Keywords: Indonesian coup, psychological warfare, Cold War in Asia-Pacific, reconciliation, documentary methodology
Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary/docufiction The Act of Killing provided a provocative and troubling account of the Indonesian massacre of alleged PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) members in 1965-1966. The Act of Killing, filmed more than 40 years after the event, documented the lingering legacy of the coup. Oppenheimer interacted with several key executioners of the coup, or the death squad leaders, asking them to re-enact scenes of their killings. The death squad members became fictional actors in this re-enactment, participating in this production in the name of “telling the story of what we did when we were young.”[1]
Oppenheimer filmed his process of making this historical-fiction, low-budget movie. The lines between fiction and reality quickly blurred when the re-enactment of violence raised real-life tensions and difficult feelings among the actors and the crew. The main figures’ positive outlook and lack of remorse at the beginning of the production gradually turned into ambivalence and reflection. This essay addresses the emotional transformation of the death-squad leader Anwar Congo, the Southeast Asian Cold War ideologies, and the gendered rhetoric of the anti-PKI coup that the documentary portrayed. I will further discuss the documentary’s stylistic choices and the event’s implication in regard to international law. I argue that Oppenheimer, through techniques that combine fiction and reality, penetrated the humans within the killers and reconstructed the landscape of violence during Indonesia’s political transition and its chapter of the Cold War, in a way that transcends moral and temporal boundaries.
The Reckoning
The film’s main storyline could be interpreted as tracing Anwar Congo’s epistemological and emotional transformations. Congo, having lived in denial and numbness with the aid of substances and entertainment, got in touch with the reality of his past actions when he was forced to re-live the killings, re-connect with the past, and be in the victim’s shoes through acting in the fictional movie production. One particular scene that illustrated this change was when the “interrogators” or torturers dehumanized Anwar’s character through verbal threats and physical abuses. Anwar, in the middle of the scene, faintly told the camera person to “cut” and started to take deep breaths with his eyes closed.[2] Fear, as he later described to Oppenheimer, overtook him in those moments. While acting as a torturer and killer did not seem like a hard task for Anwar—as demonstrated in the playful demonstrations of killings earlier in the movie—acting the role of the victim was much more difficult. When Anwar and Oppenheimer watched this scene of him on TV after filming, Anwar seemed to still have trouble dealing with the realness of those supposedly replicated, manufactured emotions of terror. Oppenheimer pointed out to Anwar that his past victims had it infinitely worse since those wrongfully accused people knew they were being killed instead of being in a play-act.
Anwar’s emotional dormancy prior to this moment of acting was due to the long-term suppression of truth following the Cold War era. In addition to recognizing the terror he induced, Anwar also started to face the nightmares that had affected him for decades. Because of his undoubted faith in the government, he genuinely believed in a state propaganda film from the 1960s which demonized the Communist party. Though his friend and co-executioner, Adi Zulkadry, was well-aware of the intentions of the melodramatic propaganda film, Anwar only saw it as what it was—he told Oppenheimer that watching this 1960’s film throughout his life reassured that he “[had] done the right thing.”[3] The Cold War in Asia fueled this anti-Communist cultural landscape in various newly-independent countries, where a narrative of good and evil was easily disseminated through strong, repetitive visual signals, such as this 1960s’ propaganda film that captured Anwar. According to Hack, local parties’ interpretations of the international Cold War contexts were “important and sometimes key” to the emergence of the Cold War mindset in Southeast Asia.[4] This spread of violence was neither purely locally motivated nor globally influenced but was the result of each government’s interpretation and manipulation of the Soviet-US ideological divide. Suharto, with the military (and paramilitary), utilized the anti-Soviet sentiment disseminated by the US to achieve his own political goal of establishing his military dictatorship in the name of democracy.
The Blend of Fiction and Reality
The tension among the actors on the set of the movie production was immensely felt when one of the actors, who was a descendant of the victim of 1965/66 massacre, spoke up about his real experience to “provide material for the movie.”[5] Although trying to make light of his experience, the actor was visibly sweating and agitated when faced with the killers of his family on set. During the scene of his character’s prosecution, Oppenheimer captured murmurs from the death squad on and off set saying, “it’s ok if we actually kill him.”[6] This chilling moment blurred the boundary between fiction and reality, echoing the past coup mindset that allowed the executioners to kill anyone they didn’t like. Besides the tension between actors, even the very materiality of the set—the blood, the smoke, the fire, the weapons—helped to create an anticipation or potential for violence.
Oppenheimer, through capturing these moments of transgression, highlighted how objective reality was sometimes irrelevant. The death squad leaders in The Act of Killing were two-fold: they were both actors for fiction and were themselves as real people. In this lens, Oppenheimer presented these killers as half-sincere and semi-fictional. This transgression of genre raised the question of whether the past acts of violence were also semi-fictional—that is, real-life actions built upon fictionalized narratives. As mentioned earlier, the anti-PKI propaganda movie was wide-spread and even prescribed as mandatory for all students in Indonesia for a prolonged period. The constant reinforcement of fiction shaped the psyche of the generation; it made the dramatic acts of violence almost part of one’s visceral life experience, and the hate for a targeted group almost innate and instinctive. Anwar Congo also said that his killing techniques were inspired by Hollywood movies—even down to the technique of the killings, fiction was part of the reality.[7]
Gender Perceptions
In other parts of the film, Oppenheimer captured several shocking moments of blunt sexual harassment by Indonesian authorities. For example, Yapto Soerjosoemarno, the leader of Pemuda Pancasila (the organization of paramilitary responsible for the killings), made utterly vulgar comments on women’s appearance and sexuality, abused his power to get close to women, and told cruel sexual jokes in public right in front of the camera. The misogyny that Oppenheimer captured demonstrated how state control was/is “shored up by control over women’s bodies.”[8] As sociologist Saskia Wieringa argues, women’s political agency has been restricted because of its association with sexual debauchery. As shown in the film, even without overt political participation, women are still wrongfully slandered by those in power. In the “stable” society envisioned by the Suharto government in 1965/66, women were largely subordinated and irrelevant.[9] In the re-enactment of Pemuda Pancasila ’s raid of a village, the victims were women and children, whose humanities and agencies were brutally neglected. Wieringa pointed out the direct association of the slander of women as part of the rhetoric for the coup, quoting Suharto’s term of “Communist whores” which denoted his political enemy as abject and feminine.[10] In the documentary, then-Vice President of Indonesia, Jusuf Kalla’s speech at a modern-day Pemuda Pancasila rally also demonstrated how the entire state-military-paramilitary system was still gendered: his key message, “use your muscles!”, referred to the force that the paramilitary needed.[11] This message, delivered with arm-flexing gestures, carried a strong masculine undertone. The 1960s’ gender ideologies of the masculine as noble and the feminine as abased are still deeply entrenched in the public’s mind, decades after the end of Suharto’s rule.
Conclusion
The Act of Killing not only portrayed the re-enactment of the coup in the format of an Indonesian historical fiction but also highlighted the real-life connections the squad had with state journalism and media, Pemuda Pancasila “gangsters” working for the state and their financiers. It was the collaboration of these apparatus that created the all-encompassing world of killing. The manifestation of this moral landscape is shown through continuous oppression towards the political and ethnic “minorities” as well as women. By blending fiction and reality, history and present, Oppenheimer provided a coherent narrative along the thread of Anwar Congo’s moral awakening, connecting the humanness to the unfathomable crime that the executioners committed. One of the key lingering questions is whether there is a future for reconciliation. Oppenheimer showed the impossibility of Indonesia’s official reckoning. He portrayed how the re-opening the case at the International Criminal Court is widely perceived as unlikely. Adi Zulkadry, when confronted by Oppenheimer, expressed disregard for international law and the potential of facing charges in Hague. Zulkadry told Congo that if anyone would apologize, it is the government, not themselves[12]. By detaching himself from his actions and believing in moral relativism, Zulkadry was internally at peace. Historian Robert Cribb noted that the 1965/66 coup was defined as “war crime” by the Geneva Conventions and ethnic-political “genocide” by scholars.[13] However, there seem to be a general lack of motivation for truth and reconciliation for the sake of peacekeeping at the international level. Therefore, potential reconciliation might only be able to take place on the individual level through personal reckonings, such as the ones that Oppenheimer’s film invoked and captured.
Xinyang Ye is an alumni of the University of Toronto and former Associate Editor in Chief at Synergy.
Bibliography
Cribb, Robert. “Genocide In Indonesia, 1965-1966.” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no. 2 (2001): 219–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/713677655.
Hack, Carl and Geoff Wade. “The Origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40 (2009): 441–48. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463409990014.
Oppenheimer, Joshua. The Act of Killing. Youtube, 2012.
Wieringa, Saskia Eleonora. “Sexual Slander and the 1965/66 Mass Killings in Indonesia: Political and Methodological Considerations.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 41, no. 4 (2011): 544–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2011.610613.
[1] Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing.
[2] Oppenheimer.
[3] Oppenheimer.
[4] Hack and Wade, “The Origins of the Southeast Asian Cold War,” 448.
[5] Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing.
[6] Oppenheimer.
[7] Oppenheimer.
[8] Wieringa, “Sexual Slander and the 1965/66 Mass Killings in Indonesia: Political and Methodological Considerations,” 544.
[9] Wieringa, 544.
[10] Wieringa, 554.
[11] Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing.
[12] Oppenheimer.
[13] Cribb, “Genocide In Indonesia, 1965-1966,” 222.
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