To Be or Not to Be · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the man on the sidewalk in Warsaw, August 1939. It's Hitler — standing alone outside a delicatessen, drawing a small crowd. A narrator solemnly explains the shock of it. Then a voice off-screen breaks in: the mustache is wrong, the actor overdid it, and we pull back to find we are inside a theater, at a rehearsal, watching a bit player named Bronski who wanted to see whether he could pass. The Führer is greasepaint. Lubitsch has just taught you, in ninety seconds and one cut, the only rule the rest of the film obeys: you cannot trust what the frame shows you until you know which stage it stands on.

That gag is the whole picture in miniature, and it is worth naming precisely what it does, because it looks like ordinary comedy and is actually something rarer. Deleuze has a phrase for a cinema where truth and falsehood stop being opposites and become a single creative material: the powers of the false. Usually he finds it much later and much darker — in Welles's forgers, in Resnais's unreliable memories, in films where you genuinely cannot say what happened. Lubitsch gets there in 1942, and he gets there through farce. Every plot turn in To Be or Not to Be is an act of forgery. Joseph Tura, a vain ham actor, impersonates the Gestapo's Colonel Ehrhardt; then, later, he impersonates the spy Siletsky; a real Nazi office and a theater set become interchangeable, because the actors' whole professional skill — becoming someone else convincingly — is the exact skill that outwits an occupying army. Tura is Deleuze's forger, the protagonist whose identity keeps shifting and who creates truth rather than reporting it. The astonishing thing is that he does it inside a comedy, where the false doesn't dissolve the world but saves it.

Why does this lens open the film rather than just decorate it? Because it explains the film's most famous quality — that catch in the laughter — as a structural fact, not a mood. When stage and Gestapo headquarters become indiscernible, you get what Deleuze calls a crystal-image: a moment where the actual (a real Nazi, real death waiting) and the virtual (a performance, a rehearsal) can no longer be told apart, and reflect each other like two faces of a mirror. Lubitsch builds these crystals everywhere. A set that is Gestapo HQ. An actor who is a colonel. Sig Ruman's Ehrhardt, blustering "So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt!" — a real Nazi doing an unwitting impression of the man impersonating him. The danger is real precisely because the acting is perfect, and the acting is funny precisely because the danger is real. Neither side wins. That is the crystal.

And yet — this is the honest part — To Be or Not to Be is not a time-image film. Its people are not seers who can only watch. They act, and their actions work. The sensory-motor circuit that Deleuze says breaks down after the war is here running at full, gleaming power: the troupe perceives a threat (Siletsky's list of resistance names) and acts to neutralize it, and every setup pays off. What makes Lubitsch extraordinary is that he runs the powers of the false as pure play inside a fully functional action-image. The forgery is not a symptom of a world that has lost its bearings; it is a weapon in a world that still can be changed. He found the concept early and used it for hope.

His method is the thing later called the Lubitsch touch, and it has a precise Deleuzian shape: the index of lack, the elliptical gesture that implies a situation the camera never shows. He learned it in Trouble in Paradise — stage the decisive act behind a closed door, let the audience infer the cut-away. Here that discretion lets him gesture at the horror of occupation while keeping the surface buoyant. The running gag where "To be or not to be" becomes the cue for a young flyer to rise and leave his theater seat is the same instinct working as a mark — Deleuze's term for an object made meaningful by its habitual chain, the thing that makes you expect what comes next. Shakespeare's most solemn line is reduced to a doorbell. And the comedy is entirely a comedy of relations the audience holds in its head: who is where, who can be seen, who is about to walk through the wrong door. That is thirdness, the relation-image, the audience as a knowing third party doing half the work.

The lineage is exact. From The Shop Around the Corner and the German farce The Oyster Princess comes the door-and-sightline choreography that treats space as a timing mechanism. From The Great Dictator comes the license to impersonate and deflate the Nazi leadership. From Maté's work for Dreyer on The Passion of Joan of Arc comes the luminous, unshowy lighting of faces — expressionist training turned into invisible polish. What Lubitsch added was nerve: the discovery that the most serious subject imaginable could be met not with melodrama but with a masquerade, and that the false, handled with love, tells a truer thing about survival than any earnest document could. Greenberg, a bit player, finally gets to recite Shylock — "Have I not eyes?" — to a hall of Nazis. It is the biggest lie in the film, a performance, staged. It is also the one moment of undisguised truth. Watch it again and see how those are the same shot.