Our Zone of Interest
What we see and what we don't see
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.
We see what might appear at least at first to be idyllic scenes of domestic tranquility, transformed by the knowledge of what is happening just beyond the wall. The Best Sound award is well earned as we very faintly but distinctly hear the ever present sounds of the shouts of the guards, at times including the commandant, the hum of the furnace, cries of those doomed in the camp. The soundtrack for the Hoss family. We hear it, they hear it, while the children are playing and while the laundry is being hung out to dry and while the garden is being tended or admired. Mrs. Hoss, of course, doesn’t tend the garden. She has an ongoing supply of potential laborers for that - and for any other domestic duty. There is, at first, little movement in the film, but I was mesmerized by this juxtaposition of the tranquil and the horrific.
Mrs Hoss’ mother comes to visit and, it seems, to stay for an extended period. She is delighted by her daughter’s situation, clearly proud of her station in life - happy to see the beautiful garden and wonderful home. But she didn’t make it through the first night. The glow of the furnace, the nearby sounds of the camp, and what all of that meant are too much for her. She was gone before breakfast, her only goodbye a note left on the nightstand. She saw the gorilla. It wasn’t okay. Maybe that was in her note.
Hedwig, brilliantly played by Sandra Huller, is the center of the film. While her husband rode into the camp every day, we might think Hedwig is pretending not to see the gorilla on the other side of the wall. But it becomes clear she does see it. It is also clear she is okay with it. More than okay. When Rudolf is transferred, Hedwig pleads with her husband to make a request for her to stay in the home with her children. It was the home of her dreams. She couldn’t imagine a better place to raise their children. Happily for her, the request is granted.
It is easy to mistake The Zone of Interest for a movie about Nazis. It isn’t a movie about Nazis. Not really.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a dissident in the Soviet Union who spent time in the system of Soviet prisons called the Gulags. His 1973 book, The Gulag Archipeligo outlines his experience there and the experience of others subjected to that oppression and repression. Subjected to great evil and suffering, Solzhenitsyn, who had left the Christian faith of his childhood, returned to it. He began to see the guards as human, as something more than an abstraction - something more than a representation of evil. He came to the realization that he was not the victim of “evil people” who could be viewed as other, separated from himself and all the “good people”
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipeligo - 1918-1956
We, all of us, can express the good and participate in evil. Neither is beyond any of us. We might say that we would never miss that gorilla - we would not live next to this camp, we would not ignore that evil, that suffering, that sound track. Probably that is true. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t missing any gorillas.
The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9
Who can understand it? That is a question we might be asking ourselves as we watch The Zone of Interest, and rightly so. But that passage is about every human heart. We all need redemption, we all miss gorillas we shouldn’t miss about ourselves, about the world, about the people in our lives. And we all live with gorillas we shouldn’t life with. Or, perhaps, we are the gorilla someone else is missing or living with. The Zone of Interest is a film about all of us - as Jonathan Glazer, the writer and director, said in his acceptance speech.
All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, “Look what they did then,” rather, “Look what we do now.”
It seems, based on other elements of his acceptance speech, he had others in mind - the ‘we’ may not have included him. But, even if he did not include us, I am. All of us are in the we. We live with stuff, we look away, we reframe, we tell ourselves a story. I do all of these things, about myself, about the world, about others.
And, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, we all have the potential for redemption and to participate in redemptive action. One of the most arresting breaks from the scenes of twisted domestic tranquility is the negative-image depiction of one of the local girls serving in the Hoss home, risking her life to sneak out and hide apples in the prisoner work areas. Redemptive action is made possible only after we see the redemptive need. Only after we feel the impact and name it, do we act to alleviate it. We cannot mourn what we fail to see, we cannot pray for what we ignore, we cannot love those we look away from.
And when the gorillas are revealed to us, it is easy to condemn them, perhaps to rid ourselves of them by condemning them - to forget that the line of good and evil runs through every human heart - to forget that we are sometimes the gorilla.
