Humanity in Modern Times

So along with eating, there are other important things for Chaplin and in Modern Times. Things that are the human things that he wants to preserve. The comedy of Modern Times was more concerned with making fun of the social conventions and behaviors that push the Tramp around. This is one of the things that comedies do, is comment on the rules that people make for each other.

The thing that remains important for Chaplin here, and the things that the Tramp cares about, are these very, very basic human needs. Food and hunger would be primary ones. Here are several scenes where Chaplin is showing us the necessity of eating, and the importance of eating for the Tramp.

Video 2.20: Food and hunger, the Tramp against the big guy.

Video 2.21: Food and hunger, the gamine steals bread.

Video 2.22: Food and hunger, the Tramp finds his way back to jail.

Eating in the age of machines is something that is one of the last human things available to one. When we get back to the food machine, eating is still a necessity in Modern Times, even in the Taylorized factory, but it’s reduced to a function, instead of being something human. Note the big boss in this upcoming scene, that he doesn't reject the feeding machine because it strips the human being of his dignity. (What the Little Tramp has to go through here is pretty humiliating, and reduces the human to an automaton.) It’s rejected because it's not practical. In other words, it's not going to help the bottom line of factory production. The big boss is, as other management principles are shown to be, kind of against the human.

Note the sound editing. What we get are the sound effects, the kind of ambient buzz, and the electronic whirl. These things that are dominating over human life.

Video 2.23: Modern Times eating machine.

Chaplin seems to be arguing that while the most human need, eating, is sacrificed to productivity, the human being is also always sacrificed to the machine in an industrial society. He's visualizing this logic explicitly through the following surrealistic sequence, and by surrealism, meaning the kind of artistic trend that, as associated with the 1920s and 1930s, was supposed to kind of represent the overly real element of dream works, or dream sequences.