Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Jojo Rabbit
2019 · Taika Waititi · Jojo Rabbit on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the opening rally footage cut to a Beatles song. (cutting)
Waititi lays German-language Beatles over archival crowds with raised arms and ecstatic faces, cut in the rhythm of concert hysteria. Two kinds of footage that do not belong together are slammed into one sequence.
Payoff: The collision makes the film's argument before a line of dialogue. The rally and the fan crowd are one body. In the reading: montage-dialectical-soviet. The reading calls this dialectical montage: two shots colliding to produce a third idea that neither of them contains alone.
Notice how centered and symmetrical the compositions are. (camera)
Malaimare frames doors, halls and rooms dead center in bright, saturated color. Low angles keep the camera at a ten-year-old's height. The town looks ordered, clean and toy-like.
Payoff: The picture-book look is Jojo's view of things. You are held inside a child's sense that all of this is a game.
Watch how the imaginary Hitler behaves in the house. (performance)
Waititi plays him lounging, snacking, sulking and throwing tantrums. He offers pep talks pitched at a ten-year-old and turns needy the moment he is ignored. He is scaled to a boy's imagination.
Payoff: This Hitler was assembled out of posters, radio and playground talk. He is the boy's internal voice with a face attached. In the reading: dream-image (onirosign). The reading calls him a dream-image: not a memory of anyone Jojo met, but a fantasy built in the shape of what he wants.
Look at what Klenzendorf is wearing in each scene. (setting)
Rockwell's captain keeps redesigning his own battle dress into something more operatic. The Hitler Youth run pageants in costume. Everyone in town is dressed up while the war falls apart around them.
Payoff: The tailoring does the criticism. Fascist bearing is shown as theater, with the costumes visible as costumes.
Watch Elsa's face while Jojo talks about Jews. (performance)
Thomasin McKenzie plays her guarded and sardonic, refusing to plead. She holds the camera without acting on anything, because she can neither fight nor run. She looks, and she lets herself be looked at.
Payoff: Every cut to her asks you to see one specific person where the boy has been trained to see a category.
Once you have seen it
Watch the shot of shoes in the town square. (cutting)
The camera drops to a familiar pair of shoes above the ground. You are handed the detail and not the event. Jojo has been tying those laces throughout the film.
Payoff: The cut delivers the object before the grief, and the comedy you were enjoying a minute earlier curdles behind you. In the reading: index-of-lack. The reading calls this an index of lack: a small detail implying a situation the film deliberately refuses to show.
Count how much screen time the imaginary Hitler gets. (structure)
He dominates the early scenes, interrupting, advising and filling frames. As Jojo spends time with Elsa and the regime collapses, the appearances shorten and turn peevish and defensive.
Payoff: The measure of the boy's freedom is how little room his invented friend is allowed to take up.
Look at the crawlspace behind the bedroom wall. (staging)
The house is warm, detailed and full of color. Behind one wall is a narrow gap with a person living in it. The film keeps cutting between the cozy home and the space inside it.
Payoff: A chamber drama runs under the comedy. Every domestic scene is being played on top of a hidden room.
Listen for the comic silence around the violent moments. (sound)
Giacchino's score drops away at the worst beats. Waititi holds a pause where a joke or an orchestral swell would normally arrive. The picture finishes on Bowie's Helden in German.
Payoff: The quiet is how the film changes register. Nothing cues you before the tone drops out from under a scene.
Carry this in: Watch the imaginary Hitler shrink. The film measures the boy's freedom by how little room his invented friend gets.