290
SUSAN SONTAG
intellectual simplification. Every idea is reducible to a cliche, and
the function of a cliche is to castrate an idea. Now, intellectual simplifi–
cation has its uses, its value. It is, for example, absolutely indispensable
to comedy. But it is inimical
to
the serious. At present, the seriousness
of the American theater is w,orse than frivolity .
The hope for intelligence in the theater is not through conventional
"seriousness," whether in the form of analysis (bad example:
After
fhe
Fall),
or the documentary (weak example:
The Deputy) .
It is rather,
I think, through comedy. The figure in the modern theater who best
understood this was Brecht. But comedy, too, has its enormous perils.
The danger here is not so much intellectual simplification as failure of
tone and taste. It may be that not all subjects can be given a comic
treatment.
This question of the adequacy of tone and taste to serious subject
matter is, of course, not confined to the theater alone. There is an ex–
cellent illustration of the advantages of comedy, and of its peculiar
dilemmas-if I may jump to the movies for a moment-in two films
recently showing in New York, Charlie Chaplin's
The Great Dictator
and Stanley Kubrick's
Doctor Strangelove: Or How I L earned to Stop
Worrying and Love The Bomb .
The virtues and failures of both
films seem to me oddly comparable, and instructive.
In the case of
The Great Dictator}
the problem is easily discernible.
The entire conception of the comedy is totally, painfully, insultingly
inadequate to the reality it purports to represent. The Jews are Jews,
and they live
in
what Chaplin names a Ghetto. But their oppressors
don't display the swastika but the emblem of the double cross; and
the dictator is not Adolph Hitler but a balletic buffoon with a mustache
named Adenoid Hynkel. Oppression in
The Great Dictator
is uniformed
bullies throwing s.o many tomatoes at Paulette Goddard that she has to
wash her laundry all over again. It is impossible to see
The Great Dic–
tator
in 1964 without thinking of the hideous reality behind the movie
and one is depressed by the shallowness of Chaplin's political vision.
One cringes at that embarrassing final speech, when the Little Jewish
Barber steps up to the podium in place of Der Phooey to call for
"progress," "liberty," "brotherhood," "one world," even "science." And
to watch Paulette Goddard' looking up to the dawn and smiling through
her tears-in 1940!
The problem of
Dr. Strangelove
is more c,omplex, though it may
well be that in twenty years it will seem as simple as
The Great Dictator.
If
the positive assertions at the close of
The Great Dictator
seem facile
