Why Living Your Best Life Is the Worst Thing You Can Do

The Zone of Interest - Philosophical Analysis

The Zone of Interest (2023)

Following my master signifier Slavoj Žižek, I theorise on films I haven’t watched. And yet, I lack the intellectual kahunas of Žižek, so I decided to watch The Zone of Interest (2023) with my dear friends Ila-Rose and Madeline McFarlane prior to releasing an essay on the film. I’m glad I did so and didn’t follow Žižek’s footsteps on this one because it was a masterpiece. Jonathan Glazer achieved an artistic feat that could only be done through the medium of cinema.

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We live in a society of overexposure where people are drowning in prolapsed voyeurism, recycled exhibition and paralysing sameness. We see too much. Contrarily, The Zone of Interest (ZoI) managed to show everything by showing nothing at all. 

The zeitgeist of our time is numbness. People are numb to the world in its pornographic hyper-unconcealment; we’ve lost the ability for delineation, to pick apart and direct our attention at that which should be attended to. The phenomenological experience of a person is a morass of TikTok and Instagram Reel bombardments before you’ve had a chance to have your morning coffee. The comedian Mark Normand says it best: “The moment you wake up, the first thing you see today is Al-Qaeda, 9/11 conspiracy theories, anal prolapsing videos, and it’s not even 9 am yet.” All of the world is laid out bare and naked in front of us. We don’t have to endeavour to know the truth because it’s not hidden. Everything is known. Everything is transparent. Innocent children are being carpet-bombed in Palestine and we’re all complicit in these crimes, socioeconomic inequality is creating manifold crises, fascism is on the rise worldwide, and amidst the climate crisis, young people are unsure if they’ll have a planet to live in the decades to come. The world’s bleakness is unvarnished, and we’re reminded of the datum subliminally known to every human: Moments of mirth are the exception to the rule. Life is tragic, and despair is our constitutive state. Happiness is a formidable lie. We’ve reached Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, but this isn’t the end we hoped for.

Paraphrasing Helen Rollins: cinema is the perfect medium to analyse our times where film does a better job at philosophising than philosophy itself. And so cinema uniquely captures the Stimmung (mood) of our epoch with films like Leave the World Behind (2023), Don’t Look Up (2021) and The Handmaid’s Tale (2017), where there aren’t happy endings. But the purpose of unhappy endings isn’t to reflect the volatility of our dire times but rather to kill hope, saying change isn’t possible, and the present is all we’ve got: “The future serves as a vehicle for the nostalgia for the present.” (Krečič, 2022)¹ The logic of neoliberal ideology is cynicism: the situation is bad now, but it will only get worse, and you are powerless, so stoically focus on yourself, find freedom within and enjoy life while it lasts because the future’s lost. The neoliberal regime does not oppress freedom. It exploits it. (Han, 2022)² In a culture that mourns a lost future, so-called “awareness” is futile. Be it through direct social action or the arts and humanities conveying to people that the world is fucked, changes nothing. Because everyone knows, and yet knowing isn’t enough. The viral video of four innocent Palestinian civilians killed by an IDF drone was seen by millions, and Motaz Azaiza’s photojournalism pages are probably the most trafficked online, but we’ve become numb and indifferent to such information. Because right next to these images are TikToks of a couple recording themselves having lunch or self-help gurus telling you how to optimise your routine, there’s no qualitative difference between these posts. Indeed, the death of God killed quality, too. Categories have disappeared. Everything is content that lacks substance. Sameness pervades our being. Banality is our geist (spirit). And so perhaps ZoI’s director Jonathan Glazer’s modus operandi is one we should all adopt? Say everything by saying nothing. Perhaps the unsaid haunts us more than the said?

A Philosophy of Violence

The ostensibly non-judgemental gaze is the first thing the viewer of ZoI notices as the film opens on a black screen with a dark crimson spot that lasts longer than we’d like. It makes us uncomfortable. And the discomfort is the purpose. Glazer claims this cinematic tactic allows the viewer to tune their ears to the film’s eerie soundtrack and distinctive use of sound instead of only focusing on the visual medium. But the blackness achieves something more powerful. It reminds us that the gaze is never neutral, objective and without judgment. We’re never simply looking at the black screen as a passive viewer, but our involvement distorts its purported neutrality. The gaze or le regard, as Lacan introduced, is supposed to uproot us from our natural state of being, reminding us there was no naturality to begin with, in ourselves nor the social order. For ZoI, the state of nature is fascism. For us, it’s capitalism—albeit they’re two sides of the same coin—that presents itself as being the proper order of things when it’s not; this traumatic knowing deeply troubles, disturbs and provokes anxiety in one as “the gaze is nothing but the way that the subject’s desire deforms what it sees. It is the impossibility of a neutral or natural field of vision. At the point of the gaze, the subject is an absent presence in the visual field that is responsible for the field’s distorted character, its lack of neutrality. The gaze is political in the sense that it exposes the unnatural status of the apparently natural visible world.” (McGowan, 2016)³

The moment the scene cuts to Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig Höss’ (Sandra Hüller) family having a picnic by the river, we know there’s an abnormality to this apparently normal day. Something mundane becomes obscene. We’re all familiar with Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil, but subjectively registering the violence of banality is what ZoI’s gaze does to the viewer. From the get-go, we know that what matters is not directly in the scene but concealed and hidden away. While the family enjoys a wholesome day out, the horror of what’s happening in the background is made salient to us. Violence can have two forms: [1] the immediate violent act like being mugged on the street by a petty thief or delinquent and [2] the structural violence that’s unspeakable due to its metaphysical elevation to being diabolically evil (Žižek, 1999)⁴ like the Holocaust or the Palestinian genocide; ZoI points to the latter. The social structure enables such atrocities. Even criminal acts or riots like those seen in France after the fatal shooting of Nahel Merzouk, which are subjective in nature; that is, the agents of violence are visible, can only take place within a system that presents itself as being neutral and non-violent. But that’s what ideology covers up: the objective violence inherent to society, which ZoI portrays in all its horror. Žižek (2009) theorises:

The catch is that subjective and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the “normal,” peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious “dark matter” of physics, the counterpart to an all-too visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be “irrational” explosions of subjective violence.⁵

Objective violence, though, should not be spiritualised and viewed as having an ethereal reality where it is too elusive to be felt by us. On the contrary, It’s a part of our material reality and responsible for the outbursts of disharmony in our social relations. As Žižek identifies, it has to be taken into account whenever one speaks of violence as it’s not imposed from the outside; it’s immanent. When Rudolf is on a phone call in his office, a pale Jewish woman knocks on the door and timidly enters the room. He continues on with his business while she removes her shoes, lets down her hair and prepares herself for sex to be raped by the SS commander. The act itself is not shown. Nazis consider Jews as disgusting vermin. So the very next scene shows Rudolf maniacally washing and cleaning his penis. After raping her, he’s trying to get the “Jewishness” out of him. This act of violence committed on the woman is only possible because of the objective structure, the “normal” state of things, that allows her to be used and abused. Furthermore, this fascistic tendency to keep society pristine and functioning in its organic wholeness also happens through disavowal.

In elementary psychoanalytic-critical theory, disavowal involves an acknowledgement of a distressing reality, in Rudolf’s case, the Holocaust and his raping of the woman, but creating what Julia Kristeva calls ‘abjection’ where a symbolic cut is made between our reality and that which causes us disgust and horror when we’re confronted by our repressed ‘corporeal reality’ in all it’s unspeakable ugliness—literally unspeakable as we do not symbolise nor speak of it. The toleration of paedophile priests by the Catholic Church would be a case in point: until the recent exposé, the abjectal object, paedophilia, was separated from the norms and rituals and publicly condemned but tolerated in practice by being ignored and even structurally sustained by the social body. The inscription of the split between the amoral practice and the deeply moralistic sociality into the symbolic network is what allows the paedophilic priest and Rudolf to commit the abjectal act. To paraphrase Žižek (2015)⁶ qua Marx: “A king is a king only because his subjects treat him as a king, but it appears to them that they treat him as a king because he is in himself a king.” Rudolf has to clean his penis and “purify” himself before going on with his daily duties, as the two universes have to be kept strictly separate. His social reality sustains the appearance that he’s a conscientious commander carrying out his duties for the nation. The symbolic role allows the disavowal of the ugly aspects of his life. And, of course, the same logic applies when he partakes in atrocious practices in the concentration camps but comes home to his wife and kids as a decent family man. There’s always a chasm between the two worlds perfectly “normalised” by socialisation.

Hedwig’s mother, Linna Hensel (Imogen Kogge), comes to stay with them at the idyllic house bordering the camp. In an unsettling scene, Hedwig nonchalantly tells her they planted pine trees by the wall to block out the view of Auschwitz. Despite having all the comforts, a few days later, Linna leaves after seeing the burning crematorium at night. She leaves a note for Hedwig, which we can see upsets her but immediately burns it somewhat instinctively without reflection, as if anything that confronts her with the abject part of her life, the truth, has to be destroyed—or disavowed. On the other hand, Linna intimates a truth about most of us. We all feel bad when seeing a dead Palestinian child on TV, and if we could spare some energy, we share a post in solidarity on social media, but that’s the extent of it. Our lugubriousness is ephemeral. Seldom do we engage with anything more radical than maybe attending a protest on a Sunday morning, and that, too, is getting rarer. But what if such common decency isn’t enough? Isn’t such pseudo-action a form of running away from the problem like Linna does? Isn’t it a way of having our conscience clear, thinking to ourselves, “At least I’m a good person” by doing something rather than nothing? This is how contemporary ideology functions. It creates cynical subjects who either partake in pseudo-ethical acts, e.g. recycling, donating to a charity, sharing a post online, etc., to simply feel good about oneself knowing very well this changes nothing or more perniciously one becomes passive nihilists where “Rather than acting in the world and trying to transform it, the passive nihilist simply focuses on himself and his particular pleasures and projects for perfecting himself, whether through discovering the inner child, manipulating pyramids, writing pessimistic-sounding literary essays, taking up yoga, bird-watching or botany, as was the case with the aged Rousseau. In the face of the increasing brutality of reality, the passive nihilist tries to achieve a mystical stillness, calm contemplation: ‘European Buddhism’. In a world that is all too rapidly blowing itself to pieces, the passive nihilist closes his eyes and makes himself into an island.” (Critchley, 2013)⁷ We’re told we’re free but only free to act within the contours provided by the hegemony. You have the freedom to choose between multiple brands of tuna or find yourself life by going on a holiday to Asia, but a reevaluation of your relationship to work or the need to not be slaves of capital is considered too radical and disruptive for the system. Today, everything is possible, but these possibilities are precisely what prevents us from re-positing newer contours, a radically different space for action, that define our existential freedom, which is what an emancipatory subject should do but doesn’t. Linna runs away from confronting the truth of her society, and we read self-help books, meditate or kill ourselves. Regardless of the form, it’s always a resignation to the inner and an escapism from the outer.

The problem arises at the deepest metaphysical level of how we understand the self. A Time Magazine (2023) review of ZoI says the movie is a “movie about marital companionship, about wanting the best for your children, about following the rules and working hard and feeling that you truly deserve the best in life. It’s about all the things that most people in the world want…”⁸ This is apt. Indeed, if we momentarily ignore the horrors of what’s not shown to the viewer, the film portrays the Höss family trying their best to live the good life no different to most of us ordinary people simply getting on with our day without worrying about grander ethico-philosophical questions and societal deadlocks, the Holocaust, Palestinian genocide and mines in Congo, to name a few. When Rudolf is transferred to Oranienburg, Hedwig refuses to leave their home next to Auschwitz. She tells him, “This is our home, Rudolf. Living how we dreamed we would since we were 17. Beyond how we dreamed.” The eeriness of this scene is felt in its familiarity, outwardly looking like a normal conversation between a couple where one of the partners has to move for work—a typical affair in most of our middle-class lives—and amidst this disheartening news, the two are discussing what’s best for their family and themselves which you’d expect from any one of us trying to live well amongst the volatility of life. In a way, you’d even empathise with their burdens—that is, if you aren’t haunted by what’s going on in the background yet again hidden from the immediate scene. Margaret Thatcher famously proclaimed that there is no such thing as society but individual men and women. And yet, life is brutal, brutaler than most people could bear. So, we’re told to work hard, take personal responsibility, and do the best for ourselves. This ethos is best captured in Jordan Peterson’s self-help rule, “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world” (2018)⁹. Although it might seem like an apolitical cliché without any metaphysical-ideological presuppositions, it is replete with ideology. The neoliberalism that underpins Thatcherites and Petersonians tells us the self is an isolated island in a vast ocean of nothingness. The only substantial existence is yourself, and all else, including other selves, are mere ephemeralities, entities you trade with for your sustenance; life is an ongoing quid pro quo. This is the same notion that reduces love to nothing more than hypergamy, hierarchies and a dating marketplace. However, all of this marketisation and capitalist realism (Fisher, 2009)¹⁰ misses the crucial point arguably conceptualised best by Hegel. The self is not a dessert; the self is social. Two selves become aware of themselves through awareness of each other:     

178. Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. [...] 179. Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self. (Friedrich et al., 1994)¹¹

One has to live with this contradiction. We live for ourselves but cannot exist without the other. You are intimately entangled and wrapped within an intersubjective space that’s simultaneously within and without you, and the more you try to isolate yourself from the world, the more you feel the pull of the other. Rudolf tried to separate himself from the social, but the more he tried to create an island around himself and his family, those abject objects of the Real that he couldn’t integrate into his socio-symbolic space appeared. When he’s in the river with his children, human remains from the camp flow through, literally touching them, sending him into a disinfecting frenzy; despite his many attempts to put his daughter to sleep, she keeps waking up in the middle of the night due to the sound of the crematorium in the camp; finally, at the end of the film his physical body begins to repulse: after attending a Nazi party similar to a mundane corporate shindig and boasting to his wife on the phone that all he could think of was the mechanics of gassing all the attendees he wanders off down a flight of stairs to a dark hallway and during his walk is overcome with the need to vomit as if his own body is rejecting himself. At the same time, the screen gets darker, and Rudolf keeps retching violently, walking into the cavernous darkness, dissenting into hell. Refusing to see your social responsibility and striving to cocoon yourself from the world to avoid the messiness of the other so that you can live a better life won’t work because the self is fundamentally relational. Life cannot be compartmentalised.

(N. B. The popular reading of this ending scene is that Rudolf finally confronts the reality of his actions and his moral culpability in diabolical evil, having a quasi-road to Damascus moment. But it’s worth mentioning (Dowd, 2024)¹² that the “real-life Höss did not have an Oskar Schindler moment. He kept serving Hitler’s vision and was unrepentant until a few days before his execution. An American psychologist who spoke with Höss wrote this of him: ‘There is too much apathy to leave any suggestion of remorse.’”)

The dialectic of the wall is the reversal of the inner and outer. The idyllic garden and the paradisal house veiled the heinous inhumanity and malevolence in the camp. The wall was supposed to keep “disturbances” out, but it was impossible as what took place in the camp invariably kept intruding, if not physically, then psychically. But perhaps the true reversal takes place when we see the young Polish girl (Julia Polaczek) who works at the house discover a piece of music written by a prisoner symbolising the profound humanity that exists within the camp, despite the Nazi attempts to dehumanise them. It points at the incomprehensible destruction of human life taking place beyond the wall. At that moment, the viewer realises that the true monstrosity isn’t in the camp but within Höss’ home in their indifference to what lies outside of them. The Israeli government officials are monsters for what they’re doing to the Palestinian people, but perhaps we are even more monstrous in our enablement of an ongoing genocide. The final message of the film is there’s no zone.

1. Krečič, J. (2022) ‘In Defense of Happy Endings, or, Where Lies the Trap of Never-Ending Stories’, Crisis and Critique, 7.2(2).

2. Philosopher, Culture Theorist Byung-Chul Han’s Commencement Speech (2022). YouTube. 13 July.

3. McGowan, T. (2016) Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. New York City, New York: Columbia University Press.

4. Žižek, S. (1999) Laugh Yourself to Death: the new wave of Holocaust comedies!, Slavoj Zizek-bibliography/laugh yourself to death/lacan dot com. Available at: https://www.lacan.com/zizekholocaust.htm (Accessed: 10 April 2024).

5. Žižek, S. (2009) Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books, p. 2.

6. Žižek, S. (2015) ‘Abjection, Disavowal and the Masquerade of Power’, Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research [Preprint].

7. Critchley, S. (2013) Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso Books, p. 14.

8. Zacharek, S. (2023) Review: The Zone of Interest Is a Breath-Stopping, Hauntingly Original Holocaust Drama, Time. Available at: https://time.com/6281554/the-zone-of-interest-review/ (Accessed: 24 April 2024).

9. Peterson, J.B. (2018) 12 Rules for Life. Penguin Allen Lane.

10. Fisher, M. (2009) Mark Fisher - Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Alresford: Zer0 Books.

11. Friedrich, H.G.W., Miller, A.V. and Findlay, J.N. (1994) Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit. New York: Oxford University Press.

12. Dowd, A.A. (2024) The zone of interest’s final moments are a Nazi workaholic’s nightmare, Vulture. Available at: https://www.vulture.com/article/the-zone-of-interests-vomit-inducing-ending-explained.html (Accessed: 01 May 2024).