Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt

The worst is that man has come to seem mindless.John Berger, “Francis Bacon and Walt Disney”The Zone of Interest is a film that has been shot at least twice: once through the lens ofits director, Jonathan Glazer, and then again through the lens of the 7 October Hamasattack and the subsequent war on Gaza. Few Holocaust films have spoken to our timesso directly. When Glazer made that connection implicit in his Oscar’s acceptancespeech – “Not to say ‘look what they did then’ – rather, ‘look what we do now’” – hetoo became part of the proxy cultural conflict that has raged from Berlin to New York.Throughout all of this, the ghost of Hannah Arendt has been a notable presence.Before its general release, Glazer said that while working on the film he was “constantlythinking” of Arendt’s description of how it was not radical evil but an outrageous mind-lessness that powered the industrialized genocide of the Holocaust. Whether judged anachingly timely masterpiece or denounced as “Holokitsch,” the film’s critics have followedGlazer’s lead and regularly evoked Arendt’s “banality of evil,” the phrase she used in hercontroversial reports on the 1961 trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann.1 In fact, whetherpeople love or loathe the film often seems to turn on whether they approve or disapproveArendt’s thesis. Or, indeed, of Arendt herself, for just as her debunking of the myth ofdemonic Nazis earned her public opprobrium, so too has Glazer’s Oscar’s speechturned him into a controversial figure in the very history he is asking us to understand.The Zone of Interest comes with a ready-made Arendtian imprimatur. I think this is also a problem.