The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

[therewillbeblus]

I also really like how there's some ambiguity to her mother's departure, as well. Is she disturbed by the death itself, or simply by the presence of it?

I'll need to see it again, but I recall

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that our last image of her is drinking a bottle alone in the middle of the night, while sitting on a single bed in a room that looked distinctly different than the one she was staying in at Hedwig's. That was a room with two small beds, while this was framed with a different (yet broadly familiar) layout - one bed, alone, attic. It felt like a purgatory-like allegory for our complacency and delusional rationalizations over time since then, a timeless canvas of us just inebriating ourselves through history in limbo, unknown, hazy dark contexts, ignorantly moving ourselves into increasingly isolated positions...

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That was the nanny, not the mother. The last we see of the mother is when she closes the curtain on the crematorium (also the only time we actually hear it, interestingly enough - as if the noise of it is amplified by her observation) and then puts a handkerchief over her nose to block out the smell. After that, she vanishes.

The image of the servant drinking herself out of life in her dingy little room was arresting, almost like a particularly angry Alex Colville painting.

Oh man, I knew something had to be off about my memory there - it just didn't make sense spliced in the way it was. Now I like the movie a fraction of a percentage less tho

[Rael]

Apologies if someone has already asked this. When the Commandant is bidding tender farewell to his horse, there is some writing in a gothic-type script on the stable wall. Does anyone know what is says? (A cinema viewer walked to the toilets in front of my seat during that scene, and I missed being able to read it in time!) Thanks.

[Rael]

Not sure if this is verbatim:

Das Gluck der Erde, Liegt auf dem Rucken der Pferde.

The happiness of the earth lies on the back of horses.

[Black Hat]

Wish I remembered more specifics of this, a film I did not like, to push back a little, but everyone's thoughts and Mr. S' rave have made me think harder about my reaction and made me more willing to revisit it. I guess part of my problem with the film, which did manage to suck me in, is a broader one, what is it trying to achieve that's new? Who is this film for? Does that have anything to do with what's on the screen? Probably not but I do think it matters. I've never liked Glazer's films partly because I think his work cuts a lot of corners by being manipulative of his audience or relying on look-at-me gimmicks I have a revulsion for but, surprisingly, he toned that down here. The sound design especially worked for me and even the night vision did too.

Mr S. (and others), how did you feel about the night vision section of the film?

[therewillbeblus]

Mr S. (and others), how did you feel about the night vision section of the film?

I thought it was profoundly effective

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for cultivating some artfully-artificial, intimate hope, complete with the mystery, tension, and all that comes with this intrusive device - within the otherwise restrained, clinical portrait of banal activity - leaving the stance towards it ambiguous. I think it's clear that Glazer believes this is worth capturing for the value in the risk, the good will, etc. and worth doing, to be 'good' in a world of consuming fear-based evil and overwhelmingly-psychological-shutdown delusions that separate us from our fellow man... and yet, history has shown that it was fruitless in stopping the horrors or altering the Nazis' attention towards the atrocities, not that it was meant to. So Glazer is coming in with his way of doing that, but I think he has complicated feelings about the utility of engaging with these concerns at all - not that he's ambivalent about its urgency, but it's unclear how much hope he really has. The illustration of that hope - shot like an escapist movie compared to the movie around it - is aesthetically ironic given that its tertiary and elliptical.

[Mr Sausage]

Mr S. (and others), how did you feel about the night vision section of the film?

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I thought they were immediately interesting and confounding, and that there was something vaguely supernatural about them. Because the two night vision scenes coincided with the one daughter sleep walking, I took them to be visions, that the moral rot was so intense it trickled down past even the daughter's subconscious and touched her very soul, causing her to have moral visions of what's missing from her environment: kindness, compassion, resistance. And the night vision look reminded me of negative film stock, which makes those scenes the diametric opposite of the rest of the film both morally and photographically, a blunt melding of meaning and media. The intrusive technique also renders basic kindness and compassion alien in this landscape, something we can hardly recognize just as the daughter seems unable to recognize them. The character that we, the audience, would most like to see ourselves in (someone who helps the jews and resists the nazis) is rendered unrecognizable. The movie allows us no easy way out of recognizing our human behaviours in these banal nazis by having a figure of The Good to latch on to.

Both the young girl and the future vision at the end are crucial moral components of the movie, too, because without them the movie risks representing nazis from the inside, as they would see themselves, without any moral or ethical reference point outside of what we, the audience, bring to it. That would make the movie's critique morally fungible. But the movie has an internal morality, and we glimpse it in these visionary moments where the monstrosity of the holocaust overwhelms even the spiritual rot of the nazis themselves and forces them to confront the naked evil in front of them.

The two most baffling parts of the movie are its most important, which I think is ballsy.

[Black Hat]

Mr S. (and others), how did you feel about the night vision section of the film?

I thought it was profoundly effective

SpoilerShow

for cultivating some artfully-artificial, intimate hope, complete with the mystery, tension, and all that comes with this intrusive device - within the otherwise restrained, clinical portrait of banal activity - leaving the stance towards it ambiguous. I think it's clear that Glazer believes this is worth capturing for the value in the risk, the good will, etc. and worth doing, to be 'good' in a world of consuming fear-based evil and overwhelmingly-psychological-shutdown delusions that separate us from our fellow man... and yet, history has shown that it was fruitless in stopping the horrors or altering the Nazis' attention towards the atrocities, not that it was meant to. So Glazer is coming in with his way of doing that, but I think he has complicated feelings about the utility of engaging with these concerns at all - not that he's ambivalent about its urgency, but it's unclear how much hope he really has. The illustration of that hope - shot like an escapist movie compared to the movie around it - is aesthetically ironic given that its tertiary and elliptical.

I like most of this, but you lost me with your pen-ultimate sentence, what to you illustrates his complicated feelings towards these sequences, about their utility? It seems to me his inclusion of these scenes makes his feelings quite clear.

Mr S. (and others), how did you feel about the night vision section of the film?

SpoilerShow

I thought they were immediately interesting and confounding, and that there was something vaguely supernatural about them. Because the two night vision scenes coincided with the one daughter sleep walking, I took them to be visions, that the moral rot was so intense it trickled down past even the daughter's subconscious and touched her very soul, causing her to have moral visions of what's missing from her environment: kindness, compassion, resistance. And the night vision look reminded me of negative film stock, which makes those scenes the diametric opposite of the rest of the film both morally and photographically, a blunt melding of meaning and media. The intrusive technique also renders basic kindness and compassion alien in this landscape, something we can hardly recognize just as the daughter seems unable to recognize them. The character that we, the audience, would most like to see ourselves in (someone who helps the jews and resists the nazis) is rendered unrecognizable. The movie allows us no easy way out of recognizing our human behaviours in these banal nazis by having a figure of The Good to latch on to.

Both the young girl and the future vision at the end are crucial moral components of the movie, too, because without them the movie risks representing nazis from the inside, as they would see themselves, without any moral or ethical reference point outside of what we, the audience, bring to it. That would make the movie's critique morally fungible. But the movie has an internal morality, and we glimpse it in these visionary moments where the monstrosity of the holocaust overwhelms even the spiritual rot of the nazis themselves and forces them to confront the naked evil in front of them.

The two most baffling parts of the movie are its most important, which I think is ballsy.

Yep, the anti-Schindler's List approach, but still, in its way, letting the audience off the hook. When we leave this film the implication is this is the past with no connection to the present. This bothered me when I saw it in September and is something I've thought about more, and been further troubled by, as the genocide in Gaza continues. I think the film has ambitions to say something about how humans can be, the tired "banality of evil" cliché, but its structure is limiting and fails at that. It falls in the genre of "storytelling" rather than making a deeper statement about anything so, for me, the film, despite its technical cleverness, is rather hollow.

[therewillbeblus]

Mr S. (and others), how did you feel about the night vision section of the film?

I thought it was profoundly effective

SpoilerShow

for cultivating some artfully-artificial, intimate hope, complete with the mystery, tension, and all that comes with this intrusive device - within the otherwise restrained, clinical portrait of banal activity - leaving the stance towards it ambiguous. I think it's clear that Glazer believes this is worth capturing for the value in the risk, the good will, etc. and worth doing, to be 'good' in a world of consuming fear-based evil and overwhelmingly-psychological-shutdown delusions that separate us from our fellow man... and yet, history has shown that it was fruitless in stopping the horrors or altering the Nazis' attention towards the atrocities, not that it was meant to. So Glazer is coming in with his way of doing that, but I think he has complicated feelings about the utility of engaging with these concerns at all - not that he's ambivalent about its urgency, but it's unclear how much hope he really has. The illustration of that hope - shot like an escapist movie compared to the movie around it - is aesthetically ironic given that its tertiary and elliptical.

I like most of this, but you lost me with your pen-ultimate sentence, what to you illustrates his complicated feelings towards these sequences, about their utility? It seems to me his inclusion of these scenes makes his feelings quite clear.

Yes, sorry, his feelings are clear, which is what I meant by a lack of ambivalence on the "urgency" of the content he's showing us. What I mean is, I think quite admirably, Glazer is not didactic about the precise value of placing the apples. On the one hand, yes, we need those acts of moral decency and human compassion, and they're invaluable in a vacuum. On the other hand, we don't live in a vacuum - things are connected, and that risky act had no effect on stopping the killing. So lives - that we never see, significantly - were ostensibly made better during the final days, weeks, months of torture, which would assign an existential value - except we're deprived of that reading because of the elided content.

I think Glazer is making this film feeling a profound sense of urgency, feeling very clearly. But as to his "hope" based on what he sees in both the past and present regarding our singular moral acts and their consequences against the friction of consolidated harm, that's respectfully left for us to sit with. And I think that's the key to the film's success - if Glazer indicated a directive of 'how' we could improve, we wouldn't be so uncomfortable watching. But he is presenting us with images and sound that are at times comfortably relatable and then uncomfortably relatable, juxtaposing empathy with indifferent violence, and so the purpose the art serves (I believe) is to force us to engage with unambiguous amoral and immoral activity and delusions we use to protect ourselves psychologically, as well as some affirmation of the small acts of kindness we attempt with motivated hope and empathy, and then connect with him around the ambiguity of how 'hopefulness' and 'taking action' can be separated and doom us, or coincide and potentially save us, but even there, maybe not. Sitting with that sadness will unite us, and then perhaps trigger some more intentional, conscious, and collective action.

This is a movie that feels designed to get us angry with ourselves and others, sad at our impotence to change horrors, grateful for having those feelings in the first place to trigger that strive to do good, and then apply it. Or some kind of experience to react against - and that was mine.

[Mr Sausage]

Yep, the anti-Schindler's List approach, but still, in its way, letting the audience off the hook. When we leave this film the implication is this is the past with no connection to the present. This bothered me when I saw it in September and is something I've thought about more, and been further troubled by, as the genocide in Gaza continues. I think the film has ambitions to say something about how humans can be, the tired "banality of evil" cliché, but its structure is limiting and fails at that. It falls in the genre of "storytelling" rather than making a deeper statement about anything so, for me, the film, despite its technical cleverness, is rather hollow.

I'm surprised you feel this way. The film did a lot to make me think about how my own life abuts human misery that, from convenience and inurement, I filter out. I'm not sure what depth you're looking for, but as a precisely observed and realised depiction of a particular set of human behaviours and attitudes, I thought the film was exemplary. The film has effects I don't see in other movies, and that makes it worthwhile.

I also think that Arendt's concept of the banality of evil isn't a cliche, but a defining characteristic of nazism that not enough movies tackle upfront. Most want their nazis to be malicious and evil. I can't think of too many where the nazis are petty bureaucrats who do very little that counts as outright evil, while at the same time being festering examples of evil. I can't think of any filmic nazi that has made me feel so gross and horrible as the wife trying on her new clothes and makeup.

[Black Hat]

I thought it was profoundly effective

SpoilerShow

for cultivating some artfully-artificial, intimate hope, complete with the mystery, tension, and all that comes with this intrusive device - within the otherwise restrained, clinical portrait of banal activity - leaving the stance towards it ambiguous. I think it's clear that Glazer believes this is worth capturing for the value in the risk, the good will, etc. and worth doing, to be 'good' in a world of consuming fear-based evil and overwhelmingly-psychological-shutdown delusions that separate us from our fellow man... and yet, history has shown that it was fruitless in stopping the horrors or altering the Nazis' attention towards the atrocities, not that it was meant to. So Glazer is coming in with his way of doing that, but I think he has complicated feelings about the utility of engaging with these concerns at all - not that he's ambivalent about its urgency, but it's unclear how much hope he really has. The illustration of that hope - shot like an escapist movie compared to the movie around it - is aesthetically ironic given that its tertiary and elliptical.

I like most of this, but you lost me with your pen-ultimate sentence, what to you illustrates his complicated feelings towards these sequences, about their utility? It seems to me his inclusion of these scenes makes his feelings quite clear.

I think Glazer is making this film feeling a profound sense of urgency, feeling very clearly.

This is a movie that feels designed to get us angry with ourselves and others, sad at our impotence to change horrors, grateful for having those feelings in the first place to trigger that strive to do good, and then apply it.

I'm with you on the rest of what you wrote, but I didn't get a "sense of urgency" at all. What I got, to your point, is a passion for design. What would this home plus its surrounding area feel like, look like, smell, and taste like? In these areas, the film is successful, arguably great, but there's more to a film than that, and the fact that the rest of the film is so spare makes it more like a real nice piece of architecture or one of those immersive art experiences that are so fashionable these days.

Yep, the anti-Schindler's List approach, but still, in its way, letting the audience off the hook. When we leave this film the implication is this is the past with no connection to the present. This bothered me when I saw it in September and is something I've thought about more, and been further troubled by, as the genocide in Gaza continues. I think the film has ambitions to say something about how humans can be, the tired "banality of evil" cliché, but its structure is limiting and fails at that. It falls in the genre of "storytelling" rather than making a deeper statement about anything so, for me, the film, despite its technical cleverness, is rather hollow.

I'm surprised you feel this way. The film did a lot to make me think about how my own life abuts human misery that, from convenience and inurement, I filter out. I'm not sure what depth you're looking for, but as a precisely observed and realised depiction of a particular set of human behaviours and attitudes, I thought the film was exemplary. The film has effects I don't see in other movies, and that makes it worthwhile.

I also think that Arendt's concept of the banality of evil isn't a cliche, but a defining characteristic of nazism that not enough movies tackle upfront. Most want their nazis to be malicious and evil. I can't think of too many where the nazis are petty bureaucrats who do very little that counts as outright evil, while at the same time being festering examples of evil. I can't think of any filmic nazi that has made me feel so gross and horrible as the wife trying on her new clothes and makeup.

Point taken with regard to film, but is it not overused in other areas of cultural/political consumption? Lately, we're witnessing it daily. Most of us, I think, have a pretty good sense of how most people are careerists, and will do what serves their best interests without a thought on how it impacts others. I do agree the film is "precisely observed". To me, however, it's the movie's strength and its problem, it's too precise, too observed, like an art exhibition, you can appreciate the execution of the artist, but something about the curation doesn't allow proper engagement with the work. Is there any further depth we learn about these characters that we don't understand from the film's title?

The night vision scenes were brilliant, but there's not enough of it, to offset what we see in the light.

[Mr Sausage]

Point taken with regard to film, but is it not overused in other areas of cultural/political consumption? Lately, we're witnessing it daily. Most of us, I think, have a pretty good sense of how most people are careerists, and will do what serves their best interests without a thought on how it impacts others.

Arendt didn't invent a new element, she described an already existing quality of the world that people had largely failed to recognize. If you're seeing it all around you, that's to Arendt's credit: she has clarified an aspect of the world. And if it's omnipresent now, that's even more of a reason to see it represented in art. We don't really expect artists to only deal with a subject once it becomes irrelevant.

I do agree the film is "precisely observed". To me, however, it's the movie's strength and its problem, it's too precise, too observed, like an art exhibition, you can appreciate the execution of the artist, but something about the curation doesn't allow proper engagement with the work. Is there any further depth we learn about these characters that we don't understand from the film's title?

The lack of depth to these characters is the point. We're watching the sheer extent of human shallowness at work and observing the precise ways it manifests. I find this, like with Arendt, clarifying. You know it's the case abstractly, like if someone asked you, but here you see it atomized, see every contour, every particular, every aspect of human shallowness and spiritual emptiness laid out, only for you to recognize how this shallowness manifests both as extreme cruelty and as the simple, everyday banalities you and I do every day. There's an intense horror in that that's unexpected and sobering, and I think a genuine artistic effect that's worth experiencing. That the horror of this banality is so encompassing that even some of the worst, some of the most empty and venal characters start to register it as psychic shocks compelling them outside of themselves, is a testament to how such horror cannot simply be ignored indefinitely, that it will out.

Yes, the movie drives at a single effect, but it drives so relentlessly and single-mindedly that what it produces is powerful, genuinely powerful, as an experience. This kind of art has its place, too.

[furbicide]

I think you'll find the book far more open to the kind of humanist readings you're attempting here, blus, especially in the sonderkommando sections with their sometimes brutal empathy and attempt to locate almost kindness where you'd think that'd be impossible. The movie seems to actively resist that kind of thing, tho'. The movie seems to be driving hard at how many layers of inhumanity rest underneath the seeming humanity of the character's day-to-day lives. There is a sense in which one just has to throw up one's hands at these particular people, and that time is more profitably spent reflecting on how often we ourselves turn a blind eye to the human despair around us in order to get on with our lives. A brutal thing to contemplate, but the movie kinda forces that on you.

Just going back through this thread and reading the fascinating exchanges here now I've seen the film!

The most interesting question for me is which out of the two representations is more realistic (based on, say, what we know of the real-life Höss and his family). Is Glazer giving us a jaundiced and oversimplified vision of these people, or is it the humanists like Amis who are weaving seductive fantasies of moral awakening in order to avoid looking too closely at the depths of human cruelty and apathy?

In a film like this that is so fundamentally about sensory experience and so grounded in everyday routine, and where we're specifically being asked to observe, scrutinise and think about "normal" human behaviour in ugly conditions, I find myself even more inclined than usual to wonder about how close this thing we're watching is to how things really were. It feels particularly important here, somehow.

[Mr Sausage]

is it the humanists like Amis who are weaving seductive fantasies of moral awakening in order to avoid looking too closely at the depths of human cruelty and apathy?

Amis certainly isn't doing that. The book has no illusions about finding the morality in nazis, or weaving fantasies in which we can imagine ourselves to be the secret heroes within the moral rot. The Höss stand in, for instance, has no moral awakening. And the book spends a long time looking closely at human cruelty and apathy, especially in the Sonderkommando sections, where morality becomes what's best described as a tortured morass, and we see what abjection does the human psyche. There are conditions where normal moral decisions do not enter in. Amis also manages a good balancing act with the two characters who do show a moral awakening. Amis actually elides much of the nazi playboy's moral awakening, revealing it in a by-the-by manner only towards the end, so that his story does not become a heroic drama the audience can identify with. As for the wife's moral awakening, it's shown mainly as disgust for her husband, meaning for a long time it's indistinguishable from regular marriage strife when one partner comes to loathe the shallow, opportunistic bureaucrat they've married. Also, we only see her through the narration of the three main characters, so there's a narrative remove to keep us from reader identification. There's also a coda with these two characters in which Amis makes clear they did not somehow escape untainted.

The novel has a lot more sides and shades. It's quite good and carefully done, not qualities I associate with Amis. But the book doesn't have the same relentless drive as Glazer's film, which is intense and overwhelming in a way Amis isn't. They're different enough that it's worth experiencing both, or at least not treating only one as sufficient. But Amis' novel is rather good where Glazer's film is outstanding.

Both works read as realistic to me, but I couldn't say how accurate they were to the specific people and locations. By paring down the story, Glazer is definitely inventing less.

[Black Hat]

Mr. S - Yeah, I can't entirely disagree with anything you wrote, but is there not an argument to be made that the over-saturation of anything comes at the expense of meaning? Its value? I don't have any hostility towards the film like many critics have expressed. I think it is successful in what it's trying to achieve, but as we've been flushing this out over these past couple of days I've come to believe, it's not as ambitious as it thinks it is.

I was listening to Elvis Mitchell interview Glazer over the weekend and it reminded me of another thing that annoyed me about the movie, he was expanding on the banality of these characters, and the issue I have with that is the wife, who if she isn't the sun everything else in the movie is orbiting around, is certainly occupying much of its zone, is not a banal character in any way shape or form. She is a terrible human being not because she sees an opportunity for personal gain amid amoral acts, it is her nature and it's an extreme version of that personality type. This woman would be cheating while playing bridge on vacation in the French countryside during peacetime. You'll probably say that's the point, totally fair, but I'll say, that's Wonder Bread.


edit: one other thing worth mentioning if it hasn't been said earlier, is the night vision girl is based on a real person who lived into her 90s that Glazer met, she was the daughter of a Polish family who owned, if I recall correctly, a coal mine or something like that, and would leave food for people imprisoned in the camp, how he incorporated her character is extremely impressive

[Black Hat]

is it the humanists like Amis who are weaving seductive fantasies of moral awakening in order to avoid looking too closely at the depths of human cruelty and apathy?

Amis .The novel has a lot more sides and shades. It's quite good and carefully done, not qualities I associate with Amis.

I laughed because of how true this is. While talented, I think he's incredibly lazy. I much prefer his essay/magazine work from the 80s, The Moronic Inferno is great, better than any of the fiction from him I've read.

[Mr Sausage]

Mr. S - Yeah, I can't entirely disagree with anything you wrote, but is there not an argument to be made that the over-saturation of anything comes at the expense of meaning? Its value? I don't have any hostility towards the film like many critics have expressed. I think it is successful in what it's trying to achieve, but as we've been flushing this out over these past couple of days I've come to believe, it's not as ambitious as it thinks it is.

The film has narrow ambitions, but wants to get a lot from them. That makes it a more limited experience, yes, but in those limitations it achieves an intensity of effect that's harder to find in more ranging or probing movies. Like I said, there is room for this kind of art, too, the art that drives hard at one or two particular effects with all its force. You get something from it that you don't get elsewhere. I see its limitations as a trade off rather than a deficit.

This is a brutally effective movie, one that demands to be thought and talked about. That's an achievement worth praising. And a movie like this is especially welcome in an age of fairly unadventurous movie making.

I was listening to Elvis Mitchell interview Glazer over the weekend and it reminded me of another thing that annoyed me about the movie, he was expanding on the banality of these characters, and the issue I have with that is the wife, who if she isn't the sun everything else in the movie is orbiting around, is certainly occupying much of its zone, is not a banal character in any way shape or form. She is a terrible human being not because she sees an opportunity for personal gain amid amoral acts, it is her nature and it's an extreme version of that personality type. This woman would be cheating while playing bridge on vacation in the French countryside during peacetime. You'll probably say that's the point, totally fair, but I'll say, that's Wonder Bread.

Sure. And in other circumstances, her husband would be in charge of a factory, figuring out ways to cut down his employees wages, over-price his goods, and in general profit at others' expense. These are shitty types of people, and they are common types. But unless you were being outrageously cynical, you wouldn't peg them as the architects of the holocaust, and yet here the movie shows how small the nudge truly is to turn all these petty people around us into just that, without much extension. That's an observation worth pondering, that modern western society hasn't transcended the holocaust as much as we'd love to think.

I laughed because of how true this is. While talented, I think he's incredibly lazy. I much prefer his essay/magazine work from the 80s, The Moronic Inferno is great, better than any of the fiction from him I've read.

Yes! I'm particularly fond of his collection, The War Against Cliche. I sold all my Amis, but I kept that.

[Black Hat]

The film has narrow ambitions, but wants to get a lot from them. That makes it a more limited experience, yes, but in those limitations it achieves an intensity of effect that's harder to find in more ranging or probing movies. Like I said, there is room for this kind of art, too, the art that drives hard at one or two particular effects with all its force. You get something from it that you don't get elsewhere. I see its limitations as a trade off rather than a deficit.

This is a brutally effective movie, one that demands to be thought and talked about. That's an achievement worth praising. And a movie like this is especially welcome in an age of fairly unadventurous movie making.

I did praise it but, given everything you said here, I wish it went further than it did. Not doing so, for me, holds it back from being a masterpiece.

These are shitty types of people, and they are common types. But unless you were being outrageously cynical, you wouldn't peg them as the architects of the holocaust, and yet here the movie shows how small the nudge truly is to turn all these petty people around us into just that, without much extension. That's an observation worth pondering, that modern western society hasn't transcended the holocaust as much as we'd love to think.

Ah, this is where we differ, I don't think shitty types of people are that common. What is common are people afraid to rock the boat for fear of a myriad of different things. The same goes for the rank & file taking orders, or those propagandized in awful directions, which usually manifests passively, with complicity, as opposed to participation but I, perhaps naively, don't think people as unabashedly evil as the wife are commonplace. The fact she has such an extreme personality weakens the necessary interrogation of this aspect of human behavior because the explanation is easy. Lastly, while implicit, I didn't make the connection you did that the film is doing a "no matter how things change, they always stay the same" type of thing. I think that's a generous reading, with those seeing that perhaps projecting their anxieties about our present time onto the work. It's a perfectly valid response, of course, but not one I buy into or that resonates with me.

I laughed because of how true this is. While talented, I think he's incredibly lazy. I much prefer his essay/magazine work from the 80s, The Moronic Inferno is great, better than any of the fiction from him I've read.

Yes! I'm particularly fond of his collection, The War Against Cliche. I sold all my Amis, but I kept that.

I've always meant to order that, which you just inspired me to do, thanks for the rec!

[therewillbeblus]

Ah, this is where we differ, I don't think shitty types of people are that common. What is common are people afraid to rock the boat for fear of a myriad of different things. The same goes for the rank & file taking orders, or those propagandized in awful directions, which usually manifests passively, with complicity, as opposed to participation but I, perhaps naively, don't think people as unabashedly evil as the wife are commonplace. The fact she has such an extreme personality weakens the necessary interrogation of this aspect of human behavior because the explanation is easy.

Well said, and an important clarification. The capacity for people to neglect or delude or rationalize to meet perceived "needs" can be influenced by infinite stimuli internally, externally, structurally, culturally, ideologically, conditioned, innate, and so on. Reducing her personhood vs. objective evil occurring seems to be the tightrope Glazer is walking, remaining consistently removed enough to never give a straight answer on how we're supposed to respond to that. It is much more common for people's behavior (including non-action) to beget evil activity under certain conditions, than it is for people themselves to be inherently evil. Personally, I don't even think the second category exists at all (typically even the most "evil" people have other, less-dominant emotional and compassionate parts that are being buried, even if they're directed at very little or don't show unless mined for), but Glazer is also prompting us to ask the question many of us have been asking ourselves, consciously or not, over the last several years (at least)... "How much of my finite energy do I give to humanism and other more compassionate and curious (and, perhaps, ultimately more socially-productive) philosophies, and where do I just make choices about who to reduce and discard and not waste that limited energy on for self-preservation?"

The fucked up part of that, is that there's a reading Glazer absolutely holds space for that the Nazis in the film are doing that too: Caught in a system much bigger than them, that they feel they cannot challenge and thus subconsciously submit to, and engaging in self-preservation to neglect stimuli that challenges their humanist characteristics. I don't believe that Hüller et al. were deprived of those - but the question is, do they matter against the objective harm? And while our own system of creating binary-assignments for psychological self-preservation might be very healthy in some respects, is it also what leads to complacency, finding ourselves in positions like these Germans, and then a progression towards supporting evil being created in some form through that exhausted disengagement. Americans are so politically exhausted that they're apparently more willing to stand with whoever T-Swift does, deprived of trusted leaders and desperately looking for a direction that will bring spiritual and connective prosperity. Germans were in a vulnerable position experiencing similar desperation for direction leading up to Hitler's rise to power, and the experience of prosperity for one's family diluting other concerns is squarely planted in the 'Me and Mine' ethos, here taken to the extreme conditions of how the psyche will protect that when a part thinks this is the only way to hang on. The comparison may feel inappropriate to some (certainly if it triggers the 'Trump getting elected = a Fascist state and Holocaust' fear being propagated so much in recent years), and I'm certainly not saying they're the same - actually I think inviting the former reading and critiquing the latter comparison allows for us to hold these people accountable, regardless of their humanity, based on the capacity to psychologically define what is perceived need vs. actual need. Either way, we are being confronted here; not aggressively with blame, but gently and urgently as humans that have not yet blocked out the capacity to feel. That's the target audience for the film, and thankfully it's just about everyone who goes to the movies. We want to feel.

I think Scorsese took a very different approach to engage in similar self-reflexivity with his film this year, and both are very interesting for coercing the audience in a cradling and 'joining' (rather than condescending), but still angry manner, in order to expose the consequences of our human applications of (the extreme cap of) our psychological elasticity. I think Glazer understands the binary and reductive assignments we make to stay sane, and also understands that it's the binary and reductive assignments that can lead to complacency and part the sea for whoever to cross.

[Black Hat]

The fucked up part of that, is that there's a reading Glazer absolutely holds space for that the Nazis in the film are doing that too: Caught in a system much bigger than them, that they feel they cannot challenge and thus subconsciously submit to, and engaging in self-preservation to neglect stimuli that challenges their humanist characteristics. I don't believe that Hüller et al. were deprived of those - but the question is, do they matter against the objective harm?

Yeah, the vomit (which I did not like) speaks to that for sure.

Americans are so politically exhausted that they're apparently more willing to stand with whoever T-Swift does, deprived of trusted leaders and desperately looking for a direction that will bring spiritual and connective prosperity.

I don't think Americans are exhausted by politics at all. They are more energized, and more substantially engaged than they have been in my lifetime by far. What I do think is happening is people are coming to the realization they are impotent, the banality of this forum's politics thread is a good example. The response people have is dependent on a combination of what is consumed culturally and how one prefers to see themselves ie. what "justice" they are convinced they are fighting for. Whichever track you take is a lot of things, but neither is reality-based.

I think Scorsese took a very different approach to engage in similar self-reflexivity with his film this year, and both are very interesting for coercing the audience in a cradling and 'joining' (rather than condescending), but still angry manner, in order to expose the consequences of our human applications of (the extreme cap of) our psychological elasticity.

They do, but both films, I think fall short, for very different reasons, in confronting the psychology behind atrocity. However, imo, Scorsese gets closer.

A film that is operating in the same space, but less directly, that is successful is Anatomy of A Fall. I was, frankly, stunned by how much I liked that one. Have either of you seen it yet? Definitely up for shifting this chat over to that film and its corresponding thread.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah I wrote a thing or two on Anatomy of A Fall, in the dedicated thread - it's funny, I think it's a much more successful version of a different BP nominee from last year, but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how it relates to these concepts!

I took the vomit to be the normal health stuff people go through, so reinforcing the "banality of evil" as this guy is just leaving the office late, alone, pointlessly. But also, as an allegory for all we've seen and what we ourselves do for psychological self-preservation: We experience something, pause, and then push it down and ignore it and keep going. It's the kind of resilience that can become conflated with complacency and disengagement and derealization.. He recognizes a problem, and just "stoically" moving on. I can see a reaching-reading (of course, sometimes the most interesting!) where he's looking down the halls, and the images are juxtaposed with the present, and he gets sick as a kind of Musical 'break' from the narrative to bridge us into this zenith of themes, but I don't think Glazer's approach to the material earns or invites that reading, simply by how it's shot just like everything else.

Your response to people engaging with politics is fair, and yes, I intentionally am honing in on the overwhelmed and how they respond to that overwhelming sensation that leads to a feeling of impotence. I guess what I mean is that many are feeling increasingly oppressed, divided, alone, powerless, and these are vulnerable qualities that can be preyed upon or that can lead to reactive responses to feel some sense of community or agency. So you're right - but it's still people coping through finding new spaces to engage, and as that needle moves further from the actual reality of politics and toward ideals and echo chambers that can self-satisfy those vulnerable parts, there's a danger and a (broad) relationship between that kind of self-preserving approach toward some kind of collective intimacy and what Germans were going through pre-Hitler.

[Mr Sausage]

The fucked up part of that, is that there's a reading Glazer absolutely holds space for that the Nazis in the film are doing that too: Caught in a system much bigger than them, that they feel they cannot challenge and thus subconsciously submit to, and engaging in self-preservation to neglect stimuli that challenges their humanist characteristics. I don't believe that Hüller et al. were deprived of those - but the question is, do they matter against the objective harm?

That's in there, but it needs to be tempered by acknowledging how many conscious choices also put them in these positions, eg. the wife fights to stay in the house beside Auschwitz while her mother, a profiteer off antisemitism in her own way, hates it so much she flees. Even the husband sought fortune and status by joining the nazi party. And, in general, these are not German citizens simply doing the best they can under the current administration, these are party members: they paid their dues to join, they attended the rallies, they actively support nazi policies, actively support German nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism as a form of social betterment, and hope to profit off all of this materially and socially. They believe in Hitler, believe in his government, and want to help the party achieve its goals and be rewarded in turn. There were a lot of active choices that brought them to this position, too.

There may well've been party members who loathed the holocaust, but there were plenty who did not. The commandant seems to be inching towards the former--his ability to compartmentalize is breaking down; but the wife seems more like the latter. Perhaps she's just made of stronger stuff and can hold on to her blind spots and compartmentalization better, maybe not. But she also might just be someone who thinks the genocide next door is good and right, just like the unrepentant nazi soldier near the end of Come and See for example. Perhaps her petty outbursts are sublimated anxiety about the horrors, or maybe it's an even pettier anxiety: she worries a nearby death camp will sully her social position in other's eyes without being too bothered by the camp itself in the way a rich person with a mansion near a sewage plant will fret about the comparison without having an objection to sewage plants.

But the film resists psychologizing these people, and I take its cue on that. It's kinda pointless to speculate when there's nothing in the film to control for your speculations. The vomiting scene reads less as a moment of psychology than a statement about the holocaust itself: that its horrors are so overpowering they can crack through the middle-class dullness of a nazi beaurocrat, indeed crack through even the veil of history to offer a vision to the least visionary, least spiritual of people (but one still controlled by the juxtaposition of daily banality with horrors). But I would say we learn as much about the interior states of these people as we do the girl whose acts of kindness we witness in negative stock. For a movie with such a specific sense of a certain lifestyle, it pushes towards generalizations rather than specifics of character.

[therewillbeblus]

Agreed, though I think the approach resists psychologizing these people, and yet, because we are humans and want to feel and engage with movies in that way, we're challenged. So we still relate - we don't know Hüller's life story but can relate to disappointment and reacting to others, though we dare not identify to that extent. I think Glazer is putting us in many different layers of uncomfortable positions beyond that surface lucidity, which isn't to say he's being sly or coy or unfairly manipulative or anything - he's being honest: Showing us what he feels is urgent and motivating and fascinating and disturbing and allowing us to react exactly how muddily he has to it all. And I guess I feel like, if the end result of that muddy processing is a pretty clean, clinical, lucid project, that doesn't necessarily mean Glazer isn't also feeling chaotic in his own response - but he's stepped into the role of artist and guide for us. But yes, it's the generalizations that can (but don't have to - again a bit of praise for not spoonfeeding us even the direction we should be feeling in, at times!) provoke our own responses about ourselves, or not. I haven't read any interviews with Glazer, but I wouldn't expect him to want his audience to feel any particular way, or feel that there's a 'correct' response, to this. But maybe I'm doing that 'director' thing again. The guy's last two movies felt respectful because they welcomed our own embrace of mystery and unknown and our fears related to those things we are impotent to truly engage with. This is more literally planted there, given.. can't go change history.. but the elliptical aspects are there too.

[Mr Sausage]

I think by taking the emphasis off why these particular people do these things, Glazer has refocused onto why people do these things, which is where a lot of that disturbing muddiness and ambiguity you write about comes into play. In that generalization we come to feel those most uncomfortable comparisons. I think we probably agree, but in our different ways are groping for the language to describe the thing the movie's doing.

[therewillbeblus]

Yep, you just summed up in three sentences what I tried to get at across many paragraphs of spaciously-roaming rather than concentrated points, and that seems about right

This year may have been the most competitive, and at least interesting International Feature competition in recent memory if Anatomy of a Fall was nominated there too, in regards to what people are voting for in their political-emotional stances (which I feel drives this category home often), and that would’ve been cool to watch play out in the race

[Black Hat]

So we still relate - we don't know Hüller's life story but can relate to disappointment and reacting to others, though we dare not identify to that extent.

This is a good point, frustration over your job transferring you, feeling under-appreciated, and the resentment that comes with it, happen every day. These people's career choices are actively participating in the mass murder of innocents and to see petty bureaucratic anxieties of the bourgeoisie exist in a similar vein as those with pointless email jobs is unnerving, to say the least.