2012 Flashback: The Act of Killing
Plus: If you disappeared, who will cover your case?
the true crime that's worth your time
Another weekend, another couple days to dive into some true crime. I’d be remiss by failing to note that the real show seems to be on Twitter today, where courtroom-level drama is unfolding in front of our eyes.
Lisa Bloom, as you might recall, isn’t just the attorney daughter of Gloria Allred, she’s the lawyer who — as well-documented in She Said — asked Harvey Weinstein for a job when he was accused of sexual assault. Most famously, she told him, “You should be the hero of the story, not the villain. This is very doable,” in what the Atlantic characterized as “an audition of sorts.”
I keep thinking about how Bloom was able to hold her nose and solicit Weinstein as a client, but finds Elon Musk so odious that she has chosen the less-monied side. To be fair, she’s sided with victims in the past — and it’s hardly a brave stance to oppose Musk, as literally no one seems to like the guy — but, still. (BTW, a non-Bloom class action has already been filed, Bloomberg reports, by labor attorney and the Democratic candidate for Massachusetts AG in this year’s election, Shannon Liss-Riordan.)
But alleged violations of the WARN act are probably not going to result in the kind of true crime content that we’d want to watch or read, so I’m queuing up Killer Sally, which Sarah reviewed yesterday, writing that “it’s very watchable and compelling.”
In her review Sarah also notes “that there’s a whole sort of grey-market situation involving “private time with extremely muscular women” that allows lady bodybuilders to exist financially,” a matter that ties into a series of Washington Post investigations that sort of got shuffled into my budget clean-out issue from last month, but that really deserve your attention. Maybe this weekend is the time to give them a look?
Here are the headlines from Built and Broken, which promises at least one more story on the business:
How about you? What true crime are you planning to read, listen to, or watch this fine fall weekend? — EB
Unlike Elon Musk, we are not billionaires who just do what we do for the lulz! Both of us have faced the same job insecurity nastiness that thousands of Twitter workers are today (at least one of us, at the hands of the same person who is rumored to have advised the allegedly illegal layoffs we’re seeing today).
Your support keeps our independent publication afloat and free of awful bosses, and helps pay for contributor work, like Margaret Howie’s review of The Act of Killing that you’re about to read. We couldn’t do any of this without you, and are so appreciative of your support.
The crime
In 1965, a bloody conflict between the government and the military led to an anti-communist purge encouraged by General Suharto’s forces and led by local militias and civilians. The result was the mass torture and murders of any suspected communist associate. While the total number of deaths is unlikely to ever be known, it’s estimated between 500,000 and two million were killed. There have been no prosecutions for their deaths.
The story
Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing was released in 2012 and lit up the film festival circuit and beyond. It was instantly installed at the top of critic’s polls, and dominated a certain tier of cultural discussion like few documentaries not made by Errol Morris or Werner Herzog ever do.
Both Herzog and Morris were executive producers of Oppenheimer’s film, which was so highly regarded that when it didn’t win the 2013 Best Documentary Academy Award it caused a mini-ruckus. This is a more exalted arena that most true crime gets anywhere close to — a text that leads to wider political, historical, cultural reckonings of crimes and criminals. But The Act of Killing also got all the criticisms that the same genre that gave us Carole Baskin’s Cage Fight does: that it’s exploitative of victims, glamorizes violence, and celebrates the killers by giving them attention.
What was so astonishing about this film ten years ago? It’s not just that there’s guileless confessions to crimes, which are boasted about with the kind of glee most of us reserve for finally having cleared out the garage. It’s in the presentation, which still has a degree of shock value ten years later. Oppenheimer and his crew, including several anonymous Indonesians, got to know several “gangsters” who participated in the torture and killing of thousands, and invited them to re-create the murders in any way they want.
These guys are not powerful members of the military scheming to maintain power. They were neighborhood hoodlums who were useful in their willingness to do wetwork, seeing themselves as John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart in their mental cinemas. They love the idea of re-enactments, dressing up and playing the bad guys one more time. They even hit the streets, looking for people to play extras, and coaching them in begging for their lives correctly.
Ten years later, perhaps we are all a bit more accustomed to people “saying the quiet parts loudly,” so when nice grandpa Anwar Congo boasts about developing his garroting skills it’s just one more person who got away with it, letting us know that they did. And everyone featured here did get away with it under Suharto’s regime.
Impunity hasn’t fallen out of favor — whatever The Act of Killing did to upend the documentary world, it didn’t bring many war criminals out on their knees, begging for forgiveness. What it does is plunge the viewer headfirst into the psyches of some very banal evildoers. These are low-level thugs who long for the good ol’ days of rape and murder, and rush to dress up to literally sing and dance about it.
There’s a queasy surrealism to these re-enactments, the horror of torture not offset but heightened by watching special effect makeup being applied ahead of it. Most of the attention is on Congo and his rancid pals, but the occasional politico makes an appearance to hype the old boys up. There’s little more than a nod to the wider forces who enabled these crimes, or the absence of any accountability afterwards — what are the Geneva Conventions, anyway, one guy shrugs, when he’s got the Jakarta Conventions?
The Act of Killing’s central innovation is in these postmodern performances of confession, a vanity project that’s also an indictment. This is the kind of stuff custom built for impassioned grad-school noodling — it’s cited in over three thousand papers on Google Scholar, more than any Errol Morris film. But without any of the extra context of a conventional narrative, it’s up to the viewer to learn about how Western governments supported the killings.
As a big, chewy, canonical piece of work, The Act of Killing carries around it a dense aura of venerability, which is ironic given that it’s subjects are for the most part the opposite of respectable or empathetic. It leaves you with a scene that could be read as a reckoning — or a weak attempt at deflection. The filmmakers pulled off a daring trick on a bunch of murderous bozos and made a very clever documentary out of that; but how much you get from that will depend on your tolerance for cleverness when there’s no place for real justice.
The Act of Killing is available to stream on Hulu, Hoopla, and Freevee, and for rent on Amazon and Apple TV. — Margaret Howie
“Is this a phishing scam?” asked one of my colleagues of the Columbia Journalism Review’s “How Much Coverage Are You Worth?” tracker. It’s not, but it probably will make you feel slightly crappy (unless you’re a city-dwelling white woman in your 20s!).
The site “calculates your press value based on current reporting in America, to expose this bias and to advocate for change,” CJR says. It asks a couple standard demographic questions, then comes up with your “press value,” that is, the number of articles likely to be written about you should you disappear or be killed — in other words, if you, yourself, become true crime.
I got “21” out of a possible 28, and a likely diss from some of my favorite (and some of my least favorite) outlets:
(That’s OK, NPR, I’ll keep donating to you anyway.) I’m dying (ugh, phrasing) to hear about how the rest of you fare. Here’s the tracker, good luck! — EB
Monday on Best Evidence: Find out which property won the November bonus review poll, which closed today.
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