Early in the movie The Zone of Interest, Hedgwig Höss (played by Sandra Huller) sees her husband off to work at their garden gate, cradling her baby and cooing, “Bye bye, Daddy.” Commandant Rudolf Höss mounts a large horse and rides it through another gate into Auschwitz, which is hidden from view by a tall cement wall topped with barbed wire. Hedwig turns back to her garden and carries the baby to a bed of blooming flowers, naming them aloud while lowering the child for a closer look. “Would you like to smell a rose? Yes, smell this one. This one is beautiful. . . Look, what a big dahlia.” The baby reaches out to touch it.
In another scene, shortly after Hedgwig brags to her mother about being nicknamed the “Queen of Auschwitz,” the camera pans through the garden, lingering on everything in bloom, while the sound of barking dogs, gunshots, and screams are heard in the background. The camera zooms closer and closer onto the flowers, stopping on a hot pink one, which slowly fills the screen until it turns completely red. The screams go silent.
The horrifying sounds do not mute the flowers’ beauty. If anything, the beauty grows sharper in its refusal to accommodate the horror; its relentlessness is part of the horror. The juxtaposition reminds me of this essay by Natalia Antonova about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Antonova, a survivor of child sexual abuse, explains why she loves Lolita, not in spite of but because of her own history:
Before Nabokov, I never really noticed how the world doesn’t bend to the horror of our individual experiences, it just carries on being the world. [. . .] Lolita is a reminder that beauty neither de-claws nor lulls evil, it just exists.
It may be easier to get this across on film, which seems to effortlessly “capture” beauty, than in writing, where any beauty must be created by someone using language. Zone of Interest is loosely adapted from a novel by Martin Amis, which apparently centers on another Nazi’s infatuation with Hedgwig Höss. This is barely in the film as it does not need to be. Aside for a few essential scenes (like the flower closeups and thermal imaging), the camera acts as a neutral observer with one limitation: it cannot breach the wall separating the Höss home from Auschwitz. Much can be heard over the wall (writer/director Jonathan Glazer called the film’s sound “the other film, or, arguably, the film”), but it remains a concrete visual barrier.
In literature (and often life), the wall is internal. Nabokov said he was inspired to write Lolita after learning of a captive ape who made the world’s first drawing by an animal: the creature drew the bars of his own cage. Humbert’s cage is his pedophilia, and he spends the whole novel trying to make it into something beautiful. Some readers are fooled by this, believing the beauty of the prose somehow shows him undeserved mercy, but the whole point is that it doesn’t. Beauty is indifferent to mercy. It just exists.
The Zone of Interest and Lolita are “masterpieces of misdirection,” a term I came across in Geraldines Brooks’ blurb for Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, a novel that also fits this description. Mobility, which is about the oil industry in the way Zone of Interest is about Auschwitz, follows a protagonist named Bunny, who avoids reckoning with the moral consequences of her career choice through a relatable pursuit for physical and financial betterment.
While Bunny may be more relatable than Humbert Humbert or Hedgwig Höss, they all escape themselves in highly familiar ways. Bunny works, travels, and shops. Hedgwig focuses on the domestic sphere and her children, while her husband focuses on his career. Humbert reverses victim and offender.
There’s also Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet, a 1957 French novel narrated by a jealous man tracking his wife, which is actually about colonialism, or so I argued in a paper I wrote in college. In French, la jalousie is the word for both “jealousy” and also “venetian blind,” the kind with horizontal slats offering a tempered view of the world outside. Jealousy’s narrator pulls such a blind over the brutality of the novel’s setting: a banana plantation he oversees. Sexual fixation operates here like a camera’s zoom, filling the screen with the object of desire, obscuring everything else.
All these works provoke our identification with people we do not want to identify with. They’re about the banality of evil, how atrocities can exist within the familiar rhythms of work and family, and even alongside non-banalities like love and beauty. Author Heidi Julavits, who writes in The Folded Clock about her attempt to read a famous Nazi propagandists’s memoir, calls these works “case [studies] of what people disallow themselves from knowing when that knowledge is incriminatory or inconvenient.”
While I was writing this, Eva came and asked me if Tramp (from Lady & the Tramp) is “nice.” She’s been fixated, recently, on identifying the “good” and “bad” characters in stories and using this information to pick favorites. (She’s 5, but the reading comprehension of many adults is still stranded at this level). Often, her decision is made prematurely, like when she claimed the emperor was her favorite character on the first page of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
I said I thought Tramp was “nice with some blindspots.” She asked what “blindspots” meant and I gave her a literal definition related to cars. “You mean like when I’m looking for something in a room and don’t see it?” she asked, and I said yes, although this scenario usually doesn’t involve any literal blindspots. What usually happens is she’s distracted by the other things in the room or whatever’s going on in her head and overlooks the thing sitting someplace obvious. But that’s what I mean. The blindspots are usually not literal. They’re internal or self-imposed—in this case, by our accumulation of toys. Maybe this is the modern American condition.
Maybe this is why there’s so much about blindness and sight in the Bible. I’ve been reading bits of the New Testament, and it seems like Jesus heals another blind person on every other page. I’m starting to think these stories aren’t about literal sight as much as spiritual sight or grace. “I was blind but now I see.”
When The Zone of Interest won Best International Feature at the Oscars, Jonathan Glazer used his speech to remark on the film’s relationship to our current moment:
All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present. Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. [. . .] Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people — whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization.
Some people in Hollywood were mad that Glazer said this. They purposely mischaracterized his words, lopping them off at “men who refute their Jewishness,” while the full sentence makes clear he was not refuting his Jewishness, but his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked” to wage unending war. He was critiquing the “dangerous conflation” between his Jewishness and the escalating violence of the Israeli government.
The Zone of Interest ends with a scene that breaks from the formal constraints the film has set for itself—breaching not only the physical wall but the wall of time. I won’t say more except that I interpret it to be a scene about hell, which I’ve become convinced is a place we create for ourselves inside the limits of our vision/understanding. “It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell,” wrote C.S. Lewis. “In each of us there is something growing, which will be hell unless it is nipped in the bud.” Hedgwig gardens. Humbert paints a beautiful cage.
Related recommended reading:
on The Zone of Interest, beauty products, and Gaza: Terror and Mundanity in a Makeup Bag