Using Bourdieu to understand perpetrators in The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence

Using Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary films about mass killings in Indonesia – The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) – as an entry point, this article explores how perpetrators remember the past and how it is interpreted by them in the present in relation to this
particular socio-historical context using a Bourdieusian approach. As represented in both films, perpetrators justified their killings as mechanisms of struggle; not only in order to accumulate cultural capital but also to reproduce ‘doxa’, which strengthens their dominant
position in the hierarchical fields of struggle. Silence as doxa creates conditions for perpetrators to be able to maintain and re-justify their acts as heroic. In contrast, as shown in the films, victims remain stigmatized as villains in the history of Indonesia. This article also
reveals the inequality of social positions influenced how perpetrators reinterpreted their memories of mass killings and how they survive as they grow older