On Jojo Rabbit
I have recently been going through a dispiriting patch with my online dating career, trawling through legions of profiles of probably nice, seemingly banal men on the dating application Hinge. Part of the problem lies in the site's layout. Unlike Tinder, which encourages you to swipe through various profiles, Hinge offers the opportunity to discuss a particular post on a user's profile, as a way of opening up conversation. Users post several photos of themselves, which you can comment on ("Nice photo! I love Italy!"), and they can also fill in replies to various set-up questions, to tell you more about themselves - along the lines of "One thing about me that surprises people is..." or "The worst mistake I ever made..." These familiar set-ups are supposed to encourage interaction and spur amusement, but in reality they annihilate any trace of originality or personality, leading everybody to make the same pat jokes. In response to "the worst mistake I ever made", for instance, a very common reply is, "... was joining Hinge." The leading questions, with their arched eyebrow, invite exactly these flat answers, which instead of sparking conversation, quash it.
Or, have you ever been roped into a round of Cards Against Humanity, against your will? If you don't know the game, Wikipedia helpfully describes it as "a party game in which players complete fill-in-the-blank statements using words or phrases typically deemed as offensive, risqué or politically incorrect printed on playing cards." The game is dispiriting in part because of its reliance on fatuous "politically incorrect" punchlines, which mesh a kind of giggling internet-nerd-humour with crass shock-comedy from the late 90s, so that you are invited to laugh at phrases like "a smattering of kiddie porn" or "regretfully happy-slapping a tramp" (I'm making these up, but you get the gist). Most of the disheartening aspect of the game, though, is the way it short-circuits actual humour by spoon-feeding players pre-written lines, giving them the illusion of being in on the joke or even the originator of the joke. The horror of starting out on a round of this game, late in the evening, at somebody's insistence, and then realising there are several more rounds of this ordeal to be got through in a kind of mock-humorous stupour, is hard to convey.
Jojo Rabbit, the new film by Taika Waititi, set during the Second World War, brought to mind both of these dismaying experiences as I sat through it yesterday evening. The film centres on Johannes, an ardent member of the Nazi youth who has Hitler for an imaginary friend and who discovers that his mother is sheltering a young Jewish girl, Elsa, in a hide-out in the house. The film has bitterly divided viewers, with some audience members going so far as to call out the reviewer class who turned their noses up at the movie - and I believe that the film's use of pre-ordained set-ups and mechanical responses to these set-ups (in other words, its use of cliché) is to blame.
From the start, the language of Jojo Rabbit - whether in its actual screenplay, in its visual aspect, or even in its politics - employs cliché . This has the effect, or desired effect, of getting the audience onside and occasioning laughter: it pulls us in by using a shared lexicon, or visual shortcuts that are easily interpreted.
A verbal cliché, for instance: when Rebel Wilson quips, "OMGott". The movie has made a big show by this point of using modern vernacular, partly for humour and perhaps as a way of underlining the absurdity of fascism when placed in a contemporary context. The film also reconfigures so many aspects of German language or life or Nazism for comedy. This joke, then, utilises both tropes, inviting us to recognise a familiar phrase, retooled. The joke is almost pre-ordained by the film, because those two aspects of the film's dialectics are constantly brought together. You could write thousands of them: "arbeit macht fries"; "why the long knife?"; "mehr cowbell!". There is a way, if you want, to hear these lines and not groan, but to a certain mindset that sees the mechanics, this facility is a drag.
A visual cliché, for instance: a montage, set to the Beatles' I Want To Hold Your Hand performed in German. (Again, please note the insistence on a familiar, modern thing very well known to us, but reframed with a German context) Montages are shortcuts, a visual cliché like no other, because instead of giving us language or ambiguity in dialogue, they silence characters and observe them with a sort of undifferentiated tone, set to music that cues the audience into the right mindset. Montages are a cliche because of these things but also because they are overdone. Again, there is a way of seeing montages - which occur several times in the film - and not finding them stale. But it's mathematically more likely that a critic, who sees a great many films for their job, would be exasperated by the technique than a punter. If you're able to watch montages, and slow-motion, and the rest of the film's arsenal of technical cliché (over-reliance on musical cues; 'sensitive' close-ups on shoes that signify a wider evil; delayed camera-pans that reveal a figure had been sitting there all along, etc) and find this relatively fresh, the film may not be such a problem.
A political cliché, for instance: "the good Nazi". This is a trope that has been doing the rounds for a long time. The most prominent good racist in recent times came in Green Book; before that Sam Rockwell (who plays a good Nazi here) had played a good racist in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The bad Nazi/racist who, sparked by a personal connection with a good Jew/black person, changes their whole ideology of hatred, can also be found in American History X, or Monster's Ball, or Where Hands Touch. The reason this is a cliché is mostly because of its ubiquity - but also because, like all cliches, it short-circuits analysis. The tools for understanding the concept are very simple: the director and the audience speak the same language. So, from the outset, it is pre-ordained that Jojo, pretty much solely by dint of being the film's protagonist, will eventually abandon Nazism and say "fuck you Hitler" (literally). It is absolutely unthinkable, in the language of the film, that - faced with his own goodness and the prevailing ideology of the time - Jojo will choose fascism. The fact that millions of people in Germany did, denouncing their Jewish neighbours, is an ambiguity that the film doesn't stoop to contemplate.
All of these stereotypes, these shortcuts in the movie's very means, flatter the audience that we are being active in understanding it - because we perceive the way the movie is set up and then spot the inevitable pay-off. This gives a rush of recognition, of pleasure - we called it right - but in reality it makes the audience extraordinarily passive. Take a scene mid-way through the film, when imaginary-Hitler (Taika Waititi) is barracking Jojo in his kitchen, inveighing against the Jewish girl. For once, joke-Hitler is approaching something like the horrifying fulmination of history-Hitler, during his hate-filled rants at Nuremberg, in which the dictator sent himself into a frenzy of rage against Jewish people. But because of the way the film has been set up, the logic of the scene dictates that, following imaginary-Hitler's screed, the film will mark a comedy beat, and then imaginary-Hitler will puncture the silence with a modern quip. The critic watches all of this play out almost in slow motion. There was a chance for the scene to end, uncomfortably, after the horrifying speech - but - no, here comes the pause that was written into the film's DNA. The cliché is in action. The pause has now ended - and what will comedy-Hitler say? "Get your shit together", comes the line. There we have it: recourse to contemporary slang, like so many "correctamundo"s and "like"s studded throughout the film, and a line that brings a pat finish to a moment that had been getting close to barbarity. The film invites us to recognise the mechanics at play - and perhaps to a certain viewer there is even a pleasure in recognising those beats.
Ultimately, what Jojo Rabbit is doing with this use of cliché, is inviting the audience into an obvious feeling of a shared ethos, a communal spirit. We are the same, you and I, the film assures us - we, ourselves, are not antisemites! The film draws us into laughter over absurd anti-Jewish scaremongering, where there might have been a harder route to take, which is to say that perhaps we are antisemites who might, when surrounded by it, believe milder, more persuasive anti-Jewish scaremongering. Jojo Rabbit reassures us of our own goodness, and the tools that it uses to do this belong to a language of easiness, of comfort, of familiarity.
Or, have you ever been roped into a round of Cards Against Humanity, against your will? If you don't know the game, Wikipedia helpfully describes it as "a party game in which players complete fill-in-the-blank statements using words or phrases typically deemed as offensive, risqué or politically incorrect printed on playing cards." The game is dispiriting in part because of its reliance on fatuous "politically incorrect" punchlines, which mesh a kind of giggling internet-nerd-humour with crass shock-comedy from the late 90s, so that you are invited to laugh at phrases like "a smattering of kiddie porn" or "regretfully happy-slapping a tramp" (I'm making these up, but you get the gist). Most of the disheartening aspect of the game, though, is the way it short-circuits actual humour by spoon-feeding players pre-written lines, giving them the illusion of being in on the joke or even the originator of the joke. The horror of starting out on a round of this game, late in the evening, at somebody's insistence, and then realising there are several more rounds of this ordeal to be got through in a kind of mock-humorous stupour, is hard to convey.
Jojo Rabbit, the new film by Taika Waititi, set during the Second World War, brought to mind both of these dismaying experiences as I sat through it yesterday evening. The film centres on Johannes, an ardent member of the Nazi youth who has Hitler for an imaginary friend and who discovers that his mother is sheltering a young Jewish girl, Elsa, in a hide-out in the house. The film has bitterly divided viewers, with some audience members going so far as to call out the reviewer class who turned their noses up at the movie - and I believe that the film's use of pre-ordained set-ups and mechanical responses to these set-ups (in other words, its use of cliché) is to blame.
From the start, the language of Jojo Rabbit - whether in its actual screenplay, in its visual aspect, or even in its politics - employs cliché . This has the effect, or desired effect, of getting the audience onside and occasioning laughter: it pulls us in by using a shared lexicon, or visual shortcuts that are easily interpreted.
A verbal cliché, for instance: when Rebel Wilson quips, "OMGott". The movie has made a big show by this point of using modern vernacular, partly for humour and perhaps as a way of underlining the absurdity of fascism when placed in a contemporary context. The film also reconfigures so many aspects of German language or life or Nazism for comedy. This joke, then, utilises both tropes, inviting us to recognise a familiar phrase, retooled. The joke is almost pre-ordained by the film, because those two aspects of the film's dialectics are constantly brought together. You could write thousands of them: "arbeit macht fries"; "why the long knife?"; "mehr cowbell!". There is a way, if you want, to hear these lines and not groan, but to a certain mindset that sees the mechanics, this facility is a drag.
A visual cliché, for instance: a montage, set to the Beatles' I Want To Hold Your Hand performed in German. (Again, please note the insistence on a familiar, modern thing very well known to us, but reframed with a German context) Montages are shortcuts, a visual cliché like no other, because instead of giving us language or ambiguity in dialogue, they silence characters and observe them with a sort of undifferentiated tone, set to music that cues the audience into the right mindset. Montages are a cliche because of these things but also because they are overdone. Again, there is a way of seeing montages - which occur several times in the film - and not finding them stale. But it's mathematically more likely that a critic, who sees a great many films for their job, would be exasperated by the technique than a punter. If you're able to watch montages, and slow-motion, and the rest of the film's arsenal of technical cliché (over-reliance on musical cues; 'sensitive' close-ups on shoes that signify a wider evil; delayed camera-pans that reveal a figure had been sitting there all along, etc) and find this relatively fresh, the film may not be such a problem.
A political cliché, for instance: "the good Nazi". This is a trope that has been doing the rounds for a long time. The most prominent good racist in recent times came in Green Book; before that Sam Rockwell (who plays a good Nazi here) had played a good racist in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The bad Nazi/racist who, sparked by a personal connection with a good Jew/black person, changes their whole ideology of hatred, can also be found in American History X, or Monster's Ball, or Where Hands Touch. The reason this is a cliché is mostly because of its ubiquity - but also because, like all cliches, it short-circuits analysis. The tools for understanding the concept are very simple: the director and the audience speak the same language. So, from the outset, it is pre-ordained that Jojo, pretty much solely by dint of being the film's protagonist, will eventually abandon Nazism and say "fuck you Hitler" (literally). It is absolutely unthinkable, in the language of the film, that - faced with his own goodness and the prevailing ideology of the time - Jojo will choose fascism. The fact that millions of people in Germany did, denouncing their Jewish neighbours, is an ambiguity that the film doesn't stoop to contemplate.
All of these stereotypes, these shortcuts in the movie's very means, flatter the audience that we are being active in understanding it - because we perceive the way the movie is set up and then spot the inevitable pay-off. This gives a rush of recognition, of pleasure - we called it right - but in reality it makes the audience extraordinarily passive. Take a scene mid-way through the film, when imaginary-Hitler (Taika Waititi) is barracking Jojo in his kitchen, inveighing against the Jewish girl. For once, joke-Hitler is approaching something like the horrifying fulmination of history-Hitler, during his hate-filled rants at Nuremberg, in which the dictator sent himself into a frenzy of rage against Jewish people. But because of the way the film has been set up, the logic of the scene dictates that, following imaginary-Hitler's screed, the film will mark a comedy beat, and then imaginary-Hitler will puncture the silence with a modern quip. The critic watches all of this play out almost in slow motion. There was a chance for the scene to end, uncomfortably, after the horrifying speech - but - no, here comes the pause that was written into the film's DNA. The cliché is in action. The pause has now ended - and what will comedy-Hitler say? "Get your shit together", comes the line. There we have it: recourse to contemporary slang, like so many "correctamundo"s and "like"s studded throughout the film, and a line that brings a pat finish to a moment that had been getting close to barbarity. The film invites us to recognise the mechanics at play - and perhaps to a certain viewer there is even a pleasure in recognising those beats.
Ultimately, what Jojo Rabbit is doing with this use of cliché, is inviting the audience into an obvious feeling of a shared ethos, a communal spirit. We are the same, you and I, the film assures us - we, ourselves, are not antisemites! The film draws us into laughter over absurd anti-Jewish scaremongering, where there might have been a harder route to take, which is to say that perhaps we are antisemites who might, when surrounded by it, believe milder, more persuasive anti-Jewish scaremongering. Jojo Rabbit reassures us of our own goodness, and the tools that it uses to do this belong to a language of easiness, of comfort, of familiarity.
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