Logistical Nightmare

On Jonathan Glazer’s "The Zone of Interest"

There is a famous case study in French psychoanalysis of a mute teenager who lived in a nice middle-class Parisian home with intellectual parents. It was the 1960s. Each night he’d walk around the house casually and violently destroying decorations. Paintings and vases fell under his ire in equal measure. There seemed to be no logic or explanation to his violence. His parents pleaded for help.

A pair of analysts arrived. They interviewed the child; they took their notes. They sat the parents down in their drawing room, and the analysts began to look around at the decorations still intact. One analyst asked, “Where did all of this expensive looking art come from?” The bourgeois Parisians dismissed the analysts from their home and refused all queries into the origins of their surprising fortunes.

To the analysts, the evidence was clear. The paintings had been stolen as part of a scheme to sell off the goods of Jewish Parisians under the Vichy regime a decade or so earlier. The silence of their son was a manifestation of this horror, that the beauty around their home, the ways in which the family profited off the extermination of Jewish people and their continued silence on the matter forced their son into an expression of rage and violence without words. The horror found its way to the surface, even if no one spoke it clearly.

I thought of this case study after a recent viewing of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a family drama of sorts, where a new baby is shown only ever crying. The narrative of the film, loosely based on the Martin Amis novel of the same name, can be summarized best as a domestic story. A husband and wife have a perfect country home for their five children. The husband excels at his job and the wife has control over the garden, home, and their servants. The children experience normal lives (there is a long scene of a garden party with a pool when their grandmother visits, and several shots of their oldest boy flirting with a girl). All is well until the husband receives a promotion that requires a transfer to a new city. The wife refuses, her life is too perfect, and sends her husband alone to his big fancy job in the city. The husband toils away at his job; the wife toils away at home. Finally, the husband’s replacement just isn’t as effective as he is and so he’s ordered back to his family to finish his work. The film ends with him leaving a holiday party the night before returning to his family. The husband and wife are the real-life Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, the King and Queen of Auschwitz.

Director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin, Birth) said he did not want to “aestheticize” Auschwitz. He and the set designer Chris Oddy rebuilt the Höss house from the ground up so that the set looked as brand new as it would have in 1943, when the film takes place. The huge wall of Auschwitz, of which we never see inside save for some key shots at the end, looks like something from a science fiction film and the camera always views it in a wide lens. The set was designed like a “Big Brother Nazi House” where the lens sits in the top corner of two walls and stares down at the subjects like something from reality television. Throughout the film, the camera is largely static with few tracking shots. The cuts, between rooms rather than characters, are usually when one of the Hösses have entered a new room or cavernous hallway in their home.

This choice makes the entire screen pallid and flat. The tension, and thus the pleasure, of this film arises instead from the context. Every viewer knows what is over that wall in Auschwitz. The characters know too. An early scene has Rudolf discussing with a contract company about a new way to build and design the ovens to burn more prisoners. The entire room shows excitement at the new logistical efficiency they’ve arrived at.

The second major effect, and one of the principal critiques lodged at the film generally, is the lack of psychologizing of the characters this allows. The argument goes something like the characters portrayed here are “monsters,” or just plain Nazis, and we are unclear on their motivation to commit and ignore such horrible acts right next door to them. I find this argument most compelling when considered within the purpose of narrative storytelling and placed into the context of Holocaust films generally.

 On the former, characters contain psychology implicitly. Regardless of a creator’s attempts to demur on this question or to make them austere or without desire, all characters within stories do want something. It can be ill-defined, lame, or simple but it exists within narrative storytelling. Psychology and thus the knowledge of wants is always embodied in the characters. The purpose of psychology (as I’ve written elsewhere) can be multipronged, even anti-intellectual, or perhaps anti-psychological. Psychology in narrative can serve to explain things like “trauma,” which can move the interpretation away from the viewer and onto the text. For example, if one wished to explain Hamlet’s soliloquys, one could make an argument from a position of trauma theory. However, in some sense, the elements within the text don’t necessitate that reading. Trauma theory can be used as an interpretative lens which the viewer applies to the story and the situation, whereas a so-called “trauma plot” must necessarily be the intervention of the author on a text. Thus, the onus for explaining the psychological elements of The Zone of Interest should be placed on the viewer of the film, not the filmmaker.

In that more pleasurable vein, psychology becomes a matter of interpretation for the viewer. In this film, the psychology of the characters is clear, but unspoken, much like the French teenager from the beginning. One can see the benefits of Hedwig’s position in society. She has gold, jewelry, fur coats, and gold everywhere. It is all stolen from the corpses of prisoners, which she knows, but she is benefiting from it. People profit from the downstream effects of horrible things all the time. Very few people, though, are so close in the supply chain of evil. We do see the effects this has on Hedwig, but not in her face, the distant camera lens doesn’t allow us. It shows in her body.

Glazer told the actress playing Hedwig, Sandra Huller, to “never stop walking.” We see her fiddle in the garden, walk up the stairs, order around servants. She is always moving; she is always running. When her children swim in a river that ends up being a disposal spot for the ashes and bones of the Auschwitz victims, she cleans them. She cleans herself with such fury it looks like she’s violently scrubbing a cast iron pan. Throughout the film, there is a slew of noises and sounds, what Glazer called the “second film,” orchestrated by sound designer Johnnie Burn and composer Mica Levi, that is clear about the psychology of the moments. The characters and thus the audience are overwhelmed with the noises of machinery, guns, yelling, screaming, other unplaceable sounds. They are trying to quiet the world inside them with the world around them, a glistening, sterile home, and a garden with every earthly delight of mid-century Europe.

A scene from the garden party

On the latter issue, of The Zone of Interest’s place within the context of Holocaust films, I will say only one thing. The motivations of films such as Life is Beautiful or Schindler’s List are patently different than The Zone of Interest. With no disrespect to those films, they are trying to render something extremely specific, and for the most part succeed in evoking powerful emotions for the characters and audience.

There is one scene in Zone which captures some of that emotion. When Hedwig’s mother rolls into town, she too knows what lies beyond the garden wall her daughter shows her. “They’re over there?” she asks with the same pathos one might ask what neighbors do for work. She adores her daughter’s new home. She loves even her persistently crying grandchild. Late at night, she is woken by the screams of that child and when she opens her eyes, she’s overcome with the sight of red and orange. It is fire from the ovens, we know. However, in one of the only closeup shots in the film, Glazer lingers on the grandmother’s red and orange lit face to show her realization of what is burning in those ovens. It is a blistering moment of cinematic psychology.

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“With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labor, the useful character of the kinds of labor embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labor. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labor, human labor in the abstract.”

                --Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, “The Commodity”

If unlike more traditionally structured films, we are not driven by the psychology of our leads then what drives this art object?

Late in the movie, at the Nazi holiday party, Rudolph has a phone call with his wife to tell her he’s coming home. She’s exhausted; it’s late and he’s drunk with his work friends.

“The entire time, I could only think about how I would go about gassing the people in the room,” he says. Hedwig sighs like a spouse exhausted by her workaholic husband.

The scenes of Rudolph’s work come with this slant irony. Throughout the film, we see Rudolph in meetings, leading discussions of logistics for transporting their victims, concerns about heat flows and disposal processes. He is the decider in a massive supply chain. The viewers all know what he is supplying of course, but I couldn’t shake the feeling how banally everything was presented. Rudolph, lacking the traditional psychology afforded film characters, dives headlong into his vile work. He is a cog in a machine yes, an extremely important one too, but, he’s an executive rewarded for his work; he’s a workaholic who also fucks his maid; he bothers his wife with talk of this or that work drama. He is, in one sense, human.

As he leaves the party, he stops to gag. He then looks around in a black and white hallway. The camera shows us Auschwitz in the present. We watch nameless workers from behind clean and scrub away at the encasement of shoes and bags. We see another vacuuming. A third and fourth sweeping. Just as Rudolph has worked tirelessly sacrificing the love of his family to murder millions of people, so too do the cleaners of the camp, the stewards of a collective memory site. Their labor however, rather than presented with the sentimentality of preservation and capital H history, comes to us in the same mode as Rudolf’s. They are completing a task, because they’re supposed to, because they’re going to be paid for it, because the world operates on the circulation of money and the abstraction of one’s labor.

The belief that the work of the Nazis in Glazer’s film is abstract is not a moral fact but an analytical one. It is “reality” just as Big Brother is reality television. There are human lives and emotions tied up within the scope of both realities. What’s more, the dialogue with this reality as rendered by Glazer, elongates the critique offered by portraying the Höss family as intellectually equal in reality with the workers cleaning Auschwitz today. With that second film of his, the soundscapes and violent noises, the spinning wheels and sharpened razors turned from soundtrack to ambience to background noise, the film asks finally, in a wide shot of Rudolph’s face, obscured by distance and time, ripped of clear psychology, obscured frank emotion of the Nazi, and then the screen fades to black so that, if viewed on a glass screen, the way most films are seen on a laptop or a home TV, the black becomes mirror, a reflection, the viewer is now subject: what sounds, what second film are you ignoring?