The Banality at Cannes

Roger Berkowitz
Apparently Hannah Arendt was on everyone’s lips this year at the Cannes film festival. Alissa Wilkinson does a nice job of parsing the allusions to Arendt. 

At the press conference following the Cannes premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, someone asked Robert De Niro about his character, a kingpin of a sort with a tricky psyche. “It’s the banality of evil,” he said, describing the character’s moral ambiguity. “It’s the thing we have to watch out for. We see it today, of course. We all know who I’m going to talk about, but I’m not going to say his name.” (Everyone knew who he meant.)
The banality of evil was hot at Cannes this year. De Niro’s statement came on the heels of the premiere of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which set Cannes critics abuzz about the same phrase. That movie — which I proposed might best be understood as an adaptation of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, even more than the Martin Amis novel it’s loosely based on — is not much like Killers of the Flower Moon, at first blush. Glazer’s is short, taut horror that evokes the Holocaust by keeping it offscreen; Scorsese’s is epic, bloody, and relentless in its depiction of a series of murders from a century ago.
Thematically, however, they often rhyme. Both are about mankind’s ability to exterminate one another while deluding themselves into thinking they’re doing the right thing. Both are about atrocities so heinous they’re hard to wrap your mind around. And both feel eerily contemporary, in an age where prejudice, racism, and fascism are on the rise around the globe.
Yet, with deep respect to De Niro (who gives one of his finest performances in Killers), only one of these movies is actually about the banality of evil, and it’s not the one he’s in. A key part of Arendt’s argument in Eichmann in Jerusalem is that her subject, Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Third Reich’s euphemistically named “Final Solution,” was profoundly vapid, lacking a discernible motivation or conscious vendetta against the Jewish people he exterminated. (This is the chilling sense you get about The Zone of Interest’s characters, too.) Arendt observed Eichmann in court, where his defense was that he simply followed orders. What struck her was his lack of ego or intelligence or personal motivation. This evil, she wrote, was banal because it was hollow, perpetuated largely by people who had given up thinking, letting themselves exist within a corrupt and deadly system.