Chaplin / The Great Dictator and the ominous voice
example · film: The Great Dictator ·
retold in 3 talks
Chaplin's first sound film split his own tramp persona into the tramp and his double Hynkel (Hitler), a pure figure of voice, showing that voice is not transparent self-expression but a foreign body that haunts; a vision later rendered invisible.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 3
“He saw there a potential ominous, spectral dimension of voice … that voice is never a transparent means of self-expression, that voice is a kind of a foreign body, intruder.”
“Hitler is the priority of the voice. It's usually even first presented as shouting voice and only then as a figure that we see.”
“Far more pessimistic one. It's that maybe the two are not so radically opposed, the good guy and the bad guy and so on, no?”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau2Anthony Mann1Russell Jacoby1Béla Bartók1Paul Watzlawick1Otto Bauer1Marie Bonaparte1Sándor Ferenczi1
alongside works
Every retelling 3
Chaplin's first sound film split his own tramp persona into the tramp and his double Hynkel (Hitler), a pure figure of voice, showing that voice is not transparent self-expression but a foreign body that haunts; a vision later rendered invisible., illustrating Hegel as vanishing mediator,ominous spectral dimension,in-between historical moments of visibility
Chaplin plays two roles: the silent Jewish barber (old silent film) and Hitler (priority of the voice). The voice is presented as a shouting, disruptive force before the figure is seen, illustrating that voice is a foreign intruder, not natural., illustrating ventriloquism of reality,voice as foreign intruder
In Chaplin's film, the Lohengrin overture accompanies both Hynkel's globe-balloon dance and the Jewish barber's sentimental closing speech; Žižek argues this signals that the good-guy speech is structurally indistinguishable from what Hynkel would have said, fascism and anti-fascist sentimentality converge., illustrating fascism and sentimentality,good and evil not radically opposed