Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is an exceptional parallel to one of Charlie Chaplin’s greatest films entitled Modern Times. As a reader and a viewer we can begin to see the how the employee is put in compromising situations within a society
Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is an exceptional parallel to one of Charlie Chaplin’s greatest films entitled Modern Times. As a reader and a viewer we can begin to see the how the employee is put in compromising situations within a society which is heavily relying on industrialization and machinery. Marcuse’s narrative dives the reader into an alternate way of interpreting Modern Times from a philosophical perspective. The importance of this perception is more-or-less an unveiling of a harsh concept: Does man control machinery or does the machinery control man?
In the film Modern Times, Chaplin is a factory worker who works vigorously on an assembly line. Although the film is meant to be comical, the way Chaplin can barely keep up with his work portrays the stark realities of work conditions during times like the Great Depression and the Industrial Revolution. The entirety of this ordeal, specifically the amount of work he was exerting, can be seen as a Marcusean representation. Marcuse writes that being an integral piece of machinery (the worker) you’re actually subject to be “as a life-long occupation, exhausting, stupefying, inhuman slavery—even more exhausting because of increased speed-up, control of the machine operators (rather than of the product), and isolation of the workers from each other” (25). The notion that machines and technology are supposed to alleviate the strain of work by increasing efficiency was actually shown to be quite the opposite during the film. In this sense, the rapid pace of the machinery makes it virtually impossible for the average laborer to do anything worthwhile, basically becoming enslaved to the master of mechanization.
During the beginning of Modern Times Chaplin’s supervisor would frequently approach him to complain about the job he was doing, or lack thereof. In actuality, here the worker was faced with less than ideal conditions and often being demoralized when it was apparent the average man couldn’t keep up with the equipment, and so it was more the culprit. Relating back to Marcuse and the film, Chaplin was never truly in “isolation” from his fellow workers. In fact, there was always a fellow coworker next to him. His inability to keep up, however, created a negative work environment and often caused his coworkers to become disgruntled. So in a physical sense he is not in isolation, but you get a sense th