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.