★★★★★
As serious as its ideas sound, Modern Times has a sweet, romantic, poignant heart. The Gamine and the Tramp share the fantasy of having a house and living together, and they pursue this fantasy in several episodes. The Gamine finds a warfside shack to role-play a happy couple in a nice house, and a little slapstick lightens the reality of the shack’s inadequacy. The couple then pursues its fantasy when the Tramp gets a job as a department store night watchman and the two can act out married bliss in the store’s furniture section until, once again, reality interrupts and they get thrown out. And there’s a delightful house fantasy with the two waking up in the morning, picking fruit from a branch that comes in through a window and milking a cow that obligingly stops by the door. Not only is this scene romantic as the couple’s ideal, but its over-the-top fantasy feels slightly of irony. It’s poignant to see the ideal of the two determined lovers continually snatched away from them.
This movie is fun, and it’s very sweet. And it also seems very ideological to me. And if I’m going to be preached to, I find the humor and romance here to be at least as engaging as the serious, emotional approach of Potemkin if not more so.
The center of the ideological content here is the Little Tramp, and I commend Chaplin for his insistence that the Little Tramp not speak in this, the character’s last film. The Tramp really is an Everyman, and I get how voice would have lent too much specificity to the character and reduced the range of those who would identify with him. Mime creation that he is, the Tramp is still for each viewer to follow by filling in his own details. The lack of voice is an asset in the rhetorical structure here.
The Everyman Tramp critiques industrialization in a way that seems very much of its time. Critics from the onset of the Industrial Revolution condemned the dehumanization of assembly line work, but the two factory episodes in Modern Times create some of the strongest visual metaphors for this idea. The most memorable, of course, is the brief scene where the Tramp is circulating around the big gears of a machine, though the Tramp’s twitch after his time on the assembly line is as big a critique since it suggests that workers could almost suffer PTS as a result of the dull repetition of their labor. But the twitch doesn’t communicate as effectively in print as stills of the cogs grinding Charlie. And this critique, like the effort to mechanize worker feeding for the sake of efficiency, is muted in the film by comedy, though few 30s leftists would have failed to sympathize with the indictment of factory work.
Other critiques of capital and power are in evidence here, too. The manager is always wanting to increase production speed, whether the workers can keep up or not; he even surveys the bathroom to ensure no one is goofing there. The very suggestion of being a leftist –something like holding a red handkerchief – is enough to land the Tramp in jail, and as the Gamine discovers, labor protests can be fatal. Her father is such a victim. Also, the middle and upper classes are allied with power against the poor here. The hungry Gamine steals bananas for poor and hungry children only to face the boatman’s wrath, and a well-to-do bystander insists that the police take the Gamine to jail for the theft of a loaf of bread although the police already have a suspect, the Tramp. The world of Modern Times is one where workers and the poor are abused and held in check by the power of the more moneyed classes.
As serious as its ideas sound, Modern Times has a sweet, romantic, poignant heart. The Gamine and the Tramp share the fantasy of having a house and living together, and they pursue this fantasy in several episodes. The Gamine finds a warfside shack to role-play a happy couple in a nice house, and a little slapstick lightens the reality of the shack’s inadequacy. The couple then pursues its fantasy when the Tramp gets a job as a department store night watchman and the two can act out married bliss in the store’s furniture section until, once again, reality interrupts and they get thrown out. And there’s a delightful house fantasy with the two waking up in the morning, picking fruit from a branch that comes in through a window and milking a cow that obligingly stops by the door. Not only is this scene romantic as the couple’s ideal, but its over-the-top fantasy feels slightly of irony. It’s poignant to see the ideal of the two determined lovers continually snatched away from them. The end of the film is certainly the least ideological element of Modern Times and makes the best case for those who want to deny the ideology at the core of the movie. As the finally-defeated Gamine asks in frustration, “What’s the use of trying?”, the Tramp tells her to “Buck up!” as the music of “Smile” rises in the background. The two march off into the horizon with the sweet music as a balm to their troubles. No calls for revolution or proletariat uprisings at the end of this film; Modern Times is an early instance of the Hollywood romantic ending blunting a strong socio-economic critique. And yet, the strong poignancy of the film’s ending stems precisely from the viewer knowing the almost impossible odds the two are marching off to confront. On some level, this seeming copout is itself a critique, calling for us to pity the ever-defeated, working class characters as they set out to continue their fight against overwhelming forces.
Modern Times makes timeless entertainment out of strong social criticism.
