Remembering With A Twist - A Jojo Rabbit & The Book Thief Video Essay

so spoiler alert for the film Jojo rabbit and the novel The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and content warning for like we're talking about the Holocaust in this video and its associated business so just strap in for that also I am only talking about the book thief novel but this is a visual medium so we're gonna look at clips from that film even though I super duper I am only talking about the book and as always these are my opinions and artists subjective and I want to reiterate that before this video because I have some strong opinions that in particular other Jews might disagree with and that's chill because we are not a monolith so with that out of the way let's dive in when I was in eighth grade my English class read an abridged stage version of the Diary of Anne Frank aloud in class it really was just a few scenes I played Peter sitting in my chair three seats down from the young boy who had taken calling me a dirty Jew on a daily basis he and his friends would talk at length about how great Hitler was and how all Jews should die and carefully loud enough voices so that I could hear them but our teachers missed it people are surprised when I tell them these stories mostly because people seem to think that before 2016 Nazis and anti-semitism went away when really it went underground and festered sometimes it put on different coats like all right or white supremacy but it never really went away I have no idea where a 13 year old boy got these ideas from in the early 2000s but we lived in the south and maybe his parents were neo-nazis maybe he picked it up from South Park or found some early internet forum espousing these ideas I had several classes with this boy and he rode the same bus as me where he would take that opportunity to throw things at me so the abuse was pretty regular for the two years I attended that school but the moment that sticks out to me more and more as time passes was in that class after we read those scenes from Anne Frank and students tittered their way through the awkwardness of having to perform in front of each other and I read a vaguely romantic scene aloud as Peter with another girl after all of that my teacher showed us a holocaust documentary before this public school I had gone to a Hebrew school I was raised in a religiously observant home so the images in that Holocaust documentary weren't new to me unlike many Gentile children who might have the luxury of growing up without having to grapple with the concept of genocide I literally can't tell you how old I was when I learned about the Holocaust sometimes it feels like I was born with this knowledge but as the screen showed us images of dead bodies in an old man crying as he described his experiences that boy and his friends sitting behind me left it chills me to this day to imagine a human being looking at that and laughing but a 13 year old boy had apparently learned bigotry somewhere and he learned it so well that he and his friends inflicted this hatred on me for around two years so with that in mind I want to talk about Jo Jo rabbit and The Book Thief [Music] in the last 20 years or so I feel that Hollywood maybe learned the wrong lessons from Schindler's List I'm doing it because I've noticed that if you do film by the Holocaust guaranteed an Oscar in 2008 writer ao Scott wrote a piece for the New York Times about the worrying commodification of the Holocaust for mainstream entertainment Schindler's List for all its unsparing and powerful recreations of the horror of the Krakow ghetto is a story of heroism resilience and survival and too great many of the mainstream Holocaust movies that have followed including documentaries in some foreign films have emphasized hope and overcoming rather than despair and destruction when death dominates these films as it does in the boy in the Striped Pyjamas an apt successor to life is beautiful it is spiritual eyes and rendered aesthetically palatable by an overlay of maudlin sentiment more often the reality of mass death gives way to yet another affirmation of life and even faithfully rendered true stories are bent into conformity with familiar patterns themes and conventions forbidden love noble sacrifice victory against the odds the Holocaust is more accessible than ever and more entertaining at the end of the article Scott muses that this may be the only or at least the most widely available way of keeping the past alive in memory but it is also a kind of forgetting and I cannot say enough that it is important to remember the real people who survived this atrocity or died in it but in film recently at least of the more mainstream Hollywood variety there's this a trend that I don't like I mean let's be real I don't like how most people talk about the Holocaust . whether they are denying it making uninformed comparisons between it and current events or deciding that a dead child is your new gay icon which no get your gay icons elsewhere please or there are the people saying the importance of the Holocaust is overstated because other bad things have also happened to other people elsewhere which no it's not a contest and other terrible atrocities don't somehow cancel out the Holocaust when it comes to film at least I will say here that if somebody actually wanted to make a film about Romani people who were the other most targeted ethnicity under the Nazi regime I would be down for that but today I am going to be specifically talking as a Jewish person about Jews and movies about Jews or quite often about the very very nice non Jews who worked very hard to save the Jews ie the righteous Gentiles now the term righteous Gentile actually originates with organizations like Yad Vashem and the newly reformed State of Israel who bestowed this title on Gentiles that saved Jews from extermination at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust sometimes they are called the Righteous among the Nations the problem is not with these very real heroes of history whose importance cannot be overstated my issue is with the stories being told about that history rich Brownstein a lecturer for the Yad Vashem department of education said in an interview in Holocaust films you have a 1 in 8 chance of finding a righteous Gentile film these films give you the impression that if you walked on the street in Warsaw or Berlin during the Nazi era regardless of if you turned right or left you probably would find someone who would be sympathetic and would help in fact only about 600 Germans out of a population of 60 million were righteous Gentiles in that quote Brownstein seems to take issue with prevalence alone but when it comes to these stories I take issue with how Jews are treated within them whereas in Schindler's List a film by Steven Spielberg a Jewish man we got characters like Ben Kingsley's Itzhak Stern who had you know a personality was treated like a person lately in films like these it just seems like the Jews are OneNote objects to be saved by the heroic boys do they have any personality outside of being tragic and probably dying it's hard to say in fact most Jews in Holocaust films and Holocaust adjacent media don't get to have any personality beyond being tragic and tragically dying the culture and faith that they were murdered for being a part of is often almost entirely absent but you know maybe they'll throw in a menorah as a consolation prize there are rare exceptions to that but of the ones I've had the patience to sit through we are too often reduced to generic window dressing in our own stories and those stories are often reduced to sanitized fairy tales a recent example would be the 2017 film the zookeepers wife which varieties Peter debruge described as having the unfortunate failing of rendering its human drama less interesting than what happens to the animals and for a subject is damaging to her species as the Holocaust that's no small shortcoming there's a new film coming out in the near future called waiting for Anya's starring Noah Schnapp of stranger things Fame and Angelica Houston which I mean based on this trailer looks destined for a similar fate the actual film version of The Book Thief would fall under this category as well for how much it Disney Faiz a dark tale and reduces complex characters to bland outlines critic Alan a stone of the Boston review said the film represented a disturbing cultural phenomenon the appetite for a Holocaust narrative far removed from the one told by the Jews who experienced it within a decade almost all the Jews of Europe who survived and vowed never to forget will be dead their account is fading from historical consciousness most of America barely noticed just as they seemed not to have noticed The Book Thief is less about the Holocaust than about forgetting it which more or less sums up everything I hate about this current Hollywood trend and so with that in mind let's talk about the film Joe Joe rabbit and the novel version of The Book Thief and let's start with the usual summaries The Book Thief is a 2006 novel written by Australian author Markus Zusak loosely based off of stories from his German and Austrian parents it follows Liesel meminger a german girl who was removed from her mother's care and sent to live with Hans and Rosa who Berman during the time spent in their care she befriends a boy named Rudy and her foster parents decide to hide a Jewish young man by the name of max Vandenberg in their basement as world war ii kicks off oh and the whole thing is narrated by death that's a basic summary of the book we'll dig deeper of course but now let's turn our attention to the other end of the spectrum Jojo rabbit is a 20-19 film written directed by and starring Maori Jewish director Tycho YTD in the film a little boy named Jojo played by Roman Griffin Davis is a passionate member of the hit youth and has Hitler as an imaginary friend his mother Rosie played by Scarlett Johansson tries to quietly teach him about compassion and empathy in attempts to undercut his Nazi ideology while she hides a Jewish girl in the walls of their house it's an imaginative movie about an international conflict seeing through the eyes and understanding of a ten-year-old it's also loosely and I mean very loosely based on the novel caging skies by New Zealand author Christine Luna n--'s and both of these are technically righteous Gentile stories and yet what they have to say and how they say it is what I want to talk about today we're like you bituminous so I've mentioned one of my main issues with a lot of media about the Holocaust now I've got to talk about Jews specifically max Vandenberg and Elsa Corr I have difficulty expressing how much I love these two characters but here's my best shot both of these characters are vibrant complicated interesting Jewish people their experiences are not OneNote they are imperfect perfect beings first there's max from The Book Thief for the beginning third of the novel we don't even know his name but the narrator death will tell us about the struggler the Jewish fist fighter who is heading towards Himmel Street and his destiny when he arrives on the hubermanns doorstep death tells us his fingers smelled of suitcase metal mine come and survival max is 24 when we first meet him and he already carries himself like a defeated man he has a thorough grasp on what it means for others to hide him and his guilt over his own survival is an immense weight that we feel from the first page when we meet him like this a guided tour of suffering to your left perhaps you're right perhaps even straight ahead you find a small black room in it sits a Jew he is scum he is starving he is afraid please try not to look away and if that isn't enough once max comes to Himmel Street he learns that Liesel is in the Hitler Youth he's initially a little afraid of her because his predicament is so Carius in one scene Lisa asks max if the book he's been carrying around since he arrived is a good one that book being mine Kampf later death tells us he had nothing to give Liesel except maybe mine come and there was no way he'd give such propaganda to a young German girl that would be like the lamb handing a knife to the butcher but slowly a friendship is forged through the sharing of nightmares that plagued them both and a love of reading as a character Max is nothing but gentle and withdrawn we're told he was once a hothead a Jewish fist fighter but now he is a soft-spoken almost fragile character at night he dreams of boxing against Hitler with the understanding that he's already lost before he throws the first imagined punch in many dreams he ends up bloody and on the ground but even in the dreams where he defeats Hitler the crowd rises up and beats him anyway then there are the pictures he draws in the painted over pages of mine Kampf which are sometimes disturbing but they reflect a deep horror and pain that is not prettied up or made digestible for an audience he left his family behind to hide with his friend Walter and then later with the hubermanns and he knows that his family probably didn't survive it's an ugly pill to swallow and when he lives within shame every day also the stories he writes for Liesl are beautiful I've always been particularly fond of the stand over man with its bird imagery calling back Liesel's description of his hair being like feathers but also in a very literal sense max is living like a caged bird I've always found these very simple drawings and they're very simple story to be beautiful and heartbreaking on the other end of the spectrum we have Joe Joe rabbits Elsa Kaur who is in many ways a sister to the book Leafs max Vandenberg the difference is that the war did not SAP away her energy or her anger unlike max who was repressing a lot and only letting out his darker thoughts in dreams and drawings where it won't scare his young friend Elsa has no such compunction 'he's like you of course Jojo was also a much more ardent member of the Hitler Youth than Liesel because Liesel realized long before Max's arrival that in some way Hitler was responsible for the loss of her mother and brother so she comes to the conclusion that she hates Hitler early and only goes to the Hitler Youth out of a sense of obligation and the general understanding that disliking Hitler is a dangerous thing Jojo has no such understanding his mother is alive and well she told him that his father was off in Italy fighting the war and for Jojo the Hitler Youth is cool and fun and Jews are bad you sound scary huh find that one I'd kill it like that that's Jews are bad according to what he knows they have horns these mind control and they seek to destroy the righteous Aryan race it's [ __ ] that JoJo's been fed for years and never thought to question until Elsa showed up and continually turned his world upside down by existing by being strong and beautiful and intelligent and by subverting his every expectation in one of his first encounters with her he tries to threaten her with a knife but he's 10 and she's 17 so she simply takes the knife I think I'll hold on to this it's pretty he tries to trick her out of the house and that doesn't work either [Music] elsa has no sympathy for a ten-year-old who believes her existence is a blight on the world and she has no patience for it those who wrestle angels and kill giant we were toasting by gods you were chosen by specifically two men who can't see before a film especially Elsa keenly bitterly understands who is at fault for her current predicament and knows that they hate her simply for being who she is you turn you back in Germany forever the attend on me fist and yet she and Jojo gradually sort of where each other down into friendship both of them are lonely and isolated Jojo because of his new accidentally self-inflicted disability and Elsa because she is in hiding the friendship they form is tenuous Jojo is still trying to reconcile her existence and humanity with everything he has learned and Elsa is dealing with her small grief-stricken existence living in the walls of JoJo's home I tell you about the Jews but you are not privileged to know about myself in the latter half of the film there is a scene where a bunch of Gestapo officers enter their home to investigate JoJo's mother and her associates Elsa ends up impersonating JoJo's deceased sister Inga to explain her presence and has to go so far as to say Heil Hitler to a roomful of Nazis moments ago this was played as a joke but it's not cute anymore and then she has to stand there while they find JoJo's book where he's been documenting all of the very real facts he's learning about the evil evil Jews from Elsa and again earlier when Jojo and Elsa made up stories about Jews being like bats and living in caves it was cute framed by their youth and creativity but when a Nazi reads this stuff aloud with delight the tone of it changes and we have to watch this child stand there while these people take apart her personhood it's for because it's true what I love about Max and Elsa is that they are not background players in their stories their pain is not the artful noise on which a story of heroic [ __ ] is told their grief their horror their suffering is on full display for us to see we cannot look away from this these stories don't want you to they want you to see human beings who were being reduced to less than that Jews like Elsa and Max were believed to be a blight upon the existence of their own country they were seen as something evil and conniving and monstrous they were reduced to little more than cattle to be put down and the book thief and Joe Joe Rabbit demand your understanding and empathy for these people because when the actual Holocaust was so bent on reducing us to less than movies that do the same to tell stories about non-jews well it pisses me off to say the least meanwhile Joe Joe Rabbit and The Book Thief do you know such thing they tell dark unflinching stories and they tell them to us in new and imaginative ways Blane Winston Churchill [Music] so I wish I could get to every interesting element in both of these stories but there's so much in both of them like I'll tell you right here I will barely talk about Rosie and she's a great character not to mention it some of my favorite work I've seen from Scarlett Johansson in years and there are entire sections of The Book Thief novel that I won't talk about it all mostly because there's a lot of both the film and the book and I've got bigger fish to fry but one of the most interesting elements of both is how these stories make no attempts to be hard factual retellings of the events of the Holocaust they are both couched in their fiction and fable elements one could even call those elements magical realism if you haven't heard that term before magical realism is defined as a style of fiction that paints a realistic view of the modern world while also adding magical elements sometimes it's also called fabulus' 'm which is a great word basically magical realism could be anything from a totally realistic world where a woman's handbag happens to contain a fairyland to a secret underground tokyo beneath are very real one in Jo Jo rabbit there are elements of whimsy and imagination throughout the movie whether it's moments like this or this in the beginning we used to live in caves but the biggest element of magical realism is I don't think I can do this yes of course you can the most absurd and one could say fantastical element of Jo Jo rabbit is Jo Jo's imaginary friend Hitler the movie even reminds us from time to time that there is a difference between the real Hitler setting about some of the most horrific events in human history and this ten-year-olds idea of Hitler remember last year when that when I'm tired von stauffenberg tried to blow me up was a table bomb yeah you survived correctamundo but the only reason I survived apart from having bomb-proof legs is because I had waited out von stuffy imaginary Hitler is ridiculous what are you burning what are you burning and anachronistic get your [ __ ] together and sort out your priorities it's a very movie sort of invention and it's executed perfectly in the first let's say two-thirds of the film things are pretty light and sure there are clear references to the horror that are going on outside the purview of this boy but most of the movie is pretty silly and any time it gets too intense that was intense of course imaginary Hitler is an extension of the greater satirical work this film is doing but we'll get to that they need somebody to walk the clones in The Book Thief the magical realism is something of a different tone you see the story is narrated by death whether you're religious and believe in a real Grim Reaper or not zeus ax death is a very specific character one that can only exist in a fantastical fiction this death likes to observe the sky and wants a vacation from their jobs since humanity is really bumming them out that's the first thing they tell us in the books opening lines first the colors then the humans that's usually how I see things or at least how I try here is a small fact you are going to die I am in truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic though most people find themselves hindered and believing me no matter my protestations please trust me I most definitely can be cheerful I can be amiable agreeable affable and that's only the A's just don't ask me to be nice nice has nothing to do with me a reaction to the aforementioned fact does this worry you I urge you don't be afraid I am nothing if not fair and that's just how they start the story since death has knowledge about current and future events that the readers don't they'll give little asides to the reader like that one I just told you or sometimes a humorous aside about the Germans fondness for calling each other pigs or to inform us by the way I like this human idea of the Grim Reaper I like the site it amuses me and other times it means death will tell us that the sky was the colour of Jews and say things like forget the scythe goddamnit I needed a broom or a mop and I needed a vacation deaths omniscience as a narrator creates the sort of fairytale like quality for much of the story and as a narrator death makes it clear this is one and a handful of stories they carry with them it lends us as readers some distance from the material it's just a story we're being told by this imagined Grim Reaper who likes to watch the colour of the sky and hates their job much like the imaginary Hitler and Joe Joe Rabbit these elements lend the story fable-like qualities they might even be morality tales but for a long time these elements make the rest of the story easier to take more digestible if you will we don't have to dwell too hard on the Jews being marched to Dachau to concentrate or on the anti-semitism Joe Joe has learned so well that is we don't have to dwell until we do [Music] so before I can get into how these stories really get me in the feelings I've got to talk about this so I do think to an extent The Book Thief is attempting a similar message but you know 2006 was a different time in The Book Thief we poked holes in the Nazi ideology mostly by having all the main characters opposed it there are moments like the Jesse Owens incident which highlight the sort of backwards hypocritical ideas they espoused early on in the book we learned that Liesel's friend Rudy Steiner is obsessed with Jesse Owens the african-american athlete who won four gold medals in the sprint and long jump events in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin yeah female Jewish Jesse Owens Jack da Rippa basically one night Rudy covered himself in charcoal and went for a run because he wanted to be Jesse Owens and when his father Alec Steiner tries to explain to Rudy why he shouldn't pretend to be the athlete they have the following conversation you shouldn't want to be like black people or Jewish people or anyone who is not us who are Jewish people mr. Steiner was steering the bike with one hand and Rudy with the other he was having trouble steering the conversation he still hadn't relinquished the hold on his son's earlobe it's like you're German or Catholic oh is Jesse Owens Catholic I don't know he tripped on a bike pedal then and released Rudy's ear I just wish I was like Jesse Owens Poppa this time mr. Steiner placed his hand on Rudy's head and explained I know son but you've got beautiful blonde hair and big safe blue eyes you should be happy with that is that clear but nothing was clear later we get a more intense version of this sort of scene about a quarter into the novel Liesel does the meth and realizes her mother was a communist and that's why she was taken away and that's why they rode the train where her brother died and all of that is somehow Hitler's fault when Liesel puts all that together she tells Hans I hate the Fuhrer and Hans slaps her across the face and tells her she can never ever say something like that outside of the house he even makes her stand up and practice her Nazi salute no character we like in the book leaf is truly a Nazi although some may be party members out of necessity Hans will be beaten for trying to give a starving Jewish person bread while he Rosa and Liesel will hided you in their basement so at their core these characters were supposed to care about go against Nazi ideology there are moments here and there with characters who do support Hitler like the hubermanns son Hans jr. after a scene where he lectures his father for not being a fully fledged member of the Nazi Party he storms out of 33 Himmel Street and death informs us that he will die freezing in Stalingrad or fraud Diller the owner of the corner shop who was an ardent Nazi she dies along with so many others when Himmel Street is bombed and death has this to say about it Frau Diller was fast asleep her bulletproof glasses were shattered next to the bed her shop was obliterated the counter landing across the road and her framed photo of Hitler was taken from the wall and thrown to the floor the man was positively mugged and beaten to a glass shattering pulp I stepped on him on my way out Hitler himself only really appears and asides from death our narrator or in Max's nightmares and drawings the effects of his reign are everywhere in the book but he isn't and in a time before this I thought we didn't need more than that to prove fascism was stupid you know for a while it was generally agreed that Nazis were bad these days but now we need to be a little more pointed in our critiques of fascism and how does one go about that myself I'll try not to repeat too much of Lindsay Ellis's excellent video on Mel Brooks and the ethics of satire but a point she touches on is the fact that many depictions of Nazis and movies like American History X are inglorious basterds or the musical cabaret are actually enjoyed by Nazis because in those films the Nazis are depicted as powerful and intimidating and possibly even cooler charismatic whereas films like The Producers to be or not to be or the dictator are despised by them and you know what else Nazis aren't gonna like jojo's imaginary friend Hitler as played brilliantly by Tycho YTD is a childish idiot a cartoonish buffoon he's immature sniffling hire me and so very far from cool people used to say a lot of nasty things about me oh this guy's a lunatic oh look at that psycho he's gonna get us all killed week one down of our anti [ __ ] satire Jojo rabbit ytt said on Twitter on June 1st 2018 can't wait to share it with the world also what better way to insult Hitler than having him portrayed by a Polynesian Jew hashtag [ __ ] you [ __ ] ler and it's not just white et's portrayal of Hitler all the Nazis are portrayed as stupid and backwards thinking a Jew enticed him and he became a massive drunk and a gambler and he cheated on his wife and then he drowned in an unrelated accident what they're spouting is not a far cry from what Nazis believed but it stated so blatantly that it sounds ridiculous and the actors all hit just the right tone of absurdity for moments like this one hi hello I live that I live I live a little or this one's definitely not a good time to be see what do you say to people who just flat out say what's so funny about Nazi Germany I say have you looked at the uniforms if you observed the ridiculous they were sure they had a lot of power and the brutal and calculating and responsible for millions of deaths but one way of taking power away from those people is to laugh at them and says to make a mockery of them and then there's Captain K who I will get to in a minute thinking I meant with neat dogs go into cities detect not actually German Shepherds oh we're gonna talk about captain K Jassi weight and of course all of this is in addition to Elsa core being everything that she is which leads Jojo to question the bigotry he learned you're not a Nazi Jojo you're a ten year old kid who likes fast ACCA's and likes dressing up in a funny uniform and wants to be part of a club but you are not one of them reality starts to conflict with the suppose that facts he's been taught and that's when the gloves start to come off and the satire becomes much sharper is one thing George Amma as Jojo becomes increasingly disillusioned with the Nazi ideology his imaginary friend gets a lot less friendly she doesn't seem like a bad person you call yourself a patriot yet where is the evidence until at the end of the movie when his imaginary friend shows up one last time and you're gonna tell me exactly what's going on with you and that thing in the Attic that thing so good you're in love with her aren't you yes we'd make it I just said yes and you know because this movie is a goddamn masterpiece this happens hire me old times sake like I want to imagine that there is a way to change people's minds I want to imagine that people out there spewing backwards hateful rhetoric against Jews or black people or Asian people or whatever I want to believe that they can be taught to think differently you've probably read those stories from former neo-nazis about how they reform themselves there's that movie burden with Forrest Whitaker and Garrett Hedlund which came out earlier this year about a reformed former member of the KKK and in all honesty I don't know how to change the minds of people like this if I did I would be doing something a hell of a lot bigger than making dumb YouTube videos but I do think as young people are being radicalized online that this movie could be shown to a young person and they might actually learn the lessons it's trying to teach and I'm not the only one since the USC Shoah foundation is now teaching this film basically I have hope for young people like I'm not angry at that kid from my middle school anymore he was a child and so was i but I'm furious that nobody intervened to try and teach him something better maybe if somebody had I wouldn't be here today telling you about two years of solid horrific misery but rather about an isolated incident that responsible adults like our teachers or his parents put a stop to maybe that's just me being an idealist but I wouldn't be making these videos if I was a cynic so with all that said let's talk about how these stories pull the rug out from under us either very slowly or very suddenly so both pieces in their own way ease you into their worlds in the book leaf it's through the gentle wit of a fantastical narrator and in Joe Joe Rabbit it's through absurdism and the imagination of the protagonist it creates a sense of unreality so we get those reminders here and there about what's really happening but the reader or viewer is kept at a distance the bad things are happening somewhere far away and Liesl and Joe Joe along with those that are closest to them are ostensibly doing okay there's a point in the middle of both the book and the film where it feels like the characters have achieved a fragile balance Joe Joe and Elsa are becoming friends across an impossible divide and Liesl and Max tell each other stories in the basement of their house on Himmel Street there are moments of fear like when the hubermanns fanatical son visits or when Max gets sick and Rosa and Hans have a serious discussion about how they could even dispose of his corpse that he died without implicating themselves in Joe Joe Rabbit the fear is in many ways Joe Joe himself his distrust of Elsa causes him to try and talk to his superiors at the Hitler Youth this act alone in dangers Elsa his mother and possibly himself that's fascinating but did you come by this information research in The Book Thief the change comes gradually because the narrator death likes to skip ahead sometimes death is constantly hinting and foreshadowing and sometimes outright telling us who was going to die and maybe even how about a third of the way through the book death gives us this aside a small announcement about Rudy Steiner he didn't deserve to die the way he did but the story gets increasingly grim like it's reaper narrator with each new turn in the story a little piece of safety and security gets stripped away the first event that cuts through that safety in equilibrium is Max leaving Liesl and the who Berman's earlier when a parade of Jews headed for Dachau were marched through the town Hans gave one of them a piece of bread and was publicly beaten for it afterwards he was convinced that Gestapo would come and investigate their home and find in their basement so max decided to leave he left Hans a note which simply said you've done enough initially it's unclear if he successfully escaped to a safe place or if he was caught by the Nazis Liesel spends a big part of the book after he leaves watching carefully when Jews are marched through town looking for him in the crowd and hoping not to see him in the meantime Hans is drafted into the German army along with Rudy's father another layer of Grimm added on to a darkening story and then one warm morning one beautiful day for a parade Liesel sees max being marched to Dachau his is the only face looking not at the ground but at the crowd of Germans watching them because he's looking for Liesel it's incredibly bleak as we realize he was unable to escape to a safe place as we realize where he's headed Liesel runs out into the crowd screaming his name and trips and Max helps her up I can't believe the words dripped from Max Vandenberg's mouth look how much you've grown there was an intense sadness in his eyes they swelled Liesel they got me a few months ago the voice was crippled but it dragged itself towards her halfway to Stuttgart the soldiers throw her out of the crowd but Lisa refuses to stay there she steps forward again and calls out to max reciting the lines from his book the word Shaker and max kisses her hand and cries they both end up getting viciously beaten by the Nazi soldiers and Rudy tackles Liesel dragging her away from the scene before she can get hurt anymore that's the moment when the tides truly turn in The Book Thief because bad things have been happening death reminds us often that people are dying in Russia and in concentration camps and bombs are dropping on Germany but now on Himmel Street Liesel's grumpy neighbor fra hops aful loses one of her sons in the war and then the other kills himself one day an enemy fighter plane crashes in the forest near mul King Rudy and Liesel find the pilot as he's dying and Rudy gives him a teddy bear that he'd been carrying as a narrator death is still poetic but the wit is mostly gone they're often charming asides are now desperate pleas and sad remembrances as they tiredly recount to us what little story there is left they told us early on that Rudy would die and they've hinted throughout the book that Liesel's time at Himmel Street was limited but at the start of part 10 the final section of the book before the epilogue they tell us that for a hop shuffle tommy mueller Rudy Steiner and Hans and Rosa Huberman will die they tell us that they held the souls of Liesel's mama and papa they say they were soft and they say above me I could hear them through the overcast sky I looked up and saw the tin-can planes I watched their stomachs open and the bombs dropped casually out they were off target of course they were off an off target a small sad hope no one wanted to bomb Himmel Street no one would bomb a place named after heaven would they would they so the final turn of the book thief is the bombing of hemel Street which Liesel happens to survive because she spent the night writing in the basement death tells us that coming to take Rudy Steiner hurt he does something to me that boy every time it's his only detriment he steps on my heart he makes me cry they tell us that they picked up rose amid snore and that honza's soul sat up to meet them those kinds of souls always do but everybody Lisa loves is dead she cries over their bodies until she is led away by the LSE and in the process she drops the book that she wrote her story in and death picks it up from there the story is almost over we'll pick it up again soon enough in Jojo rabbit the change is not gradual we are suddenly and violently torn away from any semblance of safety we might have felt Jojo and Elsa managed to trick the Gestapo away from their home and for the moment we feel that sense of safety restored and then the other shoe drops Joe Joe's mother Rosie has been hung in the Town Square and in yet another moment of sensitivity from the director we only see her shoes well I don't like the idea of seeing people hanging and particularly for a kids to find a parent like that I feel like even though it's a character it's a very intimate and personal thing I sort of don't feel that we had permission really to see what he saw a clever bit of filmmaking has been how much the movie has highlighted her shoes with close-ups of her walking or dancing so the audience knows her from just her shoes without showing us her corpse there's actually some upsetting bits of foreshadowing when it comes to her eventual fate in two scenes she walks above him by the side of the road and by the pool giving us shots like this a visual reference to this moment that would soon follow also this moment here when they see another group of people have been hung in the square Joe Joe asks what did they do what they could and later when Rosie impersonates Joe Joe's father to mediate an argument they're having she says and while I'm gone I need you to take care of my Rosie Thanks she's doing it seems Rosie's rebellion was found out in some capacity earlier Jojo saw her distributing fliers that said be free to duel and become - I part I which roughly translates to liberate Germany fight the party all we know for sure is that this is the moment the rug gets pulled out from under us Joe Joe goes home heartbroken and in a brief but upsetting scene he lashes out and tries to stab Elsa she stops him and he collapses to the floor and cries and Elsa could have been angry with him and understandably so or held this against him but she doesn't she just sits with him it's a quiet moment of Herculean empathy that is as beautiful as it is sad off-screen he tells Elsa what happened to Rosie so we find the two of them here huddled together watching a dog fight that's happening far away but the war is in sight now before it was strictly something we heard about and now it's visible on the horizon time passes Jojo and Elsa survive as best they can and take solace in each other that is until the war arrives at their doorstep it's really upsetting to watch this little boy navigate a literal warzone there are still jokes here and there like this one but the overall tone is increasingly disturbing and it's here that Jojo learns Hitler committed suicide he can't [ __ ] blow his brains out no that's impossible no the mouths his friends he doesn't really have time to absorb that because you know it's utter chaos and in the middle of all of this we see captain K so if you were paying attention you might have noticed a few things about captain K throughout the film particularly with his relationship to his right-hand man officer Finkel gay Nazi is an oxymoron you don't really hear that phrase very often so it's really fascinating it's something that is never overtly expressed although and I got great job I mean you know the idea behind the character was that he had become disillusioned with the Nazis he might have joined initially for that naive idea of heroics but he stayed out of necessity between 1933 and 1945 an estimated 100,000 men were arrested for violating Nazi Germany's law against homosexuality and of these approximately 50,000 were sentenced to prison an estimated five to fifteen thousand men were sent to concentration camps on similar charges where an unknown number of them perished so the idea is that Captain K is a closeted gay man who at this point gets his jollies by creating wild costumes and generally being useless at his job of being a Nazi and there are moments throughout the movie that communicate his disillusionment one moment that stands out is of course when he doesn't out Elsa here days of birth 19 K can clearly see on her papers that she's gotten the date wrong here but he says correct Thank You Inga and there's a moment that's terrifying in retrospect when he's prepared to hand her identification to the Gestapo officer if he demands it but luckily for Elsa and Jojo he's distracted by their little books so after everybody hiles their way out the door we get this scene stay home Jojo look after your family look after this knife he tells Jojo to stay inside so he won't see Rosie's body hung in the square and then captain K disappears from the movie for a little while until this moment captain K and Finkel are out in the middle of a war zone being flashy and literally accomplishing nothing like I can't see if captain K is aiming at anything but Finkel sure isn't so then we get to this scene where an American soldier grabs Jojo because he's wearing the Nazi uniform he throws him in with a bunch of other Nazi soldiers they grabbed and captain K is among them come to the end but is over he's scared don't be scared captain K tells Jojo he's sorry about Rosie she was a good person an actual good bus and Jojo may not understand what's happening here but K does he takes a minute to try and comfort Jojo come on let's take a look at you you're a good kid now go on look after that sister of yours and then this happens the Jew you know this Nazi don't know this dirty Jew Oh captain K knows he can't save himself but he can save the little boy who's too young to have done any real harm the little boy whose mother didn't deserve to die he didn't have to do this he could have stood by and let Jojo die with the rest of them and for this boy so much has happened he's not had time to process anything and he really doesn't understand in this moment that he's being saved go home and from there Jojo goes home to Elsa and well Joe du Huan Huan Oh we'll get to that history is hard to reckon with sometimes it comes with these huge numbers that no human mind can truly comprehend we throw around the numbers six million and we say never forget but can you comprehend six million individual lives in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum there is a memorial built specifically for the Jewish children who were murdered you walk through a dark hall and somewhere in this hall is a lit candle or two then hundreds of mirrors are placed strategically around that hall to reflect the candle a thousand times over you walk through this hall you look at thousands of reflected candles and a voiceover a speaker reads the names and ages of dead children I went to the yad vashem museum when I was 18 and I experienced what has so often happened when I engage with my people's history on the grand scale you start to shut down after a while you look at a hall filled with thousands of books so many books each of them with pages and pages filled line by line with the names of the dead or you see an enormous pile of shoes that were taken from those that were murdered in the camps in the documentary I've shown you some clips of night and fog you see piles and piles of things that were taken from the dead and fair effects that are difficult to take in like the fact that they used human hair shaved from prisoners as a textile resource it was used for things like insulation and clothing even the most graphic images of bodies after a while just become shapes it's too horrific for the mind to truly comprehend and understand and in the face of that we still need to learn this history and more than that we need to try and understand and comprehend that's what these stories are for we're at the height of human civilization and advancement it could never happen again which is exactly what they said in 1933 nothing can be as bad as the first world war they're ignorant and the arrogance to forget allows us to forget is really what is basically it's a big human flaw so I think it's very important to keep telling these stories again and again they didn't say let's never forget you know just as a joke I said in a previous video that every Jewish person is touched by the Holocaust and that is still true it happened to us and to our families the survivors of it are dying out and those survivors are grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles and so it's up to us to remember I would show a kid Joe Joe Rabbit when they're old enough to understand it because it tells in it's magical realism way of a very small piece of what the war looked like in Germany and what it looked like for one Jewish girl living in its walls and for one German boy learning to overcome bigotry some stories might be exaggerated and some might be fiction but I'm sure there were Elsa Coors and Max Vandenberg's out there right alongside those Anne Frank's and Shoshana Rabinowitz and we as people can grapple with individuals more than we can ever truly understand six million and so these stories are important even the fictional ones they allow us to comprehend one of the greatest horrors in human history beyond keywords like genocide and it seems that people do still want to tell these stories but I hope as they do they move in the direction of Joe Joe rabbit and The Book Thief or the direction of films like defiance and son of Saul I quoted a Oh Scott at the beginning of this essay his worry seemed to be that telling these stories packaged for mainstream entertainment was a form of forgetting and I think it can be when victims of this genocide are so divorced from their culture and rendered generic when they are minimized and their pain is little more than background noise if you're going to tell a story about people who were mass murdered then treat them like people remember that every one of those six million had family and friends and likes and dislikes right about human beings not onenote objects that can be heroically saved or tragically murdered we have to keep remembering keep finding new and inventive ways of telling the same story and teaching ourselves and our children lessons for how to how to grow and how to move forward unified and with love into the future and when it comes to Jo Jo rabbit and The Book Thief specifically listen I love The Book Thief a lot it has been a really formative book since I read it in the summer before I started college it has influenced me as a writer and a storyteller and I only read a few scattered lines from the book but it is some of the most beautifully written prose for example here's how we are first introduced to Himmel Street the buildings appear to be glued together mostly small houses and apartment blocks that look nervous there is murky snow spread out like carpet there is concrete empty hat stand trees and gray air and when I first read The Book Thief I hadn't seen a Jewish character like max before and he's still very special to me for that reason with that in mind let me take a second here to tell you the ending of The Book Thief which gets me a lot to this day after Liesel is taken from mole King she eventually ends up working with Alec Steiner in his tailor shop Rudy's father was the only other survivor from Himmel Street because he was still out soldiering somewhere when the bombs dropped but he and Liesel reunite on a silvery afternoon where she tells him she gave his son a kiss after he died it embarrassed her but she thought he might have liked to know there were wooden teardrops and an oaky smile so one day about a year later Liesel is working in Alex's shop when a young man walks in a man with swampy eyes feathers of hair and a clean-shaven face walked into the shop he approached the counter is there someone here by the name of Liesel meminger yes she's in the back said Alex he was hopeful but he wanted to be sure may I ask who's calling on her Liesel came out they hugged and cried and fell to the floor all that's left from there is the epilogue where we learn Liesel grew to be an old woman in Sydney Australia before death would come for her they show her the book her book which I've been carrying all this time the one they've been reading to us did you read it she asked but she did not look at me her eyes were fixed to the words I nodded many times could you understand it and at that point there was a great pause a few cars drove by each way their drivers were Hitler's and hubermanns and Max's killers dealers and Steiners I wanted to tell The Book Thief many things about beauty and brutality but what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating an under estimating the human race that rarely do I ever simply estimate it I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious and its words and stories so damning and brilliant none of those things however came out of my mouth all I was able to do was turn to Liesel meminger and tell her the only truth I truly know I set it to The Book Thief and I say it now to you a last note from your narrator I am haunted by humans and that's the end of the story a meditation on the extremes of humanity it's beautiful I still love it but where we stand today Jojo rabbit is what resonates in my soul so let's talk about the end of jojo rabbit so after this and this and also this Jojo goes home to Elsa who's waiting for him and Jojo Huan Huan or in this moment Elsa is the only person Jojo has left in the world and he's scared that telling her the truth means she will take her newfound freedom and leave him waited it's a horrifying act from a scared child for this moment he lies and tells her Germany won and for Elsa that means a life lived in walls at best and even that may not last Jojo just wants her to stay but for Elsa this is a death sentence and the movie doesn't shy away from that we are all forced to sit in this lie to imagine what a victory for Germany would mean for this Jewish girl and for Jojo it's the moment when he finally has to let go to let go of everything he learned us young boys who will rule the world and everything he believed you call yourself a patriot yet where is the evidence and then he decides to write Elsa a letter sort of I haven't really talked about Nathan yet have I nathan is that my fantasy Elsa is 17 and apparently before all this there was a boy she was engaged to named Nathan he died the year before of tuberculosis early on in the film she boasts about Nathan - Jo Jo where is he you proposed to me on the banks of the fruits he not done like a proper gentleman recited a poem by Rilke when I said yes we danced into the night it's a bit of empty posturing because she doesn't want to show weakness to this little Nazi boy and then Jojo decides to try and take the wind out of her sails by writing a fake letter from Nathan I don't want to marry you anymore I found a new woman and we laugh a lot and do the tongue kiss of course he has no idea Nathan is dead and there is no way else is fooled but something about this it's like my favorite poet really kisses we need in love to practice only this letting each other go strikes a nerve and Jojo understanding that he went too far and feeling bad about it goes and writes another letter I don't want to break up of you now I need you to stay a life this one is also obviously fake I never get married sometime even though I am truly unemployed and have nothing going on for me as time passes and his crush on Elsa develops Jojo begins to get a little jealous of Nathan no news when Nathan today I'm afraid he's probably doing something amazing like reading a book girl bid and so after he lies to Elsa he can [ __ ] another letter from Nathan I know you feel like giving up but you have to carry all me and your good friend Jojo have devised a plan for you to escape and don't worry about Jojo he'll be okay and it's only then that Elsa tells him that Nathan's dead well and she thanks him you've been so good to me and Jojo confesses that he's in love with her I know you think of me as a younger brother which is fine and if you do as younger brother is younger brother and then he tells her to get her things together because they're leaving he goes into his room and his old friend comes back one last time do you think you're going it's honestly this moment here made external for us to see this is the last lesson he needs to unlearn he's what's gonna happen you little [ __ ] you gonna put this on okay you're gonna forget about that disgusting jewy cow up there and you're gonna come back to me where you belong this is Jo Jo and the audience seeing Hitler for what he was in the end a pathetic little man with nothing but an empty hollow ideology heil me old times sake immediately man until my favorite line and then he goes to Elsa who was waiting for him and we get this beautiful little call back to Rosie in the beginning of the film when Jojo ties else's shoes and then is it dangerous extremely dangerous extremely and they step outside for Elsa this is probably the first time in months she's been outside of that house and in a matter of seconds it's obvious that Jojo lied and Germany lost so that happens and yep probably deserves and then Jojo asks what do we do now and Elsa well she learned from JoJo's mother about living about being a woman he looked at tiger in the eye and Trust without fear that's what it is to be a woman and maybe she even learned about dogs except if it were free or maybe Elsa carried this innately within herself as well like all the old stories when Jews survive overwhelming odds there is singing and dancing to thank God for being alive and earlier Jojo asked her what's the first thing you do in your free time so here on the store step and finally free free from the Nazis reign of terror and free from the terrible lessons they taught Elsa and Jojo dance and we get a final quote from Elsa and Nathan's favorite Jewish poet Rainer Maria Rilke let everything happen to you beauty and terror just keep going no feeling is final and that's the end of the movie and here's the takeaway they say you can't live that you won't live if that comes true and they win as long as there's someone alive somewhere than they lose they didn't get you yesterday or two taking late tomorrow the same because right now there are people out there who want Jewish people dead and so this does show God we have quit it's what I carry with me something I had always felt but never been able to fully Express there are a lot of people in the world right now who seem bent on eradicating everyone who is different everyone who doesn't fit into their mold of what is right and acceptable whether it's through immigration policies or an unchecked police force or a healthcare system so destructive that we weren't prepared or able to handle a pandemic that happened this year even though the government in America specifically had been warned months in advance and by the way I would think this is stating the obvious but we live in the darkest timeline so let me just say that you should give a [ __ ] about Jewish people right-wing conservatives have their own brand of anti-semitism but progressives frequently leave us out when talking about minorities because of the whiteness of many Ashkenazi Jews and that is a racer for the thousands of Jews of color like you know Tycho YTD we also make up about 0.2% of the world population and as such are a minority that deserves your consideration and it's not enough to say that you want to punch Nazis you need to listen to Jewish people in your life when we talk about the issues that concern us anti-semitism is a problem that predates the Holocaust by thousands of years and it has certainly outlasted the Holocaust if personal experience in the last four years have taught us anything and in the face of all that horror I keep coming back to this those of us that are still here every day we survive is a miracle one that should be celebrated and if you're one of those minorities that right-wing groups hate then every day of your continued existence is a victory survive out of spite if you can if that's what it takes in these troubled times remember to just keep going and that no feeling is final but most of all remember to dance or sing to celebrate being free and being alive as for me well to steal a line from John Darnielle I intend to make it through this year if it kills me [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Ladyknightthebrave

Views: 426,324

Rating: 4.9597955 out of 5

Keywords: Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi, thomasin mckenzie, Roman Griffin Davis

Id: zcOVAt13U3w

Length: 64min 59sec (3899 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/thebobbrom]

Not my video obviously but this was an incredibly moving video and I thought it needed to be shared.