The surreality of evil
‘Act of Killing’ reveals much about human nature
“The Act of Killing” is a stunning movie, a documentary in which the perpetrators of mass political murder in Indonesia in 1965 are invited to re-enact their atrocities as films of their own devising.
Director Joshua Oppenheimer came up with the device, and it is not an overstatement to say that there’s never been another movie like it. Men who killed thousands of people with their own hands still gloat, more than 45 years later. They obviously relish the chance to relive their actions on film.
It is morbidly fascinating. However, that doesn’t make it easy to watch.
“Yes, of course it’s not easy to watch,” said Werner Herzog, the famed director who served as an executive producer on the film. “So what?” He’s on to something there. “The Act of Killing” falls into the small category of films that absolutely should be seen, regardless of whether you want to see them. It says much about the nature of evil and human nature and how easily they are entwined.
The thugs and gangsters who rose to power after the toppling of the Indonesian government by the military are still revered in their country for their extermination of “communists.” (As the film reveals, that description was applied to anyone whom those in power disliked.)
Perhaps the most intriguing of the killers is Anwar Congo, who talks about how he personally killed about 1,000 people and demonstrates how: strangling them with wire after beating them proved too messy. He was inspired by Western gangster films.
To call it disturbing is not a strong-enough reaction.
“The film asks you to see a small part of yourself in Anwar Congo and thereby recog-
nize that we’re all much closer to perpetrators than we would like to see,” Oppenheimer said.
That’s not so easy. The film is almost surreal in places. Wait. That’s not right. “Not almost surreal,” Herzog said by way of correction. “It’s completely surreal in many parts.”
Parts like when Anwar dances a little cha-cha-cha after showing Oppenheimer his method of murder on a rooftop. We see a grotesque display of a man seemingly untroubled by his past. Oppenheimer saw something else.
“He says, just before (demonstrating his methods), ‘I am drinking and taking drugs, going out dancing to forget the things I’ve done.’ So in that moment is a little glimpse of a very important point, which in fact is the boasting can be defended, can be a symptom of the perpetrator’s remorse and not the opposite. I think that’s a paradox that’s gradually excavated throughout the film.
“That paradox is a tragic one. If this boasting, this impunity, is actually a symptom of our humanity, that when you kill or you commit a crime you need to justify it because you know it’s wrong, that same humanity, that same justification, that same celebration of an atrocity, that same boasting, necessitates a downward spiral into evil and corruption.”
This isn’t the film Oppenheimer set out to make. He was going to make a movie about plantation workers in Indonesia and the union they established, which was eventually crushed when the regime in power labeled them communists and killed them.
Understandably, survivors were afraid to talk about it, because the killers are still so respected. They suggested Oppenheimer talk to the killers instead. He found one and was surprised at the results.
“He welcomed me in and wanted to know who the foreigner was. He offered me tea with his wife and very warmly welcomed me. I said, ‘What did you do for a living?’ He said, ‘I began as the security guard on this plantation, but I was promoted to be the manager of the whole plantation because I killed the communists here.’
“I said, ‘What does he mean by that?’ He said, ‘I eliminated the union.’ I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He said that he killed 200 people by beating them up and then drowning them in irrigation ditches.
“He told this story boastfully and kind of gleefully. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he was pointing at his muscles, as if to say, ‘I could still do this, even though I’m in my 70s.’ He told it in front of his 10-yearold granddaughter, who watched bored, as if she had heard this before.
“That was my first encounter with the perpetrator of the 1965 killings.”
It was hardly the last. He interviewed dozens of killers. But at first the going was rough.
“Almost every time we filmed with the survivors, the police or the military would come and stop us,” he said. “They would tell us we weren’t allowed to film, they would sometimes impound our equipment and sometimes detain us a little bit. That made it very difficult to get anything done.”
Encouraged by humanrights groups, he continued. A tip to keep following the same path helped.
“One of the survivors said, ‘You know, we don’t know if you can film safely with us. But if you film the perpetra- tors, they will all be boastful like the ones you’ve met. In their boasting you will see why we’re so afraid, and the nature of this regime.’ ”
The survivor was right. Not only was Oppenheimer allowed to film while talking to the killers, he also hit upon their love for film. (Many sold black-market movie tickets when they were younger.) It’s just one more bizarre twist in the story.
“Hollywood is in a funny way the world’s etiquette manual,” Oppenheimer said. “There is something about cinema and violence. I’m not saying the film’s message is about films causing violent behavior, because I don’t think that’s what the film is saying. It’s much more that there is something so resonant with where we are now. We live in a time when vanity has been transformed from a deadly sin to a necessary virtue.”
Anwar acts out his crimes as old-time gangster movies; playing a victim seems to actually get to him. One makes a Western. One makes a musical, with dancing girls parading out of a giant fish. Although his actions eventually seem to weigh on Anwar, it’s clear that these men consider themselves the good guys — another Hollywood convention.
“What underpins almost all the stories that we tell in film is this notion that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys,” Oppenheimer said. “And one of the primary effects of that is we reassure ourselves that we are like the good guys we identify with when we watch movies. It is particularly a comforting position to place yourself in if you’re a perpetrator, so if you’re a leader of a totalitarian regime … it must be comforting to think of yourself as the white knight.”
Anwar has seen the film and doesn’t denounce anything about it. Somehow that isn’t surprising. By the end of the film, our capacity to be surprised by just about anything has been dulled. Herzog put it best. “My reaction to the film is public knowledge because it’s on the poster,” he said, “a very simple statement: In more than a decade, I haven’t seen a film as powerful, as frightening and as surreal as this one.”
You’ll get no argument here.