The Zone Of Interest Is A Horror Film
The right-wing Zionists criticizing director Jonathan Glazer for "going easy" on the subject clearly didn't actually watch the movie.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that the vast majority of Americans had no idea about The Zone of Interest until Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Oscars, where he refuted the use of his Jewishness to apologize for and defend the ongoing massacre of Gaza’s Palestinian population by the Israeli Defence Forces. Suddenly, everyone had an opinion about it, and a criticism started seeping into “the discourse,” as we term such things. He had “gone easy” on the Nazis. Richard Brody’s review for The New Yorker said it was “‘Scenes from a Marriage’ but for the Nazis.” A number of Jewish Hollywood workers signed a letter criticizing him and his work. One notorious Israeli influencer said Glazer’s film was trash because it had been funded by the Polish Film Institute, in part, and Poland’s right-wing government was anti-Semitic.
All I can say after watching the film myself is that these people are ignorant or never actually watched the movie. I was immediately unsettled by the intro, where the screen is black for nearly three minutes while haunting music slowly morphs into the sounds of a concentration camp. Then there’s a quick cut to the household, and we learn rather quickly that this is Auschwitz, and we are looking at the family of the camp commandant Rudolf Ho(e)ss.1 There are glimpses of what lies beyond, the guard tower, the barbed wire at the top of the concrete walls. An inmate pushes a wheelbarrow through the garden. A female prisoner is working as a maid, moving about wordlessly, ignored by the family and paid staff.
Without giving the entire film away, Glazer uses the sounds and certain other moments to tell a story. We see Hoss sitting with two engineers, who eagerly explain their new design for a crematorium for the Jews of Auschwitz, and how 400-500 can be incinerated at one time. Hoss attends a party, observing the fun and frivolity of the attendees. He wakes his wife with a phone call to tell her, with no remorse, almost excitement, how he couldn’t stop imagining how to gas everyone at the party. In night scenes, the smoke pouring from the camp’s chimneys mixes with the shouts of guards and the screams of Jews, all unseen, but nonetheless hitting as hard as a swift kick in the testicles.
Hoss’s wife, in some ways, is worse than he is. There is a scene with the Jewish maid that sets a new bar for cold cruelty, and her biggest passions are reserved for her fanatical desire to keep their house and beautiful garden she designed in the Lebensraum of the East. There is no mistaking her support for Nazism here. There is equally no mistaking, especially by the end, the horror of what took place in Auschwitz in both scope and scale. I call The Zone of Interest a horror film because it is the things we hear and do not see that stick with us. It has been observed throughout history by soldiers who witnessed or partook in particularly brutal acts of violence that it is the sounds which stay with them. The sights fade. The sounds, the screams, that is what stays in their heads until they die. Glazer uses the sounds of dogs, guns, shouting, cries, and the wailing of a baby to maximum effect. One wonders how anyone, let alone Hoss’s many children, could sleep through the hell taking place yards from their house. I was ready by the halfway mark to take a Xanax so I could shut out what I knew these sounds meant. If you watch before bed like I did tonight, don’t expect to be able to go to sleep right after.
The clear message taken from The Zone of Interest is that it is far too easy for people to put their humanity aside when there is material gain in it for themselves. It grows even easier when the other humans, the ones being murdered, have been thoroughly dehumanized. If it weren’t so effective, we would not see this strategy being utilized today. In the first case, undocumented migrants from Hungary to France to the United Kingdom to America have been described repeatedly as “invaders,” “vermin,” “terrorists,” “parasites,” and drains on our economy by far-right politicians and political parties. The British government, under the control of the Conservative party, is trying to ram through a law that would send all migrants to Rwanda2 and is bribing that nation’s leadership with £25,000,000 to go along with it. Donald Trump and many leading Republicans want to build concentration camps to round up every undocumented migrant in America. Never mind that undocumented migrants have taxes deducted without receiving benefits. Never mind that there hasn’t exactly been a rush of Americans to fill their produce and slaughterhouse jobs because they do not pay enough, and without the migrants, our food system will collapse, so we’ll see who wins that fight.
The second case, though, the most noticed dehumanization in the world is how the Palestinians have been systematically buried both figuratively and literally by the Israeli government. In the figurative sense, Israeli laws over the past decade have turned Palestinians into the modern equivalent of Germany’s Jews in 1936. Their homes are taken without compensation or warning by Israelis wanting them for themselves. If their homes are destroyed, they aren’t allowed to repair them or they are sent to prison. If they fight to keep their home from being seized, they go to prison without charges, missing for months or years. The West Bank is carved up into go/no-go zones, and the go zones are disappearing, piece by piece, as the IDF backs the crimes of the Israeli settlers with their guns. If the comparison offends you, it should. It should offend you that Jews, of all people, would do this to another race of people. If you say it’s justified for self-defense, no army has invaded Israel in fifty years, so what are they defending from? Unguided DIY rockets against a modern army?
Then there is Gaza, where Palestinians are caught between Hamas, who can violently attack the Israeli oppressors but don’t do a damned thing to actually uplift the Palestinians, and whose barbaric attack of October 7th, 2023 was the catalyst for Israel turning the open-air prison of the Gaza Strip into a cage where they have gone about conducting a repeat of the Serbian assault against the Bosnian people thirty years ago (funny, that number keeps coming up). Deliberately enforced famine. Murder of civilians trying to access the scarce amount of aid available. Nonstop aerial bombing conducted by drones whose targets are assigned by an AI program called Lavender that, as reported by +972 Magazine in Tel Aviv, is used for the lowest Hamas member up to the highest. Each target that Lavender marks is assigned an acceptable collateral damage number under the “rules” of engagement.
An entry-level Hamas operative can be killed at the cost of fifteen to twenty civilian lives with no repercussions. A Hamas unit commander is alloted a collateral damage amount of one hundred civilian lives. This latitude was supposed to be used sparingly, but then the targeting reviewers found they knew whenever these men went home. Because it’s “easier’ to attack them when they go home, the IDF routinely dropped unguided ordnance on houses where any suspected Hamas members entered. This is why Gaza looks like the aftermath of a King Kong-Godzilla battle. There’s been no attempt to spare civilian lives, no matter how much the IDF comms teams would like you to believe otherwise. The proof is in the fact that not a single hospital has been left standing. There’s no electricity. No potable water. Fragmented cellular communications. A people driven out of zone by zone until well over half the population was crammed into a town meant for ten percent of them. The Israeli forces have dropped enough bombs on Gaza to equal the force of several nuclear weapons.
I could not fathom that NEVER AGAIN came with an asterisk, but those defending Zionism, especially over the last three months, seem to believe otherwise. It’s okay to commit ethnic cleansing if they’re Palestinian, because Hamas used them as human shields, or they didn’t evacuate when told to, or they used the wrong road. That’s not what the Geneva Conventions say. It’s not what the International Court of Justice says. It isn’t what any common sense reading of history tells us. If we don’t apply the simple, morally forceful judgement behind NEVER AGAIN because the victims aren’t Jews this time, then the phrase never meant anything to begin with. Being the past victims of genocide is not an excuse for committing one yourselves. There will be a reckoning for Israel one day, and when it does, nobody will be better for it.
There is some debate over the proper spelling of his name, likely complicated by the existence of the deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess. In any case, the Anglicized spelling is Hoss, and it will be used like that going forward.
For those that might be unaware, it was thirty years ago that one of the worst genocides in human history took place in Rwanda when a dehumanization campaign by the ethnicity in power, the Hutus, used television and radio to rile up the Hutu population into slaughtering the populace of the Tutsi ethnicity. An accurate accounting is difficult to come by, especially because the world did not intervene. In approximately one hundred days, 250,000-500,000 Tutsi females were raped, and 595,000-800,000 Tutsis murdered, many by machetes. The killings took place in their own towns and villages, neighbor on neighbor. That is the power of dehumanization.