Requiem for the Silent Film; or, City Lights Redux

"Sing!! Never mind the words."

If the pantomime of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp was anachronistic in "City Lights" (1931), released at least a couple years after everyone else in Hollywood, as well as much of the world, already knew the silent era was over and had since committed to synchronized-sound cinema, then "Modern Times," an oxymoron of a title in this respect, is downright archaic bordering on superannuated. Indeed, it turned out to be his last silent film, and it was initially planned as a dialogue one. While plenty of other productions had done the opposite in the transition to talkies, this, as Donna Kornhaber said (in her book "Charlie Chaplin, Director"), "may be the only film in history that reversed its course creatively and changed mid-production, from a sound picture to an essentially silent film." The last silent film of Tinseltown's sole holdout from the talkies, the silent era definitively died here. Not even the Little Tramp could withstand for any longer the forces of modern times. Ever the reflexive filmmaker par excellence, Chaplin made "Modern Times," as he had "City Lights," about this very destabilizing dichotomy between silents and talkies. Like its predecessor, too, this dichotomy is synchronized with its social commentary, of the destabilizing of humanity in the machine age, which is even more pronounced here, albeit arguably at the sake of the prior's subtlety. Of course, it's also another hilarious masterpiece from the comedic auteur--the star, director, producer, editor, sound effects artist, and who again composed a wonderful score, even more complex than that of "City Lights" and that's in tune, not only in its stops and Mickey Mousing, with the visual beats of the picture.

Signaling the demise of the silent era, there's little in the way of a sight analogy as in "City Lights" here beyond a bit of blindfolded roller skating: no blind character, nor inebriated seeing-doubles theme, to instruct the spectator, the movie industry, and the world in the visual art lost in the dawn of sound cinema. The talkies had long since taken over by 1936, and even Chaplin knew it now. The Tramp even works for them--namely, on the assembly line of the "Electro Steel Corp." factory, first, and ending up as a singing café waiter in between bouts in a mental hospital or prison and of joblessness, a brief stint at a shipyard, and an overnight interlude laboring at a department store. The first and last jobs are important here--are both representative of the talkies. Nominally, we don't even know what they manufacture at the factory. Some bring up Henry Ford's mastering of Taylorism, but the only process that makes sense here are the talking pictures film-within-the-film of the factory president barking orders at his silent subordinates. Indeed, in the film's most famous scene and as others have previously pointed out, when the Tramp becomes ensnared as quite literally a cog in the machine, his body pulled between the gears resembles celluloid being drawn through a camera or projector. Less remarked upon is how when this cinematographic apparatus spits the silent Tramp back out, his journey becomes one of a nostalgic or humanistic homage to pantomime past along with an initial rampage against the talkies before coming to a reluctant compromise or some sort of synthesis.

I love that, with one climactic exception, the only voices we hear on the soundtrack are recorded ones. It drives home the point that this is about the technology of synchronized-sound recording. Besides the boss spouting off via the Orwellian telecommunications (or maybe we should just call in commonplace nowadays, or Amazon-ian, where one may be tracked by Bezos & Co. while also buying "1984" from them), there's the phonographic mechanical salesman for the feeding machine and the exposition-spewing and commercial-gag-providing radio. Note that the Tramp tries all of these talking devices and ends up turning them off or otherwise destroying them in some manner. As Kornhaber said, "Screen, phonograph, radio--these are the devices that transmit speech in the filmic world of 'Modern Times,' and they are all dangerous: dangerously one-sided and dangerously unconnected to the action around them."

Chaplin retains from "City Lights" the double meaning of the picture's proceedings. On one hand, there's the fairly obvious socio-political message. The film even opens by lifting text from the Declaration of Independence and with a sheeple juxtaposition in the didactic fashion of a Soviet montage filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, and the Tramp presumably being the black sheep among them, to make it more blunt (albeit if with tongue in cheek). The Tramp's one job loss after another and ditto trips to hospital and prison a reflection of the Great Depression. Law enforcement and other civil institutions more than ever afore in a Chaplin film become agents of capitalism, either treating the black sheep for nervous breakdowns or arresting them on charges of vagrancy. Transparent as Chaplin's signaling is here, though, it, too, would prove open to misinterpretation the likes of the Tramp waving a red flag--and of the anti-labor Red Scare hysteria sort that would eventually force Chaplin into exile. Even left-wing critics have been disappointed by, for instance, the Tramp's saving of the warden and prison guards or his desire to return to prison. Chaplin knew better than to make a straight social-problem polemic, which would likely end in a message as confused or wanting as those in prior machine-age films and for which Chaplin may've otherwise been inspired: "Metropolis" (1927) and "À Nous la Liberté" (1931). As Kornhaber argued, too, ambiguity and simultaneity of meaning was the basis of Chaplin's aesthetics and the antithesis of spoken dialogue, which concentrates the spectator's focus on successive words and tends to render meaning unequivocal much as a didactic moralizing picture does.

On the other hand of the doubled meanings, there's the more subtle one of the film reflexively being about itself--about Chaplin and his Tramp's interaction with the talkies. Long before "City Lights," too, Chaplin's films were semi-biographical. And, why not--unlike most movies made by committee and in lieu of an authorial voice, Chaplin had been increasingly in control of his pictures since he began in Hollywood and, by this point, was fully responsible for them. Thus, even early on, there were his backstage comedy shorts on the business of making movies, culminating in "Behind the Screen" (1916). There were the escaped-prisoner pictures he made, such as "The Pilgrim" (1923), when he fulfilled a contract he felt incarcerated by (and in contrast to him serving out his sentences--sometimes even contently--here and in "City Lights"). Then, there's the very personal features of "The Kid" (1921), "The Gold Rush" (1925), and "The Circus" (1928), involving him rescuing a version of his own impoverished orphan childhood, confronting his subsequent fabulous fame and fortune, and looking in the house-of-mirrors of his increasingly self-conscious clowning, respectively. The entire film is Chaplin's, so of course it's about him, too.

The department sequence is interesting in this regard. Chaplin claimed his happiest years were when working at Mutual making short films. Aside from such broad strokes as recalling the slum of his childhood in "Easy Street," his status as British expatriate in "The Immigrant" (both 1917), parodying his time at Keystone studios in "Behind the Screen," and, of course, another escaped-convict episode with "The Adventurer" (1917) to conclude his contract, his Mutual oeuvre is relatively purely comedic and with a more refined sense of slapstick and pathos than found in his prior work at Keystone and Essanay. So, in the place where customers otherwise buy material comforts, or junk like a Mickey Mouse toy, Chaplin largely, instead, shops reflexively and nostalgically for that (silent) cinematic past when the movie world was full of potential and had yet to be automatized and mechanized to the point that it had become by the mid-1930s. Note, then, that the Tramp almost breaks out an entire recycling of the escalator routine from "The Floorwalker" (1916) in the department store, in addition to some typical drunk humor, and after an extended nostalgic turn on roller skates à la "The Rink" (1916), with a blindfolded "Danger" sign nod, as well, to the thrill-comedy talkie pitfalls of "City Lights" (this time via a glass-painting shot). (Quite a few good visual effects in this one, by the way, also including hanging miniatures and forced perspectives for the factory, and the rear-projections works well for the boss' closed-circuit TV, although the sinking ship one pales in comparison to that in Buster Keaton's "The Boat" (1921).)

There's also something of the backstage mayhem from "Behind the Screen" in the Tramp's destruction of the factory and drug use recalls "Easy Street," as the Tramp's rescuing of another juvenile calls back both "The Kid" and "The Circus," there's the shack not entirely unlike his cabin stay in "The Gold Rush," and Chaplin goes back to his Keystone roots to bring back the pie-in-the-face gag. Former Keystone co-star Chester Conklin even joins him for the second one. Even the ending, more than any plagiarism lawsuits over a René Clair film, recalls Chaplin's own "The Tramp" (1915), "Police" (1916), "The Pilgrim," and "The Circus" combined with those, such as "The Gold Rush," where he got the girl, and where in between lied the unresolved "City Lights." It seems to me that criticisms of "Modern Times" as episodic or in some other way deficient in plot misses this central destabilizing dichotomy throughline of nostalgia, the silent film, humanism against the dehumanizing machine age of consumerism and the Great Depression and of the era of the talkies.

So, simultaneously, the department store extends the commentary of scarcity of human necessities in the real world (food, shelter, employment) and on the humanizing effects of the Tramp's pantomime in the cinematic diegesis. Most of the hilarity throughout plays on both levels or switches back and forth. The dream sequence of home ownership is another good bit. TV's "The Dick Van Dyke Show" totally stole the tripping-over-the-ottoman gag from it. One of the many differences between that dated sitcom and Chaplin's classic is that here the middle-class fantasy, the American Dream, isn't the entire premise of the program, and the fantasy itself is much more absurdly amusing with Chaplin, including his receiving milk on his doorstep directly from a cow of a milkman. There are a lot of good jokes in this one based around food or other consumable substances (namely, bullet-fueled booze and prison cocaine in a salt shaker). I love the bit about him handing out candy to hungry children as he also steals a cigar patiently awaiting his happy return to the safety and comfort of prison, and, of course, there's the feeding machine, with the factory manager summarizing the dehumanizing disregard in critiquing the device in terms that, "it isn't practical." On the opposite end of the food spectrum, there's also the amusing potty humor made out of Chaplin's sound effects for stomach distress. Recalling the spraying of a woman's "flaming" bottom in "City Lights," the sound of the minister's wife's use here spraying seltzer water is initially and uproariously misinterpreted by the Tramp to be signifying something else being expelled.

The talkie subtext comes most readily apparent, as the social commentary is reinforced, by the Tramp becoming a singing waiter. Throughout, Chaplin has attempted to charm the world of the talkies with his balletic pantomime--dancing, whether with the factory machines, on roller skates, or on cocaine, at every turn--and to scant appreciation except by his companion, or double, the Gamin (as played with smiles, or what Chaplin biographer Jeffrey Vance termed an "almost Fairbanksian joie de vivre," by lover-wife Paulette Goddard). Interesting, though, that this time, and despite Goddard's relative age appropriateness for Chaplin, the Tramp's relationship with the girl is asexual. They're even shown to be sleeping apart from each other in their shack (a single shanty town or Hooverville residence in stark contrast to their fantasy home). I suppose it makes sense. Chaplin couldn't top the romantic climax of "City Lights" (nobody could), and he seems to have struggled with the ending here in attempting to do so, including dropping planned war and nun-related subplots. "City Lights" was a love letter to silent cinema from a romantic who refused to admit defeat. All he and his companion could do in "Modern Times," however, was to put on a smile and turn their backs to the harsh city of talking machines. She implores, "What's the use of trying?" "Never say die," he replies, "We'll get along!" As the Tramp walks off towards the rural hillside, back turned to the dawn of talkies, never to be seen again.

Yet, not before one last dance where the Tramp is finally forced to vocalize for the synchronized-sound recording. He even must follow a trio of waiters singing some racist ditty. This was a medium, the talking pictures, after all, that was born of appropriating African-American music to the point of wearing blackface and singing about a mammy. Not Chaplin's forte, as evidenced by the black boxer in "City Lights." "No punching down," as Fritzi Kramer of the Movies Silently website succinctly put it... well, except for maybe when it comes to ridiculing the talkies. Moreover, the Tramp is provided a script for words to sing--something Chaplin, used to not working from a screenplay, did attempt when considering making "Modern Times" a dialogue picture and before, like the Tramp with his scribbled-upon cuffs here, threw it out. Besides undermining the balletic pantomime, Chaplin's concern with recording his voice was that it would ruin the Tramp's universal appeal. Perhaps, that, too, is why he's also not limited here by sexual romance with the Gamin, also a silent dancer. Reportedly, the Hays Code, as well, enforced cuts to some of the homoerotic humor--what they termed the "pansy joke"--originally included in the prison scenes (and as opposed to the pre-Code "City Lights" that plays quite a bit on sexual ambiguity), which would've further made the Tramp's sexuality also universal--like his politics, neither quite communist nor capitalist, silent and of all languages and none, he could be anyone and everyone.

Would he speak with the Cockney dialect of Chaplin's upbringing in poverty, affect the posh Mid-Atlantic mastered by wealth, do what every other English actor today does and pretend to talk American, realize his critics' worst perverse fears and desires and declare in Bolshevik Russian, perhaps protest his Nazi censorship in German, or adopt what the anti-Semitic G-men referred to in his FBI file as his "Jewish accent" (spoiler alert, they're going to hate his next film). It's bad enough that the diegetic recorded English-speaking monologues already placed the Tramp somewhere in an imagined America (albeit foreign prints would be dubbed with ease). Rather than submit to any of that, however, Chaplin ingeniously sings nonsense. A bit Italian imitation, with faux French here, an English embellishment there, but ultimately of no language, as he instead mimes the meaning of the song that is rendered meaningless by his gibberish (the music playing the French tune "Titine"). Song, as Kornhaber points out, also being the exception to words not being simultaneous (as the trio of waiters singing in unison and as the scene focuses on the Tramp and Gamin in the next room proves) and not ambiguous (as such songs halt rather than progress the plot). A more spectacularly appropriate synchronizing of the Tramp with recorded words I don't believe could've been concocted.

"City Lights" would be on my very short list for greatest film ever made, so thorough a declaration of the principles of silent cinema it is, but "Modern Times," for the nonsense song alone, or the cog-in-the-machine episode, and other great moments, including connecting the cinematic squabble with his humanism, is easily a top three or four Chaplin film, which means it's better than almost everyone else's masterpiece. With these two post-sound silent films, he secured himself as the icon of the silent era. And, although Chaplin would go on to make two or three great talkies himself--in his critique of the medium, understanding it better than most of the talking picture's biggest promoters--we should be very well aware nowadays in an age of rapid technological advancement, of modern times, that such changes, or revolutions, while opening new opportunities, close many off as well. There was something beautiful and freeing, a mimetic dance, lost here.