Modern Times (1936)

G rated and I'm pretty sure that's an okay...waitaminute!  Isn't there a whole section about "nose candy"?  Is that "nose candy" just cocaine?  Also, isn't one of the funnier gags when the Tramp accidentally takes a bunch of this nose candy and loses his mind, Cocaine Bear-style?  Still, G rating, I guess.

DIRECTOR: Charles Chaplin

It's spooky season! What am I doing writing about Charlie Chaplin?  That's a loaded question.  First, I think the obsession with spooky season has completely killed my love for spooky season.  I don't want to be the spooky season grump, but it's the way my mind is wandering.  Secondly, I was finishing a unit on the Early American studio system and Mark Sennett, so I had to show them an example of ur-slapstick.  It's one of those movies that I absolutely should have written about before this time, but my stupid obsession with rules and completeness probably put the kibosh on that.

Chaplin always is a vibe check for me.  Like how I feel with writing (especially today!), there are times that I really want to write and there are times when writing seems like the greatest burden imaginable.  With the case of Chaplin, I want to watch all of Chaplin. My mental understanding is "I like all of the Chaplin I see.  I'm sure it holds up."  The emotional understanding is, "I'm not in the mood."  It's weird.  It makes no sense and I need to get that checked out because I have a lot more Chaplin to get through.  But Modern Times reminds me how much I like Chaplin.  In terms of the feels, I'm more of a The Kid fan myself. That is a movie with a concrete narrative and a character that is worth getting behind.  With Modern Times, there is a narrative, but it is more loose than The Kid.  If anything, Chaplin sets up a lot more vignettes and gags and then ties it together with a narrative framework.  I mean, it works because I'm about to gush over this movie. But the analytical part of me really can't get by me.  I'm watching the sausage get made and I can't stop thinking about it.  Do you know why I keep thinking about it?  I've seen Modern Times a handful of times.  I remember images and gags from the movie, but I didn't remember that this was an anti-capitalism story that also had a romantic foundation.  Nope.  I remember the Tramp going through the gears and I remember the blindfolded rollerskating scene.  It's because those set pieces exist almost as a complilation of short films, similar to that of Mr. Bean.

I'm going to say that my hippie-dippie liberal nonsense loves the heck out of this movie.  If you told my 12-18 year old self that I would find the plight of the worker, especially during the Great Depression, the most fascinating part of American history (or at least close to the Cold War), I would scoff at you.  This was something that was so off my privileged radar that I found tales of survival in a capitalist wasteland exhausting.  But I start my American Lit class teaching Of Mice and Men and secretly want to hang out in this part of history forever.  Perhaps it is the fact that the survivors of the Great Depression were able to distinguish between the traps of extreme capitalism and the notion of attaching that to America that really resonates with me. Okay, it was the artists who were doing that.  But there's this parallel that I see with America today that I keep jumping back to when it comes to the Great Depression.  Watching Chaplin's Tramp navigate through the lowest eschelons of society in an attempt to make a living reminds me the value of art as a time to take the pulse of a society in need to medical / economic salvation.

Modern Times goes hard too.  I mean, it's always funny.  Good art shows up when society starts to crumble because the one thing that people need during this time is something to bond over while having something entertaining.  While Karl Marx proclaimed that religion was the "opiate of the masses", I know that entertainment has been placed in a similar camp.  But Modern Times might be the film that kind of proves that entertainment doesn't have to try to be apolitical (there is no such thing!) while appealing to notions of simultaneous education and entertainment.  I know that not all of my students found Modern Times to be perfect.  I got some genuine laughs, so I know that there's at least debate about the quality of the film.  But Modern Times, taking into account that comedy is subjective, is honestly very funny.  Comedy relies often on the suspense that comes out of dramatic irony.  The more you watch a movie, while the dramatic irony is the same, the suspense is lessened because we know when the "bang" is going to come.  But I'm a guy who has seen this movie a handful of times.  Why am I still laughing?

I think that comes down to craftsmanship.  I was getting really mad at my Wifi connection during my favorite scene.  I had to bring in my Criterion DVD (I had to throw that it was the Criterion in there.  Why?  Because my brain wouldn't let me not put that.) to show off that scene unbroken.  Logically, I remember how close the Tramp gets to the edge of the floor.  I know it.  But I still held my breath.  I still had that cathartic moment when his blindfold is taken off, despite the fact that it has been seared in my head.  Very few movies get me to laugh that way over and over again.  Why?  Magic tricks are less impressive after each viewing.  But with the sheer daring-do of Chaplin in Modern Times, he still got me.  As much as I replay that image of him skating in my head, somehow Chaplin gets even closer to the edge than I remember.  It's really very impressive.  I know that we don't have the tradition of Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd anymore, but I can't see why no one has pulled this card closer. Maybe it is that special effects and OSHA regulations have taken the danger out of any scene viewed (note: they absolutely should).  But watching Modern Times, all I can think is "How the heck did he do this?"

But back to politics!  Yay, politics! (Also, 12-to-18 year old me would roll my eyes at politics while 40-year-old me wants to burn the system down.)