It is, unfortunately, all too easy for the human brain to relegate the humanity of other human beings—to dehumanize them. This is the leitmotif of The Zone of Interest (2023), a film whose release took place in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza in which civilians, including women and children, were targeted as if they were culpable for the break-up of the U.S.S.R. and the Hamas attack in Israel. Under the fallacy of collective justice, dehumanizing carnage can run wild. In The Zone of Interest, the banality of evil is evident even though it is subtle under the protection of the status quo. To be sure, other films depict such banality of the ordinary; what distinguishes The Zone of Interest is how it shows us the rawness of human violence ironically by now showing it.
In the film, Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, his wife Hedwig, and their children live in a house next to the camp. Eerily, the house and its outdoor garden and pool have come to be home to them so much that Hedwig fights tooth and nail to stay when Rudolf is transferred. It is as if Hedwig could no longer see the ubiquitous gray smoke billowing from the chimneys, even as her mother has trouble sleeping because of the “factory” noise and the distant smoke. There are two degrees of separation between Hedwig and her mother their reactions to what is going on inside the camp. Of course, Hedwig is proud of her garden and does not want to leave what she has worked so hard on. Interestingly, the close-ups on the red flowers can be interpreted as standing for the purity of nature or, especially in light of her children swimming among human bones and ashes in the river, as intimating a funeral, and thus death itself. That the flower means one thing to Hedwig and quite another to the viewers shows us just how warped the human brain can be without realizing it. Although not arbitrary, our social realities are hardly objective, and we can be so dreadfully clueless on just how warped one’s own can be.
The language of dehumanization in the film is spoken as Rudolf meets with a few men to discuss the efficiency of adding another furnace, and later when as an inspector he compares the “yields” of different camps. Referring to the human victims as “pieces” and to “loads” to be gassed chills the ears as watching the Höss kids playing with teeth of the cremated does to the eyes. In being able to tug at our ears and our eyes, movies can make real ethical problems in ways that singular-dimension books cannot reach.
As much as “moving pictures” are visual in nature, the choice to turn the camera away and focus only on sound can be very effective in conveying sordid human interactions. In Inglorious Basterds (2009), SS Col. Hans Landa demonstrates just how quickly and starkly humans can become savagely violent once courtesy is given up. In The Zone of Interest, we glimpse with our ears only the sheer roughness in the violence with which the camp’s guards manhandle the people as they came off the trains. We hear the thuds of guards shoving the people disembarking from the cattle cars and the moans and grasping for air of the "herd animals." The sounds are raw; they depict us humans as animals, both as birds of prey and prey.
Human beings in the state of nature, Hobbes would say. Unlike Locke's claim, there are no natural rights in such a state. That the viewers can only see Rudolf’s stoic looking-on as if above the fray only dramatizes the extent of human versatility from stoic self-discipline to unconstrained violence, the latter perhaps going even beyond the unethical to being raw nature as it is rather than how it ought to be. Whereas the Nazi policy to exterminate enemies of the state can certainly be reckoned as unethical, the raw violence itself points to our genetic makeup as animals.
Concerning nature itself, we might say that it is problematical to get ought out of is, which is what Hume calls the naturalistic fallacy. Does it even make any sense to say that the lion should not kill and eat its prey? I abhor people who shed polite society so easily in order to instantly become violent. The experience of being in raw violence is so unique, and so different from anything ordinary, that it is perhaps the only way we have of getting in contact with what life might have been like for our prehistoric ancestors. Contending with a violent person does not lend itself to ethical analysis; even though the attacker can be deemed unethical after the fact, ex post facto, the experience itself, after the choice, seems to break through the wall into raw experience, which is beyond good and evil.
So, we are not completely divorced from our primitive ancestors after all. For another fallacy is to suppose that reasoning, including the impersonal business calculus that can act as a cover for the banality of evil, and techological progress can sever us from our own animal nature. As Locke points out, it is possible to find oneself in the state of nature in the experience of violence even amidst being in a civilized society (e.g., before the police arrive). It is the sheer distance between our rational nature and the experience of unrestrained violence that is so well depicted in The Zone of Interest."
