Modernity In Film

W.B. Yeats once wrote, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” (“The Second Coming”), and thus he defined the Modern temperament. Modernity, as demonstrated in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and T.S. Eliot, among others, summarizes the feeling that the locus of truth that man has always rested upon at the center of his world is, in fact, an illusion. Literary figures were not the only ones who expressed this idea, though, as all cultural media, and especially film, throughout the twentieth century, absorbed this sense of emptiness. Some of the greatest films of American cinema, in fact, presented a depressingly Modern view of society. In particular, Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate all expressed a certain search and longing for meaning in the world of men. Chaplin’s film, for one, presents the problem of human understanding when one is caught up in the chaos of the modern industrial world, while Kane narrows the focus to determining the true meaning behind the life of one man. Several decades later, The Graduate tackles the same social problem of personal emptiness, and of the gross fabrication that society has become.

Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times expounds on the theme of a man losing his humanity and his meaning in the fabric of the modern world. The film tells a story of Chaplin’s ‘Little Tramp’ character attempting to find value somewhere in society. The individual, however, simply has no place within the world of the machine, and can therefore find no nucleus of truth there upon which to rest his beliefs. While working at the factory in the beginning of the film, for instance, the Tramp almost becomes mechanical himself, and suffers a nervous breakdown as a result. After his recovery, the police arrest him in a case of mistaken identity. He finally meets the Gamin (Paulette Goddard), the one person with whom he can identify, but circumstances continually conspire to prevent them from attaining the life of their dreams. Every time life starts going well for them, every time they begin to see a glimpse of what truth and meaning can be, the modern industrial and political institutions step in to crush them. In the end, the Tramp and the Gamin realize that civilization rests upon no central kernel of truth, that it holds no meaning for them, and they turn their backs on a broken world.

Orson Welles, unlike Chaplin, presents the case, not of a society suffering the crush of Modernity, but rather the particularly hopeless circumstances involved in trying to discover the truth at the bottom of one man’s life. Citizen Kane portrays, through bits and pieces of disjointed memories, the life of Charles Foster Kane (Welles), a media giant who falls into obscurity in the last years of his life. In attempting to discover the truth behind Kane’s rise and fall, a reporter, Thompson (William Alland), latches on to the last word the great man said in life, “rosebud,” with the hope that it’s meaning will give him a clue to the story. Unfortunately, “rosebud” is the answer to everything and to nothing. The last shot of the film reveals that it had been the name of Kane’s sled when he was a boy, which, in a sense, demonstrates the emptiness that filled the rest of his life. The sled, however, represents a time in the man’s life when he actually was somebody, when there was a real person at his core. We find that he was then removed from a life with any true center, and as he grew he created himself anew as a fictional man, a man who pieced himself together from remnants of ideas. As Thompson probes further into the details of Kane’s life, he becomes more and more confused as to what possibly could have defined the man. None of the pieces he discovers seem to fit together, they form no core, no unifying theme that Thompson can discover to give Kane’s life any true meaning, or any substance. Like Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Kane can only exist as a man within the unreal world of his own invention. The answer to Thompson’s question of what defined Kane, therefore, is ‘nothing.’ The man was hollow.

As Chaplin portrays an idealistic man in a land without an ideal, and Welles presents a soulless man with no truth at his own core, Mike Nichols then synthesizes the two by placing Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a young man without meaning in his life, into a world that offers him nothing but falsehoods. As the movie opens, Benjamin has just graduated from college, and is attending a party thrown by a friend of his family’s. An older gentlemen gives him a career option and at the same time sums up the meaning of society, as he says, “Just one word: Plastics!” Later on, in his search for significance, Benjamin begins an affair with Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) and then falls in love with her daughter Elaine (Katherine Ross), but he still cannot find enlightenment through any of his actions. With Mrs. Robinson, sex is meaningless, and it drives Benjamin to ask at one point, “Could we try, maybe, talking?” to which she replies, “What’s there to talk about?” There is, actually, nothing to discuss between them. Benjamin then believes he can find fulfillment with Elaine, but, at the end of the film, after he rescues her from a potentially destructive marriage, they hop on board a bus and ride away, sitting next to one another, but not in any romantic way. This ending implies that, although her potential mate was not the right match for Elaine, and Mrs. Robinson was not right for Benjamin, the two might not be right for each other, either. Then, perhaps, there is no answer to the question of fulfillment in life. The society in which they live is a façade, but what is real?

If one defines Modernity as the search or longing for a purpose, and a sense of separation from the idealistic center of reality, then perhaps one will find the best statements of the Modern condition in American film. Beginning with Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp and his struggle for idealism in a corrupt world, and continuing with the search for the truth behind Kane, whose life was a great lie, and then culminating in Benjamin Braddock’s own search for significance in a world of falsehoods, the American filmmakers have poignantly illustrated the pain that Modernity engenders.