The Zone of Interest: The Ethics of Escapism and Genocide

The boy at the box office looks at me funny when I buy one ticket for The Zone of Interest on Valentine’s Day. I do not qualify for the date promo (two popcorns, two pops, two bags of candy for $20). I ask if there is a 50% discount for singles. He laughs, there is not. He tells me this is an interesting form of escapism. I guess I hadn’t thought about it like that.

In the theatre I am utterly alone. The sound starts and the screen stays black long enough for me to wonder if something is wrong with the projector. I look around for confirmation. Oh right, I’m alone and now deeply unsettled. The opening sequence is a blindfold. And without the visual cues I wonder if that sound is a woodpecker or gunfire and realize I have never been in a position to confuse the two. Establishing images set the tone for films, but especially, I would argue, period pieces. It takes a lot more work to place an audience in a time they haven’t experienced. The intentional lag seemed to push back and question my desire to be comfortably situated. When the first scene begins, my panic subsides. The theatre, now a time machine, drops me off in 1943 Auschwitz. And for some twisted reason this feels safer than the menacing black screen.

I blame my dad’s love of historical films for my sick methods of escapism. As a kid, I loved the event of going to the theatre and the only way to get there was to suggest the latest biopic or period film. Dad was determined to convey the realness of these stories. He loved to (way too loudly) whisper that “your grandpa wore clothes like that,” “your grandma grew up in a house like that,” always connecting it back to me and my family. I think he was trying to compress time and shrink the gap of history. But in my mind, Grandpa wore grandpa clothes, he lived in a nice bungalo with floral wallpaper and decorative plates. It didn’t click for most of my childhood. Watching Inglourious Bastards in theatres was no different than watching Star Wars. But It clicked at the end of The Zone of Interest. Hoss looks down a dark hallway, a pinhole into the present, into my dark little theatre. Watching the cleaners wipe display cases filled with shoes, dusting the gas chambers and moping the floors, I decided the movie was perfect. It does something I’m still not fully sure how to articulate. It laughs at the notion of escapism and swallows you in its open-throat, black screen cackle. It whispered to me like my dad used to in dark theatres, “your grandpa wore shoes like that.”

We rarely see The Aftermath in historical films or how memory manifests in the present. Historical films are often framed as “that thing that happened way back then.” It’s a tricky thing — to capture the nuance of a historical event, our changing relationship to a historical event or the history of history itself. All in 90 minutes. The Zone of Interest seems to do it in a matter of minutes — with no dialogue. The mundanity of the cleaners echoes the mundanity of the Hoss family, and echoes the mundanity of simply watching The Zone of Interest. It reminds me of the final radio show sequence in Killers of the Flower Moon. Both forward flashes draw attention to the artifice of history through entertainment whether that’s a radio play, a museum, or the film itself: the repackaging of collective memory as something marketable, something to be consumed en masse.

I try to imagine explaining this process to an alien: we eat junk in a dark room and watch fictionalized recounts of really horific stuff that we, as a society, did and continue to do. We give it structure, make sure to include a satisfying ending, we aestheticize the colour. And that simple act simultaneously draws us nearer to the event and distances us. It’s harder to justify the longer you think about it. What are the ethics of fossilizing genocide in the shiny resin of cinema? To TZOI’s credit, we don’t see the gore-porn holokitschification of victims, survivors and death camps. But this means focalizing the villains. A similar argument can be made about Killers of the Flower Moon. The self-reflexive endings of both films prod at the contradiction of remembering, but is it enough?

In her article “In Defence of Forgetting,” Shannon Walsh, a filmmaker and interdisciplinary scholar, argues that the excuse for memorializing genocide is often that it’s meant to prevent future genocides. That is a lofty goal to assume of a very timid breed of human: writers. Literature, film, or any art for that matter is conversation. Art synthesizes and engages with cultural memory in ways that your middle school Remembrance Day assembly could not. If we had more time I would find a way to convince you that a film is an essay: thesis (protagonist), antithesis (antagonist), synthesis (resolution). The narrative of TZOI is trying to analyze a fossilized nugget of history, but the film, as an artifact, creates another fossil — a 2023 perspective that contrasts glorified war films of the past. The endings of both TZOI and KOTFM, even if not perfectly, echo recent discourse surrounding trauma porn and the ethics of history as entertainment. Which is not to say that these films have “won an argument,” only that they do what all good essays do — they engage with and add to our ever-changing relationship to historical memory. In all honesty, I’m more afraid of a world where we unanimously agree that a single film depiction of any genocide is hands down ‘perfect’.

I have always been bothered by the cinematographer’s instinct to wash out or mute colour in period pieces of historical films. Why must the past be desaturated? In movies reflecting modern day, flashbacks are always given ‘the golden haze’ look. Part of me understands that we’re trying to capture a different time, maybe a ‘darker time’ in history. But it dates a film as ‘the bleak days of yore’ or risks suggesting we stand above past injustice. Walsh argues that “historical and cultural memories are often political, an attempt to impose particular narratives on the present day and to justify present-day positions.” She has a point, if we relate the argument to colour. To me, the message of a muted historical film is delivered when we walk outside the theatre into natural lighting. As a society we’ve ‘seen the light,’ surely the skies would be filled with smog if this weren’t true. This, I think, is what Walsh’s argument circles around. It’s unfair to say that any historical film should be condemned for memorializing genocide. Aestheticizing is the true crime.

The Zone of Interest reminds us that the sun shines on genocide. The only hope — a small girl hiding apples — is seen in infrared. It’s a simple metaphor. Evil happens in broad daylight, hope happens in the dark. Simple, but due to the desaturated conventions of historical film, effective. Glazer and Zal didn’t want to give the film an “aesthetic” and opted for natural lighting. The forecast dictated the weather of each scene. It’s hard to articulate the power of colour grading, and a lot of people hate people like me who go on and on and on about colour. But I think of They Shall not Grow Old — which is salvaged footage from WWI with the addition of colour. I half-watched these same black and white clips in high school history class. The simplicity of realistic, familiar colour drastically changed my viewing experience. I see how horrible this sounds — I need colour to feel empathy. And a lot of people hate people like me who go on and on and on about colour in film. But it did something, when I left my empty theatre time machine, walked outside, and recognized the same sky from The Zone of Interest. This was not the kind of escapism I was going for.

Walsh, S. (2018). IN DEFENCE OF FORGETTING. In P. TORTELL, M. TURIN, & M. YOUNG (Eds.), Memory (pp. 173–180). Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvbtzpfm.23