Interest is, among other things, a business, an accounting term, and a strictly capitalist one at that – as in interest rate. There are also business interests. Jonathan Glazer consciously follows the footsteps of classical Marxist analyses dissecting Nazism and the crimes of the Third Reich as an extreme fulfilment of the capitalist rationale (see Adorno and Horkheimer, Traverso, etc.) where people are exploited until depleted of life and productive energy, and then utilized like some raw material waste. In The Zone of Interest, we can see the concentration camp as a horrifying economic unit.
Concentration camp as an economic unit, subject to capitalist efficiency requirements, is one thing. Third Reich is also presented as a way of managing capitalism in conditions of its profound, structural crisis, at least on a specific, militarily conquered and controlled territory. It’s a predatory and parasitic economy, able to make some people rich only by depriving others of their life and property (think of the Nazi officers’ wives talking about clothes they have taken away from Jewish women).
Un-Interest
There is also interest as in being interested. Glazer’s film is perversely about shunning away from being interested, about a life in a state of conscious un-interest, about being comfortable while not being interested to care. Like, for example care about monstrous crimes which are routinely committed on industrial scale just under your nose. These crimes that no one has any interest in caring about, are precisely the source or necessary condition of prosperity for some.
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