A trio of Indonesian men, dressed in elaborate cowboy outfits, are pretending to viciously beat a hugely overweight man who is wearing a curly black wig and a bright satin two-piece gown. Punching and striking the man playing the woman, the cowboys yell that she is a Communist, and that she is pregnant and will give birth to another little Communist. What makes the scene even stranger, more surreal and disturbing than it might otherwise be is that the men in the cowboy suits and the one in the dress belonged to a paramilitary death squad during the anti-Communist purges in Indonesia in 1965, and they are reenacting one of their crimes. The men are the subjects of Joshua Oppenheimer’s brilliant documentary, The Act of Killing, and they are filming a collective biopic about what they did during this most dramatic and exalted period in their lives. The cowboys’ attack on the woman is a scene from their movie.
As The Art of Killing begins, a series of titles outlines the film’s historical background. In 1965 the Sukarno government, which some Western governments feared was sliding into communism, was overthrown and replaced by a military regime led by General Suharto. Blaming the initial coup attempt on the Indonesian Communist Party, the country’s right-wing leaders recruited gangs of thugs to wipe out suspected Communists with messy, improvisatory, but astonishing efficiency; estimates of the number killed during this period range from 500,000 to a million or more.
The death squads’ victims were depicted by the Indonesian government and the press as vicious Communists conspiring to destabilize the nation and enslave its citizens. Included among these “Communists” were landless farmers, intellectuals, and union members, along with anyone the government didn’t like or whose money the killers wanted. The American government supported the regime’s harsh and thorough anti-Communist programs, and, worried that Indonesia’s tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese might feel some bond with the People’s Republic of China, our intelligence services suggested that the Chinese population be killed along with the rest.
But among the interesting and unusual choices that Oppenheimer makes is his decision to forego the structure of the documentary whodunit—Who gave the orders? Who in Washington knew? Instead, he concentrates on the killers themselves: who they are, how they see their lives, and the bizarre and appalling film they are enthusiastic to make about what they did. Rather than exploring the theory that the tensions generated by Muslim sectarianism were exacerbated to fuel the massacres, Oppenheimer shows us the gangster-actors suspending a torture scene to listen in respectful silence to the chanting of the evening prayers from outside. In its revealing examination of the genesis of moral conscience and of the psychology of evil, The Act of Killing is less like any film I can recall than like journalist Gita Sereny’s book-length interviews with Albert Speer and the commandant of Treblinka.
Eerily, the Indonesian gangsters whom Oppenheimer interviews began their underworld careers outside a movie theater in their native city of Medan, North Sumatra, where, as teenage punks, they set up a movie-ticket-scalping operation.Over 400 styles of bottega wallet priced under $65. They all admired the same idols—John Wayne, James Dean, Victor Mature, later Al Pacino—and aspired to dress, behave, and kill with impunity, like Hollywood tough guys. Their big grudge against the Communists was that the leftists were demonstrating outside theaters showing American movies. The Communists hated American movies. So they had to be killed. Otherwise, the gangsters don’t talk about how they were recruited to be killers. One day they were selling cinema tickets in the street, the next day they were crossing the street to torture and behead.
When, under the military regime, their new responsibilities required new professional skills, they learned from the movies that garroting was a relatively quick and bloodless technique of execution. Anwar Congo—the elderly former gang leader on whom The Act of Killing increasingly comes to focus—recalls dancing across the street to do his grisly job after he’d seen a tuneful Elvis Presley movie. “It was like we were killing happily.” I thought of the 2008 Italian film, Gomorrah, of the scenes in which the two novice Neapolitan hoods mimic their role model, Scarface, and it crossed my mind that Al Pacino might have done some damage.
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