Movies Don’t All Need to Make a Profound Political Statement
Our obsession with labels — like calling ‘1917’ anti-war or ‘Jojo Rabbit’ anti-Nazi — is giving us all tunnel vision
The Nazis in Jojo Rabbit have two salient characteristics. They are evil (by association, even if not portrayed as egregiously wicked individuals). And they are ridiculous — not just Waititi’s own Shaggy-ish Adolf, but also characters like Stephen Merchant’s protocol-obsessed gestapo officer or Rebel Wilson’s over-enthusiastic fräulein.
Yet Jojo Rabbit, directed by Taika Waititi, is not an “anti-Nazi” movie in any meaningful sense, as critics have widely hailed it to be.
Nazism is intrinsic to the plot of Jojo Rabbit in a literal sense, but it’s almost incidental in terms of the fundamental lessons that the movie can teach us about people and relationships. Surely it takes more than a mere recognition of Nazism’s evils for a movie to be truly anti-Nazi. It is not enough to show, in passing, that the regime was cruel or the innocent suffered; we all know that, and indeed not showing those details might be interpreted as revisionism. Acknowledging the baseline facts doesn’t turn a film into a strong anti-Nazi statement, any more than a serial-killer flick like David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) is an…
