I’ve noticed I do something that ruins a lot of experiences for me. It’s an entirely self-imposed problem. If I hear a recommendation for something incredible, life-changing, or otherwise of good report, I self-sabotage by coasting through it without any effort to understand it. A show, a book, a place, etc. I just take the recommender at their word and often end up getting nothing in return, because I’ve put nothing into the experience of experiencing the thing. If it’s so good, I should understand why automatically, right?
Blood Meridian is a fantastic example of this. I knew it was a classic novel by a quintessentially American author, I knew it would be philosophical, grim, and violent. I knew too much. Nothing was gained from my first read-through. I watched video essays such as Wendigoon’s to understand what I was supposed to get out of it. As it turns out, I read through it just to say I’d read it. I wanted to join the club, and in doing so, I ruined the experience. I can’t read it for the first time again, but I will read it a second time, and form my own thoughts, probably with a report to follow.
All this is said to say: I will now tell you about a movie. This movie was incredible, life-changing, and of good report, and if you are anything like me, reading further will ruin it for you. I strongly encourage you to watch it first and return to this site afterward. It will still be here when you do.
The movie is titled The Zone of Interest. It is loosely based on a book of the same name. The movie came out in 2023, and the moment I saw a trailer, I knew I had to see it. I watched it the same night and then spent about a week unpacking and unraveling my feelings.
It is broadly a slice-of-life movie about a man, Rudolf, and his family. He visits the beach with his family, goes to work, celebrates his birthday, discusses with work colleagues how to improve efficiency, gets a promotion, and is told he needs to relocate. His wife, Hedwig, wants to stay because she likes their living situation too much. Her mother, Linna, visits, and Hedwig gives her a tour of the grounds, she stays behind to take care of the house and children against her husband’s wishes. Her mother leaves in the night because she can’t stand the screaming and the pillars of smoke from the crematoriums. The yard shares a wall with the Auschwitz concentration camp, after all.
Please forgive the misdirection, but it’s treated as a background detail in the movie, looming over almost every shot, yet never acknowledged by any character except the mother-in-law, who’s from out of town. The camp’s presence (which at this time and by these people would’ve been called an annihilation camp) is a background detail in the family member’s lives. To the family, it’s just a fact of life, something banal like the auto shop next to your apartment. But, to us, the viewers, it’s something horrific, something unignorable.
The camp itself seems allegorical of the fact that these characters are nazis. A great gray cloud hanging over all their heads. We see it, but they don’t seem to. Obviously, they know that they are nazis, but they don’t understand what we do about nazism. We know that these people are nazis. Bad guys.
This spawns several questions. How are they not aware of the darkness around them? How much cognitive dissonance are they capable of? How cushy would my life have to be to ignore the annihilation of a million people next door? How long would I need to be brainwashed to believe that they weren’t really “people“ dying over there?
Strange things with vile implications happen throughout the movie, and the characters take them in stride. Daily occurrences, they must be. A man delivers sacks of clothes to the house, Hedwig spreads them out and lets the girls pick out things they want to keep. A boy is examining gold teeth in his bed. Rudolf is fishing when a skull fragment brushes past his leg. He rushes to remove his children upstream from the river before they get covered in the strongly basic ash flowing towards them. The movie doesn’t explain these things, so neither will I. But it isn’t hard to figure out what they mean.
This is a central pillar of the movie. Showing, not telling. It doesn’t tell you how to feel when you realize what the clothes, teeth, and ashes are from, it just lets you feel. And feel you will. It also doesn’t tell you what to think about the nazis. If you didn’t know what Rudolf had done, you might feel bad for him when his wife tells him that only he needs to be relocated. He says he never considered her not being with him. It is a somber scene. Should we feel bad for him?
Rudolf is a man whose real-life counterpart made statements on how he never liked the mass shootings as a method of execution and was relieved to have the gas chambers, to spare his men from the bloodbath. Sounds like someone capable of empathy, no? Someone who cares for the mental states of his comrades? Someone who can think and feel just like us?
The message, then, is clear. The nazis were human. Evil, twisted, vile, sure, but human. To call them monsters would be to deny ourselves a valuable chance for introspection. They are not monsters. They are human and so are we. We are capable of doing what they did. Some of us still do. We are not as disconnected from them as we’d like to be. Yes, it is uncomfortable, but this discomfort will lead to growth.
If you believe you would stand up to the nazis, ask yourself, honestly, how easy it is to stand up to your boss, parent, or even friends when they do things you disagree with. Now think of how much more intimidating those people would be in black military garb, a face of bulging scars, and a personal hand in the murders of hundreds of thousands. Scary, but not monsters. Never monsters.
The fact that we are all capable of being complicit in, or performing, such acts of treachery is not one we should deny ourselves the opportunity of facing with eyes wide open. Jung spoke of confronting the shadow. I’m sure we’ll discuss that further someday, but for now, do not forget…
The nazis were human. Evil and human, but not monsters. Never monsters.