PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE YEAR’S SCARIEST HORROR FILM IS THE ZONE OF INTEREST  
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Alissa Wilkinson
December 15, 2023
Vox
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_ Jonathan Glazer’s new film dismantles simple cliches about the
banality of evil. _

The Zone of interest, IGN

 

_The Zone of Interest_, Jonathan Glazer’s first film in 10 years, is
ostensibly based on a book: Martin Amis’s stomach-churning 2014
novel of the same name. But understanding the movie’s formal and
thematic genius requires looking at it differently: as a sidelong
horror-film adaptation of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 _Eichmann in
Jerusalem_, one that goes way beyond that book’s well-worn idea of
the “banality of evil.” That phrase, lifted from _Eichmann_’s
subtitle, furnishes most people’s entire Arendt knowledge base: the
idea that evil presents itself not as a devil with horns and a
pitchfork, but in seemingly egoless, “mediocre” men like Adolf
Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution
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who carry out unspeakable atrocities.

That’s not wrong, but it’s much too simple, verging on cliche —
ironic, given Arendt’s warnings. In her reporting on Eichmann’s
trial, Arendt noted how he spoke only in “stock phrases and
self-invented cliches,” the kinds of euphemisms that Arendt said
indicated a refusal to think for oneself. In this, Eichmann was a true
company man; the Third Reich was notorious for inventing language and
speech codes that made following the rules seem inevitable. The Nazi
Sprachregelung_, _or its particular bureaucratic vocabulary, was
euphemistic in the extreme. Killing became “dispatching”; forced
migration became “resettlement”; the mass murder of the Jews
became Eichmann’s “final solution.” When you call what you’re
doing to millions of your neighbors “special treatment,” you
don’t have to think about what it really is. You might even start to
enjoy the challenge of doing it more officially.

This Sprachregelung is all over _The Zone of Interest_, in part
because its characters don’t talk about murder or genocide, but also
because Glazer — whose previous film was the brilliantly
unsettling _Under the Skin_
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the characters’ internal distance through the movie’s images and
sounds. The result is unsettling in the extreme. It takes a few
minutes of watching to realize what, precisely, you’re looking at,
and the nauseating shock at that moment packs a stronger punch than
any horror movie I’ve seen this year. Here is the sunny,
flower-filled, orderly front garden, in front of a well-appointed and
tidy home in which a large, cheerful family lives. But wait; just
beyond the yard is a tall gray cement fence with barbed wire on top,
and smokestacks visible in the distance.

The home is occupied by the notorious extermination camp’s
commandant, Rudolf Höss (a real man, played here by Christian
Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller
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their large brood of children, and a few servants, at least one of
whom seems to be Jewish. _The Zone of Interest_ keeps the Höss
family in the foreground. We see them on a picnic, having family
dinners, spending time playing in the garden, enjoying their
greenhouse and their pool. Hedwig is a nurturing mother and hospitable
housekeeper.

While they live out their lives in their happy house, we watch with
horror. Smartly, Glazer gives us only the most minimal amount of
character background; this is emphatically not a movie where there’s
a “good Nazi” to root for. Instead, it shows how the whole Nazi
system was designed to ensure that nobody could be good. We’re
hearing the Hösses talk about life in the foreground. But there’s
an ambient noise in _The Zone of Interest_, akin to the hum of a
white noise machine — except in this case it’s omnipresent, the
sound of furnaces in the distance, laced with occasional gunshots and
howls. To hear what’s going on in the house, we have to tune them
out a little. I hope we can’t.

The characters, however, have. Höss and his colleagues have been
deeply formed by the regime in which they’ve made their careers, in
which Nazi ideology is encoded in its language and systems. (They
speak with awe and obedience of Himmler and of Hitler — and, of
course, of Eichmann.) Höss has made a name for himself as an executor
of efficient systems: “His particular strength is turning theory
into practice,” a letter that a colleague writes about him explains.
The practice of killing, that is.

THE CHARACTERS IN _THE ZONE OF INTEREST_ KNOW EXACTLY WHAT’S
HAPPENING; THEY’VE JUST, ESSENTIALLY, DISSOCIATED

It would be inexcusable and deadly wrong to say that _The Zone of
Interest_ is about people living in blissful ignorance about what’s
going on just over the garden wall. They know exactly what’s
happening; they’ve just, essentially, dissociated. Höss talks about
gassing thousands of Jews as if it’s an interesting problem to be
solved, but it’s his job. What’s more chilling is that his family
knows. Hedwig — who proudly tells her mother she’s been nicknamed
the “queen of Auschwitz” — admires a fur coat that arrives in a
shipment brought in by a prisoner, trying on the lipstick she finds in
the pocket. She warns the Jewish girl who works in the house that she
could “have my husband spread your ashes” across the fields. She
speaks with her visiting mother about whether a former neighbor of
theirs, a Jewish woman her mother cleaned for, is “in there.”
There’s a tinge of revenge, the feeling that if she is, she probably
deserves it because she was probably plotting Bolshevik nonsense in
days gone by.

Perhaps the most telling scene comes when two of the young sons are
playing in the backyard. The older locks the younger in the greenhouse
— and then makes noises of gassing at him. The only family member
who seems unable to ignore the horror of what’s happening is the
baby, who screams whenever the ovens light up.

The sound design in _The Zone of Interest_ is so extraordinarily
effective that it’s easy to miss what the film is doing on a visual
level. The scenes of familial bliss take place in a beautiful garden
or a comfortable home, but they’re shot with a severity that belies
the setting; this is a world gone flat, a paean to a fascist dream of
life properly lived, yet all surfaces and no depths. To live such a
life would require a hollowing out, an ability to continually ignore
one’s senses — those ovens smell awful, but Hedwig never indicates
she can smell them at all — until they more or less cease
functioning. The insistent bright ugliness gives way occasionally to
something shocking (a few black-and-white segments reversed into
photonegative, or a shot of a flower that fades to blood-red), all the
better to remind us that none of this is beautiful, and we ought to be
horrified.

Introducing her book _The Life of the Mind _by writing about her
Eichmann observations again, Arendt could have been writing about the
Hösses. She was “struck by the manifest shallowness” in Eichmann,
which made it “impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his
deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.” In fact, she wrote,
while his deeds were monstrous, she saw that “the doer — at least
the very effective one now on trial — was quite ordinary,
commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”

What is monstrous is the insistently abstracted language the Hösses
and other Nazis use in order to avoid thought, especially contrasted
with the wordless screams that Mica Levi has worked into the score.
Höss is praised for his advances in “KL practice” (KL standing
for Konzentrationslager, or concentration camp); we watch him deep in
conversation about circular burn chambers that can more efficiently
exterminate. “Burn, cool, unload, reload, continuously!” the
designer tells him. We watch rooms full of Nazi commandants applaud
news of the beginning of the “mass deportation” of Hungarian Jews,
with 25 percent “retained for labor.” Nobody says exactly what
they mean.

TO SEE OTHERS AS SUB-HUMAN, WORTHY OF PREJUDICE OR SLAVERY OR TORTURE
OR EXTERMINATION, WE NEED TO BE COACHED THROUGH SOME MENTAL GYMNASTICS

Arendt wrote that the Nazi Sprachregelung introduced a degree of
separation between the users and reality, making the horrors of
Hitler’s ideas, as Arendt put it, “somehow palatable.” Another
way to say this is that humans are capable of great cruelties and
monstrosities, but we’re also creatures of compassion and empathy.
To see others as sub-human, worthy of prejudice or slavery or torture
or extermination, we need to be coached through some mental
gymnastics. We need words that disconnect us from reality, that put a
layer of remove between us and them, between action and thought.
Between our humanity and what we are capable of.

The effect of watching _The Zone of Interest_ ought, I think, to
make us feel a mounting horror — and then, from there, to make us
think, an act Arendt was always writing about. In the _Life of the
Mind _introduction, she argued that the antidote to the thoughtless
cruelty of the autocratic systems around us might be thinking:
“Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty of telling right
from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?”

Maybe, she wrote. “Could this activity be among the conditions that
make men abstain from evildoing or even actually ‘condition’ them
against it?” she asks. In other words, could learning to think, to
avoid cliched thought and stock phrases, train us out of complacency?
Could being shocked and horrified and made profoundly uncomfortable,
left without easy language, perpetuate a moral good?

What Glazer does with _The Zone of Interest_ is give the audience
just a taste of that shock, and then force us into thinking. He never
shows the atrocities outright — not to pique our curiosity but
because we do not want to see them. To depict it would be, in its own
way, an atrocity. Instead, he adds a visual and aural layer of
abstraction in order to let us test ourselves, to see if we are,
perhaps, the sort of people willing to be in their place now.

“The dividing line,” Arendt wrote, “between those who want to
think, and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do
not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational
differences.” All that seems clear right now, at this point in
history, is this question is eternally worth facing.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST_ IS PLAYING IN THEATERS._

_Alissa Wilkinson
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culture for Vox. Alissa is a member of the New York Film Critics
Circle and the National Society of Film Critics._

 

* Film
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* Film Review
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* The Zone of Interest
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* Jonathan Glazer
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* Hannah Arendt
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* Nazis
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* Auschwitz
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