We’re All in The Zone of Interest
Our collective apathy for everything on the other side of the wall
Earlier this month, my flatmates and I put on The Zone of Interest. We’ve been pretty good at watching the films from this awards season, though it may go without saying I needed to wait until I was mentally and emotionally ready to watch a film about arguably the most tragic ethnic cleansing event recorded in history. Or rather, the events occurring next to it.
If you aren’t chronically online/heard its premise, Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust film is a quietly gripping 105 minutes centering on the banal household that Auschwitz commandment Rudolph Höss and his family built on the border wall to the concentration camp. The title comes from the translation for Interessengebeit, coined by the Nazi SS to describe their allotted quarters that surrounded Auschwitz.
For much of the film, viewers are on edge waiting for the distressing, awful, big moment you’ve seen from much of its predecessors; aside from washing blood off boots and retching, you won’t see it here. But Glazer isn’t concerned with the visual horror we’re accustomed to… it didn’t win Best Sound at the Academy Awards for nothing!
Höss’s wife softly counts roses in the garden with her newborn as shots fire and victims wail in the unseen background, and are then silenced. They sunbathe and surmise the wealthy Jewish woman they used to clean for is ‘over there’, concerned that someone outbid them on her luxe curtains. Friends come over for an all-white pool party as human ash billows out of chimneys behind them. The orchestrators of mass destruction carry on with their lives and debate on where to holiday next, and we are meant to live alongside them.
The only time the Höss family gets a scare themselves is when the children are playing in the river as bones — and remnants of other chemicals, like Zyklon B perhaps— rapidly wash up around them. At home, they are scrubbed like nobody’s business in the tub, all the while sobbing and (likely) thinking they’re a goner. Shit gets real when it comes back to you, but until then Glazer demonstrates how easy it can be to ignore the plight of others and your own mortality.
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
The Zone of Interest is no longer a mere physical boundary in the digital age. Each day, we are faced with news headlines, press conference snippets, Facebook lives and TikToks that time and again remind us there seems to be no limit to the sheer volume of suffering that exists on Earth at one time. The Zone of Interest is only the latest of these call-outs by the current generation. Whether genocide, climate change, or race-based hate crimes, many artists are taking on a voice of activism, begging listeners to wake up.
Immediately, Hozier and Lorde come to mind as recent examples in music.
Hozier bridges divides throughout his entire catalogue. With anthems like Nina Cried Power, his lyrics recount the lineage of fearless powerhouses that brought attention to black American joy and suffering; on the latest album, Eat Your Young makes crystal-clear the rapid, cannibalistic nature of capitalist societies that swallows us whole without remorse. I saw his mesmerizing performance live back in December, where a few times his crowd work revolved around topics like religious trauma, Irish and black social activism, Israel-Palestine, and global warming.
Remember Solar Power? Lorde’s post-Covid self-exploration addresses womanhood, witchy mysticism, climate apathy, and shitty men who will always be shitty whether they quit coke or get spiritual. Listen after your pre-frontal cortex has developed and it all really hits. Leader of the New Regime in the back catalogue is a swift uppercut — 1:33 to be accurate — that serves as a portrait of a future in which our environment is uninhabitable:
Wearing SPF 3000 for the ultraviolet rays
Made it to the island on the last of the outbound planes
Got a trunk full of Simone and Céline, and of course,
My magazines
I’m gonna live out my days
-
Won’t somebody, anybody,
Be the leader of a new regime?
Free the keepers of the burnt-out scene another day
Lust and paranoia reign supreme
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We need the leader of a new regime.
There are rivers we don’t swim in anymore because of oil spills, or PFAS. Houseless populations grow and go largely ignored by a system that fails them. Our nation’s leaders turn blind eyes to helpless cries in Palestine, Sudan, Syria; on our soil in schools, nightclubs, Asian-owned salons and spas. Black kids in hoodies. Laborers subject to persistent exploitation in factories an hour away, or thousands of miles away.
We doom scroll on beauty influencers for unboxing TikToks and LTK shops without consideration for the degree of wasteful consumption they promote. We donate clothes or throw them out without a second about where they go once we discard them. You get the picture: there are so many ways in which society is fucked.
None of this is meant to make us feel helpless against the Goliath of billionaires, strangling politics on women’s bodies and children’s books, or the taxes we pay that build weapons aimed at civilians in another climate. Identifying the parasites that surround us is paramount, and we cannot be passively swiping past them on our screens until the moment it falls on our own doorstep. I’m so exhausted by the news, and often need a moment to step away and remind myself of beautiful things, but I’m FAR more exhausted by the narrative of our collective apathy. There is no one we can point to but ourselves to promote change. To quote Bey in American Requiiem, I am the one to cleanse me of my father’s sins.
U Penn professor and author of Everyday Utopia Kristen Ghodsee writes that progress is impossible if we cannot move past our innate ‘status quo bias’ — upholding that which we know, no matter if it’s poison, in order to shirk responsibility for decisions that have the potential to make a bad thing worse. Even if we want something to change, we’d much rather let someone else be the courageous one in the event it backfires. “We have to control the normal defense mechanisms of cynicism and apathy because without social dreaming, progress becomes impossible,” she writes. Our first step towards regime change, social progress, saving lives, is to have the courage and curiosity to dream of our optimal future.
To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
Rebecca Solnit
It’s not cool to be a cynic who remains static as the pressure folds in. Optimism is not naive, it is extremely dynamic and excruciatingly necessary to survival.
Make art. Read. Call your representative. Start a community garden. Write, volunteer, protest, talk to your friends… find the activist role that works for you. Activism is not reserved for the loudest voices.
Start dreaming, sheeple!!! Let me know your thoughts on how we move forward.
Ryann x
ICYMI
I pulled together some recent style combinations I love for spring.
Did you like this critique? Take a gander at what I wrote on the culture of girlhood.
UP NEXT
All the trends I let pass me by without remorse.