(Caveat: This blog post is full of cynicism. Read at your own peril.)
It seems to me that our 21st Century has strikingly little difference with the early 20th Century as portrayed in “Modern Times.” In fact, it's similar in at least three ways and there are tie-ins to poetry we've read all semester.
As the factory workers, we rely on technology, but instead of cogs and wrenches, we run on circuit boards and lasers. He who invents the next big “toy” that will revolutionize the American daily life will make millions at the expense of the materialist and the technology-proficient. The salesman cared little for the Little Tramp but only for the malfunctioning machine, and I wonder if it's all that different from how we treat people. We may not see the hard-working conditions in China or Thailand, but is buying low-priced products really all that different from the way the movie portrays the production line?
Just as the Little Tramp is chased for being too machine-like and not being able to stop himself from twisting washers – and anything that looks like them. Our equivalent is not the over-active or the hard worker but the couch potato, the 30-year-old video gamer in his parents basement, the teenage girl who can't be separated from her Blackberry without panicking. At least the Little Tramp was addicted to his work. Today, we are addicted to entertainment, fueled by technology, and we wonder why we're an obese culture. Seems like Chaplin was spot-on when he made a character that couldn't shut off. With cyborg implants on the horizon, it won't take long for some to actually become part machine in the name of progress and individual choice – or so they say now.
But back to the film. When the Little Tramp is released from prison, he asks to stay. With little to no work expect, a homey cell, and food provided at every meal, his unjust life as a prisoner turns out to be the best thing that happens to him. Until he meets the gamine, he's still striving to return to prison because it feels like a better life. He is jealous of the commodities provided, and that still happens today. Michael Moore's documentary “Sicko” revolves around the injustices of the healthcare system in America. In one part of the film, Moore takes a boat load of chronic patients with no insurance to the waters outside of Guantanamo Bay and uses a loudspeaker to demand universal healthcare for the American citizens with him, since the prisoners receive the healthcare they need regardless of the crimes they are imprisoned for. The criminal are still better off than the poor nearly a hundred years after Chaplin's film.
The theme of this movie also reminds me of Ezra Pound's “With Usura.” While Chaplin doesn't directly address the problem of debt and usury, the idea of the class gap is prevalent in both works. Chaplin blames the gap on modernization and exploitation of the little man while Pound focuses on the financial enslavement of the down-and-out man to those that already have money. Both men are commenting on the same problems we have present in our current society. The education gap is something that none of the authors have truly addressed but is becoming an increasing factor in the widening gap between poverty and wealth.
I will clarify: I don't hate technology. In fact, I believe it is useful and even necessary for our current culture. However, I found the themes in Chaplin's “Modern Times” to be striking with the same issues we have present today. Though we label our culture, literature, and philosophy as postmodern, I see very little difference between the modernity portrayed by Chaplin and the issues still in society.
It is often our past that determines our future. In the case of technology and the case that you are attempting to make, Jazz that is definitely what is happening. I don't know that I would fully agree with your premise, but it is an interesting one, that our addictions of the past have led to the present. This is true, the full outplay of it while likely be debated for generations, not only by us who use and abuse technology, but the historians of future generations.
ReplyDeleteYou've created a cynic out of me, Jazz. I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I would even go further as to say that since our current culture has been exposed to the technological revolution for quite a long time now, we are even more desensitized to its addiction over our lives. Back in the 1930s, the technological industry was in its beginnings and just starting to take off. We have grown up immersed in it since we learned how to turn on the television or the computer screen. The similarities from then are alive today, but to an even greater extent.
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