Misunderstanding 'The Zone of Interest'
Reviewing a review
Two weeks ago I watched The Zone of Interest. I had high expectations for the film, based on repute, and based on the subject matter it is tackling which requires sincerity, care, and above all, intelligence. I was not disappointed. The Zone of Interest is a remarkable film which takes several artistic risks, artistic risks which make important moral points. Others have laid out why this film is good, and why it works. It’s difficult to be all that original by this point, especially when so much ink has already been spilled.
Not everyone agrees, though. There is a particular review of The Zone of Interest that I think is worth picking apart, and trying to understand. That review is a great misunderstanding of the film, yet it’s an insightful misunderstanding. The review is by Manohla Dargis. Her account of The Zone of Interest is deeply negative. In it, she deploys the ultimate criticism of a Holocaust film: that it is disrespectful. In her most potent line, she states “a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.”
This is notably a moral judgement as well as an aesthetic one. Those that got value from the film, like myself, are bound to feel offended by such a review because the implication is that we partake in that disrespect. To approve of such a film is necessarily disrespectful, in other words. If Dargis believes this sincerely, then she is entitled to that opinion. At the same time, I think those of us who disagree are entitled to take offence, and should be inspired to write that defence down. Even if the defence is not convincing, it might at least be interesting.
What’s odd about Dargis’ review is that it consists of just under a thousand words of mostly accurate observation about the film, top and tailed by incendiary conclusions. She states: “Instead, he continues focusing on the Hösses’ everyday life without obvious editorializing (or outrage), swells of emotion-coaxing music or the usual mainstream cinematic prompts. The camerawork — save for a few traveling shots that underline the closeness of the house to the interior of the camp — is smooth and discreet. It’s demonstrably unshowy.” Correct. I don’t think anyone could disagree with that.
Dargis even makes a criticism of Schindler’s List as a film which basically has a ‘happy ending’ and which uses the crutch of “weeping violins”. Schindler’s List, in other words, has become ‘the’ Holocaust film, while being decidedly schlocky. This criticism isn’t anything new, and was made quite well by Terry Gilliam.
Beyond accurate description, there is even a glimmer of praise buried in Dargis’ account: “Glazer peers into the abyss but wisely doesn’t attempt to ‘explain’ the Holocaust.” She identifies one of the most important engines of the film: the banal self-interest which motivates Mr and Mrs Höss. They are shamefully acquisitive. Mr Höss likes his high rank and status in the SS. Mrs Höss likes her fur coats (stolen from a murdered Jew) and her flowers (fertilised by the ashes of murdered Jews).
I would agree with Dargis to the extent that this is “blunt, obvious.” Blunt indeed: Glazer’s film makes the observation that the Holocaust was a massive machine of theft as well as murder. This is a simple fact. Many people went along with the genocide for no better reason than they liked taking people’s property and ignored where it came from. The companies that profited from Auschwitz benefited in cold hard cash. Many of these companies, and their heirs, still benefit. Not complicated, but important. This is instrumental and in fact it does ‘explain’ part of the Holocaust’s motivation accurately, according with the accounts of survivors Primo Levi and Rudolf Vrba (via Jonathan Friedland’s recent book The Escape Artist about one of the few men who escaped Auschwitz).
I believe The Zone of Interest is a serious and successful attempt to understand the Holocaust, and to make viewers think about it too. Dargis disagrees. In spite of all the accurate description, she argues in her concluding paragraphs:
“And like so many other movies, mainstream or not, this one is fascinated with its villains, far more than it is with their victims, whose suffering here is largely reduced to room tone.”
The problem with this claim is that the latter part—the stinger—just isn’t true. The entire film is about the violence of the Holocaust, the destruction of life and the appropriation of property, and the callousness that enables it. The ‘room tone’ Dargis is referring to is the film’s sound design, which is masterful, relentless, and impossible to ignore for any viewer with unimpaired hearing. Violence is shown to the viewer, as Dargis herself points out, with “oblique” depictions, but they are depictions nevertheless, and the film is full of them. The film is made of them.
This is the part of Dargis’ review which I feel gets dangerously close to being bad faith. Dargis knows the film is about the Holocaust and she says as much. The criticism doesn’t make any sense in the context of what she has just said about the film, that it is a Holocaust film, that it “peers into the abyss”. No: The Zone of Interest is not a film that ignores its own subject matter, it just uses unusual methods to portray it.
Dargis objects to the “art”-iness of The Zone of Interest. Simultaneously she decries the chintz of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The reader is left wondering what possible depiction of the Holocaust she would approve of. Whatever it is, it’s apparently one that has no artistry at all: “art-film conventions [which The Zone of Interest uses] are markers of distinction, of quality, which flatter filmmakers and viewers alike, and which finally seem to me to be the biggest point of this vacuous movie.”
God forbid a film about a serious subject have “markers of distinction, of quality”—a bizarre criticism. It suggests that The Zone of Interest is a bad film because it tries to depict the Holocaust in an intelligent fashion—that such a depiction must mean Glazer is a narcissist, pretentious, and forsaking the topic at hand. I find this approach nakedly anti-intellectual. A film about the Holocaust had better think about the Holocaust. We should demand nothing less.