I had been looking forward to this since first hearing about it. The subject would be deep and strange. It had involvement by Herzog in a project that seemed worthy of him. So I made a point to see the authorial version of close to three hours, hoping to land in a broader swim that goes out in search.
Kierkegaard said, "life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward". He means that life can only be made apparent in reflection but as you live it in the here and now it will be opaque. Conversely however, it means that if we hope to understand history in a significant way, so as to be able to recognize the forces at play in the here and now and not have to wait until later, we should try placing ourselves in it as something that was lived going forward.
So by way of history that we can understand backward we learn little here. A military coup in Indonesia resulted in the persecution and death of perhaps up to a million people - that was with Vietnam already underway the same year and driven by the same strategy of containing communism and shady American involvement. But that's another story to tell.
So how to begin to make sense in the here and now of a tragedy of unfathomable proportions? The filmmaker could have plainly presented a tapestry of facts and sought historians to explain larger swathes of context. It's not because he thinks the events will be fairly well known that he omits these, rather the whole point here is different.
The film is not a historic record that only finds its impetus in the murderers; it's an examination of delusion and ignorance now in this life. Not the fact of murder so much as how individuals carry it with them. They are asked to re enact events, the re enactments played back to them so they're both makers and viewers. How do they see themselves in what they see of themselves? What form does the memory take and what does it mean to live through it after the fact?
So these re enactments would be our focal point of entry into the self who lived through them, memory brought alive. Some of them are more fantastical than others. Some are just brutish and senseless, hemmed in by the brutish imagination of their makers. The most chilling thing however is that even the enactments of violent interrogation, in particular those, afford no realer apprehension; they look as banal as movie scenes.
Which is to say that there's a certain kind of artifice here that stands in our way and the actual filmmaker can't shed away. Some will say he achieves this in the finale and perhaps he does. But there's another nagging sense for me.
See, we follow two or three people, head executioners in their day, picked among dozens of others for the purpose of the film. It quickly becomes obvious why; they're each photogenic in their way, flamboyant and unabashed. It also becomes obvious that they think they're making a different sort of film, one that chronicles their exploits in a favored light. Not surprisingly; they have lived all their life within a state- sponsored narrative that sees events of that day as brave.
Now one of them has managed to build around himself something akin to a worldview that lets him escape any guilt. Is any other country innocent of much the same? Another is just a Jack Black looking dufus probably as capable of the same now. But the third one looks like he might be awakening to a more vital realization, the one we would perhaps like him to.
See, this is the whole thing. The film becomes about this man making the breakthrough to the kind of story we would like to see told, it's why the climax is reserved for him and not the one who is unrepentant. But this way have we penetrated artifice to get to the real stuff in a deep way? The scene where he retches in the same veranda where he garroted thousands, does it offer the realization we're after?
Suddenly it feels as contrived as a dramatized version. See, the whole thing can't be bogged down to whether this man is feeling pangs of regret now, it can't be a concern that he is, unless you're willing to buy the notion that ignorance and delusion have been chased away from him and he's now cleansed. This simply isn't how I'm prepared to leave this behind. Truth, or ecstatic truth like Herzog's kind, is always something you sculpt and this isn't particularly well sculpted truth.
What we learn about present day Indonesia was more chilling truth in its way. It becomes obvious that the political caste in power comes from much the same apparatus that exterminated people. A deputy minister openly hailing paramilitaries in a speech while wearing their jacket. A surreal TV talk show that would probably reach tens of millions of homes interviewing the murderers while the whole audience in attendance are paramilitaries. Everything here shows a deeply disturbing mentality that still gleams in the eyes of people.
