In the opening sequence of "Act of Killing," torturer Anwar Congo seeks redemption by acting out a scene from his imagination. In his fantasy, the people he killed return from the dead and forgive him. Swaying and smiling, kissed by the spray of the beautiful waterfall behind him, surrounded by dancing girls, Anwar basks in the glow of his imagined forgiveness. "Peace! Joy! This isn't fake!" An anonymous director shouts from behind the camera. But once the director shouts "cut," a small army of production assistants appears to throw coats over the dancing girls, who are shivering in the cold. It is fake. It's all fake. And if you are looking for some kind of redemptive ending from ACT OF KILLING - and some critics, apparently, are - this is as close as you are going to get.
I revisited ACT OF KILLING on Netflix this week, having seen it at the beginning of its theatrical run at a screening of the Austin Film Society and the Alamo Drafthouse. This Sunday, it will be under consideration for an Academy Award, an award for which Nic Fraser of the Guardian believes it is entirely unsuited. Calling the movie "tasteless" and pretentious, he submits the opinion that people shouldn't overreach the "journeyman's art" of documentary filmmaking:
The film does not in any recognisable sense enhance our knowledge of the 1960s Indonesian killings... Instead of an investigation, or indeed a genuine recreation, we've ended somewhere else – in a high-minded snuff movie.I could not possibly disagree more with the sentiments expressed in this article. Yes, there are lots of forgotten, heavily-whitewashed atrocities in the world, which the filmmaker could have chosen to focus on. For instance here, in America - as one of the former torturers in ACT OF KILLING actually points out - white settlers committed wholesale genocide on Native Americans. "Has anyone been punished for that?" the torturer sneers. Or have the perpetrators of that particular genocide been, in fact, glorified - as cowboys, as gangsters, as "Free men?"
"I'm a gangster. A free man. A movie theater gangster. Not much education. A human drop out. There are people like me everywhere in the world." These are the words Anwar uses to justify himself, during a break in the shooting. He is restless, uncomfortable. He lights a cigarette, moves toward a window, complains he is too hot. As a youth, Anwar scalped tickets outside of theaters playing American movies, then walked across the street and cut people's heads off, sometimes still whistling the theme from the movie. The pressure of his conscience visits him in dreams. But in the daylight, he romanticizes his actions. Anwar and his companions knowingly use movies - American movies - to whitewash their actions and their roles as tough guy enforcers. They play dress up as much in life as they do in their re-enactments.
We watch them decide which stories to tell. One of Anwar's neighbors, a man with a Chinese stepfather, says he has a story to relate. Anwar and his friends are encouraging, until they realize that the neighbor's story is about how his Chinese stepfather was killed in an anti-communist raid. "We don't really have time to tell every story," they say dismissively. "But maybe it can inform the actor's performances." The look on the man's face says it all. He nods, goes within himself. When it's time for him to play the part of the victim, he weeps until huge strings of snot hang out of his nose.
What would make this re-enactment more "genuine?" Some sad music? A Ken Burns style pan and scan over some pictures of mass graves? Would that make it more of a "recognizable" documentary? What if there are no mass graves? What if the victims are silenced? What if all that is left is the story told by those who won the war?
"War crimes" are defined by the winners. I'm a winner. So I make my own definitions." When asked whether he is worried about the Geneva convention rules against torture, one man gives an answer worthy of George Bush. "I don't necessarily agree with those international laws. When George Bush was in power, Guatanamo was ok. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That was right according to Bush, but now it's wrong." You can't really fault his logic. Why should these guys pay attention to international laws about torture, if the United States doesn't?
Why do we forgive that, and not this? It's not because Abu Ghraib happened in a faraway country. It's because we've decided that torturers, murderers, and oppressors are somewhere else. They are in some other country. They can't be our grandfathers. They can't be our neighbors. They must be someone else, somewhere else, because the idea that we, ourselves, are not the guys in the white hats, is something we are not prepared to accept. The very idea of "white hats" is so bound up in our national mythology that we forget that the people wearing them were, in fact, the ones who were doing the shooting. We want a happy ending, we want the bad guys to be punished. If that doesn't happen, how can we push the badness away from ourselves? How can we know that we are the good guys?
Toward the end, Anwar is sitting on a dock in a thunderstorm. There is darkness and black water all around him. He speaks of his terror in confronting this darkness. And the viewer knows, instinctively, that he is about to confront the darkness in himself. When he finally does, his reaction is the only possible one: he retches. In an excellent AMA on Redditt, Oppenheimer describes the scene eloquently:
It’s as though his body physically rejects all the words he has been speaking. If you transcribe his words on the roof, they are much the same as we have heard throughout the film - “I had to do it, because my conscience told me they had to be killed.” (...) His body is finally rejecting his words.
For my part, I had this desire to put my arm around him and say “It’s going to be okay” (a manifestation of desperate optimism that we Americans are famous for). In that moment, however, I had this sickening realisation that no: it will not be okay. And this is what it looks like when it is not okay. And I realised then I could do nothing other than bear witness to what was unfolding.
Oppenheimer does not glamorize these men. By simply bearing witness, he uses the camera to critique not only the situation in Indonesia, but Western civilization itself.
Go watch it on Netflix. Believe it or not, I haven't even told you all the good parts already.
