The Zone Of Interest - and compartmentalisation

I recently watched the award-lavished film The Zone of Interest on Amazon Prime, and it's still rattling around my head. So here are some words about it. 

The film is about a few years in the life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, who live in their family home next door to the concentration camp. The film is masterful in its omission, and what it doesn't show. There is nothing violent or graphic except for a distant soundscape. It hauntingly blends documentary film style with feature film style, and latterly and most potently, actual documentary film.

It invites us to consider the inner world of Höss and how he compartmentalises his home and work life. It brought to mind the famed memoir of concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning. He writes about the mind being our most powerful tool, drawing on his experience from the other side of the fence to Höss. Both of them exercised incredible powers of compartmentalisation in extremely different ways.

It's a hard film to watch, and an easy film to avoid because of the gruelling subject matter.

In trying to zoom out and gain mental distance from the horror, we might consider how we compartmentalise work and home lives. Or how we don't, and the impact that has on our mental health. Work and home lives are often blurred today thanks to technology and smartphones, but perhaps they always have been, and always will be. Because compartmentalising is tough, we all have these competing inner worlds, probably at least a bit of guilt and shame, different zones of interest. And we all have less pleasant tasks or parts of our work that we might wish away, but we're obliged to undertake. We might do them on autopilot while thinking about something else, deliberate mental avoidance can be an essential tool to just getting through the day.

Avoidance or compartmentalisation has a complex relationship with focus and attention. All can be necessary at different moments.