This episode of On Culture interacts with this piece from The Embassy.
Here is an excerpt …
From time to time a psychology experiment will enter the cultural attention span - perhaps because we can relate to the findings of the experiment, even if those findings reveal a disturbing truth. One such experiment has been labeled The Invisible Gorilla.
The Invisible Gorilla is part of the popular culture nowadays, thanks largely to a widely-read 2010 book of that title. In that book, authors and cognitive psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris popularized a phenomenon of human perception—known in the jargon as “inattentional blindness”—which they had demonstrated in a study some years before. In the best known version of the experiment, volunteers were told to keep track of how many times some basketball players tossed a basketball. While they did this, someone in a gorilla suit walked across the basketball court, in plain view, yet many of the volunteers failed even to notice the beast.
The (Really Scary) Invisible Gorilla - APS - January 29, 2013
It might be tempting to think that we wouldn’t miss a gorilla walking by in plain sight, whatever we were doing. But, of course, those who missed the gorilla had to be told that they missed it. If you knew you missed the gorilla without being told - you didn’t really miss it. The really scary part, named in the title of this article, refers to the ways in which this experiment has been confirmed and extended - including radiologists missing images of gorillas in scans because they were looking for something else. The really scary part is that it names something about all of us. We miss some of the gorillas. All of us do. And, being missed, we don’t know that we are missing them.
The Zone of Interest is a movie that was nominated for Best Picture at the 2024 Academy Awards and won the Best International Feature and Best Sound prizes. Loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, it details the homelife of Rudolf and Hedwig Hoss and their children. I will reveal some things about the movie in this article - but it is a movie that might be impossible to spoil. It isn’t really about plot. You know what is happening from the start. It is a movie that really needs to be watched. So - the homelife of the Hoss family: It is 1943, Rudolf is the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp and their home is right next to the camp - the wall of the camp forms one of the borders of their garden. Each day after the family breakfast Rudolf climbs on to his beloved horse and trots through the gate of the camp to begin his work day, and that is as much of the camp as we see - which is set almost entirely in the home and yard of the Hoss family. The Zone of Interest is about missing the gorilla, without really missing it. It is about missing the gorilla while knowing all along exactly where the gorilla is. It is about missing the gorilla by convincing yourself it isn’t really a gorilla.
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