The "zone of comfort" in "Zone of Interest"
Oscar series pt. 1
A shorter post today to kick off my Oscar’s series, where I analyze a wide variety of Oscar nominees this year. I’ve left it off with more questions than answers because the subject matter is a bit too dense to pack in a weekly Substack posts. I encourage you to comment if you have any thoughts on these questions.
When you’re writing a screenplay, most screenwriting teachers are going to point you to the Hero’s Journey formula. I think Dan Harmon describes it best:
You (a character is in a zone of comfort)
Need (but they want something)
Go (they enter an unfamiliar situation)
Search (adapt to it)
Find (find what they wanted)
Take (pay its price)
Return (and go back to where they started)
Change (now capable of change)
This is the dominant framework for writing a good movie. I happen to think it’s a very good framework and use it in pretty much every script I write. But, of course, for every rule there are exceptions. Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest is one of them.
The movie follows the daily life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss as he and his family live their life right next to the extermination camp. What immediately jumps out is that most of the scenes would actually be really mundane if there was not the sounds of the most extreme human misery constantly droning in the background.
So, right away, we have characters and they are comfortable. A “zone of comfort” is established. But the central intrigue of the movie is not the departure from the zone of comfort. It is the zone of comfort itself. What is ordinary to them is horrifying to us.
While there actually is a departure from the zone of comfort, it comes late and it’s not what makes the movie interesting. Höss gets promoted to deputy inspector of all concentration camps and has to move to Oranienburg. His wife refuses to leave their nice house, so Höss makes the move alone, leaving his family behind. There’s an irony here. Presented with an opportunity to leave Auschwitz, Mrs. Höss wants nothing more than to stay. The irony depends on the audience’s understanding that Auschwitz is probably the #1 most evil place to ever exist in human history. And still, the departure from the ordinary is not what makes it interesting. It only serves to highlight how disturbing their ordinary life is: they have become so numb to the extermination of human beings they do not want to leave their pleasant little house.
The key insight here, from a movie-making perspective, is that you do not need an interesting plot to make an interesting movie. You just need some sort of dissonance. Some sort of irony. I like the way Americangwyn on X described irony: the distance between expectation and reality. We would expect that human beings would respond to the sounds of misery right next door to them but it is mundane to them. There is something about irony and dissonance that lays at the heart of what makes a movie, book, or perhaps any piece of art interesting. What is that? I have not come to a concise answer to describe this. Perhaps no one has. Perhaps it is a mystery of the muses that we can never fully wrap our heads around. But it is important to continually ask ourselves this question and others like it so we can continue to make new art.