The Gamine

It’s at this point where the love interest starts entering into the story. In comedy, it is necessary for lovers to be compatible. This is one of the constant features of comedy. In order for the comedy to resolve, the two love interests have to get together at the end, and they have to be compatible in order for society to be reconciled.

In this case, the gamine, the Claudette Colbert character, is a female version of the Tramp. She is, like him, a vagabond. She is a free spirit. In a sense, she's even more anarchistic and defiant than the Tramp is. She alone, of all female characters in the film, has shed her social mores and conventions. Like the Tramp, her motivation is always food, and Chaplin seems to be saying here, as elsewhere, that illegal acts like stealing, looting, or squatting are rendered morally justifiable by the conditions that one found during the Depression.

It's interesting that she's quite young for an older man. Recall we said that the Tramp could be anywhere from 20s to 50s, but here we know from the storyline that she is on the lam from the juvenile authorities. So people have made a lot out of this, because Chaplin was actually involved with several very young women himself, like Roman Polanski later was. This could lead you to a little bit of a psychoanalytic reading. But, within this film, what it tells us, is that the Tramp is an eternally young spirit, and their relationship is largely very chaste.

Video 2.28: Introducing the gamine in Modern Times.

With love interests, however, come something that is difficult for the Tramp, which is giving up his individuality for something like normativity. Once the relationship with the gamine is established, the Tramp has a motivation that forces him into situations that he is ill-suited for. In other words, he wants to have the material means to have a home and provide for her, so he's forced to get a job. And this is something that the Tramp doesn't like very much.

The commentary on home here rejects the rampant materialism that Chaplin saw as a feature of modern life. The rampant materialism is something that he comments on quite a bit in the department store sequence, as well as in the scene where the Tramp and the gamine fantasize about the bourgeois suburban existence, which we see here.