Is it OK to joke about atrocities?
Comedy has its pitfalls where portraying World War II is concerned, says a film historian, but drama isn’t safe either. Emily Brookes reports.
Taika Waititi’s new film Jojo Rabbit finally hit New Zealand this week, skidding in on the wake of film festival accolades, mixed reviews, and some controversy over its genre and tone.
Jojo is, by Waititi’s own description, an ‘‘antihate satire’’, a film that approaches the subject of World War II with humour, sometimes slapstick, and joviality.
It has drawn a lot of comparison to Oscarwinner Life is Beautiful and left some wondering if it’s ever OK to joke about such atrocities.
Comedy can be a powerful way of approaching a subject like World War II, according to Victoria University of Wellington historian Giacomo Lichtner, but Life is Beautiful is not a good example.
‘‘When those kind of unusual or more subversive genres approach a subject like that, I think the key issue is, do they ultimately show you things, do they reveal, or do they conceal?’’ says Lichtner, whose research looks at film as a medium for history, with particular emphasis on World War II and the Holocaust.
He says the first-half of Life is Beautiful reveals by sending up the attitudes and dogmatic beliefs of Nazis and conspiratorial Italian fascists.
But after the main character and his son enter Auschwitz, the film becomes ‘‘quite offensive’’.
‘‘The problem with Life is Beautiful’s premise, in my view, isn’t that it’s not funny, but that it tries to uphold the view that life is beautiful, even in the camp,’’ says Lichtner.
‘‘The idea that you can uphold an uplifting reading of life and humanity while in the camps is false.’’
The very end of the movie is particularly offensive, as the young boy must be shielded from the reality of his father’s death for it to uphold its uplifting premise.
‘‘To do a film that ends with the liberation of the camps and does not include mourning for the dead – that’s false.’’
There are, however, plenty of films that have successfully critiqued this period in history, going right back to when the war was still raging.
Waititi has evoked Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, released in 1940, as an influence on his own satire and his portrayal of a comedic Hitler (like Waititi, Chaplin wrote and directed The Great Dictator and starred as a Hitler parody).
Lichtner says that film is certainly ‘‘irreverent’’ in its treatment of subjects such as racial persecution and violence but ‘‘it doesn’t laugh at them, it laughs at the people who perpetrate them and through the comedy, even slapstick comedy, it has moments of real clarity and poignant moments’’.
Poignancy is no more easily found by avoiding comedy and looking at World War II through a dramatic lens, says Lichtner. In fact, drama is its own cinematic minefield.
Another film to which Jojo Rabbit has drawn early comparison is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Lichtner finds this also ‘‘highly problematic’’.
‘‘One way that realist films can look realistic, but actually get it spectacularly wrong, is giving audiences the illusion of empathy, of being able to understand or put yourself in the shoes of a Holocaust victim.’’
Striped Pyjamas, which includes a devastating scene relating to the genocide of Jews within an extermination camp, is ultimately ‘‘quite voyeuristic and it’s really a step too far [for] something that should be, if not taboo, at least handled very carefully’’.
Even Schindler’s List, a key reference point for most casual movie-watchers where great World
War II and Holocaust films are concerned, includes some moments that Lichtner says are ‘‘soppy and sentimental and do a disservice’’ to the subject matter.
Based on its trailer, Lichtner notes – approvingly and correctly – that Jojo Rabbit has a ‘‘deliberate fantasy element’’.
‘‘Immediately, to me, it seems like one of those films that constantly reminds the viewer that it’s allegorical or symbolic or fantastical – and that means the viewer is less likely to believe that that’s how it was.’’
When it comes to the portrayal of Nazis in particular, Lichtner appreciates why some (this reporter included) are uncomfortable with the bumbling fools of Jojo Rabbit.
But, he points out, few movies show Nazis in a truly realistic way. Many, however, do the opposite, using horror movie tropes to portray them as ‘‘supernatural baddies’’. ‘‘Like, for example, the Jew Catcher in [Quentin] Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, but also loads of others like that.’’
The difficulty is that neither depiction demonstrates that ‘‘Nazis were human beings, Nazi ideology was a human ideology and therefore can happen again, anywhere at any time’’.
But perhaps a well done satirical comedy like Jojo Rabbit is what we need today.
‘‘The ideologies that are dangerous now are similar to Nazis in that they take themselves very seriously,’’ says Lichtner. ‘‘White supremacy, the alt-right, etc. So maybe teaching people to spot in that rhetoric that actually the emperor is naked, that it’s a rhetoric of strength that is actually weak – maybe that helps.’’