To Be or Not To Be (1942) review
Carole Lombard and Jack Benny in To Be or Not To Be (1942)
Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be (1942), one of the greatest of comedies, is also, among many other things, a cinematic commentary on Shakespeare’s line “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players”.
A theatre troupe in pre-war Poland is rehearsing a satire of Nazi Germany. In it, nazis are goofy and ridiculous men. "Concentration Camp Erhardt", one of them is nicknamed ("We do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping!"). The Gestapo officials joke about Hitler one day becoming a “piece of cheese”, as Napoleon became a brandy. And when Hitler (or: the actor playing Hitler…) walks on set he says, "Heil myself!". Then comes the war...
The occupation puts an end to their theatre company, of course. And yet a series of magnificently implausible events forces them to gather the troupe once again and put on the nazi show: only now in reality itself. Working, somehow, for the British in trying to save the Polish resistance, they, acting the role of nazis, interact with the real Gestapo command in Poland. And the absurd happens: they discover the real nazis are exactly as goofy and ridiculous as they were in their satire. They make the same jokes, and there's even a Concentration Camp Erhardt.
The revelation: “real” nazis are nothing but idiots acting like nazis, handling the war just like the actors handled their live plays. The world's a stage means: we're all playing the role of a certain ideal, at times far-fetched and misguided, always frail, conditioned by how and to what extent other people believe and act back. The actor who plays Hitler in the play is criticized by the director for not being “convincing”: "To me, he's just a man with a little mustache", he says. "But so is Hitler!", another actor defends his colleague. And he is right.
As Nietzsche once put it: “I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the apes of their ideal.” – Well, there is nothing else to be found. When the "real" nazis, but idiots acting out a certain role that is expected of them, see this "fake" Hitler they do not distinguish him from the "real" Hitler: they think he really is the Führer, that is, just a guy with a mustache playing the role of the “great leader” of a nation.
The world's a stage, or: life imitates art. The structure of reality follows the patterns of fiction. Our sense of verisimilitude, what seems veridical or false, and how we act, is not given by the crude, cold facts of a reality behind all masks (what would that be after all?), but by art, fiction, make-believe in all its forms, the illusory itself structuring the real. The only true way to engage in reality, and change it, is by playing it.
The verb “to act” has a double meaning: it means to do something generally, i.e., a deed, but also to play a role, i.e., as an actor. To Be or Not To Be thrives in this ambiguity. An action, it turns out, is always creation, improvisation and playacting.
