The Radio: Smells like Commerce

 

Video 2.19: The Radio Sequence from Modern Times.

You can see Chaplin using sound as part of a gag. He was not against sound in pictures. Again, mostly just against the voice, dialogue, in movies. The talking in talking pictures.

Chaplin wrote in his autobiography of his lifelong revulsion towards the ethos of advertising and commercial propaganda heard in mass media society. He blamed it, as he said, for the gradual dissolution of Western culture. Our decline and fall is not the result of politics, revolutionary armies, Communist propaganda, rabble-rousing, or soap-boxing. It's the soap wrappings that are conspirators. Those international advertisers among which he listed the media, radio, television, and motion picture.

So here, the cure for the indigestion that is heard in the scene is to turn on the radio. And what we hear, then, is a commercial for if you have gastritis. So these two hostile sounds are linked by association here, and one could say that the sounds of the advertisements is worse than the problem of the sound of the stomach, that the Tramp would rather have quiet here and turn it off.

Through the prissy pastor's wife, we get a sense of Chaplin's famous antipathy toward religion. Chaplin seems to say that these kind of religious people embody a kind of bad faith that Chaplin saw in religion.