Modern Times & Naomi
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Artists in a variety of media examine the world and the society in which they live in order to find what types of changes are taking place and how those changes will affect the average person. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, did this in his 1936 film Modern Times, a film which mixes the artistry of the silent era with the current technology of the sound film to produce a hybrid work with elements of each. Similarly, Chaplin is pointing out how the modern world is becoming something more technological than existed in the past while human beings are essentially the same as they have always been. They are now forced to try to cope with the tensions of the modern world, as seen in growing unemployment, labor strikes, riots, and automation. Junichiro Tanizaki in his novel Naomi, first appearing in 1924, looks at the way his society was developing in Japan and also details the sorts of social forces with which the average person had to cope. Chaplin's film presents a series of incidents in the life of the Tramp character, incidents which point out the near impossibility of achieving any improvement in one's lost in life in a society that is dedicated to the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. The Tramp finds this new world bewildering, with constantly changing rules and with developing institutions that make little sense to him: Modern Times is an emotional response, based always in comedy, to the circumstances of the times. In the Keystone and Essanay films th
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utsider, though some of the others he shares the street with are not as benign and are given to theft and worse. The modern world has made this possible for that group as well--the Depression threw millions out of work and allowed the unscrupulous to find ways of exploiting the unemployed even as they could steal from the employed.
In the novel by Tanizaki, the modern world of Japan in the 1920s is a new world of popular culture into which the main characters are drawn. This is the same sort of world that has produced Chaplin and the motion picture, and as Modern Times shows, being pilular does not necessarily mean being superficial at the same time. Chaplin is the outcast examining American life and finding it wanting, while Tanizaki is the outsider who looks at the products of American popular culture and who is drawn to America as if it were paradise. The process taking place in Japan was Westernization, a form of modernization that included borrowing from the West. It was deplored by many in Japan as a betrayal of Japanese culture, and certainly it would be rejected for a time as the war developed in the next decade and into the 1940s, though it would be revived again in the 1950s after Japan was defeated and the U.S. b
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1418
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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