Latest news with #TheGreatDictator
Economic Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Economic Times
Is the chump we see the real Trump?
Ever since Don T kicked off his White House sequel, the drama's been streaming non-stop. Sometimes it gets so surreal, you start to wonder if the prez is workshopping policy ideas in a group chat full of conspiracy theorists. Even by those not-so-high standards, Trump's latest reads like a Blade Runner-style dystopic story colliding with a mind-bending M Night Shyamalan week, the Toot That's Out There claimed that Joe Biden was 'executed in 2020' and replaced by a robotic clone. You can make things like that up. But why would you? we have it all muddled up in our heads. Maybe the Biden clone story isn't that far-fetched. In fact, it's not been fetched far enough. It may be just as likely - nay, it's far likelier! - that the Trump that we see and hear day in and day out is an AI replica himself, of the brilliant original Donald John Trump that humanity never got to know, the one who writes inspiring speeches, who believes in climate change and doesn't call windmills cancerous, and thinks Elon Musk to be an overgrown twat. That the GenAI DeepFink version we are addicted to behaves the way he does could well be because that's how the bug in the system has developed over the years. Like the barber Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator, our Don may be the artificial version of real intelligence.
Telegraph
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Politics? This scientist thinks we shouldn't think too much about it
At the end of his 1940 film The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin, dressed in Adolf Hitler's motley, looked directly at the camera and declared war on the 'machine men with machine minds' who were, even then, marching roughshod across his world. Nor have they vanished. In fact, if you believe Leor Zmigrod, you may – without knowing it – be an inflexible, dogmatic robot yourself. Zmigrod, a young Cambridge neuroscientist, studies 'cognitive rigidity'. What does that look like in the real world? Jimmy McGill, hero of the TV series Better Call Saul, can give us a handle on one of its manifestations: 'The fallacy of sunk costs. It's what gamblers do. They throw good money after bad thinking they can turn their luck around. It's like, 'I've already spent this much money, or time, whatever. I got to keep going!'' And as Jimmy adds: 'There's no reward at the end of this game.' Zmigrod's ambition has been to revive the project of 18th-century French nobleman Antoine Destutt de Tracy, whose science of 'ideologie' sought a rigorous method for discovering when ideas are faulty and unreliable. (This was my first warning signal. If a man in a white coat told me that my ideas were 'objectively unreliable', I would snatch up the biggest stick I could find. But let's run with the idea.) A second, happier lodestar for Zmigrod's effort is Else Frenkel-Brunswik, an Austrian refugee in America who spent the 1950s testing children to see whether or not she could predict and treat 'machine minds'. Frenkel-Brunswik found it easy to distinguish between the prejudiced and unprejudiced, the xenophobic and the liberal child. She found that an upbringing steeped in obedience and conformity not only fostered authoritarianism; it made children cognitively less flexible, so that they had a hard time dealing with ordinary, everyday ambiguities. Even sorting colours left them vexed and unhappy. Zmigrod argues that the dogmatic mind's information processing style isn't restricted to dealing with ideological information. It's 'a more generalised cognitive impairment that manifests when the dogmatic individual evaluates any information, even at the speed of under a second.' Cognitive rigidity thus goes hand-in-hand with ideological rigidity. 'This may seem obvious to some,' Zmigrod writes. 'A rigid person is a rigid person. But in fact, these patterns are not obvious.' But they are, and that's the problem. Nearly 200 pages into The Ideological Mind, they're even more obvious than they were when Zmigrod first said they weren't. She reveals, with no little flourish, that in one of her studies, 'obedient actions evoked neural activity patterns that were markedly different from [those produced by] free choices.' Well, of course. If the mind can differentiate between free action and obedience, and a mind is a property of a brain at work, then a good enough scanner is bound to be able to spot 'differences in neural activity' at such times. Again and again, Zmigrod repackages news about improved brain-scanning techniques as revelations about the mind. It's the oldest trick in the neuroscientific writer's book. Zmigrod began work on The Ideological Brain as Donald Trump became US president for the first time and Britain voted to leave the EU. Her prose is accomplished, and she takes us on an entertaining ramble past everything from demagoguery to dopamine uptake, but the fresh alarm of those days bleeds too consistently through her views. She's unremittingly hostile towards belief systems of all kinds; when she writes of a 2016 study she conducted that it showed 'the extreme Right and the extreme Left were cognitively similar to each other', I wondered whether proving this truism in the lab really contributed to an understanding of the actual merits, or otherwise, of such ideologies. Zmigrod seems, sometimes, to mistrust belief per se. In her last chapter, we get her idea of the good life: 'No pressure, no predestination, no ancestors on your shoulders or rituals to obey, no expectations weighing you down or obstructing your movement.' I had to read this several times before I could believe it. So her alternative to dogmatism is being Forrest Gump? Zmigrod's thesis assumes that people are a unity. They aren't. (In the course of my work, I've met members of far-Right militias, and they remain the most open-minded people with whom I've ever argued.) She also seems to assume that the workings of mind can be read by a scanner. I'm not against hard materialism per se, but imagine explaining the workings of a computer chip by describing the icons on a computer screen: that's more or less how Zmigrod describes thought. Besides, the evident fact that brains age, and minds with them, is never a factor in Zmigrod's argument. Variations in cognitive flexibility can be explained by the ageing process, without any recourse to machines that go 'bleep'. Is it unreasonable to expect a young mind to be more liberal and open to exploration, and an old mind to be more conservative, more dedicated to wringing value from what it already knows? Few of us want to be old before our time; few want to be a 90-year-old adolescent. 'Repeating rules and rituals, rules and rituals, has stultifying effects on our minds,' Zmigrod insists. 'With every reiteration and rote performance, the neural pathways underpinning our habits strengthen, whereas alternative mental associations – more original yet less frequently rehearsed – tend to decay.' I see this as a picture of learning; Zmigrod sees a slippery slope ending in extremism. You can look at the world that way if you want, but I can't see that it'll get you far.
Chicago Tribune
05-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: What classic movies can tell us about our current moment
Historically, in times of crisis and uncertainty, when injustice intensified and the walls were closing in, audiences could expect Hollywood's output to rise to the occasion with something to say. You can criticize the results, but at least it felt like someone, somewhere, was compelled to make an effort — and had the backing (begrudging or otherwise) of executives in charge. It's a different landscape today. Screenwriters and filmmakers may be champing at the bit behind the scenes, but the major media companies that produce the bulk of TV and film seem uninterested in anything that might be construed as (gasp) commentary. Maybe Hollywood was more willing to tell these kinds of stories when authoritarian threats were primarily external, rather than coming from within. Even so, there have always been glaring exceptions that were ignored by contemporary mainstream entertainment, including the imprisonment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor. That kind of picking and choosing is more conspicuous than ever. Anonymous online anecdotes should be taken with a grain of salt, but sometimes they have the ring of truth, including this one I came across recently: 'A friend of mine just pitched something to a studio and the executive said, 'That's great, but nobody is buying anything with a point of view right now.'' Where are we without storytelling that does more than just depict the worst of the world around us, but that reminds us that we're not powerless in the face of perpetual doom? That question has me returning to movies of old. Comedies are all I can stomach for the moment and it's fascinating to see, even in the early years of World War II, the ways filmmakers threaded the needle. Charlie Chaplin's 'The Great Dictator' from 1940 is the obvious touchstone of the era. Two years later, and just months after the U.S. entered the war, United Artists released 'To Be or Not To Be' in 1942 starring Carole Lombard and Jack Benny as stage actors in Poland who outwit the Nazis. It, too, is a comedy. (Both movies are available to stream on Max.) Chaplin plays a double role in his film, both as a fictional Hitler-eseque character and a Jewish barber who looks a whole lot like him. I revisited it last year after watching the lazy Kate Winslet HBO series 'The Regime,' which draws clunky inspiration from Chaplin's film, but lacks a potent ending. By contrast, 'The Great Dictator' pivots away from comedy in its final moments in favor of something riskier — sincerity — and Chaplin gives a speech identifying the rot at the center of it all: 'Greed has poisoned men's souls (and) has barricaded the world with hate.' To some, that earnestness is a bummer and the movie's fatal flaw. I hate this interpretation because 85 years later, the speech still directly applies to our lives, and it's a rousing and hopeful rallying cry for something better. I can't remember the last time Hollywood gave us such a full-throated critique of tyranny that wasn't hidden behind a smirk. In his autobiography, Chaplin wrote that had he known the extent of the horrors, he wouldn't have done the movie at all. 'I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.' But the speech at the end is exactly why the movie works, because it understands that mockery is not an endgame. 'To Be or Not to Be' takes us into similarly precarious circumstances by way of a Polish theater company. The troupe frequently performs Shakespeare and Shylock's speech from 'The Merchant of Venice' is referenced three times over the course of the film. Talk about underscoring a point: 'Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? … If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?' Also on the bill is 'Hamlet,' and its famous speech gives the film not only its title but also becomes an important code phrase. But there's a new play they're working on as well, called 'Gestapo,' about you-know-who. The film is directed by Ernst Lubitsch, who wrote the script with Edwin Justus Mayer, adapting a story by Melchior Lengyel — all three Jewish. According to the film critic and essayist Brian Eggert, 'When it was released, many believed the film broached its subject far too soon to be deemed in good taste; Lubitsch was accused of treating taboo material as though it was primed for a farce, complete with slapstick and witticisms about the savagery of Nazis. … And yet, as Jewish artists, Lubitsch and scriptwriter Edwin Justus Mayer knew their subject all too well, enough to suggest that they did not raise this unthinkable subject naively or without reflection.' The project was also Lombard's last role; she died in a plane crash months before its release in theaters. The first 10 minutes of the film are an extended gag — and probably the movie's funniest section — but they establish the setting and underscore the power of actors disappearing into their roles. It's August 1939. A voiceover sets the scene: 'At the moment, life in Warsaw is going on as normally as ever. But suddenly something seems to have happened.' Everyone stops to stare as an infamous figure emerges from the crowd. 'Adolf Hitler in Warsaw? When the two countries are still at peace? And all by himself? He seems strangely unconcerned by all the excitement he's causing. Is he by any chance interested in Mr. Maslowski's delicatessen? That's impossible, he's a vegetarian! And yet, he doesn't always stick to his diet — sometimes he swallows whole countries. Does he want to eat up Poland, too?' Cut to a new scene. The Führer enters a room and everyone says 'Heil Hitler!' to which he responds 'Heil myself.' Before he can say more, he's interrupted: 'That's not in the script!' Turns out, we've been watching the cast rehearsing 'Gestapo.' The actor who plays Hitler (Tom Dugan) defends his ad-libbed line: 'But it'll get a laugh!' No improvising, he's told. Would you like my opinion, another actor interjects? No, says the producer. 'Alright then, let me give you my reaction: A laugh is nothing to be sneezed at.' Movie dialogue used to sing! I'm realizing how much I miss funny wordplay. The producer also says the styling is unconvincing. The actor in question is indignant: 'I'm a nobody and I have to take a lot, but I know I look like Hitler and I'm going to prove it right now! I'm going out on the street and seeing what happens!' 'And that's how Adolf Hitler came to Warsaw in August 1939,' concludes the voiceover. But not long after, the Germans arrive for real with their bombs, leveling Warsaw — 'destroyed for the sake of destruction,' as our unseen narrator puts it — and the invasion begins. This is when the theater troupe comes up with a plan. For months, Lombard's character has been playing a dangerous game entertaining the flirtations of a young pilot (a dashing Robert Stack), but ironically that dalliance ends up coming in handy; it leads to the reveal of a double agent who intends to expose the Polish resistance. Suddenly all those realistic costumes for 'Gestapo' are put to a different use and the theater company's stars (Lombard and Benny) find themselves caught in one precarious situation after another, requiring a whole lot of subterfuge on their part — or as they would call it in their day jobs, acting. At one point, a German officer chats with his spy (or who he thinks is his spy, it's really Benny's leading man in disguise). What news do you bring from London? 'Colonel, you're quite famous in London,' comes the reply. 'You know what they call you? Concentration Camp Ehrhardt.' The colonel laughs and laughs and laughs. He's just tickled. You want to smack the smile off his face. Here's how Eggert puts it: Lubitsch wanted to emphasize that 'Nazis were not the superhuman monsters that so many cinematic representations made them out to be. Rather, they were preposterously cruel and deluded human beings, and whoever chose to follow ridiculous figures such as Hitler were equally incompetent. Lubitsch also demonstrated how vulnerable the Nazis could be, an important message to incite U.S. involvement in World War II.' That the Nazis were foolish and abhorrent isn't the point, though. The movie's strength is the way it centers the theater company's plotting and strategizing to subvert the Nazis. Obfuscation and trickery are necessary and effective tactics. The actors are giving the performance of their lives. (It doesn't hurt when the other side wears uniforms that are easily replicated by theater folk.) On HBO, 'The Regime' was only interested in a nihilistic satire of Winslet's fascist anti-hero. It's a myopic narrative device that fails to meet the moment because it boils down to: We're cooked. 'To Be or Not To Be' tells a different story, of ingenuity and what it looks like to fight back, even if you are not typically in a position of influence or authority. Bravery is more than the machismo certain narratives would have you believe. When the troupe escapes to the UK and lands in Scotland, a journalist informs Benny's character that he's a hero. 'I did my best and was very ably assisted by my colleagues,' says the thespian, gesturing graciously to those around him. 'Thank you, my friends, for everything you did' — they all murmur appreciatively — 'as little as it may have been.' Multiple side-eyes ensue. Once a spotlight-loving actor, always a spotlight-loving actor.
