A24
Humanity begets desensitization. It’s not necessarily our fault that we become hardened by all of the atrocities we witness in our lives. If we’re fortunate enough to live for a long time, acclimating ourselves to an angry world is practically the only way to cope with the unending horror of humanity’s atrocities. How else can we be expected to go on, knowing all of the death and destruction that our greedy species has wrought?
But coping is one thing; achieving understanding and acceptance is another, more difficult effort. It’s a comparatively simple act to relegate terror to the conduct of others, rather than to examine the capacity for terror inside of ourselves. “I could never be a part of that,” we tell ourselves as we look back and consider all of the abominable deeds of the past, or when we wake up to read the breaking news’ most heart-wrenching headlines. Is the fact that humanity’s repugnance has persisted through history, up until this very moment, not enough to shake ourselves awake? Perhaps we’ve found comfort in our desensitization, and maybe that comfort has morphed into complacency.
The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer—which picked up five and 13 Oscar nominations last week, respectively—are two films that are unwilling to bow to this modern state of unconscious ignorance. These movies don’t aim to educate in the ways that the war films of our past have done, through graphic images of violence and inhuman brutality. Instead, all of that cruelty is offscreen, just out of sight, left to the gnarled fringes of implication. The audience is given no out in the context of these two incredible depictions of human unthinking. There are no broad pictures of destruction, or any sights of violence to give viewers a one-way ticket back to complacency. They are so blisteringly effective because that traditional method of storytelling is no longer cogent enough to obtain true empathy. By forcing the spectator to focus on the unseen, The Zone of Interest and Oppenheimer have changed the way that movies about war and genocide should be made forever.