Notes on Charlie Chaplin's Closing Speech to 'The Great Dictator'

Charlie Chaplin as the Jewish Barber and 

Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator (1941)

 

 

I. 

 

There's probably only one thing worse in the modern political imaginary than a great dictator and that's an evil tyrant. But even the former is bad enough in the eyes of those for whom power should belong to the people and not held by a single individual who, it is believed, will be invariably (and absolutely) corrupted by its possession. 

 

Any positive associations that the term may have had were lost once and for all during the 20th-century. Thanks to figures such as Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao [1], dictators are now viewed by those within the liberal-democratic world as violent megalomaniacs who oppress their peoples and bring death and chaos in their wake [2]. 

Having said that, it seems they can also inspire laughter as well as moral hand-wringing and hypocrisy, as illustrated by the 2012 film starring Sacha Baron Cohen, The Dictator (dir. Larry Charles) and, seventy years prior, the equally unfunny work of satirical slapstick that many regard as Chaplin's masterpiece, The Great Dictator (1940) ...

 

 

II.  

I don't know why, but I've never liked Charlie Chaplin: this despite the fact that, according to Lawrence, "there is a greater essential beauty in Charlie Chaplin's odd face, than there ever was in Valentino's" [3]. For even if this gleam of something pure makes beautiful, that doesn't mean it makes good and true; and it certainly doesn't guarantee to make humorous. 

 

Chaplin is mostly remembered for playing an anonymous tramp figure - a character whom I regard as the antithesis of the bum as hobo-punk given us in the songs of Haywire Mac; for whereas the latter celebrates his life on the road and railways, the former is keen to improve his lot and dreams of one day living a comfortable middle-class existence.

 

But in the feature-length anti-fascist film of 1941 - which Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, and starred in - he plays both the nameless Jewish Barber and the Great Dictator of Tomainia, Adenoid Hynkel (a parody of Adolf Hitler that some find hilarious and uncannily accurate, others, like me, a bit lazy in that it perpetuates the idea that the latter was just a buffoon and an imposter).

 

Probably the most famous scene is the five-minute speech that Chaplin delivers at the end of the film [4]. Dropping his comic mask and appearing to speak directly to his global audience, he makes an earnest plea for human decency and human progress, encouraging people to rise up against dictators and unite in peace and brotherhood, whatever their race or religion. 

The thing with such romantic moralism is that it flies in the face of history and relies heavily on emotion and rhetoric for its effect, rather than argument - ironically, in much the same manner as fascist propaganda. 

 

"We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery We don't want to hate and despise one another." 

 

Is there any evidence for this ultra-optimistic belief that the "hate of men will pass"? 

 

I doubt it. 

 

I would dispute also that our cleverness has made us "hard and unkind" and what we need is to think less and feel more; again, such irrationalism and anti-intellectualism is ironically central to fascism.

 

Perhaps most interestingly, Chaplin echoes Oliver Mellors with his diatribe against "machine men with machine minds and machine hearts". But even Mellors knew that such people now make up the vast bulk of humanity, not just those who govern; that it is the fate of mankind to become-cyborg with rubber tubing for guts and legs made from tin; motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes sucking the vitality out of us all [5]. 

 

Chaplin rightly foresaw that the age of the great dictators would soon pass - in Western Europe at least - but has the triumph of liberal democracy resulted in a life that is free and beautiful and where science and progress "lead to all men's happiness" ...? 

 

Again, I don't think so. 

 

And, like Mellors, I increasingly find comfort not in the dream of a new human future, but in a post-human world: 

 

"Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species, and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else." [6]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For an earlier post on these three great dictators (and one mad poet), click here. 

 

[2] Unless they happen to be allies, in which case they are said to be strong leaders providing stability in their region of the world, but we won't get into that here.  

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 146.

 

[4] Click here to play this scene (I would suggest having a sick bag at the ready). Even some fans of Chaplin's concede that this spoils the film as a work of art. 

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217. 

 

[6] Ibid., p. 218. 

      This is similar to how Rupert Birkin felt in Women in Love; see pp. 127-128 of the Cambridge Edition (1987), ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. 

 

 

Musical bonus: Penetration, 'Don't Dictate', (Virgin Records, 1977): click here for the studio version and here for a fantastic live performance of the song at the Electric Circus, Manchester (August 1977). 

 

   

Film Kills (1): At the Pictures with D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence: Close-Up (Kiss), 1928

Cinema is the production of icons and the proliferation of moving images. From a biblical perspective, it is clearly sinful. 

But if the authors of Exodus are primarily concerned with the making of graven images of God and the worship of pagan idols, there seems to be something else, something deeper, troubling them too; namely, a genuine concern with the very notion of representation as it relates to questions of reality, truth, and appearance. 

We find the same concern amongst the ancient Greeks - Plato providing an obvious example. His insistence on presence and authenticity makes him suspicious of most art forms and his critique of writing as a pharmakon can easily be made also of film. Indeed, it's central  to D. H. Lawrence's criticism of cinema: because the actors on-screen are not physically present before us, this invalidates both their performance and our response to it. 

As a matter of fact, Lawrence says very little about the cinema, but when he does it's uniformly negative and hostile. In the poem 'When I Went to the Film', for example, Lawrence suggests that cinema is essentially - in its very form and function - an obscene and pornographic medium and that the content of the film is, therefore, in large part irrelevant. 

This is because, for Lawrence, film sensationally stimulates false feeling and counterfeit emotion. It is both ideal and ecstatic; projecting shadows of people as if onto the wall of Plato's cave on the one hand, whilst provoking masturbatory thrills on the other. It is the art form par excellence of what he refers to as sex-in-the-head: i.e., a desire on the part of hyper-conscious, visually-fixated individuals to experience everything in their minds and to exchange the sheer physical intensity of life lived in the flesh for a new piece of knowledge and a bucket of popcorn. 

Lawrence's concern is not that this results in a loss of soul, but in a denial of the body and corporeal reality: "The amazing move into abstraction on the part of the whole of humanity", he argues, "means we loathe the physical element ... We don't want to look at flesh-and-blood people ... We don't want to hear their actual voices" [1]. Rather, we wish only to interact with them mediated via technology.

In his novel of 1920, The Lost Girl, Lawrence privileges the dying art of the music hall over that of the newly emergent cinema, prioritizing live speech and presence over celluloid sensation. It's much the same argument as he makes in his poetry: film is cheap and easy and it costs the audience nothing apart from the price of a ticket: no feeling of the heart, no appreciation of the spirit is necessary - just wide open eyes and a desire to be titillated.

Whatever we might think of this critique - and it's far from convincing - there is no denying that our curiosity towards images is always erotically charged. Sex might not be the origin of the world as Courbet suggested, but it's certainly the origin of cinema and our insatiable will to knowledge. The faces of Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino "plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy ... one literally lost oneself in the human image" [2].

This cinematic jouissance - brilliantly theorized by Patricia MacCormack [3] - is a major concern for some people. For others, what matters is the violence that is done to the real; i.e. the fact that the production of images results in the murder of objects, not that it causes audience to moan from close-up kisses and simulated sex. I'll say more about this in part two of this post.

Notes: 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', Late Essays and Articles, (CUP, 2004), p. 283.
[2] Roland Barthes, 'The Face of Garbo', Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Paladin Books, 1973), p. 62.

[3] See Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality, (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2008).