Over the past eight months of American politics, I have thought often of a passage by J.M. Coetzee, the South African Nobel laureate. In a letter to the psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz, Coetzee suggests that those with no religious faith continue to cling to an unshakable illusion: that the universe is ultimately governed by justice. Even Freud, the great disenchanter, could not let go of it, Coetzee says. Like belief in the Last Judgment, Freud’s theory of repression — that we pay a price in psychic pain for the shameful memories we try to forget — is really just a stay against moral anarchy, a way to help us sleep at night. The wicked may escape worldly justice, but they can never escape the ravages of conscience — or so we like to tell ourselves.
This faith in justice, in its various forms, permeates our culture. Stories about secrets and their devastating disclosure, from “Oedipus Rex” and “Crime and Punishment” to “Psycho” and “Twin Peaks,” seem to instruct us in an elementary truth: Secrets can’t be buried. “But what if the true secret, the inadmissible secret, the secret about secrets,” Coetzee speculates, “is that secrets can indeed be buried? What if this big secret is what the Oedipus-type story is trying to bury? In other words, what if our culture, perhaps even human culture in general, has created a form of narrative which is on the surface about the unburiability of secrets but under the surface seeks to bury the one secret it cannot countenance: that secrets can be buried, that the past can be obliterated, that justice does not reign?”
Few living artists have addressed this question with the daring and rigor of Joshua Oppenheimer. One of America’s finest directors, Oppenheimer has built a reputation as an unflinching chronicler of political violence and its psychic toll. Beginning in the early 2000s, he spent more than 10 years making a series of documentaries about the 1965-66 mass slaughter of social undesirables in Indonesia. As many as a million people are thought to have died; a million more were confined to concentration camps. General Suharto, who ordered the killings and ruled the country for the next 30 years, was a staunch U.S. ally in the struggle against communism, and the atrocity went largely unrecognized both at home and abroad. In Indonesia, those who carried out the murders didn’t just escape punishment: They were widely hailed for their service to the nation.
In his best-known film, “The Act of Killing” (2012), Oppenheimer persuades a group of these executioners to recreate, in front of the camera, the horrors they committed in their youth. The result is not an exposé of hidden crimes, for the crimes were never hidden to begin with. What’s revealed instead are the elaborate workings of self-deception, the ways the killers hid from themselves. When the film was released, to widespread acclaim, Oppenheimer insisted it wasn’t simply about a faraway country in Southeast Asia where impunity reigned. It was about impunity everywhere, including in America and the West, whose arms and money helped maintain Suharto’s regime.
As our leaders govern with increasing lawlessness and a revanchist nationalism spreads across the globe, Oppenheimer offers an alternative paradigm for engaging the enemies of democracy and truth. His work never tips into polemic, which feels increasingly futile in our polarized age. Instead, it suggests the political value of empathy and moral disarmament. Though he is driven by righteous indignation, Oppenheimer never condemns his subjects. “I went looking for monsters,” he told me last year, speaking of the killers, “and I found human beings.”
We were at Studio Babelsberg, the world’s oldest major movie studio, in the suburbs of Berlin, where Oppenheimer, who is 51, was touching up his latest film, “The End.” Previously, he made only documentaries. “The End” (now available to stream online) is his first scripted feature, the story of a wealthy oilman and his family who live in a palatial bunker after climate change has ravaged the earth. Oppenheimer, who is slender and bald and wears baggy black pants and a black crew-neck sweater on nearly every occasion, is not known for making things easy for himself, or for the viewer. His newest opus isn’t just a two-and-a-half-hour postapocalyptic survival film; it is also a musical.
This may sound like a drastic departure, but as Oppenheimer was keen to stress, there are deep continuities with his earlier output. In “The End,” as in “The Act of Killing,” a crusading impulse to hold power to account is balanced by an unlikely compassion. Late last year, when the film received its American release, several reviews raised the same objection: that it wasn’t mean enough to its pampered characters, who float through their days in a stupor of denial. But this is exactly what Oppenheimer intended. One reason that “The Act of Killing” and “The End” each took almost eight years to make, he told me in Berlin, was the struggle to find an empathetic approach to what at first may seem like satirical premises.
Keeping sight of his characters’ humanity is a matter of both principle and pragmatism. As Oppenheimer’s work attests, it is difficult to convince someone that a genocide is a genocide, and not a virtuous struggle against the forces of evil, if their sense of themselves and the nation they belong to depends on them believing otherwise. In forgoing confrontation with the perpetrators in “The Act of Killing,” Oppenheimer sidestepped their defensive reflexes and opened a margin for introspection.
“The important question for me wasn’t: Can I get you to admit this happened?” he said of the years he spent embedded with the killers. “It was: How do you live with what you’ve done? How do you narrate it to yourself in ways that make it acceptable? And what happens when you impose those justifications on the rest of society?”
Oppenheimer once favored a more conflictual approach. In the summer of 1995, while studying theater in London between his sophomore and junior years at Harvard, he worked with OutRage!, a British queer rights group that used nonviolent direct action to advance its goals. At the time, the group was targeting the Church of England over its support for so-called gay conversion therapy. As part of this effort, Oppenheimer, an openly gay descendant of Jewish Holocaust survivors, was tasked with an undercover mission. Posing as a Christian tortured by his homosexuality, he approached the vicar of a London parish who was organizing a conference of ex-gay groups within the church.
The vicar was convinced by his performance. Before long, Oppenheimer had won his trust and got himself appointed head of security for the conference. In his role as gatekeeper, he saw to it that a contingent of fellow activists was admitted to the event. At the appointed time, they began waving signs and chanting slogans. The Guardian ran a prominent article about the disruption that was deeply embarrassing to church leadership. Soon after, at a meeting of the General Synod, the institution’s ruling body, conversion therapy was condemned by several speakers. It was a small and partial victory, but for Oppenheimer it provided an early lesson in the power of ingeniously staged subversion.
Oppenheimer’s social conscience can be traced, at least in part, to his upbringing. The Holocaust, which his German Jewish paternal grandparents narrowly escaped, was endlessly discussed around the dining-room table. “I learned about it before I heard the story of Cinderella,” he told me. Both his father, a political scientist, and his mother, a labor lawyer and union activist, instilled in him the idea that preventing genocide, against any group of people, should be the highest goal of human society. After they divorced, in 1981, his parents each quickly remarried, settling in Washington, D.C., and Santa Fe, N.M. Shuttling between them throughout his childhood, Oppenheimer tried to play the peacemaker, with limited success. “They used to get angry at me because I would try to bring them together,” he said of his family. It was a painful and confusing experience, but his willingness to engage with people condemned by others would prove essential to his work.
While in college, Oppenheimer became involved with a Massachusetts-based group called Political Research Associates, which published reports on the American far right. These were the years of the Ruby Ridge standoff, the Waco siege and the Oklahoma City bombing. Seeking to infiltrate the Aryan Nations, a white-supremacist group, Oppenheimer called its information line and pretended to be a budding young racist; he was then invited to visit its headquarters in the Idaho panhandle, whose watch towers and barbed-wire fences reminded him of a concentration camp. “It was scary,” Oppenheimer told me, “because I’m not the most macho man.” The conversations he had with the group’s members, secretly recorded, form the backbone of his first student film, “These Places We’ve Learned to Call Home” (1996), which combines that audio with grainy, lo-fi images of American blight — industrial smokestacks, derelict warehouses, a public restroom being set on fire — to produce an effect of menacing abstraction. At one point, an Aryan Nations member speaks with reverence of Timothy McVeigh’s handiwork: “What happened in Oklahoma was a Rembrandt.”
Given his activist roots, Oppenheimer might have become a straightforwardly political filmmaker. A few years after graduating, he traveled to Indonesia with the filmmaking collective he helped found, Vision Machine, to shoot a documentary about a group of palm-oil plantation workers who were trying to form a union. “The Globalization Tapes” (2003) is a powerful if somewhat programmatic piece of cinema that lays out the exploitation of its subjects in no uncertain terms. Divided into clearly headed sections (“Introducing the World Trade Organization,” “Where Do the Raw Materials Come From?”), the film, made in collaboration with the workers, was intended to be used as an organizing tool in the food and agricultural industries. When his mother saw the final cut, she said that Oppenheimer must now feel like he was part of a movement. “No,” he replied. “What I want to do is more selfish than that.”
Oppenheimer, who wanted to be an artist, not an activist, was creatively dissatisfied with “The Globalization Tapes,” but it led him to the subject of his first great film. When the plantation workers first tried to unionize, their employer, a Belgian transnational, called in a local militia, Pancasila Youth, to intimidate them. Oppenheimer learned that many of the workers’ parents and grandparents were murdered by the same militia some three decades earlier. The killings were part of the extermination campaign against people suspected of being communists carried out by General Suharto after seizing power from his anticolonial predecessor in 1965. Oppenheimer, who knew little of the carnage before he came to Indonesia, was shocked to discover the extent to which the U.S. government had participated in it.
At the time, the United States was waging a costly and unpopular war in Vietnam in the name of anti-communism. Outside of China and the Soviet Union, the Indonesian Communist Party was the largest in the world, though it never officially held power. The chance to strike a blow against it, and to do so without committing a single U.S. soldier, seemed too good to pass up. Washington supplied Suharto with arms, communication support and lists of left-wing organizers, and his bloody purge was hailed as a momentous victory in the American press. This newspaper ran a column with the headline “A Gleam of Light in Asia.”
Even after the country began a halting transition to democracy in 1998 with the ouster of Suharto, the killings continued to be mythologized as a national redemption. The dead remained uncommemorated, their surviving relatives afraid to speak out. For the plantation workers Oppenheimer interviewed, however, taking part in “The Globalization Tapes” was an emboldening experience. They asked him to come back to Indonesia and make another film about the events of the mid-60s. “I was 27,” Oppenheimer has said, “and I just couldn’t look away.” Together with the filmmaker Christine Cynn, a former Harvard classmate, and an anonymous Indonesian co-director, he began collecting testimony from survivors of the violence. They ran into trouble almost immediately. The army, which had gotten wind of the project, started to harass them; Oppenheimer was arrested on multiple occasions. When he told his subjects he was having second thoughts, they suggested he try a different approach: Talk to the killers.
Warily, Oppenheimer did as they proposed. To his amazement, the aging members of Pancasila Youth weren’t just willing to recount their long-ago atrocities: They took him to the places where they had committed them (rooftops, rivers, rubber plantations) and brought along machetes to help demonstrate their methods. The men were only too happy to be filmed. His experiences infiltrating the Church of England and the Aryan Nations were coming in handy, but unlike before, Oppenheimer never pretended to be someone he wasn’t. Being American was its own disguise. Because his country had helped coordinate the purge and remained a loyal ally, the killers had no reason to suspect that Oppenheimer didn’t see eye to eye with them.
Oppenheimer had been speaking to perpetrators for almost a year when he decided to take a calculated risk. He introduced two former death-squad leaders to each other and asked them to walk him through what they had done. Oppenheimer feared that the men would clam up or censor each other. Instead they burst into an eager re-enactment, as if they were reading from a shared script. “Please, sir! Have mercy!” one of them shouted, assuming the role of a victim, as the other, playing his former self, dragged him down a riverbank. In that moment, Oppenheimer says, he knew how to proceed.
During Oppenheimer’s time at Harvard, the film department was dominated by so-called direct cinema, a style of documentary that purports to give fly-on-the-wall access to the lives of its subjects. The genre’s pioneers, like Frederick Wiseman and D.A. Pennebaker, used hand-held cameras, natural light and unobtrusive editing to create what felt like an objective picture of reality. Taking their cues from such directors, many of Oppenheimer’s classmates were trying to make socially conscious exposés. For Oppenheimer, however, direct cinema felt like a ruse. “You’re never a fly on the wall,” he told me. “You’re always an elephant in the room.” The presence of a camera can’t but impinge on those it’s recording; to pretend that you’re capturing life in the raw and not something more adulterated is, Oppenheimer believes, a sort of double imposture.
The way out of this bind, he came to feel, lay through cinéma vérité. The term is often used synonymously with direct cinema, but it denotes a more self-reflexive approach to documentary. One of Oppenheimer’s greatest influences was the French director and ethnologist Jean Rouch, who made a series of films about West African immigrants and the region’s French colonial period, like “Moi, un Noir” (1958) and “La Pyramide Humaine” (1961), in which his subjects are treated as collaborators. By inviting them to watch the footage and offer their impressions of it, Rouch created space for self-scrutiny; the presence of the camera, and the effect it has on the people it’s recording, is everywhere acknowledged in his films. “It was all about giving people the space to perform,” Oppenheimer has said, “to imagine, to stage themselves on camera as a way of documenting how they see themselves and make sense of their world.”
This is what Oppenheimer set out to do in “The Act of Killing.” Because the veteran executioners were already, as it were, performing for the camera, inviting them to make a film about the crimes they had committed seemed like a logical next step. As Oppenheimer soon discovered, movies — American movies in particular — had played a decisive role in the lives of his subjects. Anwar Congo, Oppenheimer’s central character, a man reputed to have killed as many as 1,000 people, described how his methods, like garroting victims with a length of wire, were inspired by Hollywood noirs of the 1940s and ’50s. The office building where Congo committed many of the killings sat opposite a cinema. He would often take in a film there to get in the mood before crossing the street for a long night of murder.
Oppenheimer had been interviewing perpetrators for two years when he first met Congo. He knew at once that he had found his protagonist. Congo’s macabre boasting had a clenched desperation to it, as if he needed to tell stories to keep his conscience at bay. Over time, as Oppenheimer pulled on different threads, his subject’s self-image began to unravel on camera.
As a student, Oppenheimer was deeply affected by Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” (1985), in which the director takes an interrogative, sometimes hectoring approach in his interviews with the perpetrators of the Holocaust (as well as many survivors). Oppenheimer doubted that the killers would open up to him if he tried a Lanzmann-style grilling. Instead, he gave them the creative freedom to stage their crimes however they wanted, helped them with sets, props, costumes and makeup and drew them out with a steady stream of nonjudgmental questions. The results were grim, surreal and wildly incoherent — much like the men themselves. In one scene, shot to resemble a vintage noir, Congo and his friends play hard-nosed detectives roughing up a communist in a smoke-filled room. In another, they set fire to a village and massacre its people while yelling: “Kill the communists! Chop them up!” — a carnival of violence that leaves an extra, a young girl, weeping inconsolably. “You’re embarrassing me,” says her father, a member of Pancasila Youth. “Film stars only cry for a moment.”
As Congo is shown footage at different moments in the film, his conscience starts to flutter. “Did the people I tortured feel the way I do here?” he asks after watching a particularly brutal sequence in which, with astonishing conviction, he plays a communist being beaten by the killers. Gently, Oppenheimer points out that, because Congo was only acting, his victims would have suffered more.
Oppenheimer spent five years shadowing Congo and others. Though he was living in London, where he moved after winning a Marshall scholarship, he would spend months at a time in Indonesia. His husband, Shusaku Harada, a Japanese writer, remembers Oppenheimer returning from these trips in a state of emotional distress. “He was so traumatized that he couldn’t speak for several hours,” Harada told me. “He just couldn’t say a word.” Oppenheimer would have nightmares, which made him scared to fall asleep. He developed a dependency on sleeping pills. The moral whiplash he was suffering was compounded by the fear that his work (largely supported by grants and public funding) might all come to nothing. “I had a sense of alienation and estrangement,” Oppenheimer said, “because I was working with this material that meant so much to people in Indonesia, but in London it just seemed like nobody cared.”
In 2011, after he had completed work on the film but before it was released, Oppenheimer began to shoot a companion piece, “The Look of Silence,” which centers on a man named Adi Rukun, a mild-mannered optometrist whose older brother was murdered in the purge. Oppenheimer had known him since shortly after “The Globalization Tapes”; it was Rukun and his family who suggested he try speaking to the perpetrators. Oppenheimer’s work on “The Act of Killing” had brought him into contact with some of the most powerful people in the country, including military commanders who had grown fond of Oppenheimer. Taking advantage of this reputation, he was able to arrange interviews between Rukun and some of the officials responsible for his brother’s death.
These encounters, which Rukun asked Oppenheimer to set up, were high-wire acts. If Rukun said something that displeased his brother’s killers, he might end up in prison, or worse. “Do you want the killings to happen again?” an official taunted him when he believed Rukun had overstepped. Oppenheimer told me that the director of a documentary ought to act as a catalyst, creating situations whose outcomes are impossible to predict. To be able to take advantage of what chance deals out, however, requires meticulous preparation. During each shoot the crew kept two getaway cars at the ready, along with plane tickets for Rukun and his family, in case they had to flee.
When “The Act of Killing” finally appeared in the United States and Europe, in 2012, it was widely hailed as a masterpiece. “I immediately knew I had never seen anything like that,” the director Werner Herzog said at the time. “I’d never seen anything as powerful, as frightening and as surreal as what was on the screen.” (Herzog, one of Oppenheimer’s heroes, became an executive producer.) Some accused the film of exploiting historical trauma, but that criticism is belied by its reception in Indonesia itself. Though it did not get an official release there — Oppenheimer never submitted it to government censors, assuming it would not be approved — the film was made available for free online and downloaded millions of times. The effect was galvanizing. “Fifty years of silence came to a sudden end,” Oppenheimer’s anonymous co-director explained in an email. Tempo, one of Indonesia’s largest newsmagazines, sent journalists around the country to collect testimony from other witnesses and survivors and published the results in a special issue.
Two years later, “The Look of Silence” received a public premiere in Jakarta, the nation’s capital. It was then shown across the country. Rukun, who attended many of the screenings, was greeted as a hero. “What was once seen as the ‘heroic extermination of evil communists’ or just a dark mystery is now seen as mass killings perpetrated by the army and Western allies,” the co-director told me. “The word genocide is frequently used, even in schools.” Nonetheless, Indonesian democracy is fragile, and the army has come to exert ever-greater control. While the government announced its intention to offer aid to victims of the violence in 2023, no one responsible for the killings of 1965-66 has ever stood trial. Oppenheimer’s co-director remains anonymous for a reason.
“Every film Josh has made has been like a crusade,” the actor Michael Shannon, who plays the patriarch in Oppenheimer’s climate-change musical “The End,” told an audience in late January. He and Oppenheimer, who was sitting next to him onstage in a black parka, had infiltrated another conference — the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland. Strictly speaking, they hadn’t deceived anyone to gain entry. The pair were discussing Oppenheimer’s latest film in a large tent lined with thermal insulation foam, at the fringes of the official conference. Still, Oppenheimer made it clear he had a message for the global power brokers who had gathered in the town. “You have one chance to exist, to have a meaningful human life,” he said. “I’m talking to the captains of industry here. You have one chance, and when you die, that’s it.”
Hope was hardly in the air that night. For the previous two weeks, much of Los Angeles had been on fire, a disaster exacerbated by the effects of global warming. The day before, in his inaugural address, Donald Trump had promised to “drill, baby, drill” for more fossil fuels; he has since repealed environmental regulations, withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement and set in motion a plan to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to fight climate change. Oppenheimer, however, refused to accept that the credits were rolling on humanity. He stood firm in his belief not only that the situation could be reversed but also that cinema could play a part. “We didn’t come together to create this cautionary tale because we thought there wasn’t any time left to heed the warning,” he told the shivering crowd. “We came together to do this as an act of optimism. Yes, it’s too late for the final family living in hell, but it’s not too late for us.”
Oppenheimer dates the beginning of “The End” to the spring of 2016, when he visited an underground vault in the Czech Republic, the site of a disused Soviet command center. He had come with an oil tycoon who was looking to purchase a doomsday bunker. The man and his family, whom Oppenheimer saw as potential documentary subjects, were anxious about climate change and the chaos it could wreak: mass displacement, regional wars, the collapse of social order. What would life be like down here after a decade or two? Oppenheimer mused as he toured the stronghold. How would they keep going, day after day? Now there was a premise for a documentary. Too bad it could never be made.
On the plane home, Oppenheimer took out his laptop and put on “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” Jacques Demy’s classic musical of 1964. He was looking for a pick-me-up after the nightmare of the bunker, something to remind him of the beauty of the world. Instead it sparked an unlikely idea: He could tell the story of the family in its bolt-hole as a kind of Golden Age musical. In “Lolita” (1955), Humbert Humbert describes that genre, a favorite of his teenage captive’s, as dealing with “an essentially grief-proof sphere of existence wherefrom death and truth were banned.” Oppenheimer now imagined a musical in which death and truth were forever looming up. To keep them at bay, his characters would desperately break out into song.
“The musical is the genre of a kind of sentimentalized, romanticized false hope,” Oppenheimer told the audience in Davos, explaining his unusual formal choice. He and the composers Josh Schmidt and Marius De Vries, who collaborated on the score, drew inspiration from the musicals of the ’40s and ’50s — “Oklahoma!,” “South Pacific,” “Singin’ in the Rain” — which gave voice to a limitless faith in the future at the very moment America was embracing its new role as global superpower. (Oppenheimer, who has no background in songwriting, wrote the lyrics.) It’s this faith in the future, in the possibility of endless growth, no matter the consequences, that has carried us to the brink of catastrophe, Oppenheimer believes. Even as they stare down extinction in the bunker, with the world above in flames, his family maintain the conviction, expressed in one rousing chorus, that they are living “happily ever after,” with their best days all ahead of them.
With his gentle, almost self-effacing charisma, Oppenheimer reminded me of Prince Myshkin, the Christlike figure from Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” who exposes the hypocrisies of St. Petersburg’s elite simply by means of his innocence and candor. “Any moral judgment is based in a certain amount of false confidence,” he had told me, in his beguilingly soft voice, “because we may hope that we would behave differently in their shoes, but most of us will be very lucky to never find out.” It isn’t false confidence to say that the killers or the bunker-dwelling family acted wrongly, he went on, “but it is to say that they’re rotten human beings.”
“The End” isn’t “meant to be a yardstick to the back of the hand,” said Shannon, who plays the father as a brittle fantasist clinging to the belief that he has ultimately been a force for good. Since the film came out, Oppenheimer has screened it for numerous fossil-fuel and other industry executives, occasions that bore an uncanny resemblance to the times he screened footage of the re-enacted killings for Anwar Congo. The executives were often disarmed when they realized they weren’t being satirized, though Oppenheimer told me in an email that he had trouble grasping “where genuine concern for the planet ended and greenwashing began.” He realized they probably didn’t know either. After one screening, for a C.E.O. and his family and friends, there was a long, emotional discussion that went in “unresolved circles,” Oppenheimer wrote. “They asked if they were doing enough (or really anything) to mitigate the biggest threats they feel humanity faces,” he continued. The C.E.O. said he couldn’t stop thinking about one of the father’s lines: “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve done more harm than good. Did I even care?” As far as Oppenheimer is aware, however, none of these people have made concrete commitments to change how they do business.
When I showed Oppenheimer Coetzee’s letter about the injustice of the universe, he found much to agree with in it. But he mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish critic, as a kind of counterpoint. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in early 1940, a few months before his death, Benjamin argues that history is not a series of advances — industrial development, the rise of democracy, the widening arc of freedom and rights — but “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” Like Coetzee, he accepts that the powerful are rarely held responsible for the toll of their actions, and yet his vision contains a margin of hope. Though there is no inherent justice in the world, each generation is endowed with what Benjamin calls a “weak Messianic power” to recover the memory of history’s victims, those written out of triumphalist narratives of military conquest and national glory.
This, of course, has been a central mission of many postwar artists. In some cases, the power of their work has felt anything but weak. Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” along with later films like “Europa Europa” (1990) and “Schindler’s List” (1993), helped to restore the memory of the Holocaust, which was minimized or outright suppressed for decades after World War II. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” (1973), which laid bare the brutality of his country’s prison-camp system, did much to destroy the moral credibility of the Soviet regime, especially among Western intellectuals, and galvanized opposition from within. Like “Auschwitz,” the word “gulag” became a shorthand for totalitarian evil.
The victims of atrocities committed by America’s allies, or by America itself, have had to wait longer for their Lanzmanns and Solzhenitsyns. In his book “The Jakarta Method” (2020), the journalist Vincent Bevins claims that anti-communist extermination programs carried out across the global south during the second half of the 20th century — in Chile, Guatemala, East Timor and elsewhere — killed as many as two million people. (He calls it “The Jakarta Method” because the 1965-66 mass killings in Indonesia were used by other regimes as a blueprint.) “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence” are attempts to reinscribe a part of this history of mass violence into public consciousness; “The End” is a vision of where we may be headed if the West maintains its commitment to forgetting.
Right now, this commitment feels as steadfast as ever. When I met with Oppenheimer last year, he was, like many people, distraught at the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and what he saw as the efforts of the U.S. government and media to obscure the reality on the ground. “It’s unspeakably upsetting that what’s happening there is being done in my name, as a Jew, especially given my family’s history,” he said before expressing his contempt for those who reflexively dismiss critics of Israel as antisemites. “To be told that if I don’t fall in line behind this genocide I’m somehow betraying my people is Orwellian,” he continued. At the time, the Israeli assault had claimed the lives of some 29,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry; today, 19 months later, the death toll is estimated to have reached more than 64,000.
This February, during a joint news conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, Trump proposed expelling all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and turning the territory into a luxury resort. Three weeks later, he posted an A.I.-generated video in which his vision for a postwar Gaza as “the Riviera of the Middle East,” full of lush palm trees and gaudy hotels, is grotesquely brought to life. The video is reminiscent of the sequence in “The Act of Killing,” staged beneath a shimmering waterfall, in which Anwar Congo and a troupe of dancers sway in rhythm to John Barry’s velvety anthem “Born Free,” one of Congo’s favorite songs. After a moment, a murdered communist approaches Congo and presents him with a medal. “For executing me and sending me to heaven, I thank you a thousand times,” the man says, shaking Congo’s hand. Form and subject matter (a kitschy song-and-dance number about mass extermination) are hideously incommensurate, and herein lies the scene’s awful power. In an email sent a few weeks later, Oppenheimer said that watching the A.I. video had made him feel as if “the whole world has become ‘The Act of Killing.’”
Oppenheimer, who is a citizen of the United States, Britain, Denmark and Germany, currently lives in Malmo, Sweden. His father and stepmother, who remain in the United States, became German and Austrian citizens, respectively, in 2022 — which Oppenheimer referred to as their “exit plan” should the country’s autocratic drift continue to accelerate. As he mentioned on a recent phone call, “there’s a drift toward autocracy in parts of Europe too.” In Benjamin’s “Theses,” the writer admonishes those who had trouble accepting that such horrors as fascism and a European ground war were still possible in these supposedly enlightened times. Speaking of the disposable masses of all ages, Benjamin goes on: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”
The post The Filmmaker Who Finds the Humanity in History’s ‘Monsters’ appeared first on New York Times.
