The Act of Killing

This brings us to The Act of Killing, a documentary which takes reenact­ment’s relation to the psychic realities of (in some cases evidently trauma­tized) perpetrators to a new level while giving rise to similar criticisms about the marginalization of victims’ voices.

Anybody opposed to the military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist: union members, landless farmers, intellectuals, and the ethnic Chinese. In less than a year and with the direct aid of western governments, over one million “communists” were murdered. The army used paramilitaries and gangsters to carry out the killings. These men have been in power and have persecuted their opponents ever since.

Fifty years later, the purge’s perpetrators are eager to talk about the muti­lations, rapes, and murders they committed. Oppenheimer gave them con­siderable control over their stories, inviting former death-squad members to script, stage, and film reenactments of their murderous acts in whatever form and genre they chose. While never crystallizing into a full-fledged film- within-a-film, the staged scenes are included in the documentary and are combined with footage of the filming process, along with more conventional portrayals of the perpetrators’ daily routines in Medan, Sumatra, where the documentary was shot.Taking inspiration from the gangster films that they so admire, the kill­ers enthusiastically set out to reenact their interrogations and executions of communists.

The executioners’ startling self-glorification is stimulated by their disap­pointment with the perceived lack of national-level recognition.⁷ It is further fanned by a local culture that celebrates these “free men” as good-natured tough guys who rid the nation of “communist vermin.”⁸ When invited onto a television talk show, the gangsters are heralded as heroes. Anwar explains to the audience how their killing techniques, including the go-to method of strangling victims with a wire, had been inspired by their favorite American gangster movies. As the excited talk show host misleadingly puts it, Anwar and his friends took their cue from cinema to develop “a more humane and less sadistic” method for exterminating communists. The audience bursts into applause.

Oppenheimer’s dubious arrangement with the killers seems to facilitate the latter’s public boasting and their posing as heroic Hollywood-style gangsters. Yet rather than merely adding layers of fiction and drama to the crimes, the cinematic reenactments tend to reconnect victims and perpe­trators alike to the shocking, and often unspoken, realities of violence. As Homay King cogently puts it, in The Act of Killing “fantasy can paradox­ically be the route back to reality” (2013, p. 35). King’s remark resonates with Jonathan Lamb’s view that realism in the reenactment of history is not primarily dependent on “situational exactitude” but pivots on “what happens—that is to say, what actually occurs—when history and fiction become a volatile and unpredictable emulsion” (2020b, p.

A case in point is the shooting of a scene entitled “Interrogation of a Communist.” Prior to the filming, the viewer sees the documentary’s three main subjects, Adi, Anwar, and Herman, smoking and relaxing on the set. Their assistant, a certain Suryono, tells the gangsters: “If you want a true story, I have one.” The men encourage Suryono (clearly intimidated by these respected thugs) to speak “because everything in this film should be true.” Suryono then tells the harrowing tale of how he lost his Chinese stepfather. His tone is at first impersonal (“there was a shopkeeper”), but his narrative grows increasingly intimate (“to be honest, he was my stepfather”; “I lived with him since I was a baby”). One night, when Suryono was 11 or 12,Performing Violence 317 a death squad, possibly including the very men who are now listening to him, abducted his stepfather. “I remember it well. It is impossible to for­get!” The following morning, the man’s dead body was found under an oil drum. Interrupting his speech with nervous giggles, Suryono explains that nobody would help the family dig a proper grave and that he and his grand­father eventually buried the man “like a goat next to the main road.” Shortly afterward, all “communist” families, including Suryono’s, were exiled to a remote shantytown at the edge of the jungle.

Now the gangsters are less welcoming. Herman explains that the entire reenactment film has already been planned, and Anwar adds that Suryono’s story is too complicated to be incorporated into it. The men proceed to the filming of the scheduled interrogation scene, with Suryono—his sullen face still distressed by the memories he has just revived—playing the communist. The scene has not been well planned and is ambiguous from the start.

At one point, the viewer—and possibly the gangsters themselves—cannot tell whether the scripted interrogation has been paused to give the distressed Suryono some rest. The latter sits motionless in his chair, holding the glass of water which the gangsters have given him to try to bring him to his senses. However, the bullying continues, and the men now compel Suryono to drink the water, joking aggressively that “it’s not poison.” When Suryono does not respond, Herman pours the water over his head. At this moment, Oppenheimer zooms in on Anwar’s compassionate face: “It’s sadistic,” he mumbles, his eyes fixed on the ground. When the planned interroga­tion scene resumes, Suryono begins to sob uncontrollably, snot and tears dripping from his face (Figure 16.3). Shots of him, again, alternate with

Figure 16.3 Suryono in his role as a communist in The Act of Killing.

Figure 16.4 Anwar watching the scene from the other side of the set in The Act of Killing.

close-ups of Anwar, who, in the role of director-cum-cameraman (though still in make-up from a previous scene), oversees the filming from the other side of the stage (Figure 16.4). Suryono begs his executioners, “Wait. Would you give a message to my family? Or could I speak to them one last time?” The favor is resolutely denied, after which the communist’s strangulation is staged.

Intended as a cinematic reenactment, the events on stage become an occasion for Suryono to act out his unspoken traumas. He conjures up, it seems, a constructed “memory” of the horror his stepfather went through just before he was murdered.

What makes this scene and others so bewildering is the imbrication of reen­actment as a cinematic device and as a psychic reality. On the one hand, reenactment works as a dramatized and fictionalized reconstruction of his­torical events. Yet, on the other hand (and sometimes simultaneously), it is structured by the repetitive and fractured chronology of trauma (Caruth, 1993, p. 25),⁹ taking the form of an eruption into the present of past expe­riences, roles, and emotions. This conflation of temporalities is bound to confuse the viewer: is Suryono’s weeping the result of painful childhoodPerforming Violence 319 memories or of the intimidation he now faces? Or is his apparent emotional disturbance actually an extreme form of method acting? Is the violence the gangsters inflict on Suryono part of the story they want to convey, or have they fallen back onto (or simply continued) their aggressive behavior?

The relation between reenactment and trauma is especially complex in the case of the perpetrators. While taking the men back to a violent history, the staged scenes also seem to shield them from direct confronta­tion with the realities of their crimes. The gangster-film tropes (performed with the inevitable suits, cigars, and fedoras) often help the thugs to reframe their cowardly mutilations, rapes, and executions within a self-aggrandizing narrative of toughness and stylishness.

Telling in this respect is the lavish musical-like finale of the film-within- the-film. The scene’s opening shot features a verdant, misty mountain land­scape with a waterfall in the background. Anwar, clothed in a black robe, and Herman in drag solemnly wave their arms in sync with the film’s theme song, “Born Free.” They are surrounded by identically costumed young female dancers whose smiling faces and festive dress provide additional grace notes to this sugarcoated representation of the afterlife. When the song reaches a dramatic crescendo, two scruffy communists appear beside Anwar. They take the wires off their necks (presumably used to strangle them), and one of the men pulls a medal out of his pocket and awards it to Anwar: “For executing me and sending me to heaven. I thank you a thou­sand times for everything.”

Different in form, the reenactments staged in The Act of Killing have a double impetus. On the one hand, the glorified scenes of torture and the phony fantasies of forgiveness repackage base murders in narratives of machismo and redemption and thus obfuscate the ways that historical reality still troubles the perpetrators. On the other hand, the reenactments increasingly reveal, precisely in their nervous attempts to mitigate the moral weight of these crimes, a more troubled relation to the past. As dramatized and fictionalized projections, they both visualize and trigger perpetrator traumas, even as they strive to fend them off.

In one reenactment (its style reminiscent of film noir), Anwar imper­sonates a communist who is supposedly planning to ban the screening of American films in Medan. He is intimidated by his interrogator (Herman), then strangled. During the “execution,” Anwar, suddenly out of character, becomes overwhelmed with fear, whispering to Herman in a frightened tone that he “can’t do that again.” Later, at home, after watching the kitschy afterlife scene (which deeply moves him) on his small television, Anwar asks

Figure 16.5 The screening of the interrogation scene in Anwar’s living room, as shown in The Act of Killing

Oppenheimer to screen the filmed interrogation scene (Figure 16.5). He is again visibly disturbed, this time by merely seeing the footage of his strangu­lation (Figure 16.6). Fixated on the screen, Anwar intimates to Oppenheimer that here, at this moment, “my dignity is destroyed, and then fear comes right there and then. All the terror suddenly possessed my body. It surrounded me and possessed me.” When Anwar asks Oppenheimer if he thinks the people he had tortured had felt the same way, the latter, in a rare off-screen intervention,

Figure 16.6 Anwar watching the interrogation scene in which he portrays a communist.Performing Violence 321 responds decisively: “Actually, the people you tortured felt far worse because you know it’s only a film. They knew they were being killed.”

While this is no doubt the case, it is also true that the process of reenact­ment has splintered Anwar’s well-established defense mechanisms, not only deepening his perpetrator trauma but also opening up possibilities for the recognition of his victims’ humanity (Crichlow, 2013) and providing a poten­tial means to relate to their experiences. Shortly afterward, in a much-debated scene, Anwar climbs up to the Medan rooftop that was once his favorite exe­cution spot. Earlier in the film, he had shown Oppenheimer this place, mer­rily explaining his killing techniques. But this visit is different. The rooftop now triggers memories that are apparently appalling enough to sicken Anwar. Retching and gagging, he reflects, “Why did I have to kill them?” While this scene should not be too hastily interpreted as an expression of sincere feelings of remorse,¹⁰ it does mark Anwar’s heightened and embodied sensitivity for the unfathomable horror he has inflicted on his victims.

Here the viewer begins to grasp the full complexity of the documentary’s reenactments: Suryono’s enacted fantasy of his stepfather’s last moments (filtered through his own traumas); Anwar’s apparent compassion toward Suryono during the torture scene, when he found Suryono’s treatment to be “sadistic”; Anwar’s visceral identification with his own victims in his impersonation of a convicted communist and his later viewing of the per­formance. In all these scenes discussed above, reenactment, while initially creating a convenient fictional barrier between past and present, ultimately forges a reconnection with the past, opening up at least the possibility for “empathic unsettlement” in the face of the victims’ experiences.¹¹

The audience, too, is not unaffected by these processes. The many close-ups of Anwar watching the restaged horror—with pity, fear, or disgust—suggest an uncomfortable parallel with the viewing behavior of the documenta­ry’s audience. If Anwar can be unsettled by merely watching the bullying of Suryono (by no means harsher than Anwar’s actual treatment of presumed communists decades earlier) or the staged execution of a communist, how could he have actually committed these horrors? And how far are we, the sometimes equally appalled spectators of The Act of Killing, really removed from the psychology of the mass murderer?¹² The documentary ultimately implicates its Western viewers and asks that they reconsider their geographic, cultural, and moral distance from what they are being shown, a process that is reinforced through the centrality of Hollywood violence as a source of inspi­ration and as an interpretive frame for the documentary’s protagonists.

This implication of a Western audience in an atrocious historical episode seems to be precisely what Oppenheimer is after, as is already evident in the film’s opening titles, which emphasize that the mass killings were con­ducted “with the direct aid of western governments.” In his analysis of the facilitating role that the US State Department and the CIA played in the violence, Errol Morris rhetorically wonders, “Is this a story about Indonesia or also a story about us? [...] Have we erased the memory of what happened?Have we denied our own complicity?” (Morris, 2013). More than the sugges­tion of US political involvement, however, it is the unpredictable effect of reenactment that in The Act of Killing turns the viewers into what Michael Rothberg has called “implicated subjects.” With this open-ended concept, Rothberg theorizes the “ongoing, uneven, and destabilizing intrusion of irrevocable pasts into an unredeemed present” (2019, p. 9). More specially, the term points to subject positions that are implicated in or “folded into” (the persistent repercussions of) historical events, even when these events “at first seem beyond our agency as individual subjects” (2019, p. 1). Rothberg’s concept thus “move[s] us away from overt questions of guilt and innocence and leave[s] us in a more complex and uncertain moral and ethical terrain” (2013, p. 40). The disturbing emotive force of The Act of Killing is due pre­cisely to such a dynamic of implication. Destabilizing comforting distinc­tions between the past and the “active presentness” (Bruzzi, 2020, p. 50) of its restaging, between dramatic reconstruction and traumatic repetition, cinematic and physical violence, and ultimately between the psychic world of the mass murderer and that of the viewer, the documentary precludes the audience’s detachment from the violence displayed.