Charlie Chaplin and the City

Film Review # 45516

Film > Analysis, Criticism, Etc.
Film > Artist
Literature > American

A look at the way Chaplin views city life in his movie "Modern Times".

1,762 words () | 9 sources | MLA | 2002 | Australia

Published on: Nov 07, 2003

Paper Summary:

This essay traces the ideas that influenced Charlie Chaplin and modern times. It uses the theoretical ideas of reification to explain state control and mechanization of the populace in a dystopian modernism. The main focus is on the movie "Modern Times".

From the Paper:

"Reification is "the act (or the result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent of men and govern his life". In other words when man, the subject, loses what defines him as man to his own creation, and begins to act as his own creation does. This is the fear of the modern. What happens when man comes closer to being a machine? Be it social, industrial or technological. What happens when man becomes indistinguishable from the machine? In Charlie Chaplin's film "Modern Times" we see a society that is becoming not only more mechanized in its mode of production but also on a social scale. The film illustrates a society heading towards state control, where the subject loses their identity to the machine. When Chaplin and the Gamin head off down the road at the end of the film, we realize that this road will not lead them or us to a better place but "we know now with certainty that we are on the road that does not lead to anywhere" . The road that the pair plan to travel on metaphorically leads us to the idea that is representative of Singapore and the literature of a modern state controlled society, the unavoidable by-product of reification. I will examine Modern Times and the short story "Beginning" by Ah Leong, in the light of Michel De Certeau's work on the navigation and incarceration created by the railway . I will use De Certeau's work as a symbol of our modern times and an identifier of the plight of the subject in Modern Times."