JoJo Rabbit

*This post contains spoilers

JoJo Rabbit is a dark humor satire that follows a young boy in the Hitler Youth near the end of the war. It tells its story in a lighthearted -until -it’s -not progression, showing the subtle changes in JoJo as he realizes he might not have what it takes to be the perfect Nazi, and what that means for his future. It raises questions around loyalty, love, and loss while it displays the horrors of fascism stringently in the background, showing its slow roll eventually comes crashing down on everyone.

Me and my cohost (shoutout to Tyler who is often the only person still listening by the third act of any and all of my rants) did come up with a few discussion questions for this one that I’ll share here:

1) Throughout the film both JoJo and his mother say some semblance of the phrase, “We do what we can.” For JoJo’s mom that looked like opening her home to her daughters best friend, and passing out flyers for the resistance. For Captain K it was more complicated, as he remained a part of the regime but quietly helped the resistance when he lies about Elsa’s papers and lets JoJo go at the end. What does we do what we can look like for you?

This question sparked a lot of good answers. One was continuing to boycott Starbucks and McDonalds. The Starbucks boycott began in 2023 when the coffee company fired staff who showed solidarity for Palestine, and has continued with their decision to engage in union busting practices. The McDonalds boycott also began in 2023 when the chain supplied free meals to Israeli troops, and is ongoing with a host of other boycotts against companies like Disney and Apple. Target joined the list recently as well, with their decision to comply with the Trump administrations anti -DEI messaging. Another suggestion was, where a community garden is less feasible, creating sustainable trade within small communities where someone might grow herbs on their balcony, and another might bake bread, and share those creations with each other. There was talk of a radical book club, refusing to buy fast fashion, and one of the most important ones, be willing to have hard conversations.

We do what we can, for me, is the only way we fight this. It demands that we respect our own limits, and in that way ensures that every branch of resistance is covered by people who aren’t burned out from focusing on everything at once. The people on the streets who are able and willing to put their bodies on the line are as important to change as the doom posters who haven’t let up on their stream of information since 2020. We do what we can also demands that we respect each other, which is where I think the vast array of leftist ideologies get lost sometimes. One of us is no better than any other, and the sooner we realize that we have a shared value in collaborative effort, the sooner we can bridge these gaps that are not as wide as they look.

2) How does Taika’s depiction of the Nazi youth reflect the young boys being influenced online now?

Almost immediately the conversation turned to social media algorithms and YouTube’s role in the spread of radical right ideology to young men who, no matter how innocent the initial search, could easily end up in a string of videos that led them to influencers like Joe Rogan or Alex Jones. This being far different from a woman’s suggested content, who may start in make -up videos and a lifetime later still be engaged with make -up videos. Obviously, the idea of propaganda has come up a lot, especially in the years since 9/11.

There has absolutely been a push to radicalize men in this country. To make them feel alone by flooding their daily lives with “masculine -centered” ideas like the carnivore diet or guides on how to get women to sleep with them (in bulk). Bad right -wing actors wait for those things not to work, just so they can catch them and tell them it’s not them that’s wrong but everyone else. It’s hard not to see the parallel to young german men who were manipulated with patriotism and anti-semitism to go to war for a country that would eventually turn on them, too.

3) JoJo is faced with the task of killing an innocent rabbit, which he ultimately couldn’t do. If the rest of the events in the film didn’t happen, could JoJo have ever been accepted as a member of the regime?

The answers to this question varied. Some people said he never would have been accepted, but the group compromised and pretty much landed on the regime would take him, but he would be doing the shit jobs no one wants. If JoJo never met Elsa, he would’ve continued to believe the lies he was being told about Jews, including depicting them with horns and as bats. If he never battled with his mother’s own digression from the party he was staunchly in, he would’ve continued to hold the values he was taught were right. So even though his soft heartedness might never have allowed him to take a life, he ultimately still would’ve been a member of the party because that was his community and he wasn’t presented with enough information to change.

All of that to say there’s an element of choice, an element of nature, and elements of manipulation and the human fear of going against the grain. We have so much access to information today it’s hard for me to empathize with this same sentiment in a modern sense, even though I know there are still plenty of communities within this country that are not as able to get on the internet as I have been able to for almost my entire life. It’s a question that spawns more questions. How do we reckon with ourselves when it was everyone we knew? If we know it’s wrong, where do we start in disengaging? In moving over? How often do we have to check in with our morals and dissect them to understand ourselves, and better stand up for ourselves and others? I like movies like this because it frames what’s happening as bad, and it frames the humanization of the enemy as a lesson we need to learn. Never once does it ask me to sympathize with the Nazi party, it pokes fun at Nazi beliefs, and it forces me to admit we are all as capable of great evil as we are great good. There is no such thing as passivity in troubled times.

4) After the death of his mother JoJo almost kills Elsa, because seeing her body was a reminder of the risk Elsa was to his family. The butterfly that led him to her was supposed to represent her love. Does that love have the power to defeat evil in an oppressive system?

Woof, loaded question, I know. Tyler brought out the big guns for this one, and it being our last question wasn’t the only reason it took the longest to answer. On a large scale the group mostly said no, love alone can’t defeat evil. It would take too long. It’s a tool we use to whittle away at the mountain of hatred they try to smother us under, and sometimes we get frustrated, and it slips. I want to point out the difference it made in this movie, though, because we don’t get JoJo dancing with Elsa at the end without his mother’s love. We don’t have Elsa without her love. It’s possible we don’t have proper framing for Captain K’s struggle without her love. It is small, and it is sometimes exhausting and it gets us nowhere without the raised fists that ride beside it, but it is not unnotable. It is not nothing. Which, ironically, means it is something we all can do while we’re doing what we can.

Please feel free to answer the questions with your own thoughts in the comments below. You can also reach out to me at oneofthefwords.bsky.social, oneofthefwords@proton.me or on signal oneofthefwords.77 with any comments or questions you don’t want to share here. Thanks for reading, and look out for my next one on The Death of Stalin.

AF