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The ending speech hasn’t aged well
posté par rooprectSTAFFMOD le 1 juin 2024 à 22h23
…through no fault of Chaplin but through the fault of the human race and the never-ending repetition of history we’ve seen in the 80 years since. It’s an excellent speech with a powerful delivery, as Chaplin breaks the 4th wall and stares directly into the camera addressing us with a message of hope and a call for sanity, assuring us that the clouds will pass. But that's also what makes it such a tragic speech in hindsight. Yes, WW2 ended with the clouds passing, but we learned that peace is short-lived at best, and that hate filled dictators, tyrants and corrupt governments will always come back.
This movie left me with the same uneasy feeling I had after watching The Cranes Are Flying shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The film was Russia’s “never again!” postwar declaration. Like The Great Dictator the story leads up to a climactic speech about how war & hate & tyrants must never rise again. But guess what, they do, and they did.
Réponse de rooprect
le 26 juin 2024 à 18h49
Just re-watched the movie with the commentary and thought I'd update this. The 2 film historians pointed out that even back in 1940 the ending speech would've been impractical (and indeed some critics took issue). If Hynkel/Hitler had suddenly flipped from hate to kindness like he did, Garbitch/Goebbels would've put a bullet in his head 10 seconds into it, and the crowd (Nazis already wound up on bloodlust) certainly wouldn't have cheered Hynkel/Hitler but more likely would've rioted. Chaplin was aware of this, the historians said, so the ending is deliberately a fantasy. From the moment he breaks the 4th wall and stares into the camera, it's as if we depart from the film's narrative and we're now in Chaplin's own idealistic dream where sanity and goodness prevail.
If that's true, the ending of this movie is truly mind blowing. Because if you're keeping score, there are 3 levels of reality that he's taking us through. Reality #1 is the real world and the real Hitler and all the events happening outside the movie theater. Reality #2 is the fictional story which gives us a thinly veiled mockup of world events; it's a softened version of Reality #1. And in the final scene, we get Reality #3 where Chaplin further softens the softened version to give us a completely impractical happy ending.
If you see what he did there, it's a really sophisticated 'deus ex machina'. A sudden godlike force (here the creator of the film, Chaplin himself) comes down and fixes everything. The end.
What's funny is I don't sense any hint of sarcasm or trickery. Chaplin wasn't just writing a convenient happy ending for the film but it's almost like he was trying to write a happy ending for the human race, and he truly believed it. With that in mind, even the most cynical modern audiences should be affected. Will we ever have world peace? Hardly. But you gotta admire a work of art that believes its own illusion.