What does evil look like? Popular culture will lead us to believe that evil is obvious – it resides in tall, dark towers,  it emanates a dark aura, it brainwashes the masses, it generally does cruel things out in the open. We tell ourselves that if we were in certain scenarios, say, in Nazi Germany, we wouldn’t be like that. We wouldn’t be complicit, we wouldn’t be Nazis, we wouldn’t be evil. But reality is a lot more complicated than that – evil isn’t abnormal, it’s utterly, truly banal. 

In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, philosopher Hannah Arendt argues that Adolf Eichmann, a major contributor to the Holocaust, was a prime example of “the banality of evil”. He did not seem to display any guilt and claimed no responsibility – he argued he was just “doing his job”. This banality of evil is at the center of Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film The Zone of Interest. It follows a family in Auschwitz, the father being the commander in the camp. Yes, he is evil, leading to the deaths of millions, but what makes The Zone of Interest so compelling is that it never explicitly shows the inside of the concentration camps. We only see glimpses, hear faint echoes of the horrors that lie inside, the family ignores the screams and smoke to continue living their peaceful existence. 

In 1965 to 1966, hundreds of thousands of members of the Communist Party in Indonesia were massacred in a clear act of politicide. This event is not covered in Indonesian history classes and has received minimal international attention. The documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of this forgotten historical event from the point of view of the killers. They were never tried in court and never punished. Adi Zulkadry, one of the killers featured in this documentary, proclaims “I’ve never felt guilty, never been depressed, never had nightmares”. These people do not feel remorse for their actions, they talk about how they took the job to get better clothes, they roam free to this day. 

In a 1968 CIA report, the Indonesia massacres are called “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with … the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War…”. What both these events illustrate is the banality of evil, with people in the center of both of them thinking they’re just doing their job. These films are some of the most important of all time because they show that evil isn’t found in tall, dark towers or in complex, sinister plots, but rather an aspect of everyday existence that we choose to ignore. These films force you to confront yourself and ask “Is what I’m doing right?”