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Movie Review: Start the Revolution Without Me (1970) and Its Antecedents [1]
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Date: 2025-01-04
SPOILER ALERT!
Among other things, the Declaration of Independence asserts that all men are created equal. This document formally began the American Revolution, the success of which allowed us to become a democracy, completely divesting ourselves of any trace of royalty. This revolution, however, only allowed our thirteen colonies to free themselves from the British. We did not invade England and chop off the head of King George III.
The French Revolution, which also took place toward the end of the eighteenth century, was a revolt from within France itself, leading to the Reign of Terror that subjected their aristocrats to the guillotine. As such, it is the revolution that stands out as the starkest example of one that overthrew an aristocracy in favor of equality.
By the nineteenth century, it occurred to certain authors that one way to illustrate the injustice of an aristocracy lording it over its subjects was to tell a story of “twins,” literally in some cases, but loosely understood in many others, amounting only to a double of some sort.
Although set a century before the French Revolution, the legend of the Man in the Iron Mask captured the attention of several authors, notably Alexandre Dumas. Written between 1847 and 1850, he tells a story of identical twins, sons of Louis XIV, one of whom is imprisoned with an iron mask kept over his head to avoid having him become the cause of a civil war.
Prior to that, Dumas wrote The Corsican Brothers in 1844. It is about conjoined twins, separated at birth, both surgically and geographically, one becoming a bandit in Corsica with the other enjoying the good life as an aristocrat in Paris.
In A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859, Charles Dickens tells a story about two men that look enough alike to be twins, though they really are not. One of them, Sydney Carton, nobly substitutes himself for the aristocrat who looks like him, allowing himself to be guillotined.
Although France is the perfect setting for these stories about twins, there are some that take place in countries other than France that deserve mention. One is The Prince and the Pauper, set in England, which Mark Twain published in 1881. It is about two unrelated boys that happen to look like twins, one of whom is the Prince of Wales. They switch places.
Another is The Prisoner of Zenda, written by Anthony Hope in 1894, in which a commoner from England turns out to look exactly like Rudolf V of Ruritania. The commoner is compelled to pretend to be the king when Rudolf is drugged on the eve of his coronation and subsequently kidnapped.
In 1914, Edgar Rice Burroughs published his own Ruritanian romance, The Mad King, featuring another story of royalty and “twins,” in which a man looks exactly like King Leopold of Lutha.
Let us return to France. Rafael Sabatini published Scaramouche in 1921, set in the days leading up to the French Revolution. In this story, Andre Moreau seeks revenge against the Marquis de Maynes, who turns out to be his father. This story was improved in the 1952 movie version, in which the two men are half-brothers. Through most of the movie, the two men do not know they are related because Andre is illegitimate. In this case, they do not look alike, but the unequal treatment of the two brothers still serves the purpose of illustrating the injustice of an aristocracy based on birth, especially since fraternité is right next to égalité in the French motto.
In Orphans of the Storm (1921), set just before and during the French Revolution, we have two stepsisters, Henriette and Louise. Henriette is the daughter of a married couple who live in poverty. They adopt Louise, who is the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat. In the end, Henriette marries an aristocrat, and Louise marries a beggar.
Recently, I watched Metropolis (1927). I don’t know what background music Fritz Lang intended for this movie at the time, but I kept hearing the French National Anthem, La Marseillaise, while the workers, who live below ground, are rebelling against those that live on the surface, who constitute a capitalist aristocracy. So, we are encouraged to see a similarity between what happens in this movie and the French Revolution. Are there twins in this movie? Yes, but with double or even triple meanings.
Essentially, Joh, the leader of the upper world, and Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), a mad scientist, were once both in love with a woman named Hel. She married Joh and then died giving birth to their son Freder.
Rotwang has a metallic right hand. One suspects there might be Freudian significance in this, the hand being phallic, thus indicating a castration complex, symbolic of his being unable to have sex with Hel. But I’m no Freudian, so let’s move on.
Rotwang misses Hel so much that he built a robot version of her. She is made out of metal, but he intends to complete the job by adding a flesh exterior.
Meanwhile, Freder has been cavorting about with women in the Garden of the Sons, when a beautiful woman named Maria shows up with some children so they can see how their “brothers” live above ground. With these children gathered around her, she looks maternal, even though, being unmarried, she is at the same time virginal.
It’s love at first sight for Freder, so he follows her back down below the surface where he is horrified by the working conditions of those who live down there. Eventually, Freder switches places with his “twin,” a worker named Georgy, or “Georgi” in the novel on which this movie was based, where Freder says they are essentially brothers. Unfortunately, Georgy quickly succumbs to the pleasures of the surface world.
Maria is a spiritual leader. Joh realizes that she may be trouble, so he gets Rotwang to make a flesh version of Maria out of the robot, to be used for his own nefarious purpose. Rotwang does so by kidnapping Maria and then strapping her to a machine for the flesh duplication. Because this fake Maria is also a robot version of Hel, she is an aristocrat, while the real Maria belongs to the working class.
The fake Maria thus created is likened to the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelations. She is given to all seven of the deadly sins, especially Lust. We cannot help but wonder if Hel’s name is supposed to suggest Hell. In any event, by establishing a strong association between the fake Maria and the most evil woman in Christianity, this encourages us to make an association between the real Maria and the holiest woman in Christianity, her namesake, Mary, Mother of God. In the novel, she is said to have Madonna-eyes and a Madonna-voice.
Freder finds this fake Maria in the arms of his father, which hurts him because he believes she is the real Maria. But since she is also the robot version of Hel, then she is also the double of Freder’s mother, which gives this situation Oedipal connotations, so we are back to Freud again.
This fake Maria starts a revolution, but the mob turns on her and burns her at the stake, revealing her metallic body. Rotwang chases the real Maria, thinking her to be the fake one, the duplicate of Hel, wanting to have sex with her at long last, but he falls off the roof to his death.
Freder is the Mediator that the real Maria prophesied, the one destined to bring the rulers and workers together with sympathy and love. As noted above, Hel was Freder’s mother. The robot was not only a double of Hel, but also a double of Maria. So, it’s almost as if the virginal and maternal Maria is the twin of Freder’s mother. Given the association noted above between the real Maria and the Virgin Mary, Freder corresponds to Jesus.
All these movies about twins of some sort were meant to be taken seriously, but it was just a matter of time before they gave rise to parody. Start the Revolution Without Me (1970) takes the idea of twins in the context of the French Revolution and gives it the ultimate satirical treatment. When the movie begins, we see Orson Welles standing in front of the summer palace of Louis XVI, giving the movie a serious tone as he tells of how historians have recently discovered certain previously unknown facts that might have changed the entire course of European history had certain events unfolded differently, in which case the French Revolution might have been avoided. These facts have been made into the movie we are about to see.
The story begins in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Corsican Duke de Sisi and his pregnant wife are trying to get to the hospital in time for her to have her baby, but they are forced to stop and avail themselves of the doctor in a small village. However, there is a peasant, Monsieur Coupé, who is already there and whose wife is also about to have a baby, saying his wife comes first, even though he knows the man to whom he is speaking is the Duke de Sisi, the “scrounge of Corsica.”
The duke is appalled. “That’s the scourge of Corsica, you ignorant peasant!”
The two men begin fighting, when suddenly, both wives go into labor. It is all very frantic, but each woman has her baby, and all seems well. But then both women go into labor again, and it turns out that each woman is having twins. Unfortunately, in all the excitement, with the four babies having been laid on the bed, the doctor and his assistants are not sure which twins belong to the duke, and which belong to the peasant. The doctor decides to pick one baby from each twin and switch them. That way, he says, they will at least be half right.
And so it is that one pair of mismatched twins grows up to be Phillipe and Pierre de Sisi (Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland), while the other pair of mismatched twins grows up to be Claude and Charles Coupé (Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland).
Phillipe and Pierre become the greatest swordsmen in all Corsica; Claude and Charles become the greatest cowards in all France, reluctantly caught up in the revolution with the rebels. Neither pair is aware of the existence of the other.
Owing to palace intrigue on the one hand and rebel activity on the other, Phillipe and Pierre disguise themselves as peasants, which results in their being mistaken for Claude and Charles, who in turn pretend to be the aristocrats Phillipe and Pierre.
At the very end of the movie, both pairs of mismatched twins finally encounter each other, which leads to the point at which Orson Welles is about to tell us how the history of Europe might have taken a different path. But he is murdered, so we never get to find out what happened.
What is actually killed is the use of twins to undermine aristocratic rule in favor of equality. Fortunately, Start the Revolution Without Me will not prevent us from enjoying the old stories that utilized this idea, but completely new ones are out of the question.
At least, that’s what I thought until I watched Trading Places (1983) again the other day. And while I can’t be sure, I thought I detected a hint of La Marseillaise in the background music toward the end.
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