S4E26.5: The Zone of Interest
Added 2025-11-21 11:06:39 +0000 UTCSome streams come to a head in this episode, as we discuss Jonathan Glazer's film of our time, The Zone of Interest. Rudolph Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, lives with his family in a house just off the camp itself.
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Friend of the show Bella, a refugee evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021, is raising money for her gender confirmation surgery! Anything you can give would be hugely appreciated! https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/team-bella
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Check out friend of the show Mattie's new book Simplicity here, or wherever fine graphic novels are sold!
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FREE PALESTINE
Hey, Devon here. In our home, we talk a lot about how insane everything feels, and agonise constantly over what can be done to best help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza facing the full brunt of genocidal violence. My partner Rebecca has put together a list of four fundraisers you can contribute to- all of them are at work on the ground doing what they can.
-Palestinian Communist Youth Union, which is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine
https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity
-Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla
https://www.waterislifegaza.org/
-Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also
https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848
-Thamra, which distributes herb and veg seedlings, repairs and maintains water infrastructure, and distributes food made with replanted veg patches
https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-thamra-cultivating-resilience-in-gaza
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WEB DESIGN ALERT
Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here: https://www.tomallen.media/
Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the every app account
Comments
This movie is about running away from, hiding from, and repressing your humanity, or at least parts of it, while trying and failing to continue to live as a human. What is humanity? It is kindness, compassion, empathy, understanding, and a desire for the well-being of others. It is something that is innate to human nature. But what fascism and all other acts of atrocity require is a disconnect from humanity. To commit these terrible acts, you need to block out that part of you which is repulsed by these horrible things. You need to compartmentalize it, wall it off, because you still need to live an ostensibly normal life. You want to have a family, celebrate your birthday, do well at work, and to do that you can never fully acknowledge the full truth of what you are doing. And when the function of the system of society which you exist within is to carry out these atrocities, you become fully an empty cog carrying out these actions, totally disassociated from any authentic truth or connection to the reality of it. You abandon the lived humanity and become a machine. And this is what fascism does. It removes you from humanity and turns you into a tool for the system. It placates the base desires for power and greed, and leaves you an inauthentic, hollow corpse of a human. I find Höss's story to be one of a person constantly trying to deny his humanity and ignorance the reality of what he is doing, but that humanity never fully goes away, and this denial of it just makes its re-emergence more viserally harmful to him. But because he can't do anything but repress it, he never become anything more than a willful cog in the genocide machine. I'd like to imagine that the vision of the modern day was real for him, that he was forced to see the stain on history that his actions left behind, because that just makes his decision to continue on with what he was doing to be more truthful. It's just another example of him choosing to ignore reality and his humanity. Because the truth is that, as much as I want to believe, these people who commit these horrors are not inhuman monsters, they are still very human, and they have to choose every day to continue ignoring reality and their own humanity to continue doing what they do. They have to choose to subject themselves to their own dehumanization, to the hollowing out of their souls. They are not natural born monsters, they have to be made into this. And to some extent, and gives me hope that we can prevent people from turning into this, and that human nature is fundamentally humane. This may be heresy, but I see similarities in this character arc to Owen's in I Saw The TV Glow. Both characters are constantly repressing their this innate part of their humanity to conform to a horrible and miserable system. The root of all evil it seems is the rejection of our full, honest selves, and how it serves dehumanizing and exploitative systems.
NowhereMan661
2026-01-02 01:49:30 +0000 UTCI guarantee that "Live, laugh, love" written in Hebrew is on the walls of many shitty condos in Isn'treal.
NowhereMan661
2026-01-01 23:33:25 +0000 UTCOh, so this is the fascist that innovated becoming a Catholic as an adult. Must have been huge for them
Noblesse Oblahaj
2025-12-13 19:30:03 +0000 UTCYou know what, I’ll admit it- I am in disagreement with Haeneke’s take on Spielberg, simply because I think, by its very nature, anything written ABOUT the holocaust is a story in the manner he despises applying to the holocaust itself, with arcs and themes. This isn’t to say that Schindler’s list is above criticism by any means, but simply that I don’t think you can escape the chains of narrative. This film certainly doesn’t
Ineloquent Reverie
2025-12-09 02:04:05 +0000 UTCAlso, I think this is such a great episode. It is really funny and also one of the best pieces of actual film criticism that I've heard in the format.
Emilio Porras Vergara
2025-11-26 15:28:46 +0000 UTCAbout the HDMI incident. I watched my torrented copy of War for the Planet of the Apes almost to the end before i figured out that the apes' sign language was supposed to be subtitled and I just hadn't turned it on. I thought it was a daring, audacious move to have a huge budget movie where most of the dialogue was signed!
Emilio Porras Vergara
2025-11-26 15:27:51 +0000 UTCTwo things: 1) Please don't look at masscare/war crimes footage unless you're in a good emotional place; traumatising yourself helps no one. 2) The way the Germans reconciled anti-socialism (and anti-democracy/anti-liberalism, etc.) with hatred of rich Jews is simple: rampant antisemitism. Jews were blamed for everything: too much equality, too little equality, too much socialism, not enough nationalism.
Charlie Cussans
2025-11-21 18:09:59 +0000 UTCJoined the patreon just to get at this one
Steeeeve
2025-11-21 18:04:26 +0000 UTC
