I was at dinner with a friend a few months back, and he told me he still needed a compelling reason to watch Succession. He said that the Internet’s refrain of “you’re supposed to hate them” didn’t persuade him, and I mentioned that I think the show actually has the opposite and far more interesting effect: because you’re supposed to hate them, your love of them unsettles you.
The Roys are not good people and not to be championed, but I grew to sympathize with them like a reverse Breaking Bad—in my eyes, they went from monsters to humans over the course of four seasons, not because they did anything to deserve it, but simply because that’s what time with a character does. I didn’t grow to like their politics or behaviors, but the show’s humor put me uncomfortably “on their side,” at least for an hour every Sunday.
At the time, I made a sort of sweeping statement that my friend asked me to elaborate on. I love conversations with friends, where the safety net of intimacy allows us to say things we don’t necessarily believe, but we can try opinions out and see if they tread water. I’m always grateful for friends who will hold my words up to the light to examine them without judgment.
I said that anytime someone is the protagonist of a book or movie or show, the audience—or some audience—will grow to side with them, at least temporarily. I staked the half-formed claim that a protagonist always elicits sympathy.
My friend pressed me on this point, and I backtracked: maybe what I meant at the time was that I didn’t believe people who said “you’re supposed to hate them” about Succession. Maybe I was talking about the reception of art rather than the art itself, though the reception does become a not-small part of the art over time. I’m at an age where an “annoying fanbase” is enough to make me swerve certain avenues I might otherwise walk. Who knows? I was spitballing, because I felt safe to do so. Here I am trying to practice that with you.
I was wrong, by the way. There are protagonists who don’t elicit our sympathy, and two movies reminded me of that very notion this weekend.
The first was Godland, Iceland’s submission for the Academy Awards this year. Written and directed by Hlynur Pálmason, Godland follows Lucas, a Danish priest in the 19th century, who is sent to southeastern Iceland, a barely inhabited and unforgiving environment, to build a church. The first inkling I had that Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) wasn’t going to be a very good priest was when he ignored the warnings of his crew of men and got one of them killed. As they bury the man, instead of taking responsibility, Lucas remarks that God must have had some reason for taking him. God help us.
The film spends a good deal of time showing the natural beauty of Iceland. Shot by Maria von Hausswolff, the picture was so clear that it sometimes made me feel like I was watching the movie in 3D. Patient shots of water, mountains, and snow fill the screen, and timelapses quietly remark on the changing landscape that remains long after the living have gone. I thought early on that there seemed to be no point in building a church where there were already cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.
Of course, Lucas doesn’t realize this, and he goes about building his church, or rather, watching Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson, in one of the unsung performances of the year) build his church for a small village of people. You can tell how excited they are to have a church when Ragnar offers someone a tour of the Lord’s House and she replies, “No thanks.”
I won’t spoil the rest of the movie, but needless to say, Lucas—who is told early on that he “looks miserable” and spends the rest of the movie doubling down on that prophecy—isn’t up to the task. Throughout his journey, he carries his camera equipment around, working to capture all he sees. That serves as a fitting metaphor for his efforts to colonize a land and people that don’t require him and that he can’t prove himself worthy of.
The land and the people of the village are far more interesting to pay attention to, and one character’s secular confession is a sermon more beautiful than Lucas is capable of.
I felt no sympathy for Lucas, and all for the better. If God is to be found in Iceland, such a spirit needs no introduction.
After Godland, Meg and I braved the Chicago weather for the opening weekend of The Zone of Interest, a movie that I cannot exaggerate when I say it changed the way I think at a fundamental level. The plot is simple: it follows the family of a Nazi commandant in their home, which is built on the other side of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
There isn’t a moment in The Zone of Interest that makes this family—based on the real Höss family who lived in a house exactly like the facsimile in this movie—sympathetic. That isn’t the point that director Jonathan Glazer sets out to make, and in my eyes he never veered close to it (I’ve seen some strange “why was this made” reviews that seem to accuse it of such). The Höss family display their Nazi beliefs inside their home through disturbing, dehumanizing conversations, but they also watch their children play. They relax. They rest well.
Glazer doesn’t make them out to be monsters; rather, he accentuates how human they were in their mundane lives, thereby emphasizing how it was humans—not monsters—who carried out the Holocaust.
As you watch the Höss family, you hear the atrocities happening on the other side of the wall. In this way, Glazer said that you are watching two films: one aural, and the other visual (this Time profile brought out so much more of the film for me). It felt that there was never a moment where my ears weren’t attuned to something happening in the so-called “background.”
Taken from actual audio footage from museums and documentaries, the horrors of the Holocaust are persistently in the audience’s ears while the Höss family goes on about their days. In one particularly unsettling scene (and they all are), the children scream while playing while people on the other side of the wall scream in agony, and the mixing of their screams becomes difficult to distinguish.
In 2019, Meg and I visited the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. We spent about six hours at the memorial and museum, and I have never felt so heavy with the weight of history. I have carried the feeling of that day ever since. I never thought a movie would be able to elicit that same sense of the evils that humanity is capable of, but The Zone of Interest does.
As the aural and visual films clash, I realized that the movie never once shows the inside of the concentration camp. The point to me being that we can’t see what happened there, we can only hear (about) it. But we can’t grasp it, not really. Try as we might, it remains out of reach.
In the most moving scene, which I won’t entirely spoil, we see a brief glimpse of how the memory of concentration camps comes to us now: it can never come close to how it was, and The Zone of Interest knows that. Instead of trying to show us the enduring trauma of the Holocaust to Jews, it asks us to consider which side of the wall we approach events from.
The perspective shift is alarming: I’ve never once considered how normal the life of a Nazi must have been, how easy it became for them to ignore the terror they wrought. The Zone of Interest is a movie about complicity, both in film and in everyday life, and no one walks away innocent.