Letters / On “The Hösses’ Colonial Paradise”

Like Jonathan Shamir, I long for a disruption to the monotony of Holocaust films that “prioritize pathos, catharsis, and blunt moral force over historical precision.” Most cultural production “about the Holocaust” actually shields us from having to look too directly at that genocide. Before I watched The Zone of Interest, I had hoped that a film positioning itself at the apex of this not-looking—one that takes willful ignorance as its subject—might at least illuminate the consequences of such refusals to peer beyond our own cozy garden walls. But The Zone of Interest’s zone of interest is too limited to achieve that—or, unfortunately, to do much of what Shamir’s starry-eyed review claims. Instead, the film performs yet another feat of deflected attention.

Rather than excoriate its main characters, the film replicates and even delights in those willful acts of ignorance. We see this pleasure in the gorgeous long shots, the hyper-saturated colors of the flowers, even in the many minutes the camera lingers on Rudolf Höss’s glossy and flawless hairline. For me, the most unsettling aspect of the film was how much I coveted the Höss family’s dining-room chairs. As I admired their shapely wood, though, I wasn’t just “confront[ing] the similarities between the Hösses’ lives and [my] own,” as Shamir’s review and others have claimed. I was thinking about the set designers who likely spent thousands of hours—and even more thousands of dollars—on the accoutrements of the Hösses’ reimagined life: the carefully cultivated garden, the hand-painted wallpaper. In their hyperfocus on the domestic, the filmmaker and his cohort end up doing something very similar to those who pour resources into elaborate colonial reenactments in Jamestown, Virginia, knowing the cost of their efforts will be recouped in enthusiastic ticket sales.

Instead of removing our “blindfolds,” as Shamir suggests, The Zone of Interest leans on viewers’ ostensible knowledge of what lies behind its walls and outside its frame. We may see the smoke from Auschwitz’s chimneys, but never the people next in line to be burned, nor those actively engaged in their burning. Instead, those black clouds are essentially a smokescreen upon which we’re free to imagine as we please: an atrocity lifted outside the bounds of history, or a reflection of genocides today. By refusing to engage or develop our understanding of what is happening inside the concentration camp, The Zone of Interest—like so many other “Holocaust movies”—at best allows the genocide to remain an abstraction, and at worst reinforces the idea that it is untouchable and absolute. A Holocaust hidden behind a brick wall is no more instructive to the present-day viewer than what Shamir identifies, in other films, as “a Holocaust frozen behind glass.”

In his speech at the Oscars, Glazer took the risk of peering, ever so briefly, past the wall; Shamir’s review might help a reader do so, too. But on its own, the film doesn’t disrupt the pattern of Holocaust filmography so powerfully explicated there. Instead, The Zone of Interest offers a photonegative. Without a meaningful look at those whose lives were actually bound up in the atrocities Rudolf Höss helped to orchestrate, The Zone of Interest only fulfils the perpetrators’ fantasies of leaving those human beings—and all who continue to be brutalized in the Nazi genocide’s calamitous and seemingly endless wake—faceless, blank.