JOJO RABBIT & CAGING SKIES
Taika Waititi & Christine Leunens
Review & Review
Having seen the movie version first and read the book afterwards, one may, in theory, ask if the book was adapted from the movie, and if there were an Oscar for such a category, would the book be a winner? No doubt there are other movies that have been adapted from obscure novels, the latter and their writers remaining fodder only for the credits that roll at the end, when the moviegoers have long vacated their seats. Here we are not so sure. True, the movie hit the entertainment headlines first, without much mention of the book or writer; only when winning the Oscar in the category of best movie adaptation, the journalists and gossip columnists turned their gaze upon the origins of this crazy tale, and lo and behold, there was a story to tell as well: an already famous Kiwi film maker shows off his muse at various after-Oscar parties, even though in his thank-you speech at the Oscars he only mumbled about his mother and indigenous artists. So, what on earth is going on here?
Having read a negative review of Jojo Rabbit in the Guardian as ‘unfunny’, I was under the impression that this might be some sort of failed Chaplinesque treatment of Hitler and Co. – in the event Taika Waititi as Hitler does employ the famous Chaplin sidekick, to mind very well done but more of that later). At the same time it was reported that at the Toronto Film Festival, the movie was a crowd pleaser, and now to top it all off, the Oscar. Not that in my view this Hollywood award carries any artistic significance – almost the opposite – but acting as the last straw to motivate me to go and see it myself, not being a great movie buff at all (the last movie I had watched was Godard’s The Image Book, as per invitation from my daughter who is a video and film editor with exceedingly good taste in such matters).
The screening on a Friday afternoon in an Auckland city movie theatre was a surreal experience, what with only few people in the audience – having expected a full house considering the sensation of a Kiwi film winning an Oscar. With me and my wife having whole rows to ourselves, we baulked at the opening scenes. Why is this silly Hitler/Taika Waititi prancing around as an imaginary friend for Jojo? Not terribly funny, except after a while it dawns on us that this not supposed to be a comedy – this is a tragedy, a thought experiment: would a Viennese mother who is in the resistance let her boy join the Hitler Youth as some sort of contrivance to protect her own and her son’s life? When Jojo finds out that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl/woman in the attic, his Nazi indoctrination is met with the realization that, slowly but slowly, the increasingly unfunny Hitler needs to be kicked in the groin and out of the window and be told to ‘fuck off’. Seeing his mother hanging on the gallows and seeing his neighborhood being destroyed in a cinematographic orgy of street fighting, the end is indeed near: the Americans roll in and liberate Vienna. Elsa is free at last: a kind of Hollywood happy ending: Jojo shaking off Nazi indoctrination and Elsa saved from the holocaust.
An unlikely story? Perhaps, but the acting was superb and the final rendition of David Bowie’s Heroes in the German version together with a Rilke quote plucked at the heartstrings with raw emotion, making it a very modern movie.
However, the thought experiment, on reflection, is more than unlikely (as Chomsky says about conspiracy theories: nothing is impossible but many things are unlikely). The more likely scenarios are that children follow their parents’ footsteps: the communist parents will educate their children to become good communists; the fascist parents will per force turn their children into the monsters they are. The best literary treatment of the latter is Der Vater eines Mörders by Alfred Andersch, making the point that Heinrich Himmler’s father as an authoritarian headmaster spawned a monster in his own image. One of the most moving treatments of the former is The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow, describing the devastation on the child when his father and mother are sentenced to death for being communist spies. Sure, there are propaganda stories, true or false, of the Chinese Cultural Revolution where students accused their parents and teachers of crimes against the state, and on the other side there are any number of aristocratic tales of patricide, matricide and general mayhem amongst family members, young and old.
That a boy (aged 11) becomes a rabid Nazi while his mother (and possibly his father, although this is not made clear in the movie) is in the O5-Austrian resistance is a very unlikely scenario but of course not an impossible one. It’s just that an unlikely tale has less attraction for me. I much prefer social realism, even when a bit of magic realism is thrown in, a la Gabriel García Márquez or as in Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra. As such, I did not mind the Waititi’s Hitler as an imaginary friend of Jojo’s, serving as a reminder that children sometimes do in fact have imaginary friends, espeacially when cut off from a dominant social circle: Jojo as the (later disfigured) coward (not killing the rabbit) certainly needs a father figure that reassures him. In reality, what would have been more likely is, that as a child of resistance fighters, he would have cultivated an imaginary friend more in the shape of a Spartacus, Lenin, Wiesenthal or Rilke. Even if his parents (here mother) had hidden from him the Jewish girl in the attic, he would have had an immediate empathy and love for her when discovered. There would be no strange (if not bizarre) drama of a Nazi boy having to be converted to a normal but still very troubled young man.
In making this last statement I am already jumping to the book version. Having seen the movie first and having read the book after the event, there is the inevitable question if there are any notable differences in the storyline. Well, there are, major ones. Obviously the titles are different. Why Jojo Rabbit? A clever linguistic device catching the popular imagination, as opposed to the overly intellectual book title Caging Skies. Taika Waititi (who has Jewish ancestry from his mother’s side, describing himself as a Polynesian Jew) must have been fascinated by Leunens’ thought experiment of a Nazi boy whose parents are in the resistance and harbor a Jewish girl, and what happens next.
In the book, Johannes, the boy (note that in German the ‘J’ is pronounced as the ‘y’ in ‘yes’) lives in a big house with his older sister, father and mother and grandmother. His sister dies of diabetes before she turns 12. He remembers his sister playing with another girl – the girl who turns out to be Elsa, hidden in their house after the Nazis begin to round up Jews to kill them. After the Anschluss … Leunens employs quite a few German words, presumably to sound more authentic, a contrivance that at the end of the book comes to grief, as it is explained that the whole account is a sort of confessional written by Johannes – so where does the 99% of English come from? As a native speaker of German I am pedantic enough to note, that given the effort to be authentic, Leunens and her editors should have picked up the annoying typo of Fraülein where the Umlaut should be ä … so, after the Anschluss in 1938, Johannes (now 11 years old) gets to experience the new Nazi curriculum at school and promptly falls for it. His parents, and even his grandmother who seems neither for or against the Nazi regime, are taken aback. Johannes argues with his father, saying he is wrong about Hitler. Johannes soaks up the insane Nazi propaganda about the Jews.
As a critique at this point, one has to ask if a newly perverted education system, extolling the merits of National Socialism and the Führer, can in fact indoctrinate an eleven-year-old boy whose family are diametrically opposed to these insane ideas. I think it would be more likely that such a boy would join his parents, and eventually also join the resistance. After all he loves his mother in particular, so how could this radical disjoint happen? But never mind, this is the basic premise of the story.
In the meantime Johannes joins the Jungvolk and does a bit of book burning, and after three years joins the Hitlerjugend. By then it was compulsory for all boys of the Reich of that age to join but it should be noted that even within the Hitlerjugend itself resistance cells were also formed, with Hans Scholl of the Weisse Rose a famous example. Johannes of course becomes an even more rabid Nazi, doing what is necessary, including wringing the necks of ducks and ducklings – compare this to the movie where Jojo cannot kill the rabbit, hence ever after shamed as Jojo Rabbit). By 1943 Johannes becomes a ‘flak helper’ defending Vienna against the allied bombers. Johannes gets hit and wakes up in the hospital to see his hand blown off and his face disfigured. He sort of recovers at home where his father and mother do strange things, like creeping up to the attic. His father now comes home less and less and his mother becomes more and more a nervous wreck. Only his grandmother, by now old and sick, keeps Johannes entertained with her tales of woe. Finally he finds Elsa hidden in the attic, ‘a Jew in a cage’ (the discovery remains a secret between him and Elsa). His Nazi duty is to kill her but he is ‘sickly fascinated’ and so the secret, upended conversion therapy starts, realizing that this grown-up Elsa was the little girl that played with his sister. Falling in love with her meant that as long as she was his prisoner, she would have no choice but to accept him as her savior (developing a Stockholm syndrome that is never mentioned in the book). If the war were lost, it would mean she could walk out. It must not happen. This obsession then carries the narrative to a long drawn-out conclusion.
Much later he finally tells his mother that he had found Elsa who had now been hidden under some floorboards, due to the attic being in danger of collapsing from the bombing of the neighborhood. His father, he learns, has been taken to a labor camp. His mother had told Elsa that ‘they’ are winning the war, hence she should be free in the near future. Johannes tells her the opposite: his mother is telling lies. All the while, the Nazis had become ever more insane and public hangings of ‘traitors’ became a sight to see. When Johannes looks at one of the gallows he sees his mother hanging there.
Here we interrupt with a substantial critique of both book and movie (where the same scene is played out). As I mentioned before, the literary treatment of such a horrific event has been accomplished in The Book of Daniel, when the boy learns that both his mother and father were executed by the state, accused of being communist traitors. Both Leunens and Waititi fail to comprehend such an enormity by reducing it to a short paragraph and movie clip.
Perversely, Johannes now has Elsa all to himself (his grandmother becomes a bit player and eventually dies as well). In 1945, when Elsa hears the happy shouting outside, Johann tells her ‘we won the war’. In the movie he then takes her outside and she slaps him for having been told a cruel joke: yes, actually ‘they’ won the war, Vienna is liberated, there is an American Army Jeep with a big American flag driving down the street, and Elsa is free and that’s the sort of happy end for her – and should be for Jojo.
In the book we are now only half-way through. What will happen now? To cut the story short, Johannes keeps her prisoner for the next four years up to 1949, keeping up the lie that ‘we won the war’ and that he is protecting her from being seized, to be sent to the gas chambers. She is not allowed to go outside or even look through the windows. With only the two of them in the house now, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe, that while Johannes is out of the house for hours and hours, she would not try to escape. She only needed to look out of the windows to see what was happening in the streets below – unless one invokes the Stockholm syndrome that is never mentioned but is palpable in the endless narrative spiral to the bitter end. They love and hate each other, have emergency sex, and generally obsess – mainly Johannes – about domestic issues, like what a newly acquired cat does in their new apartment (having sold the family home). The beginning of the end is a bizarre scene whereby Elsa sits naked in a chair in the middle of the room while the neighbors come in to sweep up the water that was left running, seeping down to their flats. Johannes introduces Elsa as his deranged wife but nobody really bats an eyelid. Following on, by page 295 (out of 311 pages) Elsa is gone, nowhere to be found.
Johannes, in his pathetic grief comes up with a clever authorial device: he will write an account of all that happened and maybe she will one day read it and come back to him. This, Leunens compares to sowing a seed that will grow into a tree which she describes at the very beginning of the book, a tree made up of lies, alive and well in a barren landscape. A great novel idea if I ever heard one!
So how and why did Waititi come up with this idea of a Hitler as an imaginary film prop for Jojo? And why did he not follow through with the original story line? In the first instance one can argue that it is a good cinematic device, letting a ghostly Hitler loose on the screen, for in the book Johannes pays homage to a real Hitler, telling his mother: “…if I had to die for Adolf Hitler I would be more than happy to.” Such personality cults have a hollow ring to it, even though in our times there seems to be resurgence of Hitler-types holding the populations in suspense. Maybe this is what Leunens and Waititi really want to warn us about. Beware of the crazy man getting inside your head! As such the movie has a very modern feel to it, and while the backdrops are that of a period piece, the dialogues, especially amongst the boys, are as slick and smart as any of contemporary exchanges.
In fact, I am inclined to think that 11-year olds should watch this movie, so that they get an inkling of where their violent video games might lead to. If as a parent you allow your children to be indoctrinated as a sort of immoral insurance policy – or as a genuine attempt to protect your children from suffering the same fate as a dissident in a totalitarian state – you will come to regret the tragic consequences. Maybe this is also the reason why Waititi stops the film at the point of ultimate release for Elsa, for what exactly is the point of a narrative that delves further into a total mental health breakdown, which involves the further victimization of a Jewish woman?
Why did Leunens made such an effort to research wartime Vienna, so as to arrive at an authentic sounding documentary style but then lapse into an unbelievable story about Johannes keeping Elsa prisoner for more than four years after the war? A psychological melodrama without historical context? Sure, there are a few attempted snippets of the real world, as when Johannes contemplates to escape with Elsa to lands unknown, citing a travel-agency catalogue, listing ‘Rururu, Apataki, Takapoto, Makemo … Barbados, Grenada’. Leunens may be a widely travelled author but I (as an expert on Polynesia) seriously doubt she has any idea about the French-Polynesian islands she cites, as opposed to the well-known Caribbean’s. Surely, in post-war Vienna you would not find a travel agency that sells quick getaways to Rururu!. Research that smacks of a Google-search is to be avoided at all costs!
However, apart from these niggles, I will conclude that both the movie and the novel are genuine works of art. See it and read it! Not sure what the effect would be if you read first and see second, apart from being the natural order.
