Cory Massimino

Review: The Great Dictator (1940)

September 15, 2020 by Cory

★★★★★

Sometimes the best way to reveal evil and resists its brutalities is to emphasize, not its tragedy, but its comedy. Depicting people and actions as ridiculous, silly, stupid, and nonsensical is not mutually exclusive with depicting those same people and actions as evil. Uplifting viewers through humor does not always depend on degrading the subject matter through an attitude of callousness but sometimes on *elevating* the subject matter through an attitude of resilience. At its best, satire, or the use of ridicule to expose truths, helps people endure those truths. Satire says: we can abide.

Charlie Chaplin understood all this. That’s why he wrote, scored, produced, directed, and starred in a fish-out-of-water slapstick comedy about anti-semitism, fascism, Nazism, and Adolf Hitler. 80 years later The Great Dictator remains as hilarious, biting, and insightful as ever. It follows two parallel stories that only ever really converge in the very final scene:

1) A clumsy Jewish barber played by Chaplin wakes up in the fictional country of Tomainia in 1938, twenty years after fighting in World War 1 and saving a fellow soldier, only to discover that his country is now under the rule of a ruthless dictator and Jews live in fear of police that roam the streets terrorizing them. The barber suffers anti-semitism, makes friends, finds love, cuts hair, and fights fascists.

2) The ruthless dictator Hynkel also played by Chaplin carries on the day-to-day activities of ruling Tomainia, such as dealing with bureaucracy, writing letters (but having others lick the envelopes), simultaneously posing for a portrait and sculpture two seconds at a time, romantically dancing with a balloon globe, admiring himself in mirrors disguised as file cabinets (has there ever been a better visual metaphor for narcissism?), and hosting fellow fascist dictators with which to engage in petty clashes of ego.

In many ways, The Great Dictator functions as a psychological portrait of Hitler, characterizing him as not just overtly malicious, but also extraordinarily petty, childish, rash, impulsive, and gullible (his Minister of Propaganda Garbitsch constantly manipulates him). Hynkel’s plans involve almost no forethought. He repeatedly deflects blame, lashes out when things don’t go his way, and changes his mind a whim.

Chaplin makes an interesting stylistic choice in presenting virtually the whole movie in English except for Hynkel’s unhinged ravings, which he presents in silly German-sounding gibberish. His speeches are sometimes humorously paraphrased by the narrator but sometimes not. By never translating Hynkel’s rants to the audience, Chaplin says that Hynkel’s literal utterances are not what matter most, if at all. This illustrates the way propaganda so often employs subtext, leaving the true meaning of what’s being said to be inferred, which enables the deflection of moral responsibility. We hear Hynkel in gibberish because that’s what his actual words amount to.

By rejecting the assumption that Hynek speaks in good faith and refusing to cede to him the charity presupposed by rational shared discourse, the approach Chaplin takes here is actually reminiscent of Sartre’s penetrating insights into the nature of anti-semitism, whose devotees he accuses of devaluing “words and reasons” by treating the discussion about the rights of Jews as “frivolous.” The anti-semite thereby “lends himself but does not give himself” and merely projects their “intuitive certainty onto the plan of discourse,” so we should “never believe that anti-semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies” because “they know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge.” Anti-semites are ultimately, “amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.” Thus, anti-semites “discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.”

Chaplin thinks all we need to know about what Hynkel says is contained within his voice, facial expressions, and body language, since he leaves us nothing else with which to interpret him. By doing this, Chaplin reveals how fascism is, at root, nothing more than primal urges, animalistic instincts, guttural noises, unreflected passions, empty posturing, and childish projections of the power one is obsessed with. Hynkel’s endless, aggressive rhetoric amounts to nothing more than temper tantrums.

These scenes are central to setting up (and paying off) the movie’s climax, a completely unexpected speech delivered by the Jewish barber when he’s mistaken for Hynkel. Up until now, the barber has been pretty quiet, shy, and timid (though he does stand up to the stormtroopers). He’s not had a lot to say. We’ve seen him resist fascism physically but not intellectually. He hasn’t said anything particularly political and he’s not articulated any kind of opposition to the oppression he awoke to. He wanted to stay and fight the stormtroopers when they were coming for him but his new partner Hannah insisted he run.

Now, there is no where to run. The spotlight has been thrust upon him, whether he likes it or not, whether he planned for it or not. This lowly, bumbling barber is suddenly granted a global platform to say whatever he wants to all of humanity. What does he do with it? He realizes his opportunity to do good, rises to the situation, and gives an impassioned three-and-a-half minute monologue about solidarity, freedom, love, and progress. It’s surely one of the best monologues in movie history, nailing the writing, acting, and directing to achieve a powerful emotional victory.

The barber’s speech is the exact opposite of Hynkel’s speech in every way. Where the barber is eloquent, Hynkel is crass. Where the barber is deliberate, Hynkel is careless. Where the barber is graceful, Hynkel is disturbing. Where the barber is articulate, Hynkel is mindless. Where the barber is well-reasoned, Hynkel is hysterical. Where the barber is inspiring, Hynkel is laughable. Where the barber looks to the future (the only place an amnesiac *can* look!), Hynkel looks to the past. The Great Dictator is fundamentally a movie about two men: one out of his time and one of his time; one humble, loving, hopeful, and gracious and one egotistic, cruel, miserable, and shameless.

The movie ends with a poetic call to universal brotherhood. In a mere three-and-a-half minutes, Chaplin repudiates the previous two hours of fascist absurdity in rousing and erudite fashion. Chaplin crafts the most cathartic of fascist defeats, with the Hitler stand-in dragged off to one of his concentration camps and a Jew delivering a spirited plea for liberty, equality, and justice in his place.

The very last shot, though, is neither the barber nor Hynkel, but the barber’s Jewish lover Hannah taking refuge in the fictional country of Osterlich, listening to the barber’s speech on the radio, and looking optimistically up into the sky — the one thing she said the fascists can’t take away from them (though in the context of nighttime before).

Interestingly, we are left to imagine the myriad ways the barber’s speech might’ve changed history, if it did at all. Chaplin leaves us with nothing but hope and a dream (dreams are where Hannah said she really lives earlier). In 1940, Chaplin didn’t know whether fascism would win or not. He only had hope. He also didn’t know how bad it actually was, how bad it would get, and how it would end up being tempered for a time.

But Chaplin’s satire is very sadly a timeless tale. Despite the best efforts of art works like The Great Dictator, there exist today people in positions of power that share Hynkel’s egotism, cruelty, miserableness, and shamelessness. But we are unfortunately not lucky enough to have Charlie Chaplin around to mock those people. I wish we were.

The Great Dictator says we should love rather than hate, progress rather than regress, endure rather than surrender, and hope rather than fear. During arguably the historical height of human evil and suffering, Chaplin delivered a message of simple humanism and, even at such towering heights, was able to find both humor and humanity.

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