Isn't It Ironic, Don't You Think? or How To Deal With A Nazi Invasion: "To Be or Not to Be"
In a scene about two thirds of the way through Enrst Lubitsch's comedy To Be or Not to Be, from 1943, characters give the Nazi salute and intone "Heil Hitler" seven times in just over two minutes. The sequence involves Jack Benny's character Josef Tura – a Polish actor who is impersonating a German spy – paying a visit to Colonel Erhardt, head of the Gestapo in Warsaw. The first two salutes occur when an adjutant appears to tell Erhardt the spy has arrived; both actors give the gesture a perfunctory tone, something like "You're excused," and "Yes sir." Erhardt then receives a phone call, which consists of him yelling: "You have no proof? Well that's a fine excuse! Whenever in doubt, arrest them! How many times do I have to tell you to arrest them?" Worked up, he hollers "Heil Hitler" into the phone as a kind of admonishment before he slams it down. He then stands and says it again as an imperious greeting to Benny, who replies with a languorous, almost effeminate "Heil Hitler" of his own. His tone suggests that he – a spy, who is also a professor, no less – is above all these tantrums of the Gestapo. Of course, the truth is that Benny's character is a patriotic Pole who loathes the Nazis and is involved in a plan to help defeat them, and so Benny also manages to give his salute a distinct air of distaste. The conversation then gets chummy, and Erhardt repeats a mild joke about the Fuhrer that's been going around Warsaw. Sensing his advantage, Benny's spy takes offense at the joke and Erhardt becomes terrified he will be turned in and shot. With Benny eying him coldly, Erhardt splutters about how much he loves Hitler until he can think of nothing else to say and falls back on his best and most obedient "Heil Hitler!" Benny returns the gesture magnanimously, conveying that he forgives Erhardt, but it better not happen again.
It's a wonderful sequence in an amazingly funny movie. It's also a sequence that might alienate many people today, who seem to believe that to show something on the screen is to endorse that thing. But to show something is not to endorse it. And one reason is irony.
Irony. What a difficult, complicated, annoying concept, almost naughty in its evasiveness. But it's exactly this wispy complexity that is the source of irony's power. And it's a power that is desperately needed in the world today – as it was in 1943 – beset as the world is by the forces of stupidity, cruelty, and violence. One of the signal psychological elements of authoritarianism is its constriction, its self-serious desire to repress laughter and lightness, to prevent every attempt to slip into different guises, characters, or points of view, all in the name of some grand singular concept like "the people" or "the leader." Which is why irony represents such a danger to it.
Briefly, To Be or Not to Be (which combines a complexity worthy of a Le Carre thriller with manifold layers of character and reference, making it difficult to summarize briefly) tells the story of a theater troupe in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation of Poland. The troupe is headed up Josef Tura, who is a vain, insecure, over-acting leading man, and his wife Maria (Carole Lombard) who is no less vain than Josef but far more clever, and is also growing tired of her husband's theatrics.
At the opening, the group is rehearsing for a play called Gestapo – a satire of Hitler and the Nazis – while also putting on Hamlet; the title of the film comes from the fact that every time Josef reaches the "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy, he's interrupted by a young pilot named Stanislav Sobinski (Robert Stack), who leaves the audience to go backstage and try to woo Maria. The troupe also includes best friends Bronski and Greenberg (Tom Dugan and Felix Bressart); the first longs to convince the world that he's a great enough actor to convincingly portray Hitler himself, while the second is a Jew who dreams of someday playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in a way that will highlight that character's tragic dignity, saving it from anti-Semitic stereotype.
The Nazi invasion puts an end to the troupe, but they soon find themselves involved in an escapade even more important than theater: a certain Professor Siletsky (Stanley Ridges) has been posing as a Polish resistance leader in London and is now returning to Warsaw to give the Nazis a list of everyone involved in the resistance. Colonel Erhardt (Sig Ruman) – nicknamed "Concentration Camp Erhardt" – plans to use this information to consolidate German control of Poland.
To prevent this from happening, Maria infiltrates Gestapo headquarters first by pretending to be romantically interested in Professor Siletsky, and then to prove her Nazi bonafides to Colonel Erhardt, while Josef uses the costumes from the Gestapo play to first impersonate Colonel Erhardt in a meeting with Professor Siletsky and then to impersonate Professor Siletsky in a meeting with Colonel Erhardt (this is the scene I described at the beginning.) The climax of the film comes when the real Hitler comes to Warsaw and the troupe must pull off a final high-stakes gambit which involves Bronski getting to prove that he can indeed convincingly portray Hitler and Greenberg getting a chance to deliver his Shylock soliloquy, all in order to fool a squadron of real Nazis.
It's a comedy taking place on the stage of one of history's great horrors, and to talk about it we might first talk about what we mean when we talk about irony. For some people, irony is wearing a mustache and a trucker hat or tee-shirt with a funny slogan. For others, it's when it rains on your wedding day. If you look in the dictionary, you'll find it explained as something like the difference between surface meaning and actual meaning, or between what one expects to happen and what does happen.
For my part, I'd like to suggest a metaphor: one might think about irony as a series of translucent slides of the same image, laid one on top of the other. One slide, for example, might have the outline of a bird on it, and another might have the colors of that bird – but no lines – on it. Laying them on top of each other gives a picture of a bird with both line and color. Perhaps another has shading, and yet another has a background, and so on. Together, these slides form a rich picture, but one can also pull a single slide out to examine it, or pull them all out and set them side by side to compare. To return to the idea of someone wearing an ironic tee-shirt, there are two images existing one on top of the other: the first consists of the slogan on the shirt, or perhaps of the person who might wear such a shirt, and the second consists of the person who is actually wearing the shirt and would like to be taken as not endorsing the slogan. It's the distance between these two images that makes the shirt-wearing ironic. Or "ironic."
This is certainly not a definitional metaphor, but it's a useful one, I think, because it allows us to understand the way we understand something like the "Heil Hitler" scene in To Be or Not to Be. We know, for example, that the phrase is a fascist (here meaning a conjunction of the military and the social) salute indicating allegiance to the Nazi party. This first idea is always present, no matter how many other layers of meaning are laid on top of it. In the scene's most simple usage, that between the adjutant and Colonel Erhardt, there's a also second layer, which is that of a perfunctory military routine. This allows a kind of doubling of meaning: for these men, allegiance to a world-historical evil (there is never any doubt about the film's politics) is something routine, unthinking, a matter of reflex.
But this is then contrasted by the following usage. Erhardt's phone conversation is bitingly comedic. His admonishments – "You have no proof? Well that's a fine excuse! Whenever in doubt, arrest them!" – falls into an absurdity worth of Kafka. And when he slams down the phone with his furious "Heil Hitler" another meaning has been laid on top of the words: You better do what you're told, or you will find yourself in trouble as well. So the Nazi party, Lubitsch is pointing out, is not a benign administrative state at all (the implication of the perfunctory "Heil Hitler" just seconds before): the salute is not simply routine, a matter of reflex, but is also a beacon of capricious violence that threatens even its own believers.
Next, Erhardt turns and greets Benny's character; his voracious, tough salute is answered by Benny's sly one. New layers of meaning are added. It now becomes a gesture of men sizing each other up, jockeying for power in the fascist hierarchy, with the spy's implied distaste for Erhardt's brutish behavior signaling a kind of superiority. On top of this (or beneath it, perhaps) is also the layer of Benny's insincerity, his horror at having to perform the gesture, which is something that the audience is privy to but the Colonel misses.
Finally, and most transgressively, there is the turn in which Benny's spy catches the Colonel in his joke and forces him to use his "Heil Hitler" as an abject apology. In addition to the layers of personal power between the (fake) spy and the Gestapo commander, Lubitsch has now managed to show a Nazi using the salute to abase himself to a man the audience knows is a member of the resistance. The salute to Hitler has become pathetic, craven, a symbol of idiocy.
All of these layers of meaning exist at the same time, and our understanding of them is only possible because we are able to understand (whether we can precisely define it or not) irony. And the miracle of To Be or Not to Be – for my money, one of the greatest American comedies ever made – comes in part from its continual use of this kind of layering, not simply on the political level but also in terms of the characters and the plot.
In addition to being a furious denunciation of fascism made during the height of the war, it's also a screwball comedy, with the kind of patter-driven love story – between the Turas – which those usually involve. It's loaded with sexual innuendo far more risqué than nearly anything one sees on the screen today – "I've never met a man who can drop three tons of dynamite in two minutes!" Lombard purrs to the young pilot who's wooing her – which is perhaps not surprising considering that the movie-going audience during the war consisted largely of women. The film also becomes a meditation on the importance of theater, acting, laughter, and art itself as a resistance against totalitarianism, this on top of re-using Shakespeare to combat anti-Semitism, in response to both the concentration camps and The Merchant of Venice itself.
Importantly, though, the film is not simply a farce. It never undercuts the real and terrible menace of the Nazis. Early shots of the destruction of Warsaw and of German troops marching in the street carry real emotional devastation, and Lubitsch reminds us of the actual work of the Polish resistance when he has his actors witness them blowing up a German building. The irony is not hollow but biting; it does not serve to mock sincerity (like our tee-shirt wearing ironist) but to undergird it. Despite all the comedy, that is, the film remains aware that force must be met with force and that the world is an agonizing place. Lubitsch, a Jew who grew up in Germany, was aware of this if anyone was.
This juncture of the comedic and the morally serious is, I think, where To Be or Not to Be retains an enormous amount of power today. Comedic irony is not sarcasm, it's not simple mockery, and it's certainly not meme-based sloganeering. Nor is it a substitute for action, as if one can simply stand back and point out the Nazis' foibles and hope that will be enough.
It is, instead, a method of laying bare, of exposing truths and terrors, and ultimately of arguing for human worth. Malign power virtually always attempts to reduce, to simplify, to present the world as a place in which everything will be okay if you just do what they say. "In the final analysis, all we're trying to do is create a happy world," Professor Siletsky the Nazi spy explains to Maria Tura (who, incidentally, gives her own sexually-laden "Heil Hitler" when she's fooling him into thinking she's sympathetic to the cause.) It's a happy world, in the eyes of the fascist, because the right people win and the wrong people lose, and anyone who doesn't get with the program can just be sent to the camps. Simple. Easy. Clean.
Comedic irony confounds this reductionism. It resists ignorance, and presents love of the human condition as a high virtue, perhaps the highest of them all. To understand that human beings are beautifully flawed and are noble because of those flaws, not despite them; to be able to see layers of meaning and to use that sight to flay open the horrors of which we're capable; to embrace laughter and sophistication, wit and broad comedy, and to use them to try to approach truth;– these are some of the foundational elements of the defense of human dignity. And this defense is integral to any confrontation with the anti-human.
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