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 the Tramp was knocked around in a pre-war society of underprivilege among the other immigrants and vagrants and petty miscreants. In Modern Times he is one of the millions coping with poverty, unemployment, strikes and strike-breakers, and the tyranny of the machine.
The Tramp tries to become part of modern society by getting a job, and he is foiled at every turn through no fault of his own. He tries to work on an assembly line type operation with huge mach...