Vision: Jojo Rabbit
Taika Waititi is the most celebrated Māori filmmaker in Aotearoa New Zealand this decade. He received accolades for his short film Two Cars; One Night and positive reception from critics of his early big-screen films Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople and an Oscar for his recent adapted screenplay.[1] On the back of these successes (and a vampire mocumentary set in Wellington), he entered the global mainstream with Marvel Studio’s production Thor: Ragnarok.[2] It would be fair to say, along with Kylie Klein-Nixon, that Waititi is currently New Zealand’s favourite cinematic son.[3] In both of Waititi’s early New Zealand films, Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople the central protagonist is a young Māori boy navigating a capricious and confusing world. Many of the quintessential elements that made these two films so successful are present in his 2020 film, Jojo Rabbit. Waititi’s signature Kiwi humour is a distinctive feature of all his films, but more importantly his remarkable gift of being able to bring to cinema the innocence and pathos of the world through a child’s eyes, and this with poignant credibility. Like these prior films, a young boy is the hero of Jojo Rabbit, but the striking difference in this film set in Germany during World War 2 is that this boy is not an indigenous child or even a Jew. The boy is a white, Christian German, and an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth.
It is not Waititi’s paternal ancestry, that is, his father’s roots in East Coast’s Te Whanāu-ā-Apanui, that Waititi is navigating here, but his maternal genealogy. Waititi’s ancestry through his mother is Jewish and Jojo Rabbit is in part a journey into his Jewish heritage and the appalling nightmare of the Shoah which is still without closure for many. Waititi has credited his mother, Robin Cohen, for giving him the idea for the film. Robin Cohen, in an interview with Variety, describes what is at stake in the work,
Today, we know Hitler as the evil madman who engineered the torture and murder of millions of people … But if we don’t think more deeply about how he convinced half the world to help him, we leave the door open to a repeat performance.[4]
This kind of prefacing of the work by the director’s Jewish mother seems necessary as the film, according to The Telegraph, continues to be polarizing and controversial.[5] Richard Brody’s review in the New Yorker is a case in point, describing the film as an absurdity contributing to a “blinkered folly” that takes for granted the base violence and unimaginable ideology that derived itself from hatred, and made possible the genocide of six million Jews and all those others.[6] Even Rolling Stone describes it as hit-or-miss, and a film that divides its audiences.[7] Waititi begs to differ, suggesting that in this kind of irreverent comedy, history’s worst villains such as Adolf Hitler are robbed of their power and their legacy.[8]
The premise of Jojo Rabbit is based on the novel Caging Skies by New Zealand author Christine Leunens.[9] The film, like the novel, is a coming of age story that explores Nazi Germany through the eyes of Johannes Betzler (Jojo), a young German boy with a young boy’s carefree and wholehearted excitement for his world. However, the vagaries of time and space mean that he is growing up in the orbit of Hitler Youth, Nazi propaganda, and a charismatic Führer. As Ben Travis puts it in his review for Empire, Jojo is “a scared kid growing up in a world that he comes to realise is cruel and broken.”[10] The childlike innocence of Jojo in the early chapters of the film in the context of what is widely regarded as the darkest of European histories is an uneasy paradox. It is particularly ominous in light of the current divided West and its increasingly fascist tone.
What Jojo Rabbit does do as sophisticated satire is present to its audiences the very banality that was life in Nazi Germany, and through Waititi’s comedy noir, how easy it is for toxic ideologies to be embraced. Hannah Arendt wrote in the epilogue of her report on Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) that the trouble in Germany was “… that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal …”[11] It is a devastating phenomenon of society, that the elements of racism, classism, sexism, and all the other shades of hate, can become so woven into the fabric of life that people cease to see it for what it is, and so easily look the other way. This is the one aspect that critics of the film agree on: the anti-hate message it stands for continues to be needed in this day and age. It is this same moral conflict that Jojo confronts in his small town as he begins to question his basic beliefs. He slowly comes to see, in vivid technicolor, the hate-filled half-truths and poisonous conspiracies he has learned and the impact of this narrative on the lives of real people.
Among the excellent performances in Jojo Rabbit, Scarlett Johansson in the role of Jojo’s mother “Rosie,” stands out. While others in the community, out of perhaps understandable cowardice, are buying into Nazi lies, Rosie gives shelter to a Jewish girl in her own attic. Rosie’s civil courage in the face of Nazi oppression brings to mind the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his active resistance of the evil of the Nazi regime in pursuit of love. At the highest personal cost, he believed his duty to his God lay in the pursuit of freedom and “responsible action in a bold venture of faith.”[12] Bonhoeffer’s civil courage was enacted in his stand with minorities and the marginalized in his community, people with often with a faith and ethnicity different to his. Like Bonhoeffer, the USC Shoah Foundation and Waititi claim: “Children are not born to hate; they are taught.”[13] This is the message of Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit, and with all the many other critics of this film, I would add my own voice in solidarity. In the current world where it seems of little import for a policeman to kill an unarmed black man on the street, we continue to need films like Jojo Rabbit.
Yael Klangwisan is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Laidlaw College and a Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies for Laidlaw Graduate School. She is the author of Jouissance: A Cixousian Encounter with the Song of Songs (Sheffield Phoenix, 2015). Her creative writing and poetry is published in the journals Meniscus, The French Literary Review, Hecate, Stimulus and Tarot.
[1] Toyin Owoseje, “Taika Waititi, director of 'Jojo Rabbit,' dedicates Oscar to indigenous children of the world” CNN (Feb 11, 2020), https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/10/entertainment/taika-waititi-oscar-win-intl-scli/index.html
[2] Taika Waititi (dir.), Two Cars; One Night (New Zealand: Vanessa Alexander, Catherine Fitzgerald, Ainsley Gardiner, 2004); Boy (New Zealand: New Zealand Film Commission, Unison Films, Whenua Films, 2010); Hunt for the Wilderpeople (New Zealand: Piki Films, Defender Films, 2016); Thor: Ragnarok (United States: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2017).
[3] Kylie Klein-Nixon, “All Taika Waititi's films (including the one's he's starred in) ranked” Stuff
(Oct 26, 2019), https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/116583597/all-taika-waititis-films-including-the-ones-hes-starred-in-ranked
[4] Marc Malkin, “Taika Waititi’s Mom Explains Why She Told Her Son to Make ‘Jojo Rabbit’,” Variety (Jan 31, 2020 5:23pm), https://variety.com/2020/film/news/taika-waititi-mom-robin-cohen-jojo-rabbit-1203488959/.
[5] “Disney Hitler movie Jojo Rabbit divides critics and angers Germany,” The Telegraph (9 September 2019), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2019/09/09/disney-hitler-movie-jojo-rabbit-divides-critics-angers-germany/.
[6] Richard Brody, “Springtime for Nazis: How the Satire of ‘Jojo Rabbit’ Backfires,” The New Yorker (Oct 22, 2019), https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/springtime-for-nazis-how-the-satire-of-jojo-rabbit-backfires.
[7] Peter Travers, “‘Jojo Rabbit’ Review: A Hit-or-Miss Hitler Comedy with a Heart,” Rolling Stone, (Oct 16, 2019), https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-reviews/jojo-rabbit-movie-review-889145/.
[8] K. Austin Collins, “It’s Possible to Make a Good Comedy About Hitler—But Jojo Rabbit Isn’t It,” Vanity Fair (10 September 1919), https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/09/jojo-rabbit-movie-review-taika-waititi-hitler.
[9] Christine Leunins, Caging Skies (London: Penguin, 2019).
[10] Ben Travis, “Jojo Rabbit Review,” Empire (26 Dec 2019), https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/jojo-rabbit/.
[11] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006), Kindle Edition.
[12] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), page number.
[13] “USC Shoah Foundation partners with Fox Searchlight Pictures to launch JOJO RABBIT Education initiative,” University of Southern California (19 December 2019), https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2019/12/26611-usc-shoah-foundation-partners-fox-searchlight-pictures-launch-jojo-rabbit.