one thing i really wish we would come back to in all the Lore of this tour is how during the latam leg, they had that bit during the sleep montage where we had the images of basically the entire main cast come up, in plain clothes/the prison uniforms. and how the grand immortal dictator himself is in plain clothes. (this has been talked about before, but the only person who wasn't is sylvia (& marianne, who im less sure about because she wasn't on the tour at all) - definitely an interesting choice but not the point of this post.)
with the dictator now handing out headshots of himself with little messages, along with him "being voted handsomest man in dragred magazine" constantly, it's making me lean more into the idea of the dictator being an instrument of draag himself.
if we lean into the fact that this tour generally has metaphorical elements of being under the control of the music industry, it's easy enough to think of him as a middle figure of the industry - not the big CEO, but, say, a manager or producer. theyre your boss directly and you have to perform for them....but, ultimately, they're not really in control. (this works less well when you think about how wayne looks a hell of a lot like the Warner CEO and that's intentional, though I like to think that even he had to be 'reconditioned' to some extent.)
it is interesting to me that sylvia & marianne are both opera singers - especially since the opera industry is kind of separated from the "music" industry as we usually think of it and is more related to acting....but the characters played by pure actors are equally reconditioned in the sleep video. this is a bit of a stretch but I wonder if being outside of both fields/in a sort of combination state between them is protecting them.
i also had a thought about how both the secretary/Her and the dictator wear the same/very similar round glasses, as does marianne. i'm sure this mostly arrived for cohesive theming, but i did have the very out-there thought that the glasses (and in sylvia's case, the eyepatch) was the thing protecting them from being reconditioned, both in the past and the present. maybe they had to initially 'recondition' the secretary/Her and the dictator to fulfill their roles, but they fell into it far more easily because of the power over other people that their roles fulfilled - and you don't want to condition someone out of that!
