A grinning young couple points upward toward a caption reading “our simple seggs aftercare routine.” They playact the steps: shower, snuggle, bed. Scroll: next video,… I think about The Zone of Interest (2023) while I am making my kids’ lunches, running their baths, folding laundry. Similar domestic routines make up much of the film’s action, the center of its study of how the institution of the family confers a mirage of humanity and morality onto its participants. Saturated in soft light, Broderie anglaise linen drying on a clothesline in the sunshine, the film shares an aesthetic with Julie Blackmon’s whimsical photographs of domestic life, and the Höss’s backyard recalls Esther Greenwood’s observation in The Bell Jar that a neighbor’s lawn is strewn with the “the whole sprawling paraphernalia of suburban childhood.” Toy cars, floaties, dolls, and bicycles. These symbols of cherished childhoods and the good life secured by family-making are what we see instead of human suffering. Other than the fleeting glimpse of a striped pajama and the incessant smoke from incinerating bodies, the film depicts none of the horrific visual tropes of the Holocaust genre. Instead, we spend a languid summer with the Höss family. The husband, Rudolf, is a
Bold Brave Spirit