University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series (Feb 2022)
“They Always Kill With Wire”: Indonesian Adaptations of American Cinema in The Act of Killing (Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012)
Abstract
The Act of Killing (2012) is a documentary by American film director Joshua Oppenheimer, who went to Indonesia and encouraged former executioners to reenact their murders from the time of the 1965-1966 military coup, when one million people were killed after they were accused of being communists. In a country where the government openly supports the main paramilitary organization, Pancasila (whose members also participated in the genocide), and glorifies the gangsters who were paid to kill communists and boisteriously explain the etymology behind their Indonesian name, fremen (from the English “free men”), Oppenheimer found that he was not allowed to interview the victims. Instead, he was pushed by circumstance to tell the story from the perpetrators’ point of view. The main character, Anwar, is a movie buff and big fan of American popular culture, particularly gangster movies, Elvis Presley and other movie stars and their standard costumes such as cowboy hats and bolo ties. His murders, as well as his reenactments of the murders, are sometimes close quotations of these aspects of American culture. This paper will be focusing on killing as an act of adaptation, imitation, and cultural collaboration. From this perspective, the act of killing is transformed—in the perpetrator’s view—into a performative tribute to a specific segment of American cinematic culture. The value of human life (not inherent to life, as Butler warns in Precarious Life and Frames of War) is thus read through the distancing effects of filmic adaptation; however, through the reenactment of his crimes, Anwar also appears to open himself up to an understanding of his deeds as morally problematic and traumatic, and his reading of his victims’ lives changes. In order to understand how that change is made possible (and how previously bare life becomes valuable), I will place myself in conversation with theoreticians such as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and others.
