MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Charlie Chaplin and Rube Goldberg are iconic visual culture artists of the interwar Machine Age in America. Chaplin’s film Modern Times and Goldberg’s cartoon Inventions seem to epitomize a genre that gently poked fun at machine culture. And yet these very works are far from gentle. Both Chaplin and Goldberg (still quite humorously) expose the interaction with the machine as characterized by intense physical and emotional pain. The most commonly used image to illustrate Modern Times is the famous still in which Chaplin lies grinning between the machine’s gears. But this visual does not capture the biting critique of Taylorism that the rest of the film entails. Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, implemented time and motion studies in order to assess the efficiency of workers’ movements with the end goal of speeding up production. In fact, the context of the famous still, the reason for his being pulled into the machine, is this speeding up process and the psychological effects of rote actions. Finally, Goldberg’s work is envisioned in popular culture as Hasbro’s board game, Mouse Trap, and is celebrated annually by a Rube Goldberg Machine Contest sponsored by Purdue University. These iterations are purely mechanical, but many of Goldberg’s actual Inventions featured the physical and emotional abuse of both animals and humans. Tears are used to fill cups as much as water, seen in one cartoon that instructs you to A) place chicken salad in a window, which B) is recognized by a rooster as his wife, causing him to cry tears into cup C). By re-viewing these misremembered iconic works of visual culture, we can consider both their true subversive nature and the reasons why we have collectively tamed them in our memories.