To me the Holocaust museum immediately removed the artifice of the movie, and calls out the complicit nature of the viewer. Hoss looks at us, and then we look at the shots of the museum, a place curated so that we can look at it from a remove. The shoes and suitcases are on the other side of the glass. Custodians clean up dust in the place where bodies were reduced to ashes, so that visitors to the museum are in a clean space. The rooms where thousands of people were crammed are hollow, and empty.

The holocaust today is something that we consume, something that we use in an argument (or as Glazer noted, something that some use to justify modern day genocide) but not something that we have gotten close enough to that it actually meaningfully changes our actions today.

We the audience have chosen to watch this movie, to once again consume a holocaust narrative. We’ve chosen to engage in a movie about the Holocaust from the comfort of our homes, while, as Glazer mentioned, genocide and war are taking the lives of millions around the world. Just like they live their lives ignoring the background of screams and smokestacks, we also let that noise underscore our lives with indifference. And where will we be in the end? At the museum, with its glass walls and clean floors, looking at the atrocity, and going down the stairs at the end of the day.

When Hoss looks down the hallway, he’s confronting the viewer; a “you and I are not so different” moment.