Mitzi leaves on Saturday, with her sister to return to New York. She's up and moving without difficulty, albeit with some anxiety about another fall.

I've just received the 4K UHD HDR Blu Ray (that's a lot of marketing-speak) edition of James Cameron's Aliens. Judy isn't much for sf or action movies. She's a retired therapist so her taste runs more toward complicated/dysfunctional people and the problems they create for themselves. I watch movies to forget about complicated/dysfunctional people and their problems!

I've got a "little" 32" LCD TV in my office that I use for video games, but it has a Blu Ray player connected to it. It also has Roku built-in, with the Apple TV app installed; so I could watch either disks or something from my Apple movie library, wearing headphones. It's not bad, but I did miss the 65" LG OLED, conscious as I am that its very existence is a consequence of the unsustainable capitalist/consumerist economy that is bringing about the collapse of this civilization. (See, I can be complicated and dysfunctional too.)

We all watched Zone of Interest on Tuesday night. I suspect that it was perhaps one of the most realistic portrayals of life outside the walls. I had to think about the odd, infra-red photography of the girl hiding apples. I thought it was a dream sequence or something. I finally decided it was to depict the contrast between the Germans and the native Poles when "out of sight," so to speak. But I'm not sure.

What I thought was very well done was the banality of it all. I had to look up Hoss, and the movie seemed to follow much of the events of his life in that period fairly closely.

I don't know if the grandmother ever actually stayed with them and quickly departed, but I think it perhaps illustrated the existence of the consciousness of guilt among the Germans.

I think Hannah Arendt took some heat for characterizing Eichmann as a "banal" figure. I seem to recall that she felt she was misunderstood, but that her critics felt that Eichmann was a monster and an outlier among human beings.

Despite the contrast between the grandmother and her daughter, I think there's not a huge gap between the two. If the grandmother had been young and eager to have the "good life," perhaps she would have found some accommodation with evil the way her daughter did. She certainly seemed to have no empathy for the woman whose curtains she coveted.

All of which is to say that the capacity for evil, for being monsters, exists in all of us and we indulge that capacity to greater or lesser degrees, depending on the circumstances.

As we see every day.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:02 Thursday, 21 March 2024