Probably more than half the people who dislike/hate Jojo Rabbit do so because they think it's simplistic, or it reminds them of Wes Anderson too much, or they think it's schmaltzy. They're wrong, but this post cannot help convince those people otherwise.It can, however, possibly speak to the people who find it offensive that a film would choose to make Hitler a figure of fun in the larger mission of promoting vigilance against the rise of fascism, something to which we may yet be susceptible today if we aren't careful. And the film I'm going to talk about today goes way, way further than Jojo both in making Hitler a figure of fun, and in pointing a finger at us for our own enduring worst tendencies as human beings.
That film is the 2015 German language film Look Who's Back, directed by David Wnendt (Wetlands), and to give some indication how few English speakers may have seen this movie, I could not even find a poster for it in English. It is available on Netflix, though, at least here in Australia, which is where I watched it on Saturday night. More people need to put this biting satire on their viewing schedules.
Some minor plot spoilers in the discussion to follow, but mostly in terms of the setup and not the payoff.
The German title literally translates to He's Here Again, though you can probably see why the other title is a bit catchier. Though, the title Look Who's Back does alternately remind me of Look Who's Talking and of the opening lines of Eminem's song "Without Me" ("Guess who's back/Back again/Shady's back/Tell a friend."). It's an adaptation of a 2012 book of the same name by German author Timur Vermes.
What this book/movie posits is that Adolf Hitler wakes up one morning in modern-day Germany, having mysteriously materialized in the courtyard of a random Munich apartment building. Dusting himself off and trying to get his bearings, he figures he must have gone into some kind of coma when he tried to kill himself back in 1945, though he doesn't have any explanation for why he hasn't aged or why he ended up in this particular spot.
He soon learns that Germany did not win the war and that many countries he assumed would no longer exist -- most embarrassingly to him, Poland -- are still alive and kicking and maybe even thriving. Ever the committed ideologue, he's still got an uncompleted mission and goes about trying to complete it, but now with the tools of television and the internet at his disposal.
The others he encounters are astonished by the extent of his physical similarity to Hitler and by his commitment to what can only be a performance art piece. His unwillingness to break character only further convinces them of the genius of the art. Of course, they can't conclude that this is the actual Adolf Hitler, as he obviously died, and even if he did not die, he'd be 125 years old.
Although some are offended, most seem to embrace this note-perfect incarnation of Hitler, who spouts the same hateful speech the "real" Hitler spouted, only a bit more shrewdly at first, after taking the temperature of modern political discourse. In fact, most people's very first instinct is, tellingly, to laugh, an indication that there is something inherently absurd about a straight-faced, modern-day presentation of Hitler as he was back then. And that it strikes them more as absurd and hilarious than it strikes them as offensive.
They embrace him not because they agree with his dog whistle hate speech, at least not publicly, but because they interpret it as some kind of post-modern statement whose exact meaning may elude them, but which is an important bit of commentary nonetheless. (One person who sees through it all says critics are afraid of missing the "dramatic ambiguity," which is a great and accurate comment on a common critical anxiety that we're not deep enough to comprehend a particular piece of art.)
So Hitler, who fascinates and astonishes everyone he meets, becomes this kind of minor celebrity on a popular talk show hosted by a comedian, and things snowball from there. The thing is, he's not just an entertaining novelty act -- it turns out he is able to latch on to a popular public sentiment that immigrants are taking over the country. In the 2010s, Germany indeed welcomed asylum seekers with apparently open arms like no other country, in a continued attempt to atone for the heinous acts of the Third Reich. However, these are still, on some level, the same citizens who were complicit in the rise of Nazism, if only because they didn't do anything to stop it. When asked by a reporter touring the country with Hitler, who is the story's main character, these citizens secretly commiserate the fact that they can say nothing now about these immigrants because of the past stigma against them. However, just like the native population of almost any country in the world, they are threatened by the way the face of their population is changing. Now, "Adolf Hitler" -- who is actually Adolf Hitler -- has given them the voice they need to actually state those feelings aloud.
A measure of how much I liked this film is how much it reminded me of other films I really like. One of those is Spike Lee's Bamboozled, in which an extremely wrong-headed impulse (to revive the use of blackface on television) becomes a national sensation when it starts thriving on a comedy TV show. To cement the connections, in this film, the comedian who hosts the show that hosts Hitler even puts on blackface to impersonate Barack Obama -- and it doesn't even get commented on. Also like Bamboozled, Look Who's Back goes behind the scenes of the TV show and considers how ratings prompt various principled people to sell out those principles. Both films consider how something truly disturbing is starting to come up from the collective subconscious, which in certain ways seems to be an embrace of diversity but is actually something quite pernicious instead. There's a funny bit in Look Who's Back about how Hitler hears modern hip hop on the radio and learns that "nigga" has come to be a term of affection. Of course, the person who explains this to him does not also explain the context in which it is meant to be used, and who gets to use it, making another connection to Bamboozled's exploration of the way white people try to appropriate black culture.
It also reminded me of a more obviously similar movie, but not necessarily similar in the ways you would expect. Both Look Who's Back and Mel Brooks' The Producers "make light" of Hitler in trying to make a larger point, though The Producers stays more in the realm of comedy while this film certainly has bigger things on its mind. But the real similarity is that both movies feature one or more characters who use Hitler-related content for the purpose of sabotaging someone or something for their own personal gain. While the producers are sure that Springtime for Hitler will flop, leading to the loss of investments from multiple investors (and the lining of their own pockets as a result), this film features a TV executive who was passed over for the top job, trying to torpedo the woman who got it by having her greenlight this obviously offensive material. Both projects become hits, causing the schemes to backfire.
Then there's a movie like Chris Morris' Four Lions, one of the films I considered for my best of last decade. That and Look Who's Back both share a handheld, documentary-style aesthetic, though I don't think any of Four Lions is meant to be faux documentary footage (unlike Look Who's Back, which does have some). They both involve the use of dangerous subject matter -- Islamic terrorism in that case -- for the purposes of what is sometimes quite funny comedy. Unlike The Producers, though, Four Lions has that same more serious agenda on its mind, as well as an agenda to see its characters as human beings -- something it does not share, you'll be glad to know, with Look Who's Back's perspective on Hitler.
But what I really want to communicate today is its similarities to Jojo Rabbit, especially since Look Who's Back came out such a comparatively short time before it. I can't imagine that those who feel offended by Taika Waititi's satirical risks will be any less offended by Look Who's Back, and may be more so. But at the very least, it should show them that Waititi is not doing something that was not already in the culture, and not already considered, by many, a valid way to repurpose Hitler for positive ends. In fact, there's a montage in Look Who's Back in which Hitler watches various real-world representations of himself on screen over the years since he killed himself (such as 2005's Downfall), some of which I could not immediately identify, but which were obviously comedies as well. Making a comic fool out of Hitler is not new to Jojo Rabbit, and it should not be getting the heat for it, particularly since Waititi's anti-fascist message is really as clear as day. It might be said that Look Who's Back is even more radical, as it does not confine its observations to World War II and let us extrapolate its messages to today. It instead states that this is still a really, really big problem today, and that the director's own presumably beloved fellow countrymen and women are a prime example of it.
In a way I'm surprised that Look Who's Back came out in 2015 rather than in the years since Trump was elected, as it really seems prescient in terms of its worries about the rise of new fascist leaders, be they Trump or Boris Johnson or Scott Morrison here in Australia. Okay, it may be going a bit far to call these men fascists, but only a bit. It's terrifying the way today's encoded hate speech has connected to an audience that was obviously waiting for it. And both the book's author and the film's director didn't even need to look outside Germany at the English-speaking countries listed above, because they were seeing enough of these disturbing trends in their own country. Which has been trying for 75 years now to rehabilitate its image, but continues to be undercut by a not-small-enough minority of people, who really do want Hitler to come back.
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