#78 ‘Modern Times’
Cogs, Capitalism, and the Little Tramp Who Refused to Be Assimilated
Modern Times (1936) is Charlie Chaplin’s last hurrah for his Little Tramp—and it’s a masterpiece of silent protest dressed in slapstick, a love letter to the dignity of the individual, and a not-so-subtle middle finger to industrial capitalism. It’s brilliant, biting, and oddly adorable. But while Chaplin juggles wrenches and revolution with astonishing grace, let’s not pretend he wasn’t also doing a full-on pantomime of the working class without inviting many of them to speak for themselves.
The film opens with a visual thesis statement: sheep being herded, then factory workers punching in. Chaplin’s Tramp is immediately swallowed by the machine—literally. He becomes a twitching, oil-slicked cog in a system that sees humans as extensions of levers, gears, and bottom lines. The famous scene of him being fed by a malfunctioning automatic lunch machine? Hilarious. Horrifying. A mechanical force-feeding of efficiency that still plays like every algorithmic nightmare in today’s gig economy.
Chaplin, as always, is a physical genius. He performs anxiety like ballet, resistance like jazz. But what makes Modern Times so radical is that he doesn’t just laugh at the system—he names it. This isn’t just a comedy about hard times. It’s about the violence of capitalism, the dehumanization of labor, and the quiet heroism of refusing to be broken.
And yet, as with many of Chaplin’s social critiques, the lens is almost exclusively male. The Tramp suffers, yes—but he’s allowed to suffer. His story is centered, stylized, mythologized. The Gamin, played by Paulette Goddard, is radiant and rebellious, but she’s written as pure reaction. Her father is murdered, her sisters taken, her future bleak—but she exists mostly to be Chaplin’s mirror and reward. Her arc? Survive long enough to be rescued by a man with a mustache and no stable income.
To the film’s credit, Goddard gets more grit and screen time than most female characters of the era. She’s resourceful, angry, and capable of joy. But there’s no real critique of gender in Modern Times—just a wistful nod to the idea that poor women are either barefoot angels or streetwise ornaments to male suffering.
Chaplin also sidesteps race entirely. The Great Depression impacted everyone, yes, but not equally. In Modern Times, poverty is universal—but in reality, it was—and still is—shaped by racial capitalism, something this white, European immigrant narrative politely ignores.
Still, Modern Times is astonishing. It’s a silent film made in the age of talkies that says more than most scripts ever manage. It’s a comedy that critiques labor without punching down. And it dares to end not with triumph, but with resilience: two people, hand in hand, walking into uncertainty with nothing but each other and a refusal to give in.
4 out of 5 factory levers
(One for the satire. One for the physical comedy. One for the score Chaplin composed himself. One for the quiet radicalism of turning a laugh into a protest. The missing star? Jammed in the gears of a system that still doesn’t give women or workers enough space to do anything but survive—and smile.)
