'The Act of Killing' and 'The Dirties'

Are movies dangerous?

This isn't exactly a rhetorical question. I'm not sure about the answer, but a number of films have recently asked the question, pointedly in some cases and rather obliquely in others.

The Act of Killing is back at the Vancity Theatre next week, but this time it's the director's cut, which is closing in on three hours.

I don't know if I could watch the film again. I saw the regular old cut last winter, long before the fever pitch around the film had begun to boil. At that point no one else I knew had seen it and thus there was no one to talk to about it, no way to unpack the damn thing from my head, to disassemble it into component pieces and understand it. It ping-ponged back and forth and refused to leave, like a bad party guest.

I did not like it much at the time, and even after subsequent conversations with other film folk -- some who are infinitely smarter than me -- I do not want to sit through it again. Still, the film has achieved something considerable that must be acknowledged. Joshua Oppenheimer, the film's co-director, spent eight years making the film and in doing so looked deep into the heart of darkness. In interview after interview about it, he speaks eloquently about the need to have an open conversation about what happened in Indonesia.

So, what did happen?

In 1965, the left-leaning government was overthrown by a U.S.-backed military dictatorship. The women's movement, trade unionists, land reform folk, teachers, ethnic Chinese and anyone even slightly affiliated with the Communist party was fair game. More than 2.5 million people were killed, a fact that was duly reported in the U.S. as good news. "A gleam of light in Asia," is how the killings were once described in American newspapers. The U.S. government handed over lists of names to the Indonesian military, with the implicit message being that anyone on the left could be hunted down and killed with impunity.

The Indonesian army recruited death squads from the gangs that ran movie theatres. These were mostly small-time mafia hoods involved with various rackets that used the theatres as a base of operations. Their gang culture grew up and developed around Hollywood movies, mostly musicals and gangster films. As Oppenheimer explains, things caught fire when an American film distributor named Bill Palmer was discovered with documents that outlined a plan to overthrow the government, which led to a boycott of American films.

Death squad offices were set up directly across the street from movie theatres so that the leaders could sashay out of Elvis Presley films, murder people and then dance the cha-cha back across the street to watch more films. The Act of Killing begins by offering the men who performed the genocide the opportunity to reenact their crimes for the camera. What ensues are lavish song and dance numbers, noir-ish gangster homages, yodelling cowboy epics and even the occasional cross-dressing scene.

Party to a horrible fantasy

While your mind is still trying to wrap itself around this idea, the film is busy with another objective entirely, which is to dramatize what happens when an entire nation is built on fiction. The big lie, as it were, is that the men and women who were slaughtered en masse in 1965 were the bad people. The men who populate the film make this assertion more and more desperately throughout until they become little more than dry heaves that retch up nothing, because there is nothing left inside them any longer.

In a number of interviews, Oppenheimer draws parallels between Nazi-propagated genocide and the Suharto dictatorship, stating that visiting Indonesia now is akin to going back to Germany after the Second World War and finding Hitler and the boys still in power, happily boasting about how many people they killed.

Whether the film will force any radical transformation on a political level in Indonesia remains to be seen, but the emperor has certainly been stripped naked, and the people are giving a long and lingering appraisal of his puny, withered frame.

The film should be seen and thought about and discussed. It is not a pleasant experience but perhaps a necessary one. Yet despite all of the interviews, explanations from the filmmaker about the nature of the process and the fact that it has opened up a dialogue in Indonesia, something still rankles about the film.

Oppenheimer has made an explicit point of stating that in order to make the film he had to allow the men to rationalize their actions on camera, to act out their fantasies, and that he would film whatever they wanted to show. This is indeed what happens, and the camera captures with merciless impunity the hollow rottenness at the centre of their world. As the audience watching the film we are forced to partake in their perspective in some fashion.

Maybe it is this aspect that feels objectionable. I do not want these men in my head, but there they reside in all their faded, horrible glory, tripped out in sequined gowns and bedecked in gobs of bloody makeup.

When fantasy goes too far

So maybe movies are dangerous. This idea popped up again more recently in a new Canadian film called The Dirties, screening in the Vancouver International Film Festival at the end of the month.

On the surface of things the two films don't look like they share much common ground, but there are strange points of convergence. One is a documentary that employs film fantasy to make a political point, and the other is a narrative fiction that uses documentary form and language to create a curious form of reality.

The Dirties is directed by Matt Johnson and written by Owen Williams, both also ostensibly playing a version of themselves in the story. The film won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature and the Spirit of Slamdance Award at the Slamdance Festival this past winter, and screened in a number of other film festivals before being picked and promoted by Kevin Smith (of Clerks), who slathers on the hyperbole, stating that the film is "the best movie you'll see all year."

Whether that is indeed the case I don't know, but the film is interesting enough in its depiction of a pair of movie-obsessed nerd boys (Matt and Owen) who plan and shoot a film about taking revenge on the gang of bullies who run their high school (the eponymous Dirties).

This revenge-of-the-nerds takes some liberties with narrative, and employs a loose documentary form to capture the tale of Matt and Owen as they spiral from fantasy into reality, from pretending to kill to actually doing the deed. Again there occurs a curious inversion of The Act of Killing, a film that begins with reality and ends up in fantasy.

In making a project for their filmmaking class, the boys steal bits and pieces from their favourite movies to cobble together a narrative of bloodshed and retribution. Scenes from Pulp Fiction to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre are slammed together with help of cheap editing software setup in Matt's bedroom. This room, papered with movie posters and Magic Cards, is where a great deal of the film is set. It is a place of immersive fantasy that only teenage boys seem fully capable of understanding, but mostly it is a shrine to cinema. (The closing credits are an exhaustive homage to films that boys love.)

Of the pair, the one who calls action is Matt, a classic geek who wears what may be the ugliest coat known to mankind and is regularly pummelled in school hallways for his efforts. Thick of lip and daft of expression, he is instantly recognizable as "that guy" -- the kid that can't shut up to save his life, the kid that is so movie-obsessed that he can't ever stop acting for some invisible camera crew that is there to capture his every move. Matt might seem a world away from the wretched hollow men of The Act of Killing, but there is some commonality. Movies are his reality and his escape. In spite of his Tarantino-esque riffs and constant mugging for the camera, he is not without charm. He's funny and sad and lost.

Murderers, nothing less than human

As the boys set about making their movie, elements of real life intrude. People are filmed without their knowledge or even their consent, as is the case with two younger boys who bump into Matt and Owen in a park and cheerfully recount that they too are making a movie. Even the filmmaker's real mother, a mental health worker, is filmed without her knowing as she talks with her son (both fictive in the movie and real in life) about whether he thinks he's crazy or not.

Here is where things get a little weird. The film itself, written and directed by Matt and Owen, is drawn largely from their own experiences of being bullied. It is, as many interviews and reviews have noted, a very personal project. In an interview about the film, the director himself stated:

"The movie is about a super movie-obsessed kid. In that way, it is about my own life, but the whole thing is shot like a documentary. In media classes, you have kids shooting other kids all the time, and this movie is just an extension of that... Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold [the killers at Columbine] made hundreds of movies about themselves, tons of them. And when you watch them, they're funny kids trying to make one another laugh, which is the part of the story you never hear when you hear about Columbine, when you hear about anybody who's doing something super-violent in school."

The film succeeds not only in humanizing a murderer, but also in refusing to look away, making it impossible to view such people as anything less than human. This is almost exactly how Joshua Oppenheimer explains the process of making his film, and that in becoming close to a killer you must open up to them, become vulnerable, and in so doing understand that you are not that far removed from them. There is a murderer in every one of us, and perhaps a filmmaker as well. Which is more frightening, I'm not sure.