A silent film that has lost none of its haunting significance in today’s climate of global economic anxiety and uncertainty, Charlie Chaplin’s classic “Modern Times” captures the nightmare vision par excellence of the middle class ― social demotion. Released in 1936, the film portrays the hapless character Charlie ― or, the Tramp, Chaplin’s alter ego ― comically and, at times, heroically, struggling to carve out an existence during the Great Depression in America. 

“Modern Times” came out at a time when Chaplin’s fame was at its height; however, the reception of the film was mixed. Some critics felt that the silent film era was over, and that Chaplin’s slapstick comedy act had outlived its relevance in a society reeling from financial crisis. Others argued that the film’s political dimension merely functioned as a background tableau against which Chaplin performed his usual comical sketches; a tableau that could easily have been replaced with something else without noticeably affecting the film’s main concern ― to entertain.

Among Chaplin’s 11 directed feature films, “Modern Times” is arguably among the most episodic; a film that largely comprises a series of episodes and sketches, only vaguely connected to each other, and to the overall storyline.

To many viewers, the fragmentary nature of the film made it distinctly unsuitable to take on weighty political issues ― such as the dehumanization of workers chained to the assembly line, social unrest, and the fear of unemployment. Failing to move beyond mere sketch comedy, Chaplin’s film used poverty as a means to create cheap laughs ― and little else, it seemed.

Although all the elements of a social realist scenario are present in “Modern Times” ― e.g. demonstrations, strikes, police clampdowns ― the film is in many ways conspicuously apolitical; it resists articulating a social critique of any kind.

In one scene, Charlie accidentally becomes the leader of a workers’ demonstration as he waves a flag that has fallen off a truck; while Charlie ― a man who obviously believes in the principle of property rights ― tries to alert the owners of the flag, the workers, and a little later the police, misidentify him as the standard-bearer of the demonstration. After being arrested, Charlie heroically spoils a prison riot and thus helps the police defeat a group of proletarian inmates ― but only after he has inadvertently consumed a drug-like powder.

Finally, during a workers’ strike Charlie by mistake hits a police officer with a brick after which he is, once again, arrested.

In all these cases, Charlie is entirely ignorant of the larger social issues at stake, or, rather, he fails to acknowledge and support the particular interests of the working class to which he ― as a factory worker ― belongs. In another sense, Charlie is never really a factory worker. At the assembly line, Charlie either works too fast or too slow, too distractedly or too hysterically, much to the annoyance of his co-workers; a career that ends with the whole factory breaking down.

In whatever capacity Charlie is employed, he creates chaos; working at a shipbuilding yard, he accidentally sinks a ship, and as the night guard in a department store Charlie merrily ends up getting drunk with a gang of burglars. Ironically, the one place where Charlie feels at home is in his prison cell ― safe from the world of hard labor, enjoying the life of complete idleness.

While the film may portray the dehumanization of human individuals in the age of rampant industrialization, as many critics have argued ― the only truly dehumanized individual in the film is in fact Charlie; among all the workers, he is the one constantly standing out, unable to fit in, incapable of adapting his individual personality to the mechanical rhythm of repetitive, anonymous work at the assembly line.

In a further sense, Charlie never shows much sympathy for the plight of the workers who either appear a little too paralyzed, zombie-like (in the factory), or too politically conscious (in the streets). The workers in the film get along well with the dull machine work; they fully understand their precarious political and economic situation, and hence the necessity of collective strikes and demonstrations against an exploitative system.

Charlie, by contrast, is tragicomically unfit to carry out manual labor of any sort, let alone comprehend the social implications of his circumstances, the necessity of being part of a collective of individuals united by shared class interests. It makes little difference to Charlie whether he is fired by the factory owner or asked to go on strike by the workers’ union; in either case, Charlie is without a job, and hence relegated to the streets.

For Charlie is essentially not part of the working class; he may have ended up among the anonymous mass of factory workers, but only by mistake. In reality, Charlie is the socially demoted middle class citizen who in a time of economic crisis frantically tries to re-orient himself in an unrecognizable and hostile world; it is a world in which his disheveled, worn-out bourgeois suit ― along with the characteristic cane and bowler hat ― makes him look like a tramp.

Utterly unprepared and unqualified to a ragtag existence of brutal survival in the streets, Charlie obstinately clings to the values of the middle class ― individualism, courtesy, dignity, love; he daydreams about owning a little house with a garden, about privacy, family idyll, freedom.

In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, Charlie roller-skates blind-folded in a giant department store, unaware that he’s dangerously close to falling over the edge; it is an emblematic image of Charlie’s ― and with him, a whole generation’s ― social situation.

“Modern Times” is not a critique of the devastating effects that modern capitalism brought about, at least not in a direct sense. Rather, the film’s narrow focus on the eccentric character of Charlie, and his misfortunes in society, captures the nightmare scenario that has always haunted the middle class ever since it came into existence ― a scenario which became a concrete reality for many people during the Great Depression; the terrifying social regression to the proletarian class.

That Chaplin could only approach this ultimate bourgeois nightmare of being dispossessed of class through episodic slapstick comedy testifies to the depth of its traumatic nature. As Modern Times’ comic effects have waned over the years, the traumatic vision of Chaplin’s silent film speaks to our modern times clearer than ever.

By Eli Park Sorensen 

Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.