The Banality of Evil

Film: The Zone of Interest
Format: Streaming video from Max on Fire!

For Christmas this year my kids got me a year of HBO Max, which is honestly the only thing I asked for. I’m hoping to be more current on film in the coming year, and having a Max subscription is a part of this. It also gives me access to a number of shows I want to watch. This is also where The Zone of Interest is streaming, and it’s the last film I needed to complete everything for the last Oscars on my list of categories. Naturally, once I got the subscription up and running, it was the first thing I queued up.

There have been hundreds of movies made about the Holocaust, of course, and there will be hundreds more. An evil this huge and terrible needs to be confronted, both to keep it in the public consciousness (especially since Holocaust denial is a constant issue) and to purge it. In a sense, these films are a sort of therapy, a way of lancing the boil and draining the poison. What The Zone of Interest does is look at this terrible piece of history in a completely new way, something that I thought might well be impossible at this point.

This is not a story of the inmates of Auschwitz as might initially be expected. Instead, this is the story of the family life of Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children. The film takes place in the Höss household, which sits next to the camp. What we are presented with is a sort of idyllic Teutonic existence of the family juxtaposed with the sounds of the camp text to them.

That is in large part the genius of the film. We never actually see the camp beyond the wall that separates the family from the inmates. This gives us a terrible perspective on what is happening. We see what appears in most ways (aside from things like the Nazi uniforms) to be a fairly normal family. What we hear is gunshots and screams coming over the wall. The horror of what is happening isn’t in our face, but is ever-present, something we know is always there but that we are not forced to see. As with many a horror movie, the horror that we do not see is in many ways more terrible than that we are confronted with directly; what we picture is often far worse than what we could be shown.

This horror, the reality of what is happening just off screen, just over the ever-present wall, is what drives the entirety of The Zone of Interest. We observe the daily life of these people with the full knowledge of who they really are and what they are really doing. They discuss the treasures they have stolen from their prisoners—what they found and where they found it—as if talking about what they found at the local thrift shop. And aside from a few moments, all of this is completely normalized in their lives.

Hannah Arendt, on discussing Adolf Eichmann, commented on the banality of evil. Eichmann, for as profound as his evil was, was not some mythical character of towering malevolence. He was essentially a bureaucrat doing the job that he was set forth to do. He had no ulterior motive and perhaps never really comprehended what he was doing on a deeper level, and yet through this (and perhaps because of it) became one of the most horrifying villains of the 20th century. That is what is being depicted here—the vapidity of the men who carried out one of the greatest crimes against humanity in its terrible history. Rudolph Höss, in effect, is nothing but an accountant looking for the most efficient way to complete the task he’s been given.

It’s impossible to watch this today and not look at corporate America, the assassination of and attacks on CEOs, the temporary policy of Blue Cross Blue Shield to no longer cover anesthetics for some surgeries, Nestle’s policy of denying people water for their own ends and more and not see the parallels. Like any film that discusses the horrors of the past, it’s as much a commentary on the present.

The worry, of course is that the film may humanize someone like Höss simply by showing him as human. Certainly that could be the case for people of a specific mindset, but my thinking is that it would happen only for someone predisposed to be a Holocaust denier (or a neo-Nazi sympathizer) to begin with.

The Zone of Interest is a hard film to reconcile. On the one hand, very little happens. This is the story of a man who, because of his success at what he has been asked to do, is given a temporary promotion and is separated from his family. That’s it on the surface. The power of the film comes from our knowledge of what he is so successful at doing.

Why to watch The Zone of Interest: There is no better example of the Hannah Arendt quote about the banality of evil.
Why not to watch: The soundscape will give you nightmares.