Joshua Oppenheimer Explores The Act of Killing

When the government of Indonesia was overthrown by a military coup in 1965, over one million ethnic Chinese, communists, and intellectuals were murdered in only one year. It is in this shocking and affecting documentary directed by Joshua Oppenheimer that we meet the killers and watch the explain, justify and re-enact their crimes.  The film opens in New York ON July 19th and then rolls out across the country.  The director of this disturbing and fascinating film, Joshua Oppenheimer, stopped by the SiriusXM studios to sit down with Ron Bennington and talk about the “Act of Killing”.  Excerpts from the interview appear below.

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Ron Bennington:  It’s strange to say, “great movie,” about something that is so damn disturbing, this is a very hard film to describe to people, something they should go see.

Joshua Oppenheimer:  But, I… it is something that people should go see.

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Joshua Oppenheimer Explains “The Act of Killing” 

Ron Bennington:  Explain it, because I don’t want to give too much away, because I walked into it blind and I’d love to know how you would pitch this to people. 

Joshua Oppenheimer:  I haven’t had to pitch it in a long time, (laughs) but what I would say is that in 1965 – 66, the army overthrew the government of Indonesia, installed a military dictatorship.  The military recruited a death squad – paramilitary civilians to kill somewhere between – help kill, somewhere between half a million and two and a half million opponents of the new military dictatorship.  These people could be members of unions, they could be teachers, they could be people struggling so that the land would be redistributed in a more equitable way.  Artists, intellectuals, anybody who was opposed to the military dictatorship was accused of being a communist, put in concentration camps, and many of them, somewhere between half a million and two and half million, within a year, were dispatched out to death squads to be killed.  And, unlike in other places where there has been genocide, the perpetrators have never been removed from power.  So, the men who did this are still in power and therefore unlike other perpetrators in other films, they neither deny what they’ve done nor act apologetic about it.  On the contrary, they boast and so to understand the nature of their boasting, why are they – why do they seem to be proud about this, I worked with a group of these apparently proud, apparently remorseless former death squad leaders to dramatize – and let them dramatize their memories of mass killing, in whatever ways they wished.  And it turns out that where I made the film, in Northern Sumatra, the army recruited its killers from the ranks of gangsters who had – who were hanging out in cinemas and were fans of Hollywood movies.  So they would reenact the killings in the styles of their favorite films, Western, gangster, even song and dance musical numbers, a la Vincente Minnelli.

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Joshua Oppenheimer Talks About the Reenactions of Killings by the Death Squad Members 

Ron Bennington:  You’re kind of shooting a film inside of your documentary, where it’s showing these guys acting out as they did in the 1960’s.  Some of them play victims, some of them play versions of themselves and madness is the norm.  That’s the strangest thing about the film. 

Joshua Oppenheimer:  Yeah, I think there are two different issues here.  First, they’re not making their own film, they’re making scenes for my film – for our film, so we gave them the chance, if you like, to create scenes in whatever ways they wish.  So they write the scripts, they cast their friends and their neighbors to act in the scenes, they play the killers, they play the victims, they direct the scenes, and I follow that process and use their scenes in “The Act of Killing.”  Now, when you say ‘madness is the norm,’ I would sort of say two things about it: it turns out, one of the most devastating, if you like, discoveries of the film is that this boasting about killing, the celebration of killing, seems to be, at first, a sign that these men feel no remorse about what they’ve done, that they are proud of it, and it gradually becomes clear that the contrary is true.  That the boasting itself is some sort of desperate effort on the part of the killers to convince themselves that what they did was right, so that they don’t… because they’ve never been forced to admit it was wrong.  And so… they don’t want to, one of the killers in the film says, ‘killing is the worst thing you can do.’  So, if you get paid for it, if you get away with it, do it, but then make up an excuse so you can live with yourself.  So these men killed on behalf of the government, the government gave them excuses in the form of propaganda justifying it, celebrating it, and they have clung for dear life to that excuse.  So, that’s the paradox in the film, that this crazy boasting, celebration of the most inhumane acts, actually turns out to be a symptom of the killer’s humanity.  The tragedy there is that once you kill and you get away with it, and you boast about it, and you justify it, that leads to this inevitable downward spiral into evil and corruption.  Because now you have to suppress the survivors, the relatives of the victims, so that they never challenge your version of the story.  You have to blame them for what happened, so that you can then shake them down in markets, you can steal their land with impunity, and you even have to kill again, because if the government says, ok, now kill this other group of people for much the same reason, if you don’t do it the second time, it’s like admitting it was wrong the first time.  So there’s this… the film witnesses and documents this sort of inevitable downward spiral of inhumanity that stems from the first act of killing and yet is a consequence of the very human need to justify our actions.  In that sense, the film turns out to be this painful indictment, not just of the men in the film, not just modern Indonesia, but all of us, because all of us justify our actions, all of us tell stories to justify what we do, and to escape from the more bitter and painful parts of our reality.

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Joshua Oppenheimer On How Violence in Indonesia Affects Us All

Ron Bennington:  And we’ve all sent young people off to war and said, “what you’re doing is heroic, you’re terrific,” and then when they come back they are also forced to… where do they put these things that they’ve done and seen in their own minds.  You can’t escape watching that going, at one point they kind of act like, hey we need to do this, because people will forget if we don’t, as if they were war heroes.

Joshua Oppenheimer:  And also we like to…you see this film and it’s tempting to think, ok this is this crazy reality located on the other side of the world that is interesting as kind of a case study for the depravity of human beings.  But we have to remember that this is not a distant reality, this is the dark underbelly of our reality.  This shirt I’m wearing is a $5.95 t-shirt that I picked up when I got to New York, because it was hot.  I went to H&M and I bought this shirt.  I’m cutting off the tag and I see it says made in Bangladesh, and I have to think to myself, at that moment, I wonder if the people who made this shirt are buried in a pile of rubble, because just a few weeks ago, the H&M sweatshop in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed because everything was done so much on the cheap.  And I had this feeling, in that moment… look, everything we buy is produced in places like the Indonesia of “The Act of Killing.”  Everything we buy is produced in sweatshops where perpetrators have won, where there has been mass violence, the perpetrators have won, taken power, and in their victory built regimes of fear so oppressive that the people who make everything we buy for us never can get the human cost of what we buy included in the price tag that we pay.  So, in that sense we all depend on the men you see in “The Act of Killing” the gangsters and thugs who keep people afraid for our everyday living.  And we know that, actually, I think most of us somehow know it.

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Joshua Oppenheimer Talks About the Subjects Reaction to Their Own Scenes

Ron Bennington:  We know that for a second, and then we push it away, much in the same way that if you’re going to eat a pork chop, every once and awhile you might think, hey this was a living animal… but then you go back in to enjoying your pork chop.

Joshua Oppenheimer:  And that’s exactly what we see Anwar and his friends doing throughout the whole movie.  That they glimpse in horror what they are dealing with, and then they quickly run away from that, and that’s actually the core of the film’s method.  We would let Anwar and his friends shoot a scene, they would shoot whatever they wanted and then we would screen it back to them.  We would never plan two or three scenes at once, we would screen the scene back to them, asking, what will they see in the mirror of the movie, if you like.  They would watch the scene and every time you see Anwar watching a scene, the main character, a guy who has killed a thousand people, he looks really disturbed and I think he is really disturbed, every single time, and he’s disturbed, not because the scene isn’t good but because of what the scene shows that he did.  But he never – it’s like eating the pork chop – he’s aware that something unpleasant, uncomfortable, terrible and he – and by the way, I eat pork, I eat pork chops (laughing) – and watches this and he immediately doesn’t dare say what’s wrong and instead he has to put that feeling somewhere because he’s not feeling well about what he’s watching, so he proposes a new embellishment: a change of costume, a change of clothes, a change of location.  So we see, over the course, as we move from one scene to another scene, one reenactment to another, one dramatization to another, that the dramatizations become more and more ornate, more and more surreal, more and more dream-like, and we follow the process by which Anwar, and a whole group of killers, shuffle, move from one fantasy, second-hand, third-rate, half-remembered fantasy of who the are – to justify who they are and what they’ve done.  And then they move to another one and another one, as each one grows somehow stale.

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Joshua Oppenheimer On Good Guys and Bad Guys

Ron Bennington:  This is a reoccurring history, and it’s not even a political thing, I think, it’s a species thing, in many ways.  But the other part of it that hits me is that these people watched Hollywood movies and we always talk about the ‘Hollywood liberals’, but we put out this violent, violent product and those gangsters watched that and said, ‘we could do this.’  Not so much make films, but we could do what the characters in the films are doing, and they based kind of their life on some of that.

Joshua Oppenheimer:  I think, though, that it’s important to recognize that the most… I would say the message of this film is not that Hollywood violence causes real world violence, in fact the most vivid example that the main character in the film, Anwar, has for a movie influencing his behavior is an Elvis Presley musical.  He says he would watch an Elvis Presley musical, the late show, come out intoxicated by his love for Elvis, by his identification with Elvis, dance his way across the street and enter the torture chamber and kill the victim happily.  Now, Elvis Presley musicals are not violent, but they are stupid, and they involve a certain kind of escapist fantasy that distances us from reality.  So, I think the real risk here is escapist fantasy, and the biggest escapist fantasy of all, it’s a lie every time we tell it,  and it underpins almost every story we tell is what I call the “Star Wars Morality,” that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys.  And actually the main purpose of that fantasy, I think, is to reassure us, reassure ourselves that we are the good guys because we watch movies and we identify with the good guys.  And I think that prevents us from seeing the truth, which is that every act of evil in human history has been committed by human beings like us, and that good guys and bad guys, in fact, only exist in movies and in stories.  That that whole dividing of the world into this false good and bad human beings exists to reassure ourselves that we’re good.  I would also say, that somehow we… that what we’re doing when we watch violent movies is deeply mysterious, deeply strange.  Human beings are really the only species that kill, killing is a quintessentially human act, as painful as that is to recognize.  And then, that we pay money to go into a cinema, or watch on TV, beautifully executed images of people getting their heads blown off – what are we doing?  I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do it, but at first we have to understand, what are we doing?

Ron Bennington:  It is attractive to us.

Joshua Oppenheimer:  What are we doing?  Are we trying to numb ourselves to the violence that we know underpins our everyday lives that we know that we depend on other people’s suffering for our living and that’s traumatic or difficult so we try to endure ourselves, inoculate ourselves to violence by watching movies?  Are we fascinated by violence is there a dark side of humanity that wants to see violence?  And one of the things that I think is painful for viewers watching “The Act of Killing,” is you have also these moments of screen violence, of movie violence, and we’re used to seeing movie violence, we know we like to watch movie violence and normally when watch movie violence – the real world violence that is depicted isn’t there, it’s absent, it’s fake.  If you see a guy getting his head blown off, it’s not a real person whose head is blown off.  It doesn’t have that kind of relationship to the world.  Here we watch fictional looking images of violence, and the real world violence that it refers to is haunting every image.  And that, I think, makes us question ourselves as viewers, wait a minute what are we doing by watching movies in general?  What are we doing watching this movie?  Who are we?  And it’s that question that I want the viewer to take away.  I want the viewer to say, in that one moment, if it’s only for a split second it’s ok, but for one moment if the viewer can see a small part of herself in Anwar Congo, the main character, the man who has killed a thousand people inevitably in that moment the whole edifice, the whole facade of the world being divided into good guys and bad guys has to crumble.  That’s the key moment for me, for the film, for the audience.

Ron Bennington:  Well, because he’s anyone’s nice grandfather.  He really is, he could be the sweetest guy in the world if you just met him anywhere.  This film, unlike most films, it’s such a fragile thing that you are able to get to those points and you do it so well.  This has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s a chance for us to see that film does not have to be the way it’s always been before.  It’s not a history lesson, it’s not preachy at all, and I can’t think of another film that asks more of its audience to do, its thinking.  It’s terrific.  Joshua, thank you so much for coming by.  

Joshua Oppenheimer:  It was great to talk to you.

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“The Act of Killing,” opens exclusively in New York City July 19, then in LA and Washington DC,  Friday July 26th, further roll out to follow.  Go to actofkilling.com, and @theactofkilling

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You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not yet a subscriber?  Click here for a free trial subscription.

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You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.

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