Perpetrating Narrative: The Ethics of Unreliable Narration in the Act of Killing

This article analyses the ethics of unreliable narration in Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, in which perpetrators of the 1965-1966 Indonesian massacres of supposed communists reenact their crimes. By showing the perpetrators’ gleeful depictions of their murderous histories, Oppenheimer breaks with numerous conventions of representing genocidal perpetrators to spectacular effect and much critical controversy. The documentary relies on a sophisticated toolset to expose the perpetrators’ narratives as unreliable. I argue that the unreliability we encounter in the film is not focused on the axis of facts, as many critics discussing the supposed fictionality of the reenactments contend, but on the axes of perception and, most importantly, ethics. The conventions of representing genocidal perpetrators have been formed in post-genocidal contexts in which the perpetrators have been condemned (most dominantly the Holocaust), but in Indonesia these perpetrators still wield power with impunity. This circumstance demanded a new filmic approach. I argue that The Act of Killing exposes the perpetrators as unreliable narrators in an Indonesian socio-political context that celebrates them and shows the deeply troubling ethics of these narratives.