Biting Back at the Machine: Charlie Chaplins

Modern Times
! Gregory Stephens

" October 2011

# Feature Articles

$ Issue 60

The themes of eating in general and the filching of food in particular are pervasive in Charlie Chaplins films.
A Chaplinesque instance of food filching, such as in The Immigrant (1917), may be an utterly unreal comic
situation, but it also subtly suggests a form of revolution, as Devin Orgeron and Marsha Orgeron write.(1)
In Chaplins Modern Times (1936), the focus of this essay, the leitmotifs include man-eating machines, foraging for food, and consuming materialism.

I wish to tease out an inverse counter-current to these forms of ingestion, which together constitute a revolution by rejection. (2) Men swallowed by machines are spit out in transfigured form and engage in sabotage;
the filching of food by the poor disrupts the social order and calls into question its morality; and the apparent
devouring of consumer dreams is in fact a humorous/satirical undermining of their logic.

Chaplins critique of the machine age is rooted in a history of industrial sabotage. It also foreshadows many
artistic responses to the megamachine, from George Orwells Big Brother, to the monkey-wrenchers of
Edward Abbey and T.C. Boyle, to the visionary city symphony Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982), in
which humans are enslaved by the technology that is their grid and host.(3)

Modern Times is Chaplins last silent film, and a last bow for his Tramp character, which had made Chaplin the worlds most famous man in the 1920s. After the 1931 premier of City Lights 9131), Chaplin went on a
world tour, meeting with many leaders to discuss the pressing issues of the time. In newspaper articles and later an autobiography, he described his travels.

At a meeting with Mahatma Gandhi, Chaplin said he was confused by your abhorrence of machinery, which
could release man from the bondage of slavery, if altruistically used, Chaplin argued. Gandhi replied that
machinery had made India dependent on England, so we must make ourselves independent of it if we are to
gain our freedom.(4) By the time he began production of Modern Times (then titled The Masses), Chaplin
was declaring: Machinery should benefit mankind. It should not spell tragedy, or throw it out of work. (5)

Chaplin wanted The Tramps swan song to address the pressing issues of the Great Depression and pre-WWII
years: unemployment, food shortages, the Fordist routinization of industry, and repression of political protest.
(6) Chaplins ability to combine hilarity with pathos reached classic heights in this film. But inside of Modern
Times factories, a surveillance worthy of Orwell and Michel Foucault runs things, while on the streets a police state squashes all protest.

Chaplin shows drug-running in prisons and Communist marches; he lampoons religious do-gooders and glorifies food theft by the poor. Like most Chaplin films, Modern Times is episodic, but a meta-narrative emerges:
the spirit of the machine age is double-voiced; machines mechanize human beings, but the weapons of the
weak are available,(7) and the human spirit can break out of its confinements, providing not only comic relief
but utopian models during dystopian times.

I will frame my reading with comments from two students about the Tramps interaction with machines. In an
opening sequence when factory machines are sped up to an inhuman pace, the only way to keep up with the
pace was to go inside the machine. Later, the Tramp feeds a mechanic who is trapped inside a machine during
lunchtime. Everything in the cameras view is eating.(8) That of course includes the man-eating machine.
These observations are openings onto Chaplins visual comedy about the dangers of being eaten alive (9) in
the machine age, and his tribute to the spirit of human resistance and innovation which endures, even in the
belly of the beast, or in the face of efforts to regulate and mechanize human behaviour.

Much of this metanarrative is signalled in the establishing shots. First there is a long shot of a clock tower: industrial time rules this world portrayed here. Chaplin then shows a flock of sheep rushing through a corral. In
the center is a black sheep. Next workers rush out of a subway. Workers are like sheep, we infer, but Chaplins
tramp will be the black sheep who breaks norms and demonstrates escape routes from sheepish or machinelike behaviour.

Ingestion and Dysfunction in Man-Machine consumption

I want to first focus on an early scene at the Electro Steel Corp. when a machine short-circuits while attempting to force-feed the Tramp. Chaplin dated this idea to 1916, a satire on progress in the form of a trip to the
moon for the Olympic games. The Tramp might as well be the man in the moon in the factory. That the feeding machine gags travel well is evident in the Cuban short Por Primera Vez (For the First Time, Octavio
Cortazar, 1967), in which Cubans at the cinema for the first time laugh uproariously at the segment in which
the machine spins a corn cob in Charlies teeth.(10) This scene reads almost like a travesty of enduring a drill
in a dentists chair. The failed attempt to force-feed corn to this non-industrial man helps construct the films
meta-narrative.

Chaplins Tramp will not become a man of corn in the sense of the critique of industrial food as developed in
King Corn (Aaron Woolf, 2006): a perversion of traditional corn culture which has produced corn-fed people
whose very molecular structure and thought patterns reflect the industrial foods they eat.(11) Charlie the
Tramp would eat anything put in front of him, but Chaplin the man was a vegetarian, and his critique of the
machine age extended to industrial food, as this scene implies.

This scene also foreshadows later sabotage. Although the tramp is grateful for the free food, and is not trying
to monkey wrench the feeding machine, this machine goes haywire. It may have been defective to begin
with, but something here doesnt compute: the Tramp is wired differently from the more regimented workers
the machine was designed to feed. Its almost as if the machine cannot process the Tramps free spirit, and
blows its gaskets in the effort. There is a further foreshadowing in this scene, when the machine shoves steel
nuts into his mouth. As Russ Castronovo observes, before Chaplin is swallowed in the belly of the industrial
beast, he finds the machine inside his belly.(12) Every time the machine tries to swallow or mechanize The
Tramp, we might expect he will break down, or become like the machine. But it is the machine and factory
system which breaks down, when it cannot digest Charlies Tramp.

The scene in which Charlie slides into the machines gears is iconographic, a larger-than-life picture that has
taken on a life of its own.(13) Following the suggestion that one can only keep up with the machine by going
inside it, I want to sketch some implications of this inside job. The fullness of what is denoted and connoted
in this scene seems inexhaustible. Let us start with a couple of forms of denotation.

1. We are being shown that accidents are commonplace when machines are sped up to an inhuman pace. In the 21st century,
the swallowing of humans on the production line will be played for horror, in Fast Food Nation (Richard Linklater, 2006).(14)
But this sequence is perhaps more akin to the wonder evoked by the sped-up flows of production and traffic in Koyanisqatsi.
2. In his Autobiography, Chaplin traces the films genesis to a conversation with a reporter about Detroit production lines,
particularly healthy young men off the farms who, after 4-5 years at the belt system, became nervous wrecks.(15) Chaplin
denotes a commonplace of the machine age, nervous breakdowns. But the sequence is choreographed like a ballet, from the
moment of being swallowed alive, through the subsequent madcap sabotage. Modern Times man-eating machine connotes
much more than it denotes.
3. Chaplins Tramp is like Jonas in the belly of the whale, spat out transfigured and ready to undertake his mission. He only
goes to warn of imminent destruction because he has been swallowed alive, which defamiliarizes his relationship to the
beast.
4. Charlies body winding through the gears looks much like film being wound through a projector. Chaplin may be
commenting on the loss of the utopian potential of film.
5. The nature of his transfiguration is unique in the history of representations of sabotage. After his jerky movements in the
morning, when he cannot stop his mechanized motions, and tries to tighten womens buttons, etc. we might expect that he
will become more like the machine. But after being vomited/rejected, he emerges deranged, but more humandancing a
ballet. It is while dancing that his sabotage goes into high gear.

He squirts oil on workers and authorities (both are machine-line) to render them ineffective while he continues
his sabotage, or escapes. Sensing that the workers cannot think past their mechanization, he uses the machine
to distract them. This is not mere sabotage: it is monkey-wrenching as a spirit of play. It creates joyous havoc,
disrupting the dehumanizing pace and design of the machine. Even when the tramp is fleeing the police and
re-enters the factory, he still punches in. He is not trying to destroy industrial time. But Chaplin brings the insouciance of the music hall, as well as an anarchistic sensibility to his mise-en-scne, to the staging of modern
times. Subsequent scenes seem to indicate that as long as one maintains an ability to improvise and a focus on
eating well, then in the battle between man and machine, a sort of separate peace can be achieved.

The second machine-eating scene occurs when the Tramp goes back to work because he wants to buy a
real home for The Gamin (Paulette Goddard). This is a final effort to function within an institutional context; one must read it in relation to a string of earlier failures. After his breakdown, when released from a hospital, he is swept into a series of misadventures: accused communist leader; a hero who foils a jail-break while
(inadvertently) high on cocaine. Then he gums the works in one job after another, inevitably damaging (or
pilfering) the merchandise. His only successes are in finding his way back to jail (a safe space) and charming
Gamin. For her, he secures a job as a mechanics assistant, but he is such a klutz that no equipment is safe in
his presence. He destroys his bosss tools and then manages to get him stuck inside the gears of another machine. At lunch, he decides that feeding the mechanic is more important that extracting him from the sharptoothed gears. The Tramp will not stop eating, after all. When he stuffs a stalk of celery in the mechanics
mouth we can see: everything in the cameras view is eating.

What are the implications of a mechanic being fed by the Tramp, who is outside the machine that has eaten
him? Timothy Corrigans comments on perspective in mise-en-scne seem applicable here. Corrigan focuses
on the purpose of mise-en-scne, or, all that is put in the frame. This ordering is about the theatrics of space
as that space is constructed for the camera. The construction of the overall image in a shot is done with a theatrical perspective in mind: perspective in mise-en-scne refers to the kind of spatial relationship an image
establishes between the different objects and figures it is photographing.(16)

Chaplins theatrics of space suggests a particular kind of inter-relationship between the machine and the two
men who are working on it, or being devoured by it. Keeping in mind the ethical inversions which predominate in this film,(17) one might ask re: the theatrical relations of this scene: whos in charge? The master mechanic ought to be in charge. But he is imprisoned in the machine, at the mercy of a bumbling worker who is
his inferior, in terms of technical competence. Charlie the Tramp in Modern Times is somewhat like the Juan
Bobo of Puerto Rico, the town fool who can never get things right. (18) Yet Charlie has mother wit. Unlike
that Bobo, Charlies apparent ineptness in practical matters serves as a critique of the limits of rationality. If
the Tramps bumbling is well-meaning and unconscious, it serves the conscious designs of the films creator.
In that sense, Chaplin the multi-millionaire masking as a down-and-out indigent is a forerunner of a very different sort of boboa bourgeois professional who espouses bohemian values.(19) Chaplin can afford to identify with the poor because he lives amongst the rich and privileged. From that safe distance he has made a fortune with his representations of the underclass everyman. But in the Tramps last appearance he gets off some
parting shots at a new world order that marginalizes and indeed criminalizes all that is not mechanized.

An inversion has taken place here, and the intern-inmate is clearly in charge, at least for the moment. He reestablishes a set of priorities which have been crowded out by the machines, and the mechanized men who run
them. Foremost amongst these priorities are the need for down time (indeed, work stoppage), and time for
communal dining. Something like the innocence of a childs perspective is evident, but re-ordered through the
sensibility of an adult who is both politically engaged, and keenly attuned to the bottom line of entertaining a
mass audience.

The man-eating-machine theme came to Chaplin at age 12. Apprenticed to a printer, he found himself dwarfed
by a huge printing press. I thought [it] was going to devour me. (20)As an adult he reframed this view.
Charlie is a trickster (playfulness is the essence of monkey-wrenching), and the machine has swallowed something indigestible, giving it indigestion. In the second lunch-time feeding, all but the mechanics mouth has
been immobilized. If in the earlier scene, the machine-men had tried for force their workers to ingest progress,
(21) on this lunch break, Charlie has engineered a bit of humble pie. Work and the irascible mechanics mouth
are brought to a standstill. Soon this scene devolves into something like a loving son feeding his invalid father.
That he first attempts unsuccessfully to feed the mechanic through an oil funnel, and then successfully through
the opening of a whole cooked chicken, seems to suggest the need for both mechanic and machine to be
brought closer to natural processes.

Chaplin is prescient in his representation of the struggle for food, and to control its distribution, in the machine age.(22) But this portrait hardly romanticizes leftists or labour unions: no sooner is the confining lunch
hour over, when another worker rushes in and announces that they are on strike. So Charlies latest job evaporates in less than a day, just like the others.

In Modern Times, both marginalization and attempts at integration centre on food. Hunger and the dynamics
of communal dining are central to three scenes on which I will focus:

 Lunching with a drug-smuggler in prison

Pilfering: bananas, bread, and free-loading
Dining with the Gamin in imagined and real ideal homes

Nose Powder in the Prison Cafeteria

After the post-breakdown Charlie is released from the hospital, he picks up a red flag which falls off a truck,
and finds himself leading a march. The signs declare Liberty or death, and express solidarity in several
languages. Time-honoured ideals, one might think, but of course agitating for freedom or siding with the
working class has long been criminalized and painted as subversive in the U.S. Misrecognized as a communist
leader, Charlie is tossed in jail with common criminals. The jail scenes provide a variant on the theme of going
inside the machine in order to keep pace with it. The pace here can only be sustained by criminality, as when
Charlie ingests nose powder which a criminal beside him has dumped in the salt shaker. Charlie foils a jailbreak in a coke-fueled fit of heroism. He thus gains the status of a working class hero, and an (unwanted)
early freedom. He also wins a personal episode of the Bread wars while high.

Earlier he had filched small nibbles from his burly cell-mate through guile and trickery. But only while high
on cocaine does he muster the manly force needed to take the bread for himself. Thus he is doubly rewarded,
both by the authorities and by the convicts, for his ingestion of a banned substance. But his inside job merely lands him on the street, where appetite appears to be linked with guilt and criminality as a condition of
modern culture. (23)

Food-filching and free-loading

The Gamin first appears on-screen as a desirable thief, making Robin Hood gestures and striking pirate postures. She cuts bananas on a boat, and then tosses them to hungry urchins on the dock, knife clenched in her
teeth. A good-looking pirate indeed. Her redistribution of wealth is immediately comprehensible, given what
we see of her poverty, and what we soon learn of her destitute family. But the boat and the bananas are private
property. When the owner sees her, she scampers to safety, and then engages in another, gratuitous form of
trespassing: she eats the banana in his view with defiant relish, a sexual undertone being perhaps a part of her
taunting.

Like the Tramp, the Gamin is constantly dodging policemen, but she also flees from child welfare officials after her father is shot in a street protest. She never seems to eat anything that is not stolen, but the theatrics of
space tell us that this is her due.

While the Gamins thievery is suffused with pathos, The Tramps shoplifting career is played for laughs. But
these barbed laughs plant a subtext about the intertwining of appetites and criminality in modern times. The
homeless soul-mates are brought together by a stolen loaf of bread. The Tramp tries to take the blame for her
theft, which is typical of his gallantry towards women. But it is also self-interest: a ploy to go to jail. It is
worth noting that it is actually the policeman who makes off with the bread. When the police discover that
Charlies guilt is fictional, he is abandoned in front of a cafeteria. His quest for free food and shelter is realized
by free-loading in the cafeteria, after which he enlists a policeman as accomplice. Called to witness Charlies
inability to pay the bill, he sends the Tramp back to jailon a full stomach.

The free-loading becomes a joint endeavor after Charlie, fantasizing about a life of abundance in a perfect
home, declares that they will secure such a shared abode, even if I have to work for it. Opportunity knocks
when Charlie secures a job as night watchman in a department store. No sooner has he clocked in than he
smuggles in the Gamin, and hustles her down to a soda fountain, where she can load up on empty calories. As
at the factory, Charlie makes the department into his playpenand into a penthouse for his new love, who can
wrap herself in furs and sleep on a luxury bed.

Have they swallowed consumerism? They are trying on new identities, or new masks, like kids in a playhouse. When the Gamin dons a fur coat she also sports glamorous makeup, as if she were suddenly Cinderella.
Charlie glides on a pair of roller skates, as if in a state of grace. But unattainable identities are soon shed like
borrowed clothes. Some burglars surprise Charlie, whose knees buckle; one shoots, but only opens holes in a
cask of rum. Scared stiff, the Tramp stands in front of the streaming rum with his mouth open. In short order
he is in another state of altered consciousness. One of the intruders recognizes Charlie from the steel factory,
and soon they are immersed in drunken camaraderie. Meanwhile, the glammed-up Gamin looks like a dream
as she sleeps in the lap of luxury. Life on the lam is an intoxication, it seems.

When the store opens the next morning. Charlie has slept under a pile of clothes. A lady shopper tugs on a
white shirt, which turns out to be the Tramps. When he is extracted, shoppers and the management are appalled, and Charlie and his Cinderella are unceremoniously booted out, where Charlie is carted off to jail once
more. The shirt-tugging episode, read symbolically, suggests that consumers want goods produced by or services provided by the underclass, but they do not want the workers themselves. They do not want to be reminded of the presence of those whose flesh and whose labor underwrite their consumerist convenience and
leisure.

A Little Taste of Paradisein search of the perfect home

The theme of eating at home with ones beloved as an unattainable paradise plays out in two parallel fantasies.
The first home is imagined by Charlie, while the second is a depression-era shanty claimed by the Gamin. But
in both scenes the momentary bliss experienced by the characters is dependent on a shared suspension of disbelief.

Enacting domestic happiness begins with first imagining it. Charlies fantasy of suburban bliss occurs after the
couple is flung from a police wagon onto the streets (spit out by a machine again).(24) The pair had been arrested for theftthe Gamins bread; the Tramps super-size meal. Fugitives from justice, they wander into a
suburban neighborhood and sit on a curb, where they witness a display of exaggerated marital bliss, with a
deliriously happy housewife kissing her husband goodbye as he heads for work. What Charlie describes for
the Gamin is a parody of the dream life of sub-urban abundance that was even then luring young professionals
off the farm, or out of the cities. Returning home to his apron-clad lady, Charlie can reach into a window and
pick an orange or grapes. He calls a cow which milks itself. His woman serves him a steak.

As he is cutting the meat, the real Gamin calls him back to reality. A policeman is standing over them, demanding that he keep it real. They are on private property and have to beat it.

Drawing on Gerald Masts brief discussion of Chaplins use of dream imagery,(25) David Lemaster argues
that we should recognize the importance of dreams [and fantasies] for establishing a sympathetic pity between Charlie and the audience. In Lemasters view, this motif is actually one of Chaplins favorites for further defining Charlie the Tramps mask. (26)

That the Tramp wore a mask that had evolved into a more socially engaged form should be obvious, if we see
the film in biographical as well as historical context. In My Autobiography, Chaplin recalled a period of depression and continual sense of guilt as he lived the Hollywood high life in the early 1930s. He was troubled
by the remark of a young critic who said that City Lights was very good, but that it verged on the sentimental
and that in my future films I should try to approximate realism. I found myself agreeing with him. (27)

Modern Times, then, was Chaplins effort to approximate realism. It was a tenuous approximation: Chaplin
stubbornly adhered to silent film nine years into the sound era, and sentimentality was ingrained in his character. But as David Robinsons biography shows, Chaplin was becoming radicalized during 1930s.(28) The
Tramps mask in Modern Times was in keeping with the spirit of the times. The Tramp had long shown a
proclivity to bend or break the law, and to live on the fringes of respectable societyclose enough to pick off
pretty young ladies, but far enough to avoid accountability for either his rule-flaunting or his skirt-chasing. In
Modern Times the Tramp evokes our sympathetic pity both because of his evident longing for domesticity,
and because of his discomfiture with the machine age. His fantasy about the abundance of a suburban Garden
of Eden expresses a more politicized satire. We recognize the exaggerated nature of this fantasy, and our
laughter has more bite if we see a piece of ourselves in this sketch. Most of us buy into such dreams, to some
degree. Even though reality keeps snapping us back, such dreams of romantic or consumer bliss often prove
stronger than reality.

But Chaplin more than skirts around realism in staging the other side of paradisethe Gamins perfect
shack. In Philippe Truffaults special feature Chaplin Today, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne usefully compare
this humble abode to Depression-era shanty town shacks. (29)

The shack interlude takes place 10 days after Charlie has been carted off from the department store, when the
Gamin waits for him when he is released from jail. They stand outside the shack and gaze at it as if it is Zion.
No sooner has Charlie stepped inside and pronounced: Its paradise, than a board falls and clocks him on the
head; the flimsy dining table collapses, and part of the roof caves in. Its not Buckingham Palace, she acknowledges. But the day ends with their illusions and their innocence intact, the Gamin sleeping in a pallet on
the floor, the Tramp like baby Jesus in the manger, curled up amidst some hay in a shed.

The key sequence in the shack occurs the next day. Charlie scolds the Gamin for stealing food, and she winks
Modern Times attitude towards theft by the poor. The Tramps chair falls through flimsy floorboards. No
problem: this is a moveable feast; they just move the table and start again. But their houses instability is the
flipside to the unreality of the Tramps fantasy of domestic bliss. There is no room for them at the inn of modern times.

Reading the newspaper, Charlie sees that the factories have re-opened. Interrupting their meal, he dashes off to
seek employment, wanting to buy a real home. By the skin of his teeth, he secures the mechanics assistant
position which will be interrupted by a strike. Leaving the factory, Charlie once more has a run-in with a policeman, and is carted off to jail yet again.

When he is released, the Gamin has found him work in the caf where she is a dancing waitress. The communal dining here is in vibrant contrast to the kinds of eating we see in the rest of the film. The environment is a
throwback to Chaplins music hall roots. It suggests that the domain of entertainment is their only home. But
this will not be permitted them: welfare officers catch up with the Gamin, and they make a vaudeville-style
escape. Short of a performance space, there can be only one home for the Tramp: the road. Chaplin fans have
seen this exit into a liminal space often: literally straddling two nations that cannot be his home at the end of
The Pilgrim (1923). But on departing the silver screen forever, he sets off with his girl. The saccharine rendition of the Smile theme masks what is in fact a bittersweet end to this attempt at socially relevant comic
realism. The Tramp and his love have turned their backs on modern times, and hope to find food, shelter and
sustenance in some other social order.

Conclusion

I earlier suggested that Modern Times response to the problematics of consumptiondevouring machines, a
food crisis, and consumerismtogether constituted a sort of revolution by rejection. To fully define and explore the implications of that term is beyond the scope of this essay. But I want to sketch its meaning, and suggest how this might shape our assessment of Modern Times in relation to Chaplins career, and film history.
Two questions I would pose regarding Chaplins comedic revolution by rejection are, what is being rejected?
And is that rejection revolutionary?

The term revolutionary has been devalued through over-use in the realm of advertising and right-wing politics.
I will apply it narrowly to a work of art that satirizes an economic and political order. Revolution is momentous change in a situation, or overthrow of one [order] and its replacement with another, in political terms.
Chaplin is concerned with an economic counter-revolution, the draconian imposition of a Taylorite regime.
(30) And in Modern Times, he is keen to dramatize the deleterious effects on the poor of the machine ages
momentous changes. The face of what he rejects is devotion to profit so extreme that even a trip to the bathroom is monitored. Chaplin also rejects a criminal justice system which in Modern Times harasses the poor,
and prevents a just distribution of resources. But Chaplin also is rejecting most of the sound revolution
which overthrew films silent order. It produced momentous changes which Chaplin primarily portrays as
negative, like the intrusive voice of despotic authorities. The question of whether this rejection is revolutionary cannot be answered objectively, in social science terms. But as a work of art, this is a biting satire. There
is a Trojan horse quality that Chaplin folds inside the physical comedy. As with the image of feeding the mechanic who has been devoured by a machine, deeper symbolic levels may be more apparent in the stills. The
photo used for the films poster conveys the multi-voiced quality of Chaplins symbolism. Here the Tramp is
monkey-wrencher, ready to wreck havoc on the machine. Yet this pose also seems to echo Samson, about to
pull down the pillars of his enemys temple. Yet while Samsons woman blinded him, the Gamin gives Charlie
a vision of home, and a reason to go to work. He can no longer swallow the machine ages martial law, but
marital love gives meaning to work and play. Yet again, this could be interpreted as a crucifixion pose
nailed to the machine. And yet, for an optimist, this could be the silent rebel raising his arms in triumph.

Our retrospective view of this film must be shaped by the final image Chaplin chose: not the Gamin going to a
convent, as Chaplin first filmed it, but the couple heading off towards an empty horizon together. This is similar to the iconography of the Western, and one might argue that the flight into a supposedly utopian anti-social
nothingness is reactionary, at heart. Yet there is also something archetypal here about prophets who turn their
backs on a corrupt society, and go to the wilderness seeking new vision. In cinematic terms, I think that other
generic traditions besides the Western, or the road movie, are a propos. Charlie and the Gamin are the only
two live spirits in a world of automatons, wrote biographer David Robinson: spiritual escapees from a world
in which [Chaplin] saw no other hope.(31) The conclusion of Chaplins last silent film is a forerunner of the
cinematic Last Man on Earth tradition, which became a major genre from the 1950s on. What later generations of filmmakers would process primarily through horror and melodrama, in the post-apocalyptic imagination,(32) Chaplin foreshadowed through comedy, in a pre-apocalyptic satire of machines and their guardians
run amuck. There are ironies in Chaplins representation of an escape from modernity, while he was sleeping
with Hollywood starlets and hobnobbing with world celebrities. But this ending is also prescient of his rejection in the U.S. during the era of anti-communist witch-hunts, and his exile in Switzerland. (33)

In its visual imagination, Modern Times is one of the city symphonies which have represented the ways in
which sped-up assembly lines shape humans and human society. In a cinematic timeline, Modern Times is
close to the bottles of milk in Berlin, Symphonyof a City (Walther Ruttman, 1927). But in its visual ideology, it
is closer in spirit to the flows of traffic, energy, and consumer goods in Koyaanisqatsi which, much like Modern Times, are both dystopian and euphoric. Both Modern Times and Koyaanisqatsi give a sense of the hallucinatory quality of our life on a template determined by machines. But both allow for much more benign, even
celebratory interpretations. Finally, in addition to being a forerunner of the monkey-wrenching tradition, Modern Times is a fountainhead of an ever-growing body of cinematic work which explores the interpenetrations
of humans and machines. This has become a veritable cinematic obsession: the machines we have created as
servants have increasingly not only become our masters, but have colonized our bodies and our very imaginations. All filmmakers who explore this dynamic are, directly or indirectly, in Chaplins debt.

Endnotes
1. Devin Anthony Orgeron and Marsha Gabrielle Orgeron, Eating Their Words: Consuming Class a la Chaplin and Keaton,
College Literature 28:1 (Winter 2001): 84-104 (91).
2. J. Hoberman described Modern Times as Chaplins most sustained burlesque of authority. J. Hoberman, A Chaplin
classic sounds off on Hollywood dream factory, Village Voice (Dec. 23, 2003). The notion of a revolution by rejection
became generalized in the de-centered protests of the late 1990s and early 21st century, as with the anti-globalization protests,
calls for boycotts of corporate products, and the Zapatista uprising in Mexico. See John Holloway, Change the World Without
Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today (Pluto Press, 2002).
3. Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (HarperCollins Perennial Classics, 2000 [1975]); T.C. Boyle, A Friend of the
Earth (Viking, 2000).
4. Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 1964), 344. The second part of this quote is taken from a
newspaper article which appears in Philippe Truffault, Chaplin Today, a special feature on the Modern Times double DVD
(Warner Home Video, 2004).
5. Machinery, Truffault, Chaplin Today.

6. Russ Castronovo sees Modern Times as an artwork essay on mechanical reproduction which responds to accusations that
he had become a lapdog of capitalism. Beautiful Democracy: Aestheticsand Anarchy in a Global Era (Univ. of Chicago
Press, 2007), 163.
7. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale UP, 1987).
8. This wording is from one of my students at New Mexico State University in 2009.
9. Chaplin, My Autobiography, 210.
10. Octavio Cortazar, director, Por PrimeraVez (El Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematogrficos, 1967); on special
features DVD, Charles Chaplin, Modern Times: The Chaplin Collection (Warner Home Video, 2003).
11. Aaron Woolf, director, King Corn: You Are What You Eat (Mosaic/Docurama Films, 2006). Chaplins comments on the
use of machines, that when employed solely for profit, they brought only misery (paraphrase from Truffault, Chaplin
Today) parallels what Miguel Angel Asturias wrote about the cultivation of corn. Maize could be a sacred sustenance when
sown to be eaten, Asturias wrote, but when sown merely for profit it means famine for the men who were made of maize.
Miguel Angel Asturias, Men of Maize. Trans. by Gerald Martin (London: Verso: 1988), 5-6. Asturias wrote much of Men of
Maize in the early to mid-1930s, as part of the same era that inspired a range of modernist artists (including William Faulkner)
to comment on the ways in what mechanization was destroying land and traditional cultures. See Ren Prieto, Miguel Angel
Asturiass Archeology of Return (Cambridge UP, 1983/2009), 90-91.
12. Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy, 165.
13. W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
14. Gregory Stephens, Corn-Fed Culture: Living Large and Eating Shit in King Corn and Fast Food Nation, Bright Lights
Film Journal #68 (Spring 2010); http://www.brightlights.com/68/68cornfedculture.php
[HTTP://WWW.BRIGHTLIGHTS.COM/68/68CORNFEDCULTURE.PHP]

15. Nervous in Detroit, Chaplin, My Autobiography, 383.

16. Timothy Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing About Film, 6th ed., (Pearson Longman, 2007), 56, 59, my emphasis.
17. Mark Winokur, Modern Times and the Comedy of Transformation, Literature /Film Quarterly 15:4 (1987), 221.
18. Marisa Montes, Juan Bobo Goes to Work (HarperCollins, 2000).
19. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon & Schuster, 2001).
20. From Approaches to FilmModern Times on the Modern Times double DVD.
21. Dan Kamine, Charlie Chaplins One-Man Show (Scarecrow Press, 1995), 114.
22. Chaplins silent but double-voiced Bobo represents those who are refusing to be turned into disposable people, as
Vandana Shiva writes. The industrial production of food, one of the machine-ages innovations, has worsened the creation
of redundant or disposable people. Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2008), 2-3.
23. Devin Anthony Orgeron and Marsha Gabrielle Orgeron, Eating Their Words: Consuming Class a la Chaplin and
Keaton, College Literature 28:1 (Winter 2001), 93.
24. After meeting Goddard, Chaplin described an image of the tramp being very gallant [to her] in a crowded patrol wagon
as the seed from which Modern Times grew. Chaplin, My Autobiography, 383.
25. Gerald Mast, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies (U of Chicago P, 1979), 83.
26. David J. Lemaster, The Pathos of the Unconscious: Charlie Chaplin and Dreams, Journal of Popular Film and
Television 25:3 (Fall 1997), 110-6.
27. Chaplin, My Autobiography, 382-3.
28. David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (McGraw-Hill, 1985).
29. Philippe Truffault, Chaplin Today (Warner Home Video, 2004).
30. Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Riseof Scientific Management (U. Wisconsin Press, 1980). After
revolutionizing the machine-tool industry, and Taylor undertook a career in popular management writing as more of a
public relations gimmick. But as the son of a radical feminist and abolitionist mother, Taylor was hardly a Taylorite.
31. David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (McGraw-Hill, 1985): 459. Quoted in David Gerstein, Modern Times and the
Question of Technology (1995); http://www.cartoonresearch.com/gerstein/chaplin/machines.html

[HTTP://WWW.CARTOONRESEARCH.COM/GERSTEIN/CHAPLIN/MACHINES.HTML]

32. John W. Martens, The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film & Television (Winnipeg: J. Gordon
Shillingford, 2003); Charles Mitchell, A Guide to Apocalyptic Cinema (Greenwood Press, 2001).
33. John Sbardellati and Tony Shaw, Booting a Tramp: Charlie Chaplin, the FBI, and the Construction of the Subversive
Image in Red Scare America, Pacific Historical Review 72:4 (2003), 495-530.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gregory Stephens [HTTP://SENSESOFCINEMA.COM/AUTHOR/GREGORY-STEPHENS/]
Gregory Stephens teaches film and composition at New Mexico State University. His book, On Racial Frontiers: The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley, was published by Cambridge University Press. His essay, Sisyphus in the Sand Pit: On the Iconic Character of Sand, and how the
anti-natural man Catches Water in Woman in the Dunes, appears in Kinema (Spring 2009).