1984’s The Killing Fields opens in 1973. While America is distracted by the growing Watergate scandal and the final battles of the Vietnam War, the nation of Cambodia descends into chaos. Civil War has broken out between the Cambodian National Army and the Khmer Rouge, a savage communist group led by Pol Pot. In its desire to return Cambodia to “year zero,” the Khmer Rouge targets anyone who is considered to be too educated or too urban.
Sent to cover the war, journalist Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) meets up with his translator, Dith Pran (played, in an Oscar-winning performance, by Haing S. Ngor). For two years, Schanberg covers the war in Cambodia, taking pictures of bombed out cities, dead Cambodians, and the bullying teenagers who seem to make up the majority of the Khmer Rouge’s membership. The Khmer Rouge’s leadership may claim to be creating an equal society but it’s hard not to notice that they act like gangsters, posing with their cigarettes and making a great show over deciding who will live and who will die. In 1975, when it becomes apparent that the Khmer Rouge have won the war, the press and the diplomats all prepare to evacuate. Sydney and his colleagues are able to return to their home countries. Dith Prain’s family escape but Dith Pran himself is left behind in Cambodia where, disguising himself as a disabled beggar, he witnesses the horrors of the Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero.
The Killing Fields is an accidental anti-communist film. Director Roland Joffe, produced David Puttnam, and screenwriter Bruce Robinson were all men in the left and, in the film, Sydney Schanberg puts the blame for the rise of the Khmer Rouge directly on the American bombing campaign of the early 70s. The film somehow has the audacity to end with John Lennon’s Imagine, a song that epitomized the worst excesses of the Khmer Rouge’s philosophy, playing over the end credits.
I’ll be the first to admit that the film probably does have a point about the bombing of Cambodia. The chaos that followed the bombing undoubtedly helped the Khmer Rouge to both organize and to bring in new recruits. In this film, the Khmer Rouge commanders love to show off their power because, as Cambodians, they had previously been made to feel that they had no control over their destinies. However, in the scenes with Dith Pran faces the horrors of the reeducation camps and discovers the fields full of skulls and other human remains, the viewer is reminded that it takes more than confusion to lead to this type of concentrated brutality. It takes a group of people brainwashed by a destructive ideology.
(How destructive was the Khmer Rouge’s Maoist philosophy? The Khmer Rouge’s plan was to return Cambodia to being an agricultural society, one where the State stood in for both family and religion. To do so, cities were razed. People who were considered to be intellectuals and free thinkers were tortured and executed. Doctors were murdered. Having bad eyesight was considered to be a sign of intelligence and, as such, people who wore glasses were specifically targeted. As Dith Pran says in the film, the Cambodians who survived were told that they no longer had families, friends, or beliefs. Now they were to only worry only about serving the organization, the Angkar.)
It’s the scenes of Dith Pran in Cambodia that drive home the powerful anti-communist message that the filmmakers were perhaps not aware that they were delivering. Haing S. Ngor was not a professional actor when he played Dith Pran. Instead, he was a gynecologist and an obstetrician who, after the Khmer Rouge came to power, pretended to be dumb to survive. Like Dith Pran, he was sent to a reeducation camp and he eventually escaped by making his way through the area that Dith Pran called “the Killing Fields.” Unlike Dith Pran, Ngor’s family did not survive. (After being sent to work on a rice farm, his wife died in childbirth.) In the film, when we see Dith Pran discovering the Killing Fields for the first time, we are witnessing Haing Ngor recreating the moment that he discovered them. The pain and the horror in his eyes is not only Dith Pran’s but also Haing Ngor’s and every other Cambodian who was forced to flee their country to escape the Khmer Rouge. The film may blame America for the rise of the Khmer Rouge but Ngor’s performance makes it clear that only the Khmer Rouge can be blamed for what happened after they came to power.
It’s a powerful film, though I do think I would be remiss not to mention that Al Rockoff, the photographer played by John Malkovich in the film, has been very critical of the way that the film depicts both Sydney Schanberg and a scene where the journalists attempt to make a phony passport for Dith Pran. Indeed, the scenes with Schanberg back in New York are considerably less compelling than the scenes of Dith Pran fighting to survive in Cambodia. When the film’s version of Rockoff accuses Schanberg of using Dith Pran’s tragedy to advance his own career, it’s hard not to agree with him.
The film was nominated for Best Picture of 1984 but lost to Amadeus. Dr. Ngor did win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, becoming the second non-professional (after Harold Russell for The Best Years of Our Lives) to do so. Ngor went on the appear in a handful of films before being murdered in 1996. Three members of a street gang were convicted of the murdering Ngor while attempted to rob him. (Ngor was shot when, after giving them his Rolex, he refused to surrender a locket that contained a picture of his late wife.) In 2009, Kang Kek lew, a Khmer Rouge official on trial for war crimes, claimed that Ngor’s murder was actually ordered by Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge.
The Killing Field was obviously meant to be primarily critical of American foreign policy but, intentionally or not, it has since proven itself to be one of the strongest anti-communist films ever made.
Through the Shattered Lens 