If somehow you were to wander into a screening of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) without knowing what you were getting into, it might take about ten minutes to figure things out. The film opens on a bucolic scene, a group of mostly children sitting in high grass while another group bathes in a river below. It’s a breathtaking view: the meadow-like grasses, the broad water glittering in the sun, the wooded bank on the river’s far side. A man in ill-fitting swim trunks, pasty and pudgy, walks down to the river with two boys and a younger man, who start splashing each other; a woman stays with the other children, a crying baby (it will cry through the whole film) in her arms. There’s no narrative, just lovely glimpses: the children swimming, picking berries, squabbling in the car on the way home while their parents urge them to sleep.
It’s night when they arrive at an ample, graciously appointed, unremarkable house. The children are sent to bed; outside, their source unclear, the bucolic sounds of the opening (purling water, a woodpecker’s tattoo) have been replaced by troubling noises, metallic, industrial. We see the parents in their bedroom, in separate narrow beds but turned toward each other, intimate, untroubled by the sounds that grow increasingly unnerving, punctuated by shouts and screams. A cut to the next morning, another gorgeous, painterly shot, framing the narrow hallway by the stairs. We gaze from the dim interior to the entryway flooded with early light—a Dutch interior, almost. It’s the father’s birthday; he’s led out of the house blindfolded, presented with his gift, a canoe; the baby cries when he sets her in it. And then, after he kisses his wife, we see a guard tower behind him, the huge, barbed walls of a concentration camp.
Very attentive viewers might catch on more quickly: on my second viewing, I noticed a quick flash of Nazi SS insignia on the license plate of one of the cars driving the party home from the river. But the whole conceit of Glazer’s film is to reverse foreground and background, to place the horrors of Auschwitz at the edge of our perception while inhabiting, with the kind of density and patience typical of art meant to reveal the luminous in the everyday, the privileged banal domesticity of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. The film has provoked strong reactions. It has won a slew of awards and was nominated for five Oscars; but there has been notable, virulent critical dissent, maybe most particularly, in the United States, from Richard Brody at the New Yorker, who labeled the film “Holokitsch,” and Manohla Dargis, who called it a “hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise” in the New York Times.
I wasn’t sure what I thought after seeing the film for the first time. All I knew was that something had happened to me: the film wouldn’t let me go, it was like a dark stain spreading in my interior. The film disquieted me in a way that felt more important than whether I thought it was “good” or “bad,” certainly more important than any argument I might make justifying my response. I talked about it with friends. I bought the Martin Amis novel on which the film is putatively based and read it in a day. I went to the film again, this time not in a little art cinema but in the huge AMC in Times Square, my first time in that bizarre labyrinth of a space, where I felt a little like a lost figure in an Escher engraving, riding endless escalators up and up. Ten minutes into the movie—maybe it didn’t even take that long—I felt sure I was seeing something great.
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Reading Amis’s novel was clarifying. Like Glazer’s film, the book centers on Auschwitz, and the commandant is a central character. But Amis draws on a broader cast. The book toggles, a little formulaically, between three voices: Paul Doll, its fictionalized version of Höss; Angelus Thomsen, a Nazi officer and secret saboteur; and Szmul, leader of the Sonderkommandos, the unit of Jewish prisoners given special privileges for their services in loading the gas chambers and cleaning out the crematoria. The drama of the book centers on Angelus’s desire and then love for Doll’s miserably disaffected wife, Hannah.
The book is full of horrors. Doll’s great preoccupation is the disposal of bodies (“Stücke,” or “pieces,” in Nazi parlance, which the film also adopts), and there is much description of the stench of the air, the putrid taste of decomposition-contaminated water in the town, the specter of a field flatulent with fermenting corpses. We see the terrible “selections,” where newly arrived prisoners are divided into the many murdered quickly and the few murdered slowly, their starved bodies forced to labor at double and then triple speed until they collapse. As Doll’s doubts intrude upon his ideology (a little absurdly: “If what we’re doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad?” he wonders), he grows ever more unhinged, his violence increasingly stripped of any palliative veneer, even outside the camp walls. (He brutally terrorizes his wife, whose resistance to his coercion, sexual and otherwise, becomes more assertive. When, heroically reclaiming his own dignity, Szmul refuses to murder Hannah, as Doll had demanded, Doll shoots him in the face.) But the book also has a moral center, or at least a stable ground of sanity, in Angelus, who is transformed into a heroic saboteur by his love for Hannah. “Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out,” Angelus muses; and then, making sure we don’t miss the point: “Who somebody really was. That was the zone of interest.”
The book’s momentum, the pleasure of its madcap comedy horror, carried me through a first read, but all of this curdled as I sat with it. The book, self-consciously posturing as a work of moral witness, came to seem to me a moral cartoon, radically inadequate to its subject. The macabre corpse comedy, the fact that Angelus (the name!) serves as a Vergil through the inferno, the fact that the narrative drama centers on adulterous passion, the bourgeois novelistic conceit par excellence, the fact that its moral drama centers on a Nazi’s redemption through love—there’s a word for all of this, and it’s the word Brody uses for Glazer’s film adaptation: kitsch. Not least among my reservations was precisely the book’s success, by one measure, as I encountered it for the first time: the fact of my enjoyment. Even in the grip of it, Amis’s novel gave me a qualm I’ve felt before in novels set among Nazis, maybe especially in Jonathan Littell’s in many ways amazing, Prix Goncourt-winning Les Bienveillantes (published in English as The Kindly Ones), and in almost every Holocaust movie I’ve seen. Should I really be so entertained by a book about the Holocaust, I wondered as I read Amis. Should a novel set in Auschwitz really be this much fun?
That question didn’t occur to me as I watched Glazer’s Zone of Interest, because I never felt—in a way that strikes me now as part of the film’s remarkable and moral discipline—entertained. Glazer does away with all of Amis’s characters and drama. There are no Sonderkommandos, no conflicted Nazis, no love affairs. Glazer takes Amis’s setting and focus—Auschwitz and its commandant—but reinstates the historical Höss and family, and subtracts any hint of Nazi moral melodrama. There’s very little drama at all, in fact, at least in the foreground of the film. The closest we come to a plot involves Höss’s transfer from Auschwitz and Hedwig’s insistence that she and her children will stay in the home they have made there. Höss agrees, spends a few months in Oranienburg, and then is transferred back to Auschwitz, rejoining his family there. There’s very little obvious pathos to be found; certainly none adheres to Rudolf or Hedwig. Much of the film seems determined to avoid interiority or psychological depth altogether: there are almost no close-ups of faces, and long scenes are interrupted by glances elsewhere—other rooms of the house, quick shots of the exterior. The film gives a sense of a world in which no one looks anybody else in the eyes (this is a motif in the novel); it works hard to prevent identification or easy sympathy. Glazer’s Hösses are not Amis’s caricatures, but neither are they vessels for our emotional investment.
This means that Glazer refuses us many of the pleasures we expect from cinema. Watching the film for the first time, there were stretches where I felt bored: I wondered whether we really needed all these long shots, whether the film wallowed a little too much in its own longueurs. I felt this boredom was justified even on my first viewing, part of a considered aesthetic effect, part of what guards against entertainment. But on my second viewing I wasn’t bored at all; every moment was riveting. In part this is because—and maybe this is a bit counterintuitive—the first time around I was waiting for some drama to erupt, some violence to be unleashed. Knowing what to expect, or what not to expect, let me relish what the film offers: not so much a narrative as an experience of a world, scenes of extraordinary and revelatory density.
What I mean by “density” is the strange alchemy by which great art, with the few bits of data that will fit on a page (or on a screen), conveys the pressure of an entire world—of all the innumerable data points that make up reality, which it would be impossible for an artist to include, however long the novel or the film. This density is what makes an invented world feel lived in, and to the extent that I can understand how it works I think it has to do with super-saturating details with information, so that each detail we see ramifies, suggesting all we don’t see.
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As every discussion of the film has emphasized, Glazer’s film is adamant about all we don’t see. The camp’s brutality is omnipresent, not least in architecture: the walls that abut Hedwig’s beloved “paradise garden”; the guard towers and lines of buildings whose gables poke above those walls; the crematorium’s smokestack. But we never witness violence; in the one scene that (so far as I can tell) takes place within the camp’s walls, the camera is positioned so that all we see is Höss’s face, viewed from below in a monumentalizing, socialist-realist framing. He remains impassive as the sound of grunts and screams becomes overwhelming; eventually his image is lost in drifting smoke.
The reality of the camp is conveyed almost entirely through sound, the film’s use of which is remarkable. Inside the Hösses’ home, we’re constantly assaulted by sounds from outside, human and nonhuman: trucks, sirens, the shouts of guards, the cries of prisoners. This gives the domestic scenes a surreal and devastating overcast, so that we’re constantly aware, hyperaware, of everything the family leaves unacknowledged, the barbarity that undergirds and enables their seeming contentment. (In a line of Höss’s autobiography quoted by Dargis, “my family had it good in Auschwitz, every wish that my wife or my children had was fulfilled.”) It also makes us complicit in that barbarity, not passively observing but actively imagining violence, filling in the world beyond the edges of the screen.
This is how Glazer sidesteps what Ruth Franklin, reviewing Amis’s novel for the New York Times, calls the “documentation glut” that challenges any attempt to tell stories about the Holocaust—the fact that we have access to so much information about the Holocaust, including images of the death camps. That information can often seem inert: it can be numbing, or too quickly assimilated to prepackaged narratives of evil or heroism, narratives that engage preprogrammed emotional responses, that fail to strike us to the quick. One thing Glazer’s film is doing, I think, is seeking out strategies to make us feel the Holocaust’s world-shattering barbarism, to register not just the horror (though the film does register that) but the strangeness and alienness of that barbarism. It does so, and this is what seems to me nearly miraculous in the film, not by isolating or walling off that alienness, suggesting the Nazis were some different species, monsters that have nothing to do with us—but instead by forcing us to recognize barbarism as part of the human equipment, a possibility that all of us carry.
One of Brody’s complaints about The Zone of Interest is that there’s “no room for the victims: prisoners, serving as forced laborers, appear around the house throughout the film, but silently. They’re given neither any voice nor any point of view.” As with many of Brody’s observations about the film, I think this is factually imprecise. Hedwig’s huge garden seems to be worked by prisoners. But the domestic servants at least do not live within the walls of the camp. The nanny seems to be German; the other women working in the house are Polish—targets of a slower (though no less absolute) genocidal project than that facing Jews. When Hedwig’s mother, on a visit, whispers in shock, “Jews in the house?” Hedwig laughs: the Jews are all on the other side of the wall, she says; the women working in the house are “local girls.” Their status wasn’t entirely clear to me. Clearly they are not in any normal sense simple workers, but they don’t seem to be prisoners. At least some of them live in the house with the Hösses; in one of two moments when Hedwig loses her composure, she screams at one servant, “Don’t forget you live well in our house.” When a bag of clothes from newly murdered prisoners arrives, Hedwig allows each of the servants to choose an item. They do so with what seems like pleasure.
To be clear, these workers’ lives can be, at any moment, forfeit; they’re living under a regime of terror. What seems wrong to me about Brody’s observation is his assertion that “they’re given neither any voice nor any point of view.” Point of view, as I’ve already suggested, is complex in the film—Glazer resists letting us occupy any character’s perspective—but to the extent that it’s granted to anyone it is granted to one of the Polish servants, Aniela, played by Zuzanna Kobiela in one of the film’s great performances. (The historical figure’s full name was Aniela Bednarska, and much of what is known about the Höss household at Auschwitz comes from a diary she kept, and from statements she gave after the war.) She does have one line, actually: “Nein, Frau Höss,” which she speaks before one of the film’s most chilling moments, when Hedwig, eating breakfast, calmly and quietly tells her, “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”
But point of view doesn’t depend on speech, and Aniela’s experience is conveyed eloquently, plangently, by Kobiela in every movement. In the one scene where Rudolf and Hedwig argue—Hedwig is chasing after Rudolf, yelling for him to stop and talk to her—Aniela presses herself against the wall, her head down, her broom clutched to her body: her posture speaks of absolute, animal fear, a survival strategy of invisibility. In an extraordinary sequence, as Rudolf arrives at the house with a group of German industrialists in tow (the presence of civilian businessmen at the camp, seeking slave labor and profit, is another fact of the world that is quietly omnipresent in the film), he takes off his boots before entering the house. Immediately a man (who does seem to be a prisoner) snatches them and takes them to a spigot beside the house, thoroughly washing them before setting them back at the door. This is interspliced with the image of Aniela placing a single small liqueur glass on a tray, carefully centering it before filling it to the brim, then carrying it out of the room, every movement calibrated to prevent it from spilling. This apparently negligible action takes on extraordinary drama—everything in how Aniela moves conveys the stakes for her, her fear; I was terrified too. A moment later we see Aniela take the boots from the door and set them outside Rudolf’s office.
This is what I mean by density. Every detail—every gesture, every object—is saturated with information about the world and the situation in which the characters live. The mechanized efficiency of domestic labor is a kind of shadow of the mechanized efficiency of slaughter the film hides from our view. I became hyperaware of Rudolf’s boots throughout the film on my second viewing, seeing how they are processed, cared for, how they are evidence of the line between domestic life and work—a line that never holds. In that first scene, the industrialists seem a little taken aback when Rudolf removes his boots, and ask if they should remove their shoes as well. No no, he says, there’s no need. One of the haunting questions the moment leaves unanswered is what contamination Rudolf is protecting his house from, what has soiled his boots. It suggests unimaginable horrors; the film forces us to imagine them.
Another example of density: after receiving the bag of clothing she distributes among the servants, Hedwig, played in an extraordinary performance by Sandra Hüller, goes up to her room with her own prize, a glamorous fur coat. As she tries it on, pulling it tight to her body, modeling it over her drab household clothes, it’s clear what a foreign object it is for her. She has no idea how to wear it; though it fits her fine, her body can’t inhabit it. There’s a tube of lipstick in the coat’s pocket, and this is foreign to her too: she sniffs it, she puts it on her hand to test the color, she uses her finger to rub it into her lips, finally she daubs it clumsily against her mouth. Then she takes a corner of her apron to wipe it all off.
It’s an eloquent scene, compressing a whole national narrative about Jews, who in Nazi ideology were at once vermin and privileged, hyper-cultured, the object of both disgust and envious class resentment. On my second viewing, I was amazed at how Hüller moves in the film, giving Hedwig an ungainly, lumbering gait; or the way, in the scene where she speaks that chilling line to Aniela, she shoves her food into her mouth. Details about the historical Hedwig’s upbringing are surprisingly hard to find—I couldn’t even find clear information about where she was born—but everything in Hüller’s performance suggests that the luxury in which she lives in Auschwitz was foreign to her experience, an elaborate costume. (“You really have landed on your feet, my child,” her mother says to her on her visit.)
Hedwig’s most extended speech comes in an argument with Rudolf, in a scene that is revelatory for what I take to be Glazer’s aims. The argument starts in the middle of a pool party for the children, when Rudolf suddenly announces to Hedwig that he’s being transferred—something he has known for a week—and that the family will have to leave their home. He flees her questions, walking through the house and then out the front door, and Hedwig follows him. (This is one of the only times we see the road outside the home, and the only time we see military vehicles; it’s also one of the film’s only tracking shots.) She finds him standing by the river, gazing out over the water. “We have to face facts. We have to leave,” he tells her. She responds, “No, you have to leave,” demanding that he request that the family stay in the house in Auschwitz while he goes to Oranienburg.
Hedwig justifies her demand with an impassioned speech about their ideals. She is a true believer—she and Rudolf met on a farm, both enthusiasts of a Nazi back-to-the-land movement—and makes an appeal to the beliefs she and Rudolf share. They would have to drag me out of here, she tells him. “This is our home,” she says. “Everything the Führer said about how to live is how we do. Go East. Lebensraum. This is our Lebensraum.” This isn’t just a domestic squabble; Glazer is making a serious and profound argument about the way fascist ideology suffuses domestic life, so that Lebensraum becomes not just a national program but an individual ideal. He is also, not incidentally, casually dismissing, as he does throughout the film, what has been a kind of ludicrous debate about how much Hedwig knew about her husband’s activities. In the memoir Rudolf wrote in prison, he claimed Hedwig never knew about the gas chambers, a claim some historians have apparently taken seriously. The film tacitly reveals how absurd an idea it is.
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I’ve said that the film doesn’t give us any vessels for sympathetic identification, but in fact we do see one heroic figure: a Polish girl who, at great personal risk, leaves food for the prisoners at their work sites, hiding pears among their tools and burying apples in what seems to be a ditch they are digging. These sequences (there are two of them), are hugely disruptive, erupting from the film’s texture in a wild formal extravagance: they were filmed in black and white with a military thermal-imaging camera, registering heat instead of light; they look like animated photographic negatives. In both sequences, as we watch this girl we hear Rudolf’s voice reading fairy tales to his daughters.
I wasn’t quite sure of my response to these scenes. In part this was because I respect so much what otherwise seems the film’s refusal of sanity, the way it denies us any point of sane value in the world of the film. There is no Angelus figure to serve as a reference point against which to measure the moral aberration of the Nazis. I think that’s important to the film’s moral aims. Maybe the formal device of the thermal-imaging camera protects against her serving as a kind of moral release hatch—it’s the girl who is the exception, not the actually aberrant Nazis; she exists in a different realm.
In the second sequence, while the girl is placing pears among the workers’ shovels, she finds a small metal canister left there by one of the prisoners, presumably for her; unscrewing it, she sees a folded-up sheet of paper inside. We learn what this is a little later, in a scene that is also unique in the film. After the second thermal-imaging sequence, we see a girl, presumably the same girl who left the pears, sitting at a piano in what looks to be a middle-class home. On the piano’s music stand is a page of handwritten music; by the way it is folded, we know it’s the page we saw in the canister.
The discovery of the music is invented, but not the music itself: the song is “Sunbeams,” by Joseph Wulf, a Jewish prisoner of Auschwitz, who survived the camp only to commit suicide in 1974, in despair over German indifference to his historical research into the Holocaust. As the girl plays the melody, subtitles provide the text, the only Jewish words we are exposed to in the entire film. The subtitles inform us that they’re written in Yiddish. “We who are imprisoned here, our hearts are not yet cold,” the text reads. “Souls afire like the blazing sun, tearing, breaking through their pain, for soon we’ll see that waving flag, the flag of freedom yet to come.”
Intellectually, I can’t justify this scene; it’s the one moment in the film that seems like it should be (as Brody charges) kitsch, an appeal to pathos unlike anything else the movie allows itself. But it feels right to me. Maybe it’s that the scene is treated so quietly, without melodrama: just the figure of the girl, the clumsily, eloquently played melody. I think it’s important that she doesn’t sing: if anyone matches the text to the melody, it’s the viewer. At the end of the song she stops playing, and for a moment we see her looking at the page, her expression unreadable. The whole thing only lasts a minute or two. It should seem like a violation of what I take to be the film’s contract, the rules it sets for itself; I feel like I should object to it. But maybe that violation is part of what makes it moving.
Even harder for me to swallow—though kitsch isn’t the word for it, it’s too strange for that—is a moment almost at the very end of the movie. The film ends with Rudolf, alone in what I take to be Oranienburg, descending a staircase in an empty, darkened office building. There’s something surreal about the sequence from the start: the floor has a geometric pattern, rectangles within rectangles, that echoes the seemingly endless flights of stairs. (Escher, again.) Rudolf, whom we have seen being examined by a doctor shortly before this scene, though we don’t learn why, stops and bends over, retching. He doesn’t vomit, which makes the moment even stranger; he remains bent over, as if trying to expel some rot he can’t rid himself of. He straightens, descends another flight, and repeats the gesture. Then, still bent over, he looks to his left, down a darkened hall, at the end of which is a pinprick of light. This pinprick is revealed to be a porthole, and then a door opens and we are in Auschwitz, in modern day, as a group of women enter to clean the museum.
What are we meant to make of this? On one hand, it seems to be another, more grievous, violation of the film’s contract, as though here, at the very end, it loses its nerve, offering an escape hatch from the nightmare we’ve been locked in. A domesticating, placating gesture, as if it were saying, Yes, you’ve spent two hours among horrors, but remember that the good guys win. Even worse, are we meant to think that Höss has a vision of this future, that he sees the judgment of history? It’s not implausible: I think (based on the timing of Höss’s recall to Auschwitz, news he has just shared with his wife) that we’re in 1944, by which point the writing was more than on the wall; anyone with any grip on reality could see that Germany would lose the war.
By either of those readings, I think this flash-forward is a wrong step, a failed gesture. But I don’t trust my readings. It’s such a weird gesture, for one thing; the very strangeness of it resists the kind of domesticating force these readings would suggest. It’s important that we see the museum not filled with tourists but instead undergoing routine maintenance, a place of work. We see some of the iconic images: the displays of suitcases and shoes, prisoners’ uniforms hung up for viewing. But we see them only as the women, apparently indifferent to the represented horror, wipe down the vitrines. The women aren’t trying to make meaning or memories; they’re just doing their jobs. (As I’ve thought about this scene, I’ve grown more disquieted by the dust they’re removing: How much human ash remains mixed in the soil of Auschwitz?) Does the sequence raise questions about the materiality of memory, about what we should do with the stuff of history, where we put it, how we preserve it and the labor that undergirds our efforts? Or is the point that there’s no way to keep the horrors of the past vivid, that inevitably we grow inured to them? Is this a tacit defense of the film’s approach to representing, or not representing, the horrors of the Holocaust? Maybe it’s saying something like this: we’ve tried putting those horrors on view, and the result is numbness; let’s try something else.
The museum sequence lasts a couple of minutes, a significant interruption, before we return to the view of Höss, still bent over, still staring down the hall. And then he straightens, and continues his journey down.
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Manohla Dargis’s review of The Zone of Interest in the Times fascinates me, because I agree with her about so much. She sees the same things I see: the film’s discipline in how it has chosen to tell the story, its guarding against sympathetic investment, the way the Hösses embody Nazi ideology. But she comes away with a radically different response: she hates it. She’s offended by its aesthetics, by the fact that it cares so much about aesthetics. Is it morally depraved to care about aesthetics when making a film about the Holocaust? (Would it be morally depraved not to?) Dargis seems to think that Glazer’s primary concern is impressing us with his technical bravura, what she calls the film’s “wow factor.” (She’s referring specifically to the thermal-imaging sequences, but she indicts the film as a whole on these grounds.) I don’t understand this response, especially since to me the film’s aesthetics are bound up with its moral project.
“What is the point of ‘The Zone of Interest’?” Dargis’s review begins; later, she complains that “like so many other movies, mainstream or not, this one is fascinated with its villains, far more than it is with their victims, whose suffering here is largely reduced to room tone.” This isn’t accurate to my experience of the film; more generally, much of Dargis’s negative response, like much of the negative response directed at the film, seems predicated on indignation over what I called earlier the film’s conceit, its flipping of foreground and background. It’s as though our attention is a privilege of some kind, something it’s obscene to bestow upon the Hösses. How dare we tell the story of the Holocaust from any perspective other than that of the victims, this outrage seems to presume. How dare we dramatize that story as it was experienced by the perpetrators?
But doesn’t the impossible task of narrating humanness, all that we’re capable of, demand it? It seems to me we don’t know what to do with this question. I think of Philip Guston’s great paintings from the late 1960s, in which he shows cartoonish figures in KKK hoods doing everyday things: smoking, riding around town, looking generally hapless and lost. The paintings remain controversial, more than half a century after they were made: in 2020, they prompted the then-new director of the National Gallery of Art, Kaywin Feldman, to delay a major Guston exhibition for four years. In one of Guston’s greatest paintings, one of the greatest paintings I know, 1969’s The Studio, a hooded Klansman, with a cigarette in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, paints a self-portrait. The painting itself is a self-portrait, of course, an exercise in a kind of nightmare identification. Could this be me, Guston’s paintings ask, am I capable of this; and there’s nothing glamorous in the question, no self-flattering innocence or self-lacerating monstrosity. (Abjection can be glamorous too.) The paintings refuse to quarantine the evil of American racism as something over there, something of which the self—any American self, certainly any white American self—can be pure. It’s one of the twentieth century’s great works of conscience. One of the finest things I’ve read about Guston is an essay in Artforum by the artist Steve Locke, in which he describes, after being shocked and angered by his first glimpse of these paintings in art school, how an immersion in Guston’s life and work led him to a different understanding. “I learn that I am not seeing what I think I am seeing,” Locke writes. “Instead of evidence of an artist’s racism, I learn that, for the first time in my life, I am seeing a white artist—one of the giants of American art—grapple with his own complicity in white supremacy.”
What if we all tried to grapple with our complicity in evil, even if that complicity remains, thanks to nothing more than the luck of our circumstances, passive or potential? I’ve written elsewhere about what seems to me a genuinely repugnant aspect of our moral moment, a kind of Indiana Jones moralizing triumphalism. This has flourished on the left in the era of Trump, with memes urging us all to go out and punch Nazis, memes that assume, against every scrap of evidence history can offer, that we would all of us, under the Nazi regime—assuming we were lucky enough not to be targeted by that regime—risk our lives with the resistance. This seems to me an unwarranted confidence. Of course we wouldn’t all be resistance fighters; only the tiniest fraction of us would risk our only lives for the lives of others. And what’s most important for our moral health is to acknowledge that should the shit ever really hit the fan—it looks likelier all the time—none of us can know what we would do. The posture of righteousness seems to me not only morally bankrupt but dangerous. None of us has any idea what we would do in extremis, whether we would pass a test we haven’t faced.
Or have we? I’ve always taken comfort from the fact that in anything like a Nazi regime I would be an early casualty, a degenerate cosmopolitan Weimar queer quickly cleansed. But if I weren’t? I feel fairly sure I would collapse before committing any overt act of violence; I can’t imagine killing another human being. But that was true of a lot of Germans too, and the Nazis expended a lot of effort figuring out how to make non-psychopaths, which is most of us, kill unarmed civilians without losing their minds. Even so, a lot of them did lose their minds. But let’s set that aside. What if overt violence wasn’t demanded? What if we could keep our heads down, occupy ourselves with our families, our pets, what if we could go to work and then grab a beer with our friends and read a book as we fell asleep, what if we could turn our faces away from the sufferings of others? What if it was a matter of degrees, of accepting a little more and a little more, until suddenly one was lost in some moral hinterland, disfigured, unrecognizable to oneself?
Isn’t that a fair description of many of our lives? I don’t think the Holocaust should be a metaphor, and I don’t think Glazer makes it one. I think the film, like most great art, sharpens distinctions; it doesn’t flatten them. But it also allows for unexpected points of contact. That feeling I had after my first viewing of the film, that sense that something had happened to me, was a feeling of having been indicted. Glazer treads a very fine line; I think it’s an exemplary one. He doesn’t make his Nazis caricatures, he doesn’t make them monsters we could easily cordon off from humanity, from ourselves, or—since this is our response to monsters too—that we could glamorize and sympathize with. (He’s like Guston in this, I think.) His is a film that attacks all our conventional narratives, all our pieties. It makes us recognize the potential in ourselves, if not for overt barbaric acts (though that’s there too) then for a willful blindness to, a tolerance of, barbarism. Identification, at least potential identification, without sympathy—maybe that’s a way of putting what Glazer achieves. “I have the germs of every human infirmity in me,” Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure says. Glazer’s film made me feel it.
This essay first appeared, in a different form, in the newsletter To a Green Thought.
Image credit: Still from Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest, 2023. Cinematography by Łukasz Zal. Courtesy of A24.
If somehow you were to wander into a screening of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) without knowing what you were getting into, it might take about ten minutes to figure things out. The film opens on a bucolic scene, a group of mostly children sitting in high grass while another group bathes in a river below. It’s a breathtaking view: the meadow-like grasses, the broad water glittering in the sun, the wooded bank on the river’s far side. A man in ill-fitting swim trunks, pasty and pudgy, walks down to the river with two boys and a younger man, who start splashing each other; a woman stays with the other children, a crying baby (it will cry through the whole film) in her arms. There’s no narrative, just lovely glimpses: the children swimming, picking berries, squabbling in the car on the way home while their parents urge them to sleep.
It’s night when they arrive at an ample, graciously appointed, unremarkable house. The children are sent to bed; outside, their source unclear, the bucolic sounds of the opening (purling water, a woodpecker’s tattoo) have been replaced by troubling noises, metallic, industrial. We see the parents in their bedroom, in separate narrow beds but turned toward each other, intimate, untroubled by the sounds that grow increasingly unnerving, punctuated by shouts and screams. A cut to the next morning, another gorgeous, painterly shot, framing the narrow hallway by the stairs. We gaze from the dim interior to the entryway flooded with early light—a Dutch interior, almost. It’s the father’s birthday; he’s led out of the house blindfolded, presented with his gift, a canoe; the baby cries when he sets her in it. And then, after he kisses his wife, we see a guard tower behind him, the huge, barbed walls of a concentration camp.
Very attentive viewers might catch on more quickly: on my second viewing, I noticed a quick flash of Nazi SS insignia on the license plate of one of the cars driving the party home from the river. But the whole conceit of Glazer’s film is to reverse foreground and background, to place the horrors of Auschwitz at the edge of our perception while inhabiting, with the kind of density and patience typical of art meant to reveal the luminous in the everyday, the privileged banal domesticity of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. The film has provoked strong reactions. It has won a slew of awards and was nominated for five Oscars; but there has been notable, virulent critical dissent, maybe most particularly, in the United States, from Richard Brody at the New Yorker, who labeled the film “Holokitsch,” and Manohla Dargis, who called it a “hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise” in the New York Times.
I wasn’t sure what I thought after seeing the film for the first time. All I knew was that something had happened to me: the film wouldn’t let me go, it was like a dark stain spreading in my interior. The film disquieted me in a way that felt more important than whether I thought it was “good” or “bad,” certainly more important than any argument I might make justifying my response. I talked about it with friends. I bought the Martin Amis novel on which the film is putatively based and read it in a day. I went to the film again, this time not in a little art cinema but in the huge AMC in Times Square, my first time in that bizarre labyrinth of a space, where I felt a little like a lost figure in an Escher engraving, riding endless escalators up and up. Ten minutes into the movie—maybe it didn’t even take that long—I felt sure I was seeing something great.
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Reading Amis’s novel was clarifying. Like Glazer’s film, the book centers on Auschwitz, and the commandant is a central character. But Amis draws on a broader cast. The book toggles, a little formulaically, between three voices: Paul Doll, its fictionalized version of Höss; Angelus Thomsen, a Nazi officer and secret saboteur; and Szmul, leader of the Sonderkommandos, the unit of Jewish prisoners given special privileges for their services in loading the gas chambers and cleaning out the crematoria. The drama of the book centers on Angelus’s desire and then love for Doll’s miserably disaffected wife, Hannah.
The book is full of horrors. Doll’s great preoccupation is the disposal of bodies (“Stücke,” or “pieces,” in Nazi parlance, which the film also adopts), and there is much description of the stench of the air, the putrid taste of decomposition-contaminated water in the town, the specter of a field flatulent with fermenting corpses. We see the terrible “selections,” where newly arrived prisoners are divided into the many murdered quickly and the few murdered slowly, their starved bodies forced to labor at double and then triple speed until they collapse. As Doll’s doubts intrude upon his ideology (a little absurdly: “If what we’re doing is good, why does it smell so lancingly bad?” he wonders), he grows ever more unhinged, his violence increasingly stripped of any palliative veneer, even outside the camp walls. (He brutally terrorizes his wife, whose resistance to his coercion, sexual and otherwise, becomes more assertive. When, heroically reclaiming his own dignity, Szmul refuses to murder Hannah, as Doll had demanded, Doll shoots him in the face.) But the book also has a moral center, or at least a stable ground of sanity, in Angelus, who is transformed into a heroic saboteur by his love for Hannah. “Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out,” Angelus muses; and then, making sure we don’t miss the point: “Who somebody really was. That was the zone of interest.”
The book’s momentum, the pleasure of its madcap comedy horror, carried me through a first read, but all of this curdled as I sat with it. The book, self-consciously posturing as a work of moral witness, came to seem to me a moral cartoon, radically inadequate to its subject. The macabre corpse comedy, the fact that Angelus (the name!) serves as a Vergil through the inferno, the fact that the narrative drama centers on adulterous passion, the bourgeois novelistic conceit par excellence, the fact that its moral drama centers on a Nazi’s redemption through love—there’s a word for all of this, and it’s the word Brody uses for Glazer’s film adaptation: kitsch. Not least among my reservations was precisely the book’s success, by one measure, as I encountered it for the first time: the fact of my enjoyment. Even in the grip of it, Amis’s novel gave me a qualm I’ve felt before in novels set among Nazis, maybe especially in Jonathan Littell’s in many ways amazing, Prix Goncourt-winning Les Bienveillantes (published in English as The Kindly Ones), and in almost every Holocaust movie I’ve seen. Should I really be so entertained by a book about the Holocaust, I wondered as I read Amis. Should a novel set in Auschwitz really be this much fun?
That question didn’t occur to me as I watched Glazer’s Zone of Interest, because I never felt—in a way that strikes me now as part of the film’s remarkable and moral discipline—entertained. Glazer does away with all of Amis’s characters and drama. There are no Sonderkommandos, no conflicted Nazis, no love affairs. Glazer takes Amis’s setting and focus—Auschwitz and its commandant—but reinstates the historical Höss and family, and subtracts any hint of Nazi moral melodrama. There’s very little drama at all, in fact, at least in the foreground of the film. The closest we come to a plot involves Höss’s transfer from Auschwitz and Hedwig’s insistence that she and her children will stay in the home they have made there. Höss agrees, spends a few months in Oranienburg, and then is transferred back to Auschwitz, rejoining his family there. There’s very little obvious pathos to be found; certainly none adheres to Rudolf or Hedwig. Much of the film seems determined to avoid interiority or psychological depth altogether: there are almost no close-ups of faces, and long scenes are interrupted by glances elsewhere—other rooms of the house, quick shots of the exterior. The film gives a sense of a world in which no one looks anybody else in the eyes (this is a motif in the novel); it works hard to prevent identification or easy sympathy. Glazer’s Hösses are not Amis’s caricatures, but neither are they vessels for our emotional investment.
This means that Glazer refuses us many of the pleasures we expect from cinema. Watching the film for the first time, there were stretches where I felt bored: I wondered whether we really needed all these long shots, whether the film wallowed a little too much in its own longueurs. I felt this boredom was justified even on my first viewing, part of a considered aesthetic effect, part of what guards against entertainment. But on my second viewing I wasn’t bored at all; every moment was riveting. In part this is because—and maybe this is a bit counterintuitive—the first time around I was waiting for some drama to erupt, some violence to be unleashed. Knowing what to expect, or what not to expect, let me relish what the film offers: not so much a narrative as an experience of a world, scenes of extraordinary and revelatory density.
What I mean by “density” is the strange alchemy by which great art, with the few bits of data that will fit on a page (or on a screen), conveys the pressure of an entire world—of all the innumerable data points that make up reality, which it would be impossible for an artist to include, however long the novel or the film. This density is what makes an invented world feel lived in, and to the extent that I can understand how it works I think it has to do with super-saturating details with information, so that each detail we see ramifies, suggesting all we don’t see.
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As every discussion of the film has emphasized, Glazer’s film is adamant about all we don’t see. The camp’s brutality is omnipresent, not least in architecture: the walls that abut Hedwig’s beloved “paradise garden”; the guard towers and lines of buildings whose gables poke above those walls; the crematorium’s smokestack. But we never witness violence; in the one scene that (so far as I can tell) takes place within the camp’s walls, the camera is positioned so that all we see is Höss’s face, viewed from below in a monumentalizing, socialist-realist framing. He remains impassive as the sound of grunts and screams becomes overwhelming; eventually his image is lost in drifting smoke.
The reality of the camp is conveyed almost entirely through sound, the film’s use of which is remarkable. Inside the Hösses’ home, we’re constantly assaulted by sounds from outside, human and nonhuman: trucks, sirens, the shouts of guards, the cries of prisoners. This gives the domestic scenes a surreal and devastating overcast, so that we’re constantly aware, hyperaware, of everything the family leaves unacknowledged, the barbarity that undergirds and enables their seeming contentment. (In a line of Höss’s autobiography quoted by Dargis, “my family had it good in Auschwitz, every wish that my wife or my children had was fulfilled.”) It also makes us complicit in that barbarity, not passively observing but actively imagining violence, filling in the world beyond the edges of the screen.
This is how Glazer sidesteps what Ruth Franklin, reviewing Amis’s novel for the New York Times, calls the “documentation glut” that challenges any attempt to tell stories about the Holocaust—the fact that we have access to so much information about the Holocaust, including images of the death camps. That information can often seem inert: it can be numbing, or too quickly assimilated to prepackaged narratives of evil or heroism, narratives that engage preprogrammed emotional responses, that fail to strike us to the quick. One thing Glazer’s film is doing, I think, is seeking out strategies to make us feel the Holocaust’s world-shattering barbarism, to register not just the horror (though the film does register that) but the strangeness and alienness of that barbarism. It does so, and this is what seems to me nearly miraculous in the film, not by isolating or walling off that alienness, suggesting the Nazis were some different species, monsters that have nothing to do with us—but instead by forcing us to recognize barbarism as part of the human equipment, a possibility that all of us carry.
One of Brody’s complaints about The Zone of Interest is that there’s “no room for the victims: prisoners, serving as forced laborers, appear around the house throughout the film, but silently. They’re given neither any voice nor any point of view.” As with many of Brody’s observations about the film, I think this is factually imprecise. Hedwig’s huge garden seems to be worked by prisoners. But the domestic servants at least do not live within the walls of the camp. The nanny seems to be German; the other women working in the house are Polish—targets of a slower (though no less absolute) genocidal project than that facing Jews. When Hedwig’s mother, on a visit, whispers in shock, “Jews in the house?” Hedwig laughs: the Jews are all on the other side of the wall, she says; the women working in the house are “local girls.” Their status wasn’t entirely clear to me. Clearly they are not in any normal sense simple workers, but they don’t seem to be prisoners. At least some of them live in the house with the Hösses; in one of two moments when Hedwig loses her composure, she screams at one servant, “Don’t forget you live well in our house.” When a bag of clothes from newly murdered prisoners arrives, Hedwig allows each of the servants to choose an item. They do so with what seems like pleasure.
To be clear, these workers’ lives can be, at any moment, forfeit; they’re living under a regime of terror. What seems wrong to me about Brody’s observation is his assertion that “they’re given neither any voice nor any point of view.” Point of view, as I’ve already suggested, is complex in the film—Glazer resists letting us occupy any character’s perspective—but to the extent that it’s granted to anyone it is granted to one of the Polish servants, Aniela, played by Zuzanna Kobiela in one of the film’s great performances. (The historical figure’s full name was Aniela Bednarska, and much of what is known about the Höss household at Auschwitz comes from a diary she kept, and from statements she gave after the war.) She does have one line, actually: “Nein, Frau Höss,” which she speaks before one of the film’s most chilling moments, when Hedwig, eating breakfast, calmly and quietly tells her, “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice.”
But point of view doesn’t depend on speech, and Aniela’s experience is conveyed eloquently, plangently, by Kobiela in every movement. In the one scene where Rudolf and Hedwig argue—Hedwig is chasing after Rudolf, yelling for him to stop and talk to her—Aniela presses herself against the wall, her head down, her broom clutched to her body: her posture speaks of absolute, animal fear, a survival strategy of invisibility. In an extraordinary sequence, as Rudolf arrives at the house with a group of German industrialists in tow (the presence of civilian businessmen at the camp, seeking slave labor and profit, is another fact of the world that is quietly omnipresent in the film), he takes off his boots before entering the house. Immediately a man (who does seem to be a prisoner) snatches them and takes them to a spigot beside the house, thoroughly washing them before setting them back at the door. This is interspliced with the image of Aniela placing a single small liqueur glass on a tray, carefully centering it before filling it to the brim, then carrying it out of the room, every movement calibrated to prevent it from spilling. This apparently negligible action takes on extraordinary drama—everything in how Aniela moves conveys the stakes for her, her fear; I was terrified too. A moment later we see Aniela take the boots from the door and set them outside Rudolf’s office.
This is what I mean by density. Every detail—every gesture, every object—is saturated with information about the world and the situation in which the characters live. The mechanized efficiency of domestic labor is a kind of shadow of the mechanized efficiency of slaughter the film hides from our view. I became hyperaware of Rudolf’s boots throughout the film on my second viewing, seeing how they are processed, cared for, how they are evidence of the line between domestic life and work—a line that never holds. In that first scene, the industrialists seem a little taken aback when Rudolf removes his boots, and ask if they should remove their shoes as well. No no, he says, there’s no need. One of the haunting questions the moment leaves unanswered is what contamination Rudolf is protecting his house from, what has soiled his boots. It suggests unimaginable horrors; the film forces us to imagine them.
Another example of density: after receiving the bag of clothing she distributes among the servants, Hedwig, played in an extraordinary performance by Sandra Hüller, goes up to her room with her own prize, a glamorous fur coat. As she tries it on, pulling it tight to her body, modeling it over her drab household clothes, it’s clear what a foreign object it is for her. She has no idea how to wear it; though it fits her fine, her body can’t inhabit it. There’s a tube of lipstick in the coat’s pocket, and this is foreign to her too: she sniffs it, she puts it on her hand to test the color, she uses her finger to rub it into her lips, finally she daubs it clumsily against her mouth. Then she takes a corner of her apron to wipe it all off.
It’s an eloquent scene, compressing a whole national narrative about Jews, who in Nazi ideology were at once vermin and privileged, hyper-cultured, the object of both disgust and envious class resentment. On my second viewing, I was amazed at how Hüller moves in the film, giving Hedwig an ungainly, lumbering gait; or the way, in the scene where she speaks that chilling line to Aniela, she shoves her food into her mouth. Details about the historical Hedwig’s upbringing are surprisingly hard to find—I couldn’t even find clear information about where she was born—but everything in Hüller’s performance suggests that the luxury in which she lives in Auschwitz was foreign to her experience, an elaborate costume. (“You really have landed on your feet, my child,” her mother says to her on her visit.)
Hedwig’s most extended speech comes in an argument with Rudolf, in a scene that is revelatory for what I take to be Glazer’s aims. The argument starts in the middle of a pool party for the children, when Rudolf suddenly announces to Hedwig that he’s being transferred—something he has known for a week—and that the family will have to leave their home. He flees her questions, walking through the house and then out the front door, and Hedwig follows him. (This is one of the only times we see the road outside the home, and the only time we see military vehicles; it’s also one of the film’s only tracking shots.) She finds him standing by the river, gazing out over the water. “We have to face facts. We have to leave,” he tells her. She responds, “No, you have to leave,” demanding that he request that the family stay in the house in Auschwitz while he goes to Oranienburg.
Hedwig justifies her demand with an impassioned speech about their ideals. She is a true believer—she and Rudolf met on a farm, both enthusiasts of a Nazi back-to-the-land movement—and makes an appeal to the beliefs she and Rudolf share. They would have to drag me out of here, she tells him. “This is our home,” she says. “Everything the Führer said about how to live is how we do. Go East. Lebensraum. This is our Lebensraum.” This isn’t just a domestic squabble; Glazer is making a serious and profound argument about the way fascist ideology suffuses domestic life, so that Lebensraum becomes not just a national program but an individual ideal. He is also, not incidentally, casually dismissing, as he does throughout the film, what has been a kind of ludicrous debate about how much Hedwig knew about her husband’s activities. In the memoir Rudolf wrote in prison, he claimed Hedwig never knew about the gas chambers, a claim some historians have apparently taken seriously. The film tacitly reveals how absurd an idea it is.
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I’ve said that the film doesn’t give us any vessels for sympathetic identification, but in fact we do see one heroic figure: a Polish girl who, at great personal risk, leaves food for the prisoners at their work sites, hiding pears among their tools and burying apples in what seems to be a ditch they are digging. These sequences (there are two of them), are hugely disruptive, erupting from the film’s texture in a wild formal extravagance: they were filmed in black and white with a military thermal-imaging camera, registering heat instead of light; they look like animated photographic negatives. In both sequences, as we watch this girl we hear Rudolf’s voice reading fairy tales to his daughters.
I wasn’t quite sure of my response to these scenes. In part this was because I respect so much what otherwise seems the film’s refusal of sanity, the way it denies us any point of sane value in the world of the film. There is no Angelus figure to serve as a reference point against which to measure the moral aberration of the Nazis. I think that’s important to the film’s moral aims. Maybe the formal device of the thermal-imaging camera protects against her serving as a kind of moral release hatch—it’s the girl who is the exception, not the actually aberrant Nazis; she exists in a different realm.
In the second sequence, while the girl is placing pears among the workers’ shovels, she finds a small metal canister left there by one of the prisoners, presumably for her; unscrewing it, she sees a folded-up sheet of paper inside. We learn what this is a little later, in a scene that is also unique in the film. After the second thermal-imaging sequence, we see a girl, presumably the same girl who left the pears, sitting at a piano in what looks to be a middle-class home. On the piano’s music stand is a page of handwritten music; by the way it is folded, we know it’s the page we saw in the canister.
The discovery of the music is invented, but not the music itself: the song is “Sunbeams,” by Joseph Wulf, a Jewish prisoner of Auschwitz, who survived the camp only to commit suicide in 1974, in despair over German indifference to his historical research into the Holocaust. As the girl plays the melody, subtitles provide the text, the only Jewish words we are exposed to in the entire film. The subtitles inform us that they’re written in Yiddish. “We who are imprisoned here, our hearts are not yet cold,” the text reads. “Souls afire like the blazing sun, tearing, breaking through their pain, for soon we’ll see that waving flag, the flag of freedom yet to come.”
Intellectually, I can’t justify this scene; it’s the one moment in the film that seems like it should be (as Brody charges) kitsch, an appeal to pathos unlike anything else the movie allows itself. But it feels right to me. Maybe it’s that the scene is treated so quietly, without melodrama: just the figure of the girl, the clumsily, eloquently played melody. I think it’s important that she doesn’t sing: if anyone matches the text to the melody, it’s the viewer. At the end of the song she stops playing, and for a moment we see her looking at the page, her expression unreadable. The whole thing only lasts a minute or two. It should seem like a violation of what I take to be the film’s contract, the rules it sets for itself; I feel like I should object to it. But maybe that violation is part of what makes it moving.
Even harder for me to swallow—though kitsch isn’t the word for it, it’s too strange for that—is a moment almost at the very end of the movie. The film ends with Rudolf, alone in what I take to be Oranienburg, descending a staircase in an empty, darkened office building. There’s something surreal about the sequence from the start: the floor has a geometric pattern, rectangles within rectangles, that echoes the seemingly endless flights of stairs. (Escher, again.) Rudolf, whom we have seen being examined by a doctor shortly before this scene, though we don’t learn why, stops and bends over, retching. He doesn’t vomit, which makes the moment even stranger; he remains bent over, as if trying to expel some rot he can’t rid himself of. He straightens, descends another flight, and repeats the gesture. Then, still bent over, he looks to his left, down a darkened hall, at the end of which is a pinprick of light. This pinprick is revealed to be a porthole, and then a door opens and we are in Auschwitz, in modern day, as a group of women enter to clean the museum.
What are we meant to make of this? On one hand, it seems to be another, more grievous, violation of the film’s contract, as though here, at the very end, it loses its nerve, offering an escape hatch from the nightmare we’ve been locked in. A domesticating, placating gesture, as if it were saying, Yes, you’ve spent two hours among horrors, but remember that the good guys win. Even worse, are we meant to think that Höss has a vision of this future, that he sees the judgment of history? It’s not implausible: I think (based on the timing of Höss’s recall to Auschwitz, news he has just shared with his wife) that we’re in 1944, by which point the writing was more than on the wall; anyone with any grip on reality could see that Germany would lose the war.
By either of those readings, I think this flash-forward is a wrong step, a failed gesture. But I don’t trust my readings. It’s such a weird gesture, for one thing; the very strangeness of it resists the kind of domesticating force these readings would suggest. It’s important that we see the museum not filled with tourists but instead undergoing routine maintenance, a place of work. We see some of the iconic images: the displays of suitcases and shoes, prisoners’ uniforms hung up for viewing. But we see them only as the women, apparently indifferent to the represented horror, wipe down the vitrines. The women aren’t trying to make meaning or memories; they’re just doing their jobs. (As I’ve thought about this scene, I’ve grown more disquieted by the dust they’re removing: How much human ash remains mixed in the soil of Auschwitz?) Does the sequence raise questions about the materiality of memory, about what we should do with the stuff of history, where we put it, how we preserve it and the labor that undergirds our efforts? Or is the point that there’s no way to keep the horrors of the past vivid, that inevitably we grow inured to them? Is this a tacit defense of the film’s approach to representing, or not representing, the horrors of the Holocaust? Maybe it’s saying something like this: we’ve tried putting those horrors on view, and the result is numbness; let’s try something else.
The museum sequence lasts a couple of minutes, a significant interruption, before we return to the view of Höss, still bent over, still staring down the hall. And then he straightens, and continues his journey down.
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Manohla Dargis’s review of The Zone of Interest in the Times fascinates me, because I agree with her about so much. She sees the same things I see: the film’s discipline in how it has chosen to tell the story, its guarding against sympathetic investment, the way the Hösses embody Nazi ideology. But she comes away with a radically different response: she hates it. She’s offended by its aesthetics, by the fact that it cares so much about aesthetics. Is it morally depraved to care about aesthetics when making a film about the Holocaust? (Would it be morally depraved not to?) Dargis seems to think that Glazer’s primary concern is impressing us with his technical bravura, what she calls the film’s “wow factor.” (She’s referring specifically to the thermal-imaging sequences, but she indicts the film as a whole on these grounds.) I don’t understand this response, especially since to me the film’s aesthetics are bound up with its moral project.
“What is the point of ‘The Zone of Interest’?” Dargis’s review begins; later, she complains that “like so many other movies, mainstream or not, this one is fascinated with its villains, far more than it is with their victims, whose suffering here is largely reduced to room tone.” This isn’t accurate to my experience of the film; more generally, much of Dargis’s negative response, like much of the negative response directed at the film, seems predicated on indignation over what I called earlier the film’s conceit, its flipping of foreground and background. It’s as though our attention is a privilege of some kind, something it’s obscene to bestow upon the Hösses. How dare we tell the story of the Holocaust from any perspective other than that of the victims, this outrage seems to presume. How dare we dramatize that story as it was experienced by the perpetrators?
But doesn’t the impossible task of narrating humanness, all that we’re capable of, demand it? It seems to me we don’t know what to do with this question. I think of Philip Guston’s great paintings from the late 1960s, in which he shows cartoonish figures in KKK hoods doing everyday things: smoking, riding around town, looking generally hapless and lost. The paintings remain controversial, more than half a century after they were made: in 2020, they prompted the then-new director of the National Gallery of Art, Kaywin Feldman, to delay a major Guston exhibition for four years. In one of Guston’s greatest paintings, one of the greatest paintings I know, 1969’s The Studio, a hooded Klansman, with a cigarette in one hand and a paintbrush in the other, paints a self-portrait. The painting itself is a self-portrait, of course, an exercise in a kind of nightmare identification. Could this be me, Guston’s paintings ask, am I capable of this; and there’s nothing glamorous in the question, no self-flattering innocence or self-lacerating monstrosity. (Abjection can be glamorous too.) The paintings refuse to quarantine the evil of American racism as something over there, something of which the self—any American self, certainly any white American self—can be pure. It’s one of the twentieth century’s great works of conscience. One of the finest things I’ve read about Guston is an essay in Artforum by the artist Steve Locke, in which he describes, after being shocked and angered by his first glimpse of these paintings in art school, how an immersion in Guston’s life and work led him to a different understanding. “I learn that I am not seeing what I think I am seeing,” Locke writes. “Instead of evidence of an artist’s racism, I learn that, for the first time in my life, I am seeing a white artist—one of the giants of American art—grapple with his own complicity in white supremacy.”
What if we all tried to grapple with our complicity in evil, even if that complicity remains, thanks to nothing more than the luck of our circumstances, passive or potential? I’ve written elsewhere about what seems to me a genuinely repugnant aspect of our moral moment, a kind of Indiana Jones moralizing triumphalism. This has flourished on the left in the era of Trump, with memes urging us all to go out and punch Nazis, memes that assume, against every scrap of evidence history can offer, that we would all of us, under the Nazi regime—assuming we were lucky enough not to be targeted by that regime—risk our lives with the resistance. This seems to me an unwarranted confidence. Of course we wouldn’t all be resistance fighters; only the tiniest fraction of us would risk our only lives for the lives of others. And what’s most important for our moral health is to acknowledge that should the shit ever really hit the fan—it looks likelier all the time—none of us can know what we would do. The posture of righteousness seems to me not only morally bankrupt but dangerous. None of us has any idea what we would do in extremis, whether we would pass a test we haven’t faced.
Or have we? I’ve always taken comfort from the fact that in anything like a Nazi regime I would be an early casualty, a degenerate cosmopolitan Weimar queer quickly cleansed. But if I weren’t? I feel fairly sure I would collapse before committing any overt act of violence; I can’t imagine killing another human being. But that was true of a lot of Germans too, and the Nazis expended a lot of effort figuring out how to make non-psychopaths, which is most of us, kill unarmed civilians without losing their minds. Even so, a lot of them did lose their minds. But let’s set that aside. What if overt violence wasn’t demanded? What if we could keep our heads down, occupy ourselves with our families, our pets, what if we could go to work and then grab a beer with our friends and read a book as we fell asleep, what if we could turn our faces away from the sufferings of others? What if it was a matter of degrees, of accepting a little more and a little more, until suddenly one was lost in some moral hinterland, disfigured, unrecognizable to oneself?
Isn’t that a fair description of many of our lives? I don’t think the Holocaust should be a metaphor, and I don’t think Glazer makes it one. I think the film, like most great art, sharpens distinctions; it doesn’t flatten them. But it also allows for unexpected points of contact. That feeling I had after my first viewing of the film, that sense that something had happened to me, was a feeling of having been indicted. Glazer treads a very fine line; I think it’s an exemplary one. He doesn’t make his Nazis caricatures, he doesn’t make them monsters we could easily cordon off from humanity, from ourselves, or—since this is our response to monsters too—that we could glamorize and sympathize with. (He’s like Guston in this, I think.) His is a film that attacks all our conventional narratives, all our pieties. It makes us recognize the potential in ourselves, if not for overt barbaric acts (though that’s there too) then for a willful blindness to, a tolerance of, barbarism. Identification, at least potential identification, without sympathy—maybe that’s a way of putting what Glazer achieves. “I have the germs of every human infirmity in me,” Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure says. Glazer’s film made me feel it.
This essay first appeared, in a different form, in the newsletter To a Green Thought.
Image credit: Still from Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest, 2023. Cinematography by Łukasz Zal. Courtesy of A24.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.