Watching The Act of Killing is such a challenging, disorienting experience in itself that attempting to talk about it afterward almost seems like a mountain to be climbed. I guess the first step toward working through everything the movie does is to just to try to explain what exactly it is. The film comes from director Josh Oppenheimer, and it exists somewhere between a documentary and a social experiment. It’s a sort of behind the scenes look at the making of a movie, but what’s unclear is why said movie is being made, if it’s ever even going to be shown to anyone, or if the whole point of the production existing is just so that its creation can be documented in this obviously more interesting movie. It’s kind of like Hearts of Darkness if Apocalypse Now never got put into theaters.
Probably we have to start further back than that with a history lesson though. Back in the mid-1960s, Indonesia went through a period of revolution where the military overthrew the government. After this coup, local mob bosses were brought into the new government’s fold and turned into a death squad whose purpose was to hunt down Chinese immigrants and left-leaning intellectuals, put them under a period of aggressive questioning meant to determine whether or not they were communists, and then execute them if that proved to be the case (one gets the impression that it always did). During this period of time, somewhere around a million people were executed, with the main subject of this documentary, a gangster named Anwar Congo, probably being responsible for around a thousand or more himself. These murderers are still hailed as heroes in Indonesia, and what The Act of Killing does is document their attempt at cinematically recreating the murders they carried out in their glory years, presumably so that future generations can always be reminded of what great men they were.
That still doesn’t really explain the film though. You also need to factor in that Congo and his cronies started off their criminal careers selling bootleg tickets to movie theaters, and were thus raised on a steady diet of film noirs and Elvis musicals imported from the west. Their worship of the movie industry has seemed to warp their minds a bit, or at least provided them with campy sensibilities, so what happens when they start making their own movie isn’t just that they disturb you by recreating instances of systematic slaughter and then paint them in a heroic light, they also delight, amuse, and just plain confuse you with the surreal, showy, often homoerotic approach that they take to making a movie. It turns out these death squad gangsters are also weird, bumbling dorks, and they’re basically the most unintentionally funny to watch aspiring filmmakers since Mark Borchardt and Mike Schank in American Movie.
The juxtaposition between the sobering, horrific accounts of remorseless murder and the silly, aren’t-these-guys-strange nonsense of the Plan 9 From Outer Space-level bad low budget film they’re making is hard to process all at once, and the results are a confused whirlwind of conflicting, visceral emotions that overcome you as you’re trying to understand how you feel about what you’re watching. The confusion doesn’t just come from the fact that the subjects are at the same time ignorant, bone-chillingly evil people and strange, silly goofs either. It’s also just downright confusing and disorienting to listen to all of the meaningless double talk they engage in and then attempt to gauge how they really feel about what they’ve done. In one breath they’re talking about how they don’t want to be portrayed as cruel torturers and murderers, and in the next they’re lamenting the fact that the communists were the ones known for being cruel when they were the ones who were really sadistic. The effect is like Rick James saying he would never put his muddy feet on Eddie Murphy’s couch, and then turning around to admit that he actually did it before ever even taking a breath in that segment on Chappelle’s Show, but multiplied to account for every nonsense-talking, bluster-spewing subject that appears in this film. At times you hate these guys so much that you want to reach into the screen and exact righteous revenge on them, at others you can’t help but be charmed by them because they’re such big personalities, but mostly you’re just unsure of who they actually are and what their thought processes look like from the inside. They mostly seem like they don’t ever even have real thoughts, because they’re desperately trying to avoid the emotional response they might have if they actually did.
To be a bit more specific about the different segments of the film, the entirely different tones they strike, and the entirely different reactions they inspire in you, let’s run down a few of them. In one sequence you watch a local militia leader make his rounds from meager shopkeeper to meager shopkeeper, shaking them down for money with vague threats of violence, smug in the knowledge that there’s no system of authority in place to ever hold him accountable for his despicable bullying of average men just trying to feed their families. The scene is one of the most frustrating, infuriating things to sit through you will ever see.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s another sequence in the film where the portly lackey to Congo, Herman Koto, decides that he’s going to run for local office. It absolutely kills any so-bad-its-good reality TV we get over here in the humor department, and actually rivals the most masterful mockumentaries like Waiting For Guffman if you count up its laughs per minute. I dare you to watch his mournful, gum chewing session after his campaign proves to be unsuccessful and not cackle like a mad person. I dare you.
Then there’s another scene where a lackey working on the film awkwardly recounts the time when he was a young boy and the very people he’s now palling around with abducted his stepfather, murdered him, and stuck his body in a barrel. He recounts the whole tale through gritted teeth, fake smiles, and forced laughter, pretending like he agreed with what they did, and it’s absolutely one of the most uncomfortable things to sit through that’s ever been captured on film. Take the awkward, tension-filled stuff that Ricky Gervais created on the UK Office and then multiply it by a hundred. At least somewhere in the world, this is real life.
All of that said, what the movie is probably really about is the thoughts that it puts in your head as you watch it. As you listen to Congo and company recount the hundreds, possibly thousands of murders they carried out, gleefully brag about their ingenuity in creating new means of killing, and then do silly dances afterward, you want to deny them their very humanity. You want to get as much separation between them and you as possible. You rationalize that they’re just this way because of the country they grew up in, because of their culture, or even because of their race. Ironically, in trying to deny them their humanity, you then start to understand how they could deny their victims theirs. And during the last act of the film, when cracks start to show in Congo’s facade of obliviousness and the process of making his film eventually culminates in a moment of pure, animal emotion, the humanity in him becomes undeniable. You are him and he is you, and learning how to reconcile that fact is something that you’ll probably never be able to do. The Act of Killing is a real emotional roller coaster. Somebody should put that on the poster or something.
