The Zone of Interest’s peripheral vision of evil

Director Jonathan Glazer bests Spielberg thanks to a quality of attention.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

in an immaculate garden a family play in and around a small swimming pool. Beyond the garden wall, a barracks is visble with crematorium smoke rising beyond it.

The Höss family at play at their Auschwitz home.

This has been a tremendously difficult review to write. I’ve written and re-written this review for two weeks now. You will see why.

The Zone of Interest begins idyllically. A family is picnicking by a lake. The men swim, the women pick berries in the woods. It's a gorgeous sunny day. The family happily drive home down an evocatively headlamp-lit country road. The father walks through their palatial house, turning off every light. The next morning the family are gathered outside to give the father his birthday present: a canoe. Two boys lead their blindfolded father gently down the steps from the house to the garden. The garden is magnificent: filled with flowers and immaculately kempt.

The father is wearing an SS uniform. The camera pans round the garden. Behind the garden wall you see glimpses of barbed wire, belching chimneys, rows of dormitories. You hear shouts, moans, cries, gunshots. This is no ordinary house, no ordinary garden, no ordinary family. This is the home of SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig, and their five children. This is Auschwitz. Höss runs it. Hedwig runs their beautiful home. The children run around. That is the next 100 minutes of film. It's a realist family drama from the 1940s. The children are children, the wife is house-proud to a fault, and the husband is hard-working, ambitious, and keen to do a good job. I don’t want to say much more. You simply need to go and see the film.

When Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil it was controversial. Many commentators misunderstood or misrepresented her point. Evil acts - especially an evil act as totemic as the Holocaust - are not ‘banal’. The people who commit evil on such a scale often can be. A genocidal machine of such scale and complexity needs a tremendous number of cogs… they can’t all be murderous sociopaths. Eichmann was banal in himself - he was of average intelligence, uncreative in his thinking, a follower of fads and joiner of organisations.

This is exactly how Rudolf and Hedwig are presented. Christian Friedel plays Höss with an almost continual ambience of low-level boredom. Pillow-talk with his wife, reading to his children, a discussion about the most efficient way to incinerate the Jews in his camp, is all spoken with roughly the same expression and tone. He clearly wants to do well in his work, but it doesn’t matter what the work is. Sandra Hüller gives Hedwig a marvelous, slightly nervous energy. She always seems to be keeping a combination of grasping envy and slimy smugness just barely contained beneath the surface of her features. She can’t think of much beyond the order of her house, the beauty of her garden, and her status among other SS wives. Their quality of attention is essentially absent.

Glazer has the maturity to recognise that looking directly at evil stops you from really seeing it.

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Not to be flippant, but they would be dreadful dinner-party guests, and not just because they are Nazis: they seemingly have no capacity for a thought that goes beyond themselves, and their immediate environment, and their immediate needs and wants. They are banal.

Between them Jonathan Glazer (director), Łukasz Żal (cinematographer), and Mica Levi (musician) give a remarkable demonstration of the power of restraint. The camerawork is naturalistic and almost never showy. The performers look like they were given the latitude simply to be in the scene: no over-direction. The soundscape is hauntingly bare. There is little music or sound beyond the ambient. The mood is, of course, set by the fact that the ambient sounds are roaring furnaces, gunshots, and desperate screaming. The film does not attempt to make a point or demand a response; Glazer simply gives you a slice of domestic life that just happens to be located next door to a death-camp.

Steven Spielberg has suggested this is the best film tackling the dreadful subject of the Holocaust since Schindler's List. He is wrong. The Zone of Interest is a far superior film. I love Spielberg, but Schindler's List is offensively bad. It takes a subject of such abject depravity and then tries to emotionally manipulate you into feeling bad: the music, the speeches, the more-is-more approach to showing you the pinnacle of human cruelty. Glazer has the maturity to recognise that looking directly at evil stops you from really seeing it. As Augustine says, evil is nothing in itself. Evil is the corruption and annihilation of what is good and lovely. Evil isn’t some great monster that forever battles with God. God is good…no…God is Good. So evil is literally nothing - goodness in decay to nothingness.

Glazer, whether intentionally or not, recognises this theological truth. Looking at the full abyssal nothingness of evil is beyond human comprehension. But if you see it in the periphery, then you see it. When you hear the screams of the innocent and at the same time see a woman cheerfully ignore them while she plays in a flowerbed with her infant daughter, then you recognise the potential for human depravity. You can’t truly encounter the nothingness of evil, and the dangers of letting its parasitical and destructive hunger spread, until you’ve watched others ignore it without missing a beat. I’ve never cried while watching Schindler's List. I cried while watching The Zone of Interest. Twice.

Glazer et al have done the world a great service with this film. They’ve reminded us that the weapon against evil is the rejection of empty banality. Banality is loving yourself. To reject banality is to embrace a quality of attention that is truly outward looking. Rejecting banality is loving your neighbour as yourself.

Review

Aliens

Culture

Film & TV

4 June 2024

7 min read

The problem with The Three Body Problem

The possibility of love in a universe of terror.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

a man leans against one end of a table one another sits against its other end.

Two bodies contemplate a problem.

Netflix.

If you are prone to nightmares or paranoia you might want to steer clear of the first season of Netflix’s sci-fi epic, 3 Body Problem. Adapted from Cixin Liu’s multi award-winning Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, the story starts in the Chinese Cultural revolution of the 1960s and ends twelve million years in the future. Mercifully the narrative is non-linear, so we’re spared a minute-by-minute account. It begins as a global mystery - scientists all over the planet are taking their own lives in mysterious circumstances – and ends with advanced alien weaponry collapsing the universe to a single dimension. All based on a true story, apparently.

Why the paranoia? At the heart of both Liu’s novels and the Netflix adaption, is a particularly terrifying solution to the Fermi Paradox. Enrico Fermi was one of the physicists working on the Manhattan Project (played by Danny Defari in the Christopher Nolan depiction of it in Oppenheimer), who presented his now famous paradox to his colleagues at Los Almos. The paradox goes like this: in a galaxy of billions of stars similar to our sun it is almost certain that advanced alien life is out there, and yet we have not received any convincing evidence of their existence. This, it seems, requires some explanation.

Interestingly, this question was also the starting point of C.S. Lewis’ sci-fi cycle The Cosmic Trilogy, and lies behind the title of its first book, Out of the Silent Planet. According to Lewis, the Earth has been placed under a kind of galactic quarantine, as a result of the fall of humanity, nothing and no-one is allowed in or out. The solar system is teeming with life, but we are partitioned from it. We’ve been blocked from the cosmic WhatsApp group for breaching behaviour standards. The aliens are out there but they’re keeping clear. We are the silent planet.

Cixin Liu however opts for a darker and more disturbing solution to Fermi’s question, which provides the title of the second book in his trilogy, The Dark Forest. The aliens are out there, but it is not we who have been silenced, it is they who are silent. The universe, according to this theory, is like a forest filled with predators and the most sensible thing any intelligent life can do is hide in the undergrowth to avoid attracting attention. Telegraphing our existence into the void by sending signals into space is to naively invite destruction. Alerting the universe to our presence is an act of existential self-harm. The universe is silent because everyone is hiding. For Lewis the universe shone with a love from which we had been excluded, for Liu it is saturated with malice from which we should exclude ourselves.

If Nietzsche was right, that we can survive any how as long as we have a why, then Liu’s characters are saddled with the opposite burden: endless hows and no why.

It probably isn’t too much of a spoiler to acknowledge that the inevitable happens. Aliens are contacted. They do make plans to invade. It is arguably a bit more of spoiler to give away exactly how this happens. The distance between them and us is so vast that, even travelling at one percent lightspeed it will take their invasion fleet four hundred years to get here. And in the meantime, just to ensure we can’t mount any meaningful defence against them, they fold a planet-sized computer into a photon-sized particle and send it to earth to sabotage all technological development. They can watch our every movement, overhear every conversation. We know they are coming and can do almost nothing about it. The bodies of suicides hanging in the fog from every lamppost lining the Thames underline the overriding despair. It is deliciously bleak. I did not sleep well after watching it.

Liu’s brilliance is not in doubt. The Netflix adaptation can barely capture the fireworks of creative inventiveness that crowd every page of his books (indeed the producers even dropped the definitive article from the book's title). In China, his fellow science fiction writers simply call him ‘Da Liu’ (Big Liu) in honour of his works of towering imagination. But I can’t help feeling that the overall atmosphere of The Three Body Problem is an example of what the theologian Carver Yu, another Chinese author, claimed characterised our culture: technological optimism and literary despair. Liu’s characters respond to the relentless encroachment of a malevolent universe with endless technological innovation. They possess an inexplicable will to survive in a cosmos where no one would wish to live. If Nietzsche was right, that we can survive any how as long as we have a why, then Liu’s characters are saddled with the opposite burden: endless hows and no why. They are thirsting for purpose while drowning in applications.

What struck me most watching the Netflix adaptation was that it seemed to extend the experience of living in a post-industrial society to the whole universe. Our sense that many of the organisations to which we owe our allegiance are clever but inhuman, technologically advanced yet amoral, is expanded to fill the farthest reaches of our imagination. Of course, human beings have always done this. Our ancestors saw faces in the clouds and gods in the constellations. We peer into the emptiness of the skies and populate them with our fears and hopes. Faced with the Copernican revolution and the rise of science, Pascal anticipated the cosmic horror of Liu by nearly four hundred years in confessing, ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.’ The Three Body Problem, unlike Lewis who saw planet Earth as an aberration in an otherwise benevolent cosmos, takes our global technological arms-race and makes it the ultimate reality of the entire universe.

The crucial point is that we are not obliged to populate the blank canvas of the cosmos with the malice of Liu or the terror of Pascal.

The Three Body Problem then, like much science fiction, is a valuable and ingenious thought-experiment, but not one I wish to dwell on for too long. I prefer to contrast it with something closer to the cosmology that informed C.S. Lewis. One in which the core operating principle of everything is not the necessity of violence, but the indispensability of love. Something akin to Teilhard de Chardin’s assertion that in the dreams, wonder, exploration and imagination of love, a thread is woven that reaches the very heart of the universe. Despite all appearances to the contrary, love is the deepest reality of all.

This assertion is problematic in many ways. Not least in the face of the evident brutality and violence that traumatises human life. But even more fundamentally than that, how can we intelligibly assert the primacy of love while gazing out at a vast indifferent universe? What are we to do with those infinite silent spaces that so terrorised Pascal?

Perhaps we can try another thought-experiment. This one is drawn from the work of philosopher Chris Barrigar. He calls it the Agape/Probability account. The full argument is long and detailed, so there is no time to explain it all, but the broad brushstrokes are enough. Here’s the thought. What if we live in exactly the kind of universe required to produce creatures who can freely choose to live with self-giving love? They couldn’t be forced or coerced into it, but the conditions could be set in place that would lead to the emergence of such beings. The principles of ‘asymptotic’ statistics suggest that some things may not be determined but they can be so highly probable as to be inevitable. Barrigar asserts that the appearance of a species with the capacity to love was a cosmic inevitability. What is required to turn this possibility into something pretty much certain? Two things – lots of opportunities and lots of time. In other words, with apologies to Carl Sagan, if we want creatures capable of love, we need to build a universe.

Of course, a universe like that – a universe like ours – will throw up many other things in addition to love: violence, rock music and apples pies. But the crucial point is that we are not obliged to populate the blank canvas of the cosmos with the malice of Liu or the terror of Pascal. The cold silence of space does not in itself contradict our intuitive sense that the capacity to love is somehow ultimately significant. On the contrary, when we look at the vast distances between the stars, we could be looking at the minimal amount of spaciousness required to bring about beings with the capacity for self-giving love. At the very least, it’s a thought-experiment worth trying.