THOMAS LARSON

(The Literary Review September 11, 2024)

1 / In the twenty-first century, film and music have a dominant presence in public and private space in which to speak and be heard and be of great influence to the culture. In addition, film and music have much more of a sensory hold over viewers and listeners than literature has over its readers, in part, because literature’s interior movement lacks the video-in-motion and the inner and external sonorous elements of its competing media. Though I’m a dedicated writer who’s been published nearly five hundred times, I’m at a loss of how to think about literature and its quiescence anymore. Books and magazines have lost their loudness, the megaphonic range and companioning trust they had—and I had for them—when I was young, admittedly, a long time ago. Today, literature like Ukrainian soldiers on the Donbas front is holed up in a bunker, running targeted bomb-loaded drones while their guns and rocket launchers need oil, bullets, and shells.

Such a turn in movie-over-book aural intensity I trace to the film, The Zone of Interest. If ever there was a movie that was not quite the book and a book that, coming first, is only adjacently related to the film, it’s the two competing versions of this story. Both depict the Nazi perpetrators of the Jews’ slow/fast deaths in Auschwitz, in the snuffing-out days from 1940 to 1943. They embody a weird complementarianism, the 2014 Martin Amis novel and the 2023 Jonathan Glazer film, both using the same title and, artistically processing the Shoah, wildly equivocal.

The tale, told from the perspective of the perpetrators, not the victims, is mostly true—Rudolf Höss is the Commandant who steered Auschwitz’s murderous efficiency, enjoying with his family a villa with a garden, a swimming pool, servants and friends, horses for the kids and a beloved one for himself, all of it sharing a “common” wall with the Camp. Behind that wall the sounds of the messily unending genocide (the verb, not the noun) of Jews selected for gassing and burning continue night and day. In the novel, Amis plaits the storytelling points-of-view of three characters—first, a midlevel officer, the slowly disillusioned Angelus Thomsen, who carries out orders he says reflects “me but it is also not me; there is a further me”) and lusts after his boss’s wife; second, the boss himself, Höss (here called Paul Doll), a self-aggrandizing prig who relishes “offing old ladies and little boys”; and third, Szmul, a Sonder or Jew who, conscripted, fakes his ethnic concern by steering arrivals to the labor force or to the gas chamber, the latter to a delousing shower. (Szmul divulges, offhandedly, to the reader that the showers have no drains.) In the film, the camera watches documentary-style Höss and his family patter on with their mundane lives, eliciting a bit of clumsy, even idyllic sympathy as their dutiful negligence, hearing-and-not-hearing the trains rhythmically chug into camp and unload their shrieking prey.

Devouring both, semi-sickening feasts, I’m taken by the different means of negative aurality—what’s in earshot, what’s overheard, what’s muted, what’s implied, what’s clattering and grinding and chuffing in the earful distance and inching into our nearness, what’s ignored, what’s unignorable, what our ears recognize because, at least, people of a certain age have our retinas burned with images of the camp’s actual bodies, living and dead skeletons, just over the film’s mid-background wall. That concrete wall, topped with barbed-wire, circling the fifteen square miles of Auschwitz’s three units (one for useful prisoners, one for slave labor, and one for immediate extermination) is meant to keep you out but not, with its industrial killing regime, your senses or your fears.

The novel’s sounds—for instance, a train’s choo-chooing to its final stop—are silenced by typography; putting quotations marks around words does not make them heard as speech nor do descriptions of noises raise a decibel. Instead, we hear Amis’s diabolically precise caricaturing language; indeed, both Thomsen and Doll prattle on in thought and conversation like snotty Eton grads, clever to a fault, highly literate but hardly smart. They speak more often than not as Amis writes, with faux erudition, profane wit, hit-or-miss irony or gravitas, hard to separate the mimed from the sincere.

Here is Thomsen reflecting on how, in general, Jews were inspected, deemed worthy of experiment or gas. Composed in Amis’s sardonic style, as orderly as it is barbaric, and I’m reminded of Joseph Williams’s insight that readers help construct characters from the commentary the author gives them to show themselves, at times, eloquent, at times, every day, usually logical (or straining to be) and, dare I say, musical.

The figures . . . that held my attention were not the men in stripes, as they queued or scurried in lines or entangle one another in a kind of centipedal scrum, moving at an unnatural speed, like extras in a silent film, moving faster than their strength or build could bear, as if in obedience to a frantic crank swiveled by a furious hand; the figures that held my attention were not the Kapos who screamed at the prisoners, nor the SS noncoms who screamed at the Kapos, nor the overalled company foremen who screamed at the SS noncoms. No. What held my eye were the figures in city business suits, designers, engineers, administrators from IG Farben plants in Frankfurt, Leverkusen, Ludwigshafen, with leather-bound notebooks and retractable yellow measuring tapes, daintily picking their way past the bodies of the wounded, the unconscious, and the dead.

Only Szmul and his mutterings to himself elicit for us raw resignation: “I am no longer afraid of death, though I am still afraid of dying. I am afraid of dying because it is going to hurt. That’s all there is attaching me to life: the fact that leaving it is going to hurt. It’ll hurt.”

Such simplicity does hurt, especially as we can guess (or refrain from guessing if we like) when the bullet is coming to the back of his neck. Amis does a good job of keeping the hurt internal with Szmul, his self-talk pushing his legs to lumber through the same tasks each day—shaving heads, storing valuables, lying with sincerity. Such exercises in “compassion” German officers delegate to Jewish greeters to control a mass uprising.

Amis never pins the auditory needle on the howls and pleadings. He’s busy showing off or authenticating the massive research he’s done (bespoke of in an afterword) with fetishizing the language and its Nouns with Capital Letters, the Nazi pecking order, the slosh of male lechery they claim as a birthright whether it’s fellow officers’ wives, their Polish servants, or the rape of an occasional noncompliant Jewess.

2 / It’s the film, however, that produces the willies. Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is an encyclopedia of nonvisual, backgrounded sounds, sometimes known, sometimes not, all rather ghostly. It begins with a three-minute black screen setting the “mood” with an abstracted sound swamp, an audible preface, in whose lowering we can’t escape. The film comes to live, and we become auditory witnesses to the inferential chaos of prisoners rushed-to-die. The movie refuses to show this head-on and, instead, forces us to hear, to listen to, and, nigh impossible, to fail to not listen to. This aural catalog of torture was created by Mica Levi and sound designer Johnnie Burns who won a 2024 Oscar for soundtracking the frenzied hysteria that exists beyond the camp wall and penetrates the listener. Indeed, this may be the first film I know of, reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s authoritarian stamp in his masterpieces of the 1960s, using the drama of classical music to mega-mood a movie, that updates Kubrick’s essay in sound the equal of image. (Burns and the film director Jonathan Glaser spent five months recording screams, fights, gunshots, barroom arguments, clanking machinery, gearboxes and grindstones, locomotives rumbling, track-clearing engine whistles—and palimpsest-like, running them by us, aurally noisome or attenuated but always inhospitable.)

Unlike most films where the soundtrack serves a cinematic purpose, here the aural is an earful, a character unto itself, serving a cinematic absence, though the sounds themselves never quite retreat. After the black screen mood stamp, the sound maybe of shifting soil, low frequencies slowing or dipping microtonally, we transition to Rudolf Höss and family on a picnic by a lake, birds chattering, woodpeckers hammering, the initial darkness converted to a paradisiacal scene. (This glen is in the zone of interest, an area buffering the camp, accessible only to the Nazis.) The filmic statement is—understood later—How can Auschwitz exist in this sylvan perfection?

We watch the family return to their villa—home, garden, safety, military bearing and privilege—and there we hear, as if biblically transcendent, a foreign, unfeigned, unwavering low, furnace-like roar, soft, steady. Back and behind but near, almost encroaching. The air beyond the wall is crackling, burning. Orange bands the sky. Two gunshots—wounded, dead, or two dead. Then, in a quick shift and skewed for our view, we are told where we are—at the Auschwitz Death Gate, the Holocaust’s photographic trope. Unmistakable where we are. At the camp’s edge, menacingly, safely astride. But, fear not, we remain in our bower with the family as its daily rituals unfold—the mother and a few of her girls (not the boys) weeding the flower and vegetable gardens; a servant wheelbarrowing in kitchen supplies; a hustling man polishing boots and an indentured girl pouring a shot of vodka for the commandant’s birthday; a visit by gas-chamber architects who’ve designed a circular crematorium that will run nonstop, half of the ovens at full capacity while the other half cools (the order is placed by phone later on); Höss boys in bunk beds playing with a cache of teeth and their army men; husband and wife in separate beds laughing about a person they heard on vacation in Italy making piggy sounds, oink, oink . . . until I’m squirming, When will someone in this conscienceless family stop and listen—who, hearing, will be horrified and, at least, then decide not to listen to the grinding malevolence, ignore, discount, pull curtains, shut windows, shudder with moral panic, which, in turn, will identify its reality for the viewer. Nothing doing, not yet. (As we know, no such moral panic or armed insurrection ever ensues.)

Still, our expectation finally affirmed, the agon arrives. On a ramp overlook is a ten-second shot of Höss, our overworked mass executioner, viewing the great disassembly of Jews, which now we hear, dialed up razorblade high like a factory in full production, the camera gazing up from his waist to his face and his Nazi uniform, a white clouded sky above, and we watch him listen to the horror for us—Panzer loud, turbine operational, orders and screams, screams and gunshots, herding and screams, the separated and shrieking howls of mothers, aunts, grandmothers, daughters. (Does the crying and screaming belong to children or adults? Does it matter?) Forty minutes into this hundred-minute trauma and the film pins itself for us so it and us know where it is, where it’s been all along, shocking us since we have dreaded this stamp, an enforced, overlong hearing to what we’d rather not hear, rather not have confirmed, though the film would not hurt without Höss’s silent godlike rapture of his competency.

The Zone of Interest rumbles on, its themes of impressive duty, of no escape, of Nazi orderliness—a justification of evil in itself—dragging us deeper into its morass: We can’t go on, we’ll go on. We can’t not listen. We shouldn’t not listen is the message. It’s on earful display, the abrasive machinery of Auschwitz present throughout the film and a few glimpses of the occupiers tuning in. One is a Polish woman sewing and sniffing burning flesh, rushing to shut the windows. Another is a child who stops playing with his soldiers and dice, peeks through the blinds, and quickly returns to rolling. Still another is the visiting grandmother unable to sleep, up and pacing, sickened by the sounds. The most awful may be a quick shot of a worker burying ash clumps behind the house, nurturing the blood of the soil. In these glimpses, the inconsequential peripherals are quietly sensing, listening, tuning to their senses, and for just that amount of time we get to hear, again, the crematoria at peak power.

Nearing the film’s end come major changes: Höss has been transferred and his wife, refusing to leave her little whitewashed haven, says, “They’ll have to drag me out of here.” She stays on, ruling the family more harshly. Höss goes to a Reich-wide meeting of extermination camp commandants—he notes drying that he’s been eliminating most of the 12,000 per day who arrive—plus, at an evening fete, he’s toasted for his dogged efficiency. Though he’s still a mid-career murderer, Höss seems bored. Something indigestible, some clog in his stomach, has made him bilious, a semi-conscious-filled finale. Juxtaposed is a scene of Höss descending a labyrinthine stairwell and stopping to puke, though he can’t, and a brief tour of women after-hours cleaning the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and short views of its glassed-in rooms of piles upon piles of Jews’ shoes, crutches, suitcases, prison garb. (Why did the Nazis save these personal items? To prove that what they’d done was personal, individual.) Though it feels like a relief, the scenery of extermination is pregnant with the unanswerable question. The film like the crematoria seems to just run out of fuel.

Before, another black screen, and into the ending credits, Mica Levi scores a minimalist tune of rising guttural sounds, in 5/4 time, like drying tar, to help make a final point: The elite exterminators were far more aware of what they were doing than we, witnesses and rememberers of history, are. Erasing that stain is impossible. It’s why the unlistened-to tone of Glazer’s movie is “audibly” filmed and, consequentially, so loud.

There’s no (literal) listening to the book and there’s no reading the film. The contrast is perhaps elemental to the vaunted distinction between film and literature. A nonvisual auditory mise en scène of, or for, Auschwitz as the lynchpin of the Shoah. It’s atmospherics, not to say why anything happened but to be another baffling “explanation” of that which is primarily inexplicable though bodily visceral and strangely rational in what has and what can and what should survive—footage of timber-like corpses bulldozed into mass graves, liberated famished prisoners, children hiking up their sleeves to show us their number tattoos, films and novels that try to depict the sense of it.