“Cruelty and Goodness,” “Beauty and Terror”: Initiation and Moral Awakening in Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit
“Cruelty and Goodness,” “Beauty and Terror”: Initiation and Moral Awakening in Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit

Summary/Abstract: Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit (2019) portrays the initiation process of Jojo, a ten-year-old Nazi fanatic boy, whose mother hides a Jewish girl in the attic of their house, during the final stages of World War II. Befriended by an imaginary Adolf Hitler and being a member of the Hitler Youth camp, Jojo, in the beginning, is a proud child indoctrinated by the Nazi ideology. Then Jojo, through his interactions with his mother Rosie and the Jewish girl Elsa, changes, welcoming love instead of hate, further becoming aware of moral choices. Both Rosie’s peaceful worldview that embraces active goodness in the face of cruelty and Elsa’s educatory companionship guide Jojo in his initiation process, which finalizes in his emancipation from the Nazi ideology. The film portrays, on the one hand, institutional cruelty (not the cruelty in the battlefields and concentration camps), in which the young generation also learns to internalize the justification of cruelty, but also goodness represented by the courageous mother who dares to be a victim of cruelty to fight against it. Arguing that Jojo’s initiation is shaped by the conflict of cruelty and goodness, this study scrutinizes Jojo’s initiation through the philosopher Philip Hallie’s ethical lens, in which he reexamines cruelty with its multilayered aspect, analyzing institutional cruelty and ways of goodness that would serve as an attitude to cruelty.

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