Satire Usage in Film as a Tool for Social Change

Satire Usage in Film as a Tool for Social Change

Satire is a corrective form of humor but it can take different forms; in fact, the five films analyzed in this essay are all satires but belong in various sub-categories. The first one, Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, creates a lasting image of the industrialized world’s dehumanization, while Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is a classic of black humor, Woody Allen’s Sleeper is a parody of futuristic fantasies, but one important objective that these films have in common is to get the audience to laugh.

Sydney Lumet’s Network does not try for laughs, other than a smile of recognition, and at the other extreme South Park uses humor to get the audience to laugh at their own prejudices. In all cases, these films set out to make this a better world and all have, in a small way, achieved their goal; that is, each of these films has contributed an image that has become part of the collective conscience.

Modern Times, originally called The Masses, is remembered mostly for the images created in the film’s first twenty minutes, showing how machines have taken over our lives. Even though this film was made nine years after the introduction of “talkies,” Chaplin used titles instead of dialogue, perhaps because he had had his greatest successes in silent film. The theme is announced when the credits are shown over a ticking clock, implying that time is money, and the opening shots show sheep being herded, followed by working men and women emerging from the subway. The scene for which the film is best-known centers on Chaplin working on an assembly line, tightening two nuts over and over.

The factory is spacious and clean but human beings are insignificant next to the huge machines they operate. The president of the company, called Electro-Steel, sits in an office with little to do but watch the operations on a film screen, bark orders at the muscular man who controls the speed of the lines, and work on a jig-saw puzzle. There is even a screen in the toilets so the president can make sure no one is wasting the company’s time.

A mechanical salesman presents a machine that can feed workers while they are on the line, thereby making a lunch break unnecessary. It is tested on Chaplin with predictable results. Eventually, the process of tightening nuts all day causes Chaplin to have a nervous breakdown. After that the film “gets back to the old Chaplin comedy pattern,” says Theodore Huff, abandoning the theme of workers being dehumanized by the machines they operate; in fact, Huff regards the last two-thirds of the film as “a sort of anticlimax to the opening idea” (252-253).

Chaplin himself claimed not to be aware of any social significance in his work. He aimed to entertain, not to lecture his audience. Modern Times, says Chaplin, started as “an impulse to say something about the way life is being standardized and channelized, and men turned into machines” (qtd. in Huff 256). Huff points out that the film is not opposed to capitalism but that it supports the individual in his or her struggle against mechanization.

All that is shown clearly in the first section of the film, specifically when Chaplin is swallowed up by the giant machine as if through its digestive system. It is an image that lives on in people’s minds as a warning against letting machines, or technology, take over too many of our functions. In that way, it has made us more aware of the dangers inherent in progress.

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, described as a “nihilistic satire” by Mario Falsetto (8), was inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 when the world came within a hair’s breadth of blowing itself up. Kubrick bought the rights to the novel, Red Alert, by Peter George but when he began writing the screenplay he kept rejecting the ideas that came to him because he was afraid people would laugh at the film.

Finally, he realized that “the things I was throwing out were the things that were most truthful.” After all, Kubrick said, “what could be more absurd than … two superpowers willing to wipe out all human life because of … political differences that will seem as meaningless to people a hundred years from now as the theological conflicts of the Middle Ages appear to us today? (Qtd. in Gelmis 40). He, therefore, decided to turn it into a black comedy in which much of the humor derives from the nightmarish context in which ordinary things happen. (Gelmis 41).

In the finished screenplay General Jack D. Ripper, who commands a Strategic Air Com