There is no such thing as the “best” Holocaust movie. The very idea is ridiculous on its face. Its experiential details are too vast, its reverberations are too far-reaching. If Schindler’s List and The Grey Zone are Holocaust movies, so are Harold and Maude and Hamsun. And critics are forever debating whether a good Holocaust movie breaks with its tropes—the courageous Jews, the cruel Nazis, the hellish camps and ghettos—or reiterates them with increased artistry. Of course directors merely see themselves as following history as best as they are able, art can either be a stabilizer or an enabler.
The Zone of Interest, by its very existence, could not avoid this culturally ingrained lineage. Some, like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, have put it on that very pedestal, while others have tried to take it down for profaning both its predecessors and the history it depicts. It’s never an encouraging sign that a Holocaust movie is controversial. Still more unthinkable is that there is a certain intention behind the film’s heresies implied by its detractors. The Zone of Interest is not the best Holocaust movie ever made (so far), yet to call it a very good movie set amid the Holocaust does it no greater justice.
Jonathan Glazer’s film teems with contradictions. It is rich in detail and sumptuous in color yet monotonous in tone. It is historically precise yet narratively insular. It is graceful and understated yet not particularly subtle. Like Kubrick with The Shining, Glazer takes Martin Amis’s layered novel and strips it to pure ambience. It is mercilessly cold; not so much realistic as voyeuristic. And by focusing entirely on the home life of commandant Rudolf Höss just outside of Auschwitz’s walls, it crescendos to its most contradictory point: that the Holocaust was kind of boring.
Put another way, The Zone of Interest returns the German to his central place. Not that he’d ever left; rather he became decorative. The price, perhaps, of sowing mass carnage, but something that carries its own historically desensitizing effects. The Nazis have been decontextualized. The swastika, Hitler’s speaking voice, the German language itself are reduced to all-purpose occult talismans. The German personage, as Glazer himself put it, assumed “almost mythologically evil” proportions. That the swastika carried profound meaning to anyone who wore it was not necessary to consider. Yet it must be considered in order for The Zone of Interest to function.
It is better to appreciate The Zone of Interest as the best lebensraum movie. Set mainly in Poland in 1943, it trades the suffering of the occupied for the utopian bliss of their occupiers. Höss and his family enjoy a shockingly remote existence. Not only are they at a safe remove from the people they rule over and kill, but from the events that bear more directly upon every other German: from the collapse of the eastern front, from the calls of totaler Krieg, from encroaching western air raids, from Hitler’s steady retreat from public life and from reality itself. They seem just as privileged against the chaotic situations in other camps—1943 had uprisings at Treblinka and Sobibór that allowed prisoners to escape by the hundreds. In fact no main character ever mentions the war directly. The most distressing plot point comes from Höss’s wife Hedwig at the prospect of leaving Auschwitz for Germany on Martin Bormann’s orders so that her husband can be promoted. In the end she can do without her husband so long as she can keep her garden.
In a tweet posted a few months after his unsurprisingly bad review of the film, Richard Brody hit at what he saw as its core appeal. “[I]t’s a science-fiction film about the Holocaust, complete with abstraction, design, grandiosity, and world-building.” For once I thought the hate directed towards the critic for this remark was unfair, not that I thought Brody’s point was as clever as he clearly thought it was. Of course it’s “complete with abstraction, design, grandiosity, and world-building.” It’s a film about a political movement who wrecked an entire continent and very nearly exterminated an entire people by fusing arcane folklore and ritual with modern technology, a fact which does not appear to be lost on its makers.
Glazer takes the viewer deep into the recesses of the Teutonic ideal for living; even as Auschwitz prefers the pastoral proto-cottagecore of Hitler’s watercolors to the grand Wagnerian theatrics of Riefenstahl’s films. Here there is no contradiction between the ornate romance of the garden and the brutal efficiency of the camp. It is as Peter Viereck observed in Metapolitics that for Germans “[e]motional artiness and a sentimental attitude toward history … are compatible not with softness and inefficiency but with cruelty, military courage, and a burning ruthless will to power.” This impresses upon the viewer through the garden itself, which seems filmed in such a way as to make you lose track of its proportions, as if its growth corresponds with with every transport arrival; positive beautification working in tandem with negative beautification. And the correspondence is made suggestively literal by the use of ashes as fertilizer.
But the film’s characters start to sense that the living space is closing in. The beautification efforts begin to coalesce rather than correspond. The negated never quite go away. They hang in the air, they drift in the water, they intrude upon their killers’ thoughts. Their killers think and speak only in logistics, cleaving a negative space between too much work and not enough. The Nazi romanticism inverts to a German expressionist photonegative, literally and thematically. The pastoral dream world is made a nightmare of cadaverous realism and infernal cacophonies. A racial utopia eulogized in degenerate art.
This view runs somewhat counter to Glazer’s own, in which the film is a historical narrative that still has something to say about “the here and now.” Cruelty has an echo, and the SS commandant, his angry wife, and their annoying children are closer to us than we’d like to believe. The discomfort you feel is the point. What they’re capable of, you’re technically capable of, no matter your own context or principles. That itself is an echo of the almost legendary idea of the banality of evil, one that is often thrown around context-free whenever liberalism is in crisis, such as it is now. But being itself a liberal idea, comprehensible only to the most liberal-minded, it is pure anachronism.
As with Brody’s take, I concede Glazer’s interpretation of his own film without finding it compelling. I can’t watch it and say with a straight face that what it depicts is in any sense banal, let alone easily transferable across time. Nothing short of absolute zeal and sense of mission assures the kind of world the SS made for themselves in Poland. There’s nothing banal in the pursuit of beauty. There’s nothing banal in believing your version of the world to be the right one. There’s nothing banal in ending centuries of antisemitism by ending the Jews. It’s peaceful; but it’s a dull, hostile, ultimately depopulated peace, dictated by a chimerical knight errant: part undertaker, part accountant, part wolf.