Machines or Human Beings?

In the movie “Modern Times” Charles Chaplin is living in the era of progress and modernity. A period of time when getting a job was so difficult and the working conditions were not appropriate.

Charles Chaplin is a man who works in a factory where the owner’s only interest is production. Charles is forced to work hard, fast and without stopping in order to produce as much as it’s possible in every single day. His boss is always watching at him to make sure if he is working, as a machine, because if he is not he could loose his job immediately. The treat from the boss through the workers is aweful. It seems like they were machines that just have to produce all day because the more fast they work, the more happy is their boss. As it is a era of progress, modernity and technology, they make a machine to feed the workers to keep them working even in lunch time. Chaplin loose his job and is taken to jail where he get use to live because the conditions there are better than outside. In jail he doesn’t have the need to work and he knows he will receive food afterwords. Nevertheless, he is not in jail for ever, so once he is free, he starts getting into troubles just to go back to jail because of the bad conditions outside, and at the same time he falls in love with a poor woman. They both fall deeply in love and make plans for the future, such as buying a house and make a family life together.

While the time pass, he fortunately finds a new job in another factory but unluckily he is fired again.

His life and the life of most of the people from that time is hard and sad, working a lot to live in very poor conditions, in other words just to survive, while the owners of the factories get rich doing nothing.

I have never seen a Charles Chaplin’s movie before and this as the first one I see, I really liked it. I think that even though there are no voices, it shows the reality of those times in a funny way. The message is clear, what the movie is supposed to represent is very well done. It shows poverty, bad treats to the worker society, aweful conditions of work, in short, it is what they called progress and modernity and unfortunately it is the kind of progress we have nowadays. No big changes are seen in terms of the relationship between boss and worker or the conditions for them to work.