The Act of Killing

In The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer has assembled a group of thugs who were instrumental in the murder of over one million suspected Communists when the Sukarno government was overthrown in l965. It’s a kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission in reverse, to the extent that the perpetrators proudly boast about their crimes. Anwar Congo and Herman Koto who play themselves in the film would also be wonderful casting choices for an Indonesian production of The Threepenny Opera, (despite the fact that Congo’s face bears a disconcerting resemblance to one of the most peaceful politicians of all time, Nelson Mandela). These goons freely admit the Communists weren’t the cruel ones and proceed to demonstrate their torture techniques, one of which is garroting with a wire, preferred because there’s nothing the victim can do to loosen the pressure, even in the unlikely case that his or her hands were free. Gangster, Congo explains means free man and he is revered as a force behind the still feared paramilitary Pemuda Pancasila Youth, which is still active today. Where the provenance of terrorism usually comes from training camps, Congo and Soto are in love with Hollywood and claim to have learned their sadism from Brando, Pacino and John Wayne. Imagine movie characters from Quentin Tarantino’s Resevoir Dogs (with its famed torture scene) or Pulp Fiction running a real country and you get some insight into The Act of Killing. Is it a documentary? Hard to say. In fact, it’s a reenactment and as such it’s easy to see Congo and Koto would be willing to cooperate. By reenacting atrocities so brazenly, Oppenheimer’s cast are sending out a message. Yet there are times when the film is gets ahead of itself. A group of villagers playing their parts—as the victims or rape and torture—can’t stop crying even after their scene ends and when Congo plays the subject of an interrogation, who is accused of trying to ban Hollywood films, he seems to be caught up short. He has to stop. As brazen as he is, he’s the one character who admits to being haunted by nightmares. He’s also plainly capable of compartmentalizing with the help of alcohol, marijuana and ecstasy. The Act of Killing is a little like using the Nuremberg trials as a casting couch for The Producers. Say instead of sentencing Goring, Bormann or Hess you offered to make them film stars. Oppenheimer has inadvertently created a new form which we might term real cinema verite. He isn’t using non actors to play roles, as in The Battle of Algiers. He’s using real war criminals who still inspire fear. Read the film’s final credit sequence (as the director instructs in his prologue to the film). Half of the names read ‘anonymous.”

Nature’s Riddle

William D. Hamilton

In a review of Ullica Segerstrale’s biography of the evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton (“Inclusive Fitness," TLS 8/2/13), Nature’s Oracle: The Life and Work of W.D. Hamilton Jennie Erin Smith makes the following comment “The concept of inclusive fitness argued that an organism could increase its genetic success not merely by reproducing itself, but also by aiding the reproduction and survival of relatives carrying some proportion of identical genes.” What Hamilton was trying to deal with was essentially altruism or “why an animal should forego reproducing…or expose itself to danger to warn its fellows of a predator.” When you think of it altruism is actually contradicted by natural selection. Yet rather than being an aporia, it falls into a category that is becoming increasingly common amongst high level thinkers in both science and philosophy. For instance Thomas Nagel, who defines himself as an atheist, still maintains in his current book Mind and Cosmos, that pure naturalism cannot effectively explain the emergence of consciousness. The “inclusiveness”of a thinker like Nagel bears comparison to Hamilton who also exhibits a kind of scientific thinking that takes nothing for granted. But Hamilton who believed in Segerstrale’s words that warfare “could be seen...as adaptive rather than pathological” could also be quite provocative. Thinkers like Hamilton and Nagel, along with the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer of Animal Liberation fame are part of the “more things in heaven and earth” club who ask uncomfortable and bothersome questions that are bound to upset the applecart for purists who are unable to tolerate a multivalent view of the world. Philosophic and scientific multitasking is the name of this game.

Confronting Your Walking Alter Ego

Meet the walking alter egos talking earnestly to their proclivities. “I know that I don’t need to eat sugar and that sugar is as lethal to me as meat or caffeine or women. I realize that I don’t have to live the kind of life where I crave the delights of the flesh. When I'm lured up against the shoals of pastry eating, the Scylla and Charybdis of chocolate, I know it’s my disease talking to me. It’s not the real me.” Some people exhibit their alter egos like Popeye his muscles. But walking alter egos, are not harmless. With their determination and glazed eyes, these alter egos often resemble the doppelgängers in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers  and with with their robotic talk, The Stepford Wives. Walking alter egos can make you feel like you're suffering from Capgras Syndrome, a neurological disorder in which people seem like impostors. Indeed, these alter egos may cause viscosity in pedestrian situations that can result in traffic snarls. What to do when confronted with an insistent sounding alter ego in heated conversation with its other half? The answer is that it's hopeless to separate them. A walking alter ego is on a mission. Getting in its way is not as bad as surprising a bear raiding your garbage. You do not have to shoot it, but it's also important not to try to talk it out of its self-justifiying behavior. Above all don’t interrupt--especially with permissive sounding liberal pieties like "that's not so bad," "I’ve done that to myself too,” or “I can ID that." Walking alter egos will not be reasoned with, nor will they be convinced that the programs they propose are overly extreme or harsh. Moderation is not what alter egos want to hear. Nod knowingly when confronted by a walking alter ego and remember not to take it personally. It’s not you it's talking so prescriptively to. It’s just another part of itself.

Free Love and Subprime Mortgages

Portrait of August Strindberg by Edvard Munch

Free love was a little like subprime mortgages. It was a creation of the sixties counterculture and it’s selling point was the idea that there could be no strings attached sex between individuals. Subprime mortgages were a creation of the first decade of the twentieth century and proposed the idea that big time money could be made (by borrowers and lenders) through easily obtainable loans. It was free love financing. What the two ideas have in common is that there is no price to be paid for the pursuit of pleasure, whether it be sexual or material, even when easy money or easy sex leads to overindulgence. Lest we equate this idea with puritanical concepts of sin, here is a quote from a very non puritanical thinker, the playwright, August Strindberg who believed in determinism and would probably have found the advent of double entry bookkeeping to be tantamount in importance to if not even more important than the advent of romantic love. For Strindberg, no love was free. There was always a price to be paid. Here’s an exchange from A Dream Play, which epitomizes his attitude towards both love and real estate.

“Daughter: You are a prisoner in your own room. I have come to set you free.

  Officer: I have been       

  waiting for this, but I wasn’t sure you would want to.

  Daughter: The castle is strong—it has seven walls—but it shall be done. Do you want to be set free-  

  --or not?   

  Officer: To tell the truth, I don’t know. Either way I’ll suffer. Every joy has to be paid for twice over        with sorrow. It’s wretched here, but I’d have to endure three time the agony for the joys of freedom...”

The Attack

One of the most interesting things about Ziad Doueiri’s The Attack is the retrospection. The film is based on a novel by Yasmina Khadra and the many of the flashbacks are more novelistic than cinematic. They're not merely visuals amplifying a story, but independent vignettes, part and parcel of the back and forth between appearance and reality that constitutes the theme. Nothing is what it appears to be in the film which deals with a Palestinian born Israeli doctor (Ali Suliman) who discovers that his wife is a terrorist. Throughout the first part of the movie Amin, the doctor, is slowly and painfully disabused of his preconceptions about Siham (Reymond Amsalem), his beautiful wife. These early scenes, which are suspenseful could be compared to Vertigo in which Scottie (James Stewart) seeks to find an apparition, a woman who it turns out never existed. Then just as the protagonist and by proxy the viewer are ready to accept one truth, another asserts itself. Siham is, despite everything she has done to herself and others, what she always was, a devoted and loving wife. Does the film owe its provenance to Hitchcock or to filmmakers like Pontecorvo who used a cinema verite style to convey a political message? In the case of The Attack, the esthetic and the political aren’t mutually exclusive. The Attack uses the unraveling of the suspense genre in the service of its message—which is one of moral ambiguity. There's no right or wrong. Both Amin and Siham are deluded into thinking that political reality does or does not define them. Their tragedy—and it’s something they both learn too late to do anything about—is that the personal and the political are inextricably intertwined.