In my freshman year of college I took a class in which we watched films, typically about a tense political time in history or a genocide, and discussed them. We also had to write response papers based on our findings. For one particular class, we watched The Act of Killing (2012) which follows the perpetrators of the Indonesian Mass Killings of 1865-1966 as they shamelessly recreated their atrocities. You watch as they shoot scenes of the killings they took part in and give detached director-like commentary on the massacre and how it should be portrayed. This is obviously a very difficult subject matter to tackle. However, there were several parts of the film that were undoubtedly funny. One perpetrator was featured in several scenes shirtless and screaming while playing the drums without any additional context. As was a natural response, during those scenes several of us laughed.
The movie ended and while we were usually dismissed to our discussion rooms, on this night we were held up by one of the T.A.s in our class. He ordered us to remain in our seats and then proceeded to chastise us for laughing in a 15 minute long diatribe. In this diatribe he called us immature and accused us of making light of such sensitive subject matter. Of laughing at the pain and killings of innocent people. He also went on to say that he “expected better” from a class our age. He then dismissed us to our individual discussion sections which I found no reprieve in because unfortunately, he was the T.A. for my section. In discussion, the berating continued as various students tried to explain that obviously we wouldn’t laugh at a genocide. That we had seen several movies at this point and had never laughed before because none of them were mockumentaries like this film. He, however, was hearing none of it and I left that night feeling a deep sense of shame. I also left with the understanding that I would never feel comfortable speaking in this discussion class again, effectively being silenced for the rest of the semester.
Shaming aside, I think he showed a fundamental misunderstanding of what I believe the film was trying to accomplish. The scenes function in the film was subversion, which in my opinion is the basis of comedy. When a comedian gets on stage to tell a story, what makes you laugh is the subversion they create with the story. Maybe it's the candor in which they tell a story that would normally garner a much different response. Maybe it’s an outsized reaction they had to a situation. Maybe it’s the fact that subconsciously, they are engaged in behavior you would not assign to someone like them (this phenomena was the basis of my comedy when I was an aspiring comic). But the point is that subversions in our world make us laugh and I believe the team who edited and released this film did so intentionally.
When you imagine the kind of person who could commit such an atrocity, you imagine a terrifying monster of sorts, who is untouchable and powerful. This is normal as their actions are unimaginable to the average person. What you don’t imagine is a man running around shirtless screaming as he bangs wildly on a drum set. This subversion brings this monster down to Earth as a man, fallible and conquerable, which removes some of the outsized power he had claimed for himself. It is the same reason why a musical like the Producers exists, to lampoon an otherworld image and make a fool of the man behind the atrocity. You’re supposed to laugh. If you don’t, nothing changes and those men remain great.
The reflection of shame was inspired by a video essay titled, “May December and the Melodrama of Film Twitter” by the always incredible Broey Deschanel on Youtube. In this video, there is a section in which the creator discusses how they defended people’s right to categorize May December (2023) as a comedy online and were subsequently shamed. Many of the responses took on the tone of “This is a serious matter. Anyone who could laugh at this is a messed up person”, assigning negative personal characteristics to people who laughed at a movie that had obvious and carefully crafted humorous moments into the film. Moments which were specifically placed on the shoulders of Julianne Moore’s character, Gracie. Which in my opinion, removes your ability to feel bad for her which honors the seriousness of her crimes.
The desire for perfect purity of thought and feeling is chipping away at our ability to understand the media we take in. This chipping ultimately hurts our ability to even understand the world around us, dulling our sense of nuance of response and thought. We’re given a plethora of media to consume from TV, to movies, to YouTube series but the array of “appropriate” responses to that media is very limited. Other’s perceptions of us have too much control over what we like and how we like it. If you watch reality tv and like a person most people hate, you must agree with everything that person does. You must be just like them. If you watch violent action movies you have to be violent, right? This fear of altering our perception in the eyes of others leads to the kind of self-policing that removes our ability to critically think. It’s why the worst actors in our society can get away so much. All they have to do is play on our shame and we’ll take care of the rest. Americans have dealt with this level of shame and self-policing for months now and I can’t help but wonder what conclusions we’d all come to if we were given the freedom to think.
Ultimately it is up to us to assign traits to people based on their actions, as opposed to their media. This is tricky however, because there are limits that I believe naturally form with content. If you consume media that has resulted from the direct, non-consensual suffering of another, you hold responsibility for that. Otherwise, you are what you do and NOT what you watch. The policing of people, especially those who are embarking on the journey of developing their personal understanding of the world, can only do harm to those people and to ourselves in the long run. Scared people are not curious people and knowledge slips through our fingers when we’re beholden to an unattainable goal of moral purity.