Guilt is a funny thing. It’s difficult to know if feeling it is a form of torture or flattery. After all, anyone stricken by guilt can always tell himself, no matter what he’s done, that he is a good person. Otherwise, why would he feel guilty?
When guilt, however, is threatened by an excess it can’t abide it has a perverse ability to compartmentalize the self. The mind is able to shut certain things out and either never see the crime, or — if it can’t ignore it — deny it, or rationalize it. When someone has done something so bad it would threaten him with feelings of suicide or personal disintegration the mind is capable of defense mechanisms that will protect it.
The Zone of Interest is a movie where you wonder if this must be what you’re being asked to witness. It sets out to depict how incredibly normal the Nazis could be in every respect except for their penchant for murder.
Based on historical characters, it’s the story of Rudolph Höss and his perfect Aryan family. Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz and he and his family lived in a nice home and gardens that literally adjoined the camp. You can see the smoke from the incinerators from their bedroom windows.
The idea that these monsters could live normal lives, untouched by the atrocities a stone’s throw away looks meant not only to say something about the Nazis, but about human beings in general. What’s really scary about the film is how the people in it would be considered, in every respect, a really nice family if it were not for their direct participation in the Holocaust.
What’s also truly unique and indeed brilliant here is the way in which the crimes themselves are reduced purely to context. Everything is taken from the family’s point of view. We never see anything to speak of in the camp. We hear horrible things. We see the smokestacks of the crematoriums and the trains that are constantly arriving, and at night we see the deadly glow of the fires. But the grotesque and astonishing facts of what is really happening are left to the audience’s imagination where they’re allowed to fester to unimaginable proportions. Through it all Höss acts pretty much like anybody with a career — someone intent on proving himself and moving up in the world, even if moving up means devising more efficient ways to slaughter human beings.
I’ve never seen a film like this. Almost nothing happens in it and yet there’s a constant tension. Doom pervades everything. Of course, you know that most of the prisoners are doomed. But even Höss and his family appear impervious to the fate that surely awaits them should they lose the war. They are people living in a fantasy of everyday life that exists entirely in the moment, one which looks disturbingly like the world most people live in. It some respects it’s difficult to see the difference between the two.
From a storyteller’s standpoint what’s also exceptional is the way the movie so aptly illustrates how a story is never about the storyteller’s imagination but about the audiences’. Everything that truly needs to be said is never said. Everything that truly needs to be seen is never seen. There are no real discernible arcs on the part of any of the characters. They are frozen in a blissful present. And yet so much is revealed that is truly painful. They live pathologically compartmentalized lives.
You can’t help but watch this and wonder what sort of compartments you yourself are living in. How much torment are you blind to? How much exploitation is involved in the pleasures you take for granted? How do any of us live with ourselves without being aware of the ramifications of our privileges and pleasures? Most of us aren’t Nazis, but you can see the same things working in yourself and others in some small way if you look hard enough.
The film does not have anything to say directly about any of these issues. It trusts the audience to arrive at their own conclusions. This is an incredibly effective choice. All the tension that is generated does not incur in the characters but in the audiences’ observations. Observations they must make through a process of chilling implication and induction.
The Zone of Interest is a movie that works on a lot of different levels. And, if anything, it should tell you that if indeed these people are not so different from us after all, how can we be sure if we’re not capable of the same things?
I understand what you're saying, but since I hadn't read the book, I spent the whole movie waiting for their lives to collapse. I also think that deliberately making it pedestrian really expanded the message of it. I actually had a hard time thinking of the Nazis as I watched it. I was thinking more about the way so many of us live, about how we use our iPhones while at the same time seeing footage on TV about a suicide fence on the roof of the building where they make them in China because so many workers there are at the end of their rope. Who knows, for that matter, how many people suffered putting together the shirt on your back? And when we find the shirt to be too expensive we complain. In some ways, I think the fact that it never reached any real dramatic conclusion only makes it more pertinent to the lives we lead.
Have you read the book? I read the book when I heard the movie was coming out and I must say I was actually pretty disappointed in the movie. The book has a lot of intra-personal complexity that the movie lacks. The movie to me felt simple and pedestrian. But I think I'm in the minority there. A critic I like said it best--he felt that the problem with the movie is that it only has a single idea, and it beats that idea over and over again relentlessly until you're numbed by it. It's like, "okay, I get it, there's a normal family living next to Auschwitz. Is that all?" Whereas with the book, there are many, many ideas. I will also say that I didn't watch the movie until Jonathan Glazer's idiotic Oscars speech, which kind of soured me on the whole thing before delving in. Enjoyed reading your thoughts on it. I may have to give it another viewing down the road.