Social Issues in Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”

Charlie Chaplin, the world's first global cinema star, mastered his skill in the now dust-covered formats of vaudeville and silent film, yet he remains an important voice who speaks to us about critical issues regarding governmental power and our shared humanity.

Chaplin's films investigated societal issues and potential solutions that were relevant at the time and continue to be relevant today. Chaplin's iconoclastic, contentious, and stormy work serves as a vital context for understanding his legacy as one of history's most effective communicators of political and cultural ideas through mass media.

When it came to messages in his films, Chaplin, like most of us, didn't always have a clear response to the vexing challenges of modern life, as the sometimes-silent comic could be imprecise and uncertain. Indeed, Charlie Chaplin's political statements and personal experiences may be a maze of opposing viewpoints. But it's part of what makes him so fascinating to decode the man and his work.

The Little Tramp, who had won Charles Chaplin worldwide renown and who is still the most globally recognized fictional image of a human being in the history of art, made his final film appearance in Modern Times.

The world into which the Tramp said his goodbyes was substantially different from the one into which he had been born two decades before the First World War. Then he had shared and symbolized the tribulations of all the poor in a world just emerging from the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of America's Great Depression, when huge unemployment coupled with the massive expansion of industrial automation, he found himself in radically different situations.

The documentary Charlie Chaplin: Modern Times addresses a number of socioeconomic issues that disproportionately affect the poor. 

A couple of these concerns are as follows:

• Uneven wealth Distribution

All of Europe's effects of depression, unemployment, and automation enraged Chaplin. As a result, he came up with his own economic approach, which he thought was excellent. This concept focused on a more equitable division of labor rather than wealth. A fair division of labor, he believed, would lead to a fair distribution of income. "Modern Times" tackled all of these issues in a lighthearted manner.

• The difficulties that the underprivileged elements of society faced during the First World War :

A battle is fought between two leaders, but the effects touch everyone in the country, especially the impoverished.

Afghanistan, Iran, Sub-Saharan Africa, Syria, and other countries are still ravaged by war and bloodshed, trapping many people in poverty. While peaceful countries seek to escape poverty and bloodshed, corrupt political leadership typically leads to war, further impoverishing society and making the poor poorer.

• Poverty and high unemployment

Poverty, unemployment, strikes and strikebreakers, political intolerance, economic inequity, the tyranny of the machine, and narcotics are only a few of the issues addressed in the film.

• Great Depression in America

During the Great Depression in America, industrial output was given such a high priority that unemployment surged. The machinery that was supposed to help humanity was putting people out of work. Machine operators were humanity's last remaining jobs.

Chaplin's character is introduced in the film as a worker who is driven nuts by his brutal work on a conveyor belt and is used as a guinea pig to test a machine that feeds workers as they work.

Despite the fact that the movie was made in the 1930s, the themes it addressed are still relevant today. The sad reality is that these issues are still receiving little attention today.