47. Watching a dystopia
I.
Horror is often at its most terrifying when you know something is happening, but cannot see it. In The Zone of Interest, we follow the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, who live right next to the concentration camp. The family completely ignores the horror. We see the children playing happily in a blooming garden, whilst black smoke rises from the chimneys in the background.
As a viewer, you never enter the camp’s walls. So you see absolutely nothing, but you feel a constant sense of foreboding, just as the family must feel it too. Whilst mother Hedwig shows her baby the most beautiful flowers in the garden, we hear screams in the distance and the sounds of heavy physical labour. The film is full of ambiguities and contrasts. The Höss family seem unconcerned. A visitor complains about how hot and crowded it was on the train. “Someone even fainted.” It is these kinds of banal remarks that make the protagonists of this film utterly terrifying.
It is clear why director Jonathan Glazer (who previously made the brilliant Under the Skin) does not show the physical torture and misery on screen. The more you try to keep it out of sight, the more present it is and the harder it hits home. In The Zone of Interest, you watch like a fly on the wall as an ambitious Nazi leader goes about his daily business, while mass murders are being carried out just next door. Because of the extreme suffering, Auschwitz has become a name that sends shivers down your spine, but for Hedwig it is the most beautiful place in the world. She beams because her husband calls her ‘the queen of Auschwitz’.
This is the sort of film that leaves you with a knot in your stomach. And a final punch to the gut at the end.
---II.
Just a quick word on Apple’s Vision Pro glasses. Because they’ve officially launched in the United States and over the past few days I’ve seen (alongside excellent reviews from The Verge and Marques Brownlee) one dystopian image after another appearing on social media.
I saw videos of kitchen timers that appear to float above pans, of shopping lists hanging in shops and of people vacuuming virtual coins off the floor so as not to miss a single corner.
I get it, these are just jokes. People are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible to generate attention. Just like people who walk down the street in videos whilst supposedly opening windows around them. Something that doesn’t actually work, because the images are fixed in the environment and don’t move with them. Still, videos like these will help Apple normalise the glasses. I can imagine the clips whetting a large audience’s appetite for all the possibilities.
At the same time, I can’t help but picture what the creators of these videos look like. How they’re vacuuming with a heavy pair of glasses on their nose. How the steam from the hot pan fogs up the lenses whilst cooking. It makes for hilarious footage (just look at Casey Neistat’s brilliant video below), and I certainly get the appeal. I’d love an IMAX screen in the living room too. But at the same time, it’s very Black Mirror (or The Simpsons, e.g. *the end of S28E2, Friends and Family).
Lately, I’ve actually been leaning towards fewer screens rather than more. Soon the screens will literally be on your face. For an article on 20 years of Facebook on NU.nl (behind the login), I spoke to a professor who said that we can partly blame social media for the fact that we live in our own bubbles. “My neighbour and I no longer worry about the same things,” he said. That’s because our online experience is determined by our clicking and reading behaviour. Your Instagram and Facebook feeds don’t look like mine. In a way, that’s nice, because we discover more of what appeals to us, but it also divides us.
At least for now, we still share the physical world around us. But what if, in the future, we constantly overlay a layer on top of reality? What if I’m sitting on the sofa chatting to my girlfriend and use a deepfake to turn her face into someone else’s? What if I stop listening to what she’s saying altogether because I’m watching a YouTube video that she can’t see at all?
Suddenly, I saw mainly the dystopian aspects of where this is heading. Brr. Better to think again about that lovely private cinema it can also be.
---PS.
One of the best websites on the internet is Neal Agarwal’s. His latest creation is called Infinite Craft. On a board, you can drag all sorts of concepts over each other to create new things. With two bits of water, you make a lake, and with fire and earth, you create lava. You soon end up with the craziest things. I crossed Elon Musk with a superhero and got Iron Man. Zeus was hanging there to make Thor. You can keep doing this endlessly. The website lets you know if you’ve created something no one else has found yet, such as, in my case, the – here it comes – Cthulicornphoenixdragonwhalgnom. Try saying that ten times really fast in a row.
A new trailer for Death Stranding 2. Nobody makes games like Hideo Kojima, and I’m glad he’s still getting massive budgets all the time to create something totally bizarre again.
---In the 1980s, director David Lynch adapted Dune for the screen, with roles for Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks) and singer Sting. It was largely a flop, which is why there was never a sequel. But Lynch had already made good progress on the script for part two, and that script was recently found by film journalist Max Evry. He writes about it on Wired.
State Secretary Van Huffelen has left X and I had the scoop on NU.nl. She is not the first to leave the platform, and certainly not the last, but I still thought it was worth reporting. As the minister responsible for digitalisation, she is sending out an important signal. She hopes that her colleagues will also ask themselves whether they want to remain on a platform that does not comply with European rules and has no intention of doing so. (And the fact that the piece was quoted in Van Roosmalen & Groenteman was a personal highlight.)
A brilliant video from the ever-sharp Videogamedunkey on all the steps you need to take to get a gun in the hit game Palworld, also known as ‘Pokémon with guns’. The video perfectly illustrates why I don’t play this. It’s Such a Hassle.
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