The Act of Killing : From Fever Dream to the Dream-Work David Denny Intertexts, Volume 21, Issues 1-2, Spring-Fall 2017, pp. 89-114 (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/itx.2017.0004 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/721367 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] The Act of Killing From Fever Dream to the Dream- Work DAVID DENNY “Is not the dream essentially an act of homage to the missed reality— the reality that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself end- lessly, in some never attained awakening.”1 In the fi nal scene of Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary fi lm Th e Act of Killing (2012)2 we see Anwar Congo, the lead character in the fi lm and a former henchman responsible for killing hundreds of so- called Communist dissidents in Indonesia in 1965, retching on the same rooft op where he long ago executed so many people. Th e famous documentary fi lmmaker Errol Morris had these words to say about this scene: Th e last scene is one of the most powerful I have ever seen. And I am left with this strange question. It’s a really deep question for me. Is it performance or is it real? And what does it actually mean about him or about us and about our connection with the past? It is powerful because it is so inherently strange and ambiguous. It’s a “what the fuck is this moment”? What is actually going on here? I can’t tell you that it’s real or isn’t real, it’s fabricated or isn’t fabricated, it’s play acting or isn’t play acting. I don’t know. And I think for this reason, it becomes an amazing moment. Joshua Oppenheimer may be far more optimistic than I am, that we emerge somehow more knowledgeable, more self- aware. I think we learn nothing.3 In the same interview, done by Vice magazine, Werner Herzog com- ments on this fi nal scene by saying that nothing like this has ever been 90 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017 captured on fi lm and that we will not see something like this for another fi ft y years.4 But it is not just this fi nal scene that has elevated the fi lm to the status of something like a cinematic event. Even without this fi nal scene, we still need to ask why the fi lm succeeds in holding so many of its viewers in a state of fascination, outrage, disbelief, and awe. Before getting into these questions, let me fi rst provide the set up. Th e Act of Killing is a documentary fi lm that investigates the genocide of as many as two million alleged Communists, Chinese, and Trade Unionists in Indonesia in 1965– 1966 that helped establish the New Order govern- ment of President Suharto. Peculiar to this fi lm is the way Oppenheimer participates in and encourages its unfolding. Surprised by the boasting of the henchmen, and coupled with their avowed love of Hollywood gangster fi lms, Oppenheimer asked whether they’d be willing to make their own movie of the killings. Th e result is the rather surreal cinematic eff ect of watching the actual henchmen, some forty years later, directing and re- enacting their own crimes. Th e eff ect is heightened by the many diff erent layers of perspective that Oppenheimer captures and employs, especially when it comes to editing the many parts and frames into a whole. For example, the fi lm jumps, oft en quickly, from the henchmen walking the streets and recruiting local townspeople for their fi lm, to a modern industrialized shot of Medan, to a desolate and improvised shot of everyday life, to real- time interviews of the henchmen, to a re- enactment scene that replicates a fi lm- noir gangster scene, to An- war watching his own fi lm and commenting on it, to a re- enactment of one of Anwar’s own dreams, to a television show hosting the hench- men, celebrating their accomplishments, and so on. Absent is historical commentary by specialists working in related academic fi elds, as well as testimony from any of the victims (with the exception of one mo- ment that I will discuss below).5 Also absent is the typical documentary technique of carefully arriving at some empirical insight via statistics, historical references, or competing narratives. To agree with a comment that Herzog made in the Vice interview, the fi lm succeeds at creating a surrealist eff ect more so than any surrealist narrative fi lm ever made for the precise reason that it is not necessarily trying to make such a fi lm; it merely happens due to the editorial reframing of unscripted footage. For this reason, the fi lm escapes the ideological pretense of the surrealist art Denny: From Fever Dream to the Dream-Work 91 form; it rather happily (and perhaps surprisingly) fi nds itself in the midst of the accidental, of what appears to be a series of unrelated associations that are intimately connected. As a consequence, the fi lm documents the un- documentable: the inner- being, the psychic workings, or even the soul- murder of Anwar Congo, the main character and the person about whom Morris is speaking in the opening quote. Th is happens because of the unique combination of “free” associations that are presented, seem- ingly and mostly unsolicited by Oppenheimer, to the camera. Oppenheimer, commenting on the bizarre nature in which the henchmen boasted about their crimes and their willingness to re- enact them, said, “I knew it would be fl amboyant because denial and escapism are always fl amboyant mental process and a collective mental process . it turned out to be a kind of fever dream.”6 In fact, in many of his interviews, Oppenheimer uses psychoanalytic concepts to explain what he understands to be happening. He recognizes, for example, the fi gure of trauma that not only haunts Anwar but also ordinary people, some of whom are asked to be part of the re- enactments.7 He contextualizes the fl amboyant re- enactment scenes as a way to create psychic scar tissue around the wound. He says, “For me, I want the fi lm to be something like one of those dreams that, although it’s a dream, you recognize a truth about your life in the dream that is so piercing that it jolts you awake.”8 Suffi ce it to say, I agree wholeheartedly with Oppenheimer that there is a psychoanalytic aspect to this fi lm. I, however, would go further and say that it is only through psychoanalysis that we can arrive at a certain knowledge of the fi lm, or the events surrounding the fi lm. In fact, Oppenheimer assumes the theoretical position of the psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek when he says, “Somehow there is the ability for perpetrators— and all of us— to act on beliefs that we empirically know are false.”9 Th erefore, in order to approach the questions posed above (what is it about the fi lm that holds us in thrall, how might the fi lm index a knowledge that exposes a lack in empirical knowledge itself, what is so strange about Anwar’s retching at the end of the fi lm, and does the fi lm rise to the level of a cinematic event), I will work specifi cally with the psychoanalytic ideas of Jacques Lacan. To that end, there are three psychoanalytic concepts or moments in the fi lm that I will address. Th e fi rst is how Oppenheimer’s participatory involvement and masterful 92 intertexts 21.1–2 · spring–fall 2017 editing calls to mind Lacan’s notion of the discourse of the analyst. Th e second, which is a consequence of the fi rst, is the peculiar way in which fi ction, the re- enactment scenes, produces a register that is more real than reality. Using fi ctional or exterior staging elements to heighten the reality principle of a documentary fi lm is not new. What is diff erent in this fi lm, however, is the element of surprise, how the staging element of fi ction opens up insights or, better, produces signifi ers that the fi lmmaker, much like an analyst, could not have imagined. Here, the act of staging the past becomes an opening for the possibility of free association, that particular trope so essential for the psychoanalytic practice. Th e third concept, or moment, occurs precisely because of what the fi rst moment opens up and allows but cannot complete. Here I turn my attention to the spectator’s involvement with the fi lm, specifi cally to the fi gure of enjoyment. It is here that we will return to the denouement of the fi lm, Anwar’s retching, in order to understand why Lacan privileges transference over and against free association to mark the end of analysis. The Discourse of the Analyst “Personally, I have never regarded myself as a researcher. As Picasso once said, to the shocked surprise of those around him—I do not seek, I fi nd.” 10 “What occurs, what is produced, in this gap, is presented as the discov- ery. It is in this way that the Freudian exploration fi rst encounters what occurs in the unconscious.”11 It would be a daunting but interesting task to think of documentary fi lms along the line of Lacan’s four discourses: master, university, hysteric, and analyst.