The Year's Best Film
Well, at least for me...and just in time for the Oscars!
My choice for Best Film of 2023 is THE ZONE OF INTEREST directed by Jonathan Glazer.
If I had seen this film 15 years ago, it would have shocked me. Sadly, nothing about its content is now shocking to me. Later in this post (point III.) , I will explain why I now feel this way (the post is long and you might have to click to read below the fold).
I. PARADISE AND THE HELL NEXT DOOR
It took Jonathan Glazer ten years to make The Zone of Interest, a film that focuses on the minutiae of everyday life for a “normal” family living right outside the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The family home and gardens are idyllic, the children are beautiful, the husband and wife often dress in light, summery colors. But the metaphorical/ spiritual background to their homegrown paradise is vibrant red, the color of blood and death.
Glazer’s film is a Holocaust film unlike any I have ever seen. In fact, it is unlike any film I have ever seen on any topic, especially one this tragic and harrowing. In it, we follow the daily life cycles of Nazi Commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife, Hedwig. Although Höss is the architect of the many structures of death and torture contained inside the walls of Auschwitz (the ovens, the use of Zyklon D, the gas chambers), he is a well-loved and gentle father. He spends time cradling his beloved horse and reads fairytales to his daughter.
As I watched the film’s beautiful images full of love and light, I kept thinking of the word “wholesome.” This reminds me of James Baldwin’s brilliant letter to his nephew in which he refers to those upholding white supremacy as “innocents.” These innocents have –in both past and present–oppressed and dehumanized his people. They are “innocent” as they believe so strongly in the normality of the privileged, “wholesome,” lives they provide for their families. And in order to do this, they must willfully ignore and/or normalize the brutality that must occur in order for this normalized, exclusive, privilege to be maintained. Baldwin writes:
“It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
The area around the Auschwitz concentration camp was called the “Zone of Interest” by the Nazis. The term is bland, euphemistic, devoid of horror. And in this brilliant film, we see very little in the way of horror–but we know it is there. Although we see images of lush vegetation and normal family life, Glazer uses truly distressing, almost unlistenable SOUNDS of torment to remind us of the reality on the other side of the wall. This is a horror film that uses sound, subtle images, and our collective historical memory to force us to look at the psychology of white supremacy and the very comfort, privilege, and “wholesome” exclusion it births.
In Glazer’s film, we never see over the wall that divides what Hedwig refers to as “paradise” (“I’m the Queen of Auschwitz!”) from the hell of the death camp. The only Jewish prisoners we see are servants inside and outside the Höss home.
In an interview with the New York Times, Glazer explains:
“I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural. You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”
This is the deep mystery and even deeper horror of the film.
“It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victim.”
Glazer scoured historical documents in the archives of Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum where, according to the Times article, “he’d hired a pair of researchers to scour for information on the Hösses, the more quotidian the better.” He found a documented domestic life of calm, warmth, and happiness.
In a 2013 The Globe and Mail article featuring portions of Thomas Harding’s 2006 interview with the commandant’s youngest daughter, Brigitte, Harding relays that "She told me that he was the nicest father in the world, that he would read stories and take them on boat rides. His family loved him. There were two sides to him—the father and the commandant.”…“What I found is that a single person can be both [a man and a monster], and that’s frightening. It could happen again, and that’s why we need to be vigilant.”
The film certainly shows this side of Höss, the devoted father. Yet there are always reminders of the lost lives that the family’s perceived utopia is built upon. As Rudolf reads a bedtime story to his daughter, we hear abrupt, atonal music–almost like an alarm going off. We suddenly see thermal camera images of a young girl placing fruit on the ground outside of the camp.
In another joyful scene, the children and their father enjoy a boat trip together–until one of them finds the jawbone of a murdered Jew in the river. Rudolf rushes the children back home where they are painfully scrubbed of any “contaminants.”
These are the intrusive moments which jolt us back into reality.
It is very easy to see Rudolf’s wife, Hedwig, as merely a devoted mother trying to care for her children–until we see her modeling a fur coat, the spoils of her “shopping".” According to the historical documents Glazer accessed, the commandant’s wife regularly stole from the personal effects of Jews that had just been gassed and cremated. In this grotesque scene, Hedwig finds a tube of lipstick in the coat pocket and applies it, not concerned about any “contaminants.”
Moments like these remind us that we are easily fooled by gentle the day-to-day portrayal of the film’s protagonists and the lush empire that they have built.
In one surprising sequence, the camera closely examines the beautiful flowers in Hedwig’s garden. When it zooms closely onto the petals of a deep pink zinnia, the screen suddenly turns to bright red. We must sit and stare at a reminder of the blood-red crimes that have “bought” these flowers.
In an email to me, Dutch film director Jaap van Heusden observes:
“One of the strong things I already took away from the film is how false and misleading sentimentality is. Nowadays the notion that a film (or something) makes you ‘emotional’ is a good thing. But Glazer showed us that ‘false feelings’ (for flowers, a horse, a house) can distort reality, because they give you the impression that you are fully human, because you have all the same rich feelings as a human, while you are devoid of the basic feelings, like compassion.”
II. DOUBLING
The must puzzling part of the film is, of course, trying to reconcile the quiet domestic life of a Nazi commandant with his career of killing. It is easy to sidestep this cognitive dissonance by assuming that this was a “German” problem or that the Nazis were more “evil” for some inherent reason that could never be duplicated. But this completely misses the point of Glazer’s film which forces us to look at our own “normality” and to perhaps even question how far we would go to preserve it.
The film is loosely based on a novel of the same name by British novelist, Martin Amis. I have not read The Zone of Interest, but I have read (and taught) Amis’ other Holocaust novel called Time’s Arrow, and I found the research I did for that novel particularly helpful in developing a deeper understanding of this film. The plot of Time’s Arrow moves backward in time, and the Nazi doctors featured in the story repair and rehumanize the Jews rather and destroy and dehumanize them. In writing the novel, Amis did an extensive amount of research on the psychological analyses of those high up in the Third Reich, particularly the Nazi doctors (who were killers rather than healers). The book was deeply indebted to the study The Nazi Doctors by psychologist Robert J. Lifton. In this seminal text, Lifton discusses the phycological transformation that the Nazi doctors went through after arrival at Auschwitz when faced with the obvious moral dilemmas:
“The individual Nazi doctor needed his Auschwitz self to function psychologically in an environment so antithetical to his previous ethical standards. At the same time, he needed his prior self in order to continue to see himself as humane physician, husband, father.”
Lifton calls this partitioning of Nazi life and home life “doubling.” And although The Zone of Interest is not about Nazi doctors, the principle still applies. How could Rudolf Höss be both a good father and a killer of men, women, and children? Höss and so many others in command sacrificed their human capacity for empathy and compassion on the altar of white supremacist ideology. He thought that he was preserving the “innocent” and “wholesome” life of his family in a well-earned “paradise.” The Jews were seen as a threat to that “innocence,” so they were seen as sub-human pests, a threat to “real” humanity, and this threat must be exterminated. Like all instances of indoctrination by white supremacy, the real end goal was power and money–but many “true believers” were able to convince themselves that they were on the right side of history, upholding the “moral” good to preserve their innocent “purity.” Of course, this is all a demonic lie (can I put it more bluntly?). But this allowed Höss and men like him to lead a “double” life, to care for their family while destroying other families.
As I watched this film, I kept thinking of the brilliant poem “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock” by Gwendolyn Brooks. In it, a reporter from a Black Chicago newspaper is sent to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1954 to write a story about the white town member’s violent resistance to school integration. The “Little Rock Nine” were threatened, screamed at, and pummeled with rotten fruit and other objects just for trying to go to school.
The poem is full of the Black reporters descriptions of the white residents of Little Rock:
“In Little Rock the people sing/
Sunday hymns like anything/
Through Sunday pomp and polishing.”
After documenting their normality, the reporter writes, “I scratch my head, massage the hate-I-had”. And he simply must report:
“They are like people everywhere.”
He is shocked by their good Christian everyday humanity, “like people everywhere.” At the same time, he cannot deny what they have done:
“And true, they are hurling spittle, rock,
Garbage and fruit in Little Rock.
And I saw coiling storm a-writhe On bright madonnas.
And a scythe Of men harassing brownish girls.
(The bows and barrettes in the curls And braids declined away from joy.)
I saw a bleeding brownish boy. . . .
The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.
The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.”
This poem about “doubling” is a reminder that this practice is not unique to Nazi Germany. And that reminder is even stronger when we remember that the United States still does not have an official Memorial to the Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade until 2015. We have had a Holocaust Memorial Museum since 1980 (which is a very important, needed museum, of course). The point I am making is that in one story, we (the US) are the heroes. In one, we are the villains. What stories do we tell ourselves– or do we try to erase–to get by?
III. Why the Film’s Content/ Central Tension Did Not Shock Me
As I said at the beginning of this email, the film’s content did not shock me. I have seen the doubling at work so vividly ever since I began to start looking (but I had to unlearn a lot before the “looking” even began).
I have spoken with so many Black students at my former university about the “nice” and “innocent” people who have dehumanized them. And in the summer of 2020, I stood alongside some of these students protesting for the relocation (not destruction) of a Confederate monument in our small Southern town. As I stood next to them protesting, kneeling and praying, and singing songs together, I watched the body language and listened to the words of the “other side.” One pastor preached that “sin” in the Bible is described by “Black".” Others waved Confederate flags. On the scariest of nights, a train of trucks, pledging their allegiance to the then current president, repeatedly sped by us, screaming and waving flags. Small children leaned out of the windows, faces contorted with hate. Some of the truck drivers laughed and “rolled coal,” a method of coming threateningly right up against the curb in order to “gas” the protestors with exhaust fumes. It was frightening, and I sensed an evil that could only be described as demonic. As adults and children sped by, yelling words of hate and mockery at the protestors (including many of my former students), my deep sadness was stronger than my anger. I could only pray against the supernatural reality of evil that animated this hate. They thought they were doing the right thing, preserving their children’s “innocence” by trying to preserve symbols of oppression (the monument) and spewing the rhetoric of white supremacy. They were dead wrong.
You can read more from this summer of protests here.
In an interview with The Guardian, Jonathan Glazer explains:
“The reason I made this film is to try to restate our close proximity to this terrible event that we think of as in the past. For me, it is not ever in the past, and right now, I think something in me is aware – and fearful – that these things are on the rise again with the growth of rightwing populism everywhere. The road that so many people took is a few steps away. It is always just a few steps away.”
We can see this in the rhetoric of Christian Nationalism, Kinism, and so many other veiled normalizations of white supremacy. Many are proponents of the “Great Replacement Theory,” the fear that a supposedly “white” country will be overtaken by people of other races, and that this new demographic will lead to the country’s moral downfall and declining prosperity. You can see evidence of these theories in the images below: the first was taken in the fifties, the others are all recent. The AI image of the “wholesome” Christian Nationalist family has been circulating on twitter recently–and it is a chilling reminder of the images of “innocent” Aryan families in Nazi propaganda.
IV. A Sliver of Holy Hope in the Darkness
I have so much more to say about this incredibly important film. There are so many small, important moments. There are so many unique and powerful uses of sound, abstraction, and editing. But I need to stop here.
I want to end this sobering post on a hopeful note, a reminder that it is important for art to tell the truth about evil AND about goodness. As I mentioned above, there were several scenes in The Zone of Interest that featured a preteen girl spreading fruit outside the gates of Auschwitz at nighttime.
Jonathan Glazer has explained that this character was based on a real person, a 12-year-old girl named Alexandria. The director actually met this 90-year-old woman when he was filming the movie:
“She lived in the house we shot in. It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. Sadly, she died a few weeks after we spoke.
Read the director’s heartfelt, powerful words about Alexandria’s sacrificial mission:
“That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light. I really thought I couldn’t make the film at that point. I kept ringing my producer, Jim, and saying: ‘I’m getting out. I can’t do this. It’s just too dark.’ It felt impossible to just show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere and I found it in her. She is the force for good.”
I now have chills.
Thanks for reading,
Mary
Thank you Mary for this thoughtful essay. I confess I’ve resisted seeing the movie but your analysis gives me courage. Thanks. (And, Happy Birthday!)
I started reading your analysis a few weeks ago, but realized I need to watch the film first! I finally did yesterday. Such a difficult viewing, but I knew I needed to see it and I appreciate everything you wrote about it.