Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times has a disposable quality. How can I qualify this? It must be the pace of the film, having a speed slightly faster than reality- 24fps. Within the night time department store a new world opens up to Chaplin's character and that of the young street urchin. Oversized beds, large pieces of cake, gargantuan barrels of gin, port, whiskey, endless sandwiches-so large they bow at either end when held in the middle. This is hunger.

The opulent life of Hollywood films, and the Hearst Castle is seemingly caricatured here as well. But the decadence of this moment is fleeting. Such opulence passes quickly through the hands of Chaplin and his companion. The notion of dreaming is paralleled well here, having the sequence take place at night, in the abandoned department store, and all of it dissipating in an instant the next dreary and hungover morning. The young street Urchin flees the scene in the morning under the ever-watchful eye of the clock, a reminder of 'reality.' Its gaze dutifully sees her out of the store before the store opens and resumes its intended purpose as place of both capitalist transaction and capitalist dream.

The clock is the ultimate conceptual map of the city, perfect in every sense. While the clock has no actual power of physical coercion it keeps the order of the urban hierarchy in tact. It signals the beginning and end of the work day. It is the mechanical coalescence of order, it overlays a synchronized conceptual map of human experience in the urban setting (see Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth)

 Yet as we accept the presence of time, we can also bend it and mold it into a far different map within those initial constraints. This is evident in the ways that era's past are re-imagined and re-historicized, framed through different theoretical approaches, i.e. the feminist reading (blatant example).