Ascetic Ghosts in the Machine

IN MODERN TIMES (1936), Charlie Chaplin captures, with pitch-perfect ire and ennui, the inanity of living under a capitalist regime. The Little Tramp’s slapstick misadventures in just trying to get by in the Age of Industry bring tears to the eyes, and not only tears of laughter. At one point, he is caught in the sprocket of a factory machine, a human cog grinding in a corporate wheel. He suffers a workplace nervous breakdown, is fired, is hospitalized, and recovers, only to wander into a picket line, where he is mistaken for a communist and thrown in jail. He is soon released for accidental good behavior, but the living conditions inside, he finds, are more congenial than life on the outside. The rest of the plot unfolds as a series of thwarted attempts to get rearrested. That the film is mostly silent and marks the last appearance of Chaplin’s signature character adds pathos and poignancy to the satirizing. The bright future promised by modernity, the film is trying to tell us—at the height of the Great Depression and on the cusp of World War II—ain’t what it used to be.