When I was in college, I took an Introduction to Psychology class. Among the lesson plans was a day dedicated to watching The Milgram Experiment. The prompt was simple. Two parties would be officiated in an exercise by a scientist. The main party, seen on camera, was a man who would dole out electrocution to the unseen second party based on certain requirements. With each act, the electrocution was said to grow worse. Even if you know that it’s merely an exercise and the hidden party was safe, it’s hard to not believe that they weren't under duress. I watched this man grow full of guilt as the scientist told him to move forward, to keep pressing the button even long after the hidden party grew silent. It was painful. I never saw the second man, yet I felt every volt run through my body.
It was a formative moment of collegiate learning that has stuck with me as time progressed. Every now and then I had to wonder why the man didn’t stop. Was there something to peer pressure that would encourage you to keep abusing an innocent party?
Rarely have I thought about The Milgram Experiment as much as watching the equally haunting yet visually evasive masterpiece The Zone of Interest (2023). The Jonathan Glazer film has received praise for depicting the mundanity of evil without showing a single lashing. At no point does Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) so much as raise his voice. If you were to watch the film out of context on mute, you could easily mistake it for a variation of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960) where a man goes to an office to hold meetings and complain to his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) about how he does all the work his boss gets credit for. The only difference is that where most would be complaining about useless paperwork, Rudolf is talking about The Holocaust and the inefficiency of Adolf Hitler without him running the camp on the other side of the home. It would be so comic if it wasn’t so repulsive.
Hundreds of films have tried to deconstruct the role of Nazis in World War II, but I’d argue Glazer has found one of the most triumphantly uncomfortable. As a species, I think we often assume that seeing something so brutal and unimaginable is what it takes to understand evil. It’s a powerful cinematic tool, but the desire to shift more to realism forces us to contemplate the grey area that humanity exists within. In theory, everyone follows their own moral code and sees themselves as “good.” It’s only the outsider who determines what is “bad.” Also, it’s hard to say that every act a person does is a determinant of this moniker. In theory, Rudolf does a lot of mundane things that are neutral, and yet they become more disturbing because of what Glazer doesn’t show. It’s there in the soundscape, like a repressed memory that believes, “If I didn’t see it, it didn’t happen.” Somewhere in the invisible framework is the more recognizable form of disturbance.
However, I’d argue The Zone of Interest is at its best when it comments on the mundanity. When you begin to see the character's behavior through a recognizable lens, you begin to see certain tragedies emerge. In theory, Rudolf had the choice to quit this Milgram Experiment a long time ago. Early on he admits that despite Hitler being the face of the operation, he is the one turning the gears. For a man who is deemed a historical nightmare, it’s bizarre to see a man so jealously ask for credit for atrocities. The viewer immediately becomes aware of the free will he carries. If enough people stood up to evil, maybe The Holocaust could’ve been avoided. Had people recognized that their boss was beyond psychopathic, maybe history would have looked differently. Instead, Rudolf is less driven by compassion and more by a notion many are familiar with: pleasing the boss. He needs to land the contract (one of the most disturbing scenes is someone selling him a gas chamber by describing how fire and smoke navigate inside) so that he can get the promotion. Maybe then his wife will love him. But, just like any other profession, there’s a good chance that you can never be satisfied by one promotion. You’ll keep kissing the ring if it offers you protection from complete disaster.
What I think makes Glazer’s direction brilliant is how he never shows inside the camp. The upper floors can be seen over the fence, but they’re a background to this perceived suburb. Every scene is shot with a stagnant and distant lens, more like a security camera waiting to watch these characters break character. You get a tense voyeurism just watching people running through this house, playing with their toys. Hedwig is the most quietly sinister as she not only takes too much pride in wearing coats taken from deceased individuals but considers this her dream home. She sees the place like Americans saw the suburbs in the 1950s. Slowly things grow more disturbing as realizations set in. It’s there in her neglect of her Jewish housekeeper. It’s there in how she slowly grows more and more emotionally distant from Rudolf as the story progresses. The trauma of evil has slowly warped her perspective, making the barely smiling optimism that opens the film play out like Jeanne Dielman (1976) where it becomes the small things that show how isolation and morbidity have rotted her soul.
Not only that, but the viewer becomes aware that Hedwig is responsible for children. They’re the most impressionable of everyone in the cast, and the ones who are least likely to recognize the turmoil on the other side of the fence. It’s also the point where I think Glazer’s sound design becomes stomach-churning. The correlation of beautiful visuals (like flowers) with haunting sounds (like gas chamber screams) is bad enough, but I came to wonder how the children were perceiving it. Given that their mother is losing more and more empathy by the minute, it’s easy to see her trying to convince them that there’s nothing wrong. Maybe they’ll come to imagine a world where beauty and bigotry are one and the same. Who even knows what impact Rudolf has, especially since he seems like he’s finding unhealthy ways to cope with his lot in life. It’s easy to see how The Zone of Interest discusses hatred from then in Rudolf and Hedwig, but I’d argue it’s even worse to know the generational impact that it implies may still be among us.
And in all this time, I’m still reminded of the small ways that Rudolf has given up free will. Where I watched The Milgram Experiment and saw a man break down in tears after a few minutes of disbelief and bullying to continue, it was even more uncomfortable to see Rudolf keep pressing the button. He could’ve stopped any time and found his own independence, but chose the path that he saw as rewarding. Instead of recognizing the weight of his actions, he saw everything as a paycheck, a promotion of rank in file. Even as it bled into his everyday life, where he discovers a rogue jawbone floating in the nearby river, he chooses to ignore the worst and believe that he’s achieving his dream. He has a wife. He has a job where he’s respected. Why break free from that comfort even if it comes with clear detriments?
Then again, does he consider his acts to be detrimental? The ending of the film isn’t some grand gesture, but the culmination of who he’s become. In a phone call with Hedwig, they have a weird call about Rudolf’s morbid fascination with murdering his colleagues. This isn’t questioned but instead reflects how numb they’ve become. Both are codependent on the misery of others and in their own way are trapped in a morose legacy. Nobody stopped pressing the button. There wasn’t a protest, nor did anyone move away. They chose to stay overlooking disaster, believing that it was fine.
Throughout the soundscape was a score by Mica Levi. This is the second time that Levi has collaborated with Glazer after Under the Skin (2013), and it’s safe to say that they bring out the neuroses inside each other. Whereas Under the Skin featured an alien screech of strings turning into a romantic motif, The Zone of Interest is even more alarming and less catchy. It sounds like the pit of hell blowing magma into the listener’s ears, intentionally creating queasiness. It plays like the inverse of a religious chant, summoning an unseen evil to do its deed. Given that Rudolf has arguably sold his soul, it’s easy to see this as his insides slowly becoming cancerous. By the final scene, he is seen weakened and on the verge of vomiting as he descends stairs to an unseen place. I personally see this scene as a callback to The Act of Killing (2012) where real-life war criminal Anwar Congo visits the scene of his worst actions. While he hadn’t been held accountable up to this point, the audience witnesses Congo try to avoid his own body rejecting him. Rudolf’s body is not dissimilar at this moment, albeit with an antagonistic touch. Much like everything else, we don’t see his suffering made visible. It lives inside him, forever, to be maintained by future generations forced to live with this legacy.
It wasn’t until after watching The Zone of Interest that I actually looked up the history of The Milgram Experiment. Whereas I thought the comparisons were coincidental, I soon discovered that it was designed in response to World War II as a way to reflect the emotional weight of atrocity. It may explain why Glazer shoots the film this way. Every minute, you’re wondering why he doesn’t stop. It becomes too uncomfortable and makes him look worse. Suddenly his human characteristics are blurred by the few moments of daily brutality. It consumes him whole. I think Glazer also suggests in the framework that while many of us will never commit an act this horrible, there’s a certain way we can slowly slide into recognizing that behavior. It’s not one simple radical act, but a numbing. If we get a reward, anything can be achieved.
To end, I think another interesting conversation that emerged in my schooling was something that puts The Zone of Interest into a larger context. Given that The Holocaust and WWII weren’t done overnight, we asked: why didn’t the Jews leave? It’s true that many did, but without context, you wonder why everyone didn’t leave a place where they weren’t welcomed. It seems impractical until you realize that America, in 2024, isn’t exactly offering a solution to contemporary examples. The southern border dispute remains a notorious dividing point. Several subgroups of citizens are having their rights taken away. In the week this was published, a popular Republican presidential candidate suggested that some NATO members deserved to be attacked for not paying their dues. There’s a lot to worry about even now in the humanity and future of even “the land of the free.” As much as The Zone of Interest can be pinned as a period piece, I’d argue the mundanity of evil has slowly turned America into some perplexing shapes over the past decade.
Why didn’t they leave? Why didn’t Rudolf quit his job? The answer soon becomes obvious. They didn’t leave because home was familiar. To leave for a new land was to risk a new kind of persecution. Their new lives could be as alien as Under the Skin, provided they stand any chance of getting in compared to refugees who Americans are eager to turn away. Rudolf didn’t quit his job because it was comfortable. He wasn’t losing much in the tactile field by being complicit. Glazer’s film may recontextualize a lot in hopes of making us understand how much more sinister evil actually looks. However, he was losing his soul. I think Glazer asks the viewer not only to consider the past but to ask what they’re doing to not lose theirs. Are they making the future a better place? Stop and think about it. Hopefully, your answer is much less disturbing than Rudolf’s.
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