Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest rehashes The Twilight Zone for the ‘cease-fire’ crowd.
In 1995, after Schindler’s List, Jean-Luc Godard declined the lifetime-achievement award bestowed on him by the New York Film Critics Circle. In a letter to the group, he listed among his reasons that he was never able in his “whole movie maker/goer career to prevent M. Spielberg from rebuilding Auschwitz.” Britain’s Jonathan Glazer also ignores Godard’s lament in The Zone of Interest, an art-house curiosity in which Auschwitz is an offstage presence. Glazer portrays a family of Nazis, based on Commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who lived in a real-life Twilight Zone — a suburban-style compound next door to the concentration camp, enjoying the benefits of military privilege and ignoring the devastation that was literally next to their backyard. Glazer’s conceit uses Auschwitz to stir a movie maker/goer’s sense of historical guilt.
Godard knew that Holocaust exploitation was a risky ambition for any popular filmmaker, loaded with pitfalls — and offensive — for anyone he considered unserious. Godard’s warning should include Glazer, who doesn’t view the Holocaust as sacrosanct. The Zone of Interest remains remote from human horror even as it represents a new indifference to the history of Jewish suffering (despite the fact that Glazer is himself Jewish). The Wrap reports that an open letter from a large group of Jewish professionals in Hollywood refuted Glazer’s Oscar-acceptance speech for The Zone of Interest “as drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”
By keeping concentration-camp obscenity off-screen, while referring to it obliquely through sci-fi sound effects and abstract visual metaphors, Glazer invites a new, smart-aleck sanctimony. Using reverse-negative images of a small girl planting apples, he artsifies the simplicity of that little girl in a red coat in Schindler’s List. Spielberg may have borrowed the color-coded image of alarm from Kurosawa’s moralistic crime drama High and Low, but Glazer leaves out morality to imply high-toned superiority. It’s a hipster’s position, recalling Glazer’s early career as a well-connected music-video director, and that’s what is offensive about The Zone of Interest.
Glazer has made an oddly complacent movie for an amoral era. We’re meant to tsk-tsk Hedwig’s enjoyment of furs and jewelry that once belonged to the camp’s dispossessed Jews. These house-and-garden scenes use complacency to parody monstrous politics. It’s some variant of bourgeois guilt (including Rudolph’s toxic masculinity and nasty infidelity) made popular after Black Lives Matter. Glazer’s Zone is a perfect metaphor for corporate media’s post–October 7 switch of allegiances. The Holocaust sentiment that once prevailed in Hollywood has now been replaced by Millennial apathy that disdains pity yet judges righteousness.
In recent years, popular culture has undergone a sea change by which formerly prominent and popular tenets — the humanist tradition that inspired Hannah Arendt’s insight into “the banality of evil” — are disdained in favor of revolutionary “change.” Wickedness rules in today’s film culture, such that Glazer can re-create Auschwitz as a sci-fi gimmick. This allows makers/goers to enjoy the film’s obscenity for their own hipster superiority. They get to have it both ways: repulsed by Nazism while satisfied that their empathy is no longer obligatory.
The Zone of Interest tells us nothing useful about history, but it sure does exemplify Millennial insensitivity. Those who marvel at its sound design must never have appreciated the glorious sound-mixing Godard did with François Musy, starting with For Ever Mozart and climaxing with Nouvelle Vague. Critics who overemphasize Glazer’s technique are indifferent to its meaning. Glazer’s anti-aesthetics are part of the current antipathy, whereby bad motives are projected upon others.
Christiane Amanpour, political agent for the Public Broadcasting System, slanted the Zone of Interest toward the new anti-Israel debate on her X post, in which she quotes Glazer: “It’s not saying, ‘Look at what they did.’ It’s saying, ‘look at what we do.’” She added, “Glazer tells me that his film The Zone of Interest offers an interrogation of our own complicity in atrocity, and makes ‘grotesquely familiar’ the perpetrators of evil.” This is the same projection that far-left corporate media always foist on their opponents.
Amanpour’s selective morality typifies the insensitivity that has been Glazer’s forte since his previous grotesque films Birth, Sexy Beast, and Under the Skin. On Instagram, a music-video colleague of Glazer’s raved: “This film evolves the art form. An unmissable experience. And it is experiential. Must be seen (and heard) in a cinema.” This is elitism.
Another political agent, Jasmine Liu, this time for the Pulitzer Center, chose to read the Höss characters as “people suffering from a form of hyperesthesia, a neurological condition in which sensory perception is so radically overloaded that the brain no longer registers information but instead destroys it.” Glazer’s over-amped sound design and really indecent fun with special F/X derive from the sanctimony of assuming superior insight. Glazer’s stunt gave Liu room to compare the wall in the West Bank separating Israeli settlers and Palestinians to the wall between the Höss home and the Nazi death camp next door. The comparison is aligned with Glazer’s intent.
Bringing blame home to the U.S., Liu asks, “How many of us can say that we do not live comfortably in — and profit from — a state of historical denial?” This mix of guilt, horror, and apprehension is exactly the self-destructive bent of masochistic progressives. Pauline Kael called them “Nazi junkies,” and now Glazer has made them a focus — and target — of Millennial NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard). In The Zone of Interest, Glazer appeases hypocritical liberalism: He’s pro-Jewish, anti-German, and anti-Zionist. Politics aside, it’s a way for him to keep feeling superior.
