The Gaze as the Obscure God

Natalie Wülfing

The Zone of Interest (2023), a film by Jonathan Glazer, transports us from the first frame into the deepest dread, felt in the body. With a grey blank screen and the indistinguishable sound of distant droning we are looked at by nothing.
Then we observe provincial family life, in nature, in a garden and inside a home. We are in the home life of Nazis, the garden wall being the wall of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The father of the family is Rudolf Höss, the commander responsible for the acceleration of the mass murder through the efficiency of the gas chambers and crematoriums.

But it is not a holocaust movie falling into absurdities of voyeuristic kitsch. Films about victims of any kind always display this humanist sadism inherent in good intentions.
Glazer’s film does not fall into this trap. Here, not our “vision is solicited, but our gaze is aroused”[1], as a nausea that reigns over the entire experience of watching this film. We are in the field of the gaze.
The camera creates a dispassionate effect using remote-controlled fixed cameras, echoing the distance of the protagonists to the real next door. Glazer makes us part of the horror by emphasizing the manifestation of the “rejection of the pathological object.”[2] The protagonists are shown in the scotomisation of reality, result of the foreclosure, that both knows and sees, and ignores. The soundtrack, diffuse and haunting, enters the body of the viewer instead.

Thus, Glazer does not avert his eye and does not “succumb to the fascination of the sacrifice in itself,”[3] as many film directors have been guilty of. He rather makes present what “the offering to obscure gods of an object of sacrifice” means. “As if under some monstrous spell,”[4] Lacan adds. Glazer renders this monstrous and invisible spell present by the absence of the crime and its victims. Unspeakable atrocity is here shown by the unspeakableness as such.

Prosaic homelife, the dahlias and the lilacs, serve as banalities of evil. The fog represents the other side. Yes - there is the fog of the smoke rising behind the garden wall, the fog of ash falling into the stream where the family goes boating - but the voice and the gaze are present as objects a in their function of appearing in the absence of seeing, hearing and speaking.
The fog - Night and Fog by Alain Resnais is referenced in the grey blank screen and its industrial humming sound - is a real of “desire in its pure state” that “culminates in sacrifice and murder.”[5]
As Lacan says, indifference or averting one’s eye from the barbarity, as has been said about the German population of the time, are but indicators. They are not the key to the mystery of the monstrosity. “But turning a courageous gaze towards this phenomenon […] the sacrifice signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of this Other that I call here the dark God.”[6]

REfErences

[1] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, London: Penguin, 1994, p. 274

[2] Ibid., p. 276.

[3] Ibid., p. 275.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., pp. 275-6.

[6] Ibid.