ReportWire

Tag: martin amis

  • “Bodies lie in the bright grass and some are murdered and some are picnicking”: The Zone of Interest

    “Bodies lie in the bright grass and some are murdered and some are picnicking”: The Zone of Interest

    [ad_1]

    When Martin Amis’ fourteenth novel, The Zone of Interest, came out in 2014, many people still believed we lived in a very different world than the one of Nazi Germany. For Americans, after all, it was still before the 2016 election, the 2021 insurgency, the reemergence of Trump yet again in the 2024 election. People outside of the U.S., however, have always been less naive. Especially Europeans. For the lingering pall of World War II remains cast over everything throughout the continent: monuments, statues, plaques, walls. Constant reminders that to forget history is to slip back into the same dangerous patterns in the present. 

    With Jonathan Glazer’s brutal adaptation of Amis’ novel, a different aspect is highlighted than in the source material. An aspect that more directly asks the question: how does evil not only so effortlessly rationalize itself, but continue to live with itself each day? In the book, Amis does a better job of concealing his main character’s true identity by, if nothing else, naming him Paul Doll instead of Rudolf…as in Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant at Auschwitz. Glazer doesn’t much bother with that, likely figuring one of history’s biggest monsters doesn’t deserve such a cloak. Being Jewish himself (unlike Amis), Glazer’s take on the material is undoubtedly more personal. And certainly comes across that way. His merciless contrast between how someone so despicable lives right next to the very thing that serves as the crux of their despicability is what keeps viewers on the edge of their seat throughout the film despite never actually seeing any onscreen torture of camp prisoners. 

    Instead, Glazer relies on the horror of the sounds coming from the camps. Screams, burnings, gunshots. All contrasted against “idyllic” scenes like the flowers growing in Rudolf’s (played by Christian Friedel) backyard. Or, more accurately, his wife’s backyard. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, clearly on her game this year with film choices, for Anatomy of a Fall is also Oscar-nominated), indeed, “runs the roost,” as it were. Perhaps being more Nazi-like in her rigidity than her husband. In point of fact, Rudolf is sure to tell her she’s the “Queen of Auschwitz.” This being something she relays proudly to her visiting mother, Linna (Imogen Kogge). Initially, Linna seems pleased with her daughter’s way of life. “Living off the land” and all that, but, after enough days spent seeing and hearing the goings-on at the camp (complete with watching the flames burst into the sky as the crematorium roars on next to them), she departs without any warning. The note she does leave behind with an explanation is never shown to the audience, only the image of Hedwig reading it and then promptly burning it in her own “mini crematorium” of a cast iron fireplace. Because it’s clear that Hedwig can’t “receive” any information that might infect her delusions about what this place really is. What it actually represents. And that is, of course, how the unspeakable suffering of others is always at the core of those on top’s pleasure. Glazer elucidates this in so many ways throughout The Zone of Interest, but among the most memorable is when Hedwig is given the latest batch of personal effects from those transferred to the camp. Among these items is a lavish fur coat and a pink-hued lipstick. 

    Greedy Hedwig is quick to retire to her room and try these things on, even the used lipstick. Because, apparently, Jews aren’t that “dirty” to Nazis when they want to use something they’ve stolen from them. Plucked and pilfered from their very body. It is such a disgusting sight that it makes graverobbers look almost positively benign by comparison. Glazer eases his audience into this more overt form of reprehensibility, opening the film with a black screen filled with ominous noises and Mica Levi’s jarring music. That blackness leads into the contrasting image of Rudolf on an idyllic picnic with his family, taking a swim in the river as he surveys and appreciates the natural beauty around him. Natural beauty that is a stark contrast to the visions he views at “work” on a day-to-day basis. Where “just following orders” meant the mass extermination of millions of human beings. This done in just less than five years. All that life snuffed out thanks to methodical German “efficiency,” carried out by men with the same effortless compartmentalizing ability as Höss. And yes, walls like the one between Höss’ “home” and the concentration camp do make it so much easier to compartmentalize. Something that not only Germany knows about, but also Israel. With its West Bank Barrier designed to keep Palestinians (therefore, Palestinian “militants”) out as they’re summarily abused in their occupied territory.

    The seed for building this barrier was heavily planted by former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who said in 1994, “We have to decide on separation as a philosophy. There has to be a clear border. Without demarcating the lines, whoever wants to swallow 1.8 million Arabs will just bring greater support for Hamas.” The clinical, “pragmatic” tone with which Rabin stated this is a mirror of Nazi “logic” during WWII. And, as so many have pointed out, it seems more than a touch ironic that the very race—Jews—subjected to such cruelty has decided to unleash similar acts of violence and oppression on another race. This being yet another reason why The Zone of Interest’s release comes at such a timely moment. Glazer couldn’t have anticipated just how timely. Not only in relation to Israel with Palestine, but also that “other” increasingly forgotten war between Russia and Ukraine. 

    This is why, when accepting the LA Film Critics Award for Best Director, Glazer remarked, “Obviously the events in the film predate the abominations of these current conflicts by years. But the questions it poses are the same: to ask ourselves to have a genuine human response, to ask ourselves why one life can be considered more valuable than another. Human pain is pain and loss is loss and at their most basic or fundamental, the needs and desires of any of us are the same. Violence and oppression of any kind produces more violence and oppression, not less.” But it seems history will never teach governments and regimes anything, that it will forever be doomed to repeat itself. Especially since, as The Zone of Interest suggests, it isn’t necessarily “pure evil” that causes violence and subjugation and genocide, but rather, a willingness to simply go along with pure evil’s will. “Just following orders.” 

    It was the Milgram Shock Experiment, conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961, that accented an unsettling point about that Nazi-spouted excuse: any ordinary person is capable of what is reductively branded as “evil.” When coerced by those in positions of authority, Milgram found that the large majority were willing to go against their own personal beliefs in order to “follow orders.” To obey. Milgram eventually summarized these unnerving findings as follows: “​​The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

    Despite ringing true in relation to how the events leading up to the Holocaust could go unchecked, Milgram’s experiment was viewed unfavorably as an analogy for what Nazi officials like Höss and Adolf Eichmann were capable of doing. And even what Höss’ wife was more than capable of turning a blind eye to for the sake of her “comforts” and “needs.” Something most are also willing to do every day while others suffer on an unfathomable scale. As Jenny Holzer once said in her Survival series, “Bodies lie in the bright grass and some are murdered and some are picnicking.” This is at the heart of what The Zone of Interest quietly, yet ruthlessly illuminates. The tragic part being that we all still need to be illuminated about our own complicity in the goings-on of the present.

    [ad_2]

    Genna Rivieccio

    Source link

  • Martin Amis Is Dead at 73

    Martin Amis Is Dead at 73

    [ad_1]

    Swaggering, satiric, urbane, corrosive, propulsive, hilarious, erudite, and malevolent: such was the prose of Martin Amis, a writer who had the presence and personality to back it all up. With pursed lips, an outsize forehead, and the kind of glare that could set newspaper and television interviewers back on their heels, Amis was ready-made for media celebrity. In a widely repeated formulation that probably revolted him, he was the “Mick Jagger of the book world.” There’s some truth in it. The Booker Prize eluded him, but you would be hard-pressed to name a bigger literary star to come out of Britain in the past half century. Since the early 1970s, Amis has been a recurring feature on best-seller lists and in review sections, at conferences, and in the media, with a steady stream of essays, criticism, profiles, and, most notably, novels that included The Rachel Papers, Success, Money, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, and Yellow Dog.

    Amis died of cancer on Friday at age 73, 11 years after his best friend, Christopher Hitchens (a longtime columnist for this magazine), died of a similar disease. Although they tended to work in different genres (Amis largely literary, Hitchens largely political), the two made a pair: a Fitzgerald and Hemingway for the Age of Thatcher and beyond. Amis’s final book, 2020’s Inside Story, a novel/memoir mash-up, was fueled by goodbyes, with Hitchens at its center, along with other departed figures who left their mark on the author, such as his prose hero, Saul Bellow, and the poet Philip Larkin, a close friend of Amis’s father, Kingsley Amis, the celebrated novelist of Lucky Jim.

    Inside Story was a distant echo of Amis’s 2000 memoir, Experience, but with a fractalized timeline, shifting perspectives, pseudonymous figures, and plentiful digressions, along with the usual uproarious jokes, sexual candor, and lacerating insights. Although Amis’s battles with cancer were not publicly known, it was difficult not to read Inside Story as a settling of accounts: the author’s own farewell.

    Amis was born in Oxford, England, on August 25, 1949. His paternal grandfather was a clerk in the mustard business, but the literary family Martin grew up in knew no such ho-hum middle-class stability. Kingsley Amis and Hilly Bardwell, Martin’s mother, would have multiple marriages (Kingsley later married the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard) and Martin, the middle child of three, attended more than a dozen schools. In the academic year 1959–60, the family lived in Princeton, New Jersey, as Kingsley made his way from university town to university town. “America excited and frightened me,” Martin wrote of the experience decades later, “and has continued to do so.”

    Amis, with that unmistakably British perspective and voice, wrote often about the United States in his fiction and essays, including the 1986 nonfiction collection The Moronic Inferno, whose title, borrowed from Bellow, feels even more prophetic now than it did then. At the time, Amis himself predicted as much: “It exactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the only reality,” he wrote in the book’s introduction. In his later years, living in Brooklyn, Amis was preoccupied with the bonfire-like conflagrations of American politics in the Trump era.

    As an undergrad at Oxford, Amis, a voracious student, hoovered up the entirety of English literature, graduating with first-class honors from Exeter College. He later said that he fantasized in those days about E. B. White showing up, out of the blue, to offer him a job at The New Yorker. Instead, Amis found employment at the Times Literary Supplement; by the age of 27, he was literary editor of The New Statesman and soon after became a feature writer at The Observer. Given his family background and predilections, such precocity was perhaps only natural. It extended into the realm of fiction, as Amis began turning out novels, starting in 1973 with The Rachel Papers, an unabashedly raunchy and gleefully adolescent comedy about coming-of-age and sex during the era of polyester and platform shoes. The book achieved a further level of fame through scandal: another young writer, Jacob Epstein, liberally plagiarized it in a headline-generating case of brazen literary theft. (Epstein later apologized publicly for swiping passages from Amis and others.)

    As the 1980s unfolded Amis was taking bigger swings. His London trilogy—Money, London Fields, and The Information—cemented his literary superstardom in a series of fat novels that allowed him to fix his basilisk glare on the excesses and privations of late capitalism. The New York Times lauded his “cement-hard observations of a seedy, queasy new Britain, part strip-joint, part Buckingham Palace.” Moving into the 21st century, the focus widened still: Hitler, Stalin, September 11. Geohistorical horribleness became the theme and with it an ever-enlarging ambition. The question of whether Amis’s talent, vast though it was, properly equipped him for this challenge remains open among some readers and critics, even those who admire him. As Giles Harvey put it in The New Yorker, attempting to fix Amis’s position in our time, “A new generation of readers may think of him primarily as an aging controversialist, the maker of certain inflammatory comments about Islam or euthanasia, rather than as the author of some of the most daring comic novels of the past several decades.”

    Amis came to the fore with the imposing generational fraternity that consisted of him, Hitchens, Ian McEwan, James Fenton, Julian Barnes, and Salman Rushdie (whom Amis wrote about for Vanity Fair, in 1990): the bright young British things of the era, an intellectual boys’ club. Among them, Hitchens was Amis’s wingman, counselor, competitor, foil, cheerleader, and near twin. (“The Hitch” unerringly referred to Amis with an affectionate sobriquet: “Little Keith.”) Barnes was the one with whom Amis had a famous falling out in 1994, after Amis fired Barnes’s wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, and took up with the powerhouse Andrew Wylie, who managed to secure a 500,000-pound advance for The Information. (“It was not my finest hour,” Amis later said.) Particularly in his home country, Amis was the target of envy and animus for an array of infractions—for his illustrious surname, for his indecorousness toward British letters, for his success in love (a Lothario reputation preceded his two marriages, the current of which is to the writer Isabel Fonseca), and, broadly speaking, for his success in success. The satirical Private Eye took aim, referring to Amis for years as “Smarty Anus,” the kind of jibe that could have come from Amis’s own pen.

    Another member of the reading public who had difficulty with Amis was his own father, who never showed much outward enthusiasm for his son’s work, which, in truth, came to outshine his own. They tussled over politics, as the aging, dyspeptic Kingsley migrated ever rightward. The son made an emotional plea to another elder novelist, Saul Bellow, with whom he’d become close in the 1980s. “As long as you’re alive,” Amis wrote the Nobel laureate author, “I’ll never feel entirely fatherless.” As for Bellow’s own opinion of Amis’s work, when a journalist asked him if Amis had the kind of genius that could merit comparisons to Flaubert and Joyce, Bellow responded, “Yes, I do.”

    [ad_2]

    Mark Rozzo

    Source link