The Act of Killing From Fever Dream to the Dream-Work

"Is not the dream essentially an act of homage to the missed reality—the reality that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself endlessly, in some never attained awakening."¹

In the final scene of Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary film The Act of Killing (2012)² we see Anwar Congo, the lead character in the film and a former henchman responsible for killing hundreds of so-called Communist dissidents in Indonesia in 1965, retching on the same rooftop where he long ago executed so many people. The famous documentary filmmaker Errol Morris had these words to say about this scene:

The last scene is one of the most powerful I have ever seen. And I am left with this strange question. It's a really deep question for me. Is it performance or is it real? And what does it actually mean about him or about us and about our connection with the past? It is powerful because it is so inherently strange and ambiguous. It's a "what the fuck is this moment"? What is actually going on here? I can't tell you that it's real or isn't real, it's fabricated or isn't fabricated, it's play acting or isn't play acting. I don't know. And I think for this reason, it becomes an amazing moment. Joshua Oppenheimer may be far more optimistic than I am, that we emerge somehow more knowledgeable, more self-aware. I think we learn nothing.³

In the same interview, done by Vice magazine, Werner Herzog comments on this final scene by saying that nothing like this has ever been captured on film and that we will not see something like this for another fifty years.⁴ But it is not just this final scene that has elevated the film to the status of something like a cinematic event. Even without this final scene, we still need to ask why the film succeeds in holding so many of its viewers in a state of fascination, outrage, disbelief, and awe.

Before getting into these questions, let me first provide the set up. The Act of Killing is a documentary film that investigates the genocide of as many as two million alleged Communists, Chinese, and Trade Unionists in Indonesia in 1965–1966 that helped establish the New Order government of President Suharto. Peculiar to this film is the way Oppenheimer participates in and encourages its unfolding. Surprised by the boasting of the henchmen, and coupled with their avowed love of Hollywood gangster films, Oppenheimer asked whether they'd be willing to make their own movie of the killings. The result is the rather surreal cinematic effect of watching the actual henchmen, some forty years later, directing and re-enacting their own crimes. The effect is heightened by the many different layers of perspective that Oppenheimer captures and employs, especially when it comes to editing the many parts and frames into a whole. For example, the film jumps, often quickly, from the henchmen walking the streets and recruiting local townspeople for their film, to a modern industrialized shot of Medan, to a desolate and improvised shot of everyday life, to real-time interviews of the henchmen, to a re-enactment scene that replicates a film-noir gangster scene, to Anwar watching his own film and commenting on it, to a re-enactment of one of Anwar's own dreams, to a television show hosting the henchmen, celebrating their accomplishments, and so on. Absent is historical commentary by specialists working in related academic fields, as well as testimony from any of the victims (with the exception of one moment that I will discuss below).⁵ Also absent is the typical documentary technique of carefully arriving at some empirical insight via statistics, historical references, or competing narratives. To agree with a comment that Herzog made in the Vice interview, the film succeeds at creating a surrealist effect more so than any surrealist narrative film ever made for the precise reason that it is not necessarily trying to make such a film; it merely happens due to the editorial reframing of unscripted footage. For this reason, the film escapes the ideological pretense of the surrealist art form; it rather happily (and perhaps surprisingly) finds itself in the midst of the accidental, of what appears to be a series of unrelated associations that are intimately connected. As a consequence, the film documents the un-documentable: the inner-being, the psychic workings, or even the soul-murder of Anwar Congo, the main character and the person about whom Morris is speaking in the opening quote. This happens because of the unique combination of "free" associations that are presented, seemingly and mostly unsolicited by Oppenheimer, to the camera.

Oppenheimer, commenting on the bizarre nature in which the henchmen boasted about their crimes and their willingness to re-enact them, said, "I knew it would be flamboyant because denial and escapism are always flamboyant mental process and a collective mental process … it turned out to be a kind of fever dream."⁶ In fact, in many of his interviews, Oppenheimer uses psychoanalytic concepts to explain what he understands to be happening. He recognizes, for example, the figure of trauma that not only haunts Anwar but also ordinary people, some of whom are asked to be part of the re-enactments.⁷ He contextualizes the flamboyant re-enactment scenes as a way to create psychic scar tissue around the wound. He says, "For me, I want the film to be something like one of those dreams that, although it's a dream, you recognize a truth about your life in the dream that is so piercing that it jolts you awake."⁸ Suffice it to say, I agree wholeheartedly with Oppenheimer that there is a psychoanalytic aspect to this film. I, however, would go further and say that it is only through psychoanalysis that we can arrive at a certain knowledge of the film, or the events surrounding the film. In fact, Oppenheimer assumes the theoretical position of the psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek when he says, "Somehow there is the ability for perpetrators—and all of us—to act on beliefs that we empirically know are false."⁹ Therefore, in order to approach the questions posed above (what is it about the film that holds us in thrall, how might the film index a knowledge that exposes a lack in empirical knowledge itself, what is so strange about Anwar's retching at the end of the film, and does the film rise to the level of a cinematic event), I will work specifically with the psychoanalytic ideas of Jacques Lacan. To that end, there are three psychoanalytic concepts or moments in the film that I will address. The first is how Oppenheimer's participatory involvement and masterful editing calls to mind Lacan's notion of the discourse of the analyst. The second, which is a consequence of the first, is the peculiar way in which fiction, the re-enactment scenes, produces a register that is more real than reality. Using fictional or exterior staging elements to heighten the reality principle of a documentary film is not new. What is different in this film, however, is the element of surprise, how the staging element of fiction opens up insights or, better, produces signifiers that the filmmaker, much like an analyst, could not have imagined. Here, the act of staging the past becomes an opening for the possibility of free association, that particular trope so essential for the psychoanalytic practice. The third concept, or moment, occurs precisely because of what the first moment opens up and allows but cannot complete. Here I turn my attention to the spectator's involvement with the film, specifically to the figure of enjoyment. It is here that we will return to the denouement of the film, Anwar's retching, in order to understand why Lacan privileges transference over and against free association to mark the end of analysis.

The Discourse of the Analyst

"Personally, I have never regarded myself as a researcher. As Picasso once said, to the shocked surprise of those around him—I do not seek, I find."¹⁰

"What occurs, what is produced, in this gap, is presented as the discovery. It is in this way that the Freudian exploration first encounters what occurs in the unconscious."¹¹

It would be a daunting but interesting task to think of documentary films along the line of Lacan's four discourses: master, university, hysteric, and analyst. The four discourses, extensively developed by Lacan in his Seminar XVII, posit four distinct ways in which a signifier situates a subject's relation to knowledge. While this is not the time to describe each of the positions, we can say, in general, that the documentary form's relation to reality, not unlike the subject's relation to knowledge, is haunted by an awareness that the filmic apparatus mediates this relation, or that, like language, which frames and mediates our relation to knowledge, the camera does the same with regard to reality. Therefore, the will to knowledge, or the will to document reality in order to shine light on a particular object, is always fraught, always liable to break down or be dismissed by the spectator. One way I want to get at this question of what makes The Act of Killing so striking, so different, perhaps even at the level of a cinematic event, is to posit that the film succeeds at replicating the discourse of the analyst. While any given documentary film can move among the four discourses, I will briefly provide cinematic examples of the master, university, and hysterical discourses in order to set up how we might think about the analytical discourse.

To begin, there is a famous scene from Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man where Herzog stares at us through the screen and earnestly tells us that he must withhold from us the tape of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend screaming bloody murder as they are mauled to death by a grizzly bear. I argue that in this moment Herzog assumes the position of the master. We, the spectators, the others who are being addressed, have no choice but to oblige. We do not so much feel or experience the lack of being, the alienation within language that is conferred upon us by our acceptance of the master's discourse; rather, in this instance, we modern subjects are instructed to accept it. It is a strange cinematic moment. Because Herzog assumes this paternal position of "knowing better," he also finds himself in a position to enjoy what is produced from this situation, namely, a surplus-jouissance generated from our forced submission. This is not to say that Herzog should have let us hear the screams or that the film would be better for it; rather, his mastery of this precise situation reveals Herzog's own relation to truth. In this case, the Real is something that can be directly accessed. It can be shown, displayed before our eyes or ears, and, as such, it is horrific, not something the general public should have to endure. However, from a Lacanian perspective, we can argue that Herzog, at the precise moment when he protects us from the horror of existence, is in fact the furthest from the Real, that his safeguarding it is a gesture that betrays the safekeeping of his own master signifier.

The example of a documentary film that assumes the position of the university is the very popular 2006 film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim. The film mostly consists of Guggenheim following Al Gore on a speaking tour. The film functions as a fascinating sort of liberal manifesto. It summons the courage to address a real problem that faces humanity, using sophisticated visual effects to simulate the horror that awaits our future if we fail to do anything about the problem. At the level of science, it is hard to complain about this film. It is indeed expertly researched and presented. The problem is that Gore, who clearly assumes the position of the agent of expert knowledge, is repressing or, perhaps better, burying the truth—the master signifier that confers his own position within a chain of other signifiers. This becomes clear toward the end of the film when Gore explains the psychological reasons why we allow global warming to continue. We liberal citizens of the world are like the frog who sits in a pot of water that is ever slowly rising in temperature. We, the frog, do not realize that the temperature of the water is gradually increasing until we either boil to death or are rescued. The striking conclusion to this film is the message that we need to change the way we think, and, even more, that this is not a political issue but a moral one. Therefore, and more succinctly, what is being repressed or disavowed from Gore's position of agency is his master, namely, globalized capitalism. While it seems as though Gore is addressing us, his fellow liberal citizens, he is actually addressing an excess or a surplus-jouissance that he cannot contain. Thus, from a Lacanian perspective, Gore's beautiful soul is exposed; his attempt at addressing the other with an expert knowledge that will help change how we think and save the world turns out to be a liberal fantasy. What we really need to think about is how to traverse the fantasy of the liberal democratic institution that Gore serves. Meanwhile, what is reproduced by such a film is the liberal subject, that is, a desiring subject caught or split between moral concern and outrage, on the one hand, and political cynicism, on the other.

The documentary form that has experimented with and explored different techniques in order to get at something more real than reality is the hysterical discourse, or the discursive position of the hysteric. I agree with William Rothman's brilliant thesis in his Documentary Film Classics that the genre's trouble with reality, from a very early start, led filmmakers to explore the technical and formal aspects of its own art form, eventually coming to embrace these obstacles as opening up a creative space between so-called reality and some presumptive real.¹² Rothman's conclusion is that these innovations bring the documentary form to the same ontological shores as narrative film. The documentary genre and the narrative genre both realize the need to mess with form, to use the obstacle, the element of fiction or techne, in order to access something more real than reality. Perhaps we could say that this common shore that Rothman articulates is precisely the title of Žižek's book The Fright of Real Tears.¹³

What does Rothman's thesis have to do with the hysterical discourse? Documentarians, already self-conscious of the obstacle presented by the camera, distrust the perceived advantage or mandate of their form; they recognize the more masculine and thus unreliable discursive position of the master or the expert, and they resist it. In some form and measure, they simulate the Modernist tradition in literature by rendering their own perspective as unreliable. We especially see this in the emergence of personal narrative built from within the story so as to shed light on the very unreliability of the subject matter at hand, dating from, for example, the 1975 film Sherman's March to the more recent 2014 film The Stories We Tell. However, the hysteric's discourse is not relegated to this personal twist, in which the filmmaker inserts herself into the film; it can also refer to how the camera and editing techniques are manipulated in order to produce the effect of the undecidable, an effect that can double as an enjoyment by participating in the satisfaction of not knowing. An early classic film that assumes this position is Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer (1961). At the end of the film, after Rouch and Morin gathered their Parisian subjects for a debriefing session, we see Rouch and Morin walking down the hall. Morin says something quite remarkable: "They criticized our characters as not being true to life or else they found them too true" (Chronicle of a Summer). In subsequent interviews Rouch revealed the editorial decisions that went into heightening the effect of undecidability between fiction and reality, between being authentic or merely acting.¹⁴ This remarkable exchange at the end of the film strikes me as enacting the hysterical discourse to the letter. They acknowledge their own philosophical discord with the impossibility of authentically documenting a summer in Paris; they address the master (the audience seeking or expecting some concrete insight) as being a fool for presuming to know; and through the filmic experience, they produce a tension and therein an enjoyment in the participation of a knowing that is uncertain and lacking. The question then arises: To what extent is the integration of the lack of knowing by the subject a way of normalizing the contemporary social link? In other words, if the social link is determined by a permanent, self-revolutionizing economic order, how might a certain and often avant-garde documentary form, arguably and perhaps loosely associated with Lacan's hysterical discourse, be complicit with the reproduction of this very social link? My argument here is that documentary filmmaking needs to turn an eye toward Lacan and the discourse of the analyst in order to effect or change the coordinates of our current social link.

I argue that The Act of Killing does not fit into any one of these discourses, which, of course, begs the question of whether it meets the "requirements" of assuming the coordinates of the analytic discourse. If it does meet the requirements, it may help us understand the profound and strange nature of the film. To begin, the uncanny coincidence of an actual mass murder, the agreement by the actual henchmen to re-enact the murder, and the real-time interviews by these same men creates a surrealist landscape of juxtaposed images and intensities that create the formal, if not clinical, conditions that allows Oppenheimer to assume the position of the analyst. We know that the analyst, while engaged in a clinical setting, sets out, in opposition to the science of searching, to provoke the magic of finding signifiers that prove to be more profound in leading us down the royal road of the unconscious. The key to finding these signifiers is pointing them out as they unintentionally or accidentally appear. Part of the technique is having the patience to allow the signifiers to appear within the fiction-making of ego-talk. Lacan writes, "The Freudian unconscious is situated at that point, where, between cause and that which it affects, there is always something wrong."¹⁵ This point is represented as a gap or a discontinuity between the smooth line of cause and effect. The ethical position of the analyst is to occupy precisely such a gap, a certain non-place within the field of the symbolic (what Lacan called the object a) so that the analysand may confront the cause of his or her desire, indeed a cause or an object that the analyst has no knowledge of. By assuming this gap within the symbolic, what could also be called a position of pure desire, the analyst addresses the split within the subject, or the analysand. The split represents the non-coincidence between the ego (the conscious representation of meaning) and the unconscious (unconscious desire, or how a signifier represents another signifier for the subject).

Clearly Oppenheimer is not a psychoanalyst. But he does pull off something cinematic that gestures to the scene of the clinic. It is not just that he knew he was on to something, that he sensed that something strange and important was appearing in the gaps between the fictional re-enactment and the way Anwar, and others, narrated the past, but that he had the courage and the foresight, like a trained analyst, to follow its path, to encourage those points in his interlocutor's narrative that led him and them further down the rabbit's hole. Not only this, and perhaps more importantly, he succeeded, perhaps beyond his own wildest imagination, in manipulating the contents and analyzing the data through the art of editing to create not simply a fever dream but a simulacrum of what Freud called the dream-work. This is the brilliance of Oppenheimer's film. It is one thing to have had the existential courage to assume the dangerous role of the subject that now knows, but it is still another to have the psychoanalytic wherewithal to stitch hours of footage into a filmic dream-work the likes of which we have never seen. Oppenheimer said in an interview that "the editing is not just about how I'm going to put together a great story out of what I shot or show what happened: it's an excavation, it's an analysis of all the data."¹⁶ As a result, he adds, "All these layers of meaning make the material much smarter than I am." While the analyst represents the non-place or gap within the symbolic, she is not merely or solely passive. The point not be missed is that the position of the analyst, within the clinical arrangement, is a discourse that seeks to produce a certain truth that leads to a knowledge of unconscious desire. It is an analytical discourse that works against the current of empirical or rational knowledge and in the direction of the dream-work. Therefore, the analytical discourse is not merely the accumulation and notation of free association for its own sake, one that, say, celebrates the play of signifiers in order to produce the effect or affect of undecidability; nor is it the pretense of unveiling what lays buried or hidden in the unconscious, or in the latent dream. Dream-work is the art of interpretation, what the analyst does with these associations or signifiers, how they are juxtaposed and related to one another so as to produce gaps or ruptures within signification, indeed to gesture to another scene, another perspective that can alter the coordinates that structure the surface of things. In writing about how dream-work can only rely on the conscious activity of the mind, Jonathan Lear says, "What one discovers is not so much hidden contents, but unconscious activities of the mind. Call them unconscious thoughts if you will, but the interpretation of dreams is essentially concerned with the active mind."¹⁷ Oppenheimer succeeds as an analyst by inciting Anwar Congo, the analysand, to free associate, to essentially externalize and reproduce his own psychic scars. As such, not only does Oppenheimer provide an intimate look into the mind of a killer, but this active mind becomes a frame to analyze the event within a broader historical frame and therein implicate a whole cast of characters who all share a relatively similar relationship to the artful obscenity of rationalization, of white washing, of living with a heinous and obvious crime. There are so many scenes to analyze, but I will turn to three scenes that provide different ways in which dream-work gets constructed in the film, that is, the way signifiers are pieced together so as to disrupt signification and therein create the effect of the Real in the middle of reality itself.

Reality and the Real

"Lacan situates the truth, so to speak, in the midst of reality. … The truth is not some impossible and lethal Beyond that can be rendered only by transgressing the limits of the Symbolic and the Imaginary… it is (rather) something that speaks between the lines, detectable in changes of discursivity, in the disturbances, interruptions, and slips of a discourse."¹⁸

A persistent theme throughout the film is the strange and shocking way in which the killers openly boast about their deeds. In fact, Oppenheimer says something remarkable after speaking with two men who had never met each other but who were being interviewed at the same time: "What was most horrifying to me was not the atrocities that they were recounting, not even the boasting, but the fact that they were both reading from a shared script. That's what told me that this is political; this is performative; this is historical. The boasting is functioning now, and I am witnessing a performance that is intended to have real world effects now. That was when I had this realization that the boasting is a symptom of something wrong with the present."¹⁹ The horror, I argue, represents a breakdown of what we expect from certain codes of basic human decency (i.e., it is not normal to boast about certain topics, like rape, murder, and torture, that clearly represent criminal behavior). The fact that the killers are not following some unwritten protocol that effectively hides from view or makes an excuse for their behavior is horrific, perhaps more horrific than the act of killing itself. For if we can openly boast about a criminal activity, then the activity itself is no longer criminal; rather it enters the domain of the normal and thus of the repeatable. What does this boasting tell us about the present moment? What Oppenheimer suggests can be understood through the Lacanian term the big Other. The henchmen are not merely boasting for the sake of boasting. There is some libidinal investment in this boasting that reifies or rationalizes what they have done. It is not a question of how boasting equates to self-satisfaction, of drawing attention to oneself; it is, rather, that they need to believe that they have done something necessary and good. They not only need to know that the big Other has their back (the Lacanian notion for the Symbolic order, which involves the written and the unwritten law, and thus the locus of the Other's desire), but they also need to continue to believe in its existence, its approval, and so on. It is as if the unwritten rule (or law) of boasting about this past is performed for the precise reason that the official story or narrative about the genocide is not widely or wholly accepted by the people.²⁰ Because the henchmen are not entirely convinced that the Other knows this, they seek proof that it knows; clearly the boasting itself becomes a performance that reifies, over and against knowledge, that the big Other exists.²¹ Alenka Zupančič puts it nicely when she writes, "The Other knows and is coherent. It knows everything except that it 'does not exist.' Hence we not only need assurances that the Other exists but that it knows it exists."²² The boasting, therefore, functions as a stratagem or a performance that demonstrates that the Other, in spite of appearances to the contrary (what other people actually feel and think), exists. It is as if the ritualistic performance of the boasting functions like a specter whose very existence is linked to the fact that the genocide has never been symbolically or officially recognized. As such, the same specter that haunts its victims, and which is brilliantly illustrated in Oppenheimer's sequel (or, better, diptych), The Look of Silence, becomes for the henchmen this perverse agent of legitimation, an obscene supplement to the real tears of the genocide's victims.²³

The crucial scene that magnifies this tension between private displays of boasting and public acceptance is when Anwar and friends take the stage on a regional talk-news television program. This scene has it all. Anwar is named the hero of the film; he takes delight in citing his Hollywood influences; he boasts of his killing technique; the audience (all members of the Pancasila militia who participated in the genocide and who are still strong in numbers and in youth)²⁴ cheer wildly. But the scene within the scene, the cut to another perspective from within the main attraction, provides the gap that exposes the fiction on display. The film cuts to the point of view of the producers behind the stage who comment on the madness that lies before them. One even says, "Doing something like that must make you crazy." Here we see the tenuous and troubled nature of public acceptance. While the TV stint reinforces the henchmen's belief in the existence of a big Other, the effect of the cinematic cut to another related scene undermines the legitimacy of that belief. Moreover, we viewers, at this point in the film, have seen all kinds of different layers and perspectives, but to witness the boasting get elevated to a regional television program adds yet another degree to the fever underway. It is not as if this outside perspective from a producer has a closer relation to the reality of the situation; it is rather that the two perspectives, the two fictions, produce another effect that happens in between the two.

This scene, however, should not strike the Western observer as so mad or out of place. For what stands before us, in this wild scene, is an extreme example of a phenomenon that has been taking hold for some time now, and was certainly accelerated in the aftermath of 9/11, when the once undebatable topic of torture became something common and everyday to debate, as politicians and scholars openly debated its necessity in preserving a greater public good. The once unacceptable moral issue suddenly slipped into the realm of the possible and the ordinary. Not only this, the commodification of torture became ubiquitous fodder for cultural capital in television and film studios. Under the auspices of a greater good, torture became a spectacle for daily consumption. Even before 9/11, reality TV and talk shows began to excavate the so-called sacred domain of private lives in order to exploit illicit desire, shame, humiliation, and the like for public consumption. Nonetheless, it might be easy to compartmentalize what is taking place in modern Indonesia as particular to their political and historical setting, and therefore to claim that such occurrences in the West are totally separate. I, however, agree with Žižek who writes that the modern trend of privatizing public space, such as we see in this scene from the movie, is "not an isolated event that we can blame on either Hollywood or on the ethical primitiveness of Indonesia. The starting point should rather be the dislocating effects of capitalist globalization which, by undermining the 'symbolic efficacy' of traditional ethical structures creates a moral vacuum."²⁵ Though extreme and shocking, the henchmen's public display of their private sins as a source of pride, and even enjoyment, is symptomatic of not only "their" times, of their historical memory, but also of our times. Further, while such a display does indicate a decline in "symbolic efficiency," in the ability of the symbolic to confer a center that authorizes meaning, it does not mean that there is any less belief in the big Other's existence, as is illustrated by the henchmen's persistent need to boast. In fact, the inability of the Other to legitimize a piece of empirical knowledge (say, global warming) has the effect of heightening one's own individual belief in the Other's existence. For without this external point of guarantee, one enters the gray zone of a generalized paranoia and psychosis produced by the normalization of idiosyncratic beliefs, conspiracy theories, and the like—which helps explain the disbelief of the female producer who looks on in horror at what is unfolding on the television set. What this scene demonstrates is how the big Other, today, is able to accommodate two wildly disparate "realities" within the same frame, that is, the television studio. It is the same logic that accommodates any antagonism of real or serious merit, like global warming or gun control. The point is that we need to know that the big Other exists even though we do not have faith in it to confer meaning outside of our own discrete and idiosyncratic beliefs. What the modern global media-scape gives voice to is precisely an algorithm of "dignified" idiosyncratic beliefs. This ethical predicament is not isolated to Indonesia or other developing countries currently over-wrought with violence and terror; it is rather a symptom of capitalist globalization. It is this bizarre and extreme scene "from afar" that creates an anamorphic stain on the normative lens from "up close"—the Western media-scape.²⁶

I want to move on to another scene that perhaps more dramatically illustrates how the Real is something that appears in the middle of reality, at the point where the symbolic fails or breaks down. Suryono is a neighbor of Anwar and has been working on the set as a helper. He agrees to re-enact an interrogation scene; in the midst of this re-enactment, he breaks from character to relate a true story about his stepfather, a Chinese man who was dragged from his house, murdered, and left on the side of the street. He recalls how he saw his stepfather lying on the side of the road like a dog and how he had to help drag him away. He narrates this story under the auspices that he is merely relating a scene that might help the film, and he assures the henchman-turned-filmmakers that he is not judging them. From the standpoint of the spectator, you cannot help but imagine a ten-year-old boy witnessing this entire scene in abject horror, and, of course, the thought of trauma enters your mind. Meanwhile, as Suryono tells this story, the camera cuts to Anwar, who has a pained expression on his face, one that suggests a range of emotions, from complicity and compassion to enjoyment. Something profound then happens. Anwar and a few others involved with the film's direction, comment in very matter of fact and pragmatic tones that the scene would take too long and be too difficult to shoot. Sensing perhaps the absurdity of this juxtaposition—between the recalling of a trauma and the pragmatic, business-like appropriation of it—Anwar says that they can still use the story as a source of inspiration. The next cut takes us to Suryono back in character. It is not clear whether this take follows directly in real time or if Oppenheimer has edited the film to capture the sequence of cuts. Regardless, Suryono's acting becomes so good that it gets perhaps too close to the fantasy that is being staged. While begging for his life and pleading to see his family one last time, he breaks down and cries uncontrollably. The heartfelt and emotionally wrought re-enactment of the memory of his own trauma threatens to undermine the fantasy that frames the idea behind this re-enactment scene. For it is clear that Suryono's acting does not merely enhance reality by adding some emotional tone to it; it won't, for example, make Anwar's imaginary film more authentic. His acting, however, does double up the fiction; it places one fiction side by side with another, thus producing the effect of the Real as that point of discontinuity between the two fictions.²⁷

The psychoanalytic insight here is that fiction is necessary in order to produce the effect of the Real. If reality, or one's perceived reality, succeeds in insisting on its own symbolic coordinates, then the psychoanalytic technique, the discourse of the analyst, instructs us to fictionalize this reality so that something else can come between one's sense of reality. This is what happens in the clinic. Oppenheimer's use of editing in this sequence with Suryono produces the effect of the Real. The re-enactment of the act of killing is a grand fantasy on a spectacular level. The Real interrupts the fantasy when the fantasy becomes too real, too close to being realized. While there are other scenes where this happens, this scene with Suryono may be the most striking due to the dialectical coincidence of a "real" victim's traumatic story directly rubbing up against the perpetrators' fantasy of not only the significance of the historical event but also their wish to get it right, to direct it right, and to have actors perform it right. Here acting and reality short circuit, therein exposing each (fictional) position relative to the thing itself—the historical event, or the historical phantom of getting it right.

I want to mention one more scene; it involves Anwar's friend and counterpart, Adi Zulkardy. He is a man of action who has an icy, instrumental way of pragmatically dealing with the questions that surround the past. Right after the scene with Suryono, we see Adi driving in a car having a conversation with Oppenheimer. Adi says some things that are not entirely untrue: He defiantly says that the winners define history, citing the criminal activity in the US's invasion of Iraq. He admits that the murders may have been wrong and unnecessary, and that more important than putting the fear into people is the image of being right. He comments, in another interview, that what the former henchmen are doing is dangerous because they are basically admitting that they are no better than the adversaries they killed. Note that by this time in the film we have gotten to know Adi as a polished, well-spoken, middle-class thug. This car scene is later followed by a scene of Adi with his wife and daughter in a shopping mall. It is a striking juxtaposition, one that Oppenheimer employs often throughout the film and that draws a connection between two seemingly opposed realities. What does a shopping mall in Jakarta have to do with a mass murder forty years earlier, or what does it have to do with the perpetrators who are still in power? Why does this edit succeed in shaking the symbolic coordinates that frame these two separate realities? It is precisely because commonsense, as ordered by a liberal democratic ideological frame, assumes that these two images are unrelated. Whereas the fever dream of these images, set within a larger frame, may only add to our disorientation, to the surreal feeling of a strange but unrecognizable coincidence, the dream-work places them side by side, enabling an analytical discourse to provide the social link. It can seem rather abstract to link globalized capitalism—clearly exemplified by a modern mall outfitted by products from all the multinational corporations that litter the globe, creating the eerie feeling that this same mall could be anywhere in the world, a scene of everywhere and thus of nowhere, bringing to mind Alain Badiou's claim that capitalism is worldless, a world devoid of culture²⁸—to a single perpetrator of a discrete historical crime forty years earlier. But that is precisely the point. There is no need for commentary here, for a voice-over or an academic specialist to remind us of the collateral and contingent damage inflicted by Western Imperialism. Oppenheimer could have easily left all of these shots of contemporary urban Indonesia out of his film. But like an analyst piecing together the multitude of associations being flung about by a fever-dream-like reality, he attaches this one crucial signifier to a host of others. The governor of North Sumatra, Syamsul Arifin, at an earlier point in the film, adds to this connecting of signifiers by saying, "Communism will never be accepted here because we have gangsters. Gangsters mean free men. Thugs want freedom to do things, even if they're wrong." The layering of these separate shots reveals how gangsterism, a motif that is threaded throughout the film, provides the necessary social link between the mass killings and globalized capitalism; the latter needs variations of the former in order to get things done. With this scene, we see how seeming unrelated scenarios—a modern mall and a vicious genocide of some forty years earlier—are sutured together by a jump-cut in which the perpetrator of the historical event becomes the beneficiary of the current event. To see the killer walking aimlessly with his wife and daughter through this familiar modern scene renders the scene itself unfamiliar, even uncanny. Suddenly the innocent, self-referential act of leisure and consuming becomes exposed as brutally contingent, as Real.

Transference

"We must now regard the transference as bearing on a certain 'affective tie,' a certain 'libidinal investment,' a dimension of 'identification' that cannot be reached by the symbolic work of free association."²⁹

I could see if one complained that I've merely fronted the dream-work as a hermeneutic ploy, that we are still amid the fever dream, amid the mad rush of conflicting perspectives and free-floating associations, and that nothing has come of this dream-work as far as grasping something like unconscious desire or traversing a fantasy. This is why I now want to focus on Anwar and the dramatic final sequence of the film. For it is Anwar, as I have suggested, who acts as the analysand, the one mostly responsible for opening up a treasure trove of conflicting signifiers. There are two movements I want to explore: first, the significance of Anwar retching at the end of the film, and, second, how this scene effects our own involvement with, or enjoyment of, the film.

The final thirty-three minutes or so of the film are stunning. The fever dream reaches a fever pitch, as all of the perspectives thus far explored get stitched together, culminating in the final sequence where we see Anwar retching. To frame this final sequence, I quote from Lacan's early essay "The Function of Speech and Language in the Field of Psychoanalysis": "In psychoanalytic anamnesis, it is not a question of reality, but of truth. … [T]he effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the little freedom through which the subject makes them present."³⁰ What this formulation of the analytic setting asserts is how the subject can gain a little freedom from the psychic knot, or the anamnesis, that presently haunts her, and which has driven her to the couch in the first place. Applying this to Anwar, we could point to how, especially in the long final sequence, he does indeed begin to connect and order past contingencies such that he is able to arrive at this moment, a moment whose "little freedom" may allow him to put to rest his nightmares, to assume his guilt, and, who knows, perhaps to participate in truth and reconciliation projects. The "full speech" that liberates him from his own psychic trauma would be the retching, the act that renders the letter material, that finally arrives at its destination—that is, the Real of the message he is trying to, but never can, rationalize away. We witness a series of scenes that seemingly show Anwar headed down this road. After the re-enactment of the Kolam massacre, we find Anwar fishing on a dock as lightning exposes the dark night. He says, "It's like we are living at the end of the world. There is darkness all around. It's so very terrifying." We next see him lying awake in bed, the specter of a night of bad dreams before him. Then a film noir re-enactment scene simulates Anwar, now as victim, being executed by strangulation. He interrupts the filming, claiming that he really felt like he was dead for a moment and that he could not continue the scene. Next Oppenheimer brings back what is perhaps one of the most effective cinematic layers employed in the film in terms of demonstrating the necessary relation between fiction-making and the Real. We go to an ornate, technicolor fantasy scene in which, to John Barry's song "Born Free," amid the spray from a giant waterfall and alongside an angelically dressed women, Anwar, now playing a spiritual figure dressed in a black robe, receives praise and gratitude from a victim of the genocide. The victim says, "Thank you for executing me and sending me to heaven. I thank you a thousand times."³¹ We now approach the denouement. Anwar is watching himself re-enact the failed strangulation scene and says to Oppenheimer, "Did the people I tortured feel what I am feeling here? I can feel what the people tortured felt." Oppenheimer seizes on this detail, this opening, this blatant gap within the schema of cause and effect, by responding, "Actually, the people you tortured felt something far worse; they knew that they were going to die. This is just a film." To which Anwar responds, "But I really felt it, Josh, I really feel it. (pause) Or have I sinned? I did this to many people. Is it all coming back to me? I really hope it won't. I don't want it to." After a cut to Adi in the mall staring blankly at a mirror as his daughter gets her hair done, and then a shot of Herman drumming and screaming wildly, we witness Anwar return to the rooftop where he performed his executions and, quite remarkably, begin retching.

From a Lacanian perspective, we could argue that the process of free association loosened the psychic knot of a past trauma, that certain signifiers incited other related but unacknowledged signifiers, therein producing a "little freedom" that the subject (Anwar) made present; indeed, the master signifier at the root of Anwar's nightmares may have become signiferized, that is, linked to other signifiers so as to unlock the repressed hold of a certain chain of signification. For me, this scene and this question is at the crux of reading the film; it is why I began with the quote from Morris, who says about this scene, "I think we learn nothing." It is also why I think Lacan shifts his thinking away from the symbolic subject (the unconscious subject as the discourse of the Other) to the subject in the Real (the subject as marking that point of non-integration into the symbolic). The concept that helped Lacan develop this line of thinking was the object a. The object a is not the object that I desire but can never attain; it is the object that causes me to desire. As such, the object a represents an irreducible gap or cut between word and thing, and thus persists as a reminder and remainder of symbolic lack, that which the desiring subject cannot name but which she cannot do without. If the object were to appear, it could only do so partially, as an apparition that cannot be integrated back into the symbolic. Here we find ourselves on the outside of those symbolic coordinates that help frame or make sense of our desire. On this shift in Lacan's thinking, Charles Shepardson writes, "In a manner that is similar to fantasy, the 'object of the drive' designates a point of bodily jouissance, a 'libidinal attachment' that does not appear at the level of the signifier and is irreducible to the symbolic order."³² To put it in simple terms and to provide an answer to Morris's question—"What is actually going on here?": it is precisely the figure of enjoyment, of jouissance, a figure that cannot be reduced to the symbolic, that renders the scene so enigmatic. Suddenly, the spectator finds herself in the position of the analyst, and what stands before her is precisely the in-distinction between fiction and reality, or between performance and authenticity. The "what the fuck" moment that Morris articulates comes from the same place from which both Freud and Lacan acknowledge the potential impasse of analysis, of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic of unconscious desire.

How does learning nothing amount to something, and wherein lies the spectator in all of this? The end of the film provides no closure, no way out. Indeed, at the precise moment when we think there is some redemption, some assumption of guilt by Anwar, we find ourselves dissatisfied by our own wish for meaning; we find our gaze (one complicit in the enjoyment of having seen) turned back onto ourselves. The ending exposes not a deeper understanding of the 1965 genocide or even the psychological profile of the petty bureaucrats and thugs who did the killing, but our own (unconscious) investment in the pleasure of cinema, or, more precisely, our own enthrallment with the way fiction-making is immanent and necessary to reality itself. I say pleasure, but I really mean to use the stronger word of enjoyment (jouissance). Our own involvement in the fever-dream production unfolding before us is enhanced by enjoyment. There is repulsion and attraction; a surprise and an amazement that enthrall us, that lock us in; a disbelief that is all the more heightened by the fact that we are engaging with the real killers, that maybe we are pulling for Anwar, as if we are complicit with some of the fictions on display, or that when we see Adi strolling through the mall with his family we approximate how our own privilege is structured by brutal contingencies. The Lacanian term jouissance (enjoyment) is necessary because it best explains this tension and conflict between pleasure (fascinated with the fever) and pain (disgusted by it), as well as the feeling of agitation that doubles as enthrallment.

The question that Lacan addresses directly in Seminar XI becomes how might this enjoyment become otherwise, how might learning nothing (analysis at an impasse) become something (the impasse itself opens up something else)? First, I think we need to say strongly that Anwar is no longer the issue or the problem. We are left in the dark when it comes to his future psychic state of mind. If a truth and reconciliation project gets underway, it will happen because the people demand it from the government, because Oppenheimer's two films fuel the movement, and not because the thugs are suddenly coming to peace with their nightmares. If, however, the fever dream is to become a dream-work for the audience such that we turn our gaze away from Anwar's therapeutic future to our own involvement, we need to consult Lacan a bit further. In Seminar XI, Lacan writes, "We can succeed in unraveling (the) reality involved in the transference only on the basis of the real in repetition."³³ Transference in the Symbolic/Imaginary order is fairly straight forward. I identify with and thus transfer my lack—my dissatisfied life situation—unto, say, Ryan Gosling, so as to breathe a little enjoyment into my life. Transference involves the logic of the supplement, wherein an S2 (a signifier within a chain of other signifiers) stands in for an S1 (master signifier) within the discourse of the Other. It also presents a pretty straightforward example of repression; something is being repressed in order for me to relive or relieve a psychic wound without having to revisit the wound directly. What might transference look like when it produces the Real via some repetition? How is enjoyment in the Real different than how it is experienced in the Symbolic and Imaginary registers?

Though enjoyment is tied to the register of the Real, it is always expressed or felt through some form of screening device; that is, repression is involved. It protects the subject from the Real. This is what makes enjoyment such an important and interesting problem for politics. On the one hand, enjoyment is most often instrumentalized as some nugget of stupidity, a surplus-value add-on, that confers a form of irrational identification that is in excess of symbolic or juridical law. The insane love of the flag currently front and center in the US, for example, is a form of acceptable enjoyment that stands in for (represses) racism or some other object of resentment. On the other hand, the Real exposes, through repetition, something in the big Other that changes everything, that creates a radical shift in one's reality such that what one believes to be only reality, is reality. In other words, from a Lacanian point of view reality is always structured by fantasy; put differently, fantasy functions as a support that enables one's reality to work, to remain predictable or consistent. The problem is not seeing reality more clearly or more objectively; it is coming up against those (fantasmatic) supports that maintain one's reality or one's ideological frame. Transference in the Real is that moment when enjoyment feels the effect of its own repression, its own lie. It could be, for example, that moment when the object of one's moral authority (fidelity to the flag and subsequent disdain for black athletes) suddenly dissolves into the object of one's disgust (with how the flag functions to obfuscate or reinforce class and race relations). The shift happens not on the level of some symbolic mediation (understanding) but in the register of the Real via some different encounter with enjoyment, an encounter that shifts one's relation to the big Other.

I argue that it is the psychoanalytic notion of transference (in the Real) that helps explain the moment in which we see Anwar retching on screen. Up until this moment, we are enthralled by the fever dream that unfolds before us. But watching Anwar retching is utterly perplexing. Could he be faking? What does it all mean? It is here, in this space of ambiguity, of non-knowledge, or of misrecognition, that the fever dream becomes the dream-work. That is, the moment when the diegetic reality of the film (a fever of many different and seemingly conflicting realities and fictions, the play of shifting signifiers) becomes all of reality (all of these shifting signifiers become connected, and, what is more, there is no outside this reality from which it could be explained; there is no redemption for Anwar, nor a cathartic experience for the spectator). This culminating moment registers the brilliance of the film: there is no outside the film (text). What is suddenly called into question is unconscious desire, that is, the enjoyment of being so thoroughly enthralled in a seemingly surreal and hallucinogenic cinematic event. Anwar's authentic or inauthentic final act becomes our own, and we are forced to step back and gain some distance from what had up until this moment been all too close at hand. The symbolic coordinates that structure the spectator's enjoyment become unsettled, and, as a result, one experiences the symbolic in a different light, as being not-all what one thought it to be. In other words, coming up against the wall of non-knowledge, of nothing that is Anwar's final act, the spectator comes up against the impasse of (historical or psychological) analysis. Rather than this moment marking some failure with the film to produce meaning, it is precisely this failure (to know) that is the film's greatest achievement, an achievement that can only be properly measured, in terms of the documentary form, through the lens of Lacan's discourse of the analyst. Like the analysand who has come to the end of analysis and who now looks at the same object through completely different eyes, we see the Indonesian genocide, and hopefully other related events as well, in a different light. Whether it is visiting a mall or hearing someone complain that they learned nothing from this film,³⁴ or another dismissing the Indonesian problem as their own, or that global capitalism is the final and grandest conclusion to world history, something shifts within one's symbolic coordinates that changes how one thinks about these same things or structures. The nonsensical "what the fuck" moment, so aptly noted by Errol Morris and directed at Anwar, is redoubled, becoming our own moment of reckoning, our own participation in a dream-work that is directly or indirectly related to the enigmatic and contingent phrase the act of killing.³⁵