Why Audiences Love to Laugh at History’s Monsters

What is the correct distance from which to film a dictator? You could give him a close-up, revealing his psychic wounds, in a biopic or drama. You could turn on a spotlight, make him sing and dance onstage. Perhaps it’s best not to put him on-screen at all, and to focus instead on those who suffered at his hands.

Pablo Larraín, the director of the Oscar-nominated black comedy El Conde, wrestled with this question carefully. He feared that using a dramatic lens to depict Augusto Pinochet, whose 17-year-long military dictatorship in Chile made torture and forced disappearance state policy, could risk generating “some sort of empathy” in viewers, as he noted in an interview with the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario. “It would be completely immoral and dangerous to do something like that,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. Instead, the director shot the film in black and white and invoked satire to “produce a distance necessary.” Oh, and he made Pinochet into a vampire.

Plenty of Oscar contenders this year feature controversial historical figures: Napoleon, Oppenheimer, and Killers of the Flower Moon are among those vying for golden statues on Sunday. Yet Larraín’s Spanish-language film, nominated for Best Cinematography, approaches history from a more absurd angle. Mixing Saltburn’s gothic horror with Poor Things’ quirky gore, El Conde revamps Pinochet (played by Jaime Vadell) as more goofy than ghastly. He’s a 250-year-old monster draped in stylish fur coats, Batman-esque capes, and a world-weary nonchalance. Meanwhile, his five bumbling adult children fight over their inheritances, like characters straight out of Succession, and scream “Good afternoon, General!” when their father arrives at dinner. Sure, Pinochet prefers drinking English blood (“it has something of the Roman empire”), and he wouldn’t recommend that of South America (“the blood of the workers”), but in his view, he’s not a bad guy. Why all that killing and stealing? “I can’t live like a country peasant,” he tells his butler, with a disarmingly bashful shrug.

Latin America has had dictators to spare, yet El Conde is the rare film that gives one the satirical treatment. It’s part of a longer legacy of movies that have sought to shrink history’s villains, through humor, down to a more manageable size. Hitler spoofs began as early as the 1940s, with Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, and continued in films such as The Producers, Look Who’s Back, and Jojo Rabbit. Mel Brooks, the writer and director of The Producers, explained his approach to The Atlantic in 2018. “The way you bring down Hitler … you don’t get on a soapbox with him,” he reasoned. “If you can reduce him to something laughable, you win.” Some movies, such as The Death of Stalin and The Interview, parodied other world leaders—in the latter, the actor James Franco even rocks out to a pop song with a fictionalized Kim Jong Un.

[Read: Führer humor: the art of the Nazi comedy]

In El Conde, Pinochet’s monstrosity keeps him at arm’s length, and the film doesn’t ask viewers to relate to his violent motives. As we laugh uncomfortably, watching him blend blood smoothies and fly over the stocky skyscrapers of Santiago, the Chilean autocrat—who ruled by fear and violence—is deflated by the pinprick of silliness. Larraín’s choice to make Pinochet a vampire is an especially lucid way of defanging him. Because the Pinochet of the film has been around for hundreds of years, the true details about the dictator are not the focus; instead, the character becomes a stand-in for the concept of greed.

Larraín’s Pinochet came up in 18th-century France, where we watch him sensually lick the blood off Marie Antoinette’s guillotine. He resolves to avenge the fallen French monarchs by sabotaging revolutions around the world, and travels to suppress uprisings in Haiti, Russia, and Algeria. Eventually, he settles in Chile, a country that the movie’s English-speaking, British-accented narrator calls “an insignificant corner of South America” where one might find it interesting to be “rich in a country of the poor.”

Because Larraín zooms out, Pinochet’s crimes in Chile become just one manifestation of the vampire’s centuries-long spree. More than Pinochet alone, Larraín seems to suggest, viewers should fear avarice, because it’s what drives autocratic rulers to pop up across the globe, even if they go by different names.

Poking fun at a dictator could easily backfire, downplaying cruelty in pursuit of comedy. This is a critique made of many Hitler satires, which, at their worst, “just allow viewers to look away,” as Daniel A. Gross wrote for The Atlantic in 2015. Several scenes in El Conde tiptoe into this terrain. In one exchange, delivered with the blasé airiness of two friends discussing the merits of tennis versus golf, Pinochet’s butler (Alfredo Castro) deadpans, “I liked killing, and you always liked to steal,” to which the dictator responds, “No, I liked killing as well!” Castro and Vadell’s lackadaisical tone drains the vile remarks of any solid meaning, trying to earn laughs instead.

But in Larraín’s hands, it’s clear that the film’s real target is not just Pinochet but also something he represents—a longer tradition of exploitation and misused power. By the movie’s end, viewers aren’t allowed to comfortably relegate the dictator’s power-grabbing wrongs to history. In the final frames, the cinematography shifts from black and white to psychedelic color, as it’s revealed that an aging Pinochet has found a way to begin anew with his crimes. This visual choice underscores how political profiteering can respawn, existing in the present as much as the past—a point that feels especially timely given the corruption accusations made last year against the current Chilean president.

Yet no matter when or how despots arise, El Conde and other spoofs can help audiences see them with perspective. By using a good dose of zaniness, the best satire lets us look through a fish-eye lens, revealing dictators to be shrunken figures, warped and distorted by the vampiric thirst for more.