18 GESTURE

Jonathan Lamb

Joshua Oppenheimer’s film The Act of Killing (2012) begins with a troubled man fishing from a wharf on a dark night. He is holding the line in his hand and he says, “Now, look around and it is all darkness.

Oppenheimer’s plan for reenactment was to re-present history by using the actual people involved in making it. Not ghosts, then, but actors in the events were to play themselves, performing in front of us what they had done, experiencing it for the second time. A remark­able cast of former murderers put themselves at his disposal, along with the Pancasila Youth Movement, a paramilitary organization that was very busy during the massacres. Oppenheimer used a repertory of reenactment scenarios, ranging from sheer fantasy to the miming of tor­ture and killing. He relied on three gifted amateurs: Herman, a young man with a large figure and a penchant for wearing women’s clothes, too young to have been actually involved in the extermination but a passionate reenactor; Adi, an intelligent and wealthy beneficiary of the mayhem, who refused even to pretend that he felt guilt or remorse—“winners are always right, there’s no reconciliation,” he said; and finally Anwar, an aging dandy who recollected vividly the movies, dances, and clothes that were fashionable in those days (“for massacres I usually wore jeans”), and who showed no reluctance at all in demonstrating exactly how he put Communists to death.

Anwar is the central character because he is so good at explaining and acting out what it was like, how they would come out of an American gangster movie with their imaginations on fire and move smoothly from watching violence to committing it. For him, the whole business had

Gesture

been a kind of costume drama filled with song, dance, and killing, so he was eager to re-enter the world of movies this time as a star, drawing on his vast wardrobe for effect and carefully inserting his false teeth before every scene. However, Anwar has had bad dreams. He is troubled especially by the memory of cutting off a man's head and not bothering to close the eyes after it was severed. A short exchange with Adi, the Machiavellian materialist, who tells him it is all just his nerves and to go and see a shrink, precedes a series of reenactments that move from realism (how to garotte a Communist, burning a village, interrogating the stepson of a man who was actually assassinated) to fantasies that are meant to probe the vulnerable spot in Anwar's psyche, first by a mock-beheading, followed by various lurid scenes involving Anwar's own head, apparently amputated, witnessing some extraordinary cannibal feats performed on his own body by Herman and a troupe of monkeys. This is history punching back with a little help from Oppenheimer, who obviously thinks Anwar is his best bet for some kind of sympathy with the dead, provided the right contingency is applied. So he has Anwar garroted, a scene done twice. The first time it leaves Anwar claiming some kind of sympathy with his victims, a sentiment Oppenheimer did not find convincing. The second time, Anwar is truly shaken: “I feel like I was dead for a moment. I can't do that again.” When agents become actors in representations of events they actually perpetrated, two possibilities of gesture emerge. The first is a histrionic control of the body designed to reinforce the verisimilitude of the historical scene, pure work of the will; the second is the involuntary accompaniment supplied by the body to performances of the past that provoke unexpectedly intense reactions.

What is happening to Anwar happened long ago to Ulysses at the court of King Alcinous, when he listened to Demodocus, the bard, sing so vividly of the destruction ofTroy that he remembered his own part in those terrible scenes and began to weep. Virgil copied the scene in reverse for the lacrimae rerum episode of the Aeneid, where Dido shows Aeneas the paint­ings of the ruin of the city and the deaths of its inhabitants and he cries, but not so copiously as Ulysses. As he describes the scene with Ulysses at the Phaeacian palace, Homer evidently moves along a similar track to Oppenheimer vis-a-vis Anwar, expecting remorse, pity, some kind of gesture toward the people he has left dead. But, in fact, what happens is something dif­ferent in both cases: here is the description in Chapman's translation of the effect on Ulysses of Demodocus's song:

This the divine Expressor did so give

Both act and passion that he made it live,

And to Ulysses' facts did breath a fire

So deadly quickning that it did inspire

Old death with life, and renderd life so sweet

And passionate that ah there felt it fleet—

Which made him pitie his owne crueltie,

And put into that ruth so pure an eie

Of human frailtie, that to see a man

Could so revive from Death, yet no way can

Defend from death, his owne quicke powers it made

Feele there death's horrors, and he felt life fade.

In teares his feeling braine swet: for in things

That move past utterance, teares ope all their springs.

(Homer, 1956, p. 147)

Jonathan Lamb

The gesture toward pity (“which made him pity his own cruelty”) is supplanted by an intuition of his own mortality that has him oscillating between feeling what it is to be alive, and what it is to be dead. Adam Smith had this to say about such a predicament:

It is from this very illusion of imagination, that the foresight of our dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, make us miserable while we are alive.

(1979 [1759], p. 13)

Ulysses weeps so copiously because, as Smith would say, he has brought the matter home to his own bosom, inhabiting at the same time the horror of his own death and the horror of having put so many people to death, just like Anwar. The physiological reaction is justified in Homer by a detailed parallel between Ulysses' case and that of an imagined Trojan woman trying hope­lessly to protect her family from their enemies—a version of Hecuba. If her grief expressed itself in convulsive gasps that made her bark like a dog, Ulysses' horror emerges in the uncontrollable flow of liquid from his eyes and his brain: brain-sweat. A similar parallel makes way for Anwar's convulsive moment. The second to last scene of The Act of Killing returns to the space upstairs where the garroting used to be done and in which the reenactment began: it is not Anwar's lungs, eye, and brain that empty themselves, but his stomach. The scene is so lengthy that two reactions are possible. The first is that the emotion caused by the reenactment must be utterly excessive, as excessive as the limitless cruelty it mourns and the inexpiable guilt it confesses. A tsunami of remorse, like Ulysses'. The second is that Anwar has finally figured out what Oppenheimer was after and is faking it.

Further reading

Buruma, I., 2015; Melvin, J., 2018.