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.
