Jojo and the fake news rabbit hole
senior lecturer in film and media at Victoria University
There could be nothing more whimsical, and nothing more profoundly insightful, than a Ma¯ ori Jew playing Adolf Hitler on screen. With slapstick humour worthy of Buster Keaton, this is what Taika Waititi presents in his latest role as writer, director and cast member of Jojo Rabbit.
While many reviews of the film have focused on Waititi’s role as Hitler (both positively and less favourably), far more important is the burgeoning relationship between Jojo Betzler, a 10-year-old member of the Deutsches Jungvolk junior section of Hitler Youth, and Elsa Korr, a Jewish teenager hidden in the upper floor of Jojo’s house.
Central to their relationship is Jojo’s attempt to write an expose´ on the Jews and Elsa’s defiant, witty, and even gentle, subversion of his preconceptions. When Jojo illustrates his book with pictures of Jews hanging, bat-like, from the ceiling, wonders where their horns are hidden, and Nazi-splains that Jewish doctors use foreskins as earplugs, Elsa unceasingly rebukes him without losing a sense of the mysticism so deeply embedded in her culture.
How absurd that Jojo and his contemporaries could possibly believe these things. But how equally absurd that some of us in the 21st century believe the Earth is flat, that vaccines are simply a mechanism to profit Big Pharma, and that the Holocaust was a hoax. Central to these beliefs are growing portfolios of evidence in the form of discredited research papers, viral anecdotes, attempts to call legitimate counterclaims fake news, and actual fake news.
Yet, as any media or internet scholar knows, fake news is hardly new. We have a long history of studying propaganda and its ability to inform the beliefs of large swaths of people.
Jojo Rabbit is not providing a unique take when it points out that antisemitic misinformation had a devastating effect on the German people in the leadup to and during World War II.
What is significant is that the film reminds us it is not the medium, nor even the message, that is important but rather the human-led dispersal of lies. From the absurd montage in the Jungvolk training camp at the beginning of the film – where preposterous depictions of Jews are provided in a classroom setting – to the moment when Captain Deertz of the Gestapo sniggers appreciatively at Jojo’s bat-Jew drawings, there is always a human agent driving the spread of malicious information, and another human agent either unquestioningly absorbing it or actively redistributing it.
This takes us (not unironically, considering his Judaism) to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent appearance in the United States House of Representatives to defend Facebook’s lack of regulation for its political advertising.
Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s takedown of Zuckerberg, in which she got him to agree it would be possible for her to run ads stating that Republicans voted for her Green New Deal, demonstrates the absurdity of him allowing his company to enable the wide distribution of false information for political gain.
Although Zuckerberg has been the face of this recent controversy, we often default to assuming the medium is the primary problem. As The Great Hack documentary shows, social media has dramatically increased the speed and efficiency with which personalised manipulative messages can be distributed.
In light of this, regulation (particularly selfregulation) is to be welcomed, such as Twitter’s recent riposte to Facebook via its announcement that it will ban all political advertising, or Cloudflare’s removal of technological support for 8chan so the site could no longer support white supremacist and alt-Right groups.
Similarly, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s Christchurch Call has important aims in its desire to prevent social media from promoting terrorism and violent extremism.
Nonetheless, focusing on the medium provides a certain smokescreen. New media and production technologies have long been used to accelerate the impact of propaganda and fake news. Social media will soon be old media, and a new medium will take its place, with an equally potent ability to allow hate speech and its insidious implications to flourish.
There is nothing wrong with paying attention to the technological infrastructure and particularities of each medium, but when this becomes the overriding focus it hides the fact it is human beings (not algorithms, not sophisticated bots) who begin, spread and absorb misinformation.
The only true solution is serious investment in education – at all levels, from primary to tertiary – that teaches each and every one of us to be critical readers so we are able to look beyond the medium to see who is telling us the message, what evidence (if any) is behind it, and why we are being told it.
In the short term, this also means support and funding for activist, intercultural and gender-diverse organisations that are exposing and counteracting contemporary fake news.
It also means sharing the stories that remind us about the human connection that is at the core of all of this.
This is why a whimsical comedy about World War II is sharply relevant today. As Waititi says, ‘‘Isn’t it weird that in 2019 someone still has to make a movie trying to explain to people not to be a Nazi?’’