Burn, Cool, Unload, Reload

Just as many film savants had predicted, Oppenheimer bagged the Best Picture Award in this year’s Oscars. I saw the film days before the ceremony, and I, too, made the same prognosis. It just has the making of a classic: magnificent screen performances from its lead actors (Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey, Jr., and Matt Damon), fabulous cinematography, and an innovative screenplay. The last is hardly surprising since unconventional storytelling is one of the hallmarks of Christopher Nolan’s works. But just as many people found Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk a little confusing owing to its unconventional storytelling style, some people might also be hard-pressed to follow Oppenheimer’s narrative, which jumps back and forward in time. People who are not familiar with the historical events from the end of the First World War to the beginning of McCarthyism in the United States would also be at a disadvantage. In other words, Oppenheimer is a marvelous film that will remind you of the 1941 film Citizen Kane, but it is also the type of movie that will benefit from a second or third viewing.

But these issues aside, and despite its artistic merits and unequivocally anti-war theme, Oppenheimer is hardly the most relevant film that got the attention of the Academy during this year’s awards season. That distinction goes to The Zone of Interest, a film that documents the life of the commandant of the notorious Auschwitz Extermination Camp, Rudolf Höss (not to be confused with Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s Deputy Fuhrer until the former's fall from grace in 1941), as he and his family tried to live a normal and happy life in a beautiful villa (their “zone of interest”) next to the camp. Set in 1943, during the implementation of Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” the film shows what kind of person Höss was when he was not ordering the killing of millions of innocent people.

Utilizing techniques of transcendental cinema, typified by Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), the Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer, through the predominant use of static shots, the absence of musical score, and a story-telling that leaves much of the narrative to the imagination of the audience, was able to accomplish what other films dealing with Nazi atrocities did not.

While Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) is always cited as one of the greatest movies of all time, and remains one of my personal favorites to this day—I have probably seen it ten times or more—it is often criticized for giving the wrong impression about why and how the Holocaust happened. In the film, Amon Goeth (played masterfully by Ralph Fiennes--yes, the actor who played Voldemort in the Harry Potter film series), the commandant of the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp in Poland, is shown shooting random prisoners from the balcony of his house which overlooks the workcamp. He was doing this while nonchalantly smoking a cigarette. At an earlier scene, he also orders the summary execution of the Jewish engineer in charge of building one of the camp’s structures, whose only fault was having the gall to tell him that the structure was built wrong and therefore had to be rebuilt. He follows the engineer’s advise and orders his men to rebuild the structure anyway, but not before having her shot.

The film devotes considerable screen time to scenes that show how terrifying and murderous Amon Goeth was. While this is historically accurate, this had the unfortunate effect of abetting a   misconception about why and how the Holocaust happened. And this misconception has a catastrophic consequence on the present. This is what The Zone of Interest is all about. It seeks to shatter the old myth about why the Holocaust occurred in the 20th century. And that is what makes it more disturbing and terrifying than Schindler’s List.

In The Zone of Interest, Rudolf Höss is never shown killing a prisoner, or ordering his men to carry out killings. He is never even shown holding a gun. What we see is a doting father who reads stories to a daughter who has trouble sleeping; a good husband who enjoys talking to her wife in the middle of the night about a previous trip to Italy, who playfully mimics the sound of pigs, and who shares a hearty laugh with her; and a guy who genuinely cares about his horse’s well-being. At night we see him locking the doors of the house and flicking the light switches before going to bed. Except for instances when he is shown discussing the design of a new crematorium with another man (“burn, cool, unload, reload”), or when, while at a party in Berlin, he tells his wife over the phone that he has spent the night thinking of how to effectively gas everyone in the room, we barely see glimpses of the monster that he really is. He is just an ordinary guy just like everybody else— a thought that sends shivers down your spine.

This does not mean that the film has left out the reality of the genocide occurring within the confines of the camp altogether. According to Glazer, there are two films in “The Zone of Interest”— the one you see, and the one you hear. That description is spot on. There is one scene that best illustrates this. In the garden, Hedwig (Höss’ wife) is having a conversation with her mother, who just came over for a visit. Her mother, having just seen her daughter’s expansive house, beautiful garden, and pool, ecstatically tells her how proud she is of her daughter for having “landed on her feet.” And then a very faint but unmistakable crackle of gunfire is heard. The audience is then shown close-ups of exquisite flowers in the Höss’ family garden while the sounds of barking dogs, shouts of military officers, screams of women, and cries of children can be heard in the background. The Hösses were having the best time of their lives enjoying the sun, drinking coffee, and swimming in the pool, while human lives were being destroyed on a massive scale over their garden wall!

By showing the mundanity, the ordinariness of Rudolf Höss’ life and his family, and then by juxtaposing it with the sounds of suffering from the Auschwitz extermination camp, The Zone of Interest has succeeded in driving home its point: the Holocaust happened not because madmen like Amon Goeth were in positions of power. It happened because perfectly normal people turned a blind eye to what was being done, supported its perpetrators, or became the perpetrators themselves—all the while carrying on with their daily lives. It tells us that we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that crimes against humanity of the same magnitude as the Holocaust cannot possibly happen again because the Nazis are gone. It can happen again at present, if it is not happening again already, because the monsters never left us at all. And the monsters never left because there are no monsters at all. There are only normal, ordinary people just like the Höss family--just like you and me. And this horrifying thought is once again being brought to the fore by recent events.

In 1946, Höss was captured and tried in Nuremberg for his war crimes . He was sentenced to die by hanging for being directly responsible for the death of around 3 million innocent people. Four days before he stepped onto the gallows, he wrote the following statement:

"My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time (underscoring mine)."

Obviously, Höss’ hopes that the horrible crimes that he helped commit would “make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time” were in vain. If Höss were alive today, I wonder what he would think of the genocide that is being perpetrated against the Palestinian people by the descendants of the survivors of the Nazi Juggernaut. I also wonder what he would think of the perfectly normal people who enable the commission of such horrendous crime against humanity through their complicity and silence. Maybe he would think he wasn’t so bad after all. Ω