History As Fiction As History As Fiction: The Act Of Killing

Today after going home sick I decided to do what's traditional in such situations and watch documentaries on Netflix. The one I ended up watching was called The Act Of Killing, in which Anwar Congo, the leader of an Indonesian death squad responsible for over 1000 deaths as part of a larger genocide of over 1 million suspected Communists in the 1960's, is interviewed about and allowed to make a series of filmed reenactments of his actions. What he ends up creating turns out to be incredibly surreal, almost accidentally post-modern, and very relevant to what we've been discussing with regards to Slaughterhouse-Five, and the course in general.

The film begins 40 years after the start of the genocide, when Anwar Congo is an old man. In many ways he reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five, but as one of the key perpetrators of the crimes he talks about, the questions he grapples with are very different. They tend to have more to do with individual guilt and the lengths people will go to to avoid facing their conscience. An added twist is that, like Kurt Vonnegut and the American veterans of World War II, Anwar is celebrated in Indonesia for his actions; according to the government and the common people, he and his cohorts are heroes for ridding the country of the Communist threat. We see enormous rallies where the organization he helped found, now a paramilitary organization with 3 million members, celebrate the murders he committed and gleefully reenact them -- in one case using the descendants of the people killed as conscripted actors. This culminates in an absurdist interview on national television where an upbeat reporter asks a cowboy-hat-wearing Anwar about the methods he used to execute Communists. 'He was just wiping them out!,' she says, grinning, over raucous applause. At another point in the interview the reporter asks Anwar whether or not he was influenced in his methodology by Western films; when he says yes, and details the ways he based his killings off of Mafia movies, she smiles again and says 'Isn't that interesting? It was just like the movies!' Cue further clapping.

This isn't the only time Anwar brings up the influence of Western film on his actions, and that's where the movie really ties in with some of the themes we've brought up in this class. It gets repeated over and over again that his gang started out by scalping movie tickets and watching the ones they couldn't sell. His favored method of execution, garroting, comes directly out of Hollywood gangster flicks and their cheap Indonesian knock-offs. He explicitly refers to himself as a 'gangster,' which he defines to mean a 'free man,' and boasts about extorting Chinese shopkeepers. When he films the reenactments of his murders, he does so based on his favorite styles of American cinema: Western, gangster, and musical. His favorite actors are the "badasses" Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, and John Wayne. Even his style of dress is American, switching between cowboy hats and suits, and Hawaiian shirts and chinos.

All of this goes to show that, if nothing else, his sense of style is influence by American culture, which is admittedly not uncommon in the rest of the world; that doesn't prove that it has anything to do with his murders. However, there are also scenes where things get much darker. He and his friends have an idea of "sadism" as a positive trait, at least in certain circumstances. They argue over whether being sadistic is necessarily the same as being cruel; from their point of view, being sadistic means simply to kill with style. In one chilling section, Anwar talks directly about the influence of gangster movies in his ideas of sadism -- having seen bloody interrogations on the big screen, he sought to emulate them in real life. He then goes on to say that watching World War II movies in particular inspired him, because the actions of the Nazis were the most sadistic things to be seen on screen -- and he realized that he could do worse in real life.

An argument could still be made that Anwar is just using movies as an excuse, to absolve himself of personal guilt. And it would definitely be unreasonable to say that he only killed people because he watched violent movies; the Nazis he saw on screen weren't consuming cowboy movies to the same extent he was, and they still managed it. However, his attitudes towards the people he killed were very clearly affected by how he saw the 'bad guys' in American movies act. That he would be actively inspired by the behavior of Nazis, who don't tend to be portrayed very positively by Hollywood, lends credibility to the argument that any kind of war movie will end up glorifying violence, whether or not it has an anti-war message. This is especially important when we consider people outside the group of Western critics for whom those messages are written. What seems obviously against war to someone used to viewing films through a critical lens, who is aware of the mostly liberal context in which most are created, may appear to be the opposite to someone who has little conception of that context.

There's a lot I could say about this in relation to the ideas of cultural reappropriation in Mumbo Jumbo, but to cut this off before this turns into a full-length response paper on this movie (which I could definitely write if I thought anyone would be reading it), the way The Act of Killing blends the various genres of historical and fictional movies about violence is probably the best example I've ever seen of a post-modern history. It's a documentary, about people making fictionalized movies, based on things they really did, based on movies they've watched about other people doing similar things, which also influenced the way they actually did those things, all meant to question the parallel "official" versions of explaining those events. Together with the personal stories we hear people tell about their experiences during the genocide, from both "sides," and the narrative the filmmakers give of a black/white mass murder of innocent people, that leaves us with seven or eight different interpretations of the murders committed, to the point where it's almost impossible to tell what they were actually like, even as we watch people who know exactly what it was like, because they were there, try to grapple with the way their own internal metanarratives are twisting their memories! And yet despite all of this, I still feel like I learned a lot more from this movie than I would from a 'traditional' documentary. There wasn't too much explicit factual context, but I feel like it did a good job of illuminating the effects of Western media on other cultures and the personal impact of traumatic events on the people who commit them, which seems like a worthwhile trade-off for knowing more (arguably unnecessary, once you have the rough story) details about the events themselves.