Today I read the
next fifty pages of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s The Buenos Aires Quintet. In this section of the novel, Carvalho
succeeds in his mission when he locates his missing cousin Raúl, but his
success is only temporary, as Raúl soon escapes and disappears again. This
momentary resolution and partial success reflects the book’s account of the
consistency between the old and new Argentina; in other words, not much has
changed with the overthrow of the military dictatorship and the election of the
‘reformer’ Carlos Menem. As one character puts it “Apparently all the secret
shit of power never disappears.” The personification of this ‘secret shit’ is
the mysterious figure of the Captain, responsible for many deaths during the
Dirty War and still pulling the strings in the ‘new’ Argentina, much to the
frustration of both Carvalho and the Argentine police. One of the most striking
aspects of Carvalho’s character is also highlighted in this section of the
book—his habit of burning books. Why does he do it? Partly, he says, because
books “taught me nothing about to live” and partly because Culture is “nothing
more than a mask for fear and ignorance. For death.” It remains to be seen
whether Montalbán is in earnest when he makes this claim.
I also read the next fifty pages of Alexander Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through
Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture. As this section of the
book covers the period leading up to the 2008 US presidential election, the
number of negative assessments of both Obama and HRC increase dramatically. In
this context, Cockburn’s repetition of a claim he’s made before, namely, that
Gerald Ford is America’s greatest President, really stands out. This iteration
of the claim is prompted by Ford’s passing on December 26th, 2006,
and Cockburn justifies his claim by saying “Transferring the Hippocratic
injunction from the medical to the political realm, he did the least possible
realm.” Cockburn’s speculations about what might have happened had Ford been
re-elected in 1976 are not persuasive, but his view of Ford is certainly a
bracing alternative to the Saturday Night Live version of Ford as an utter incompetent. Much more
difficult to fathom is Cockburn’s response to the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007.
The problem is not so much Cockburn’s focus on the criminally incompetent
response of the University to that day’s events, but rather his brusque
dismissal of the need for gun control: “There have been the usual howls from
the anti-gun lobby, but it’s all hot air. America is not about to dump the
Second Amendment giving people the right to bear arms.” Even worse, Cockburn
goes on to argue that a better response would be to arm “appropriately
screened’ teachers and students. Only a simpleton would believe this would
improve the situation instead of leading to more deaths.
I also watched The Act of Killing, the 2012 documentary directed by Joshua
Oppenheimer that has just been nominated for an Academy Award. It tells the story
of what happened in Indonesia in 1965 when Suharto took power and killed over a
million Communists, primarily by means of death squads led by gangsters such as
the two men Oppenheimer focuses on most, Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry.
Oppenheimer’s film has met with near-universal acclaim and that fact alone
makes me suspicious of it. But it’s important to understand what its real
weaknesses are, rather than its apparent ones. For example, it’s been said that
the film lacks historical context and only presents one side of what happened.
Both of these claims are true (for example, the film says nothing about the US
role in the killings, discussed in detail here) but they are
also beside the point because The Act of
Killing is not a documentary in the conventional sense of the word.
Oppenheimer has called it a “documentary of the imagination,” which is a useful
way of making sense of how the film blends fictional and non-fictional elements.
Specifically, when Oppenheimer encourages the killers to recreate some of their
killings, they take to the idea with great gusto, filming scenes in the style
of several of their favorite genres, including a gangster movie, a war movie,
and even a musical. These recreations, cross-cut as they are with standard
first-person interviews with the killers, give the film a bizarre, almost
hallucinatory quality and make The Act of
Killing truly distinctive. At its best, it powerfully demonstrates the
influence of these movie genres on the self-definition of these individuals
when they were committing the murders in the 1960s. And in doing so, it shows
us that documentary can never draw upon a well of undiluted ‘reality’ for its
representations. Rather, it is always necessarily trafficking in a combination
of the fictional and non-fictional. Accentuating this combination, however, is
a technique that is fraught with danger. Does the recasting of acts of torture
and murder into B-movie scenes aestheticize and trivialize the violence? Does
blurring the line between fiction and reality make it more difficult to make
accurate truth claims about what happened and who is responsible? As the movie
progressed, I found myself becoming more and more troubled by the way in which
this film represents the killers and by my inability to distinguish reliably
between truth and fiction. Both of these issues come to a head in the film’s
final scenes involving Anwar Congo. Apparently, as Congo participates in more
and more recreations, the ghosts of the past come back to haunt him, especially
once he plays the part of a victim. As Congo’s humanity seemingly begins to
reassert itself (even on a visceral, physical level, as the concluding scene of
him retching suggests) we are offered the spectacle of redemption, not only of
Congo, but also of our faith in humanity, so sorely tested by the rest of the
film. But why should we believe what we are seeing? What confidence do we have
that this is not another fictional scene? Personally, I was unconvinced by this
attempt to install Congo in the place of victim. It felt wrong not only on a
moral level but also on an aesthetic level: it was too neat to be convincing. But
even if one is not convinced, one can understand why Oppenheimer makes this
decision. Congo’s apparent redemption offers Oppenheimer a much more promising
conclusion than Adi Zulkadry’s complete lack of remorse, guilt, and nightmares.
It seems that The Act of Killing
simply does not know what to do with Zulkadry’s acceptance of what he has done
and instead opts for a sentimentalism that, intentionally or not, exposes some
of the problems with this film.
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