The Tedium of Evil
More like the Zone of zzzZZZzzz am I right?
I had a conversation with a friend recently about this idea doing the rounds online that it's easy to be evil, and much harder to be good — as well as the concept that it's also harder to write characters doing good deeds. Apart from the fact that all dichotomies are horseshit, it struck me that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what "good" and "evil" actually mean, as archetypes of behaviour in fiction. Good and evil are not individual choices, but phenomena — they manifest in individual actions as the result of systems and cultures. The valourisation of goodness seems to me a losing battle to replicate the succinct magic of what Morrissey (unfortunately) said best in 1986: "It's so easy to laugh, it's so easy to hate; it takes guts to be gentle and kind." This much can be true in social microcosms, but can't be generalised to all of character writing, let alone to more overarching concepts with such narrative weight as good and evil. Regular readers will know I hate heartwarming fiction, so it'll come as no surprise that I think we don't need to be making up reasons to explain why it's actually bold and brave not to wrestle with repulsive human emotions, by trying to act like goodness is any more complex than evil. All humanity is complex, and the vast majority of us lie somewhere in the messy middle of the two polar options; all good writing reflects that.
I've been thinking about this again since I saw Jonathan Glazer's awards season offering, The Zone of Interest. The film has been lauded as a thorough portrait of true evil — which it is — and a chilling Holocaust horror — which it is not. One thing I'll say about The Zone of Interest is it definitely deserves that sound design Oscar, and cinematography too, though it wasn't nominated for that. This is without a doubt some of the highest production value I've ever seen. The visuals, the colouring, and the framing of each shot — each detail is impeccable. The soundtrack is clever and memorable. The acting — of course, etc etc. It's all like this, not a hair out of place. This is all in service of a perfectly restrained depiction of evil, the life of the commandant of Auschwitz and his family. In this sense, the message of The Zone of Interest is obvious: et in Arcadia ego. The stylised touch of our high-definition window into Höss's family life reinforcees Hannah Arendt's idea of "the banality of evil," which you will have read about in every single review of this film because it's pretty much the only theme at play. It's the idea that most morally reprehensible actions are driven by the complaceny of the comfortably privileged in a system of power that functions on violent repression of its enemies. Violence, in its tangible form, is absent in the Höss family, but ever-present as a spectre, in this case literally just on the other side of a wall. This is where the skillful sound design shines, amplifying the cries and gunshots and the workings of the furnaces; this is where the direction's understated, mannered qualities serve to highlight what is being elided.
But to the charge that this is unsettling, some kind of horror film: I was unmoved. The Zone of Interest is so buttoned-down that it rarely leaves room for actual shock. I don't mean the kind of shock you think of when someone says "shock value" — but there isn't really a better word to describe the feeling when the silence is ruptured; the sudden violence of an idyll interrupted. The Zone of Interest presents a series of discontinuities in its paradise, but because the long shadow of Auschwitz is always there, the film never strays from a sort of comfortable medium. The ambient low-level violence, from background noise to a parade of micro- and macro-aggressions, makes most moments of rupture profoundly unsurprising. There is no suspense — not only because the film assumes that viewers are already familiar with the story of Auschwitz, but because it never fully withholds it from us anyway. There is no tension, and barely even a creeping sense of dread. It is just slow, and consistently kind of upsetting.
The few tonal digressions from this norm are, by large, not thematically coherent enough to feel like real disruptions. The infrared dream sequences are beautifully shot, but narratively too obtuse to be overly meaningful. The flash-forward at the ending fell flat for me. I imagine it's supposed to shock us in its stillness and mundanity, but it just seemed like a concession to all of the film's weaknesses — that The Zone of Interest couldn't show us true horror in its own time, so it has to remind us of the historical horror, alive in our reality. It is not bad filmmaking, but it is bad storytelling. I would say there's one truly powerful moment of rupture in the movie. We see Hedwig Höss's mother, visiting the family's home, unable to sleep at night because of the lights and sounds of the furnaces at Auschwitz — and the next morning she has left without notice. This reversal from a character who has spouted the most vile antisemitism is shocking, and it also underscores the complacency of the Höss family by, just for a moment, shattering the sanctity of their world — exposing the ugliness beyond their walls, both literal and metaphorical.
So what, then, can we say of writing about evil? Does The Zone of Interest capture the mundanity alongside the horror? I'd say so — in many ways it represents an almost platonic ideal of the atrocity narrative. I felt similarly about another 2023 release, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, which focuses with precision on the perpetrators of atrocity and declines to show us its victims. The success of this approach is twofold — Oppenheimer deftly sidesteps the slippery slope to trauma porn, while also allowing itself the thematic focus to delve into one phenomenon, one pathology, with exquisite depth. The Zone of Interest affords its subjects little depth, which I think is clever in its own way — the Höss family, devoid of humanity, aren't afforded the dignity of character depth. But character writing aside, The Zone of Interest sacrifices thematic depth; a depth which I think would be necessary to counterbalance an otherwise calculatedly surface-level focus on the aesthetics of the banality of evil. The film reminds us vividly of Arendt's thesis, and does this job so well it shoots itself in the foot, at the cost of a compelling story.
That other question, then: is evil easier to write than good? In this one case I have to concede the point — Glazer seems to be far more skilled at showing us evil. Goodness in The Zone of Interest is limited to archetypes. The only scene where we see an ostensibly Jewish character, an innocent, features a young girl playing a Yiddish tune on the piano. We don't hear the words, but we see them in subtitles. It is a beautiful, poignant moment, of course — and little more substance beyond a cursory tug at our heartstrings. I was left wondering what this had to do with the film's themes; or if it had just been kind of tacked on because it looked cool and made people feel things. Because the viewer certainly does not need more reminders of the Jüdenhass at the core of Nazi Germany — it's there in every conversation the main characters have on screen. It is never subtle. This poor girl, by comparison, is barely window dressing. She has even less depth than the hollow agents of evil. In the end, both extremes are boring: evil and good alike.
On the other hand, this scene could be read the same as the flash-forward, as a reminder of how we remember the victims of atrocity. I don't think victimhood should stand alone in fiction, but it shouldn't be ignored, either: even Oppenheimer shows the titular character realising the gravity of his crimes. I am interested in stories about evil; I think we need art that deconstructs systemised violence. This, too, is a way of saying "never again." But at times The Zone of Interest was so boring that I wondered why we'd bothered to remember the Höss family at all. The girl at the piano — what was her story?
