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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE ZONE OF INTEREST IS ABOUT THE DANGER OF IGNORING ATROCITIES –
INCLUDING IN GAZA  
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Naomi Klein
March 14, 2024
The Guardian
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_ “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the
present – not to say, ‘Look what they did then’; rather, ‘Look
what we do now.” _

In the Zone of Interest, IGN

 

It’s an Oscar tradition: a serious political speech pierces the
bubble of glamour and self-congratulation. Warring responses ensue.
Some proclaim the speech an example of artists at their
culture-shifting best; others an egotistical usurpation of an
otherwise celebratory night. Then everyone moves on.

Yet I suspect that the impact of Jonathan Glazer’s
time-stopping speech
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last Sunday’s Academy Awards will be significantly more lasting,
with its meaning and import analyzed for many years to come.

Glazer was accepting the award for best international film for The
Zone of Interest, which is inspired by the real life of Rudolf Höss,
commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The film follows
Höss’s idyllic domestic life with his wife and children, which
unfolds in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the
concentration camp. Glazer has described
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characters not as monsters but as “non-thinking, bourgeois,
aspirational-careerist horrors”, people who manage to turn profound
evil into white noise.

Before Sunday’s ceremony, Zone had already been heralded by several
deities of the film world. Alfonso Cuarón, the Oscar-winning director
of Roma, called
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“probably the most important film of this century”. Steven
Spielberg declared
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“the best Holocaust movie I’ve witnessed since my own” – a
reference to Schindler’s List, which swept the Oscars 30 years ago.

But while Schindler List’s triumph represented a moment of profound
validation and unity for the mainstream Jewish community, Zone arrives
at a very different juncture. Debates are raging about how the Nazi
atrocities should be remembered: should the Holocaust be seen
exclusively as a Jewish catastrophe, or something more universal, with
greater recognition for all the groups targeted for extermination? Was
the Holocaust a unique rupture in European history, or a homecoming of
earlier colonial genocides, along with a return of the techniques,
logics and bogus race theories they developed and deployed? Does
“never again” mean never again to anyone, or never again to the
Jews, a pledge for which Israel is imagined as a kind of untouchable
guarantee?

These wars over universalism, proprietary trauma, exceptionalism
and comparison [[link removed]] are at the
heart of South Africa’s landmark genocide case against Israel at the
international court of justice, and they are also ripping through
Jewish communities, congregations and families around the world. In
one action-packed minute, and in our moment of stifling
self-censorship, Glazer fearlessly took clear positions on each of
these controversies.

“All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present
– not to say, ‘Look what they did then’; rather, ‘Look what we
do now,’” Glazer said, quickly dispatching with the notion that
comparing present-day horrors to Nazi crimes is inherently minimizing
or relativizing, and leaving no doubt that his explicit intention was
to draw out continuities between the monstrous past and our monstrous
present.

And he went further: “We stand here as men who refute their
Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has
led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of 7
October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.” For Glazer, Israel
does not get a pass, nor is it ethical to use intergenerational Jewish
trauma from the Holocaust as justification or cover for atrocities
committed by the Israeli state today.

Others have made these points before, of course, and many have paid
dearly, particularly if they are Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim. Glazer,
interestingly, dropped his rhetorical bombs protected by the
identity-equivalent of a suit of armor, standing before the glittering
crowd as a successful white Jewish man – flanked by two other
successful white Jewish men – who had, together, just made a film
about the Holocaust. And that phalanx of privilege still didn’t save
him from the flood of smears
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misrepresented his words to wrongly claim that he had repudiated his
Jewishness, which only served to underline Glazer’s point about
those who turn victimhood into a weapon.

Equally significant was what we might think of as the speech’s
meta-context: what preceded it and immediately followed. Those who
only watched clips online missed this part of the experience, and
that’s too bad. Because as soon as Glazer wrapped up his speech –
dedicating the award to Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, a Polish
woman who secretly fed Auschwitz prisoners and fought the Nazis as a
member of the Polish underground army – out came actors Ryan Gosling
and Emily Blunt. Without so much as a commercial break to allow us to
emotionally recover, we were instantly jettisoned into a
“Barbenheimer” bit, with Gosling telling Blunt that her film about
the invention of a weapon of mass destruction had ridden Barbie’s
pink coat tails to box-office success, and Blunt accusing Gosling of
painting on his abs.

At first, I feared that this impossible juxtaposition would undercut
Glazer’s intervention: how could the mournful and wrenching
realities he had just invoked coexist with that kind of California
high-school prom energy? Then it hit me: like the fuming defenders of
Israel’s “right to defend itself”, the sparkly artifice that
encased the speech was also helping to make his point.

“Genocide becomes ambient to their lives”: that is how Glazer
has described [[link removed]] the
atmosphere he attempted to capture in his film, in which his
characters attend to their daily dramas – sleepless kids, a
hard-to-please mother, casual infidelities – in the shadow of
smokestacks belching out human remains. It’s not that these people
don’t know that an industrial-scale killing machine whirs just
beyond their garden wall. They have simply learned to lead contented
lives with ambient genocide.

It is this that feels most contemporary, most of this terrible moment,
about Glazer’s staggering film. More than five months into the daily
slaughter in Gaza, and with Israel brazenly ignoring
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the international court of justice, and western governments gently
scolding Israel while shipping it more arms, genocide is becoming
ambient once more – at least for those of us fortunate enough to
live on the safe sides of the many walls that carve up our world. We
face the risk of it grinding on, becoming the soundtrack of modern
life. Not even the main event.

Glazer has repeatedly stressed that his film’s subject is not the
Holocaust, with its well-known horrors and historical particularities,
but something more enduring and pervasive: the human capacity to live
with holocausts and other atrocities, to make peace with them, draw
benefit from them.

When the film premiered last May, before Hamas’s 7 October attack
and before Israel’s unending assault on Gaza, this was a thought
experiment that could be contemplated with a degree of intellectual
distance. The audience members at the Cannes film festival who gave
The Zone of Interest a rapturous six-minute standing ovation
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felt safe toying with Glazer’s challenge. Perhaps some looked out at
the azure Mediterranean and considered how they had themselves gotten
comfortable with, even uninterested in, news of boats packed with
desperate people being left to drown just down the coast. Or maybe
they thought about the private jets they had taken to France, and the
way flight emissions are entangled in the disappearance of food
sources for impoverished people far away, or the extinction of
species, or the potential disappearance of entire nations.

Glazer wanted his film to provoke these kinds of uneasy thoughts. He
has said
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he saw “the darkening world around us, and I had a feeling I had to
do something about our similarities to the perpetrators rather than
the victims.” He wanted to remind us that annihilation is never as
far away as we might think.

But by the time Zone made it into theatres in December, Glazer’s
subtle challenge for audiences to contemplate their inner Hösses cut
a lot closer to the bone. Most artists try desperately to tap into the
zeitgeist, but Zone, whose theatrical release has been muted given the
initial response, may well have suffered from something rare in the
history of cinema: a surplus of relevance, an oversupply of
up-to-the-minuteness.

One of the film’s most memorable scenes comes when a package filled
with clothing and lingerie stolen from the camp’s prisoners arrives
at the Höss home. The commandant’s wife, Hedwig (played almost too
convincingly by Sandra Hüller), decrees that everyone, including the
servants, can choose one item. She keeps a fur coat for herself, even
trying on the lipstick she finds in a pocket.

Everyone I know who has seen the film can think of little but Gaza

It is the intimacy of the entanglements with the dead that are so
chilling. And I have no idea how anyone can watch that scene and not
think of the Israeli soldiers who have filmed themselves rifling
through the lingerie
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Palestinians whose homes they are occupying in Gaza, or boasting
of stealing
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and jewelry for their fiances and girlfriends, or taking group selfies
with Gaza’s rubble as the backdrop. (One such photo went viral
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writer Benjamin Kunkel added the caption “The Zone of Pinterest”.)

There are so many such echoes that, today, Glazer’s masterpiece
feels more like a documentary than a metaphor. It’s almost as if, by
filming Zone in the style of a reality show, with hidden cameras
throughout the house and garden (Glazer has referred
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“Big Brother in the Nazi House”), the movie anticipated the first
live-streamed genocide, the version filmed by its perpetrators.

Zone offers an extreme portrait of a family whose placid and pretty
life flows directly from the machinery devouring human life next door.
This is most emphatically not a portrait of people in denial: they
know what is happening on the other side of the wall, and even the
kids play with scavenged human teeth. The concentration camp and the
family home are not separate entities; they are conjoined. The wall of
the family’s garden – creating an enclosed space for the children
to play, and shade for the pool – is the same wall that, on the
other side, encloses the camp.

Everyone I know who has seen the film can think of little but Gaza. To
say this is not to claim a one-to-one equation or comparison with
Auschwitz. No two genocides are identical: Gaza is not a factory
deliberately designed for mass murder, nor are we close to the scale
of the Nazi death toll. But the whole reason the postwar edifice of
international humanitarian law was erected was so that we would have
the tools to collectively identify patterns before history repeats at
scale. And some of the patterns – the wall, the ghetto, the mass
killing, the repeatedly stated
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intent
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the mass starvation, the pillaging, the joyful dehumanization, and the
deliberate humiliation – are repeating.

So, too, are the ways that genocide becomes ambient, the way those of
us a little further away from the walls can block the images, and tune
out the cries, and just … carry on. That’s why the Academy made
Glazer’s point for him when it hard-cut to Barbenheimer – itself a
trivialization of mass slaughter – without missing a beat. Atrocity
is once again becoming ambient. (One might see the entire Oscar
spectacle as a kind of live-action extension of The Zone of Interest,
a sort of Denialism on Ice.)

What do we do to interrupt the momentum of trivialization and
normalization? That is the question so many of us are struggling with
right now. My students ask me. I ask my friends and comrades. So many
are offering their responses with relentless protests, civil
disobedience, “uncommitted” votes
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event interruptions, aid convoys to Gaza, fundraising for refugees,
works of radical art. But it’s not enough.

And as genocide fades further into the background of our culture, some
people grow too desperate for any of these efforts. Watching the
Oscars on Sunday, where Glazer was alone among the parade of wealthy
and powerful speakers across the podium to so much as mention Gaza, I
remembered that exactly two weeks had passed since Aaron Bushnell
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a 25-year-old member of the US air force, self-immolated
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the Israeli embassy in Washington.

I don’t want anyone else to deploy that horrifying protest tactic;
there has already been far too much death. But we should spend some
time sitting with the statement that Bushnell left, words I have come
to view as a haunting, contemporary coda to Glazer’s film:

“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive
during slavery? Or the Jim Crow south? Or apartheid? What would I do
if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re
doing it. Right now.”

 

 

 

* Film
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* Film Review
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* The Zone of Interest
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* Naomi Klein
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* Jonathan Glazer
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* Auschwitz
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* Auschwitz. Gaza
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