It Will Eat Holes in Your Heart
The Zone of Interest’s context, erasures, and influences.
When I’ve talked about The Zone of Interest, I’ve said the sentence “I loved it,” and then wanted immediately to take it back, because that is a wrong sentence to say about such a film. I admired it tremendously; I felt awed by its power and versatility; it made me consider everything I know about that place and time and everything I thought I knew about human nature. This is a successful film, to evoke these reactions. But “I loved it” implies enjoyment, even potentially entertainment, and neither of those elements is present in the film.
This is probably deliberate. “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Theodor Adorno said. Creating entertainment of Hitler or the Holocaust is “unspeakable,” Michael Haneke said. The intentions and ambitions of The Zone of Interest are so complex they will take a thousand essays to unwind, but critic Joshua Lee put his finger on one of them in (amazingly) Stony Brook University’s college paper: anti-cinema. There is no enjoyment here. There is no entertainment here. There are touches of the sublime, but they embarrass me to admit or discuss, because the sublime is supposed to be good. Nothing here is meant to be good, unless it is literally/visually reversed.
Another obstacle to discussion here is the encyclopedic nature of this film. Jonathan Glazer would have to be a genius for everything I thought I recognized in this film to be in it on purpose, along with everything else not of term paper fodder that composes the film. Freud, Arendt, Bentham; The Conversation, The Act of Killing, Jeanne Dielman; Wiesel, Beckett, Brecht. And if just one person, me, thought of all these on a first watch, heaven knows what else could be in there.
Yet the film’s surface is so mundane, its structure so uncomplicated. How is it possible for a film to be made that looks so simple but invokes so much? Especially when the invocation intended to reach the broader audience is thunderingly obvious.
Considering this film obvious (as I do) does drag along behind it the question of obvious to whom. Because if you show this to someone who’s never heard of the Holocaust, they will not know what the soundtrack is doing, what the screams and the underhum mean, how many, the volume, the sheer masses, the overpowering aspects that the film recognizes only once directly and twice more indirectly, the way it will eat you up if you truly acknowledge it, face it head-on, look up while you’re vacuuming in front of the glass cases — or look up while you’re playing in the pool. It will eat you up inside. It is so big and so much that it will eat holes in your heart. Looking at it sideways is a method for staying sane; but even looking at it sideways creates a surprisingly obvious film, one that forces the audience to look sideways, that tilts the audience’s head to look over the wall. It is text, not subtext. The full shot of the garden, the children in the pool, the monster in white standing there while train smoke chugs out overhead, above the wall: the point of that shot is the train smoke, and I know it and you know it and Glazer knows it, and that’s what makes it obvious, even if the point is that the people in the shot are not looking at the train smoke. You are. I am. Glazer is. Comprehending the point of the shot should not happen before the shot does.
But maybe the audience isn’t, on the whole, comprehending it in the same way I am and Glazer is. Maybe The Zone of Interest isn’t obvious to the entire audience, even if it feels obvious to me.
Evidence:
If the film is following a) the timeline of the novel and b) the timeline of Höss’s actual transfer out of Auschwitz in the winter of 1943, the tide of the war had already turned and Germany had started to lose. This occurred after the battle of Stalingrad, which ended in February of 1943. The party scene at the end, if it’s, oh, March of 1944 — that occurs when Russian soldiers have already taken back a good deal of Belarus and Ukraine (much of the ground gained since Barbarossa launched in the summer of 1941) and have marched across eastern Poland, and are approaching Auschwitz, right then, as Höss talks to his wife.
All of that context is something an average viewer of The Zone of Interest probably does not know, I wager. It makes the film’s bucolic aspects more deeply absurd in a way I think an average viewer would want to understand.
However long Mrs. Höss thinks this wonderland of a garden on the edge of hell is going to bloom for her, the film doesn’t say precisely — she twice says plants will grow and “cover everything,” which indicates several seasons. That idyll is certainly going to be shorter than she thinks. Perhaps the majority of the audience knows that. The Reich did not last for a thousand years; it lasted for around eighteen months after the film’s opening in late summer 1943, and the film presses on the hilarity of how brief that period is. But the quieter knowledge: the Reich is already crumbling as the film opens. Hitler’s overconfident strategies were failing; the Wehrmacht was breaking against the inexhaustible Russians; the Reich was running out of citizens to do labor and had rolled back restrictions against women working.
Part of the reason Glazer’s film doesn’t explore any of this context is the film isn’t about that. This is a film about the Zone of Interest, KL Auschwitz, and it is not a film about anything else.
When I started researching WW2 about two years ago, everything I learned made more sense once I realized there were three theaters: the Pacific theater, the European theater, and the Holocaust. Logically, the Holocaust should be looped in with the European theater (it was not a front, soldiers did not die there in statistically significant numbers, geographically it was in Europe), but in reality that’s not a useful way to study the war. What the Wehrmacht did and what camps did were distant from each other, connected mainly by ideology, not practical concerns. So it makes sense that nothing about the war as soldiers or populace experienced it makes its way into The Zone of Interest, because the title tells you everything the film is about. Not the marching Russians et al, but this place, right here.
It’s also why I’m troubled by the erasure of the (actual) millions of people who were murdered in the Zone of Interest, by the elision of them into smoke and shouting and stolen objects. Oppenheimer was criticized for not adequately depicting or acknowledging the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the movie is called what it’s about: Oppenheimer. A movie about Hiroshima would be called Hiroshima. I realize this is simplistic, and that dead white men have many more movies devoted to them than is perhaps necessary or appropriate in what we like to think are postcolonial times, but that too is outside the scope of Glazer’s film.
Which is called The Zone of Interest. Thus, what happens in the Zone of Interest is relevant to the film. And yet. The millions, their bodies destroyed, their lives crushed into ash, their existence blown out like candles on a birthday cake — we see them only sideways, from afar, through tall grasses. We see their artifacts.
I bring this up because I think it matters that these human beings existed in breathing, heart-beating, speaking reality. (Phil Chernofsky’s And Every Single One Was Someone solemnizes this truth in a way that few works in this horrible genre manage to do.
Not that they could. A movie or a novel or a single anything can’t really do what Chernofsky did, unless it does specifically what he did.) And of course worrying over what The Zone of Interest includes and erases draws up the existential question of how to make art about the Holocaust at all. And whether to do so. This film is quite a reasonable answer to both of these questions. Whether: yes, but deeply unpleasant art, not art that anyone with sense can say they loved; how: see previous answer.
This might be why Manohla Dargis panned the film with the word “hollow.” Very little about this film is alive. It is a remarkably unvivid film. I don’t mean this only re: the color scheme, its blue-balanced indifference, or the lack of strong emotions revealed by any of the actors (Sandra Hüller plays her biggest scene whiny instead of passionate — a smart choice, but it maintains the film’s sterility), or the persistence of security-camera angles. The people look pale and enervated. The dog is the only creature that moves with pleasure instead of fatigue or ungainliness (Hüller’s awful gait!), and even it is a skinny, purebred, all-black animal. All of this does feel hollow, but I don’t think it makes the film a hollow exercise. I think it’s a reflection of how hollow are the lives depicted inside the film, but not how hollow a gesture it is to try and make a film like this.
Absurd, impossible, fraught, yes. Not empty. Never empty to try and create something true about this episode of human behavior.
Perhaps I’m harping on the word hollow, and perhaps Dargis used that word, because the film as technical achievement is so stunning that it outweighs whatever Glazer’s more humanist priorities were in tackling a film about the Holocaust, and whether he succeeded or failed at such a mission. Come and See is like this, a film so arresting in its craft that the unbearable sights and sounds in it are not the primary reason it should be immortal. It happens to be an extraordinarily upsetting film, too, in the hall of fame for fucked-up movies that make you not want to be a person for at least a day or so afterward. Whether The Zone of Interest can stand on the shelf with Come and See for both of these reasons, time, not I, will tell for certain. Perhaps that is hollow, the sense that I’m watching a masterpiece while I’m watching a film that both points at and erases the obscenity over the wall, a film that centers the daily lives of Nazis. Still, it’s important to note how profoundly restrained this film is, how meticulous, how much it builds on prior philosophies and works of art both in its subgenre and not. How assured it is.
I did not feel this way — the adjective “assured” — about Under the Skin. It felt to me like it intended to have something deeper emerge from beneath the surface of the film, but that something never did. (And yes I do see how odd/fitting that assessment is, given the title and content of the film.) I did not find its abstractions compelling, and I did not think it reversed misogynist expectations as much as it reinforced them. I thought it was the result of overthinking, over-abstracting, and overcutting, a film so oblique it ended up saying nothing.
The Zone of Interest carries over from Glazer’s previous film the feeling of a flat, unpretty surface under which leviathans roil and feed. Either I was better informed about the context of that underworld, or the abstractions were more carefully considered, because I found this film monumentally successful. In part because it allowed the underworld to erupt from time to time in ways less subdued than in Under the Skin. Every time I have doubts about the integrity of The Zone of Interest, I think about the 45-minute mark, when a red dahlia reds out the entire screen while a man screams in agony, and after a few seconds of that, the sound abruptly cuts out, and then the film moves on. Andrew Wyatt correctly described this to me as a moment of vapor lock, the film seizing in the face of the intolerable.
A rupture. One of a handful in The Zone of Interest, when the weight of the erased becomes too much to bear, and cinema collapses into anti-cinema.
How can it not?
