The Complicity Plot

Warning: Spoilers for Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Zone of Interest, Succession, and The Curse abound in the following essay. Read at your own risk.

Summer 2020 was supposed to “the summer of racial reckoning.” For many key American institutions — government agencies, universities, businesses, progressive nonprofits — the period after George Floyd’s murder was a time for either self-interrogation or an elaborate pantomime of self-interrogation. Statements were drafted, DEI trainings were held, reading lists were circulated; individuals and organizations confessed their sins, both historic and recent.

The moment passed without leaving much of an imprint on American institutions. Urban and suburban police departments remain well outside civilian control; elite universities are retreating from “wokeness” under pressure from their right flank; the country’s largest media outlets are dedicating column inches to shockingly racist propositions, like the assumption that any Black person with an important job must only be there because of “racial gerrymandering.”

But the post-Floyd moment did leave trace residue in other areas of American public life. Nearly four years later, some of our most important artists remain stuck on questions of historical guilt and responsibility. Three recent movies address those questions head on, even as they grapple with the limits of cinema to provide satisfying answers.

In the past year alone, three major directors, all of them white men, have premiered films about the historical complicity of other white men. Only one of them, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, was by an American director addressing American crimes. The other two — Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest — were by English directors; and while Oppenheimer dealt with America’s invention and subsequent deployment of the most terrible weapon in human history, The Zone of Interest was more exclusively fixated on German atrocities during the same period. Nonetheless, all three of these movies concern themselves with themes that the “racial reckoning” moment brought to the forefront of public consciousness.

Call it the “complicity plot” movie: Oppenheimer, Killers, and Zone all feature real, historical figures acting as accessories to real-world acts of nightmarish violence against designated “others.” None of these characters are instigators: The Zone of Interest is about death camp bureaucrat Rudolf Höss, not the führer; Harry Truman, who actually made the call to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, appears in only one brief scene of Oppenheimer. The complicity plot is not about prime movers but their enablers. It is about people very much like us and how they make sense of their own participation in monstrous acts.

Of the three directors mentioned above, Nolan provides us with the most conventionally heroic version of the complicity plot. This is only to be expected of a guy who directed three movies about Batman. His Oppenheimer is a different type of dark superhero: a tormented genius, utterly magnetic and utterly morally serious, despite his serial philandering. While his motives for directing the Manhattan Project are mixed, they are at least in part noble: as a Jew and American, he wants to help defeat the Nazis.1 And after the United States flattens Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he immediately understands the gravity of what he helped bring about: other than the first nuclear test, the best sequence in the film is a horrific, phantasmagoric trip into his subconscious after he learns of the Hiroshima bombing. Oppenheimer spends the rest of the movie after that bombing alternately trying to atone for his culpability and being punished for the effort.

Nolan is not a director known for his restraint, and Oppenheimer is burdened by the usual Nolan-isms: a nonstop score that throbs like a migraine, female characters who remain background furniture despite the exertions of terrific actresses, and male characters who have a tendency to carefully spell out a scene’s subtext when silence would have been more effective. But Oppenheimer is nonetheless a very good (if not quite great) movie, and part of the reason is Nolan’s uncharacteristic restraint in one regard: he does not show the bombs falling on Japan. He doesn’t even show their aftermath. The closest he gets is in a scene where his hero, being shown footage of the destruction, shamefully averts his eyes; the movie averts its eyes with him.

This is the right choice. To show the horror would be to aestheticize it, to render it into yet another sexy Hollywood spectacle like the folding city of Inception. The visual language of the movie cannot contain something so terrible while doing it justice. And to break with the movie’s visual language and attempt to render the Hiroshima bombing in all its gory particulars would risk turning something profoundly solemn and serious into snuff pornography. When the movie looks away, it is out of respect to the victims. But it also reflects the protagonist’s inability to face the enormity of what he has done, no matter how much he thinks he should.

The Zone of Interest takes the act of looking away as its fundamental aesthetic conceit. In his 2000 debut, the hilarious Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer showed himself to be a master of gonzo maximalism; here, he lets his story unfold with a chilly spareness. Most of Zone is dedicated to domestic scenes in the life of a bourgeois German family; the shots are static, the score is barely there, the lighting is strictly diegetic. The one noticeable special effect is both subtle and brutally effective: the carefully rendered sounds of Auschwitz, of gunshots and screams and infernal machinery, constantly leaking in from over the wall of the Höss family compound.2

Again, the camera’s refusal to enter Auschwitz itself is a decision to confront us with the camp’s horrors while denying us the catharsis of cinematic misery porn. And as in Oppenheimer, this act of looking away recreates the blinkered vision of the film’s central characters, Aushwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig. These are very different characters from Robert Oppenheimer, and they embody a very different type of complicity: not the ambivalent involvement of a brilliant man with good intentions and an arrogant streak, but the blithe participation of sociopathic careerists. Rudolf and Hedwig don’t look away because they’re haunted by their crimes; they look away because they don’t care.

If the ambient sounds of Zone tell the movie’s real story, the blocking and cinematography tell a different story entirely. At first, watching the movie, I was reminded of what Paul Schrader has called the transcendental style of directors like Yasujirō Ozu and Robert Bresson — and, it must be said, Schrader himself. The Glazer of The Zone of Interest shares with these directors a commitment to static shots and what appears to be a coolly objective regard for the action. But there’s something vaguely off about the transcendental style in The Zone of Interest: odd cuts and camera angles that after a while made me feel like I was watching security camera footage of a crime in progress.

As it turns out, that’s more or less exactly what I was watching. Glazer embedded ten hidden cameras around the film’s central setting, the Höss haus, so he could pick up the actors as they improvised their way through various scenes. This choice, combined with his refusal to lean on such basic tools of movie magic as set lighting, add a spooky verisimilitude to the whole exercise. It’s all completely mundane, and all the more horrible for its mundanity.

Ernest Bukhart, the protagonist of Killers of the Flower Moon, is not a troubled genius like Robert Oppenheimer or a bland monster like Rudolf Höss. He’s more or less a regular guy, maybe a bit of a misfit, affable but none too bright. Most of all, he’s a coward and a weakling who lets his desire to simultaneously please his uncle and placate his wife stand in for anything like independent moral judgment. The Rudolf Höss of The Zone of Interest is a Nazi because there are fantastic opportunities for career advancement available to anyone who is willing to soak themselves in innocent blood; the Ernest Burkhart of Killers would have been a Nazi if it was what everyone else was doing.

Scorsese has never been coy about depicting violence, and unlike Nolan and Glazer he points the camera firmly in its direction. His movie is an old school historical epic like the kind they used to make in the 1970s, complete with immersive crowd scenes, a soaring score, and a sprawling, multi-decade narrative. But Scorsese, who has been making movies about sin and redemption for as long as Nolan and Glazer have been alive, is one of our most morally serious directors, and he is keenly aware of the Hollywood epic’s limitations as a vehicle for historical and moral instruction. Much like his last movie, the phenomenal The Irishman, Killers turns into a different sort of movie in its last third, once it comes time to take stock of the bloodshed that we’ve seen unfold. The movie sort of loses its shape and becomes more ruminative. Ernest is slowly broken, and then shattered all at once when his son dies. He decides to confess his sins — all of them except one.

If Oppenheimer martyrs himself for his sins and Höss feels no remorse at all, then Ernest opts for the compromised but more heavily trafficked path in the middle. Once he’s been cornered, he turns state’s witness. He appears to feel genuine remorse. But when Mollie Burkhart — his Osage wife, his victim, and the true beating heart of the movie —confronts him about his betrayal, he is too weak to admit what they both know: that he not only participated in the murder of her family but poisoned Mollie herself at his uncle’s request. Ernest can face neither Mollie nor himself, and this awful revelation is the pivotal moment of the movie.

What follows is a strange sort of coda. All three complicity plot movies have unconventional endings; in grappling with complicity, they also grapple with conventional cinema’s shortcomings. The first ending of Killers of the Flower Moon is as conventional as it gets: the FBI swoops in, led by a man who is literally wearing a white hat, and arrests all the bad guys. But Scorsese knows this ending is too just so. So he offers a second climax: the one where Ernest, ever the people pleaser, tries to have it both ways with regard to his innocence. And then a third, where Scorsese himself delivers the final lines during a bizarre parody of a 1950s radio play.

This radio play is more than parody. It’s a comment on the insufficiency of narrative drama itself. Like Killers of the Flower Moon itself, the radio show valorizes the FBI and devotes greater attention to the white butchers of the Osage than to the Osage themselves. Scorsese is making a confession of his own here — or, as Sam Adams puts it, an apology. He is trying to honor the dead with the tools he has, but even our greatest living filmmaker can only push so hard against the limits of his chosen medium. Where Glazer pushes the evidence of Höss’s crimes into the background instead of aestheticizing them, Scorsese both embraces and undermines the conventions of Hollywood storytelling.

Neither of these approaches is the “right” one. They are divergent but equally coherent approaches to the central dilemma of the complicity plot: how to depict atrocity without providing false comfort or catharsis to the audience. Endings are where that dilemma becomes most pronounced.

Two recent television shows, The Curse and the final season of Succession, offer variations on the complicity plot. Neither show concerns real historical incidents, but they are clearly politically minded: Succession is about a group of solipsistic billionaires whose media empire tries, in the show’s final season, to install an unreconstructed fascist in the White House. The Curse is about a couple of vulture landlords and would-be television stars who try to convince themselves that they are progressive do-gooders.

On Succession, we never find out whether the fascist becomes president. That show’s way out of the complicity plot is to offer no climax, no closure at all.3 The Curse opts for an even more bizarre exit ramp: one of its two main characters simply falls upward into outer space, as if the world is ejecting an undigestible morsel.

In contrast, Oppenheimer, Killers, and Zone, despite their wildly different tones and sensibilities, all make use of a specific device in their endings: the forward time jump. Killers of the Flower Moon actually has two time jumps, with the first being the jump to the radio play and the second being a scene of an apparently contemporary Osage celebration. The Zone of Interest ends with Rudolf Höss apparently gazing into the future, watching as janitors at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum clean the glass cases that hold his victims’ possessions. And Oppenheimer ends with its central character reflecting on whether his invention will ultimately destroy humanity while Nolan shows us a montage of modern day nuclear arsenals.

These movies vary in how they connect the past to the future. But all three do connect the past to the future in their final moments. They are reminding us that their characters’ crimes leave a stain on the present; that none of us can say we have nothing to do with these people. After the shot of modern day Auschwitz, Glazer leaves us with a cut back to Höss, gazing directly into the camera. The death camp is now a museum, Glazer seems to be saying, but Höss is still with us. Evil itself is with us, and it will still be there when we avert our gaze. Averting our gaze, in fact, is what helps it thrive.