Listening to
- Meat without Misery. Sam Harris talks to Uma Valeti about using meat cells to grow meat. I was wondering most about the cost. Uma says it currently costs $40/gram (making a steak dinner for two around $20,000), but costs will reduce to a few cents per gram over the next 5 years.
- Juggling and Jesus by Colin Ryan
- Empathetic Subway Screaming by Jeff Simmermon
- You can come back by Joshua Wolf Shenk
- The impossible dream by Jimmy Tingle
Watching
- The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer. This is a good review on amazon:
“In 1965 the Indonesian military responded to an attempted coup with the massacre of at least 500,000 people. They employed local gangs to help carry out these murders, transforming young idling street toughs into death squads who killed without abandon or regard to the political pretense of eradicating the alleged communist threat.
Anwar Congo is one of these killers, a flamboyant man with a penchant for the gangster movies he once stood outside scalping tickets to. Anwar has never been charged for his crimes. To the contrary, his atrocities have made him somewhat of a minor celebrity in his hometown of Medan, a large city in Sumatra. He believes he is responsible for murdering about a thousand people; mostly by strangling them with piano wire, the way gangsters did it in the movies.
Joshua Oppenheimer met Mr. Congo traveling through Indonesia while working on another project. He was struck by Congo’s zeal in recounting his horrific acts like an aged athlete recalling his bygone glory days, acting out his crimes and providing little asides on the most efficient methods of killing a large number of people quickly and cleanly.
Oppenheimer proposed filming and financing re-enactments of Congo’s crimes starring the murderer himself, his surviving accomplices, and his young lackeys. As inexplicable as Oppenheimer’s proposition to help a mass murderer make a film is, Congo’s decision to recreate his transgressions through an array of genres – horror, musical, war, westerns and, of course, gangster – is even more baffling. Oppenheimer’s documentary, The Act of Killing, is the collision of Congo’s bizarre scenes realized, chilling interviews, and fly on the wall observation.
The fact Congo maintained final cut gives the documentary its occasional perverse comedy. Laughing at these men’s lack of sophistication is double-edged; it’s this same absence of self-awareness that made them capable of killing thousands of people and recall their actions with little of no sense of remorse. So when one young lackey engages in a quixotic run for public office, explaining how much easier it will make shaking people down for bribes, it feels almost as absurd as something off of NBC’s Parks & Recreations, while providing a prime example of what makes Indonesia so hopelessly corrupt.
This sort of ironic detachment takes an even darker turn when a man recalls the murder of his father during the ’65 genocide. The man suggests the story would make a good addition to the film. One would think Anwar would recognize this thinly veiled confrontation by a victim, or perhaps feel some tug of guilt for his participation in events that led to the death of this man’s father. But Congo is unable to see past his film, and dismisses the idea, characteristically, without thought.
And yet, The Act of Killing does catch glimpses of some semblance of remorse in Anwar Congo. On several occasions, local citizens are solicited to act the part of Communist dissidents. Most decline, visibly terrified of being mistaken for Communists. Yet a few do concede (likely for what is to them a great deal of money), and as they are mock beaten and murdered their children fall into hysterics, not understanding what is going on. One woman appears to slip into shock from the experience.
It’s at moments like these that something like regret appears in Congo’s face. There are also admissions of terrible nightmares that have plagued him for years, quieter conversations with accomplices about coping with memories, and a final fifteen minutes which are almost unbearable to watch.
But while watching all of this, I couldn’t help wonder if Oppenheimer had discovered and crossed some line of ethics with his film. Yes, we sit in judgment of Congo, but he himself is blissfully unaware of this. All he sees is the medium provided to glorify his actions. Even since The Act of Killing was released, Congo’s complaints are detached from the crimes, instead focusing on his feeling of being misled in terms of the type of film he was making.
But most troubling, is it ethically sound to make a movie that causes participants trauma or puts lives in danger? My knee jerk reaction is to say such a film should not be produced. But this feeling is countered by the powerful visceral reaction viewing this film stirred in me.
The Act of Killing, is many things: sober documentary, meta-film within a film; exploitative, surrealist, funny and always deeply uncomfortable. I can safely say I have never seen a movie like it, and that my thoughts returned to its characters and images in a way only a few documentary films have. It is a unique and troubling masterpiece.”
Links I liked
- When I went to Accra for Christmas, policemen and women were peppered across city corners, waving down cars, asking for “Christmas gifts”. People often say that higher pay would cut corruption. Apparently, it doesn’t.