In a culture where nuance and intelligent discourse are bludgeoned into unrecognizable heaps of brain matter on a daily basis, bad faith takes and gross distortions that serve other agendas are to be expected. Two weeks ago, filmmaker Jonathan Glazer won an Academy Award for Best International Film for THE ZONE OF INTEREST (to me far superior to and more morally penetrating than the turgid hagiography that won Best Picture, but I digress). The speech that he gave to an audience of millions was brief and nearly apolitical, speaking to what should be a fairly obvious moral need to fight dehumanization on any stage. Yet his words were immediately attacked by a very vocal contingent for supposedly “renouncing his Jewishness” and equating the mass murders happening in Gaza (at the hands of the current Israeli government) with those carried out by the Nazis in World War II. That his words did neither speak to how disingenuous and self-serving many of these people are, their willful ignorance and moral repugnance clear given what the entire world sees with their own eyes, every single day in the Middle East.
I’m reminded of what Naomi Klein wrote, that “Glazer described his characters not as monsters but as ‘non-thinking, bourgeois, aspirational-careerist horrors,’ people who turn profound evil into white noise.” I can’t think of a better description of those who have signed their name to a blacklist that is nothing more than an embarrassing and shameful apologia for genocide. Many of them are executives in the film industry (and random, sleezy makers of middling horror movies) who build ivory towers on the backs of those who tirelessly create for them, who have no sense of self awareness and a complete inability to be self-critical and realize they are on the wrong side of history. Glazer’s speech, to me, was profoundly humanistic, an almost too diplomatic way of speaking out about the horrific bloodshed to an audience not used to being called out on their moral blindness. That the work, and his words, will long outlive any of these people’s moral failings isn’t up for debate. But for now, it’s a disgusting and disappointing misrepresentation of a great work of art.
