Movies and Empathy

Pulitzer winner writer Viet Thanh Nguyen’s scheduled reading at 92NY in Manhattan was canceled because of his criticism of Israel. Defending the principle of free speech, other writers canceled appearances and several staff members resigned. Nguyen expressed disappointment at his cancelation, saying that an important function of art is to open minds and hearts. Psychologists at the University of Toronto found support for this in their study of the relationship between a reader’s absorption in works of fiction and empathy.

Since works of art, including movies, can increase empathy, I raise the question: which award-winning picture is more likely to support a person’s moral compass—Zone of Interest (2023) or Schindler’s List (1993)? These two award-winning movies engage the Holocaust in very different ways. Zone of Interest centers on the life of the commandment of a death camp as he and his family go about their cozy, domestic routines in the villa that abuts Auschwitz. There are no views of beatings or dead bodies. The commandant is a dutiful husband and father while viewers hear gunshots and screams off-screen and see barbed wire atop walls and smoke from crematorium smokestacks. Director and writer Jonathan Glazer explains that the movie is less about Nazis than it us about “the thing in us that drives it all, the capacity for violence that we all have.” The movie isn’t about the victims of the Holocaust but “about us and our similarity to the perpetrators.”

The film also makes the point that turning away from evil makes us complicit in the killings. By not showing the horrors on the other side of the wall, Zone of Interest implies that those who ignore others’ suffering today or any day are as culpable as the camp commandant. It is the silence that makes the movie unnerving, the banality of evil. According to Glazer, “this is not a film about the past. It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.”

Unlike Zone of Interest, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List doesn’t shy away from depicting abject horror. Victims are ever-present with gut-wrenching scenes woven throughout as the movie focuses on Oskar Schindler, the gentile industrialist who saved more than a thousand Jews from certain death by employing them in his factory. After this death in 1974, some of those whom he helped survive brought his remains to Israel to be buried in the Catholic Cemetery in Jerusalem. The inscription on his grave reads: “The unforgettable rescuer of 1,200 persecuted Jews.” A tree was planted in Schindler’s honor in the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem.

Does either movie bring us closer to being better people? Some Holocaust scholars are skeptical, Lawrence Langer amongst them. Langer says there was no redeeming moral lesson to be found in the Holocaust. The atrocities were beyond imagining, beyond human understanding, he says. Portrayals of resistance and rescue always fall short of the truth and therefore deflect the awful truth of the Holocaust. It is the testimony of survivors that needs to be listened to and taken seriously without sentimentality or mythologizing. Langer is even critical of Anne Frank. The Holocaust proved Frank wrong with her claim at the end of her diary, Langer said, when she wrote that “in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Langer’s and others’ rejection of finding redemptive messages in the Holocaust begins with the reality that people died for no reason. It was senseless, relentless genocide. He insists that we see mass extermination for what it is and reject triumphant endings like those in Schindler’s List. Lots of people tried to survive, Langer insists. "They were resolute and struggled mightily. But nonetheless, they died. If they survived? Pure luck."

Both movies are important from an ethical viewpoint if we look at them broadly and not as history lessons. Zone of Interest’s director asserts as much when he states that his isn’t a movie about the past but about how even seemingly good people can turn their backs on terror under the right circumstances. Whether the film’s conceit of placing the genocide off-screen works in making the point about the banality of evil is debatable. But what isn’t is that those who have seen the movie knowing the story of concentration camps and genocide is that it raises disturbing questions about complicity in the face of evil.

To that extent, Zone of Interest taps into one stream of empathy, namely the cognitive dimension, which is “perspective-taking or putting yourself in someone else's shoes.”The movie succeeds morally if viewers put themselves in the commandant’s place, then take the next step to examine what cruelties they, the viewers, have chosen not to see, not to hear and not to stand against in their own lives.

While Langer and others may be correct that depictions of the Holocaust obscure the unique dimensions of the Jewish genocide, Schindler’s List is successful in tapping into the other aspect of empathy, namely affective dimension. The final scene of the movie, when it turns from black-and-white to color and the real-life survivors of the death camp appear on the crest of a hill en masse and walk to Jerusalem’s Catholic cemetery to place stones, the Jewish ritual of remembrance, on Schindler’s grave marker, it moves the audiences to deep tears.

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What’s more, the movie portrays Schindler as the flawed person who nevertheless chose to save strangers at great cost and risk to his life. Schindler is amongst those honored at the Yad Vashem, one of those “who dared to defend humanity when, all around them, evil prevailed. By focusing on this element of the Holocaust we invite our students to be inspired by the best of human character.” Schindler was a hero and “Heroes boost our feelings of happiness and simultaneously reveal our missing qualities,” write psychologist Elaine L. Kinsella and others. “Participants [in the studies] described heroes as ‘moral symbols to protect everyday innocent people,’ ‘providing moral goals for society,’ and that they ‘personify the things we cannot articulate.’ In our studies it was clear that some heroes were perceived by participants to act as agents of social justice, striving to improve the situations of the disadvantaged.”

One outcome of the movie: Holocaust survivors approached the movie’s director saying that they had stories they wanted to tell. As a result, Steven Spielberg vowed to record the testimonies of survivors. More than 52,000 testimonies are preserved at the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which in turn have been used as educational material.

Both films, in different ways, may well contribute to strengthening viewers’ moral sensibilities—Zone of Interest by provoking uncomfortable introspection, and Schindler’s List by inspiring moral behavior through example.