Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times
Nhil B
BYUH
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times
Being told that we were going to watch a 1936 Charlie Chaplin movie made me excited. I have never seen any of his films so I did not know what to expect. Seeing the movie title as “Modern Times”, however, made me think that the film is about the lives of the people during the Great Depression. As it turned out, I was correct. But aside from showing the concerns and difficulties of those who lived during a severe economic depression, the film also shows how modernization in society affects the people. What is more interesting, though, is how even more than half a century later, Chaplin’s film still mirrors the influence of modernization on the lives of many people and the world they live in.
Chaplin allows his viewers to understand the effect of modernization in the workplace through several scenes. One example is when an inventor makes his character, the Little Tramp, as a subject to present a “modern” feeding machine. In that scene, Chaplin shows how eager people are in the modern time— or at least in their modern time in 1936— to make workers do their job faster that they will venture to reform the normal way of eating during lunch break. Chaplin also shows that people are so absorbed in recreating and inventing things to achieve efficiency in what they do. One can say that this constant invention and reinvention of things that are being used in workplaces is still true today. This is evident by how companies continue to upgrade and reprogram their computers to hold more information and be better at multi-tasking.
The effect of modernization not only changes the tools people use but also changes the people who use those tool. This effect is seen when the boss of the factory asks to make the machine the workers use to run faster, requiring The Little Tramp and his colleagues to also act faster than how they can handle. The increasing demand for faster manual labor eventually makes the Little Tramp suffer a
BYUH
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times
Being told that we were going to watch a 1936 Charlie Chaplin movie made me excited. I have never seen any of his films so I did not know what to expect. Seeing the movie title as “Modern Times”, however, made me think that the film is about the lives of the people during the Great Depression. As it turned out, I was correct. But aside from showing the concerns and difficulties of those who lived during a severe economic depression, the film also shows how modernization in society affects the people. What is more interesting, though, is how even more than half a century later, Chaplin’s film still mirrors the influence of modernization on the lives of many people and the world they live in.
Chaplin allows his viewers to understand the effect of modernization in the workplace through several scenes. One example is when an inventor makes his character, the Little Tramp, as a subject to present a “modern” feeding machine. In that scene, Chaplin shows how eager people are in the modern time— or at least in their modern time in 1936— to make workers do their job faster that they will venture to reform the normal way of eating during lunch break. Chaplin also shows that people are so absorbed in recreating and inventing things to achieve efficiency in what they do. One can say that this constant invention and reinvention of things that are being used in workplaces is still true today. This is evident by how companies continue to upgrade and reprogram their computers to hold more information and be better at multi-tasking.
The effect of modernization not only changes the tools people use but also changes the people who use those tool. This effect is seen when the boss of the factory asks to make the machine the workers use to run faster, requiring The Little Tramp and his colleagues to also act faster than how they can handle. The increasing demand for faster manual labor eventually makes the Little Tramp suffer a