In the Factory

The first idea that Chaplin takes on as he brings us into the factory environment is the question of modern management principles. This is often called either Fordism or Taylorism and is based on the people whose writings modern management styles were derived from. Fordist principals of scientific management were derived then from the writings of Frederick Taylor, which stressed studying what was necessary for production and systematically reducing every action in the factory to its most efficient form. Standardization and homogenization, it was believed, would lead to quicker productivity and assembly line mass production would therefore produce more profit. This was a principal of management that was what made mechanized production, or what we might think of as line production, possible.

Chaplin however, as an artist and somebody who valued imagination and the creative spirit, felt that this mode of production tended to dehumanize workers, treating them as cogs in the machine, and make their humanity less important than productions. This is the notion of dominating over the human elements with ideas of profit and production.

Chaplin saw this wholesale assault on freedom and imagination to be the great tragedy of modern times. This is in a lot of his films, but most specifically here, showing us Chaplin's take on the nature of management on the people who run these systems that dehumanize workers. The character of the bosses begins early and throughout. Watch this clip of the Big Boss.

Video 2.15: Big Boss from Modern Times.

So what is the big boss up to here? Again, the details are very crucial. The big boss is a man of leisure. He's leisurely working on the crossword puzzles, and on his own puzzle here, and reading the comics. And the comics itself, here it's Tarzan who's a modern man raised by apes, pointing to that disconnect between modernity and natural man.

So before the work day begins, this is what the man of leisure does. We know that his health is bad. His secretary brings him an aspirin. And his jobs seems to be not to work, but rather to survey and, by using modern technology, monitor the work of others, and to essentially demand more speed.

Note the sounds here. Chaplin was very concerned with the intrusion of sounds into motion picture. We had the buzz of electronic TV gadget here, and the whir of the machine which increases with the speed of the machine. There's an alarm bell, and then a mechanized voice of the big boss who's barking out orders.

The times where we hear people speaking in this film, it's always in this imperative tone. The only time the big boss ever speaks is through this mechanized media of the loud speaker and the television screen. And whenever he does, it's to order people around. This is very different than something like art. Here we see it is an imperative to be faster.