‘Oppenheimer,’ ‘The Zone Of Interest,’ And Protagonists’ Fear
Oppenheimer; The Zone of Interest. Courtesy of Universal Pictures; A24.
Editors’ Note: This piece contains full plot spoilers for Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest. Proceed with caution, and/or watch both films before reading.
Jonathan Glazer described his subtle yet devastating film The Zone of Interest as “Not a history lesson, [but a] warning.” Christopher Nolan urged great minds to consider Oppenheimer, his guilt-driven American Epic, as a film about a man who regrets his innovation because [Oppenheimer] failed to consider its ramifications. The common thread here is that both of these filmmakers, masters at their craft, made films about their fears.
For Nolan, these fears stemmed from growing up in the nuclear age, when there was a seemingly near-constant fear of the possibility of governments going to war, and his — anyone’s — safety became a lesser priority. “[Oppenheimer’s] story is one that I’ve known about since I was a kid growing up in the shadow of nuclear weapons in the early ’80s in the United Kingdom. It was very much in the pop culture.” Nolan brings this fear to the big screen through the perspective of its creator, using first-person, subjective storytelling in a way similar to that of Memento to get the audience inside the mind of a particular character.
Though these films use very different approaches to their visual storytelling — Oppenheimer’s use of subjective perspective and Zone’s use of static shots and flat compositions to separate the viewer from the characters — they each leave you feeling horrible. Oppenheimer’s ending gives a sense of dread and fear. Fear for the uncertain possibility that man’s greed and lust for power will outweigh their reason and concern for one another. Zone’s is more inward-faced — forcing its protagonist to grapple with his legacy, one he’s suddenly faced with after a premonition strikes him. (Though, it’s worth noting that this comes directly after Rudolf tells his wife that the only thing he could think about while attending a Nazi party is how to efficiently gas everyone in the room. The high ceilings are a problem, he says.)
The Zone of Interest. Courtesy of A24.
It’s easy to call The Zone of Interest a film about the banality of evil. To a certain degree, that’s what it is. It’s a movie that asks us, the viewer, if we’re able to recognize and define evil, and if we’re able to differentiate it from mundanity or repetition in routines. Hannah Arendt defined the concept as “the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness.” You can call the film mundane. It depicts a woman tending to her garden, raising her children, and celebrating her husband’s birthday. It shows a man teaching his kids how to paddle a canoe down a river, talking to his maid after her shift ends, and going to meetings for work. It just so happens that the meetings involve discussing the most effective and efficient ways to cremate Jews in mass amounts.
As a reminder, The Zone of Interest follows Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), commandant of Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland where over one million Jews were executed during the Holocaust between 1940 and 1945. It uses the normalcy it presents in the Höss’ lives to juxtapose our recognition of what’s being depicted on screen with the implied, and what’s just outside the edge of the frame. The most violence we ever see on screen comes in the form of one of the Höss boys playing with toy soldiers, or, somewhat differently (and more uncomfortably), when the eldest Höss son locks his brother inside the family’s greenhouse and pretends to gas him as if he were a prisoner in a chamber past the metal wall to their right.
Instead of depicting these hauntingly tragic atrocities on screen, Glazer chose to convey the sheer terror and level of awful acts being committed through sound. In a montage, he verbalizes the pain of the tortured, murdered Jews while showing pretty flowers, growing vines, and the work that Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) put into her garden. “CLOSE UP [on] a purple dahlia. As off-screen we start to hear a voice over the wall crying out in pain. Off-screen the tortured voice gradually increases. We stay on this red flower. As the screen becomes gradually redder. And the off-screen sound of the voice gets louder. Until the red flower disappears in the red screen. And the off-screen spasms of pain get louder. Suddenly all the sound cuts out completely. And we are left in the red,” Glazer writes in the film’s screenplay, in a moment that solidifies his juxtaposition of the sometimes beautiful, lush imagery with the off-screen horrors that deliver the feeling of exactly what the Höss family may be subconsciously experiencing.
It’s this same red — now metaphorical, no longer literal — that Glazer leaves us in as the film ends. In the moment of Rudolf’s premonition, he calls upon our intelligence as viewers — the same thing he’s done since the first frame lit up the black screen — to understand what’s happening. He’s immersed us in the normal — the day-to-day and the mundane of this family’s lives, almost to the point where we, too become numb to the atrocities being committed past the wall that surrounds us and them. He calls upon us, the viewer, to not only understand what he shows — and doesn’t show — but to question the film and its characters. To ask ourselves, implicity based on how Arendt defines the Banality of Evil, what evil is, how to recognize what given acts are evil, and if that reflects upon the moral qualities of the evil-doers, or if it’s an isolated incident altogether. It’s a scary question, to be clear, that Glazer asks of his audience, but it’s a necessary one — one that we as a society have been attempting to answer for the better part of the last century.
Oppenheimer. Courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Similarly, Christopher Nolan leaves viewers with a sense of dread at the end of Oppenheimer, his decades-spanning American epic that unpacks the history of the atomic bomb and the life of its creator. The final moments of his film tie back to a moment from the first few minutes — one referenced to throughout the film, particularly by Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), in which Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) speaks to Albert Einstein (Tom Conti). In this moment, Oppenheimer conveys to him the weight of their actions — “Albert? When I came to you with those calculations? We were worried that we would start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world... I believe we did.”
Moreover — Nolan provides this same sense of dread throughout the film’s entirety, in a sense. He opens and closes the film with the visual of Oppenheimer’s anguished eyes, an image he repeatedly returns to, including during the film’s most important scene.
You might think that the most important sequence in the 180-minute film in its 400-something scenes is the Trinity Test, which arrives just before the two-hour mark. The test, which is, in a way, the film’s pinnacle of tension, is the supposed buildup of everything we just watched. The team at Los Alamos gathered the materials, built the bomb, and it worked. Everybody wins, right?
One would think that especially the creator of such a monumental achievement would celebrate this moment, but the most important scene comes moments later, when Oppenheimer speaks to a crowd in the Los Alamos gymnasium.
His speech seems straightforward at first — “The world will remember this day... I’m proud of what you accomplished...” but slowly becomes something much different — much darker. Oppenheimer sees light pouring into the room, bodies disintegrating, people screaming — the effects of the dropping of a nuclear weapon in the room in which he stands. This motif comes back in a crucial scene in the third act when Roger Robb (Jason Clarke) questions Oppenheimer about the “moral scruples” he faced regarding the dropping of the atomic bomb, and Oppenheimer, once again, is faced by the “LIGHT OF A THOUSAND SUNS” as he’s forced to justify his position on the dropping of the A-bomb’s use and the Hydrogen bomb program. Nolan uses these visuals to depict the crippling guilt that J. Robert Oppenheimer had to live with, in the outcome of the use of his “deadly toy” while also being forced to justify his “whole life” to the Gray Board in charge of evaluating his security clearance.
While Nolan doesn’t ask the viewer to make a choice in the question of Oppenheimer’s morality and stances on various issues, he makes it explicitly clear that Oppenheimer is truly afraid of what he’s done, and is haunted by the potential consequences of his actions.
Nolan reminds us of this in a series of shots at the end of the film that show “THE EXPANDING NUCLEAR ARSENALS OF THE WORLD...” and the Earth, on fire, the atmosphere being burned by the chain reaction Oppenheimer himself helped to start. Glazer, too, does this at the end of The Zone of Interest, when Rudolf is given a glimpse of what may be the “[present-day] Museum corridor we were just looking at.” He has to reckon with his place in history and his actions, with the direct part he played in the deaths of many and the largely indirect part he played in the genocide of millions.
Nolan and Glazer both made films that end with their protagonists afraid of what we, the viewer, had just seen them do. While one can’t — with absolute certainty — made a direct connection to what these auteurs feel about the subject matter (and their personal fears), you have to ask yourself why now, and why endings which leave their respective audiences with such an awful, sometimes sickening feeling.
