The Tartan

At the end of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” a dark comedy that satirizes the Nazi regime, there’s a three-and-a-half minute speech. If you haven’t gotten a chance to see the film, I’d highly recommend you do. For one of the most well known actors of his era, it’s one of the most important parts of his career; it ends with over 200 seconds spoken directly to the American audience of 1940.

And he’s dressed like Adolf Hitler.

Chaplin, a legend of the silent film era whose comedy has resonated through the decades, plays the not-so-subtley named “Adenoid Hynkel.” Despite never directly invoking the Nazis, Chaplin makes it clear that this fictitious dictator despises Jewish people. They’re named over and over and over again, each time reminding the audience who is being attacked.

All the while, Hynkel and his cronies — though “cronies” indicates a level of competence that the film does not endorse — bumble their way through major plot points. At one point Chaplin’s other character, a poor Jewish barber, struggles to survive in an environment increasingly hostile to his people. He disguises himself in an escape, but the physical similarities between him and Hynkel can confuse viewers.

The film ends up with Charlie Chaplin giving a speech about freedom dressed as a budget Nazi. The movie never once gives the Nazis even the satisfaction of appearing formidable. Hynkel shoots someone — not in anger but as part of an experiment on bulletproof clothing. He rants in indecipherable gibberish that we are sometimes treated to translations of, but most importantly he’s no cunning, calculating leader; he’s a buffoon, surrounded by yes-men and puppets.

There’s an unfortunate trend of people misinterpreting media explicitly designed to criticize them. “American Psycho” is one of the classic examples, with many finding Patrick Bateman to be something that speaks to them, individually, instead of the critique of masculinity and yuppie culture that he is. And while “death of the author” can be used to justify much, Bret Easton Ellis is very much alive and very much not happy with people failing to figure his book out.

Strip away the actual plot and contrivances of “American Psycho,” and focus on Patrick, though, and the admiration becomes far more clear. He’s rich, wealthy, and does what he wants. He follows no rule but his own. In a strange way, he is something that people envy.

There is no envy of Adenoid. No secret reason to identify with the man, or feel as if there’s something to admire. With that, Chaplin’s satire succeeded. We see a monster reduced to a farce. It’s something a lot of media that covers the Nazis struggles with.

“Inglourious Basterds” has a lot of fun killing Hitler. I was audibly shocked when I saw the ending the first time.

The penultimate sequence of the movie is a blood-fueled romp and incredibly cathartic to watch. Still, the movie would not be complete without Hans Linda, the cunning villain sometimes declared the greatest villain of the silver screen. He is humiliated, but throughout the movie, his quick wit is constantly working in the backdrop. The characters must remain two steps ahead of him or their plot falls apart. He betrays everyone to save his own skin and very nearly gets away with it. There are analyses of his dialogue taught in film classes. He’s just … effortlessly terrifying.

It’s that terrifying presence that begins to attract people who might see themselves in Linda. “Inglourious Basterds” is in no way a pro-Nazi film, and yet people find Linda to be a sort of aspirational figure because he’s explicitly written to be exceptional.

We want our villains to be exceptional. They need to be monsters. Whether they’re the hulking beasts portraying 1970s Japan or the cruel geniuses of James Bond, we want media with larger-than-life figures. It’s part of our nature to look for an enemy we think is deserving, a hard fought fight.

But behind the curtain, sometimes, is a sniveling man who maintains that what he did was in line with his orders. When the man on the other side looks like every other office worker you’ve ever seen, the evil feels so empty.

Few movies are willing to commit to that. Taika Watiti’s “Jojo Rabbit” manages to do it to perfection.

I’m also going to recommend the scene where the titular Jojo tells Hitler to “fuck off.” I’m not sure what else could sell someone on the movie. “Jojo Rabbit” operates on a very different basis than “Inglourious Basterds” — one much closer to the black comedy of “The Great Dictator.” It follows a 10-year-old German boy who wants to be a Nazi and the 17-year-old Jewish girl he is forced to hide in his house. The movie continually toes the line of presenting the Nazis as foolish, while still showing the very real consequences they forced upon people during their reign. This film doesn’t make me scared of the Nazis because of their ideology or competency. They’re idiots who can’t figure out when to stop “heil”-ing each other because it’s too ingrained into their culture. They’re the dumbasses who seem to prescribe their kitchen sink of problems on the Jews because it’s more convenient than admitting fault. Their leader blew his brains out in a bunker after they lost France because he overslept. They’re not intimidating, they’re flailing out to try to get noticed.

And sometimes in those flails, they harm people. Lots of people. We’re continuously reminded that the Nazi Party is no less cruel for their incompetence. They’re pathetic, but they’re dangerous, and that’s a fitting descriptor.

How can one find the Nazis of “Jojo Rabbit” anything but pitiful? There are no cunning generals, no saving grace. They’re people, sure, they’re humanized by the film, but on the whole their evil is no less significant. It’s the banality of evil personified on a screen. The message communicated focuses on the heroes who need to outsmart a villain, survive, and pull through. They must escape the noose the Nazis have every time it tightens, but at no point are we ever indicated that the Nazis are smart.

There’s a scene when Elsa, the Jewish girl Jojo is hiding, very obviously misremembers the birthday on her fake identification. Let’s contrast this to a similar scene in “Inglorious Basterds,” where Hans Linda is trying to find Jews hidden in a farmhouse. Linda plays his cards right, gives a memorable speech, and eventually puts together the evidence to find out where they are. In a show of the cruelty that he will continue throughout the movie he kills them all, save one. He’s introduced as the “Jew Hunter” and we see him act on that. In “Jojo Rabbit,” on the other hand, a Nazi captain who seems disillusioned with the regime (and is closer to Jojo than most) doesn’t mention Elsa’s discrepancy. He let her go. That’s the difference between these movies: the idea of the incompetent villain.

Media has to handle the Nazis carefully. Since World War II, the tides of the American war movie have changed. It’s not just a glorious triumph of heroes, but a deconstruction of the war itself, and the horrors within. It’s “Schindler’s List” and documents the people saved, or it’s “The Grey Zone” and bleakly retells an insurrection at an internment camp.

For every “Jojo Rabbit,” there’s a dozen movies like “American History X,” a movie that is anti-Nazi and is yet used as a model by modern neo-Nazis. It speaks further to what can be described as that “coolness” factor that many villains seem to enjoy, regardless of how they’re punished. And that “coolness” factor was a big part in how “American History X” was received by neo-Nazis. Derek Vinyard, one of the principal characters, talks a lot about his racism. While he reforms — and the movie is about that reform — there’s never really much counter to those speeches during the film themselves. We as an audience know they’re bad, we’re supposed to know they’re bad, because they’re racist speeches. But to neo-Nazis, who wholeheartedly agree with Derek, they’re just another part of yet another character they want to emulate. That’s a huge part of how the “coolness” factor affects villains. “American History X” handles Nazi ideology clumsily. While the condemnation is there, it becomes easy for people to tune that out and focus on something else — the “great villain” narrative, pushed further.

This problem isn’t exclusive to Nazis, and there’s a lot more to be said about a similar aspect in the whitewashing of the Confederacy, and it’s why it’s so important that media focuses on how it portrays villains. It’s not easy to demonstrate the true source of cruelty and horrors and remain engaging. But it’s important to learn. Media has a responsibility and, sometimes, in a film’s pursuit of drama and tension, it becomes easy to lionize the villains we are meant to pity.