The horror is not
visual but it is relentless, and you watch this till your eyeballs start to bleed.
The horror, it feels, is a matter of fact. Or, one can argue (an Indonesian
mass murderer certainly would), a matter of history.
Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act Of Killing was pure brutal
fascination. It was irresistible because it was grotesque. You had a million
people who died during the genocide in Indonesia in 1965-1966, and here you saw
those decrepit sons of bitches smiling smugly to the camera and gushing over
the details of how they tortured and murdered their victims. A little less
farcical, and you could throw up. As it was, you held on squeamishly and tried
to make some sense of a completely
different civilization.
The Look Of Silence is an afterthought. Oppenheimer's attempt to go a
little further and try to make sense of what actually happened in Indonesia in
mid-60s. At some point you feel he almost gets there, to some horrible
revelation, but deep down you know he doesn't stand a chance. And nor does the
quiet little Indonesian man facing the killers of his elder brother. Getting
close would burn you down. Getting close would require you drinking the blood
of those murderers.
Which is what those
murderers apparently did: they drank the blood of the people they killed. The
rational justification is grotesque, but you get to hear it again and again.
They did it not to go insane. Decades later, there's no remorse and hardly a
breath of apology. Decades later, they were obedient soldiers doing their job.
Decades later, it was all bloody politics.
Another fruitless
encounter, and you know the whole premise is an illusion. You can't get
through. Sometimes there's no truth beneath human nature, and you are only left
with a few horrific images that will stay with you for a very long time. Like
the restless jowls, swirling insanely, of another sorry bastard who used to
drink blood and cut off human genitalia. The past, someone like him says,
should never be stirred up. Or else it will happen again.
If there’s one thing
that Joshua Oppenheimer gets out of this, it’s that history doesn't equal fact.
History is emotional. It's the sweat and the tears. And the blood, too.
