Jojo Rabbit · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy stands at the mirror in his brown uniform, working up the nerve to be a good little Nazi, and Adolf Hitler leans into frame to coach him. This Hitler bums cigarettes. He does bits. He gets sulky when he's ignored and delivers pep talks a ten-year-old could have written, because a ten-year-old did. He is imaginary, and he is the engine of the whole film.

Deleuze has a name for an image like this. He calls it a dream-image — an onirosign — a picture that isn't a memory of anything that happened but a free-floating fantasy that redresses the world in the shape of desire. A recollection points back to a real former present; you can date it. Jojo's Hitler points nowhere. Jojo never met the man. He built him out of posters, radio, playground rumor and the aching want of a fatherless kid, and what he built is propaganda wearing a friendly face and taking snack breaks. That is the film's quiet thesis, and the dream-image is how it lands: fascism here is not an argument the boy accepts. It's an imaginary friend he can't stop hanging out with.

Naming the concept tells you where to look. The real subject is never Hitler; it's the manufacture of the interior voice. Watch how it's assembled and you catch the movie in the act.

It starts with the very first cut. Waititi opens on archival rally footage — the raised arms, the ecstatic faces — laid over the Beatles singing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in German. Two images that don't belong together are slammed into one, and out of the collision comes a third thing neither shot contains on its own: the equation Beatlemania equals fascism, hysteria as a youth phenomenon. This is montage in Eisenstein's oldest sense, the shock that produces a concept. And notice what the crowd becomes. It stops being people. It's one pulsing affective mass, what Deleuze calls a dividual — a collective filmed as a single quality of feeling. The rally and the concert are the same body, and the film has told you so before a line of dialogue.

Then there are the uniforms. Klenzendorf keeps redesigning his own battle dress into something more operatic; the Hitler Youth stage their pageants; everyone is playing dress-up at the apocalypse. Deleuze would read the flamboyant costume as a gest — a posture that stops being personal and exposes a whole social relation. The fascist body is theatre. Its masculinity is a costume it can't take off, and Waititi lets the tailoring do the criticism. You laugh, and the laugh is the point being made.

Against all this pageantry the film sets faces. Elsa, the girl behind the wall, watches Jojo with a guarded, sardonic stillness that refuses to plead. Jojo's own face keeps registering things his beliefs have no slot for. These are affection-images: the close-up as a feeling that has arrived but has nowhere to go, no action to discharge it. Elsa can't fight and can't flee. She can only look, and be looked at, and let her face hold the charge. Every time the film cuts to her it's asking Jojo — and us — to do the one thing propaganda forbids: see a particular human being instead of a category.

And then the film withholds. Jojo comes out into the square and the camera drops to a pair of shoes he knows, his mother's, above the ground. We are given the gesture and not the event. Deleuze calls this an index of lack — an elliptical detail that implies an unseen situation, forcing you to complete the horror yourself. Jojo has tied those laces all through the picture. The cut hands you the shoes before it hands you the grief, and the comedy you were enjoying a minute ago curdles retroactively. This is the film's cruelest and best edit, and it works precisely by refusing to show.

The lineage is a specific inheritance. Chaplin put on the moustache and shrank the tyrant to a balloon-dancing clown; Lubitsch staged farce inside the occupied Reich; Brooks defanged Hitler by turning him into a gaudy show tune; Benigni invented a game to shield a child from the camps; Malle and Schlöndorff filtered the whole catastrophe through a boy's limited sightline. Waititi's own move sits on top of all of them and changes the wiring. He doesn't impersonate Hitler on a stage the boy watches. He installs Hitler inside the boy's skull as a playmate. That fuses the two traditions he's borrowing from — the Hitler-satire and the child's-eye war story — into one gesture, because now the buffoon and the propaganda are the same object. The dream-image is the indoctrination. To grow up is to evict it.

Which is finally what the film argues about art and fascism both. You don't defeat the fantasy by out-reasoning it. You out-live it — a mother's love, Elsa's realness, the shabby collapse of the war — until the imaginary friend has nothing left to feed on and Jojo can kick him out the window. Watch it again and track one thing: how much screen the fake Hitler commands early, and how little he's allowed by the end. The measure of the boy's freedom is how small his god gets.