Can You Make Them Like You Used To?: "Modern Times"
The word "complain" has an interesting history. Etymologically-inclined folks tell us that it arose in the late 14th Century, originally bearing the meaning of a lamentation or expression of grief or suffering. It's linked through Old French to the Vulgar Latin complangere, meaning to beat or strike the breast, the way people undone by uncontrollable torment do in old tales, and perhaps even in real life.
From this grief-bound origin, the word slowly changed in its meaning, until by the 17th Century it had come to bear its more modern connotations of grievance, blame, and annoyance.
I bring this up because I've been thinking this week about the frequently-voiced idea that "They can't make a movie like that anymore."
This statement is not to be confused with the equally-frequent observation that "They don't make movies like that anymore," which, because of its use of "don't" is grammatically uninterested in issues of blame. When we say they don't make many big budget Westerns or Musicals anymore, we're generally leading up to some rather amoral discussion of market tendencies or audience preference. It's simply an observation, a statement of fact.
But when we take out the "don't" and use the pesky little word "can't" in its place, something entirely different happens. Now, we're implying that there is something preventing these movies from being made. Depending on the way the phrase is being used, that something is either praiseworthy or blameworthy; because we live in a culture of grievance, it's usually the latter.
Which is to say that when the phrase "They can't make a movie like that anymore" gets bandied about, there is almost always more than a hint of regret in it, of complaint, in both its older and more recent senses. It's a claim that, like the word "complaint" itself, often starts with grief, a metaphorical beating of the breast, before quickly moving into blame and annoyance.
In this sense, the phrase is frequently invoked by real or metaphorical old fogeys (another interesting word, fogey, coming from the Scottish expression for an "old, dull fellow" and perhaps linked to an archaic usage of "fog" which was used in reference to moss or long grass, giving us the delightful image of an old fogey as someone so aged and dull that they're covered with overgrown grass and moss, like some fallen-down building) to imply that the world is no longer as fun as it used to be because of all the political correctness that has come crashing down around us in the last couple of decades.
They can't make movies like Porky's or Revenge of the Nerds anymore, goes a version of this complaint, because for some reason we're not allowed to watch boys getting their innocence rocks off by peeking through holes in the wall at naked women's breasts; or, they can't make movies like Lawrence of Arabia or The Last Samurai or anymore, because we're not allowed to tell stories about other cultures that are centered on some white guy taking a leadership role in that culture, regardless of whether or not in history (or our imaginations) that really actually happened; or, they can't make movies like Blazing Saddles or Cheech and Chong: Up In Smoke anymore, because the jokes are too close to being racist.
Sometimes, of course, this phrase is invoked in a more celebratory sense. They can't make movies like The Birth of a Nation or Gone With The Wind anymore, because it's no longer acceptable to tether heroism to domestic terrorism or to float the idea of the Civil War as a proving ground for southern gentility. Nor can they make movies like The King and I or Breakfast at Tiffany's anymore, because it's no longer acceptable for white actors to play across racial lines or engage in gross stereotype.
On the surface, both cases – the fogey on his barstool pining for the raunchy Porky's of his youth, and the non-fogey moviegoer made queasy by Mickey Rooney's turn as "Mr. Yunioshi" in Breakfast at Tiffany's – differ. The first is a complaint aimed at how the contemporary evolution of society has taken away a source of entertainment; the second is a complaint about the way things used to be, and a lauding of the evolution that has made those things no longer so.
But they share in common an assumption: They can't make movies like that anymore because we have evolved, progressed, become more enlightened. This is clear in the case of the contemporary moviegoer, but even the old fogey yearning for his boobies understands, I think, that the reason those movies can't get made anymore is because society has moved forward. He may not like it, and he may think feminists are a bunch of whiners, he may wish that society were moving backwards, but somewhere deep in his soul he knows that society doesn't move backwards. And so he drinks another beer and complains some more.
But what if – and this is the question posed by watching Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times in 2022, eighty-four years after it first appeared on the screen – these folks are all wrong? What if, occasionally, they can't make a movie like that anymore because society has actually gone backwards, devolved, bent further away from, rather than closer towards, things like justice and sophistication?
Released in 1936, Modern Times is the last film to feature Chaplin in his role as the Little Tramp, that bemustached fellow in oversized shoes whom Chaplin had been portraying on screen at that point for some twenty years.
It's a mostly silent film: human voices are heard, but there is no on-screen dialogue, and it tells the story of the Tramp's disastrous confrontation with modernity. At the start, he's working on an assembly line, turning screws with a wrench in each hand. The work is so monotonous that even when he's on break, the Tramp can't stop his hands from making the wrenching motion. Eventually, after he's used as the factory guinea-pig for a new force-feeding machine intended to improve efficiency, the job drives him into a mental breakdown.
He ends up in jail, where he mistakes some cocaine smuggled in by a fellow inmate for salt and gets high, which ends up with him foiling an escape attempt. Thankful for his help, the guards let him live like a king, gussying up his cell and spending his time relaxing. It's a way of life – given the realities of the Depression wracking the nation – that he would very much like to continue, but be released he must.
He gets a job at a shipyard, where he accidentally launches a half-built ship, which sinks. But what's he to do? He's not a laborer, the Tramp, not built for work; he’s built for living, he's a lover of life, an embodiment of Uncle Walt's suggestion on how we ought to exist: "This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families."
Fired from the shipyard, the Tramp meets a gamin – a fetching young woman left parent-less by economic devastation – named Ellen (Paulette Goddard) and eventually takes another job, this time as a night watchman in a department store. He confronts some burglars, only to realize that he knows one of them from his time in the factory, and that they've been driven to burglary because they're starving to death. Rather than apprehend them, he falls asleep under a pile of ladies' clothing, scandalizing the well-to-do clientele when they discover him in the morning.
Fired again, he shacks up with Ellen in a shack, and then, after several more adventures, ends up getting hired as a singer in a nightclub where she's working. He can't sing, but manages to improvise a song and dance routine that delights the crowd, whereupon the police show up again, this time to arrest Ellen for some of her own misadventures. Rather than pursue his newfound career in entertainment, the Tramp runs off with her, and the film ends with them walking together into a sunlit future, poor in material prospects but rich in love and in their faith in existence.
There are any number of fascinating elements to the film that I might put forward to buttress the suggestion that it represents a vision of life more just and sophisticated than those that surround us today, but I'm going to try to limit myself to just one: the film's very first post-credits image. This is of white sheep, packed together and rushing forward from the top of the frame to the bottom; there is among them, a single black sheep. This then cross-fades to a shot of a mass of people streaming up from a subway on their way to work.
One wants, initially, to argue that the image is simple to the point of reduction: By cutting from a shot of sheep to a shot of workers, Chaplin is saying that modern society has turned everyone into a bunch of sheep. And this is a fine, and perhaps even fair, starting point.
But what is it that has done this to us? Well, the title gives us a clue: it is Modern Times themselves that have degraded us into this animalistic condition.
Ok, good. But animalistic how? The image leads us in the following direction: like the sheep, we are now (in 1936) packed tightly together, flowing forward with no real notion of why or where. And what happens to sheep? Well, they are on their way, presumably, to have all their hair cut off so it can be made into wool, whereupon they will grow it again, and once again be shorn, as many times as possible. Or perhaps they are on their way to be milked, the thing they produce to feed their young being sucked out of them and carted away in great slopping buckets to be made into cheese. Or maybe they are to be eaten, hit on the head with a hammer and skinned and butchered and served on a platter with a sprig of rosemary. Or perhaps they will be milked and then shorn and then when they get old sold to a manufacturer of dog food, who will kill them and grind them into kibble.
The point is that this bleating, uncomprehending forward motion is not arbitrary, not pointless. It is life made into a consumable. Being turned into a sheep, in this context, doesn't mean surrendering your free will, in the way we often think of the term when we snarl at our fellow human beings: "What a bunch of sheep!" Instead, it's about being turned into something that has more value because of what it produces than because of what it intrinsically is.
The film then goes on to explain what, specifically, does this to us in our modern times. The first culprit is, of course, the way we work. The Tramp's job in the factory is mindless, senseless; he is little more than an automaton. When he's on break, as I noted above, he has difficulty in stopping his arms from continuing to perform the habitual motion of turning the wrenches that takes up all his time. One might want to try to reduce this to no more than a critique of life on the production line in 1936, but notice (with the comparison to the sheep in the background, always) the subtlety of Chaplin's observation: which of us, in our modern times, does not have our non-working hours invaded by our work in precisely the same way?
The image of the Tramp walking around trying to convince his arms to stop their wrench-turning motion, in other words, is an exact metaphor for the way virtually all of us try, almost always unsuccessfully, to keep our minds from returning in our off-hours to the work that dominates our lives, to keep from habitually checking our email to see what new tasks have come in, to resist the slow infiltration of work into all of the non-working areas of our lives.
And what better image for our frequent relationship with food than a mechanism that pours soup down our throat and shoves morsels into our mouths while we continue to labor? "Food on the go, for busy people" is not just an anodyne ad slogan that blasts at us from our televisions and phones, it's a description of the acceleration of our lives, of the way that being busy (read: making money) has become not simply a description but an end point, a goal, a way of life. Food is "fuel" these days, and what does fuel do? It powers machines. And machines, like sheep, exist not for themselves but for someone else to use.
The film takes this notion and follows it through. What does the Tramp's world force him to do? Rush forward as fast as he can, packed in with his fellow humans, scrabbling for existence. But the Tramp – remember that there is a single black sheep in the opening image – cannot conform.
He does not want to be a sheep or a cog, he wants to live. His job drives him mad; when he cannot abide by the rules of the sheep-system, he is put in jail; when he tries to work again he realizes that he has been hired by the owners of another kind of factory – a department store that sells frivolous beauty-items to folks who have been convinced how desperately they need to buy such things – to protect the profits from those spoils against people who have no food because they, like him, can't get along in the system; even his ability to be funny and entertain people, in the night club in the end, is turned into a way to get customers to pay for drinks and meals.
The image of the sheep, then, is an image that makes a claim about the way we are at threat, at all times, in all of our activities, of being turned into a means instead of an end. And the story that follows that opening image is about the hilarity of trying to resist this, and the means through which we might do so. In the spirit of Whitman, whom I quoted above, the Tramp tries to resist by finding solace in love, in leisure, in stepping out of the assaulting flow.
I noted at the beginning that it might be the case that Modern Times is one of those films that "They can't make today," not because we have progressed, but because in some ways our world is actually less developed, less just, less sophisticated than it once was. This is a complicated claim, and surely no more than half-right. Films from Joe Versus the Volcano to Falling Down to Office Space to Two Days, One Night to Sorry To Bother You, among many others, have all taken up the mantle of Modern Times in the past decades, in various ways and to greater or lesser degrees of success.
On the other hand, one wonders about the reaction of contemporary viewers to a film that starts by comparing them to sheep. The opening image of Modern Times assumes an audience that is not defensive about its position or prospects, and for whom solidarity is still an actionable idea. An audience that is able to understand the metaphor, and laugh along with it. Is that still possible? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. But it does seem to be the case that these days we are entranced by the notion that we are not sheep. We are, in our own view, radical individuals, each with a "unique dream" that can be achieved if we just work hard enough.
"I have the best advice for women in business," Kim Kardashian brayed recently. "Get your fucking ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days." Kardashian has rightly been the subject of a great deal of gleeful mockery for the inanity of her stance. This is a woman who made it to the top, it has been pointed out, by being born into a wealthy family and then "accidentally" leaking a sex tape to thrust herself into the public eye, rather than by lifting herself up by her proverbial bootstraps through a devotion to self-improvement or actual labor. She is a woman who, perhaps more damningly, famously uses an army of unpaid interns to do her menial work, playing on their desperate hope that they might somehow catch her eye, or that some of her magic wealth fairy dust might rub off on them, in order to instrumentalize them, turning them, in Chaplin's view, into sheep she sheers and milks for her profit.
But there is also something deeply, even radically, telling in her statement. Not because it is wrong, but because it is so widely accepted. If you are not working, if you are not hustling, you are, in the eyes of a vast number of our fellow human beings, a loser. Work, the acceleration of modern life to the point where all the rest of it – meals and free time and love and leisure – becomes a blur; or worse, the acceleration to the point where love and leisure themselves become a kind of work, a way of getting ahead, an Instagram post that might just get me enough likes to make me an influencer;– this, for many people, is the point.
And the stark, naked truth, which Chaplin and his audience knew so many years ago, is that this is an illusion. The vast majority of people will never be rich, never be famous, by definition. Because to be rich and famous requires precisely a massive pool of people who are not rich and famous. Wealth is not wealth if everyone has it; celebrity does not exist if everyone is equally well-known.
So why are we urged to work, to strive endlessly, to pursue our dreams, no matter how many hours upon hours of our lives it costs us, to turn ourselves into sheep to be shorn and milked and slaughtered? It's certainly a question that seems worth thinking about. Unless, of course, you'd rather just take the day off from thinking, grab the hand of your lover, and go spend some time doing absolutely nothing at all. Which I, personally, would heartily endorse.
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