I killed people. I need you to understand that before we begin. I killed a lot of people. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand. I lost count, which is itself a confession, because you don’t lose count of something unless there were too many to hold, and there were too many to hold.
But that is not what I am confessing.
What I am confessing is that I watched a film about a man who killed people, and I could not stop watching, and I do not know if that makes me a witness or an accomplice or an audience member, and I am not sure those are different things. The film is The Act of Killing. The man’s name is Anwar Congo. What he did is real. What he does on camera is something else entirely. Something for which no word exists.
I should tell you what happened. In 1965, there was a military coup in Indonesia. In the aftermath, the new government oversaw the killing of somewhere between 500,000 and over a million people accused of being communists. The killers were not soldiers. They were gangsters. Paramilitaries. Civilians with machetes and wire and permission. They were never prosecuted. Many of them became powerful men. Some of them became politicians. The organizations they belonged to still operate. The killings are still officially celebrated.
Anwar Congo was one of these men. He lived in Medan, North Sumatra. Before the killings, he scalped tickets outside a cinema that showed Hollywood films. He loved gangster movies. He loved Elvis Presley. He loved John Wayne. When the communists threatened to restrict American films, Congo lost his income, and when the military offered him a new one, he took it. He walked across the street from the cinema to an office upstairs and he began killing people.
He developed a method. At first, he beat them to death. Too much blood. So he invented a system using wire: loop it around the neck, tie the other end to a post, pull. Less mess. More efficient. He demonstrated this for Joshua Oppenheimer’s camera on the rooftop where he used to do it. The rooftop is above a shop that now sells handbags.
Then he danced the cha-cha.
I need to confess something else. The cha-cha is funny. It should not be funny. A man has just demonstrated how he strangled hundreds of human beings and now he is dancing, and it is funny, and you laugh, and the laugh sits in your stomach like a stone for the rest of the film.
This is what The Act of Killing does. It makes you laugh at things that should not be laughed at and then it makes you carry the laughter. You cannot put it down. You cannot give it back. You laughed. That happened. Now you are part of whatever this is.
Oppenheimer spent years filming the killers. He had originally intended to film the survivors, but the army shut that down. The survivors told him: go film the perpetrators. You might find out what happened to us. So he did. He went to the men who did the killing and he found something he did not expect. They were proud. They were eager to talk. They boasted. They demonstrated techniques. They invited him to film more.
So Oppenheimer made a proposition. He told the killers: show me what you did, in whatever way you want. You choose the genre. You choose the costumes. You choose the story. I will film everything.
They chose gangster movies. They chose film noir. They chose musicals. They designed sets. They hired extras. They applied makeup. Herman Koto, Congo’s enormous, gregarious partner, put on a dress and played a pregnant communist woman. The deputy minister of youth and sport arrived to help direct a massacre reenactment. A newspaper publisher saw the footage and told Congo: “You’re a star now!”
This is not satire. This is not parody. This is not a dark comedy, though it contains moments that are so absurd they could only exist in a dark comedy. These men are genuinely making the film they want to make about the things they did, and they are choosing to make it as entertainment, and nobody is stopping them, because in Indonesia, nobody has ever stopped them.
I confess that I do not understand The Act of Killing. Not in the way I understand other films. I have seen it more than once and each time I understand it less, not because it is confusing but because understanding it would require me to understand how a man can strangle hundreds of people with wire and then dance, and I cannot understand that, and I suspect that if I ever could understand it, I would need to confess something far worse than watching a film.
Werner Herzog is an executive producer. Errol Morris is an executive producer. Forty-nine crew members are listed as “Anonymous” in the credits, twenty-seven different positions, because they live in Indonesia and they are afraid.
Here is the scene I cannot stop thinking about.
Congo agrees to play the victim. He sits in a chair. Herman wraps the wire around his neck. The camera rolls. Herman pulls. Congo shakes. He waves his hands. They stop. He slumps in the chair, breathing hard. His face has changed. Something has arrived in his body that was not there before.
He says: “I can feel what the people I tortured felt.”
Oppenheimer, off camera, says: “Actually, the people you tortured felt far worse, because you knew it’s only a film. They knew they were being killed.”
Congo hears this. He nods. He does not argue. For a moment, the distance between acting and being closes to nothing, and in that nothing is the entire horror of the film: that Congo has spent forty years building a wall between what he did and what he feels, and the wall is made of movies, and now the movies have turned on him.
I confess that I am not sure whether Congo’s suffering at the end of this film is real.
I confess that it might not matter.
I confess that the film makes it impossible to tell the difference between a genuine reckoning and a performance of a genuine reckoning, and that this impossibility is the point, and that the point is unbearable.
There is a scene where beautiful women in elaborate costumes stand in front of a waterfall. They thank Congo for killing them. They thank him for sending them to heaven. The sky is blue. The music is lush. The women are smiling. This is Congo’s fantasy. This is how he wants to be remembered: as a liberator, a hero, a man whose victims are grateful.
The scene is gorgeous. The production values are high. The women are perfectly lit. And somewhere in the gap between how beautiful this scene looks and what it actually means is the darkest thing I have ever encountered in cinema: that evil does not always look like evil. Sometimes it looks like a musical number. Sometimes it looks like a film you would enjoy. Sometimes it applies its own makeup and hires its own extras and builds its own set, and the result is beautiful, and the beauty is the crime.
I need to confess one more thing. I have been writing this as if the confession is mine, as if I am the one with something to atone for. But the film’s real confession belongs to Anwar Congo, and his confession is this: he returned to the rooftop.
The final scene. He goes back to the roof above the handbag shop. The same roof where he demonstrated his wire technique at the beginning of the film. He walks to the spot. He stands there. And something happens to his body. He begins to gag. He dry-heaves over the railing, his body trying to expel something that cannot be expelled. Nothing comes up. There is nothing left to bring up. He has told everything, shown everything, performed everything, danced everything, and now his body is doing the one thing his performance could not: it is refusing.
Is this remorse? Is this a scene? Is he performing repentance the way he performed killing? The film does not say. Joshua Oppenheimer does not say. The camera holds its position and watches an old man retch on a rooftop in Medan, and you sit in your seat and you watch, and you do not know what you are watching, and that is the confession.
Not his. Yours.
You watched. You are watching now. You chose to keep reading. You laughed at the cha-cha. You admired the waterfall. You felt the wire tighten and you did not leave.
The Act of Killing was made from over a thousand hours of footage, edited over years. It premiered at festivals and won dozens of awards. It was nominated for an Academy Award. It was banned in Indonesia for years. Anwar Congo died in October 2019 at the age of eighty-two in Medan, near the cinema where he once sold tickets. The Pancasila Youth organization to which he belonged still operates. The killings are still officially justified.
I do not know what kind of film this is. It is not a documentary. It is not fiction. It is not horror. It is not comedy. It is something that should not exist, about events that should not have happened, made by people who should not have been willing to participate, and watched by audiences who should not have been able to sit through it but did, because the film, like the killings, like the confession, like the cha-cha, does not stop just because you want it to.
I watched it. That is my confession.
I am not sure I am forgiven.
The Act of Killing (Jagal) Director: Joshua Oppenheimer Country: Indonesia / Denmark / Norway / UK Year: 2012 Runtime: 159 minutes (director’s cut)
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