Overlooked

  For some reason I've seen Kubrick's Shining adaptation pop up in more than a few reviews for The Zone Of Interest, as if it's some obvious cinematic inspiration - it is very much not.

  The truth is that the formal techniques used in The Shining (slow zooms, snap-zooms, POV shots, flowing Steadicam, cross-cutting, stylistic lighting, helicopter shots) are so far outside of Jonathan Glazer's visual language in Zone as he goes out of his way to avoid using these and other techniques. So, how exactly are these two similar? I mean, they're both creepy movies but by that logic I could compare Zone to The Babadook or Insidious. Even their temperaments are diametrically opposite; The Shining is dramatic and heavy-handed in everything it sets out to do* while The Zone Of Interest is undramatic, observational and subtle.

  *I'm not saying this is a detriment, I'm a fan of everything Kubrick does in that movie, I'm just pointing it out for the sake of the comparison. I mean, for fuck's sake, the 'Kubrick Stare' became a meme for a reason yet he's still regarded as this 'subtle' filmmaker. There's a huge gap between the movies people think Kubrick made and the movies he actually made - just as there's the myth and mystique of him as this elusive figure vs. the regular-ass Roseanne-loving dude he was (not to mention the persistent misconception that he abused Shelley Duvall, which she has explicitly debunked).

  So what is this comparison to The Zone Of Interest based on, exactly? I think trying to unpack that lies probably somewhere in Rodney Ascher's Room 237 about the cumulative effect of how The Shining became a cultural black hole. Again, there's the misconception that Kubrick was a perfectionist, so when we have clear continuity errors they're blown out of proportion. Kubrick was more focused on performances than he was on chair placement but when you see him through the lens of an infallible genius, a chair moving from one part of the frame to another means 'secret ghosts.' Jonathan Glazer's movies have that air of mystique and perfectionism so maybe that's why the Kubrickian stereotype is laid upon him and his work...despite having nothing to do with The Shining.

   It's also why so many interpretations of Glazer's approach flatten the movie into being about "the banality of evil" despite that classification not applying in the slightest (and I've been talking about positive reviews, just to be clear). One person says it, then another, and eventually it gets parroted absentmindedly until we have a consensus of cliches. The Shining is a buzzy, nostalgic, easily recognizable IP to point to - which is exactly what a 'Pick Me' review thrives on in the attention economy of Film Twitter and Letterboxd.

  The amount of reviews eschewing craft for purely vibes-based analysis is seriously fucking worrisome. If that sounds sensationalistic consider that there are even established filmmakers (Ava DuVernay and Scott Derrickson) who've said that the filmmaking process isn't important to them.

  Both quotes indicate fundamental misunderstandings of their chosen artform. They're essentially prioritizing 'feelings' over craft as if the two are at all separate to begin with, admitting to a willingness to abandon artistic integrity because execution isn't as important to them as intent. This 'Content over Form' philosophy is anti-art brain rot. That's why comparisons to The Shining are evidence of a skill issue; media illiteracy.

  But, I mean: vibes.

  Despite attempts to smear him and his intent following his Oscars speech, Glazer's film accomplished everything it set out to, without any Derrickson/DuVernay compromise, because he deftly understands aesthetic virtues. His craft and his intentions aren't even 'tied,' that's too weak: they're connected down on an atomic level. His movie and its restraint wouldn't exist without the disciplined technique he employed to make it.

  That's why it's so frustrating (paradoxically so) to see what he's done go unnoticed: a profoundly thoughtful movie that interrogates its audience's ignorance.

  Alissa Wilkinson, for Vox: 

 "The effect of watching The Zone of Interest ought, I think, to make us feel a mounting horror — and then, from there, to make us think, an act Arendt was always writing about. In the Life of the Mind introduction, she argued that the antidote to the thoughtless cruelty of the autocratic systems around us might be thinking: 'Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty of telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?'

Maybe, she wrote. 'Could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evildoing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it?' she asks. In other words, could learning to think, to avoid cliched thought and stock phrases, train us out of complacency? Could being shocked and horrified and made profoundly uncomfortable, left without easy language, perpetuate a moral good?

What Glazer does with The Zone of Interest is give the audience just a taste of that shock, and then force us into thinking. He never shows the atrocities outright — not to pique our curiosity but because we do not want to see them. To depict it would be, in its own way, an atrocity. Instead, he adds a visual and aural layer of abstraction in order to let us test ourselves, to see if we are, perhaps, the sort of people willing to be in their place now."