Representing Justice in The Act of Killing What [Rumsfeld] forgot to add was the critical

fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” things that

we don’t know that we know – which is precisely
and The Unknown Known the Freudian unconscious … the disavowed
beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we
pretend not to know about, although they form
the background of our public values. To unearth
Most of us think of the invitation to act in a film as a desirable, even enviable, opportunity. these “unknown knowns” is the task of an intel-
But what if the invitation is not to act in a film but to be in a film, to be yourself in a film? lectual. This is why Rumsfeld is not a philosopher:
What will others think of you; how will they judge you? What aspects of your life may the goal of philosophical reflection is precisely to
stand revealed that you had not anticipated? … [These questions] place a different burden discern the “unknown knowns” of our existence.
of responsibility on filmmakers who set out to represent others rather than to portray The Unknown Known … [W]hat is the Kantian transcendental a priori
characters of their own invention. — bill nichols if not the network of such “unknown knowns”
the horizon of meaning of which we are unaware,
with, perhaps, the hubris of those like Donald Rumsfeld who but which is always-already here, structuring our
do claim to speak for us or on our behalf. So my question approach to reality?11
by Amir Khan signs of fatigue and breakdown, from the ozone layer to in citing Cavell’s text against Morris’s is simply to ask if we
the temperature of the oceans.”6 These words, seemingly can begin to think of or take Cavell’s or philosophy’s episte- In making his case for the unknown known, Žižek is saying
benign, immediately restrict the type of activity human mological concerns over what we do not know we know as that the role of philosophy is to betray, or make us realize,

T
he three documentary films I will discuss are The
Unknown Known (2013),1 The Act of Killing (2012),2
and Sophie Fiennes’ documentary on the thought
of Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012),3 the
latter shot in the mode Bill Nichols would call “expos-
itory,” which “directly addresses issues in the historical
world,” and is “overly didactic.”4 The first two are shot in
the mode Nichols would call “participatory,” emphasizing
the use of “archival footage”5 and documenting the film-
maker’s direct intervention and interaction with his/her
subjects. As Nichols alludes to, these “participatory” docu-
mentaries raise all sorts of vexing questions about ethics and
justice, forcing us to ask, if we are willing, whether or not
the camera has any business seeking out justice, or whether
or not it is ethical for us, as viewers, to expect any kind of
justice or redress through the passive consumption of these
types of documentary films.
Zižek’s discussion of the Lacanian “big Other” will serve
a purpose here – particularly its rendering on film via Sophie
Fiennes. This filmic discussion of the big Other, in terms of
content, certainly lambastes our continual dependence on
societal “big Others” (i.e. our reliance on such “Others” to
point the way toward something like justice, for example).
However, at the same time, the filmic representation of this
message serves to underscore a dangerous and lingering
ideological big Other: the (Western) belief in supra-histor-
ical interstitial imaginative spaces from within which any
notion of justice could be derived – a belief rendered aesthet-
ically most effectively, hence most deceptively, via (docu-
mentary) film. Exposure of the camera’s pernicious fixation
on this big Other of “justice” – as achievable via the imper-
sonal capture of so-called “objective” interstitial spaces – is
what I seek to do here.
In a very curious essay called “The Future of Possibility,”
Stanley Cavell addresses squarely the prospect of possibili-
ties lost, citing the following passage: “Everything is worn
out: revolutions, profits, miracles. The planet itself shows
beings ought to carry out – that is, if possibilities surrounding
revolutions, profits, and miracles are exhausted at the outset.
What this paper seeks to address is if, by extension, the idea
of justice, or redress, is also exhausted. Here is where I think
Cavell, and even Žižek, see a particular role for philosophy,
though we have to ask if, in their conception of things, some-
thing like justice and transcendence are mutually exclusive.
Cavell appeals to the American transcendentalists
(Emerson most famously) to, if not declare, then reframe,
the goal of philosophy as one of “integration” – that of the
pessimisms of the old world and its failed revolutionary poli-
tics (Europe) to which must be added the philosophy of a
“new yet unapproachable America.”7 In making the case for
possibility, then, Cavell quotes from “Experience”: “In liber-
ated moments we know that a new picture of life and duty is
already possible.”8 Cavell goes on to add his commentary:
This demand for integration sounds like a begin-
ning of that American optimism or Emersonian
cheerfulness to which an old European sophisti-
cation knows so well how to condescend. But it
has never been sure, even where I come from, that
Emerson’s tone of encouragement is tolerable to
listen to for very long ... What occurs to us in liber-
ated moments is that we know. That “we” claims
to speak for us, for me and for you, as philosophy
in its unavoidable arrogance always claims to do;
and moreover claims to speak of what we do not
know we know, hence of some thought that we keep
rejecting; hence claims to know us better than we
know ourselves.9
That philosophy’s task is to unearth something we do not
know we know invites (and please bear with me) speculation
on Errol Morris’s documentary film, The Unknown Known, a
documentary confessional dealing not with epistemological
philosophical problems of knowledge or exhaustion, but
linked to, or made manifest in, some political “real world”
arena (rather than inhabiting, exclusively, the realm of
thought, philosophical or otherwise) via Donald Rumsfeld’s
political speculations – particularly when the language
employed by both Cavell and Rumsfeld, at the very least,
sounds the same. But do they mean the same? Christ’s death was its replacement of Old Testament fear
Errol Morris: Let me put up this next memo.
Donald Rumsfeld: You want me to read this?
Errol Morris: Yes please.
Donald Rumsfeld: February 4th. 2004. Subject.
What you know. There are known knowns.
There are known unknowns. There are unknown
unknowns. But there are also unknown knowns.
That is to say, things that you think you know, that
it turns out, you did not.
The date alone brings us back to the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
carried out, of course, on the erroneous pretext of confis-
cating weapons of mass destruction. So Rumsfeld clearly
does not have in mind what any philosopher has in mind.
When he says “unknown known,” he means something like
a mea culpa, as though the “unknown” portion of the phrase
cancels out what was once, indeed, “known.” But the philos-
ophers are talking about something diametrically opposed
to this: they mean, things that you think you didn’t know, it
turns out, you did.
There is indeed some overlap between what both Žižek
and Cavell want of philosophy. Here is Žižek commenting
directly on Donald Rumsfeld’s amateur philosophizing.
Note that Žižek is here responding to Rumsfeld’s initial
statements made to the White House Press Gallery in 2002:
“There are known knowns. There are known unknowns.
There are also unknown unknowns.”10 No mention of the
fourth term here, i.e. the unknown knowns, upon which
philosophy builds its house:
what we do not know that we know. In the cinematic adap-
tation of his thinking, Sophie Fiennes traces his line of
thought more intimately to our genealogical uncovering
and relationship to some “big Other.” Žižek’s reading of
Lacan has it that the Christian sleight of hand achieved after
and trembling with Christian love.
The contrast between Judaism and Christianity is
the contrast between anxiety and love. The idea is
that the Jewish God is the God of the abyss of the
Other’s desire. Terrible things happen. God is in
charge, but we do not know what the big Other,
God, wants from us. … Judaism persists in this
anxiety, like God remains this enigmatic, terrifying
Other. And then, Christianity resolves the tension
through love. By sacrificing his son, God demon-
strates that he loves us. So it’s a kind of an imagi-
nary, sentimental, even, resolution of a situation of
radical anxiety.12
However long it has been the case that God is dead,
what philosophy is supposed to do is to show us, even in
our post-Christian and secular order, how we are still
commanded, ideologically, by remnants of this “big Other.”
Continuing on, Žižek adds the following:
If this were to be the case, then Christianity would
have been a kind of ideological reversal or pacifi-
cation of the deep much more shattering Jewish
insight. But I think one can read the Christian
gesture in a much more radical way. … What dies
on the cross is precisely this guarantee of the big
Other. … The message of Christ is, “I’m dying,
but my death itself is good news. It means you
are alone, left to your freedom … This is why I
claim that the only way really to be an atheist is

66 cineaction cineaction 67
 to go through Christianity. Christianity is much
more atheist than the usual atheism, which can
claim there is no God and so on. But nonetheless
it retains a certain trust into the big Other. The big
Other can be called natural necessity, evolution, or
whatever. We humans are nonetheless reduced to
a position within a harmonious whole of evolution,
whatever. But the difficult thing to accept is, again,
that there is no big Other, no point of reference
which guarantees meaning.13
Philosophy is charged with the task of helping us see past
our current and more pernicious “big Others” – modern
day equivalents being “democracy and freedom,”14 “human
rights,”15 “evolution,” or “natural necessity” – those abstract
ideas the meaninglessness of which we do not know that
we know. We replaced the terror at the hands of the “big
Other” by turning said “big Other” into love, and have since
turned that love not into a love of God, but to a love of
other things – say a love of freedom, or justice.
But in this scenario, unlike in Cavell’s, what we don’t know
that we know is that justice is a dirty word and that its pursuit
is destined to manifest itself as another outpost of old oppres-
sions. This brings us to the feelings of exhaustion highlighted
earlier. By pursuing justice, are we not simply trying, once
again, to deny that which we know – striving, in a sense, to not
know what we indubitably know – that the pursuit of justice
is merely the pursuit of one more dogmatic big Other?
[P]hilosophy emerges in the interstices between
different communities, in the fragile space of
exchange and circulation between them, a space
which lacks any positive identity … This is
what Kant, in a famous passage of his “What is
Enlightenment?”, means by “public” as opposed to
“private”: “private” is not the individual as opposed
to one’s communal ties, but the very communal-in-
stitutional order of one’s particular identification,
while “public” is the transnational universality of
the exercise of one’s Reason. The paradox is thus
that one participates in the universal dimension
of the “public” sphere precisely as a singular indi-
vidual extracted from or even opposed to one’s
substantial communal identification – one is truly
universal only as radically singular, in the inter-
stices of communal identities.16
In short, Žižek has philosophy exposing our limited vantage
point within “private” communal orders to instead reveal
that the truth of reason occurs in the interstices between
communal identities. The impetus is to push us past our
local obsessions, each organized around some cultural “big
Other” that is, in fact, not universal. The task of modern
day philosophy is to expose the current big Other manifes-
tations around which we order our experience of everyday
reality. Going back to Rumsfeld, Žižek concludes:
68 cineaction
Today, all the main terms we use to designate the
present conflict – “war on terror,” “democracy and
freedom,” “human rights” etc. etc. – are false terms,
mystifying our perception of the situation instead
of allowing us to think it. In this precise sense, our
“freedoms” themselves serve to mask and sustain
our deeper unfreedom – this is what philosophy
should make us see.17
These are the unknown knowns: we don’t know that we
know that these (local) phrases are ultimately meaning-
less. So what does this say about the pursuit of justice in
particular? That it can be achieved only in some radically
singular “public” realm of reason? But surely we perceive
injustice at the local level – not between communities, but
precisely within them. But surely, also, we can see the danger
behind attaching ourselves too dogmatically to these (local)
big Others, and surely we can see (or are meant to see) that
this is some sort of aphasic disturbance suffered acutely by
Donald Rumsfeld – in his “obsession” with Iraq, guised no
doubt under the seemingly universal rubric of “freedom and
democracy,” concepts we should all supposedly cherish and
work to bring about.
Errol Morris: Why the obsession with Iraq, and
Saddam?
Donald Rumsfeld: Well you love that word
obsession. I can see the glow in your face when
you say it.
Errol Morris: Well I’m an obsessive person!
Donald Rumsfeld: Are you? I’m not. I’m cool and
measured. … The reason I was concerned about
Iraq is [be]cause four star generals would come
to me and say, “Mr. Secretary, we have a problem.
Our orders are to fly over the northern part of
Iraq and the southern part of Iraq, on a daily basis,
with the Brits, and we are getting shot at. At some
moment, could be tomorrow, could be next month,
could be next year, one of our planes is going to be
shot down and our pilots, and crews, are going to
be killed. The question will be, ‘What in the world
were we flying those flights for? What was the cost
benefit ratio? What was our country gaining?’ So
you sit down and you say, I think I’m going to see
if I can get the President’s attention. ... And remind
him that we’ve got a whole range of options. Not
an obsession. A very measured, nuanced approach.
I think.18
Is Rumsfeld fooling himself here? Errol Morris, in titling
the film The Unknown Known, suggests as much, i.e. that
Rumsfeld, in a way, knows he is committing himself to a
fixation. Is the point of philosophy to get characters like
him to step back and occupy the interstice? Does Rumsfeld
do this?
Donald Rumsfeld: If you take those words, and
try to connect them in each way that is possible,
there was at least one more combination that
wasn’t there. The unknown knowns. Things that
you possibly may know that you don’t know you
know.
Errol Morris: But the memo doesn’t say that! It
says we know less, not more, than we think we do.
Donald Rumsfeld: Is that right, I reversed it? Put
it up again, let me see ... Yah I think that memo
is backwards ... I think you’re probably, you know,
chasing the wrong rabbit here.19
So Rumsfeld does stumble upon the phrase Žižek high-
lighted earlier. He clearly says, however fleetingly, not that
he lacked knowledge, but that he had too much, too much to
know what to do with.
However, even if he glimpses what he didn’t know he
knew, he quickly represses it, accusing Morris of “chasing
the wrong rabbit.” At this point, what are we supposed
to feel? Sympathy because he manages to stumble upon
his own fixation (his knee-jerk desire to believe in a lack,
instead of plenitude, of knowledge)? – or exasperation that
he ultimately denies this knowledge? But what is novel or
surprising about that? We are fools, that is, to expect any
kind of acknowledgement at this juncture, or at any junc-
ture involving someone like Donald Rumsfeld. I mean, it is
hopeless to expect justice to emanate from his soul. So why
indeed are we watching? What has Morris left breached?
Let’s now read Rumsfeld’s act of acknowledgment and
subsequent repression, against the seemingly non-repres-
sive attitude taken by the protagonists of The Act of Killing,
if, say, the following constitutes that film’s epiphany:
Anwar Congo: Did the people I tortured feel the
way I do here? I can feel what the people I tortured
felt. Because here my dignity has been destroyed
and then fear comes, right there and then. All the
terror suddenly possessed my body. It surrounded
me and possessed me.
Joshua Oppenheimer: Actually, the people you
tortured felt far worse because you know it’s only a
film. They knew they were being killed.
Anwar Congo: But I can feel it, Josh. Really I feel
it. Or have I sinned? I did this to so many people,
Josh. Is it all coming back to me? I really hope it
won’t. I don’t want it to, Josh.20
One conclusion we might entertain is that both Anwar
Congo and Donald Rumsfeld were acting within local-
ized communities, pursuing “justice” in equally demented
ways and that by virtue of spotlighting each, both Morris
and Oppenheimer have reminded us that whatever we take
justice to be, it occurs, indeed, in the interstices between
narrow-minded ideologies, just as Žižek intimated. We may
feel acts of injustice at a communal, subjective level, but
we certainly have no business pursuing it on such levels;
indeed, better here to be fixated on “the fragile space of
exchange and circulation ... a space which lacks any positive
identity.”21 In such extra communal headspace is our only
hope, say philosophical hope, of achieving justice. Justice,
so conceived, is less a real world correlate than a revelatory
transcendence of real world local antagonisms.
But what sleight of hand have we perpetrated here? Is
justice something human beings have no business pursuing
in the actual world, but can only hope to tepidly theorize
on (i.e. its eventual manifestation someday in the future)?
Something of the latter sentiment is what I take films like
The Unknown Known and The Act of Killing to be fixated upon.
It is what, in short, I take certain documentary confessionals
to be upholding – a blind faith to the idea that justice is
removed from localized human concerns, to be achieved only
in supra-national historical spaces to which only the camera
has objective access – a filmmaker’s (and a film watcher’s)
very own pernicious big Other.
For instance, does Žižek believe that justice is achiev-
able by debunking our ideologies, or is he implying that any
real-world local conception of justice is an ideology that
necessarily requires debunking? Aren’t Rumsfeld, Congo,
and us as viewers all hoping for the manifestation of the same
thing – precisely some vision of justice? We have different
localized conceptions of how justice is to be achieved
(invading Iraq, killing Communists, watching confessional
documentaries), but surely we all crave the same thing.
Rather than getting too fixated on Žižek, let us see how
Cavell addresses the question. In the paper noted earlier,
he is explicitly talking about “possibilities,” the “future”
of them, and suggests, rather emphatically, that it is the
job of philosophy to ensure that our present sensibilities
remain open to future possibilities when it seems that we
have exhausted the realm of the possible in human affairs.
Drawing upon his usual suspects, Cavell reminds us that
Nietzsche, after Emerson, links the sense of human
exhaustion with the sense of the unresponsiveness
of the future to human will (how different is that
from the sense of the unresponsiveness of God?). ...
Here we have to think of Emerson’s description of
the mass of men as in a state of secret melancholy;
Thoreau will say “quiet desperation”; Nietzsche
sometimes formulates the sense of exhaustion as
“boredom”[.] ... So philosophy becomes a struggle
against melancholy – or, to speak with due banality,
against depression.22
Cavell is conceiving philosophy’s role as “cheering” the
populace, not necessarily to point to how or in what way
it is imprisoned by its unknown knowns (à la Žižek), but to
create a mood that induces its members to want to speak at
all, in face, indeed, of Thoreau’s otherwise all-consuming
“quiet desperation.” The appeal to Nietzsche, Thoreau, and
Emerson, at first glance, suggests that Cavell sees the role of
cineaction 69
 philosophy as tied up intimately with transcendence, over-
coming the everyday hardships, oppressions, and humilia-
tions by somehow willing oneself out of one’s melancholy.
This sounds very similar to the Christian sleight of hand
noted earlier by Žižek, i.e. replacing one’s terror with love
(non-understanding with transcendence, essentially another
version of non-understanding). So even Cavell’s formulation
of philosophy’s task, via Nietzsche, Emerson, and Thoreau,
turns out to be an outpost of old oppressions after all.
But after establishing his own transcendentalist ground,
Cavell very startlingly equates the diminishment of melan-
choly with justice and not a transcendence of (desiring) it.
Whereas Žižek says that philosophizing has always been
about occupying the interstices between communities,
Cavell highlights
philosophy’s ancient perception of the distance of
the world from a reign of justice ... This distance,
or discrepance, is the world’s public business, now
on a global stage. I hope nothing will stop it from
becoming the principal business of the twen-
ty-first century. But it is, on my view, while a task
that philosophy must join in together with every
serious political and economic and, I would say,
therapeutic theory, not now philosophy’s peculiar
task ...
Philosophy’s peculiar task now – that which will
not be taken up if philosophy does not take it up –
is, beyond or before that, to prepare us, one by one,
for the business of justice, and to train itself for
the task of preparation by confronting an obstacle,
perhaps the modern obstacle, to that business. I
mean a sense of the exhaustion of human possibility,
following the exhaustion of divine possibility.23
What is so startling is that Cavell makes a case for transcen-
dence and justice, whereas we are conditioned to believe
that we pursue the transcendence of real world injustices
that we cannot, for whatever reason, hope to address, or see
redressed, in our lifetimes. Cavell wants us to move closer
to justice, and Žižek would rather we take a step back. We
have Žižek’s insistence on the cool rationality of the inter-
stice versus Cavell’s insistence on moods. Cavell says that the
discrepancy between our perception of injustice and the hope
for the manifestation of justice is the “world’s public busi-
ness, now on a global stage.” He is not making a case for the
interstice; he is arguing for its reduction. But Žižek says that
Kant’s “public use of Reason” works precisely to “extract”
the individual from one’s communal ties; reason, that is, has
no use for moods, which can only be expressed subjectively.
“Possibility” lies either in the exhausted subjective search for
localized visions of justice, the overcoming of melancholia, or
in the “measured” reach for transnational objective reason. In
the former conception of philosophy and its aims, the subjec-
tive articulation of justice is the only hope for philosophy at
70 cineaction
all; in the latter, “justice” could only be a dirty word, articu-
lated as a “big Other” merely, requiring debunking. But how,
indeed, is such continual debunking to affect the mood of the
populace – I mean, how is such continual debunking liber-
ating? If all we are destined to continually discover is that our
conceptions of justice are merely tied to some “big Other,”
what have we committed to?
Moreover, Cavell does not say that it is the business of
philosophy to address the discrepancy between the percep-
tion of injustice and the manifestation of justice, but, rather,
to prepare the soul to want to address our seemingly endless
inability to achieve justice in the first place, which requires
not relegating such local concerns to amorphous and ambig-
uous spaces known as “interstices,” the formulation and
conception of which does more to douse any burning desire
to reach for justice in the first place. Žižek’s interstices, and
even Kant’s realm of ends, so conceived, is precisely the
realm of exhaustion, of zero possibilities. The fixation (even
“obsession”) on such spaces is what is disturbing, and the
camera, left to its own devices, routinely buttresses this fixa-
tion. What we do not know that we know in watching films
like The Unknown Known and The Act of Killing is that we are
committed to impersonal, and mythical, interstitial spaces
made manifest by the camera specifically. We tell ourselves
that justice indubitably manifests itself there rather than
face the terrifying reality that we no longer know where, or
care, to look.
Rumsfeld is fixated certainly. Morris asks Rumsfeld if he
feels he shapes history or is shaped by it. Rumsfeld responds
saying “neither,”24 asserting that to be shaped by history is
(for him) to be a failure (at his given position, say). But he
doubly recognizes that no individual can possibly hope to
shape history. He is certainly expressing his own relation-
ship to some big Other, trying both to implicate himself
within history and extract himself from it simultaneously.
Rumsfeld knows not where to look. Saddam is not a “local”
fixation, but precisely an interstitial, rational, fixation. To
Rumsfeld, the camera of all things ought to bring this to bear.
***
T
he true documentarian chases the unknown in order
to prepare us for the business of justice, rather than
assume – as this film, The Act of Killing, does – that
simply by pointing a camera, we have done our duty and
justice will reveal itself. For instance, what are we supposed
to be surprised at? That the act of killing can be under-
taken so easily, or that the act of killing can be re-presented so
easily? Perhaps it is easy to be wary of this film, to cynicize
it in a way because what else have those who reveal them-
selves and their shortcomings onscreen become but another
commodity? – as though their cravenness for fame, to
become commodifiable, so easily translates into some sort
of documented tell-all because to speak of horrors is still to
speak of something. And to have a voice in the cacophonous
noise that is consumer culture, to be given the opportunity
to be consumed, whatever the message, is the ultimate prize
in the West.
But such a critique seems pertinent only in the West.25
It has no place in Indonesia. So the humanity of Anwar’s
final breakdown before the camera cannot be acknowledged by
the West, or, say, by Western sensibilities because Westerners
have been trained to consume such drama as commodity.
That is, we can only pity Anwar or hold him responsible,
and both responses are grotesque. Where is my proof? My
proof comes in the fact that it is inconceivable to imagine
a Western war criminal like Robert McNamara or Donald
Rumsfeld enacting the carnage they committed. Now you
will say that it is indeed so inconceivable because neither
McNamara nor Rumsfeld actually faced their victims, never
put the wire to their throats. But that doubly reinforces my
point; not only is it inconceivable to imagine them on the
field with those whom they have murdered (and why not?
Because they didn’t actually “murder,” i.e. commit the “act
of killing” that the brutes in this film clearly did), but it is
doubly inconceivable, even if they had, that they would be
naïve or moronic enough to film themselves recreating
the scenes of horror they had taken part in and expect to
come off scott-free. I mean, the colossal stupidity not of
the act itself, but the re-enactment. The naiveté of Anwar
Congo and Herman Koto in particular, the sheer honesty
of their acts of killings, comes not in their idiotic imitation
of American gangsters they so admired, but in their belief in
the power of the silver screen to depict legends (like Bogart,
Humphrey, and Cagney), never undo them.
Which brings me back to the humanity of Anwar
Congo’s final breakdown, to which we are made privy. What
are we supposed to feel here? That some sort of karma has
indeed come full circle? That those who commit acts of
The Act of Killing
killing, even those brazen enough to re-enact such acts,
will necessarily be haunted by the grotesqueness of those
acts? I remain unconvinced and find myself sceptical of
what the documentarians are aiming at in the film’s final
twenty minutes. They seem cornered into making a morality
play. Anwar is certainly not to be admired, nor pitied, for his
humanity. But it is equally grotesque to hold him respon-
sible. So from where does his humanity emanate?
It emanates only from his sincere and astonishingly
stupid belief in the power of cinema to redeem, the type
of naïveté that propagandists in the West are well apprised
of and willing to exploit – in their matchless and relentless
quests to conquer the imagistic through staged photo-ops,
scripted town halls and political speeches, all delivered
on set and on queue – where everything from lighting, to
backdrop, to tie colour is chosen beforehand as a means
to manipulate and deceive openly and knowingly. We are so
desensitized to the propagandistic elements of images (we
in the “visually literate” West) that we cannot recognize
that the humanity of Anwar’s willingness to re-present his
crimes comes via his complete candidness before the camera,
the sort of candidness any Westerner knows better than to
perform onscreen. The Act of Killing completes the colo-
nization process. First, have brown hands do the killing;
then consume their fixation and avoid our own,26 which,
arguably, is the same fixation: amorphous or interstitial
conceptions of justice rendered fully on film (i.e. film as
necessarily offering some “big Other” type of “interstitial”
or “rational” guarantee). Oppenheimer’s film achieves this
avoidance. Why is Anwar Congo on trial before us? The
film does not say, as if its business is precisely not to say.
The Act of Killing is averse to documenting a stand, as
though justice requires such aversion lest justice become
cineaction 71
 propaganda. But it is this faux-disinterested stance of
justice that is propagandistic. The modus operandi of such
documentary confessionals is simply to film the culprits
and hope for the best. Like Anwar and Rumsfeld, we too
believe the redemptive powers of the screen will somehow
work its magic, will magically fill the empty interstice (with
moral instruction to boot), with the added cowardice of
not facing up to our own (Western) atrocities, all the while
consuming others only too willing to do so in our stead. We
are merely going through the moral motions first carried
out long ago by Conrad – peering into, though unable to
address or rectify, some grotesque heart of darkness. But
unlike in Conrad, what is here on display is not our impo-
tence or lack of seriousness in seeking any sort of redress,
but, much more cynically, the moral perturbations of some
pathetic colonized man acting at the behest of his white
Notes
1 The Unknown Known, directed by Errol Morris (History Films:
2013).
2 The Act of Killing, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (Piraya
Film: 2013).
3 The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, directed by Sophie Fiennes
(BFI: 2012).
4 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 2001), 138.
5 Ibid.
6 Cited in Stanley Cavell, “The Future of Possibility,” in
Philosophical Romanticism, ed. Nikolas Kompridis (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 21.
7 Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America
(Chicago: Chicago UP, 1989).
8 My emphasis; Emerson qtd. in Cavell, “Future,” 22.
9 My emphasis; Cavell, “Future,” 22.
10 The full quotation by Rumsfeld: “Reports that say that some-
thing hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because
as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we
know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that
is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But
there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don’t know
we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our
country and other free countries, it is the latter category that
tend to be the difficult ones.” U.S. Department of Defense
News Transcript, February 12, 2002. <http://www.defense.gov/
transcripts/transcript.aspx? transcriptid=2636>
11 His emphasis; Slavoj Žižek, “Philosophy, the “Unknown
Knowns,” and the Public Use of Reason,” Topoi 25 (2006): 137.
12 Quotation begins at approximately sixty-fourth minute of
Pervert.
13 Quotations here begin at approximately the sixty-fifth minute
of Pervert.
14 Žižek, “Philosophy,” 142.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 140, 141.
17 Ibid., 142.
18 Quotations here begin at approximately the fifth minute of
the film, Unknown.
19 Quotations here begin at approximately the ninety-third
minute of the film, Unknown.
20 Quotations here begin at approximately the ninety-fourth
minute of the film, Killing.
72 cineaction
superiors, from the cinema and elsewhere. The truly cynical
thing, indeed, is that the film poses, or acts as if, redress is
actually something it is interested in – though in the end, we
see it has nothing much to offer other than going through
perfunctory moral protestations for the sake of reiterating
the misguided notion that justice comes from some objec-
tive space that only a disinterested camera could hope to
capture, thereby betraying its reliance on an unhealthy
Western fixation on impersonal “interstices” – truly another
dangerous ideological big Other. Put simply: this film and
others like it reinforce not the diminishment of injustice
and the discovery of redress, but their further deferral. At
the end of his film Errol Morris asks Donald Rumsfeld,
“Why are you talking to me?” to which Rumsfeld replies,
“I’ll be darned if I know.” We should be asking ourselves the
same question – namely, why are we watching? 27
21 Žižek, “Philosophy,” 140.
22 Cavell, “Future,” 27.
23 Ibid., 26-27.
24 At approximately the ninety-second minute of the film,
Unknown.
25 Several films which come to mind immediately include Hitman
Hart: Wrestling with Shadows (1998), Beyond the Mat (2000),
Tyson (2008), and The Armstrong Lie (2013), all of which
showcase the downfall of once prominent elite professional
athletes. We can no longer consume their success; try now to
consume their failure.
26 A critique of Clifford Geertz’s “thick-description ethnogra-
phy” is pertinent here. The methodology Geertz promotes
is to extrapolate from certain localized customs far-ranging
anthropological cultural truths. The problem is that readings
of local examples are often too hastily perceived as cultural
universals. Geertz, for instance, reads Balinese cockfights as
providing Indonesians with a “vocabulary of sentiment [that
includes] – the thrill of risk, the despair of loss, the pleasure
of triumph.” Yet as Vincent P. Pecora points out, nowhere
in Geertz’s topical analysis of Indonesian society does he
discuss either the “American involvement [in the coup] nor
Indonesia’s wholesale swing to a pro-Western orientation.”
Neither, for that matter, does The Act of Killing. See Clifford
Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Selected Essays (New
York: Basic Books, 1973), 28, 449; and Vincent P. Pecora, “The
Limits of Local Knowledge,” in The New Historicism, ed. H.
Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 258.
27 A question I have left breached is how documentaries which
Nichols would classify as “expository” address injustice. How
effective, that is, is Sophie Fiennes’s film on the thought of
Žižek in addressing injustice? Because it lectures, rather than
documents, one is not fooled into objectivity; one knows,
clearly, one is dealing with a subjectivity, i.e. Žižek’s. The test
of this film is whether it manages to capture the gist of Žižek’s
thought successfully. I believe it does. Though it too defers
questions of justice, making it worthy of the same critique I
am levelling at the other two films, it presupposes and some-
what prescribes struggle. Justice is not necessarily nigh.
Simply by watching the film, we may, indeed, be no closer to
justice. On the other hand, in films like The Unknown Known
and The Act of Killing, there is no struggle. We have done our
duty in the watching alone.