| Brad Bellatti |
The Great Dictator plays on glorious 35mm film at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, July 6th, through Tuesday, July 8th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
For the better part of 15 years, the above image of Chaplin has bothered me. No matter how many times I watch this sequence, the finale of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) shakes me up. I’ve tried many times to find the right words to express this sentiment; I taught it four or five times in various classes at the University of Minnesota, and probably 20 plus times in my rhetoric unit at the high school level. I don’t imagine that I will come to any satisfactory response to this, but let me lay out the argument, as I see it, that Chaplin presents with this final scene. It is a powerful three minutes of oration, but in most of the comments I see about this speech, few address the important artistic decisions that Chaplin made for his speech—which is not often considered a very cinematic performance. However, because it is a film and not merely words on a page, they must be considered when trying to examine how this rhetorical situation was constructed by Chaplin.
As many commentators such as Bosley Crowther (in his 1940 New York Times review of the world premiere of the film) and Roger Ebert have pointed out, Chaplin does not seem to give this speech in character. We are, it seems, supposed to recognize that it is Charlie Chaplin delivering his speech to the film audience as if breaking through the fourth wall; although, if this is entirely true, it is curious that he references the pre-recorded soldiers in attendance, and he speaks directly to another character in the film during his monologue. The fact that the speech often makes the rounds on social media as a powerful statement seems to corroborate that because anyone can watch/listen/read this out of context and still take away the importance of what Chaplin said. Let’s attempt to read the scene like that. I’ll still provide some context from the rest of the film as I think is important in understanding what initially and continues to give me such an uneasy relationship with that frame.
In the film, Chaplin plays a Jewish barber who accidentally trades places with the Hitler send-up Hynkel after the latter is arrested by the Gestapo for being mistaken for the Jewish barber. To fulfill this charade, the Jewish barber must give a speech to a large crowd of soldiers at a political rally or they will know he is an impostor and he will be killed.
While Ebert and Crowther point out that the speech is out of place and serious for its comedic genre, comment section after comment section (well, anywhere public comments can be made) throw out endless superlatives to express the greatness of what they see as Chaplin’s impassioned cry for liberal values. If I was reading Chaplin’s speech on paper, I would be inclined to agree that the speech is quite rhetorically smart; I watched the clip without the context of the rest of the film for many years, and it did feel like a situation where Chaplin stuck this in at the end of the film, just as it is capable of standing alone from the rest of the film without much trouble from anyone watching it on Youtube.
But then I come back to the film itself, and this frame, and I cannot decide if we as the audience are supposed to take it as seriously as present day audiences do. It’s that frame I began with that sticks in my craw. Almost as much as the gesture that follows it.
In the first, I see terror. The soldiers cheer him whole-heartedly after the bombastic end to his speech and it hits like a wave crashing upon a rock as if they have all decided to agree with the one-hundred and eighty degree twist on politics that they hear from their fascist leader. Why then does Chaplin gesture as if his internal monologue reads “What have I done?” The film cuts to pre-recorded footage of a mass rally to see what Chaplin sees—an unending mass of cheering bodies (probably from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will [1935]). In what world is this liberal speech able to immediately change these soldiers’ minds to give up their Nazi ways and unite in “the name of democracy”? If it is capable of performing such magic, why does Chaplin look so concerned? To even approach an answer to that question, we have to examine what leads up to these fraught gestures.
Chaplin precedes his speech by situating it within the narrative. He walks onto the stage and greets the military official who has just announced him as the “Future emperor of the world!” After the officer steps off the stage, Chaplin stands in a framing that imprisons him between 2 tall microphones on either side. He looks small compared to the massive basilicas behind him, the two giant pillars on either side of him that stretch out of all three sides of the frame, and is outnumbered by the microphones on stage.
Before he begins the speech, the film cuts to a close-up where the microphones cannot be seen. The audience is allowed to look closely at the face of the man who must speak or die.
He begins, in a somber and reflective tone saying that “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor.” He talks about himself and what goals he wants for a peaceful world with the rhetorical goal of establishing his ethos (why should we take the speaker seriously?). At the end of this section of making himself out to be a noble person with lofty liberal goals, such as when he says that “Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness—not by each other’s misery” the film dissolves to an image of his girlfriend Hannah, who has fled the country with her family to escape persecution, lying crying on the ground while listening to the speech on a radio. When the film dissolves back, the framing is drawn back to reveal the microphones that he has been speaking into the whole time.
The film bridges this transition with Chaplin saying, “To those who can hear me, I say—do not despair.” Chaplin reintroduces the microphone as a nod to his awareness that this speech is being displayed to the masses—but does this necessitate drawing a parallel between the audience and the Nazi crowd or between Chaplin and Hitler’s use of mass communication? This may feel like a stretch, but I ask the reader to finish the sequence and remember those images that it culminates in. In this shot, Chaplin says:
Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes—men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men—machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate—the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
Chaplin pairs ethos (appealing to the audience and their emotions) with the microphone. The medium framing also allows Chaplin’s body the opportunity to command more of a presence. He looks down on the soldiers as he directly addresses them. He has stood almost completely still up until he begins to address them. His head moves first, then his hands move away from his body, then he begins to angle his torso. These microphones and the crowd are slowly bringing him to life. He is becoming filled with passion and it courses through his body.
If he can reach millions of people, perhaps he can use that power to persuade them to make the right choice in terms of choosing liberal humanism over Nazi barbarism. At the time of the film’s release (even though it was banned in Germany, and several other countries that harbored Nazi sympathizers) it would not have been impossible to imagine that Chaplin was speaking to the masses of Nazi sympathizers in the US and elsewhere; Chaplin’s biopic Chaplin (1992) includes a scene where Chaplin confronts Nazi sympathizers at a party. After this call for action, the camera seems to dolly in (perhaps even upon a crane) to another close-up of his face as he delivers the lines, “In the 17th Chapter of St Luke it is written: ‘the Kingdom of God is within man’—not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you!”
So, if we buy Chaplin’s argument (we should take him seriously and have our emotions properly stirred), what are we to do? Chaplin completes the rhetorical triangle with the logos (logic) that places the power to make the world in the image that they choose in everyone (hopefully, one where people are good to everyone else and make a world of happiness). So, just before he stops, and the crowd swells with uproarious applause, he delivers his final line, “Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!” This line is strange for so many reasons.
The conflation between the audience he knows will be watching the film with the soldiers in the film’s world becomes an issue worth taking seriously. Has Chaplin, intoxicated by the power of mass communication, imagined himself capable of adopting Hitler’s performative style to raise an army to fight for democracy? There are too many parallels to draw between this final part of his speech and the way that Hynkel delivers his angry tirades to be an accident. This shouting end to this extended monologue is nearly the same cadence and volume as the way that Hynkel ends a speech earlier in the film. To this, just prior to that frame that has haunted me is, Chaplin throws his hand up as he asks the soldiers to unite and I don’t think it can be read as anything other than a Nazi salute.
The image this essay started with, to my reading, is that Chaplin recognizes (as both himself as an artist and as the character of the Jewish Barber) the seductive possibility of mass communication. While his previous film Modern Times (1936) had a synchronized soundtrack and includes a few lines of dialogue (typically spoken through a communications device—the record player advertising the Billows Feeding Machine or the radio advertising a gas suppressing pill, although his nonsense song at the end of that film is him singing) this is, for all intents and purposes, Chaplin’s first talkie. What would one of the world’s most famous men say in his first film where he spoke in a coherent manner?
For what should be a persuasive speech that seems to tick all the boxes of an effective attempt at persuasion, it’s that success and Chaplin’s need to undermine it that have left me at odds with myself. Should rhetoric alone, produced and distributed via monologue on mass media, be capable of moving entire groups of people (hopefully both those who support the speaker’s ideas as well as those whose minds are trying to be changed) to join together to go to war regardless of which side is being represented so long as they think they are doing the right thing? Is Chaplin aware that this whole enterprise to use mass media for the good of humanity is destined to fail because such an act is not only impossible but highly manipulative? Is Chaplin working through what it must feel like to command such large audiences with spoken words rather than the gestures and titles of his silent films? Is Chaplin aware that a successful persuasive speech puts him in a similar position as the fascist agitator who bullrushes its listeners with rhetorical techniques to convince without actually making the necessary logical arguments to support it (logos is typically one claim short of being a logical proof)? Can I even find the right question to explain why this speech feels so powerful to someone who shares Chaplin’s sentiments and why the last moments bring me such discombobulation? I don’t think I have the right words to form the right question to get over this feeling I have when I watch or teach this clip. Maybe that’s the point I should take away from Chaplin: It’s not about finding the right words, but maybe just remembering to try and do the right thing.
This is not the end of the speech, though to look at the transcript of it on official website for Charlie Chaplin—or the clip of this scene on the Youtube channel “Charlie Chaplin”—it wouldn’t surprise me that most people who see this in today’s digital world (like myself for many years of watching this clip but not the entire film) don’t know that. The film ends with a close-up of Hannah, no longer crying, listening to Chaplin talk directly to her as he tells her to look up, that the world is coming out of darkness, and that people have gained decency and will live up to Chaplin’s demands to make the world a better place. This obviously did not come true as WWII was still ongoing by its release in October of 1940. Yet, I would be remiss to not say, that to my ear, when Chaplin delivers these inspirational aspirations for humanity’s future, it sounds as if he is holding back tears; if Chaplin doesn’t suspect this is as fantastic of a claim as that of changing the minds of Nazis, perhaps the Jewish barber (whom Chaplin once again inhabits in the film’s narrative space) realizes the soldier’s cheering him on means his futile hope of changing the soldiers’ minds just means they were never really listening to his words—only responding to his gesture of the sieg heil, which the film makes comedically clear in Hynkel’s earlier speech that it’s like the applause light flashing at a live taping. The war’s still on, and there’s nothing that one of the world’s most well-known artists can do to stop it… even if he could find the right words to say.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon