Review: To Be or Not to Be (1942)

 

In Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Hannah Arendt attributes the criminal mind of Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann to a “sheer thoughtlessness - something by no means identical with stupidity…” A Report on the Banality of Evil, which is the book’s subtitle, introduces a kind of evil - the worst conceivable kind in human history - that departs from the “radical evil” that is at the heart of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Shortly after the publication of Eichmann, Arendt wrote to philosopher Gershom Scholem:

 

      […] I changed my opinion and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” […] It is 

      indeed my opinion now that now that evil is never “radical”, that it is only 

      extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension […] 

      It is “thought-defying”, as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, 

      to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated

      because there is nothing. That is its “banality”. Only the good has depth that

      can be radical.

 

That evil lacks a teleological basis is perhaps less controversial now than when the idea first appeared, but the question concerning its exact origin continues to elude us. The existence of evil entails that of good, although one might also say that evil - it seems to be increasingly the case - can exist on its own, beyond the frame of reference to which it is usually fixed. And when or in what circumstance does evil begin to get banal? As we all know, evil is abetted by the non-action of the good: this non-action, in time, may come to be taken as tacit acceptance, from which the banality must stem.

 

Can it be possible, if the banality persists, that some sort of a common ground may be found between good and evil? This is a rather dangerous question, and proposition, on which Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-war satire,To Be or Not to Be (1942), revolves. Lubitsch’s approach, perhaps not to everyone’s moral code, is simple and straightforward: there is no absolute good or absolute evil; and both good and evil, since they are embodied by the humans, are naturally inflected with varying degrees of humanness. In Lubitsch’s vocabulary, what is human is that which is invariably plagued by folly and a proneness to situational comedy. To clothe evil in the garb of humane language seems all but justify its horror, but I doubt that was Lubitsch’s intention here.

 

On a deep level, all comedies are cautionary to some extent. As Henri Bergson famously said, laughter implies an “unavowed intention to humiliate and consequently to correct…” The so-called figure of fun or butt of joke is invariably conferred on an otherness, which in most circumstances is either preceded or followed by a lingering resonance, a moment of recognition when the laugher realises that a reversal of roles (the laugher becoming the joke) is probable. The majority of Lubitsch’s films play with this dualism of the strange and the familiar, generally in a lighthearted mood, only very rarely, as in To Be or Not to Be, with a dark overtone. It is especially disconcerting to see that the monsters behave as all of us do: that they blunder, bungle, fumble, fidget, cry in rage, laugh in sudden delight, subject themselves to various human emotions. To the audience when the film first opened, the shock must be compounded by a reflection on the current events and the latent knowledge that we, the humans, are collectively responsible for the miseries and chaos in which our lives are plunged. Evil is truly a face in the crowd, Lubitsch seems to hint, and if we cannot extirpate it why not turn it into a funny joke?

 

As a rallying call to ramp up supports for the war effort, the film does manage to convey an important and encouraging message: that Good will eventually triumph over Evil, if we have enough faith in our strengths and the good sense to utilise the resources that are at our disposal. In the film, it is the profession of acting, which inevitably bleeds into life, that saves a Polish theatre troupe from the claws of the Nazis. The ineffable “Lubitsch’s touch” is detectable in every of the comedies of errors that ensue, in every arch of the eyebrow, the wrinkle-up of the nose, the conspiratorial look, the whisper of a fateful word. The characteristic style assumes the only personal element in a film that celebrates the fearlessness and patriotic pride of the everymen, and in every way the rhythmic structure and the subtle tone, to which the director’s “touch” amounts, give those qualities a most elegant tribute.