A Film Canon

The greatest political satire to date, The Great Dictator's genius lies more in its premise than its execution - and, specifically, in its culmination of the Little Tramp's persona. Although Chaplin ostensibly plays two new characters - a Jewish barber, and Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomania - both of these represent discrete aspects of the Tramp, who haunts them like a mirage. Most basically, the Tramp's infantilism is embodied by Hynckel, while his innocence is embodied by the barber - and, at this level, it feels as if fascism is a mere pretext to elevate these traits to a sublime extremity, as evinced in Hynckel's reduction of a potentially catastrophic negotiation to a food fight, or the barber's oblivious skip down a street exhibiting the aftermath of a Kristallnacht-like spree. Yet Chaplin also emphasises a certain indistinguishability between infantilism and innocence, encapsulated in the two dance sequences that form the centrepiece of the film. In the first, Hynckel's supreme gesture of infantile megalomania - dancing with a balloon-globe of the world - takes on an extraordinarily poetic innocence, epitomised by his wide-eyed surprise when it finally bursts. In the second, the barber's oblivion to the pain of one of his customers produces a series of violent acts whose abrupt pedantry recalls the pettiness of the dictator. At this level, the focus shifts from the Tramp back to fascism - a tendency that is reinforced by Chaplin's disruption of another distinction. Although the barber is virtually a silent character - and his ghetto a silent world - he nevertheless exhibits a capacity for speech that is always as surprising as it would be in one of Chaplin's silent films. Similarly, although Hynckel is defined primarily as an aggressive mouth, his most intense outbursts degenerate to a mock German that is little more than noise, and best registered as a visual phenomenon, whether in terms of its transformations of his face, its hyperbolic impact upon technology (microphones cringe, stands wilt) or, most ingeniously, the pervasive implication that language is not only a visual phenomenon, but is itself capable of visibility, the omniscience of the word 'Jew' becoming indistinguishable from Hynckel's gaze. The result is a regathering of all the forces previously fragmenting the Tramp under the banner of fascism; or, alternatively, a clarification that Chaplin's most penetrating critique of industrial society was always as a latent form of fascism. Yet, just as City Lights finally grants the Tramp sight, so The Great Dictator grants him speech, albeit with the slightly awkward, discursive intensity that will characterise the remainder of Chaplin's sound films.