The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2009)
Miramax DVD (region 1, 2, 4)
d. Mark Herman; pr. David Heyman; scr. Mark Herman; novel. John Boyne; ph. Benoit Delhomme; m. James Horner; ed. Michael Ellis; cast. Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, Rupert Friend, David Hayman, Vera Farmiga, Amber Beattie, Richard Johnson (94 mins)
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is an elegant and stately, well-acted and subtly scripted English addition to what is a post Bush era revival in Holocaust-themed Hollywood cinema.
Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist are, of course, the respectable face of such Holocaust drama having received multiple Academy Awards between them. However, contemporary Hollywood has launched into Holocaust drama with a distinctly reformist intent in an emerging body of work – Valkyrie, Good, The Reader, Defiance – which might be described as “Nazi humanist”. These films collectively work from an underlying ontological assumption – psycho-dramatized in Valkyrie as the confrontation between faith and reason in the battle between secular humanism and religious Totalitarianism (as represented by religious, specifically Christian, belief) – namely, the absence, indifference and by extension, non-existence of any Deity.
In the renouncement of Theism gradually emerging as this genre develops, humanist concerns are much more to the fore – stripped bare to survivalist allegories of collectivization and moral relativist behavioural responsibilities in Defiance, that film’s assessment of rationalist vs. religious socialization is counter-weighted in the concurrent release of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. That is not to say that the film is heavily religious: indeed, far from it. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas works essentially from a different rationale to conventional American film narratives as so far deployed in the Nazi Humanist genre. A British film, it is more in the tradition of such mannered looks at childhood innocence from David Lean’s Oliver Twist to J. Lee Thompson’s Tiger Bay (the film that showed the sexual and moral ambiguities of a young Hayley Mills before she was appropriated by Disney to become the face of Pollyanna). Childhood psycho-social development is the underlying principle behind The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, skilfully using the gulf between what a child is told about the Jewish “final solution” and what he discovers for himself to probe the humanist dilemma of the Holocaust.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas examines an 8 year old boy’s psycho-social development as he is gradually socialized around his father’s association with the Nazi Party. When his father (a slyly restrained and elegantly menacing David Thewlis) is made head of a Concentration Camp, the boy and his family are displaced to a new residence. The boy is informed only of the move, unaware of the wherefore of his father’s new duties. Able to see the Camp from his bedroom window, he naively thinks it is a farm, where all of the workers wear striped pyjamas and play a game involving numbers on their pyjamas.
Interview with David Thewlis
Fond of reading adventure stories, he sneaks away from the Commandant’s quarters to the edge of the “farm”, where he meets – on the other side of a barbed wire fence – an 8 year old boy in pyjamas. Confused as to what this boy is doing there, the two of them gradually become friends. However, Thewlis has hired a tutor for his children, to educate them in the means of National Socialism – an education that is perfectly reconciled with what the film subtly reveals as a Christian socialization: the boy recites prayers to God before bed much as the officers swear allegiance to Hitler. The boy now learns that his friend is a Jew – subhuman and responsible for all evil according to his new official Nazi tutor. His incipient humanity torn, the boy seeks to help his Jewish friend in an action that both reveals the indifferent, inhumane tragedy of the Holocaust and conclusively establishes the irrelevance of any Theist belief when confronted by the reality of that Holocaust.
As a rationalist film, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is about childhood psychological development and the conflict between human moral relativism and Theist absolutism in terms of developmental psychology. Allegorically, the dissection of the family here is interesting. Thewlis, the Nazi, is the head of the Family. As a Patriarch, he is symbolic of the Theist absolutism sustaining Patriarchy – his fanatical devotion to his work evidence of his duty (to both Hitler and God as this film allies both, like Valkyrie before it) and his absolute belief in righteous action. His absolutist dedication separates him from his wife, who cannot suppress her humanism and is outraged by what her husband is in charge of: however, women have little place beyond the functional in such absolutist Patriarchal structures and the wife is soon consumed by her inability to act against Patriarchal destiny, she must without option reconcile herself, throwing herself into the protection of her son. As such, her subservience to Thewlis’ demands that she put on a proper front echoes the plight of the Jewish women in Defiance who must prostitute themselves to stay alive under a Patriarchal definition of community, validating their decision in mock marriage ceremonies meant to legitimize gender imbalance in the preservation of stagnant religious rite.
Childhood innocence is often an idealized state for those of a religious persuasion, the protection of children being the paternalistic rhetoric behind Christian moves to censor film, literature and the arts in general. However, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas does not idealize childhood. Instead, it presents it as a behavioural stage in developmental psychology. The film is depicted from the child’s point of view, so that all changes in circumstance and narrative unfold as the child discovers them, observes and interprets them.
The juxtaposition between the child’s naïve perception and the truth of the matter is used not to contrast childhood and adulthood in terms of a traditional innocence vs. experience dichotomy but to reveal the extent to which the developing mind makes sense of the world around it – how do young minds make sense of circumstance. As the boy is socialized to living near a concentration camp so too his own sense of right and wrong are called into question, focused in an increasingly obsessive friendship with the Jewish boy. When confronted by the paradox of Nazi socialization and his own inherent humanity, the boy tries to make sense of it. However, he is at an age where the reality of the situation’s enormity is beyond him and when he finds out of the true capacity for evil his father has engineered, his innocence makes him a victim.
By revealing narrative and character points in detail through the perception of the child, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas simultaneously essays the way in which the Nazis could perpetuate the Holocaust without much of the German people knowing (at least until it is too late to do anything about it – as is the mother’s dilemma here when she finds out by accident what the husband has been keeping from her about the reality of the camps). The boy’s innocent question about what is causing the smell coming out of the farm chimneys – what are they burning there father? (rags, son) – is nicely paralleled to the propaganda footage the Nazi Party create of the Concentration Camp, making it look so much like a holiday camp that the boy thinks there is a café there. For the filmmakers, this is a clever assessment of objective fact vs. individual perception, all the more acute for its placement within a developing psychology.
The film finds a curious enigma in its two 8 year old boys. Too young to comprehend what is going on, they are victims of Patriarchy’s absolutist appropriation of history. The German boy in particular remains a humanist – though confronting absolutist indoctrination and gradually learning of the compromises people make through fear (his dread of his father’s Aryan helper) and belief (Nazism is willingly embraced by his sister). As such, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas functions as a probing look at innocence’s resilient humanity and the role of education in guiding moral relativism / moral absolutism whilst being a fascinating treatise on childhood developmental psychology. Brilliantly acted and cleverly directed throughout, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is perhaps the most quietly eloquent of the sudden batch of Nazi Humanist cinema: certainly it is the most affecting on a humanist level, shorn of the genre trappings of conventional Hollywood fodder.
Teachers reading this review should note that The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is available in a Special Classroom Edition Interactive DVD (see purchase info above right).
