"The Zone of Interest" and the Banality of Evil
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— “The Second Coming”, W.B. Yeats
Part I: Innocence Drowned
One of the most frequently mis-attributed quotes goes something like this: “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good to do nothing” — Edmund Burke. More likely, the essence of that quote can be traced back to utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill in a lecture delivered at the University of St. Andrews in 1867. He said, “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject” (https://www.openculture.com/2016/03/edmund-burkeon-in-action.html).
The key difference that is expanded upon in the Mill quotation and is not present in the Burke fabric-quote is the position of he who aspires to remain neutral, to stand outside an ethical situation. In the Burke, there is a clear separation between good men and bad men. The Mill indicts the middle man, the standby, the one who collaborates simply because he does not participate in the resistance.
I’ve thought about this quotation a lot in reference to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023). Another famous term that people have invoked in conversations about Glazer’s film is the phrase “the banality of evil”, coined by German philosopher Hannah Arendt. While certainly apropos, given that Arendt introduced the phrase in a book about Nazis, the way in which it has been thrown around in regards to this film misses some key points.
First, a very watered-down summary of part of Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem:
Eichmann’s invocation of Kant’s categorical imperative misunderstands the role of the self as moral legislator. Eichmann placed Hitler as his moral legislator, allowing him to claim he was merely following orders.
Eichmann’s inability to think for himself, evident in his reliance on stock phrases and the words of the Reich, repeated language to the point that it lost its meaning and power, allowing for him to understand Hitler’s orders as “somehow palatable”.
Eichmann demonstrated “no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical antisemitism or indoctrination of any kind. He personally never had anything whatever against Jews.”
Throughout his life, Eichmann was a “joiner”, always seeking organizations to be a part of because the collective identity of these organizations (one which Hitler would imagine came from the character of the German nation, “das volk”) allowed him to receive orders that required no critical thinking or moral working out. He could, in a sense, pass the buck and burden of being correct and being morally right onto the organization with which he associated.
Upon seeing members of German high society and the intellectual elite endorsing the horrors of the Reich, Eichmann felt his moral responsibility relaxed.
Six Israeli government psychologists found no mental illness or personality disorder with Eichmann.
Arendt concludes: “everyone could see that this man was not a ‘monster.’” This startling revelation runs counter to the often circular logic we use to understand the most horrific of evils. That mass shooter was a ill/crazy/a monster and that’s why he did this horrible thing. How do you know he was ill/crazy/a monster? Because you would have to be in order to do this horrible thing. We simply cannot imagine anyone of normal intelligence, without mental illness, with no outstandingly awful prejudice carrying out these unspeakable actions. And yet, it happens. It does happen here. It is not innate to human nature. Arendt reminds her readers of places, like Denmark, which resisted the Reich, where it did not happen. But it could happen anywhere.
By identifying in Eichmann someone who was not sick or ideological, but rather someone average and mundane who used cliche defenses, Arendt introduces readers to “the banality of evil”, where actions are motivated by complacency more than by ideology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Eichmann).
Key Takeaway: Arendt's "banality of evil" holds that those who perpetuated barbaric crimes against humanity, even as "middle men", are most clearly understood not as monsters who are unidentifiable as humans, but as average and mundane persons who are in a unique position to shift their moral and intellectual agency on some unseen, collective force of authority.
Part II: Poetry After Auschwitz
Taking time to consider even a truncated version of Arendt’s argument helps us interpret Glazer’s film. What appears on the surface to be an historical drama about the a Nazi commandant and his family can be further understood as a film about the ways in which film, by the nature of the aesthetic principles it uses to make a movie a movie, not only cannot capture this subject matter adequately, but may in fact enhance those evils which it purports to decry. There’s something baked into the DNA of narrative cinema, Glazer seems to argue, that makes the cinematic representation of certain events not only impossible, but unthinkable.
Another famous misquote is attributed to German philosopher Theodor Adorno. He is assumed to have written, “It is impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz”. What he actually wrote was:
Cultural criticism finds itself today faced with the final state of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.
Curiously, Adorno found it necessary to argue against himself, a self which never said it was impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz. He responded,
Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living — especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt put on him who was spared.
(https://persistentenlightenment.com/2013/05/21/poetry-after-auschwitz-what-adorno-didnt-say/)
Key to this revised statement is the phrase “bourgeois subjectivity”, which is understood by Joshua Davis in Waiting and Being: Creation, Freedom, and Grace in Western Theology to refer to “the modern subject’s consciousness of itself as free and self-determining” which is “an illusion produced by the bourgeois notions of property that mediate its self-awareness. The bourgeois property right is the incoherent attempt to universalize, either transcendentally or ontologically, the distinction between a person who is subject of the empire and is invested with the right to ownership, and a thing, which is an objective property owned by a person.
The notion of bourgeois subjectivity applies to both the Hoss family in The Zone of Interest and to the modern filmmaker and cinematic spectator. It is barbaric, Glazer might be suggesting, to make cinema after/about Auschwitz not because the subject is untouchable but because cinema is an ideological product that the consumer and filmmaker bring their notions of the right to ownership. This ownership is displayed in the choices of cinematic language and vocabulary (aesthetics) that a filmmaker makes to represent their subject, and in the viewer’s expectations, through unspoken contract, of what a film will produce and deliver.
We might take, for example, Michael Haneke's famous rebuke of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Haneke's most notable quotation is the reversal of Jean-Luc Godard’s contention that film is “the truth at 24 frames per second.” Haneke contends that a “film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth, or the service of the attempt to find truth.” Applied to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Haneke finds it barbaric to orchestrate cinematic entertainment, be it tension, suspense, or catharsis, from the extremes of human depravity. He points out the cinematic tropes Spielberg uses in one scene in which Jews are herded into a gas chamber: “The idea of creating entertainment out of this … The mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question whether out of the shower head, gas is going to come or water, to me is unspeakable.”
Haneke continued: “The only film about the Holocaust that, for me, is responsible as a filmmaker is Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog. Alain Resnais, in the film, asks the spectator, ‘what do you think about this, what is your position, what does this mean to you?’ That’s what it’s about. Anything that treats such a subject as entertainment is, for me, unspeakable.” (https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/michael-haneke-calls-steven-spielberg-unspeakable/)
Defenders of Spielberg often take issue with the word “entertainment.” Haneke does not mean to suggest that Schindler’s List is the sort of amusement park ride that something like a Marvel film is. Rather, he is identifying those cinematic techniques that are used to manipulate viewer sentiment. Others offer the feeble, well, that’s not what he meant to do. Informing people is important. Fair, but as we know, authorial intention is far from the end of a text’s meaning, and information can come in many different packages, which is why Haneke invoking Resnais is essential to his argument. It’s not that films cannot be made about something like the Holocaust; it’s all about how it is done, what it expects/demands from the viewer.
Key Takeaway: The aesthetics of narrative cinema are oriented toward entertainment, and so they are inadequate ethically presenting the extremities of human barbarity, as with something like the Holocaust.
Part III: Confronting the Present -- When Cinema Breaks Apart
...Which brings us back to Glazer and The Zone of Interest. Glazer’s film is disturbing, beguiling, and boring. His aesthetic choices — and make no mistake, there are aesthetic choices, even behind the appearance of objectivity — serve to alienate and dissociate the viewer from the people and events being depicted. There is no objectivity, but rather than creating identification or suspense, like Spielberg’s film does, Glazer’s choices are implicating and antagonistic. His camera is distant from the action, static. The color palette is dull and digital, drawing attention to the modern technology used to create the film, not, as Spielberg’s film does, aestheticizing through black-and-white some appearance of verisimilitude or authenticity. Glazer and his team hid ten cameras inside the Hoss house and ran hundreds of feet of microphone wire through the walls, floors, and ceilings. His intention was for the actors to never know if they were focal in the shot, to never know if they were in close-up, medium shot, etc. It’s un-stagey, almost surveillance-style. The formal choice to shoot the film cold and detached, observationally, does not bely the fact that the reality on the screen is constructed; it highlights and exaggerates that truth. There’s very little musical score, until there is a lot of it.
For Glazer, The Zone of Interest is two movies — the one you see and the one you hear. His camera never goes behind the wall that separates the Hoss's home from the concentration camp right next door. As a result, they go about their daily mundane lives -- picking flowers, having birthday parties, entertaining guests, playing music, swimming -- with only the sounds of gunfire and screams and the sights of ash and smoke giving any indication of the horrors just beyond the wall. The Hoss’s stomp around their home, each footfall a brash and brazen assertion of their existence, while a hundred yards away the life breath of their fellow humans is extinguished. They work at hard at ignoring the extremities of evil and human suffering that enable their bourgeois life — even bidding on curtains and trying on coats of those whom they exterminate. It’s sickening, but only because of the context, only because the viewer knows what the Hoss’s ignore and what the camera and the microphones catch. This is how Glazer implicates the medium and spectator. What lies beyond our own zones of interest? What barbaric atrocities make possible the comforts of our daily existence? And at what lengths do we go to ignore or deny our complicity in them? These are our protagonists; not our heroes, but, crucially, not monsters.
Glazer has said that his film is about our world today. These, along with other comments, have garnered him pushback at best and silencing at worst. Surely, attempting to draw any direct comparisons between the Holocaust and any other barbaric human extremity are impossible and misguided. It cannot be said that any one atrocity is commensurate with another. But this objection, too, misses the point. It’s not that the exact Holocaust in all of its specificity and intention and detail has been repeated. It’s that it could be. That the banality of evil is a truth of the human condition as it exists in modern society. And so is the capacity for resistance. There is no element of hope in The Zone of Interest, but there are glimpses of compassion from a girl who leaves food items at the base of the wall by nightfall. In these sequences, Glazer films in infrared night vision and blasts Mica Levi’s score. The music, like the guttural reverberations of demons, casts a pall of hell upon the images we watch. These aesthetic choices, coming after a cut to a red screen, jar the viewer into the realization that some things simply cannot — not "should not", but "cannot" — be depicted in the vocabulary and aesthetics of film. The medium is simply insufficient. Glazer’s film breaks apart, collapsing under the weight of evil and barbarism that it hopes, soberly, to represent. The film, film itself, cannot contain it.
Why, then, make this film? I can’t speak to Glazer’s personal intentions, but a good enough reason might be to respond to the desensitization of our image-based world. We live in such a media-saturated culture that even the most horrific and true images (like those captured in 20 Days at Mauripol) fail to shock and galvanize. A good enough reason is to clap back at Spielberg, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and Life Is Beautiful. How can the same medium contain the aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl and what Jonathan Glazer hopes to show?
Key Takeaway: If we insist that even the most extreme limits of human depravity must be shown on film, and given that the medium has rendered itself insufficient at ethically presenting these subjects, then filmmakers like Jonathan Glazer must find new filmic vocabulary, an aesthetics of anti-cinema, in order to respect the subject and to interrogate the viewer's thoughts and feelings on what it means to be witnesses of history.
The Body Rebels: Conclusion
I found this film to be provocative, disturbing, and essential. It might be a failure on its own terms, but it is a piece of art unlike any released in cinemas last year, or lauded at the Oscars. It’s challenging, and it should be. Even the recent revolt against Glazer and his film are an important part of this reckoning, clear evidence that this is a conversation that needs to be had, but that we remain unwilling and unable to navigate gracefully. As of this writing, Glazer’s acceptance speech for Best International Film remains inaccessible on the Academy’s YouTube page. The backlash and the controversy are too heavy for a show that climaxed with a performance of “I’m Just Ken.” But out of respect for the viewer and the intellectually curious, here is what Glazer said:
"All our choices we made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say 'look what they did then.' Rather, 'look what we do now.' Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.
Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza -- all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?" (Jonathan Glazer, 10 March 2024)
You may find this appalling. You may find this poorly worded. You may find this offensive. Any of those reactions are yours, and so is the right to feel them. But we do not have the right to ignore and to drown out.
In the stunning final moments of The Zone of Interest, the film breaks apart again, this time catapulting through a small beam of light coming from behind a door. Hoss looks, and is transported through the aperture of the camera, of the conditions of his existence as a cinematic character, and catches a glimpse of Auschwitz today: a museum, a tourist destination with a collection of personal property that belonged to the millions of innocents that were brutally and meaninglessly slaughtered. Those who work custodial at Auschwitz go about their mundane tasks, sweeping, cleaning, straightening, organizing the contexts and settings by which we now learn about and experience and glimpse the darkest days of barbaric human extremity. Given this premonition, Hoss vomits twice on the stairs … and proceeds along with his day. There is no moment of reckoning, no realization, no turn, no change of heart, no plea for redemption. There’s no Oskar Schindler moment of “I could have done more.” But the body rebels. Supposedly, Heinrich Himmler vomited when overseeing the extermination of hundreds of Jews, and then kept on going. This moment recalls the climax of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, when an Indonesian mass murderer restaged some of his killings for a movie, and then is seized by retching. The body rebels against the mind, or maybe the soul has its final say.
Thank you for the gifts of your time and your attention.
-TJ