THE ZONE OF INTEREST Won't Go Beyond Banality

Jonathan Glazer's timely Holocaust film will have a profound impact on people. That doesn't make it truthful.

Image Credit: A24 Films.

“I’m very suspicious about people making films about the Holocaust, I was even suspicious of myself.” — Jonathan Glazer, Director, The Zone of Interest.

Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-nominated film, The Zone of Interest, based on the Martin Amis novel of the same title, is perhaps the most timely ever. It is timely because it is a Holocaust film released to great critical and audience acclaim—the kind rarely enjoyed by even the most prestigious indie cinema—during a genocide. It is a fact not lost on the team behind the film, with its producer James Wilson noting that what is “going on in the world, in Gaza” reminds us of “selective empathy” and Glazer himself telling the Financial Times that this resonance has been “front and centre” in his mind (though he stops short of describing the Israeli assault on Palestinians in Gaza as genocide, something that the world’s highest court, The Hague, finds “plausible”). Glazer, who is Jewish, sets out to depict the Holocaust without “drama”, focusing on the eerily ordinary domestic lives of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife, Hedwig, whose house effectively shares a wall with the death camp itself. This framework enables Glazer to clearly illustrate the nature of complicity, especially of ‘normal’ middle-class Westerners, in crimes against humanity of the gravest nature. That so many audience members, particularly young people (Deadline has reported more than half the film’s US audience has been under 35 years of age), will have it put to them that what they may otherwise view as ordinary life is, in fact, inextricably linked to the ultimate human horrors, is no doubt impactful.

The film functions as an elaborate construction, aiming to impress a sense of evil’s ‘presentness’ through the manipulation of cinematic convention and time. By exclusively adopting the perspective of Nazi génocidaires (Jewish Holocaust victims are seldom seen, and when they are shown, they are deliberately obscured) and following the quotidian rhythms of their lives, The Zone of Interest seeks to initiate uncomfortable introspection in its audience. As Glazer put it: “For me, this is not a film about the past. It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.” In his essay ‘Rethinking Transcendental Style’, the acclaimed screenwriter and director Paul Schrader notes, “The film artist moulds introspection via duration. Duration can evoke Deleuze’s “memories, fantasies and dreams.” Duration can peel back the social veneer of an activity.” As such, Glazer leverages the temps mort inherent to everyday life (even the lives of Nazis administering and subsisting off the Auschwitz extermination camp) to activate the viewer, forcing them to ask serious questions of themselves: “Is it really possible for mass murder to be so routinised? So incorporated into ordinariness? So rewarding to its perpetrators? How different are these people from me, really?” Such cogitation is vastly different from that prompted by generic Holocaust narratives, and it is tired that they encapsulate the banality of evil, a concept popularised by Hannah Arendt in her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial. In this context, The Zone of Interest’s felicitous timing lends it a dual power whereby audiences must confront the film’s assertion that the prosaicness of bureaucratic capitalism infects even its genocides and that such operations are both immanent to Western life and current.

To achieve this effect, however, Glazer deploys a host of idiosyncratic filmmaking techniques, most commonly found in arthouse cinema. In doing so, the director opens an enormous contradiction at the heart of his film, predicated on depicting the Holocaust matter-of-factly by eschewing the dramatic conventions of popular cinema. Take, for instance, how, except very few dolly shots demonstrating the luscious Höss garden fertilised with the ashes of Auschwitz victims, the Nazi’s home life is shot via purely functional surveillance cam. Glazer has cited the popular reality TV series Big Brother as the inspiration for this style. These shots are necessary to create the distance between audiences and the figures they observe, adopting an almost anthropological quality. But in enforcing said distance—notably also maintained by a refusal to admit overt acts of genocidal violence into the frame—The Zone of Interest creates just another cinematic Holocaust fantasy, à la Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The decision to ruthlessly emphasise the supposed mundanity of the Holocaust’s architects supplants the film’s notion to be a kind of study of how heinous crimes are normalised, and it ends up an elaborate, albeit effective, thought experiment. Putting the morality of this aside, even the most incisive thought experiments have severe limitations.

It is a plain fact that the Holocaust and other mass atrocities like it can involve chilling normalcy—indeed, many banausic functionaries contributed to Hitler’s exterminatory commands. But this is not and cannot be the whole truth. Genocides, including the Holocaust, are not defined by mundane bureaucracy as The Zone of Interest obsesses over; they are the manifestation of fervent, racial supremacist ideologies, of which Nazism is a glaring example. The real Rudolf Höss was not so much a dispassionate drone who signed off communiqués with “Heil Hitler et cetera” but a true believer who, as early as 1923, conspired with the Freikorps to murder Walther Kadow, himself a German ultranationalist. Where is this fanaticism in Glazer’s film? It is not enacted by the character of Höss so much as it is presupposed. Ideology is present in The Zone of Interest: Hedwig verbatim outlines Lebensraum, and the Höss lifestyle embodies it, with their elaborate garden emblematising the Nazi back-to-the-land, anti-urban movement. Notably, though, without what you bring into the cinema and throwaway lines about Jewish Bolshevism, you could nearly be forgiven for coming away thinking that the Nazis didn’t care about exterminating all of European Jewry. Partially, this is nobly intended to universalise the film’s message. But the film’s observatory edifice can only scratch the surface, never revealing Nazi internality or motive, even while it encourages us to compare ourselves with it. By effectively omitting the particularities of Nazi racialism and the severity of its enmity, one cannot help but feel that the political viscera of the Holocaust is being erased.

You only need to be familiar with the virulently antisemitic Der Stürmer or the lurid and sanguinary genocidal incitement issued by Israeli political and military leaders in recent months to know that passionate racism is categorical to genocide. Glazer’s totalising fixation on the banality of evil fails to capture the depths of human depravity and ideological fervour that cultivated the Holocaust and which animate the genocides of the present. Ironically, in its meticulous and unsentimental reconstruction of the Nazi genocide, The Zone of Interest functions as a kind of political deconstruction, wherein Nazism proper is conspicuously absent. To be sure, the film impresses intensely how ideological bias can be transfigured into technocratic obscenity without any ambiguity as to the horrific consequences. But the wellspring of this endpoint of industrial mass murder is entirely hidden from us in politics, emotion and sense—why? One could argue, as Glazer does, that “it’s impossible for The Zone of Interest to do everything that was the Holocaust”. But it is Glazer’s over-reliance on dead time and bureaucracy to achieve his ends that extinguishes the possibility of fuller fidelity in his depiction of the Holocaust.

The film’s conclusion simultaneously expresses its conceit and brilliance. Rudolf Höss departs a party celebrating the beginning of Germany’s extermination of Hungarian Jews via a dim, liminal stairway. Suddenly, Höss begins retching as if his insides are about to spew out from his mouth. He experiences a premonition by which the film takes us inside Auschwitz, the world-historic apex of genocidal extermination he scrupulously constructed for the very first time. We witness employees of the Auschwitz Museum dutifully sweeping the gas chambers and cleaning the ovens, preparing the memorial to receive visitors. We know the monument belongs to Höss’ victims and that he has been reduced to a mere historical footnote. In this sequence, Glazer blurs the boundaries between past and present, bridging the emotional and temporal distance he fastidiously maintained throughout the film. By finally allowing us to see the camp, Glazer necessarily invokes the military defeat of the Nazis, therefore implying Höss was a failure—if you can say that a devoted génocidaire personally responsible for exterminating over a million ‘undesirables’ failed. However, this newfound cathartic proximity is juxtaposed with a symbolic separation, represented by the glass through which we view the shoes of exterminated Jews. Despite the transparency of the glass, which contrasts with the opaque walls of the camp observed earlier, it serves as a reminder of the enduring barriers between us and the essence of the historical atrocity being depicted. Thus, while Glazer may have written the film’s language in that of Theodor Adorno’s proscription that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz”, The Zone of Interest undeniably rhymes.