The British coach thinks so. While working on the film, director Glaser said of Arendt’s portrayal of the Nazis’ insane anti-Semitic ideology turning into industrialized genocide, which was not evil but catastrophic thoughtlessness. I was always thinking about it.” Even before the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent brutal attack on Gaza, even before the question of moral responsibility in politics reignited, Mr. Glazer had made it clear that Gaza was a “zone of concern.” It was as much about the past as it was about the present, and “was not about our similarity to the victims, but our similarity to the perpetrators.”
For many, it is this unsettling similarity that makes “Zone of Interest” so powerful. The film allows viewers to ask uncomfortable moral questions in the upholstered comfort of a movie theater. Why do ordinary people consent to crimes against humanity at best and commit crimes at worst? Could I have done the same?
These are good questions, but they’re not the ones that “Zone of Interest” really challenges. No one can seriously imagine themselves planting dahlias while smoke billows from the chimneys of Auschwitz after watching this movie. If we indulge in the thought experiment that this film presents, we do so knowing full well what the Holocaust was. This distance makes it relatively easy to dispel any familiarity with the perpetrator. Auschwitz commanders Rudolf and Hedwig Hess and their cat-obsessed companions are clearly monsters.
The monster of mediocrity was only part of Arendt’s argument. In this respect, Glaser’s film offers a masterclass in the aesthetics of Nazi banality. As the camera tracks an ugly house and cartoonish garden to an acclaimed horror soundtrack, everyday horrors are deftly conveyed through the little things: bloody boots, a manic dog, a creaking wheelbarrow. I am.Smell normal “Zone of Interest” is a German word meaning extraordinary ordinariness, and “Zone of Interest” certainly succeeds in reeking of ordinariness.
However, even if Arendt’s famous concept is complementary to Glaser’s, Despite the ethical claims, I don’t think this movie conveys the moral or political lessons we need right now. For all its ambient artistry, the work still fails to resonate with Arendt’s broader concerns: “How did we get here and what can we do about it?” plug.
Arendt never thought that Eichmann, the logistics man who delivered Europe’s Jews to concentration camps, bragged about it, and then played the role of a cog in a terrifying machine at trial, was just like you and me. . She argued that the thoughtlessness with which he and others carried out their crimes devastated the categories by which we understand good and evil. This is why she always put the word “ordinary” in quotation marks in the Eichmann Report (and why she never used the word “ordinary”).
She did not think that the banality of evil was timeless or somehow inherent in the human condition. Although I thought it was entirely possible that the Nazi genocide had taken a turn, as if we were destined to sweep the crumbs off the table as humans were incinerated against each other. , turning the unprecedented into a precedent. She was describing a post-Holocaust world in which our ability to make moral and political judgments was fatally derailed. And she was asking us to do something about it.
The larger question that the Eichmann trial posed for Arendt is eloquently expressed by survivor József Debreceny in her shocking account of her time at Auschwitz, “Cold Crematorium: Reports from the Land of Auschwitz.” “Why do so few people think they are committing a crime?”
This was a historical issue with deep legal, political, and moral implications. Eichmann represented a new kind of criminal who committed a new kind of crime against humanity itself. The genocide of Europe’s Jews was not only the latest and most horrific anti-Semitic massacre. For Arendt, it was an attack on human plurality, on the fact that we exist together, committed on Jewish bodies and carried out by terrifying new technologies. In short, modern genocide was everyone’s problem.
Judge Eichmann ruled that in cases of brutality, the law requires that one should listen to one’s own heart as much as to orders from above. If the “black flag,” named after the prosecution of Israeli soldiers after the 1956 massacre of Palestinian villagers at Kafr Qasim, is waved, we must obey. The only time Eichmann refused to follow his orders was at the end of the war, when Heinrich Himmler, knowing the Nazis were losing, ordered the death train to slow down. Eichmann’s black heart told him that the only law that mattered was that Jews must die. The “normal” rules do not apply.
Arendt would recognize the shrill moral quandary that characterizes our political culture today: accusations of absolute collective guilt, claims of just innocence, and the responsibility of good people for crimes not their own. (“Can I be like that?” Hedwig Hess?) and the bad guys are refreshingly indifferent to the damage they’ve done. These are as much symptoms as they are manifestations of moral confusion. Arendt teaches us that we are doing something wrong, but it remains unclear whether we have the courage to learn the right path.
The law is still struggling to catch up. The black flag waves wildly in the wind, but from Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Iran, many interpret it as a call for more violence rather than a warning that crimes against humanity are being committed. Too much.
Movies allow us to ask ourselves what we did in the past. Reality is complex, difficult, and resists easy answers, requiring us to ask ourselves what we are doing now. Since the film’s release in December, critical praise for the film has increased in proportion to the rise in political violence, particularly but not just in Gaza. It’s no wonder that films depicting complicity in atrocities are making waves right now.
But collusion is only half the story. Even worse is surrendering to confused and thoughtless thoughts. It takes courage to understand when we are committing crimes and to condemn others when they commit crimes. Read Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil And it is clear that what interested Arendt most were those who resisted, those who went against the grain in horrific circumstances. In her words, “The best people are those who know one thing for sure: no matter what else happens, as long as we live, we will It means you have to coexist with yourself.””