The Zone of Interest is the kind of once-in-a-blue-moon achievement that makes very good films seem paltry and pointless by comparison. In a year of troubled pictures that reckon with twentieth century evils—searching, clearly, for the secret to averting their twenty-first century recurrences—Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama stands apart for its supreme daring, originality, and, most importantly, wisdom.
Allow me to explain my reverence for The Zone of Interest.
The film follows a Nazi family presiding over unspeakable suffering. Directly over the wall of their property lies Auschwitz, where father Rudolph Hoss has made a name for himself as an efficient and levelheaded manager of Jewish extermination. He isn’t a crazed maniac, though—at least not outwardly—unlike the cinematic villains of Schindler’s List and Inglourious Basterds. In fact, he wife, Hedwig, are, from what we can see, quite dull. They dodder around the house and act out a boring family drama: Rudolph has to leave town for a new post while Hedwig stays behind and cares for the kids.
An unremarkable tale. The film’s titular “interest,” though, lies in the way that the characters go through their daily motions without acknowledging the gunshots and cries of torture that pour steadily into their yard from the camp. These noises are easily audible to us, which means that the Hosses can hear them, as well. How, then, do they go about their day? How do they live with themselves?
Because of the remarkable dissonance on display, The Zone of Interest has been repeatedly linked to Hannah Arendt’s notorious formulation of “the banality of evil.” But I think the comparison is misguided. In Arendt’s argument, Nazis were guilty of substituting official commands—the “law”—for the truer law of Kant’s categorical imperative. Glazer’s Nazis, however, don’t appear morally confused in this manner. Unlike the mindless rank and file of Arendt’s imagination, these characters know what they’re doing, and they know that it’s wrong. They simply don’t want to know (because they stand to benefit from it), and they succeed in hiding their knowledge from their own consciences.
Several developments demonstrate that the Hosses, in contradiction to the notion of the “banality of evil,” know perfectly well the evil of Nazism. When Hedwig’s visiting mother, for example, tells a pithy story about a Jewish servant, Hedwig becomes visibly uncomfortable. Apparently, for Hedwig and Rudolph, even anti-Semitism isn’t good enough: what they require is total omission of Jews from discussion. Lies, after all, are leaky, since their fallacies risk being recognized. Constant, effortful ignorance, by contrast, is airtight. If Jews are never mentioned, the morals of their elimination never require consideration, let alone justification. (Indeed, Hedwig’s mother later leaves the house in discomfort: although bigoted, she alone, having spoken the victims into existence, finds herself haunted by the crematorium.)
The question, then, isn’t how the Hosses fail to realize their culpability—they do. The question is how they distract themselves from it. And this is what the bulk of The Zone of Interest illustrates.
Floors are swept. Hedges are trimmed. New clothes are tried. Board meetings are held. Parties are thrown. Gossip is exchanged. Work calls are made. Marital squabbles are had. These are the events shown in The Zone of Interest, because they comprise the all-important bubble in which the Hosses have ensconced themselves to guard against their own moral compasses. Not even the sounds of mass death can penetrate this bubble: dreariness, it seems, is a formidable shield. Only when evidence of such horror arrives unmistakably under their noses—such as Hedwig’s mother’s departing letter, or the appearance of human remains in the nearby river—is the bubble invaded, but even then, Rudolph and Hedwig quickly discard the relevant evidence, quickly rebuilding their mental fortress of domestic duty.
Mundane matters, it appears, can consume a life. They’re the blinders that, if we prefer, can shield us from real reflections. Such as: What is my responsibility to the world? Am I making society better or worse? What is happening outside of my immediate circle, and is it good or bad? The Hosses find it possible to participate in genocide because they know how to drive their ugly thoughts away: by keeping busy with trivialities.
But for a brief, perhaps inevitable moment, the mental fortress does falter. At the movie’s conclusion, Rudolph begins dry-heaving after a Nazi social event, suggesting, for the first time, discomfort. He’s so uncomfortable, in fact, that he experiences, apparently, a premonition of the future: the opening of the Auschwitz museum, where the horrors he helped implement are on display for the world to see.
There’s something wrong, though. The impact of this vision isn’t what it should be. The employees preparing the exhibits don’t seem to notice what they’re looking at: unthinkingly, they scrub the windows, vacuum the floors, sweep the cells. Just as in the Hoss household, it seems, there’s work to be done. And, just as at home, the little tasks at hand—not the explosion of suffering all around—command all the attention.
Rudolph sees this. He sees that, in the future, our eyes will glaze over. That we’ll be too busy, too distracted to shudder or recoil. That the same banality that shields him and his family so safely from having to consider their actions will, just as surely, shield us, far in the future, from having to do so, as well. After all, under the shroud of dreary goings-on, he’s escaped his own conscience. Why not ours, too?
Reassured, he stops dry-heaving. Composed once again, he slips down the stairs, into the darkness, unseen, unnoticed, his crimes forever in shadow, his villainy vanished from the world, which has more pressing things to do than think about it. Thinking, of course, is the scourge of atrocity, and people are endlessly good—and getting better and better—at finding ways to avoid it.
So: the banality of evil? Jonathan Glazer, our newest deserver of the title of cinematic master, has given us a new, terrible take: the evil of the banal.
—Jim Andersen