Silence, Organization, and _Modern Times_

Last semester in Dr. Walsh's course on oral and literate cultures, we spent a great deal of time discussing Walter J. Ong's assertion in Orality and Literacy that as cultures gain literacy, the emphasis on textual organization (via labeling, indexes, alphabetizing, etc.) becomes much more visual--and much more spatially structured--than in texts that come from primarily oral cultures, which rely heavily on mnemonic devices such as rhyming.

The silent film Modern Times, as its name reflects, represents a literate American culture (we see this through writing on Chaplin's cuff and through his girlfriend's "wanted" sign, for example) and a culture that is highly reliant on the organization of workers and machines for function; this pervasive organization seems to be part of the film's ironic humor.

What makes this film "funny," then, is its use of both silence, satire, and irony (often all at once)to point out inherent contradictions in "modern" American culture. Specifically, the notion of a "silent" film, wherein silence is interrupted only rarely for characters' moments of stomach growling and music vocals, appears to show how such a tightened world--via social, literary, and mechanical hyper-organization--dehumanizes and, by extension, silences its participants' ability to speak for themselves. However, audiences also participate in this struggle; they must rely only on visual cues such as scene labels and characters' physically exaggerated movements to understand the film's plot since vocal dialogue is absent. The film also points out how these visual cues sometimes fail: for example, as Chaplin walks among a crowd carrying signs reading "unidad" ("unity" in Spanish) and "unite," the crowd immediately splits up and de-unifies.

I should point out, as a concluding thought, that although I appreciate the irony and social commentary of this film, I wasn't particularly amused by it. It's almost as if, as the silent film has lost popularity, some viewers in my generation--who are used to dialogue and enhanced soundtracks when watching movies--have become less literate (at least in the Ongian sense) when engaging with this type of media. I expect, when playing a film, to hear the joke; visual slapstick and labels can enhance it, but I dislike relying too heavily on just one sense when watching (or listening to) a movie.