Eating/ Machine: Discipline, Digestion, and Depression-era Gesticulation in Chaplin's Modern Times by Christian Hite
http://cinema.usc.edu/archivedassets/098/15861.pdf
Modern Times - Charlie Chaplin Eating Machine (movie clip)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZlJ0vtUu4wModern Times and the Question of Technology
Perhaps it was his status as a tramp, but for whatever reason, the icon Charlie represented one important ideological stance above others: a silent protest against advancing technology. Chaplin stated when in the early planning stages of Modern Times that "I am always suspicious of a picture with a message," so Chaplin never made a film in which he verbally indicted machines or automation as intrinsically bad; Robinson pegs Times as "an emotional response, always based on comedy, to the circumstances of the times" (Robinson 1985: 458). Specifically, most reviewers seem to agree that it was angst over the transition to sound -- a technological advancement that brought class to even the cheapest studios that adopted it -- that brought out the more general urge to combat the bogey of 'gizmos in positions of authority'.Chaplin felt deeply that sound would compromise the entertainment ideals toward which he was working with the Tramp -- in fact, with film in general. "If Charlie's universality was not to be compromised with a voice," Wes Gehring put it, "the character itself would need to be retired" (Gehring 1983: 41). Of course, this need not happen, Chaplin figured in the early days of sound, were the new medium only to become one way of making films. "I regard it only as an addition, not as a substitute," he said. "Silent comedy is more satisfactory entertainment for the masses than sound comedy . . . [which] I think is transitional" (Kamin 1984: 100). Chaplin viewed silent film as the art form; now modernity was reaching forward to oust his preeminence as other comedians like the Marx Brothers (whom Chaplin called "frightening") became the new kings of the new art form. It was Chaplin against a world which he viewed increasingly as being made up of novelty-oriented robots.
Thus in Modern Times, a largely silent film Chaplin released as late as 1936, Charlie and his female counterpart, the Gamine, are "the only two live spirits in a world of automatons," as "spiritual escapees from a world in which [Chaplin] saw no other hope" (Robinson 1985: 459). The film's workers are likened to sheep in the opening shot, and in one of the most famous sequences, Charlie himself is caught in the cogs of a vicious machine and, later, feeds a meal to a poor devil caught, perhaps forever, deep in the bowels of another metal monster. Historian Dan Kamin emphasizes how human actors' voices are only heard over loudspeakers in Modern Times; when characters speak to one another, their words occur on printed subtitles in almost every case (a chorus of singing waiters, hardly integral to the plot, excepted). The world of this film thus presents machines as most advanced; yet being advanced in one way (having the power of speech) hardly cancels out the destructive power machinery is given. When brought in for Charlie's slave-driving boss to inspect in the film's opening minutes, a machine meant to feed workers while leaving their hands free announces its functions by an associated LP record. The device's viciously mechanical, repetitive quality, and its urge to present itself as superior, are emphasized by how the recording points out no less than three times that the lunch hour can now be eliminated from the workday.
The power of "progress," its advancement working to the commoners' detriment, and its potential for out-of-control mayhem are all crystalized very nicely. Charlie, the pretentious tramp, is outiconified by an image-breaking machine, more worshipped and more evolved than the highest man (Charlie's nervous, sweating boss) and yet more abusive and vulgar than the lowest ruffian: the device feeds Charlie bolts which have accidentally been left on its tray, thus forcing him to literally ingest progress (my interpretation from summary in Kamin 1984: 114). Machinery devours him by forcing him to devour its own excesses: it is only a short time later that Charlie is, as has been noted, himself devoured by the machine age in the geary maw of a huge construction device (ibid). Later, he is driven completely mad by his job of tightening gears to the point where he becomes a human machine, unable to stop his involuntary tweaking (with pliers) of anything knoblike.
What does all of this have to do with icon theory? The answer, or the means to the answer, can be found in Roland Barthes' analysis of wine. Barthes refers to how wine enobles the French worker by adding ease to drudgery; it also has a sophisticated quality that raises him above (for instance) countries where they "drink to get drunk" (Barthes 1972: 59). Meanwhile, the intellectual finds that the "beaujolais of the writer . . . will deliver him from myths . . . will make him the equal of the proletarian" (1972: 58). In short, wine behaves a double-edged sword, an icon that creates a common ground and shifts the social order. Chaplin's use of machines is, in fact, quite similar in its style and its effects (although, as the film's lumberingly demonic contrivances never reappeared in such capacity as in Times, they did not become recognized icons themselves). Machines may not enoble Charlie, but they bring the boss down to his level (the boss is seen as agitated and exhausted by his mechanized life), they leave no one alone (just as the Tramp is heckled by superiors' voices and images piped into the washroom, the management is heckled by the feeding machine's insistence on its own usefulness). And while machines are ennobling, they cause vulgarity by their malfunctions, masticating on workers. Like Charlie before them, a figure whom varying classes identified with in his mature form, these insidious devices are a great equalizer, but in a bleak manner. Beside them, Charlie the icon seems more satisfying, the alternative and better choice to that which would equalize by giving the rich and poor a diet of grommets, eating the worker and symbolically consuming the freedom of the managerial class, and eliminating the lunch hour, eliminating the lunch hour, eliminating the lunch hour.
Both Charlie and the machines, to paraphrase Barthes again, "give . . . a foundation for a collective morality, within which everything is redeemed" (1972: 59). What choice would an audience take -- redemption as Charlie, a humanistic icon (his creator aside), or as a machine, the demon-Charlie with his bolt-tightening obsession? It is not hard to guess. Wes Gehring calls the scene "a defeat over Charlie to which no other, living antagonism has come close" (Gehring 1983: 43). And yet Charlie, in the end, loses out in the battle between icons. When we next see him in The Great Dictator, it is his last time on the screen: he has refined his ways such that he is no longer officially the Tramp (most texts I follow call the character the Barber, although identifying him as implicitly the same Charlie). More importantly, he speaks -- while not an addition that, like some critics, I view as detrimental or overly alienating to the character, it is a sign that Chaplin could not withstand modernization forever. The difficulty he had in coming to terms with the Machine Age as it most affected him -- challenging his silent film style at the core -- finally fell in technology's favor (a point well-taken by IBM in its Charlie advertising campaign of recent years).Modern Times, for whatever it's worth, was seen as more political a film than Chaplin's previous efforts; quite frankly, its indictment of a segment of society made it that way. The New York Daily News' Kate Cameron saw the film as straight entertainment, but was of a minority; "more politically and aesthetically . . . conservative" critics, notably, made up that camp (Maland 1989: 155). Liberal commentators, such as the New Theatre's Charmion von Wiegand, were quicker to see the movie as "acutely [aware of] the changes which are occurring in the body of our society . . ." Conservative viewers, stressing the Tramp's humorous aspect, were quite telling in their emphasis on this, for whenThe Great Dictator came about, they would decide that there was more to worry over in Chaplin's ethic than fear of machines. But that is another chapter in the life of the icon.
-- David Gerstein
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