Story Spotlight: Jojo Rabbit

Was Jojo Rabbit rightly shunned?

I recently rewatched Jojo Rabbit with my family. Before it was widely acclaimed and won an Oscar, my husband and I first saw it at Spokane’s Magic Lantern Theater. For those unfamiliar, this theater is, in a word, “alternative.” It’s the kind of place where they don’t bother with tickets because they’ll “remember you,” and as a bonus, you get to sit strangely close to your neighbor.

Both my husband and I immediately loved the movie and thought it was incredibly well done. We were surprised, therefore, that it wasn’t playing in larger theaters and that it stirred up so much controversy. A few critics labeled it “anti-Semitic,” and one reviewer called it “Extremely wrong satire about the Nazis and Hitler.”

The Language of Story

But this controversy touches on something I’m always jumping up and down about: as modern Americans, we often don’t understand how stories work. As I’ve discussed before, including in my article about misunderstandings of fairy tales like Snow White, we tend to interpret stories in two fundamentally flawed ways:

• First, we assume that they’re a literal, point-for-point depiction of reality.

• Second, because of this, we reduce stories into nothing more than collections of stances on specific issues.

This tendency stems from a broader cultural habit of reducing everything to its “gist,” as though clarity always means brevity.

It’s the same mindset that assumes bullet points are better than paragraphs. Flannery O’Connor once responded to a student asking for the “gist” of one of her stories by simply directing them back to the story itself. Her point? The story IS the gist.

Sometimes, saying less makes things clearer—and we’ve got that one down. But there are also times when saying more means saying it better.

The Problem with Modern Lit Crit

I recently read a Substack article titled Leave Literature Alone, in which writer Liza Libes reflected on studying literature in academia. Like C.S. Lewis before her, she criticized the modern habit of slapping contemporary opinions onto older stories like a template, which has become the norm in literary criticism today. She sums it up this way:

“If you tell me that the purpose of literature is to comment on the political dimension of a given social structure or to use language as a means of fighting for justice, I will stand my ground and tell you that literature is, rather, a group of beautiful sentences that provide a universal observation about human nature.”

The modernist approach to literature simply makes me want to give up on the human race. When we do this, all we get is a shallow mirroring of our own views. Stories become little more than vehicles for modern checklists, losing their essence entirely.

This approach doesn’t just ruin stories; it vandalizes and diminishes them, robbing generations of the joy of storytelling. Worse, it has shaped our collective tastes, steering us toward clear, reductive stories that are easily digestible but just plain bad.

We’ve turned stories into something akin to spending a long afternoon with an aunt who constantly spouts her opinions and takes herself very seriously while never even trying to understand a different viewpoint. Real fun at a party.

What’s the Deal with Jojo Rabit?

If, at this point, you’re wondering what this has to do with Jojo Rabbit, I would say that’s fair. I’ll start with one clarifying point. I’m not saying that a film like Jojo Rabit does not reflect any views or opinions at all—it does.

In another recent article, I criticized morality tales for kids. My intention was not to state that stories shouldn't have morals. In the same way, I’m not arguing that stories do not convey specific viewpoints.

And for the record, no, this film is not anti-semitic or pro-Nazi—quite the reverse. To think so reflects a massive misunderstanding.

We need to back up before we rush in. We cannot begin to understand what the movie is conveying without first understanding how to read the language of stories.

And it gets even more complicated because Jojo Rabbit introduces yet another twist to storytelling: satire.

If we don’t know what to do with stories in general, we seem utterly lost when it comes to satire, especially in the States.

This was initially going to be one article, but I’ve decided to break it into two, which might make me guilty of a bait and switch. In the next piece, I’ll take a deeper dive into satire as a literary device, exploring why we desperately need it, why the medievals embraced it, and how it can benefit us as a society today.

Stay tuned!