"watered-down misunderstanding of Arendt's Banality of Evil" is a sharp cut ... to which I can only say: I've read Arendt, and think I understand what she means by Banality of Evil, and I don't think this movie is showing, or trying to show, that. Arendt uses the phrase to describe Eichmann's argument that he was "simply doing his job" in perpetrating the Holocaust: that he was neither swept in furious Jew-hatred, nor struggling to suppress a wounded conscience, but that he simply did what he was ordered to do, what he was employed to do, without fear or favour. But I don't see Glazer's "Zone of Evil" as being about that, because we don't actually see what Hoss's job entails. Rather we see the stuff *outside* his job: everything that isn't the banality of evil ... house, family, children, his adultery, jockeying for position in the Nazi hierarchy. This is a movie about the juxtaposition of ordinariness and horror, but with the actual horror occluded, so that we only see the ordinariness (although obviously, we're not idiots, we understand what's *really* going on)

Not to go on and on, but Arendt's subtitle "the banality of evil" was a reaction to her own earlier work. In "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951) she'd insisted that "the absolute had erupted in the politics of the Third Reich and of the Soviet Union"; that a kind of malign totality had realised itself under Hitler and Stalin, a circumstance in which hideousness became permissible and activatable: "Hell, which had previously only been imagined, was now established on earth ... radical evil." But watching Eichmann on trial Arendt was struck by how boring he way, how lacking in depth and deliberateness, and so she revised her thesis: evil not as fanaticism but thoughtlessness, not Satanic but shallow. BUT (and this is the point of my blog) Glazer's film isn't really interested in either side of that debate.