I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade. The Act of Killing is unprecedented in the history of cinema.” – German filmmaker Werner Herzog.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Act of Killing” stands Western morality on its head. This documentary film shot in Indonesia, eight years in the making, is neither for the faint of heart nor for those who revel in American film culture’s black and white morality. With the editing help of Herzog, his seemingly disjointed documentary continues Indonesia’s oral story telling culture in a series of video snapshots that have a surprisingly powerful emotional impact. Imagine, if you are able, a world in which the Nazis won. A world in which someone approached Goeth, (the commander of Auschwitz), and asked him to star in a movie about the death camps. Or, a newsy talk show hostess treated Goeth as a hero and asked how he developed his efficient ideas of killing to audience applause.
If you can understand and tolerate this dark reversal, one that Philip Roth played with in “The Plot Against America,” then rush out and see this film. Oppenheimer adds a Busby Berkley touch to the macabre subject matter with beautiful dancing girls strolling out of the mouth of a burned out airplane converted into a giant stage fish, auditions in the streets for people to play victims, and applause for the killers reenactments of murders.
How did this film happen? In stumbling upon a group of women spraying a dangerous toxin on oil pond in Indonesia, Oppenheimer and his crew discovered that the exploited women plantation workers feared starting a union because their parents in the labor party were killed for being communists. In following up this story Oppenheimer and his crew “found themselves” talking with people who were rewarded for killing communists“ with cushy jobs and promotions.” He reports emotionally responding as though he had walked into Germany 40 years after the Holocaust, only to find the Nazis still in power.
In this daring film we are introduced to two main characters Anwar Kongo and Herman Koto. Anwar is one of the most unforgettable persons I think that I have ever met in a movie. Both men were heads of killing squads organized to kill known and suspected communists. Both profited from their work and were and still are respected or feared by the people tied to the government and honored for their actions. In Indonesia in 1965, like in a grade B war movie, even suspicion was enough to get one brutally executed.
Its hard to determine from this film that required the Indonesian crew to remain anonymous, how all the executions were carried out. There are broad hints of villages being burned and heads removed through an ingenious but simple garrote employed on the roofs of buildings revisited by the “heroes” Kong and Coto. Suspects were garroted after being beaten, tortured and interrogated though no real violence in the film. Often being Chinese was enough to earn a death sentence, as political affiliation was irrelevant when terror was one of the military’s political goals.
Also shockingly revealed in the film is a current militarized children’s corps. A kind of junior SS called the Pancasila Youth. It is Indonesia’s equivalent of the Brown Shirts or the Hitler Youth, in which militarized children are required to honor and support the current government and defend against any threats against it. Scenes of the corps chanting are among the most chilling reminders of the impact of education on young people that is promoted by right wing military governments. The Corps appears as a kind of Boy Scout –SS hybrid ensuring peace, terror and ongoing power for the Government. Terror regimes depend on the idealism and energy of its young people to maintain them -selves.
Oh, by the way, Indonesia, which never owned up to the 1965 genocide, is a “friend” of America and was rewarded after the mass murders as a barrier to the communist east.
Kongo, believed to have killed at least 1000 people, utters lines that couldn’t be written by western screenwriters. From within another culture Kongo reflects the uniquely American cinematic exuberance for violence and for getting ahead in the world. For example he says: “Each genre had its own method. Like in Mafia movies, they strangle the guy in the car, and dump the body. So we did that too.” These remarks in response to the host of the TV show who leads applause for his more humane system of extermination derived from the American Gangster genre that inspired them to kill communists.
Kongo and his pal Koto, later dressed as a drag queen, see themselves as “gangsters” revealing a unique definition as ‘free men’, men living by their own laws and trying to not experience guilt. An equivalent of an Indonesian “Cossack.”
Another Kongo quote is remarkable! After demonstrating how he garroted his victims he says” “I’ve tried to forget all this by listening to good music,” He finishes with:” Dancing. I can be happy. A little alcohol. A little marijuana. A little—what do you call it?—Ecstasy. Once I’d get drunk, I’d ‘fly’ and feel happy. Cha Cha.” If this wasn’t a real person speaking these words it seems a broad double of a capricious Al Pacino in “Scarface” (1980)
Oppenheimer’s camera captures through his character portraits and visual images remarkable truths about mass killers and their morality. For example Adi Zulkadry’s remark: “We shoved wood in their anus until they died. We crushed their necks with wood. We hung them. We strangled them with wire. We cut off their heads. We ran them over with cars. We were allowed to do it. And the proof is, we murdered people and were never punished. The people we killed, there’s nothing to be done about it. They have to accept it. Maybe I’m just trying to make myself feel better, but it works. I’ve never felt guilty, never been depressed, never had nightmares.”
These killers in the film had license to anything they wanted to do in the name of a war against communism. While they no longer have that power in their reminiscences they appeal to Bush’s idea of “weapons of mass destruction” as being a same invented moral justification for killing. At the time of the filming they appear as petty criminals extorting money from shopkeepers and dressing in 50’s nightclub style adding yet another reflected image of American culture.
All the actual leaders of killing squads are incapable of reflection though they report flashbacks of specific murders and only Kongo admits to nightmares about his acts as they try to film one of them. In contrast another killer simply admits,“ if they were pretty I’d rape them. Delicious!” Only at the very end of the movie after Oppenheimer convinced them to make a movie of their exploits, after Kongo takes a victims role in a re-enactment of a rooftop garroting, does he have a surprising physical response to his past.
The awful truth revealed in this film and in reality is that the winners of a war determine what is just and what is moral. I must now consider that the lens used to determine morality at the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials belonged to winners of the war armed with a democratic Western morality. Part of that moral visions strength is found in the newly emergent idea of “crimes against humanity”; a concept rejected in this film by the killers. What trials would the Nazi’s have ordered had they won?
Beyond Philip Roth’s dark brooding fantasy of America as an ally of Germany in “ The Plot against America “ we have only twice been attacked: in the war of 1812 and on September 11. While belligerent since World War 2 and having the largest standing army in the world we have continued and supported both cold and hot wars first against communists and now against fundamentalists. Oppenheimer, through Kongo holds a fractured mirror up to our American cinematic culture while on the surface showing the hidden face of a genocidaire.
There is another psychoanalytic lesson to be garnered from this film. Amongst the scarce psychoanalytic literature following World War 11 is the odd book by the Mitscherlichs’ (1967) on the failure of Germans to mourn after the war. The Mitscherlichs’ sought to explain the widespread failure in postwar Germany to confront its nation’s past by applying Freud’s early papers on mourning and the effect of failed identifications in the generation after Nazi surrender. They believed that only by a prolonged process of authentic mourning the loss of the failed identifications with the Nazi could the supporting narcissistic identifications that provided support for mass murder be worked through.
While controversial at the time, the Mitscherlichs’ mourning thesis was too caught up in the economy of drives to understand the complex historical/political phenomenon that led to the mass murders and their complex aftermath. In addition, their ideas were too Furher centric and, importantly, few of the perpetrators were prosecuted and even fewer punished. While Nazi-ism continues to produce books and movies that reflect these powerful issues, any reduction of the generational conflicts in post war Germany can not be reduced to the dynamics of mourning and guilt, or its denial. The separate dynamics of mourning by perpetrators is yet to be explored and seemingly reflects on the current misdiagnosis of PTSD in our veterans. As revealed as a subtext in the Oppenheimer film there is a complex teaching through symbols, experiences and lack of judicial response that mass killing is acceptable as a political solution; these extra psychic events instruct people’s capacity to tolerate differences and otherness. Foremost among the learned structures in Nazi-ism and the Indonesian killers is not only the sanctioning of violence throughout the culture, but that violence is accompanied by a thinking in rigid binary oppositions: a dynamic that was examined by social psychologist after the war. Otherization is bedrock for mass murders; but there is more to genocide than prejudicial attitude towards others as murderous violence is required.
Oppenheimer’s film indirectly raises profound and unanswered questions concerning the reasons for a seeming absence of social support for working through of “mass murder’’ in any subsequent generations. In fact, the killers in Indonesia are honored and the victims only acknowledged without being given proper names or memorials.
In addition, there is a deeply profound issue hinted at by one leader of a killing squad. While mass murder retains the psychological capacity to evoke imaginative retelling in film, fiction and memoir, in most of these depictions the one significant and ignored issue is whether the post genocidal generations psychic wounds and their healing depend less on the fate of the victims than on the outcome of the war and the prosecution of the perpetrators. It must be, I learned from this film, that the purpose of documentary film art is to impart the sensation of historical events and people not as they are known, imagined or remembered but as the audience’s new experiences that changes perception of history.