All exception and no rule

Via umadoshi, a really excellent post on loving Narnia despite its flaws: How To Get Back to Narnia.

I was talking about the Narnia books with a friend the other day, and I mentioned that I loved them, present-tense, as in I re-read them every few years. It's a different kind of relationship, where I read them more to deconstruct them than to escape into them, but that's different than outright rejection.

I think Narnia might have been my first experience with Your Fave Is Problematic, a training ground for experiencing a geek culture that, while appealing, doesn't exactly like or represent my sort of person (and is even more hostile the more marginalized one is). Unlike the author, I got the religious anvil at a very early age (as in it was clear to me that the Dwarves at the end were Jews), and managed to be offended by the sexism and racism on first read, which at least in the case of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, may very well have happened before I learned to read. And yet I still somehow identified and kept coming back to them as escapism even when they were equally the source of outrage.

It's kind of how I can reconcile critique and love, and why I occasionally probably come off as too easy going and then snap into buzzkill territory on a moment's notice. Lotsa practice.

The Act of Killing

fatpie42's recent review of The Act of Killing, a documentary (well, kind of) by Joshua Oppenheimer, reminded me that I'd downloaded it awhile back but never actually watched it. So I did.

I can't review it properly; I'm not sure this film can be reviewed properly. I mean, I could say that it's among the most brilliant films I've ever seen, and certainly the most brilliant documentary I've ever seen, but can I recommend it? I don't know. I like you guys. Not sure I want to put you through that.

Oppenheimer went to Indonesia to interview members of paramilitary death squads and gangsters who murdered 500,000 people, who they claimed were communists, between 1964 and 1965 following Suharto's coup. The purge was committed with complicity and aid from Western governments, including my own. (I have clear memories of Suharto's 1997 visit to the APEC conference in Vancouver, where he was greeted by our politicians as if he were an actual human being and not scum worthy only of eradication, like a cockroach, and those protesting the arrival of this unrepentant war criminal were treated as criminals themselves. But I didn't grasp it back then. It's one thing to be worked up into a rage against a monster responsible for mass murder—any right-thinking person would be, unlike Chretien—and another thing to be confronted with the realities of what those murders were like.)

So if it had just been interviews and information about what happened, it would have been disturbing and powerful enough, but Oppenheimer does one better than that. He convinces the men—now quite elderly—to create an art film based on their memories of the massacres. They act in it as both themselves and their victims, complete with makeup and special effects. One, Anwar Conga, founder of the Pancasila Youth paramilitary movement and personally responsible for the murder of 1000 people, has nightmares and feels some remorse; the other, Adi Zulkadry, not so much. Along with their friends, they talk about how they idolize the gangster lifestyle (repeatedly, people in the film state that "gangster" means "free man") and Western movies. The reenacted scenes are shot in the style of the movies they enjoyed in their youth. As the film goes on, there are fewer interviews and more surreal sequences.

Nearly every major subject in the film is a monster. The filmmaker, at least until the end, withholds judgment, which must have been an unimaginable struggle, allowing them to talk about their rapes and murders, to demonstrate how they did it for the camera, bask in the appreciation of journalists and politicians who see them as heroes. At one point, they travel through a market extorting money from Chinese merchants to throw a party; all on film, all completely unrepentant, with no self-reflection or question as to why they feel that they can take what they want through violence. Interspersed are scenes of Anwar with his two young grandsons, the gangsters golfing and bowling, one running for election even though he can't even remember his lines and only wants to use the position to extort more money from people.

And it's just horrible. It keeps going. It's so hard to watch, but I felt I owed it to the victims to know what happened to them and to try to understand their murderers' psychology. I'm constantly baffled by how regular people justify their support for or complicity in atrocities; this film is a window into that mentality without allowing a single easy answer.

Anyway. You should watch it. Or you shouldn't. But you probably should.