The Most Disorienting Documentary I’ve Ever Seen
What “The Act of Killing” tells us about the U.S.
The other night at Oakland’s New Parkway theater, I saw Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing”—a documentary so surreal, so bizarre, so truthful, I thought it might be fake.
The film, which is currently nominated for an academy award, follows perpetrators of the 1960’s Indonesian genocide as they recount, with pride, the killings they carried out against their fellow Indonesians. It is so disorienting that it had got to be staged, right? Nope.
Oppenheimer began working on this film by interviewing the survivors of the genocide, a topic illegal to discuss publicly, but the Indonesian government quickly shut him down. At the suggestion and encouragement of the survivors and Indonesian human rights community, he began interviewing the perpetrators of the genocide. He traveled the country for 2 years filming these mass killers boast openly about the hundreds of murders they’d personally committed. They spoke not with remorse but celebration and self-satisfaction. The 41st perpetrator he met was Anwar Congo, who he ended up following for 5 years, and around whom the film revolves.
“I chose to focus on Anwar because his trauma was closer to the surface,” Oppenheimer said in the Q&A afterward. “I could see it the first day I met him.”
Watching the psychological undercurrents of this man carries the whole film. He and his fellow war criminals decide to reenact their mass killings—the central narrative thread of the documentary—while maintaining total denial that what they did was wrong. To witness his remorse almost, but never fully, rise to the surface is excruciating.
I didn’t get a chance to speak during our discussion after the film ended, so I thought I’d write what I wanted to say—to Joshua Oppenheimer and to us, a mostly white U.S. audience sitting in the plush chairs of the New Parkway.
First of all, thank you for having the courage, compassion, and conviction to spend the 7 years it took to create this film. I don’t know too much about Indonesia, and I definitely learned something. It’s phenomenal that this film (which has screened thousands of times and is streaming free in Indonesia) has opened up a previously forbidden public conversation about the genocide upon which their modern society is founded. Phenomenal.
But I’m from the United States, and so I found myself viewing this film as a U.S. citizen. That’s what I know. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how this film is also deeply, deeply about the United States. Perhaps more so than any film I’ve ever seen.
It’s not just that Congo’s entire “gangster” identity and killing techniques were inspired by the Hollywood films he and his fellow war criminals adored. That, in between pulling a thin, sharp wire around his victims throats—too thin for them to grab—he was watching Hollywood films in movie theaters, getting inspired. Or that Indonesian state media literally refers to him as a heroic “movie theater gangster.”
It’s not just that the U.S. was supplementing its Hollywood exports with financial and military support for General Suharto and his paramilitary forces, under the guise of defeating (exterminating) communism. That the CIA compiled lists of people for the death squads to target.
It’s about a mentality, a logic. It’s when one of the perpetrators describes Guantanamo Bay as a “good idea, ” or says “How are we wrong? The United States committed the same genocide.”
There it is. The painful truth that he is not wrong. That all these countries across the globe who use brutal military violence against their own people to “modernize” their economies are following the model of the “greatest, freest nation in the world”: The United States of America. Genocide. Unspeakable violence.
Oppenheimer pointed out that when he thought Congo would finally express his remorse, he forced himself more deeply into denial. “I realized he was a pendulum, swinging back and forth more and more violently between almost-remorse and total emotional repression,” Oppenheimer said.
In the film, Congo ultimately chose denial. In one of the final scenes, he stands amidst lush greenery, beautiful women dancers interspersed around him, all facing the camera, as a giant waterfall pours down behind him, and he holds out his hands in a large black gown like the caricature of an angel. This is one of his self-directed scenes. A man walks up to him and says, “Thank you for killing me and sending me to heaven.” Congo is the all-knowing, all-powerful, benevolent mass murderer.
During this batshit crazy scene, I could not stop thinking about one thing: Manifest Destiny.
The radiant, glory-filled, god-given gift of Anglo-America’s western expansion on regal horseback across the pristine virgin wilderness of North America—untouched land that was just waiting to become the greatness that would be the United States of America.
Genocide. Occupation. Unspeakable violence.
Anwar Congo is us.
Especially those of “us,” who are white, male, cisgender, hetero, citizens, wealthy, “American.” The descendents and members of a nation so addicted to celebrating our “exceptionalism,” the you-better-not-fucking-tell-me-otherwise Greatness of our Nation.
The denial. Pushed down so deep the only way to escape is to celebrate ourselves. So we go on continuing the violence because we don’t know how to stop. We are the Greatest, haven’t you heard?
In the end, it is not, as one audience member said, that “maybe the Indonesians just don’t have enough education.” It is not that we should spend our time transphobically laughing at one of the war criminals who consistently dressed as a woman, as another audience member suggested. It is not simply, as you said Mr. Oppenheimer (in an admittedly short question and answer period) that we must stay aware that our clothes are produced in places like Indonesia.
It is that Anwar Congo’s denial is our denial. His celebration and laughter is our celebration and laughter. When will we let our sins bubble to the surface?
Of course Anwar Congo is not a metaphor. He’s a real man. But your film—that is what is more, a mirror, a reflection of us.
So, my question for you is, as a fellow social justice filmmaker who is also white, male, and from the United States: “If you win an academy award, which you have a very good chance of doing, what will you say with your 60 seconds on a global stage?”
Originally posted at 4amnotes.wordpress.com
Follow Lucas at @4amnotes.
