The Pervert's Guide To Cinema Page #4

and the poor, finite, mortal reality of our bodies.

This is not just the pathology

of being possessed by ghosts.

The lesson that we should learn

and that the movies try to avoid

is that we ourselves are the aliens controlling our bodies.

Humanity means that the aliens are

controlling our animal bodies.

Our ego, our psychic agency, is an alien force,

distorting, controlling our body.

Nobody was as fully aware of the properly

traumatic dimension of the human voice,

the human voice

not as the sublime, ethereal medium

for expressing the depth of human subjectivity,

but the human voice as a foreign intruder.

Nobody was more aware

of this than Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin himself plays in the film two persons,

the good, small, Jewish barber

and his evil double,

Hynkel, dictator. Hitler, of course.

- Come on. Leave me alone.

- Why, you...

He bit my finger.

The Jewish barber, the tramp figure,

is of course the figure of silent cinema.

Silent figures are basically

like figures in the cartoon.

They don't know death.

They don't know sexuality even.

They don't know suffering.

They just go on in their oral, egotistic striving,

like cats and mice in a cartoon.

You cut them into pieces, they're reconstituted.

There is no finitude, no mortality here.

There is evil, but a kind of naive, good evil.

You're just egotistic, you want to eat,

you want to hit the other,

but there is no guilt proper.

What we get with sound is

interiority, depth, guilt,

culpability,

in other words, the complex oedipal universe.

Here you are.

Get a Hynkel button. Get a Hynkel button.

A fine sculpture with a hooey

on each and every button.

The problem of the film

is not only the political problem,

how to get rid of totalitarianism,

of its terrible seductive power,

but it's also this more formal problem,

how to get rid of this

terrifying dimension of the voice.

Or, since we cannot simply get rid of it,

how to domesticate it,

how to transform this voice nonetheless

into the means of expressing humanity,

love and so on.

German police grabs the poor tramp

thinking this is Hitler

and he has to address a large gathering.

I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor.

That's not my business.

I don't want to rule or conquer anyone.

I should like to help everyone, if possible.

Jew, gentile, black man, white,

we all want to help one another.

Human beings are like that.

There, of course, he delivers his big speech

about the need for love,

understanding between people.

But there is a catch,

even a double catch.

Soldiers, in the name of democracy,

let us all unite!

People applaud exactly in the same way

as they were applauding Hitler.

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