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.

Ten Days of Terror!: Under the Skin

Film: Under the Skin
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on laptop.

When the new 1001 Movies book came out and I saw that I had just four movies to watch to finish for the year, I planned to end with Under the Skin. This is, after all, a science fiction movie with horror elements, two genres that tend to be overlooked on the 1001 Movies list in general. It’s a movie I’d heard a lot good about, it having received a great deal of universal acclaim. I like to end October with a bunch of horror movies anyway, so it seemed like a natural fit. What could go wrong, right?

What could go wrong is that the emperor could have no clothes. I’m certain that our filmmaker here has some deep meaning attached to this film, but I’ll be damned if I know what the hell it is. Under the Skin is almost certainly an allegory of some sort, but an allegory only works if your audience can actually figure out what the meaning is. Sadly, Under the Skin is almost completely opaque in that respect. This is not a film that offers much to the viewer in terms of help. It also doesn’t offer much in terms of entertainment.