Refusing To Look: The Zone of Interest
A Meditation on Darkness
The Zone of Interest, the latest film from Jonathan Glazer, does not really have much of a plot to spoil, and I will not be spoiling that plot. But if you’re the kind of person who cares about having the “experience” of the film spoiled, consider this your spoiler warning. The experience of going into The Zone of Interest relatively blind to what it is is a profound one, but also one of the heavier experiences I’ve had in the cinema.
It’s an unusually warm Friday night in January. The downtown streets are bustling with couples heading to dinner and groups of friends crawling their way from one brewery to another. A small group of strangers enter an old building and purchase tickets for a strange new art installation on opening night. We know very little about what the art installation contains- the marketing was vague. I had heard from a friend it was good. One of the couples seems to have just spontaneously wandered in on a date.
We’re offered concessions, and then ushered into a dark room. We crowd into the center of the room, and wait in the darkness, unsure of what the room contains.
Eerie, wailing music plays loudly over a sound system. After a few minutes, slowly a light begins to explore the contents of the room; a spotlight illuminating only the objects that lie vaguely in the center. We see a pastiche of images. Moments from the life of a German family: they swim at a lake, eat dinner together, celebrate the father’s birthday. We see images of flowers in their garden. Based on their clothes and the period it’s clear this is Nazi Germany. The family looks well off but fairly ordinary.
As I explore more of the images intently, I begin to have a sickening sensation. The couple beside me munches on cheese and crackers as they look at an image of a few Germans discussing some architectural plans. I’m glad I opted simply for water.
Slowly the light begins to illuminate the images on the outer wall of the room. Here the light is incredibly dim. The other patrons seem to realize the nature of the exhibit at different times, but as it becomes increasingly obvious a solemn silence falls across the room. No more snacks are eaten.
The images on the outer wall, devoid of context would be fairly innocuous: empty concrete rooms, piles of thousands of old shoes, a furnace. What they imply here is enough. A small door opens to the back of the room and we enter a cold, echoing, chamber. We all stand in stunned, horrified silence as the magnitude of where we are washes over us. We’ve been transported from the downtown street of our small city on the warm January night through a door into the location of one of the worst human atrocities in history, the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Oświęcim, Poland.
After a while the lights go out and we’re cast back into darkness. Horrifying music again fills the room. When the lights come back up the exhibit has somehow disappeared.
The other patrons and I exit the exhibit in stunned silence. It’s as if we’re surprised to find ourselves back on a street in the mountains of North Carolina. A couple stands on the sidewalk in a daze deciding what to do next, the woman asking her partner if he’ll be okay.
I walk slowly back to my car. It’s the same walk I took to get there, but the street looks different. I make a wrong turn. Something about the world has shifted, as if I’m seeing it through a different lens. This fades before long but the memory of the exhibit lingers. It’s all I can think about when I wake up in the middle of the night that night. And some of its images enter my mind as soon as I wake up the next morning.
Cinema at its most powerful is transportive. It constructs a space, and though you physically remain in one location for the duration of the film, it is as if you move through that space and emerge at the other end. When you exit the theater you leave through a different door than the one you entered through.
Cinema at its most powerful can also be wildly confrontational. It’s a populist medium, one largely used for entertainment. But the possibility of using it to covertly lure someone into an experience that they weren’t expecting always exists. There’s a possibility of forcing an audience to sit with something they may not have chosen to sit with in any other venue. Movies that harness this potential are (in a way thankfully) rare. Even most “artistically challenging” movies or movies that explore difficult topics usually provide some catharsis, or balm to soothe their more painful moments. True discomfort, true horror in cinema is usually only a beat in a progression towards something else. The momentary difficulty facilitates some greater narrative reward. It is the rare film that ushers you into a space where you have three choices: leave the theater, disassociate from the experience, or meditate on the nature of true darkness.
What does it mean to call a movie a meditation? Guided meditations, if you’ve ever done one, usually follow a format: setting the stage, presenting you with an object to give your attention too, and easing you back into reality after a period of time. The goal of a meditation is not to provide you with a narrative. It’s not even to try to evoke a specific feeling or sequence of feelings in you. The goal is for your attention to rest on an object: the mantra, your breath, or some other sensation for the duration of the meditation.
The Zone of Interest is a meditation on the nature of evil. A meditation on the darkness that humanity is capable of, but more specifically, the capacity we have for turning a blind eye to that darkness even when it is right in front of us, creeping in at the edges of our mundane everyday life.
Why meditate on evil? Evil is a shadow object, the ghostly negative of love and beauty. But it is not a simple thing. It is chameleonic and shape shifting. It tries to hide as what it is not. If we are to recognize it in ourselves we must understand it’s shape. We must see the subtle contours of how it can start to emerge and bud, so we can catch it before it blooms.
The questions that often follow are: does this meditation accomplish anything? Is the provocation justified? Was the event depicted "appropriately?"
I am not sure there can be any truly appropriate way to depict such horror. To look from the comfortable remove of history diminishes it's reality, not to look denies it. Can a film shatter a sense of complacency by forcing us to take a (literal) long hard look at an obscene case of complacency? Maybe. I don't know. But I value art that tries. Getting hung up on these questions, about whether the film did things correctly, feels to me like just a way to sidestep the question the film wants us to ask ourselves. That question is a painful one, that few want to engage with and that few will, but I cannot shake the feeling that it is a necessary question to ask.
One of the most powerful moments in Oppenheimer, another recent film that (less successfully) deals with the human potential to inflict horror, is one where Oppenheimer himself is finally confronted with images of the horror his creation has wrought, and he refuses, or simply cannot bring himself, to look. He does not look because he knows it is a horror, and does not want to see that horror.
The Zone of Interest confronts us with what feels like an impossible reality —what if you did not look, not because you knew what you’d be looking at was a horror, but because you didn’t think it was? What if the horror happening around you, the horror you were perpetrating or complicit in, you did not see as a horror? What if it was just another mundane feature of your life?
This is what The Zone of Interest wants us to meditate on. The horror of the Holocaust itself is in the periphery at all times, and this is solemnly disturbing in the same way an encounter with atrocity should be. But here it took on a different quality to me through Glazer’s profane use of the horror film principle that “not showing the monster makes it scarier.” How many times have we seen imagery of the Holocaust in movies, cheapened through their use as a dramatic climax to illustrate just how grave the evil was that the good guys are fighting to defeat? Movies bear witness to the victims and audiences identify with their struggle, or pity them, or are inspired by their strength and courage. Meanwhile we see the perpetrators of the horror and think that could not, and would never be me.
Glazer puts us close to the horror, but doesn’t allow us to look, and through this it’s as if I felt the reality of that horror through the cinema for the first time. It didn’t feel like a horror that existed within the space of the story, it felt like a horror that existed in my world.
There is a horror that he does show. We see it in stark, excruciating detail. What we are really seeing on screen is the deep horror of the human ability to somehow, inexplicably live alongside an atrocity they are perpetrating or complicit in.
Were they really ignorant to the depth of the evil they were perpetrating, as it would seem on the surface? If so, the implications of this should shake us to our core. What horror are we perpetrating or complicit with that we are simply unable to even see as horror? The other option, the one I think Zone ultimately suggests, is that there may be in these people some deeply subliminal understanding of the horror, which has been so deeply buried under ideology, belief systems, and the mundane status quo that it can hardly come to the surface, unless it forces itself out of them.
If this is the case, we are confronted with the question of where we have sublimated our own acts of violence against the world. The ways we personally might be burying hate underneath ideology, a system of belief, or simply “getting by” in the midst of the mundane status quo. How do we accomplish the seemingly insurmountable task of uprooting the darkness we might have hidden in the periphery of our lives? It’s a question for both the individual and a society.
I do not know the answer, but I believe it starts with allowing for the discomfort of that self-examination. Allowing for the discomfort of seeing the shape of darkness, and searching yourself for that same shape of hatred disguised as ignorance. To not be so closed off to the idea that there might be some small piece of the Nazi in yourself that you never actually look to see. How can humans inflict such hate upon another human? How can they not see themselves in the people they hate?
The challenge, when you see that shadow in yourself and your society, is to avoid recoiling into denial, apathy, or defensiveness, but instead to treat it with the kind of love that allows it to dissolve. The love that contrasts the dehumanizing blindness of The Zone. To do the what protagonists of The Zone of Interest refuse to do. We must look. But more than that we must see.