Jojo Rabbit – savaging propaganda and bigotry

Have you ever noticed how, at the cinema when the certificate is shown on screen, it will include keywords about the film’s content: ‘moderate violence’ or ‘mild swearing,’ it will tell you, for instance.

It’s difficult to know why this happens, since people have already made the decision to shell out their hard-earned and take their seat.

Does anyone ever leave on seeing this ‘guidance’?

Before Jojo Rabbit, the first word that pops up with the certificate – and which I’ve not personally noticed before – is “discrimination”. Which is amazing really, given that this is a film about the Nazis, propaganda and bigotry.

As the opening titles make clear, it’s “an anti-hate satire”.

But if you survive such a warning, then Johannes ‘Jojo’ Betzler is a 10-year-old boy living with his mother in Nazi Germany in the latter stages of the second world war.

Jojo has fallen hook, line and sinker for all the nationalism and bigotry with which he’s been pumped by the system – in spite of his mother clearly not agreeing with any of it. But his invisible friend, a childish Hitler, eggs him on.

A member of the Hitler Youth, he earns the sobriquet Jojo Rabbit after he finds himself unable to kill a rabbit as ordered at a youth camp.

But then Jojo finds out that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl in their home – and slowly he finds that the propaganda he’s been fed is being challenged.

Taika Waititi had wanted to bring the story, based on Christine Leunens’s novel, Caging Skies, to the screen for years. Now he’s done it and the wait has been worthwhile.

In spite of having written the screenplay, directed and co-produced it – and played Hitler – Waititi (whose maternal grandfather is of Russian-Jewish heritage) never lets himself get in the way.

It’s frequently very, very funny, but never loses sight of the main aims: to throw a spotlight on the utter crassness of intolerance, the real dangers of nationalism, fake news and propaganda – and the impact of all these on children.

A little aside here.

A German friend, himself born in 1946, once told me how, in 1945, a 16-year-old cousin was on the front line to defend his home town against the allies.

Fully indoctrinated, he waited in a trench, his gun sights trained on the advancing US forces. Then he realised that a young American soldier was looking down his own sights at him.

Clarity cut through the propaganda and he realised that, just as he did, the American probably only wanted to go home to his mother. The teenage German threw down his weapon and threw up his hands.

Tragically, many more boys – and girls – did not reach such a conclusion. And perhaps it needs noting that a 16-year-old in 1945 had been just four when Hitler had come to power.

It was an anecdote that I remembered forcefully when watching Waititi’s film. Today, we’d know that what happened to my friend’s cousin and what happens to Jojo and his friends is ‘grooming’.

There are plenty of laughs, but it’s never at the expense of the humane message and indeed, I suggest taking tissues, because there are a couple of real couple of kicks to the gut that bring home the importance of the message.

It’s an excellent cast. Scarlett Johansson is a revelation as Jojo’s mother. Thomasin McKenzie as Jewish teenager Elsa is vulnerable yet strong – and (importantly) never plays the character as a ‘victim’.

Sam Rockwell gives a very nice performance as Wehrmacht officer Captain Klenzendorf, who has been ‘demoted’ to running Hitler Youth camps after losing an eye in the war.

Stephen Merchant has a cameo as a suitably sinister comic book Gestapo officer, while Rebel Wilson turns in a similarly fine cameo as Fräulein Rahm, a Hitler Youth camp instructor who spouts the most ridiculously extreme anti-Semitic propaganda.

Waititi’s own turn as Hitler is also very good – as is that of Archie Yates as Jojo’s friend Yorkie.

But to a large extent, the film rests on the 12-year-old shoulders of Roman Griffin Davis as Jojo himself – and it is a remarkable performance of enormous nuance.

And just a brief mention for the incredibly clever weaving in of pop culture references – keep your eyes peeled – which are not gratuitous but add to the whole.

Waititi has done something remarkable with Jojo Rabbit: in so many ways, you tell yourself it shouldn’t work. But in its irreverence and it’s sense of fun, it is perhaps one of the most deeply serious movies of our times and its message could hardly be more important.

Superbly entertaining – and with a deeply significant message.

Beware the propaganda you pay heed to

Bogart with fag: filtered or not?

A few days ago, with an hour to while away at lunchtime, I pottered along to the British Library to see its current exhibition on Propaganda: power and persuasion.

Although the subject is hardly new, the exhibition itself is described as ‘groundbreaking’.

On that note, I was at a bit of a loss to understand why. That’s not to say that some of the exhibits are not fascinating – a 16th-century book of anti-papal cartoons, for instance, which is used to illustrate the importance of the printing press to the spreading of propaganda – but it hardly felt revelatory.

The exhibition included recorded interviews with various people, including, for instance, Alistair Campbell, the former spin doctor to Tony Blair, while various exhibits bring the subject bang up to date by examining how social media is being used in the cause of propaganda.

There were materials from both sides in the first and second world wars, materials relating to colonialism and liberation struggles, to domestic politics and also to the sort of health and public information messages that we perhaps forget are also propaganda.

Perhaps it all felt a little staid because of the times we’re living in.

After all, this is the government that has looked as though Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It has been its working script for governance.

And that’s before we mention Iain Duncan Smith’s repeat offence of being ‘economical with the truth’ about welfare stats.

Or David Cameron’s “there will be no more top-down reorganisations of the NHS”.

They could give Goebbels lessons.

Mind, as we’re also seeing, a complicit, conniving media is a big help.

In much the same way, as the issue of pornography has hit the headlines, the propaganda machine has been beavering away to sell the idea of internet service providers (ISPs) putting anti-porn filters on any contract.

You’ll have to opt in to ‘adult material’, not opt out.

But as I asked the other day: “One of the concerns about this announcement is whether it softens people up for further censorship. Do we trust government on the issue?”

Well, I didn’t then and the reasons are becoming increasingly apparent – whatever personal feelings are on the issue of pornography itself.

Because it seems that porn is far from the only thing that the government wants ISPs to block.

It seems that users may also find that they have to actively opt out of blocks on a variety of things from ‘violent material’ to ‘suicide-related websites’ to ‘alcohol’ to ‘smoking’.

Now it’s hard to know how this would work – whether a search for Alcholics Anonymous, for instance, would be barred if you hadn’t opted out of the relevant one. But that’s far from the only issue.

Many of the currently listed topics to be ‘filtered’ could easily play well with the population – ‘extremist’ materials, for instance.

But who finds those by accident anyway?

What should alert people rather more to the real agenda here is seeing ‘web forums’ listed – why? – together with the extraordinarily-labeled ‘esoteric material’, which, one suspects, could be applied to mean whatever someone wanted it to mean.

After all, since ‘esoteric’ means, in essence, ‘only understood by the initiated’, that could be applied to anything.

This blog, for instance. Trade unions. Religious groups. Take your pick.

Or, more to the point, whatever is the pick of whomsoever is in charge of defining these things at the time – fuller story here.

There’s a simple lesson to be learned here – hopefully before it’s too late: beware the propaganda that you allow yourself to believe.