He was unfailingly polite to adults. He never got into trouble at school. He was quiet but not too quiet. He played sports, but he wasn't too aggressive, never pouted when his team lost. He was everyone's idea of the perfect kid, and I had no evidence to prove otherwise. If someone was going to teach Jason a lesson, it had to be me. I wanted it to be me.
Because even though Erin and I didn't have the kind of uncanny twin connection that allowed me to read her mind, I felt it when she was in pain. She was a part of me and Jason had taken from her one of the few things that made her happy. So I was going to take something from Jason, because I could. Because I had recently come to understand that I wasn't like other people.
Promise me you'll never use it, Kenna, because you're too young to control it, and if you start I don't know if you'll be able to stop. So I promised, but my promise was a lie. If someone tells you that you're special, that you can do something extraordinary, you have to try it at least once. Three days after I buried Clint Eastwood, I trailed Jason into the woods, observing him, stalking him the way I imagined he stalked his doomed victims. He caught a monarch butterfly in his net and let out a whoop of triumph before inserting it into his killing jar.
I didn't want to seem like a threat. Not until it was too late. He clutched the jar to his chest, like I might try to take it from him. These were his real eyes. His vacant crow's eyes. I didn't answer his question.
I lowered my gaze to the jar and the butterfly trapped inside, its crisp wings the color of Halloween, velvet black and flame orange. The butterfly beat against the walls of its glass prison until it lost the will to fight and drooped against the bottom like wilted lettuce. Jason's empty eyes beamed with excitement then, and fury uncoiled in me like a rising cobra.
He never saw it coming. I grabbed Jason by the wrist and felt something unfurl from my skin, connecting me to him like a shared vein. His mouth opened in a distended O, but he couldn't scream. I didn't give him the chance. His life, his essence, a sensation like rising and expanding, like I'd swallowed a sunrise, flooded my body. At the same time, Jason's color waned from pale to waxy gray.
His skin shriveled into a dehydrated shell. The hair fell from his head in hunks. His eyes turned black as underground tunnels and his cheekbones protruded in chalky, white wings. I've never told anyone about the hurricane of raucous, feral energy that poured from Jason into me, so heady and rapturous that it almost lifted me off the ground.
It told me I could do anything. Run a thousand miles. Swim an ocean. Live forever. Raise the dead. It was all within my grasp. I knelt beside the shattered killing jar and cupped the limp butterfly in my palms. Psychiatrists are not for lunatics Psychiatrists are not for lunatics. They are. Come on, make an effort When you see a psychiatrist, talk to you, talking.
And then you give vitamins to nerves You remember the campaign "Crush Chinese". Throughout the route Sountirman Chinese kill anyone saw. I do not remember how many, but it was dozens If they succeed, their stabs. My girlfriend was Chinese The "Crush Chinese" became.
He fell into a ditch. I hit him with a brick. He sank in the water. He was the only Chinese in the region For here I am honest, I was my stepfather. I lived with him since I was baby On 3 the dawn someone knocked on the door. She begged him not to do it Take the cloth and links' of the eyes. I did not understand anything I am amazed.
Why not hiding what we did. It has nothing to do with fear. But with image. The whole society will say. I do not agree with these international laws When Bush was in government, the. The English "translation" was distracting because it was absurd.
Revisions Compare revisions Revision 18 Rollback. Retired user. Revision 17 Uploaded. Revision 16 Edited. Syed Husain. Revision 15 Edited. Revision 14 Edited. The process by which we made the musical scenes the waterfall, the giant concrete goldfish was slightly different again. Anwar and his cast were also free to make changes as we went. In the end, we worked very carefully with the giant goldfish, presenting motifs from a half-forgotten dream.
An allegory for his storytelling confection? For his blindness? For the willful blindness by which almost all history is written, and by which, consequently, we inevitably come to know and fail to know ourselves? If it could be explained adequately in words, we would not need it in the film. For the scenes written by the newspaper boss Ibrahim Sinik and his staff, Sinik enlisted the help of his friends at state television, TVRI.
He borrows the TVRI regional drama studios, and recruits a soap opera crew. In these scenes, our role was largely to document Anwar and his friends as they work with the TV crew, and to catalyze and document debates between fiction set-ups.
But above all, we focused our cameras on moments between takes where they debated the meaning of the scene. After their grotesque chat show was broadcast, there was no critical response in North Sumatra whatsoever. This is not to say that the show will not be shocking to Indonesians.
According to Anwar, the union was angry that such a large-scale production had occurred in North Sumatra without their knowing about it. Luckily, Anwar had the humility to tell them that he is not an actor, that he was playing himself in scenes made for a documentary, and therefore would decline the offer. Anwar and his friends knew that their fiction scenes were only being made for our documentary, and this will be clear to the audience, too.
But at the same time, if these scenes were to offer genuine insights, it was vital that the filmmaking project was one in which they were deeply invested, and one over which they felt ownership. It has won over critics but this tasteless film teaches us nothing and merely indulges the unrepentant butchers of Indonesia. The Act of Killing won the documentary prize at the Baftas last week and is the favourite to win the much-coveted Oscar.
I watch many documentaries on behalf of the BBC each year and I go to festivals. Much about the film puzzles me. I am still surprised by the fact that so many critics listed it among their favourite films of last year. You might think this is a recondite subject, worthy of a late-night screening for insomniacs or atrocity buffs on BBC4, but, no, the film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer has made the subject viewable by enlisting the participation of some of the murderers.
He spent some years hanging out with them, to his credit luring them into confessions. But he also, more dubiously, enlisted their help in restaging their killings. Although one of them, the grandfatherly Anwar, shows mild symptoms of distress towards the end of the film, they live in a state of impunity and it is thus, coddled and celebrated in their old age, that we revisit them.
So let me be as upfront as I can. I dislike the aesthetic or moral premise of The Act of Killing. I find myself deeply opposed to the film.
Getting killers to script and restage their murders for the benefit of a cinema or television audience seems a bad idea for a number of reasons. I find the scenes where the killers are encouraged to retell their exploits, often with lip-smacking expressions of satisfaction, upsetting not because they reveal so much, as many allege, but because they tell us so little of importance.
Of course murderers, flattered in their impunity, will behave vilely. Of course they will reliably supply enlightened folk with a degraded vision of humanity. It feels wrong and it certainly looks wrong to me. Something has gone missing here. How badly do we want to hear from these people, after all? Think of other half-covered-up atrocities — in Bosnia, Rwanda, South Africa, Israel, any place you like with secrets — and imagine similar films had been made.
Consider your response — and now consider whether such goings-on in Indonesia are not acceptable merely because the place is so far away, and so little known or talked about that the cruelty of such an act can pass uncriticised.
The film does not in any recognisable sense enhance our knowledge of the s Indonesian killings, and its real merits — the curiosity when it comes to uncovering the Indonesian cult of anticommunism capable of masking atrocity, and the good and shocking scenes with characters from the Indonesian elite, still whitewashing the past — are obscured by tasteless devices.
At the risk of being labelled a contemporary prude or dismissed as a stuffy upholder of middle-class taste, I feel that no one should be asked to sit through repeated demonstrations of the art of garrotting. What I like most about documentary film is that anything can be made to work, given a chance. You can mix up fact and fiction, past and present.
You can add to cold objectivity a degree of empathy. You will, of course, lie to reluctant or recalcitrant participants, in particular when they wish not to divulge important pieces of information. And trickery has its place, too.
In a makeshift, fallible way, they tell us what the world is really like.
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