If you walked away from your first viewing of Best Picture nominee The Zone of Interest disappointed – good. That’s the point. Spoilers ahead.
What is The Zone of Interest about?
The Zone of Interest portrays the mundane daily life of the family of Rudolf Höss, a real-life Nazi officer responsible for running and optimizing the infamous Auschwitz death camp – which their beautiful home happens to abut. We see the family swimming and canoeing in a river discolored by cremains; the children reenacting what they’ve seen on the other side of the wall with toy army men; the matriarch trying on clothing and makeup stolen from the victims as if shopping at Macy’s. There is very little plot to speak of, in terms of a cohesive narrative. The only disrupting action is when Rudolf reveals he’s getting transferred, although the family remains in their villa and he rejoins them shortly after the end of the film.
Jonathan Glazer’s take on the Holocaust is not Schindler’s List, it’s not The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and it’s certainly not Inglorious Basterds. That’s because it’s not entirely about the Holocaust. It’s about you and I, how we package and consume horrific events like the Holocaust. Yes, it’s also about the banality of evil, the compartmentalization required for otherwise normal people to do terrible, terrible things; but, by playing with our expectations and leaving us wanting more, he reveals something about the viewer that can be difficult to digest.
What’s with the long stretches with no visuals?
The film clues you in immediately that you’re in for something different, as the title card fades to black and then hangs for what feels like ten minutes but is probably only two – still long enough to start to wonder if something is wrong with the projector. This is a clever way to train the audience that they should be listening at least as much as they are watching. Most of the horror is played out through the hellish score and the award-winning sound mixing that contrasts the beautiful visuals on the Höss side of the wall with the agonized screams, gun shots, and hissing death machines on the other.
We get another two minute break after the first act, this time with close ups of the flowers that have grown literally out of the ashes of Auschwitz to make for a pleasant family garden, bleeding away into a blank red screen while we listen to the day-to-day machinations of the camp. The film closes on yet another long black pause, Mica Levi’s score beating against the audience almost painfully. We exit the movie as uncomfortable and confused as we entered it, and fittingly, that break in the middle happens right when the grandmother is touring the grounds and it’s starting to feel like a normal movie. Glazer doesn’t want you to make that mistake.
Why does Rudolf throw up on the staircase?
As Rudolf descends the staircase – perhaps metaphorically to a lower layer of hell that he is earning for himself by ramping up the death toll with Operation Höss – he abruptly stops to vomit, and then again to dry heave. This could be read as a manifestation of his guilt, long ago suppressed but brought up anew because of the brutality of the task given to him, especially in juxtaposition to the opulent party he has recently stumbled around, bewildered. The real Rudolf Höss did write letters indicating he had a change of heart and deeply regretted his actions while he was in prison awaiting the death penalty.
There are other instances where we see the Höss family is more impacted by the cognitive dissonance than they let on. The youngest daughter sleepwalks, at one point saying she dreams she’s handing out sugar; perhaps revealing that she wishes she could make those sorrowful people in the camp happy the best way a child knows how. Claus, the eldest son, locks his little brother in the greenhouse and hisses gleefully, in a reenactment of the gas chambers he has witnessed – the cruelty of the Nazis rubbing off on and poisoning the next generation.
Why does the movie cut to people cleaning a museum?
As Rudolf reckons with his guilt in the stairway, he looks down the hallway and the film cuts to modern-day Auschwitz, where we see workers sweeping floors, wiping windows, and preparing for visitors. We see exhibits like thousands of pairs of shoes that belonged to the victims there. It’s a shocking reminder of the magnitude of the atrocity and the humanity of each individual soul that was lost, yes. But that could have been accomplished (and has been in other popular media) in a number of ways that fit within the narrative of the film, why show the workers tidying up in the museum some 80 years later?
First, it highlights that this movie isn’t just about history, it’s about today. There are horrific things happening constantly in our world, and we, the ticket-buying audience, are happy to ignore or forget about those things in order to maintain homeostasis in our own lives. We have a wall covered in ivy that we’ve constructed to keep ourselves blissful ignorant of those others suffering on the other side of it. Sometimes, if we’re unlucky, we’ll hear the metaphorical screams and gunshots, we’ll catch a whiff of something off from our open window – but then we’ll turn the music up or close the kitchen window, and we’re back to gossiping with our neighbors over brunch.
More importantly, the shots of the museum are a comment on the film itself. Sometimes we will expose ourselves to atrocities willfully. We’ll go to the Holocaust museum and look at belongings of those who died, in sanitized rooms behind Windexed glass. We’ll feel terrible; we’ll shed a tear; we’ll post on social media how horrible fascism and genocide are; and then we’ll go have a nice dinner and sleep in a fancy hotel and enjoy our lives, once again safe on “our side” of the wall. This act of self-flagellation absolves us. We aren’t like those who deny the Holocaust, and certainly not like those who committed the crimes, because we were brave enough to dip our toe in the pool of human suffering for an hour. We are the good ones.
In the same way, we the audience have gone to see The Zone of Interest, ready to be entertained or at least hurt in that particular way we crave. We’re okay with some artsy fartsy bits, that’s how we know it’s an elevated movie and that makes us feel smart (we signed up for an A24 film, after all). But we’re not okay that the movie is boringly long in some scenes. We’re not okay that there’s no conclusion, some sort of Nuremberg trial or hanging scene to put a bow on the story. Although we’d never admit it, we’re not okay that the director never shows any violence or grotesque shots of the camp – he intentionally angles the camera up at Rudolf’s face in the one scene we see from inside the walls, showing nothing but blue sky in the background. We want the exploitation, the sick feeling in our stomach, the gut-punch of a character we love losing a child to the gas chamber. We want to feel bad, so that we can feel good about it.
We consume history like we consume everything else, but it’s all empty calories to us. We enjoy it on the way down, but we don’t use it to fuel our actions. We say “never again” while we whistle past it happening all around us. The Zone of Interest shoves it down our throat and says, “Oh you didn’t like the taste? Too fucking bad.”