Remembering: “The Act of Killing”

The Act of Killing - Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and anonymous 

Preface: Indonesia, a now-autonomous and Muslim republic comprised of over 17,000 islands in Oceana, has had anything but a peaceful history. A bridge situated between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the island nation became a contested hotbed throughout its Dutch colonization and occupation from 1512 to 1949. Serving as a trade colony between its neighboring China via the South China Sea to the north and Australia via the Timor Sea to the south-east, geographically, Indonesia is like the Silk Road in terms of geopolitical importance. There’s not enough words to attempt to abridge an entire region/nation’s history in a lump-sum paragraph, but what is an important factoid is that after reclamation in 1949/50 and upon declaring independence (recognized by the Dutch), Indonesia would go through what can only be called a culling, a mass-extermination of communists and ethnic-Chinese, all spurred/backed by the United States, via proxy. The subsequent (and the ongoing legacy of) brutalization employed by the western-backed Suharto regime is among inhumane legend, rivaling that of other dictatorships like Pol Pot, Mao, etc. 

The Act of Killing is a documentary that focuses on the ontologies of those previously-described Indonesian paramilitaries and totalitarians, attempting to dissect how fellow countrymen can slaughter their political and ideological enemies, and often, without any second thought (many of the subjects captured within the film, doing so in droves). For all of its historical and political pretext, The Act of Killing is decidedly un-sensationalized in terms of production and aesthetic, tone; a somber nuance of distinction is carefully orchestrated through the film’s use of vignettes to let the Indonesian killers recount their stories of incomprehensible, inhumane blood spilling, torture, and so forth. Yes, you read that right: The Act of Killing interviews and assists those fascists in recreating their crimes against humanity through the use of B-movie-y sets and props, all under the guise that they themselves are making a nationalist-propaganda film. There’s really not an equivalent here that I can think of in terms of filmographic similarity, because The Act of Killing is like a bizzaro-Christopher Guest movie, where we see something like former SS hitmen joke about their time murdering Jews and political dissidents, but in a world where the Nazi’s actually kept power. For as much officious candor the films’ subjects exude in detailing all of their war crimes, the filmmaker’s approach are thoroughly documentarian: the cuts are long, there’s hardly any music (outside that being made of the subjects), the questions asked are all hard-hitting and fearless, and a strong contingency/sensibility invoking Errol Morris throughout.

Now-deceased Anwar Congo, a former hitman for the paramilitary organization, Pancasila Youth

 While it’d be easy for most filmmakers to make a quick hit-piece on whatever given-atrocities are associated to the one “bad apple” or dictator-villain as explanation, The Act of Killing goes deeper than that by examining the mindsets behind such callous and inhumane acts employed by the Suharto regime, deeper than just “why,” but “how.” We all know the story of imperialistic occupation and profit-driven foreign expansion (or at least, I’d like to assume we do), but is it possible we can learn how a brainwashed individual justifies committing an act of unspeakable violence against someone – of let’s say – their own family? This isn’t merely a top-down look at the status quo (blaming hitmen on decisions of their occupier’s political influencers), but rather an inversed, “top-upward” look, looking from the bottom upward at what kind messaging goes into making someone right at the bottom a cold-hearted, ruthless assassin. The film goes a long ways to examine messaging and beliefs through the persuasive and propagandizing use of Hollywood films in Jakarta, which ultimately are successful to lionize and mythologize a “strongman” to the Indonesian nationalists, who are seen comparing themselves to Americans actors portraying gangsters. “...my favorite is Al Pacino,” utters Anwar Congo, a particularly cruel executioner for Pancasila Youth – one of Indonesia’s largest paramilitary organizations – who is the main subject of the film, as his mindset is explored with stunning nuance and complexity. 

Though now deceased, at the time Congo was renowned in his political sphere for being a cold and efficient garrotter with a body count in the quadruple digits. One of his associates describes being fearful of Congo back in their heyday of anti-PKI killings, laughing with a cognitive-split in his voice that’s peculiar as it is horrifying. Throughout the film’s 2 hour runtime (or in my case, a director’s cut of 2h, 45m) we follow Congo’s recreations of his murders and listen as he tries to explain why it was right to do any of the following: falsify suspected communist testimonies as laissez-faire setup for committing murder, rape, torture, brutal and agonizing murder without any evidence, the full-out ethnic cleansing of Chinese Indonesians, destruction and/or seizure of suspected communists’ property, and...in one shocking case, butchering an infant with the use of a knife during “interrogation,” then later, joking about it. Things of true nightmares are discussed and painfully recreated by the killers as an act of gloating indifference, yet, over the course of the film, it gradually becomes clear that even these hitmen responsible for so much death, trauma and suffering are affected by the consequences of their actions just underneath the surface. Anwar Congo’s demons manifest through his complex-posttraumatic stress and an inability to sleep at night, so we see him recount his days of alcohol, cannabis and ecstasy use, in addition to living a hedonistic lifestyle in order to dissociate himself from his past, yet it’s of no use. It isn’t until the film’s final moments, when after reenacting and recreating some of his atrocities on the other side (i.e., having to “act” the part of being someone tortured or killed by his associates) that we see him suffer a mental breakdown, even if-only getting a glimpse of the terror and/or anguish his actions have caused. In one particularly haunting scene – a rooftop of which he conducted his routine executions – from where we first meet Congo, happy-go-lucky and with a mocking affect, he begins to involuntarily dry heave when discussing his murders, as he is eventually unable to go down memory lane with the same lackadaisical tone as before. 

Anwar Congo and Herman Koto rounding up civilians for a movie in The Act of Killing

I feel like I’m unable to put into words how impactful this movie was/is to me. The semblance and visage of conflict intertwined with campy, low-budget vignettes audaciously made by the killers themselves feels so cerebral, jarring, unsettling. Two magic words are at the heart of this movie: cognitive dissonance. It’s of the split between logicality and indoctrination where we see the hitmen inhabit and comingle in this film, that space where empathy is not a natural stimuli to other human beings but rather a faucet that can be switched on or off. As we see these men recreate their heinous acts through wannabe-Hollywood sets and film shoots, it’s like a glimpse into the psychological ecology of cult membership, a cult of fascist-radicalization that inducts its members to systemically dehumanize their opposition through social and media propaganda. I know there’s a lot more than one 2 hour documentary can do to capture the horrors embedded into Indonesian civil-conflicts, but The Act of Killing is a start, certainly eye-opening of its own merit. With all the intense and focal subject matter captured here, I suppose there’s a question that begs to be asked: is this documentary exploitative in-nature? I don’t feel like I’m equipped nor qualified to answer that, but it was a question that ran through my mind a few times. 

This movie is a venture into the heart of humanity, at its most brutal, shocking, resolute and as a study of radicalization. The Act of Killing leaves as many questions as it introduces, but there’s a part of me that thinks if this is an effective, persuasive method, documentary highlighting the horrors and atrocities of the Suharto regime, then asking the right type of good-faith questions can go a long way to examine ourselves. Yes, what the killers tell us of their past acts of violence are abhorrent and inhumane, but ultimately, they are human (both the actions of the oppressors as well as they themselves), which – in my opinion – is why and what makes this film so frightening: we are fissured from this conflict and its subsequent acts merely by chance, and the human beings that do the horrible, unspeakable things have existed as old as we, the species, ourselves. I’m still letting my thoughts settle about this documentary, as I feel I don’t have enough in me to exhume enough words to try and attempt to describe what it is I feel remembering it. Horrified? You bet. Shocked? Knowing what little I do about the influence of western imperialism upon the world, yes, of course, who wouldn’t? All in all, though, this is the type of film you need a few hours afterwards to talk about with whoever you saw it with, and I absolutely mean that. This is a documentary not only to remembered, but talked about, for as long as we can for both.