The Zone of Interest

The extreme difficulty of the topic of the Holocaust – a deep open wound of Western civilisation till today (and maybe even more so today than before) – means that the first question a movie about the Holocaust needs to answer is: how is a Holocaust movie supposed to be like? And more generally, how is Holocaust art supposed to be like? Or, it can be put in a more specific way: with all those memoirs of the survivors and the perpetrators, all those literal, oral and visual records of the Holocaust, what exactly is there in the lessons of this humanitarian catastrophe that still calls for, or even necessitates, the participation of a cinematic narrative and a thinking enabled by a moving camera? To this viewer, the answer to this question is not, at the most fundamental level, a sensational depiction of the shocking character of the Holocaust, and even less an emotional usage of this unprecedented tragedy for the evocation of some kind of hope or guilt towards humanity, but the one thing that truly lies in the foundation of our success and failure of being human: shame, and its immeasurable depth.

THE ZONE OF INTEREST, in this viewer’s opinion, is one of the few cinematic works about the Holocaust that has found its potency and depth in its relation to and focus on the theme of shame. Despite the possible inherent limitation of the perpetrator perspective in terms of how deep it can go into the exposure of shame, this film does a pretty good job in grasping and showing the kernel of this perspective – the denial of shame, in a way that slips into neither a sensationalist drama, nor a banal biography. Moreover, the bold and unsettling juxtaposition of the cleansing of Jews to the very last bit of their residue, and the cleaning of the museum converted from the gas chamber, suggests a perspective that sees the outrageous denial of shame in the anti-Semitic acting-out not as simply a devastating yet accidental ideological “mistake”, but as a major dysfunction of the immunity of our mind and body, a function which, with the extreme tragedy it has led to when it went wrong, is nonetheless always and will always be essential to the founding of human life in its necessary openness to “nutrition” of all kinds and indispensible protection against “pathogens” in its milieu. Such an illumination can no doubt be extremely disturbing, as many viewers and critics have sensed, with its implication that every single act we believe as sight-clearing, care-taking, order-preserving or safe-guarding, no matter how ordinary or necessary it seems, always and unavoidably runs the risk of turning out to be (self-)deceptive, destructive, exclusive and forgetting. However, the more disturbing it feels, the more pressing this question comes out to be: couldn’t it be the case that, our incapability to encounter and handle our fate as immunological beings is exactly the vulnerability that opens the door to another (beyond-)tragic immunological dysfunction of our society?