out at
45 degree angles and his buttocks high in the air, his arms fumbled and his eyes
only blinked when absolutely necessary.
He created a skewed version of humanity in his gaze, his movements and
his interactions with people in his stories who conform to the rule of society. His character in Modern Times is ill at ease, he’s a man that fidgets and bumps into
the on-goings of the machine, whether it is the people operating as police
officers, jail guards or factory workers.
The film is
a masterpiece of American cinema because Charlie Chaplin was able to come off
as a bombastic clown in most scenes and simultaneous never lose sight of his
film’s over all narrative. He knew what
story he was telling and never lost that story in the whims of comic
relief. Chaplin was able to provide enormously
sidesplitting entertainment while commenting of the state of the world as he
saw it. His characters in his films
often seemed oblivious but he as a man was not.
He knew the world was a mess, he knew that a group of pass-me-down elitist
were running the world, holding the population for some sort of deranged ransom
for their compliance. His true genius is
he knew that reality could only be passed down to the uninformed through
comedy. He knew the elite don’t tolerate
overt descent but were so blinded by dollar signs that they rarely understood
metaphor. In this little window of
weakness, Chaplin found his platform.
Modern Times also stars a young woman, whose
sisters are taken away from her. Here’s
where the heart of the film exists, where one man simply wants to settle down
with a gamin and live happily ever after.
The woman suffers in this machine age just as the factory worker when
they cross paths. After the factory
worker has been subjected to a mental institution because of his lack of
conformity, he goes to jail, where he oddly begins to enjoy himself. The solace here is no one really expects much
from prisoners so, even though locked up, the factory worker finds
freedom. Here we explore the even more
absurd aspects of modern society.
The factory
worker is set free from the jail when he helps guards recapture the jail when
thugs attempt a break out. It’s as if he
stops them because he thinks that they don’t realize how good they really have
it. He sees it as if he is doing them a
favor by releasing the prison guards from a cell. Chaplin is telling his audience the freedom
we think we have, we don’t, the society we think is looking out for our best
interests and is there to protect us, isn’t.
Chaplin is telling us that society, like in FightClub, is insane. He’s telling us that because we have been
drinking the Koo-aid for so long we no longer see how unfree we truly are.
Modern Times is a beautifully shot film with
massive set pieces and wonderful performances.
The film carries us through a series of vignettes that themselves stand
alone as magnificent. The scene where
the factory worker is carried by the conveyer belt, after failing to keep up
with tightening bolts on some arbitrary piece of equipment, into the guts of
the machine. Here he is squeezed in and
around gears only to be reversed back out of the machine, as if spit out for
having a pulse pumping through his veins, which itself physically happens when
he is escorted off the property for being – weird. There is a scene where he and his lady attempt
to play house, living the domestic life, a promise of the American Dream, only
for the house to fall apart in places, his chair collapsing through the floor,
him leaning on a wall and falling through into a river. Chaplin is telling that this dream we have is
fake and it doesn’t hold up to reality. 
The
restaurant scene toward the end demonstrates the true masterful vision that is
Charlie Chaplin. The factory worker is
tasked to perform in front of an audience, he’s reluctant but his lady believes
in him so he tries. After realizing the lyrics
to the song he was supposed to sing, lyrics written on his sleeves are gone, he
improvises and gives a wonderfully entertaining performance as he mumbles the lyrics
in unintelligible Italian while dancing around the floor in this comedic ballet,
in and around the restaurant’s customers.
Chaplin
conveys his contempt for the law as he manipulates the legal system for his own
benefit, with the film ending with the factory worker and his lovely lady,
after escaping the authorities, walking down the paved highway toward the
mountains, Chaplin is encouraging us to get out and save ourselves from the
trappings of an economical mechanized self-serving society, where the elite
want it all.
Modern Times is a delightful film to behold. It’s a journey into the greasy machine of
modern society but it’s also about connection.
The film shows how the system is convinced that it knows your best interests
better than you do. Most importantly is
the film shows that great minds will prevail, it shows that hope can be found
at the end of the tunnel. Modern Times shows us that other people
can’t take your spirit if you don’t let them, the key here is and what the film
is trying to convey; is be awake enough to learn how to protect yourself from a
modern fast-moving, identity-stealing world. 
“I don’t
believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have
drawn from my career.”
- Charlie Chaplin
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