The Zone of Disinterest: Remembering to Repress the Holocaust
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest has won many awards, but what is the real impact of this film?
By placing the murder of Jews out of view, it is possible to think of this movie as a form of Holocaust denial. Of course, the people celebrating it claim that it depicts the banality of evil, but the focus on a concentrate camp’s leader’s family, tends to drown out even the muffled sounds of the extermination machine.
While we do see the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss treat Auschwitz and other camps as a mostly bureaucratic project and a means to career advancement, very little of his actual vile beliefs are expressed. Yes some Nazis loves their children and animals, but this emphasis on their humanity serves to repress what made this event such an historical trauma.
Perhaps the message of the film is that we should not ignore the horrors that occur right outside of our homes, but to use the Holocaust as the pretext for this lesson appears to undermine this point. As the victims of this attempted genocide are kept at a safe distance, the movie unintentionally reveals how we turn to media depictions of horrific events, not to engage our activism, but rather to enact our passivity and indifference.
As Freud said in relation to jokes, cultural productions help us to turn the suffering of others into our pleasure and the serious into the unserious. In exchange for enjoyment, we promise not to hold the creator of the fiction responsible, and in this way, everyone escapes feelings of guilt and shame.
Of course, Hollywood loves to reward films that make us feel good about ourselves, and in this case, virtue is signaled by paying attention to an important issue. But, Freud also argued that behind our desire to have our morality recognized by others, we often find a desire to repress our own anti-social aggression.
By removing the Jews from the Holocaust and focusing on a Nazi and his family, we are taught to forget what we don’t want to remember.