Rush 4: Wonderful Life

In the ending of It's A Wonderful Life, one interesting visual parallel that bridges the gap between the worlds of Bedford Falls and Pottersville occurs when George wipes away the snow and ice that covers the dates of his brother's brief life. The film had begun George's story by recounting how he saved Harry from drowning underneath ice, uncovering his body from the ice as it were. The way he uncovers the dates of birth and death from underneath the ice is a similar, parallel gesture, an altered allusion to that opening scene. It brings different meaning to the act of uncovering because here George is powerless, uncovering only the sad truth of death in a world without him. This is an allusion because it necessitates understanding of outside material, in this case not a proverb or a biblical story but a scene from earlier in the film. Like the critic referring to the crucifix in the context of two gangsters, the filmmakers allude to the earlier scene with this simple movement, and it becomes horrific in its new context.

Rush 3: Freud and Chaplin

One example in The Great Dictator of a decidedly "bad" joke is when the officer Schultz tells Chaplin's character, "I always thought of you as an Aryan," and Chaplin replies, "I'm a vegetarian!" with a totally straight face. This is a classic sound-association pun. There is no implied parallel in the inner meanings between Aryan and vegetarian. It qualifies as one of Freud's bad jokes, or a "groaner" in American lingo. Of course, it's still quite hilarious and absurd. I think part of this humor derives from the fact that there is no actual connection between Aryan and vegetarian, yet the gag is delivered as if there was. This pretense goes along with an underlying commentary in the film that shows how ridiculous and arbitrary the Nazi ideology is. Being Jewish should not actually be any more of a ground for genocide than being vegetarian. The two are in reality just as irrelevant in determining how to treat an individual. When cracking a joke that seems to make a pseudo-connection between these two categories, it forces the audience to think about just how insane it is to judge a person on one but not on the other. So this is a "bad" joke which, in its contextual usage and delivery, is actually quite witty and brilliant.

Rush 2: Murnau and Marx

In The Last Laugh, the uniform seems to me to represent working class dignity, agency, and control. When the porter is stripped of his uniform, it is symbolic of capitalism's stripping of these attributes from workers. His demotion is driven by a desire for quicker, more efficient, machine-like work with no respect for the personhood of the worker: in other words, profit. This old man is shown striving to recover his dignity in the metaphor of his uniform. He looks at it longingly as it hangs in the closet. In this light, it is a revolutionary act when he steals it back from its resting place. The bourgeoisie locked away the "fabric" of his rights and freewill, and he has to subversively steal it back. The tragedy is in the irony that even though he steals back the signifier, he has no ability to steal back the real rights that should have been signified by the wearing of it.