![]() ![]() This crude drawing is an effective substitute for Groucho's face, whose moustache was drawn on anyway. The other Marx brothers simply draw his trademark face – glasses, eyebrows, moustache – on the vase. In another 1930s film, Duck Soup, a large pot falls on Groucho Marx, trapping his head. In his film The Great Dictator, the radical Chaplin got revenge by using this likeness to satirise Hitler. Hitler adopted the same demotic facial hair, to appeal to the popular culture appreciation of Chaplin. The hugely popular – and leftwing – silent comic had a little moustache that signified his working class identification with the common man. Yet the source of Hitler's look was more specific – the most famous toothbrush moustache before his belonged to Charlie Chaplin. He came to power in 1933 in the age of Mickey Mouse, when cartoonists were starting to discover the power of simple graphic signs in a mass media age. Toothbrush moustaches and side partings were quite popular in the early 20th century, but Hitler managed to twist this into a globally recognised icon, as recognisable as a cartoon character. To answer this we need to ask why Hitler looked the way he did. The Hitler puppy follows on from a house in Swansea that looked like the Führer. We might ask why Hitler is so often the "strange face" modern adults see. Adults, more cut off from our dreams, tend to need a stronger trigger. ![]() "If you look at a mottled or stained wall," said Leonardo, "you may start to see landscapes, battles and strange faces." Children see faces and monsters easily in the pattern of a curtain or the shape of a cloud. There is a psychological phenomenon behind our tendency to see images in arbitrary shapes – a modern term for this is apophenia, but it was first diagnosed by Leonardo da Vinci more than five centuries ago. ![]()
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