In The Zone

REVIEW OF FILM THE ZONE OF INTEREST

“”No. Only two and one half million — the rest died from disease and starvation.””

- Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz Concentration Camp when asked if he’d kill 3.5 million people

“The man sitting next to me was Hitler and he made so little impression on me I can’t remember a second of it”

• Orson Welles, On Meeting the Führer in the 1920s

“I did not see any murders, I did not see any torture. I did not know at all such a thing there”

- Adolf Eichmann, at his trial in Jerusalem

Paradise, for most people, would not consist of millions of people being tortured, killed and incinerated just over the garden wall. Not so for Hedwig Hoss, the wife of the Auschwitz commandant, obersturmbannfuhrer Rudolf Hoss. Even her mother-in-law, an overt anti-semite who gleefully mused about her former boss being in the death camp, found the constant burning of bodies to be… a bridge too far. Yet the rest of the Hoss’ family seemed quite at home adjacent to the carnage. The children played in back yard with the slave labor, while Ms. Hoss sorted clothes confiscated from inmates, who were probably dead by the time she tried on the coats etc…. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is certainly a different take on the nadir of 20th century barbarity…. Yet there is no overt violence, only the humdrum family drama. The couple has disagreements. The prospect of a sudden reassignment triggers raised voices. There is the occasional angry jab when “the help” slips-up. And yet there are sounds….. haunting sounds just over the wall. The film is about distance… or maybe the wish for distance. Sylvan domesticity is pitted next door to Dante’s Inferno… and yet everyone manages to play house without a hitch. The result is a terrifying portrait of the capacity for ordinary people to become monsters beyond the imagining of any fiction writer’s sociopathic villain.

Glazer opens the film in complete darkness. It goes on for so long an audience member might think something has gone wrong with the projection. Is this supposed to happening? Yes. This film will be an inquisitive experience going beyond simply following a well drawn linear narrative. It is a akin to the opening of Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, which consisted of 5 minutes of washing a tiled floor. It is as if the directors are signaling the audience to leave if they can’t be bothered actively engage in ALL aspects of the film.… listening as well as seeing. The soundtrack is as critical as the visuals in parsing meaning. The never-ending black leader is accompanied by a chorus of voices. Is it murmuring? It’s nor quiet threatening… or is it? The whispering swells into a terrifying off-key dissonance. Something is desperately WRONG. Given the context we might think we are in a box car filled with human cargo awaiting the terror of selection. Perhaps we are within the infamous gas chambers themselves at the moment the Zyklon B gas is dropping. Then, in the midst of trying to decipher the ghoulishness, an image of serenity appears. A domestic setting of a family in the midst of a sylvan bliss. A casual picnic outing which seems set in an Hudson-River school oil painting. Once again Glazer never permits too much comfort. The pater familias, fishing mid-stream without a shirt, is too white. He is separate from the pastoral background. The distinctly military buzz-cut adds to a sense of foreboding regarding the nature of his character.

The film continues to meander through the dissonant, tranquil domesticity. The children play in the make-shift back yard pool. The father’s equestrian passion is revealed with a number of rides, accompanied by his eldest, through the lush vegetation. A beautiful family on beautiful animals riding down to the river… except the sounds of yelling and the awkward encounter with a work detail. I remember as a child driving on a family vacation in Florida witnessing a chain gang along the highway. Nothing was said but… the overt cruelty of the adult world drifted, momentarily, into endless-summer fun. A sour chord in an otherwise lighthearted ditty. The children in this film play in the same way all children play but even in their innocent fantasies the creepiness of their circumstance rises to the surface. They are lying in their bunk beds and fooling with some things that they picked up in the garden. It turns out that ash for the crematorium is used as fertilizer. They are toying with a human jaw bone…. At least I thought it was…. It’s hard to tell when nothing is in close up.

Distance is at the heart of this film. It would be difficult to recognize any of the central actors outside of their roles as we never really see anyone except through a broad wide shot. They are metaphorical… everybody. Unexceptional in their demeanor, yet terrifyingly extraordinary in their wicked lack of empathy. The only intimate moment where the closeness creeps in is, strangely, between the commandant and his… horse. It is part of the bizarre dynamic of this portrait of a inhuman human that somehow, despite his obvious psychopathology, there is connection with any sort of living soul. The intimate moment of saying goodbye to his horse contrasts with his somewhat formal relationship with his family and his professional attachment to his soldiers. The troops throw him a birthday party but it has the same staid quality that permeates his domestic life. Much of the life takes place in his “villa”, which posses the charm one would expect of well-off upwardly mobil family with some means. There are ‘servants’ strutting around the garden and acting as domestics. It is only when the Frau of the house makes the remark to a misbehaving charge that she could “have my husband spread your ashes all over the field” that the audience understands the conceit behind all the seeming normalcy. The setting might evoke simplified elegant country living, the context renders it a portrait of hell on earth. It is the film equivalent of Karl Hocker’s photo album. This SS officer put together a photographic record of all of his comrades performing formal official duties and kidding around in their spare time. It all looks fun and funny… until you realize the people laughing at the Solahutte resort south of the Auschwitz camp were key player in perpetuating the Holocaust. The film’s protagonist is pictured in the album standing next to Jospeh Mengele. They are in the front row of a chorus of officers singing in front of an accordion player. The bulk film is metaphorically taken from the same home-movie angle. But there are key moments that depart from the script.

The film leaves the seemingly staid tranquility to launch into abstract sequences that evoke the angelic little girl in the red coat in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. There are eerie black and white negative images of a little girl who secretly gathers the bountiful fruit of the commandant’s garden to clandestinely deliver to the starving work gangs. The transition features a red flower morphing into a blanket of red then the abstraction of a photographic negative of the little girl on her mission of mercy outside the window of the house. The ending of the film also breaks from the domesticity. Our hero is in the city with Nazi big-wigs accepting his promotion to an eponymous mission to kill over 700,000 prisoners waiting for transport. It is an odd moment where we see the commandant awkwardly mingling with the dignitaries in an elaborate building. He breaks from the festivities to call his wife and gossip. After the call he descends into a labyrinth akin to the setting in Orson Welles’ The Trial. A landscape of hallways and stairways leading nowhere and everywhere. It all ends as we reveal the building is now the site of a holocaust remembrance. The institutional setting is now a warehouse of horror. There are neat glass sealed dioramas of suitcases, glasses, shoes…. The jetsam and flotsam of lives ripped from everyday living by an ideology of hate that recruited an army of thoughtless, colorless bureaucrats such as Rudolph Hoss.

The Zone of Interest is a fable resurrecting the central point in Hannah Arendt’s essay Eichmann in Jerusalem. The mundane masks the horrific. One can comfortably distant themselves from Hannibal Lecter, a ruthless cannibal hiding behind the facade of an erudite doctor. But what if an upscale suburban neighbor, the logistics chief for a Fortune 500 company, turns out to be even more savage? Rudolph and Hedwig are forgettable yuppies and yet they posses the ability to supervise the gruesome slaughter of millions. The film is a seemingly quiet meditation on the remarkably unremarkable people who find a comfortable path of normalcy in a seat of unspeakable depravity. It reminds us that polite society is rooted in power, not justice. Being the instrument of slavery, deprivation, famine might very well bring status and riches. The key is telling ourselves we’ve never overtly crossed the line into being the Hoss family, with a chateau nestled next to their human crematoriums. As we watch the solidly middle class family play and go about their days it raises an eerie specter about questions we might not be asking ourselves.

Ten percent of the planet goes to bed hungry. Most people in first world countries have house-hold products and food staples made and or harvested by enslaved people. The film asks us to examine our very own zone of interest. Once again distance is what brings it all home. How big is our zone? At one point does the proximity to evil blur our morality? How close do we have to be to make up stories that justify our actions? These questions linger and make The Zone of Interest a film that hits too close. Horror films scare. Films about horror haunt. Rudolph and Hedwig are the stuff of nightmares and day dreams. On a tranquil sunny day while out with the family on a picnic, do you ever hear anything in the distance?