I disagree, Abigail. I don't think the movie characterises the Hosses as "absolute freaks", because I don't think it characterises them, really, very much at all. I think they are simply figures in the landscape of the drama, coded ordinary. More, I'd suggest your description of them as absolute freaks is a kind of projection from a place where "characterisation" is the main business of art, novels, storytelling: because, in an absolute sense, and given the monstrosity of the situation in which they are in, /of course/ they must have been monsters to carry on. When you say "the evil radiation of the camp has mutated something in the Hosses' souls" that strikes me as a reasonable intuition about what a situation like this would do to people. But I don't think that's what the film shows us. That is, it doesn't show us the Hosses' souls. Not because it believes they have no souls. It's just not interested in "souls", which is to say it's not an exercise in "soul analysis" ("what kind of hideous human being could perpetrate such evil? here is my anatomy of their awful subjectivity" and so on). It is an portrayal of the way genocide and normalcy exist side by side; the way genocide is not some outrageous, outraging exceptional darkness or lightning-strike out of the dark god's storm cloud, but something that went on, and goes on, all the time. It is, as I say in the blog, not about human souls, but about what is seen and what is not seen, about what we see and what we ignore.

There is a larger point here, I think, about "characterisation" as such, in contemporary culture: novels and films. Your recent account of the last series of "Umbrella Academy" for instance (interesting! though it didn't exactly make me want to watch the final instalment of the show) was pretty much an itinerary of the various characters in the show, how successfully (with what degree of continuity and plausibility, or otherwise) these "characters" had been developed through the four series, and the extent to which spending time with these "characters" is a worthwhile and well-rendered matter. One of the things I'm thinking about in this blog is the validity of that, for all that it has become the horizon of popular culture. It crosses over with identitarianism, I think, as the way so many people conceive of themselves (in essence, "what kind of *character* am I in the ongoing narrative of life?") To say this isn't to advert to Auschwitz, of course, since most people are not looking for evil character-roles. But I think it says something that my blog contrasts Amis's novel (as being all about the characterisation and storytelling of the Holocaust) and Glazer's film, which I genuinely see as uninterested in both those things -- as interested in other things -- and your response is: "but just think of the characterisation of the Hosses! They *must* be freaks!" Which is to say, it says something about the ubiquity of "characterisation" as our way of understanding contemporary culture.