chaplins "modern times"

(“MODERN TIMES” AND “THE FLANEUR”)

“The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below” the thresholds at which visibility begins…they are walkers “wandesrmaenner”, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban text.”

In “Modern Times” Charlie Chaplins character is the quintessential “walker” .His home is the public places of the city .In this sense he could be easily compared to Walter Benjamins “Flaneur”. However his role as a working class laborer, searching for money, food and shelter denies him the freedom of the flaneur and sets him apart from him. The flaneur is essentially a middle class romantic. A person who is enchanted by the teeming crowds of the city, while still possessing the economic privilege to stand outside of it looking in. Chaplins character is a proletarian, a man defined by his labour in much the same way as a machine. He is a commodity. His dual role of Flaneur and proletarian are represented in his directorial choice of images and dialogue as well as the unique physical style of his “little tramp”. He walks the streets in search of, n

In the case of the Flaneur his need, and inability, to be part of the masses is an economic issue. The Flaneur was borne from the class of the petty bourgeoisie at the beginning of its decline. This was the late 19th century and they were still a class of wealth and upbringing but they were not powerful. This meant that their primary interest was to pass the time as pleasurably as they could. So the Flaneur took to the streets hoping to immerse himself in the visceral pleasures of the crowd. However his privilege and education forces him to constantly view the masses from the outside as an uncontrollable mass of threatening strangers. Chaplins Factory Worker is undoubtedly part of this crowd, a working class everyman who enjoys the anonymous freedom of being a commodity. Chaplin himself can not enjoy such freedom. His inability to completely lose himself in the crowd comes from his harsh unromantic knowledge of the streets. This is because he is a self made Flaneur. A man who came from the working class and strived to become a member of the affluent upper classes. It is for this reason that his mechanical comic rhythm and style seem so authentically to come from the crowded city. It is also the reason why the Flaneurs fear of this bustling, faceless mass and his need to escape it pervade his film.

While Chaplins “tramp” is in jail he mocks this uniformity of the crowd when, under the influence of cocaine, he constantly breaks the marching ranks with the other prisoners to waddle of in his own direction then return back into single file as if nothing had happened. The scene is hilarious because, like all great comedy, it has a sense of danger to it. The danger being that the Factory Worker is unintentionally singling himself out. In the final moment of the film it is his conscious decision to accept his difference, to leave the city and seek new adventures outside of it, that best shows how Chaplin is most like the Flaneur. Both yearn to slip seamlessly in to the anonymity of the teeming masses yet neither can help but stand awkwardly apart from them.

In Walter Benjamins essay “The Flaneur” the author suggests that the first literary endeavor of this new species of city dweller was “panorama literature” or “physiologies”. In these texts different classes, cree

Some topics in this essay:
Factory Worker, Alan Poes, Walter Benjamins, Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin Flaneur, Industrial Age, ENGLISH ESSAY, Factory Workers, Karl Marx, Factory Worker”, factory worker, chaplins character, “modern times”, threatening strangers, defined labour, apart flaneur, walter benjamins, flaneur streets, faceless mass, individual enterprise,