In 1965, Indonesia was the scene of a military coup whose leaders quickly scapegoated the Communists for all the country's woes. Shortly after taking power, the generals hired a production company to make a preposterously grisly propaganda film to re-enact the blood-curdling barbarism of the enemies from whom they were "protecting" the people. This film was required viewing for all students k-through-12 and so convinced the country of a Communist menace that it fomented retaliatory atrocities against dissidents that were far worse than any attributed to them. Retribution became a form of patriotism so pervasive that at least one, and perhaps as many as 2.5, million people were murdered in the year after the takeover--nearly all of them by paramilitary groups and youth-gangs.
One adolescent gang leader, Anwar Congo, who saw and believed the propaganda film became a willing, almost gleeful executioner--responsible, by his own admission, for as many as a 1,000 deaths. Already launched as a local teenaged crime boss when he began abducting suspects off the streets and out of homes, Congo and his henchmen operated in the back office of a local rightwing newspaper with the full blessing of the local government. What's more, and as bad, Congo personally devised and conducted most executions using wire to strangle victims, then wrapping their bodies in bags and dumping them in a nearby river. After a day of killing, this seasoned assassin smoked marijuana, got drunk and went dancing to forget his bloody, burdensome civic duties. His righthand man, Herman Koto, who looked then and now like a sumo wrestler, was always with him. When the twosome were not rounding up "suspects," they were extorting money from local shopkeepers. Their favorite targets were Chinese merchants who knew that if they didn't pay the bribes regularly demanded of them that they were eligible for accusations of Communist affiliation and speedy star-chamber interrogation, torture and execution.
Nobody knows how many Anwar Cargos operated with impunity in Indonesia during the Great Genocide of 1965/6. American filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer interviewed 40 such gang leaders before meeting Anwar around 2005 and selecting him to "star" in his film. Oppenheimer was in Sumatra trying to convince executioners to re-enact their crimes for a documentary of remembrance. Congo was the first killer he met who bothered to bring his modus operandi with him in order to demonstrate firsthand his primary murder method. Convincing himself that it was morally necessary to commit his original war crimes, as well as participate in gigantic genocidal snuff film about them 40 years later, Congo recruited government officials and locals to appear in Oppenheimer's movie, finally released in 2013, and called "The Act of Killing." The title is both literally and figuratively true since the movie shows execution in graphic detail and hovers close, by enthusiastic verisimilitude, to
Act-
tuality.
The premise of the movie forces cinema into a new dimension and gives it a moral magnitude it rarely has had until now. "Remembrance" movies like Max Ophuls' "The Sorrow and the Pity," and, more recently, Arnon Goldfinger's "The Flat," raise disturbing questions about complicity, but Joshua Oppenheimer makes retrospection about evil a form of captivity for all, including viewers, who participate in it. Anwar Congo is not just talking about his past, and occasionally squirming with discomfort as he does so, he gradually becomes as helpless and uncontrollable in the wake of recall as a man in the advanced, irreversible stages of an hallucinogen. And as the drug trip charts its own course, the viewer becomes a hostage to a magma of repressed memories that trap all in their path.
"The Act of Killing" is the most harrowing and inescapable art-experience I have ever had. Watching grown men dredge their psyches for detailed memories of anonymous victims takes them into terrifying, uncharted territory of sadism and psychosis. Indeed, the last third of the movie is what its maker calls a "fever dream," as ghosts of the slain abduct Anwar into replay, not just recall, from which he has even less escape and mercy than those he murdered. By the end, Anwar succumbs to literal psychic and physiological breakdown. There is a long moment of crippling acid reflux at the very end of the movie where the killer is convulsed into dry heaves by un-expellable guilt. He can not cough up the past or swallow it. He is literally choking on his crimes. I felt like I was watching the paroxysms of the damned. Hell is to fall into the permanent freeze frame and screen-lock of non-assuagable remorse. Only exhaustion, drunkenness or death can end this torment. The last scene of the movie is one of the most unforgettably phantasmagoric I have ever seen--a dance number personally choreographed by the devil.
I checked IMDB for "The Act of Killing" box office figures this morning and found that as of this week the movie has grossed less than half of its $1 million cost to make. Hopefully, DVD sales will help here. I know that this movie is a cornerstone of any modern cinema collection. Indonesia is just one of the many genocidal sagas of my life time. Palestine, Syria, Libya, Egypt, South Sudan are simply latter-day recurrences of the chronic, institutionalized inhumanity which has left me with less hope than Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and Coriolanus. I end with a poem by Jack Spicer, written in 1955, that sums up the desolation this movie left me with:
THE DAY FIVE THOUSAND FISH DIED ALONG THE CHARLES RIVER
And when the fish come in to die
They slap their heads against the rocks until they float
Downstream on one dead eye. From rocks
The Irish boys yell and throw rocks at them and
beat them with their sticks.
Gulls wheel in the fine sky. Tall as an ogre
God walks among the rocks. His angels cry,
"Yell and throw rocks at them and beat them
with sticks!"
But watch those upturned eyes
That gleam like God's own candle in the sun. Nothing
Deserves to live.
Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This To Me, Wesleyan Press, 2008, p. 56
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