The Act of Killing

As I was watching The Act of Killing last night, I could not help but feel as though a part of my soul had changed and that I would never be the same again.  Not only that I would not be the same, but that I would never be complete.  It may sound like I am being overly tragic or that I am pulling on some clichés, but it is true.  Waking up this morning, I was not the same person who woke up yesterday, and I have doubts that tomorrow morning will be any different.

The Act of Killing is a documentary that focuses on former members of death squads in Indonesia who carried out mass murders in the mid-sixties.  The documentary meets up with them today and has them re-enact the atrocities for the camera by using different Hollywood genres that they grew up with, such as westerns and film noir.  It is rather fitting, because the main person they follow, Anwar Congo worked selling black market tickets in front of a theatre before his switch in professions to killer for hire.

Why would something like this be done?  How did someone ever come up with the idea and why is it even a good one?  The director, Joshua Oppenheimer, appears to take this approach because things like mass murder and genocide are concepts that we seem to know little about or ponder on in glorified cinematic ways.  Perhaps putting this spin on it is to juxtapose the common approaches to such things with the mindboggling reality of it.  But who knows just why this came about.  I am not sure that I want that question answered.  Far too often is it that a documentary leaves so much interpretation up to the audience, and I would hate to have that ruined for me.  That having been said, I will never ever watch this documentary again, not even if I was paid to.

The cause of the torment that I underwent while watching it (and for hours afterwards, and even now as I am forced to revisit it for the purposes of this review) is hearing different people talk about the horrific events.  It is partly the content that they discuss, but even more disturbing is the manner in which they talk about it.  To hear people lightheartedly talking about walking down the street and stabbing every single Chinese person they meet is beyond awful.  To hear them chuckle as they mention that their girlfriend’s father was Chinese and the way that they killed him is enough to destroy your being.  The relaxed look on their faces, the fond memories, that is what annihilated me.

But, that is why this film is important.  It is seeing them and hearing their thoughts and memories that sheds the much needed light on the worldwide conversation of genocide.  There are a number of different people who we hear from in this documentary.  There are some who are in positions of power based off of the work of the ‘gangsters’ (the people who are the unofficial strong arm of the government, romanticized by leaders as being described as freemen in a dictatorship as a way to gain support and recruit more into their ranks) who seem to be with no conscience of the actions, never losing a night’s sleep, justifying and defending the actions.  There is someone who seems to be profoundly philosophical now because of toiling over the memories of what happened.  We see many different people who react to it differently and remember their own version of history.

The film shows a small portion of a propaganda film that was used to brainwash people into killing communists, and we hear the subjects of the documentary discuss it.  One admits full well that it is indeed propaganda, that it was a tool to influence their minds and that because of that they became the real villains.  We also get an account of it from the standpoint of unwavering loyalty which brings out the scary reality of the power of media, showing that it was able to reassure people that all of the murdering was for a noble cause.

Most of what we know of violence and darkness if from what we see in cinema and on TV.  In The Act of Killing we have an almost absurd use of the Hollywood formats to pull the gloss and shine off of these lucrative elements of the movie industry and see the empty coldness that really exists in them.  We never see any footage of the brutal acts, but that is not needed.  Simply hearing about it and voyaging through the recreations are strong enough, and more powerful than anything that could be developed on a Hollywood sound stage.

Right now I am wondering how something like this is to be reviewed?  How do you process something that is so horrible and so real?  Perhaps that conundrum is the point of this documentary.  I have seen some powerful and moving documentaries and movies before, but The Act of Killing makes Schindler’s List look like a Pixar film as this is one serious slog through the darkest elements of humanity.  It left me a complete wreck, nauseous and in a state of shock for the whole night that I was unable to shake no matter what I tried.  It is odd… even in the nastiness of the reality, you see the humanity of the killers, and that is the most disturbing thing.  People like you and I who ended up being in these situations.

Human nature is the worst, because, by definition, it is something that lives within us all – something that binds us all together in the various ways we are similar and what we are all capable of doing under different circumstances.  The people who were involved in the killings were all different, with various reasons for what lead them to such things.  These years later, some have come to realize that what they did was wrong, others needed to see it through the process of this documentary to come to that place, and still others seem like it was the morally correct process.  If people who are of so many different values and mindsets could all commit the same atrocities, is it too hard to believe that you or I in their situation would be invincible against carrying out the same actions?

Rating – 4 out of 4 stars