Cinema as Social Critique: Charlie Chaplin and the Discontents of Modernity
This blog is written as a task assigned by the head of the Department of English (MKBU), Prof. and Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. Here is the link to the professor's blog for background reading: Click here.
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| MOVIE: MODERN TIMES |
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Introduction: The Twentieth Century Breakdown: Progress Without Certainty
The early decades of the twentieth century marked a decisive rupture in human history. Rapid industrial expansion, technological innovation, economic instability, and the emergence of totalitarian regimes fundamentally disrupted earlier faith in moral stability and social continuity. This period of crisis generated what may be described as the Modern Age sensibility a critical mode of thought that questioned inherited authority, exposed systemic injustice, and articulated deep anxieties about alienation, loss of individuality, and the erosion of human dignity.
Although Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940) are cinematic works, they belong unmistakably to this modern intellectual tradition. Through visual satire, symbolic framing, and exaggerated performance, Chaplin produces what can be described as a cinematic “X-ray” of modern civilization, revealing the hidden structures of domination beneath industrial efficiency and political spectacle. By closely analysing four key frames across these films, this blog demonstrates how Chaplin’s visual language parallels the central concerns of Modern English literature and exposes the psychological and moral failures of modern power.
Frame Study of Modern Times (1936):
Industrial Modernity and the Erosion of the Self
Frame 1: The Assembly Line: When the Worker Becomes the Machine
Mechanized bodies, timed gestures, and the quiet erasure of individuality Chaplin’s Modern Times captures the human cost of industrial efficiency.
The assembly line sequence in Modern Times functions as a powerful visual distillation of the Modern Age crisis articulated by A. C. Ward. Chaplin’s Tramp is positioned within an environment dominated by rigid metal structures and relentlessly moving machinery, performing a single mechanical task tightening bolts at a speed entirely dictated by the machine. The composition deliberately reduces human presence; individuality is visually diminished as the human body is overwhelmed by industrial apparatus.
The moment when the Tramp’s hands continue the tightening motion even after he leaves the conveyor belt suggests that mechanization has invaded the nervous system itself. Industrial discipline no longer governs only labour; it reshapes bodily instinct and consciousness. Ward’s observation that modernity accelerates material progress while eroding moral and spiritual integrity is rendered visible here. Efficiency increases, but the human subject disintegrates.
This scene resonates strongly with Modern English literature. Writers such as D. H. Lawrence condemned industrial civilization for crushing instinct and vitality, while T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land, portrayed modern life as fragmented, repetitive, and spiritually sterile. Chaplin translates these literary anxieties into physical comedy: Eliot’s fractured voices become a fractured body, symbolizing the modern individual’s loss of inner coherence.
Crucially, the assembly line also illustrates Ward’s argument about modern submission to systems and expertise. Authority here is impersonal and unquestioned; there is no visible tyrant, only a mechanical system that demands obedience. Chaplin’s satire exposes a disturbing truth the worker does not resist oppression but adapts to it, until adaptation itself becomes pathological. Progress thus appears stripped of humanity, offering efficiency without meaning and labour without dignity.
Frame 2: The Feeding Machine: Progress Reduced to Absurdity
Efficiency engineered, humanity erased—Chaplin’s Tramp becomes a test subject of industrial progress in Modern Times (1936).
The feeding machine sequence represents Chaplin’s most savage critique of modern faith in technological progress. Strapped helplessly to a chair, the Tramp is subjected to an automated device designed to eliminate lunch breaks. The machine’s gears spin aggressively as spoons malfunction and food is violently forced into his mouth. While the human body is immobilized, the machine dominates the frame through exaggerated motion and mechanical precision.
Ward describes the Modern Age as a period in which belief in scientific progress collapsed into profound disillusionment. The feeding machine visually embodies this collapse. A device meant to enhance efficiency instead inflicts humiliation and physical suffering. Chaplin exposes the inhuman logic of capitalism, where even eating a fundamental human activity is treated as an obstacle to productivity.
This frame closely parallels literary critiques such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where technological perfection demands the sacrifice of individuality and human dignity. The Tramp is reduced to a biological mechanism, managed rather than respected. Ward’s observation that modern systems treat individuals as administrative units is literalized here: the machine decides when and how the body functions.
Importantly, Chaplin does not condemn machines themselves but the ideology governing their use. The feeding machine fails because it embodies a philosophy that equates progress with efficiency alone, ignoring ethical consequences. In doing so, Chaplin reinforces Ward’s warning that technological advancement without moral responsibility becomes a form of violence.
Frame 3: Invisible Power: Surveillance and Systemic Control
Power watches, the worker obeys—surveillance replaces humanity in the industrial world of Modern Times (1936).*
In this frame, the factory owner appears only through magnified screens, monitoring workers across the industrial space—even within the washroom. Authority is no longer embodied; it becomes omnipresent yet invisible. The visual hierarchy is striking: the workers are constantly observed, while power remains distant and inaccessible.
Ward identifies the rise of impersonal institutional power as a defining feature of the Modern Age. Chaplin’s imagery anticipates literary explorations of surveillance and bureaucratic domination found in Kafka’s The Trial and Orwell’s 1984. Control no longer relies on physical coercion but on constant visibility. The worker internalizes discipline, regulating behaviour even in the absence of direct supervision.
The washroom scene is particularly revealing. It demonstrates the collapse of boundaries between public labour and private existence. Chaplin’s satire exposes how modern freedom erodes quietly, masked by efficiency and order. The frame suggests that industrial capitalism and authoritarian governance share structural similarities both depend on surveillance, obedience, and systematized control.
Frame 4: The Paradox of Freedom: Safety Found in Confinement
When prison offers security and freedom offers hunger, Chaplin exposes the moral failure of modern society in Modern Times (1936).
One of Chaplin’s most devastating ironies emerges in the prison sequence. Inside jail, the Tramp experiences stability, regular meals, and predictable routines. Outside, society is marked by unemployment, hunger, and chaos. Chaplin reverses expectations: confinement offers security, while freedom offers deprivation.
Ward argues that the Great Depression shattered faith in liberal capitalism’s promises of justice and prosperity. This frame visualizes that collapse. Freedom, in modern society, proves meaningless without economic security. The Tramp’s preference for prison exposes the moral failure of a system unable to protect its most vulnerable citizens.
This critique parallels George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, which exposes the harsh realities concealed beneath narratives of national progress. Chaplin forces the audience to question whether modern civilization offers genuine freedom or merely new forms of dependence. Security exists, but only at the cost of dignity and autonomy.
Frame Study of The Great Dictator (1940):
Totalitarian Power and Ethical Breakdown
Frame 1: The Globe as Toy: Imperial Fantasy and Political Hubris
Hynkel’s graceful dance with the globe turns the world into a toy-an unsettling metaphor for modern authoritarian power, where political ambition expands without moral restraint, until its fragile illusion inevitably bursts.
The globe dance sequence is among the most enduring visual metaphors in twentieth-century cinema. Chaplin’s dictator, Adenoid Hynkel, dances gracefully with an inflatable globe, treating the world as a personal possession. The scene is visually elegant yet deeply unsettling. The dictator’s isolation within a vast, empty space underscores both his authority and his narcissism.
Ward notes that the Modern Age enabled unprecedented concentrations of political power, often detached from ethical restraint. Hynkel’s interaction with the globe symbolizes this imbalance: technological and political power has expanded beyond moral responsibility. The globe is not governed; it is possessed.
The fragility of the balloon is central to the metaphor. When it bursts, Chaplin delivers a silent commentary on the instability of authoritarian ambition. Ward’s historical insight that unchecked power leads inevitably to catastrophe is condensed into a single poetic image. The scene critiques not only Hitler but the broader modern tendency toward hubris, warning that when authority loses moral limits, the world itself becomes expendable.
Frame 2: The Ghetto - Dehumanization as State Policy
The ghetto exposes the human cost of power-where ideology replaces morality and oppression becomes everyday routine.
The ghetto sequences present a stark contrast to the dictator’s fantasy of power. Here, Chaplin depicts the everyday reality of oppression violence, humiliation, and systematic dehumanization. The visual language is harsh and claustrophobic, emphasizing vulnerability and fear.
These frames reflect Ward’s assertion that the Modern Age witnessed a collapse of moral civilization under totalitarian regimes. Individuals are reduced to racial and political categories, stripped of dignity and humanity. Chaplin’s satire exposes how propaganda and state violence normalize cruelty, transforming oppression into routine administration.
This depiction aligns with Modern English literature’s moral response to fascism, particularly in Orwell’s political essays, where language and ideology are shown to legitimize brutality. Chaplin’s cinema, like modern literature, insists on restoring moral vision against ideological blindness.
Frame 3 : Authoritarian Spectacle and the Illusion of Compassion
In The Great Dictator, Chaplin uses the image of the dictator holding a child as a sharp political satire on how authoritarian leaders manipulate visual symbolism to manufacture consent. By associating himself with a baby an emblem of innocence, care, and the future the dictator attempts to project a benevolent, paternal image, masking the brutality of his regime. Such imagery diverts attention from oppressive policies by replacing fear with sentiment, encouraging the public to perceive power as protective rather than coercive. The presence of the child evokes sympathy and suggests continuity and hope, implying that the authoritarian state safeguards life and stability. However, Chaplin subverts this strategy by emphasizing the dictator’s visible discomfort and uncertainty, exposing the gesture as performative rather than genuine. The frame thus critiques the politics of spectacle in the Modern Age, revealing how authoritarian leaders exploit emotional imagery to legitimize control, silence dissent, and conceal violence behind a carefully staged façade of compassion.
Frame 4: A Voice Against Silence: Humanism in an Age of Tyranny
The concluding speech of The Great Dictator abandons satire in favour of direct moral appeal. Chaplin speaks openly against dictatorship, hatred, and mechanization, calling instead for compassion, democracy, and human solidarity. The frame is simple and unadorned, emphasizing sincerity over spectacle.
Ward emphasizes that Modern Age literature increasingly adopted an ethical stance in response to violence and oppression. Chaplin’s speech belongs to this tradition, echoing E. M. Forster’s humanist plea to “only connect” and Orwell’s insistence on moral clarity. Chaplin rejects the worship of machines and systems, affirming that humanity must reclaim ethical agency.
This moment represents the Modern Age’s turn toward engaged art. Neutrality becomes impossible in the face of barbarism. Chaplin’s final frame asserts that the purpose of art is not merely representation but moral intervention.
Final Reflection:
Collectively, these frames affirm The Great Dictator as a cinematic parallel to Modern English political writing. Chaplin exposes the mechanisms of authoritarian power, ideological propaganda, and mass control, revealing the moral breakdown that defines the Modern Age in Ward’s analysis. Blending satire with moral urgency, the film stands as both historical testimony and enduring warning.
Conclusion: Cinema, Literature, and the Struggle for Human Dignity
Taken together, the frame analyses of Modern Times and The Great Dictator establish Charlie Chaplin as one of the most incisive critics of the Modern Age. His cinema translates into visual form the very anxieties that dominate twentieth-century English literature as described by A. C. Ward mechanization, mass society, surveillance, disillusionment, and authoritarian power.
Whether portraying the worker reduced to a mechanical appendage or exposing the seductive imagery and brutal reality of dictatorship, Chaplin reveals the contradictions of modernity: progress without humanity, power without morality, and freedom without security. His films echo the concerns of writers such as Eliot, Lawrence, Forster, Shaw, and Orwell, who similarly interrogated the erosion of individuality and the dangers of mass obedience.
Yet Chaplin’s critique is not merely diagnostic. By concluding The Great Dictator with an explicit appeal to humanism, compassion, and moral responsibility, he aligns himself with the most enduring impulse of Modern Age literature the belief that art must confront historical reality and reaffirm the value of the human spirit. In this sense, Chaplin’s cinema stands not outside literature but alongside it, functioning as a modernist intervention in a world struggling to reconcile technological power with human dignity.
References:
1. Barad, Dilip. Activity: Frame Study of “Modern Times” and “The Great Dictator”. ResearchGate, Dec. 2024, doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.12198.84805.
2. Barad, Dilip. “Charlie Chaplin Modern Times Great Dictator.” Dilip Barad | Teacher Blog, 1 Sept. 2020, https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2020/09/charlie-chaplin-modern-times-great.html. Accessed 15 Dec. 2025.
3. Chiu, Hsien-Yuan & Chu, Wei-Lin. (2019). Analysis of the Narrative Types of “Metaphor” in Animated Short Films. Art and Design Review. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344349569_Analysis_of_the_Narrative_Types_of_Metaphor_in_Animated_Short_Films.
4. Cross, Karl. "Mechanical Laughter: Comedy and Social Issues in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times." Academia.edu, 2014, https://www.academia.edu/9294576/Mechanical_Laughter_Comedy_and_Social_Issues_in_Charlie_Chaplins_Modern_Times.
5. Denning, Michael. "Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and the Minstrel Tradition." Modernism/modernity, vol. 23, no. 2, 2016, pp. 217–235.
6. Fielding, Raymond. "Charlie Chaplin's Films and American Culture Patterns." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 16, no. 4, 1958, pp. 540–550.
7. Masterson, Kelsey. "The Power of Voice Merging in Chaplin's The Great Dictator." Schwa, vol. 9, 2015, pp. 45–56.
8. Modern Times. Directed by Charlie Chaplin, United Artists, 1936.
9. The Great Dictator. Directed by Charlie Chaplin, United Artists, 1940.
10. Ward, A. C. Twentieth-Century English Literature: 1901-1960. ELBS Edition, 1965. Butler & Tanner Ltd, Great Britain.
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