There are these rare moments when the filmic world melds into the real so seamlessly that the material frame of the screen holding the constructed universe becomes an extension of both our lived and imagined experiences. And even rarer is the moment when the material frame cannot contain the quaking existential graveyard inside our collective hearts and minds. Ten minutes into the filmic universe of Jojo Rabbit, similar to Moonrise Kingdom sans the uncontrollable symmetric precision of generic Wes Andersonian stylized aesthetics, you know you are in the presence of something special. It helps that the holocaust has been hitherto palimpsestically rendered; the precedent is there, and the director is activating collective memory. The stage is already set, no further paraphernalia is necessary for the exposition — we dive into a textured sepia-toned world that seems monstrously like our contemporary moment: children are blinded by hate beyond repair; they slingshot grenades like flying discs; blow up rafters in exchange of greetings; participate in desultory adult-like conversations with a worldliness that is comedic but played to frightening effect.
I have always wondered about the profilmic moment in front of the camera and the chosen angular posing that determines the audience’s point of view. What if the protagonist was someone else — the mother who executes (and is in turn executed) the impossible task of conveying what it means to be radically hospitable through time and timelessness — would the filmic universe still have that same hold? I use timelessness as a metaphor here, but the implication is real — celebrated philosophers will tell you that radical hospitality is timeless because it is impossible — impossible to perform, impossible to demonstrate, impossible to hold. But Taika Waititi comes really close to making it possible, which brings me to the question — what can films do?
I watched Jojo Rabbit in a theatre in Kolkata with eight other people, six of whom were at least ten feet away (way before social distancing became a ritual), situated like islands in different corners of the sprawling room. Nervous laughter from an unidentified corner of the theatre sometimes punctuated the sequences while silent tears rolled down my cheeks. Part of the theatre watching experience is to second guess other people’s emotions; you sometimes hear other people react to cues and you are startled by other artistic interpretations of the same event. The sonic, the visual and the performative had synchronously mutated for me into an unexplainable affect that found some articulation through oblique physical gestures — my being conscious of myself crying in a room filled with mostly strangers and my being conscious of the delicate fragility of that constructed space; the movie on the big screen, the material contours of a room, the intellectual proximity of a close friend and the nervous laughter from unnamed bodies. During intermission, I pointedly refused to meet the eyes of my friend next to me, also an artist, lest he witnesses the despair within.
But amidst all that quaking desolation, onscreen and off — I watched humanity unfold as a 10-year-old Nazi befriends a fourteen-year-old Jew. Just like everyone else, I root for the mother, her fierce strength and buoyancy as she traipses down the verdant countryside slopes in her summer hats. But, the profilmic narrative had already been parsed and carefully curated by a master conjurer who knows how to play his cards right. Like everyone else, I willed the mother to survive but my theory-addled brain already knew that radical hosts were impossible both in theory and art. The sequence when it comes pulses with hooded eyes staring out of droopy windows; a lidded hat pulled over the ears, drowning the sonic but transmuting the filmic into the specular — the hooded eyes fixate on us as we collectively shift in our seats. Contact is established but we see what Jojo sees — a shattered dream and an unforeseen settlement.
When the movie ends, and some amount of hope has been vindicated — everyone knows this part of the story by now — the quaking graveyard inside me is filled up by the corpses of many dead weights. Hope is entombed in despair.
As someone who sometimes attempts to write for an imaginary audience but mostly to assuage a deep sense of guilt for not always being viscerally cognizant of the value of what I do, there are these moments when I force myself to go back to the fundamentals. What is the value of Art at the end of the world? It is perhaps not a question of efficacy, after all, but one strictly lodged in the aesthetics. But can there be an objective value ever placed on aesthetics?
We have all seen those lists — books to read during quarantine, films to watch, recipes to perfect, list to end all lists and so continues the endless rigamarole of regurgitated curated hyperlinks. But what if the pandemic crisis is not as they say the exemplary condition of the present moment but something far deep-rooted and at the risk of sounding terribly pessimistic — the only condition that binds us together. What can be the value of the visual when the pre-existing profilm is a shared condition of loss, degradation and disaster; at all times inflected by variations of the personal and the collective experience. The question then perhaps is one of scale or rather a movement — how much a work of art can move you; or drive one to explore the banality of our existence, stripped away from all accouterments.
Like the novelist and the artist, both the seasoned and the amateur, the filmmaker for me is neither a historian nor a prophet, and neither they should be hailed as one or held against metrics to adjudge whether they qualify as one. There was a time when art thrived in collective anonymity and did not buckle from preset neoliberal aspirations of what it meant to be considered great or who makes it to what list. One knew of them through their greatness and not because they were dispatched by already adjudged greats. The filmmaker like the novelist is an explorer of existence and a host that must believe in the possibility of radical hospitality. The viewer is above all a guest that is choosing to participate in an exchange where they are opening themselves up to be moved. The medium, the film, and the storytelling must be able to create an unobstructed opening for that engagement. So this larger discussion is really about how much films can move you.
And above all is the question of aesthetics and playful inventiveness — the comedy at the heart of the tragedy and the exceptional at the heart of the banality. The present ongoing catastrophe can very well attest to the curious aporia of our time — people dying all around is catastrophic, while celebrities not having the correct flavour of ice cream in the house and migrant labourers dying of hunger show up on our newsfeed as personal and collective disasters. Taika Waititi’s hammy Hitler and exploration of radical hospitality reminds us of the optimism of extreme artistic will and the pessimism of cynicism.
I wanted to believe that day like Jojo, that I too will find my soul, but the world around me looked bleaker than ever as I made my way outside from the dimly lit theatre, scrolling through the news that notified me of more human rot. A student protester in Delhi was repeatedly shot in the hand by a gunman with links to a radical Hindu nationalist organization on the day of Gandhi’s assassination. I read the news and steeled myself for scheduled meetings with old friends, knowing that this moment too shall pass like most other things. But in the silence of my room, well past midnight, in the darkness of a semi moonlit night, I remembered the vulnerability of a ten-year-old boy who has butterflies in his stomach and a dance in his steps.
