Why I'm rooting for 'The Zone of Interest' at the Oscars
It's the 2023 movie that lingers with me most.
I didn’t include ‘The Zone of Interest’ in my list of best movies I saw in 2023, because I hadn’t seen it yet. In fact, I didn’t see it until February — and then mostly because I realized it was the last movie nominated for the Best Picture Oscar that I hadn’t seen yet.1
Here’s what I wrote about it on Letterboxd:
Not about the banality of evil so much as how evil undergirds so much of what we think of as banal. Our careerism, our raising of kids, our building of houses and gardens, and all that we love and think is beautiful, so much of it takes place within earshot of the roaring crematorium and the muted sounds of gunshots.
If you look at Letterboxd or even any review by professional critic, you’ll see that phrase — “banality of evil” — a lot. Naturally. Because we don’t directly see the horror of the Holocaust in this movie. Instead, we see the lives of the people who live on the other side of the walls from the horrors of Auschwitz. Lives … very much like our own.
Among the 10 Best Picture nominees, it’s the one that’s stuck with me most. Not because it’s about the Holocaust — there are other real-life horrors on the nominee list — but because it’s the one that’s most clearly about us.
David Klion, writing in the New York Times, today offers what I think is the best take on the movie — “best,” I suppose, because it’s the one that most closely matches my own.
By keeping the violence of the camp just barely out of frame, Mr. Glazer renders it an omnipresent backdrop to everyday life. In compelling us to spend time with the Hösses, the film demands that we reflect not only on the Holocaust but also on our own degrees of complicity in the horrors that we know are being carried out on the other sides of figurative and literal walls today.
Höss is the overseer of Auschwitz and enters the camp every day, but his wife and children don’t see what’s on the other side of the wall. Yet much of the film’s impact comes in dissecting how they are broadly aware of what goes on and are directly implicated, while still able to carry on their routine lives mostly unperturbed. Watching “The Zone of Interest” as U.S.-made bombs rained down on civilian neighborhoods in Gaza, I couldn’t help but dwell on the banal acceptance of these mass civilian casualties that I’ve witnessed closer to home.
So many movies about the Holocaust — as with many movies about slavery, or civil rights, or other gigantic historical wrongs we can name — invite us to identify with the heroes, to see ourselves as being folks who would have great moral courage in the face of great and obvious evil.
For the most part, I believe, that’s a nice lie we tell ourselves. There are evils being done in our name all the time. The slaughter of civilians in Gaza2 is only the most recent, obvious example.
It’s not always that we’re cowards. Sometimes it’s simply that we’re comfortable. And in our comfort, we can ignore — or, worse, justify — the worst kinds of terrors, because they’re happening to other people.
“The Zone of Interest” doesn’t let us hide that from ourselves. Not if we’re really willing to pay attention.
Of course, as Klion notes, depicting the Holocaust in movies is tricky — you risk exploitation and sentimentalization, so much I think it’s true that most such movies probably never should have been made. “The Zone of Interest” is an exception for me, but not for everybody: This week I attended a presentation about the movie by a pair of Holocaust historians at my nearby Jewish community center. It’s clear they found it distasteful.
And I understand their reaction, though I don’t quite share it.
The problem with the existence of this movie is that it turns the Holocaust into metaphor about our lives. And that’s meaningful, to me, as it helps me understand my own life and circumstances in a new and troubling way. But I understand the impulse by many people who might resist metaphorizing the Holocaust in a way that shifts the focus from them to us.
Maybe it’s an act of critical empathy. Or perhaps it’s simply narcissism. The answer to that question probably depends on the viewer.
“The Zone of Interest” almost certainly won’t win Best Picture on Sunday night.3 But among the nominees, it’s the movie that I keep returning to most in my thoughts — challenged, and troubled. And in that sense, it’s the best of what movie art can give us.
Is that a humblebrag? Only if you’re a movie nerd.
Set off, of course, by the slaughter of Israeli civilians. That wasn’t done by my government, or with its help, so it’s not what I would consider “in my name.” But it was a great evil — one that isn’t negated by the Gaza slaughter, nor does it justify that slaughter.
Though it should win for Best Sound, for reasons you should read about here.