The Look of Silence

A companion documentary to the director, Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2012), The Look of Silence, also a documentary about mass murder in Indonesia, is less flamboyant, shorter, but equally harrowing.  The 2014 movie is also disheartening and leaves the viewer with unresolved emotions -- most of us expect that the world will turn out to be a just place.  (Martin Luther King:  "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.")  Oppenheimer's films offer a nightmarish alternative to King's optimism:  what if the must awful injustice not only evades retribution but, ultimately, is rewarded, praised and a source of great power and wealth?  This scenario seems to have occurred in Indonesia and Oppenheimer's films are alarming because they unflinchingly document a nation where the most vicious and sadistic cruelty prevailed and, indeed, catapulted its practitioners into positions of power and eminence -- in Indonesia, the bad guys won and, in fact, are still winning.

The back story to The Look of Silence is simple enough.  In 1965, probably at the urging of the American CIA, the Indonesian army decided to solve its problem with Communist insurgents by simply massacring everyone who could be considered a menace to the military junta.  To avoid the appearance of state-sponsored mass murder, the army deputized local death squads to carry out the slaughter.  These death squads acted with great enthusiasm, committing horrifying acts of violence.  Apparently, more than a million people were murdered, many of them simply poor farmers or other dispossessed people caught up in the lethal purge.  The anonymous protagonist of The Look of Silence is a small-town optometrist who seems to make house-calls.   The optometrist is 44 and, during his house-calls, questions local people who were members of the militia death squads about their murderous activities -- when he does this, breaching a code of silence that seems ubiquitous in Indonesia, he is met with weird justifications, denials, threats, and, most often, the titular "look of silence", a blank uneasy stare in which the killer's face and lips contort but no words are spoken.  Much of the film is unnerving, consisting of long moments of complete silence in which the protagonist simply looks at the killer (or members of the killer's family) with an impassive, expressionless, indeed, almost reptilian stare.  It is this same bland, and impenetrable, stare that we have seen on the optometrist's face as he watches footage shot by Oppenheimer of the elderly mass murderers joking and congratulating one another on their savagery forty years earlier.  (About a quarter of the film shows the optometrist alone in a featureless room, a kind of abstract purgatory, watching TV interviews that "Josh," as his Indonesian informants call the director, has shot.  Indonesians seem to have a propensity for acting things out -- this was obvious in the garish song and dance numbers in The Act of Killing, a film that covers the same terrain, and many of the old death squad murderers enjoy pantomiming how they hacked off heads or slit bellies; one old fellow has his sidekick squat down so he can mime how he cut off Ramli's penis -- Ramli is the protagonist's brother who was literally hacked to pieces in 1965, two years before the optometrist was born.  This jolly old butcher has written a book illustrated with sketches of how he chopped up Ramli.  With his wife and a sidekick, the old killer displays the book and gives jocular details about how, for years, no one would eat the fish hauled from the Snake River, the site of the worst massacres, since the creatures had been feasting on human flesh.  Near the end of the movie, the optometrist confronts the death squad leader's wife and sons.  They claim to have no knowledge of any of the killings.  The wife goes so far as to assert that her husband never wrote any memoir about the killings, certainly not an illustrated book.  When the optometrist shows her lap-top computer footage of Oppenheimer's interview with her husband in which he proudly displays the book and its gory pictures in her presence, she becomes befuddled and leaves the room.  Of course, the images show her standing next to her husband giggling about his memoir.  Her son's threaten the optometrist and one of them squawks:  "You are no longer our friend, Josh!"  The old murderer has died unrepenitent. 

Oppenheimer is a poetic filmmaker despite his horrendous subject matter.   The movie is shot in beautiful, restrained color -- mostly huge close-ups and landscapes with the sound track tremulous with the amplified sounds of insects.  The film is structured around three strands of imagery that annotate the horrific story.  First, we see tiny spherical beans, jumping and skittering on the surface of a plate or a piece of wood.  These are encapsulated butterflies struggling to merge from their bean-like cocoons -- at least, this is how the strange skittering and twitching seeds are explained.  The optometrist's father is said to be 103 years old and he haunts the film like a ghoulish, dwarflike specter.  We see his wife ladling water over the tiny naked and emaciated homunculus as he shivers and trembles.  The old man is like Tithonus -- he's so ancient that he doesn't exactly seem human.  He's also senile, claiming in a child-like voice that he's only 17 -- he sings a little risqué ditty about a girl, pop music from his boyhood.  When questioned about his son, Ramli, the old man simply denies that he ever had a son.  The old man suggests that an implacable doom is befalling all of the murderers -- it's simply the ravages of old age.  The old villains that we meet in the film all seem to be dying, they have one foot in the grave.  In some fundamental way, the film is about death -- the young victims who died so horribly are, at least, spared the indignity of old age that afflicts murderers and survivors alike.  Human revenge has failed but, nonetheless, the worst of the murderers are now suffering -- the injustice is that they are suffering the common fate of all of us who live to be old.  (In one terrible scene, the shriveled old man is lost in his own house and shrieks that someone should rescue him -- his grief and sorrow seem analogous to the numb disbelief that some of the killers experience when confronted about their murders:  how can this be happening to me in my own home?)  The final strand of the picture involves the protagonist's family life -- he has an elderly mother who prays for the everlasting damnation of her son's killers and implacably wishes for revenge.  (She no longer sleeps with her superannuated husband because "he smells of pee.")  The hero also has a small daughter and we see him playing with her and reading to her from a book.  These images suggest that life goes on despite the terrible things that happened in 1965.  And this aspect of the film shows how easy the day to day concerns of our lives will erode our ability to retain in our imagination, horrific things that we know happened but that we wish didn''t oppress us any longer.  Overriding these separate narrative strands is the film's central metaphor -- often, the optometrist conducts interviews while his subjects are wearing apparatus that allows the hero to correct their vision with different lenses.  In a real sense, the protagonist is working so that people in his part of Indonesia will be able to see better -- that is appreciate what happened in 1965.  He is trying to open people's eyes.  In this respect, the protagonist, with his fixed, unflinching gaze, resembles a camera -- he seems almost completely inert, a pair of watching eyes and the film's fixation with optical devices enhances the impression that the optometrist is a surrogate for the camera itself, recording impassively and, without comment, the images that it receives.  Part of enigma in the film is the hero -- we don't know his motive and can't understand exactly what he is trying to accomplish.  And, if he is baffling to the audience, he is a complete mystery to the Indonesians who each and every one  (including a death squad victim who escaped) seem to regard it best to not re-open the terrible wounds left by the mass killings in 1965.

The movie is filled with disconcerting images.  One old man who led death squads says that the Americans should have given prizes to him and his compadres -- perhaps, a plane flight to the USA or, at the very least, a cruise.  A member of parliament who ordered thousands of deaths says menacingly:  "Of course, I was right -- this is shown by the fact that the families of those I killed all voted for me."  A 1965 newsreel narrated by a NBC newscaster suggests that the Communists wanted to be murdered and, in fact, even politely scheduled appointments for their slaughter -- a sentiment echoed by several of the old murderers shown in the film.  (Students in an elementary school are told that the Communists gouged out people's eyes and, then, pleaded to be punished by death -- the notion of injury to the eyes is fundamental to the film and the optometrist's central role in the picture.  The most shocking moment in the film is when the daughter of a killer says that she wants to make peace with the optometrist and have him as a member of her family.  The optometrist hugs her and says that he is now a member of her family.  She, then, asks the optometrist to embrace her senile father and forgive him for killing the hero's brother.  To everyone's surprise, the optometrist does embrace the delusional old man showing almost supernatural grace by making this gesture of forgiveness..  In this film, two old men claim to have kept their sanity in the midst of the slaughter by drinking human blood --"it's sweet and salty" one of them tells the camera.  Drinking human blood was a remedy for the horror of killing so many people and, in an odd way, these old murderers are more sympathetic than the urbane politicians and land developers who profited from the slaughter.  At least, these two men recognized that they had transgressed beyond the bounds of the human and that their only means of remaining sane was to engage in this overtly supernatural ritual.  Both of these old men cut the interview short -- it's time for them to go the Mosque for their evening prayers.