Jojo Rabbit: Stronger Than Hate
The Manor Theater plays arthouse movies in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood.
The theater is considered one of the cultural staples of a city caked in steel factory soot and memories of an industry gone by. It has four screens with seats reminiscent of the business class on a top tier airline (take your pick), staff members who pour the artificial butter in your popcorn for you twice— once in the middle and then again over top, and a small sign taped to the inside of the front door probably printed from some HP desk jet sitting in the back; all of the other businesses in the theater’s vicinity bear the same small sign in their windows: “Stronger Than Hate”. For less than five minutes away from The Manor sits the site of one of the most heinous anti-Semitic crimes in recent history; where, on October 27th, 2018, a congregation of Jewish Squirrel Hill residents were gunned down with a Colt AR-15 by a man who screamed “All Jews must die” during the massacre. Eleven died, seven were injured. Over a year later, and you can see the neighborhood still grieving the victims as you drive across the Squirrel Hill streets, walk past the store fronts, step into The Manor past the “Stronger Than Hate” sign, enter into a theater with a primarily Jewish audience, and sit uneasily in your seat, watching as Taika Waititi’s buffoonish Adolf Hitler is plastered across the screen. You anxiously wait to see who cracks the first laugh. Hope it’s not you.
Prior to this visit to Pittsburgh, my hometown (or close enough to it), I had seen Jojo Rabbit twice in Los Angeles. I was taken aback at its ability to teeter the line between farce and melodrama— especially considering the subject matter. Following in the aura of The Great Dictator, The Producers, and, most recently, Look Who’s Back, Waititi’s “anti-hate satire” shares shades of these films and others like them. But what is most surprising to me, and might be distasteful to some others, is that while it may contain heavy doses of idiotic Nazi shenanigans, Jojo Rabbit has the boldness and audacity to give its Nazi characters a sense of humanity. Its thesis insists that the Nazis were idiots, yes, but they were idiots who had full range of emotion, the ability to make mistakes, and even the capacity to change. I assume that this is a strange and utterly uncomfortable notion for audiences who are particularly sensitive to the subject matter— as they should be. Hence my anxiety in my realization of where and when I was during my third watch of the film. I knew what I was in for, while the old woman in the wheelchair perhaps may have not been ready for a film to take such a centered and nuanced perspective— not on the Holocaust, but on its Nazi participants.
On most of its marketing materials, Jojo Rabbit is advertised as an “anti-hate satire”; an asterisked disclaimer, trigger warning combination; a small sign in the window. I aways detested these types of markers on works of art, but in a theater only minutes way from a scene of domestic anti-semitic terrorism, I came across a situation what challenged my opinion on the matter. Even so, the theater was packed— my very Filipino, very Catholic family and I sat in the back due to the construction in the tunnel delaying our arrival. Because of my vantage point, both physically in the theater, my point of reference as a non-Jew, and my rapport with with the film that had been established twice over, I found myself observing three separate experiences: the screen, the broader audience, and my family next to me who had never seen the film before. I’m not sure whether they realized the circumstances surrounding the exhibition of Jojo Rabbit in this particular neighborhood, but the Tree of Life Shooting was such a devastating event, that it tsumanied into our surrounding suburb. They had to have suspected something coming in.
The film was the same as I remembered it. Funny, heartbreaking, highly original with a raucous punky stick-it-to-the-man energy courtesy of the editing and and a score/soundtrack combo somewhere between pop yodel and late 80s German cover band (although the songs “covered” were actually sung by the original artists i.e. The Beatles, David Bowie, and others). The performances were edged and precise. The titular ten-year-old, Hitler-Jugend, Jojo Betzler, is depicted by Roman Griffin Davis, who portrays blind fanaticism with a childlike maturity. His inexperience as an actor plays incredibly well into the unsureness and malleability of his character. Taika himself takes on the daunting task of Adolf HItler, Jojo’s imaginary “friend” turned all-too-real ideology to be kicked out the window. His Adolf is anchored into the story with a level of petty abusiveness that is unhinged and controlling. Jojo and Adolf’s relationship feels like a purposeful bastardization of the actor-director collaboration taking place off the page. And while they, along with Thomasin McKenzie and Sam Rockwell, shine in all of their scenes, it is Scarlett Johansson who crafts my personal favorite character of the year, Jojo’s single mother Rosie, acting as a second conscience for her son, directing him without handing out line-readings like Taika’s HItler. An ode to mothers everywhere.
My watch at The Manor not only reconfirmed my feelings for the film, but allowed me to watch the movie with a group of individuals that were much closer to the subject matter than I was. As the accordion faded over the Fox Searchlight splash page (a splash page synonymous with Disney now, which to me, is as strange as it is fitting in terms of the hopeful message of the film), I felt the heavy skepticism wash over the room. I winced as I anticipated the first off-color bit— a tutorial of how to heil Hitler. These people are going to hate this. And halfway through the bit, there it was— a chuckle in the front. A woman probably around 40 years old, in a considerably raspy tone, had given the crowd a permission slip reading “Yes, grief and laughter can co-exist”. Even the old woman in the wheelchair was laughing after the initial giggle. Nearing the halfway mark of the film (and I will never forget this), a man laughed so hard that it sounded physically straining. The joke? One about Hitler’s testicles. The heaviness of the inherent suspicion lifted higher and higher as the crowd opened up to a new mode of the grieving process.
The signs in the window were validated at that moment. Jojo Rabbit became the proof to the thesis that the signs had been putting forth since the Tree of Life incident: Squirrel Hill is stronger than hate.