Paper Mache
The Academy Awards ceremony will be held this Sunday afternoon. Each year, I try to see all the Best Pictures nominees, not that I hold up the Academy Awards as the be-all and endall of the movie world. It is part of the Hollywood marketing machine, but the nominations help me cull the movies I want to see from the hundreds of new films created each year. I realized that after the nominations were announced I had seen most of the top category nominees, so I set out to see the rest.
The Best Picture list includes
The Holdovers, American Fiction, The Zone of Interest, Barbie, Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall, Maestro, and Killers of the Flower Moon. There is not a lot of frivolity in most of these films below the surface. Well maybe in Barbie and Maestro, but they even pack a punch if you look closely enough.
I have to say, I liked them all, but the one that has really stuck with me is the holocaust era film, The Zone of Interest. Don’t we have enough death camp films already? Not like this we don’t. It takes the dehumanization of Jews to a whole new level. The basic story is about the Auschwitz camp commandant and his family. They live just outside the camp walls and live a seemingly normal existence as if oblivious to what goes on just beyond their backyard. In one especially chilling scene, a board meeting of the top brass discusses improved next-generation crematorium designs and commends the camp commandant’s productivity. They talk in very cold terms about the need to step up production as 700,000 additional units (Jews) will soon arrive from Hungary. The scene that haunts me the most shows the commandant’s family in their backyard having a picnic, kids playing in the pool, a classic suburban scene, with the smokestacks of Auschwitz just over the fence belching out smoke from burning bodies. Can’t get it out of my mind.
There is nothing new about the dehumanization of large groups of people at the hands of the reigning power structure. When Europeans first arrived in the New World, there were tens of millions of indigenous people across North America. By 1900, there were only 230,000 due to genocide and disease. As American expansionism progressed, they were seen more as an impediment to nation-building and were further dehumanized and exterminated. All the while this genocide was occurring, shiploads of African slaves were arriving. At auction, they were referred to with nonhuman names like bucks, wenches, and pickaninnies. Look at the current border issues in Texas where the individuals are referred to as “illegal aliens,” whereas illegal Europeans are émigrés or immigrants.
Several other films touch on the theme of the dehumanization of large groups of people. The Osage Indians in Killers of the Flower Moon certainly weren’t treated as equals by the whites looking to steal their oil money by any means including marrying into families and killing off in-laws. In the year’s favorite, Oppenheimer, this is certainly the case. Even though Mr. Oppenheimer was conflicted about the work he was doing to neutralize an entire nation to avenge the Pearl Harbor attack, traditional weapons can’t compare with the atomic bomb’s ability to render lifeless many square miles of cities. The victims must be dehumanized to do that sort of work. Conservatively, the death count between Hiroshima and Nagasaki was well over 100,000 with far more injured who would die prematurely. Like any great art, films can teach us a lot and remind us that there is still much work left to be done.