No Substance #178: Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest
After The Zone of Interest won an Oscar for best Foreign Film, British director Jonathan Glazer, along with producer James Wilson, got up to accept the award. ‘Right now,’ he said once he was on stage, ‘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 in Gaza.’
What followed was, perhaps, predictable. Conservatives and the PR machines that they operate turned their wheels and a thousand opinion pieces were launched, all of them criticising Glazer and his film, calling him and it many things, including antisemitic. Others accused Glazer of betraying his Jewishness. There was even an open letter from Jewish people in Hollywood condemning Glazer. This isn’t to say that Glazer was met with condemnation from all corners. In fact, if we’re being honest, those who criticised him were mostly nobodies and people who wish they were nobodies. It was a shame to see Jennifer Jason Leigh was part of that group, though, I must admit. Later, another letter by a different group of Jewish celebrities including Joaquin Phoenix and Elliot Gould came out in support of Glazer.
At this time, I hadn’t seen the film myself. This was mostly because the film wasn’t released until the end of February, in another one of those, I-Wonder-Why-Australians-Download-So-Many-Films-Who-Knows-Lets-Release-The-Film-Months-After-Everyone-Else-Has-Seen-It decisions. Honestly, simultaneous released dates, is it so hard? But I digress. The long and short of it is that I watched the film after all the controversy and so I watched it with all this on my mind. I also watched it as Israel continued its genocide of the Palestinian people.
I am not Jewish. I want to say that up front. I also want to say that I know the Holocaust was real and that it was horrific. I can’t believe I have to say that, but that’s the world we live in now. I also believe that the Israel government are colonists. I know that won’t please everyone to hear, but I live in a country that was colonised (and is still actively being colonised) and it is dishonest within myself and my country to not see the similarities that exist between the two and especially the acts of each government. I also believe that what the Israeli Government is currently doing to the Palestinian people in Gaza is genocide. I don’t believe they will stop now until everyone in Gaza is killed and that the remaining Palestinian people become a scattered population around the world, unable to return home. I believe that all the world’s governments know this, and are silently watching it take place because there is no profit to be gained in defending such poor people.
The Zone of Interest speaks directly to this. It was not made to do so. Glazer finished his film well before the acts of October 7. But it is a film about an atrocity, and as it speaks about one, it speaks about another than unfolds before us.
The film takes place in 1943 and focuses on Rudolf Höss and his family. Höss is the commandant of Auschwitz and he and his family live next to the camp in a beautiful, idyllic house surrounded by lawns and gardens and large walls that hide what is happening on the other side, in the concentration camp. The walls don’t stop the sounds of the camp, however, and they are the soundtrack of the film, filtering in through the day to day life of the family and their conversations. Mostly, the family ignores it. They focus instead on dinners, on reading stories to the children, picking the best of the clothes and items that they’ve stolen from inmates, planning holidays, and receiving guests such as Höss’ mother in law. Oh, and Höss also organises the construction and use of a new crematorium, the efficiency of which is explained by a pair of executives from Topf and Sons in the early parts of the film.
The horrors of the holocaust are never explained, or shown in explicit detail to the viewer. Rather, you see hints of it, are shown the absence of a larger picture. You watch one of the children examine teeth in his bed at night. You see the windows of the house glow red as the crematoriums work at night. No one discusses with any real intimacy what is happening, or what they are doing. Höss appears unmoved by what he is doing. He could be organising factories to make cars, or to ship furniture. When he is transferred away from Auschwitz, his wife tells him that she and the children will not go with him. Why should they give up their beautiful home? she asks him. This house next to the camp is their home and they will remain in it until he returns. The film ends before he does, but historically, he does return. Later, Höss is caught and tried for war crimes, and he is executed in 1947.
The Zone of Interest is about the holocaust, but it is also about living in an atrocity, not as a victim, but a perpetrator. It is about being an active participant in the horror that is taking place around you. It is about complicity, about the ability for the human mind to compartmentalise and rationalise the most unthinkable of things, such as genocide. In fact, the true horror of the film is not hearing what is going on outside the walls, but watching the people who are living with it, watching how ordinary they are, how they can talk about holidays and the needs of the garden while people are killed in their thousands. It is something you would not think yourself capable of, but as horrors take place in the world around you, both afar and close, you can sadly recognise some of the behaviour in the family in you. Your only justification for what you do is that you are powerless to stop what is happening. Few are like Höss. Few are the commandant of the camp.
The Zone of Interest is a great film. I wouldn’t call it particularly enjoyable because it is not designed to be so. It is meant to be uncomfortable, unpleasant, and troubling. It is meant to stay with you after you’ve watched it, and it does. Perhaps it does moreso given the controversy and its link to the events after October 7. Sadly, however, even if that had not happened, even if the uneasy, difficult peace had remained, we would have been able to pick events in the world that resonate with what Glazer and those involved in The Zone of Interest are saying. Sadly, we are all living amongst atrocities, and we justify and ignore them as our politics and beliefs allow.
Ben.
(Ben Peek is the author of eight books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His ninth book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)