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Ferdy murder case: Supra-power and turn back cops
Indeed, actors or agents raised in a corrupt system stand a great chance of gaining supra-power to co-opt the system.
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A TV screen displays footage of former police internal affairs chief Insp. Gen. Ferdy Sambo attending a closed-door questioning by ethics commissioners at the National Police headquarters, South Jakarta, on Aug. 25. Ferdy has been accused of the premeditated
murder of his aide-de-camp Brig. Nofriansyah Yosua Hutabarat in July. (Antara/M Risyal Hidayat)
T
he theme of corrupt police has been portrayed in the feature films of a variety of countries. Hollywood produced The Departed, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon (2006), and Bollywood made the famous film Zanjeer starring Amitabh Bachchan (1973). More recently, the Korean drama Taxi Driver went viral in 2021, based on a true story about a victim who was wrongly arrested by the police.
In Indonesia, it seems it remains a taboo to bring real stories related to corrupt state institutions onto the big screen, even though they relate to our daily lives. But in the last two months, we have been watching a reality show about such bad cops.
Former National Police Internal Affairs Division head Insp. Gen. Ferdy Sambo, along with his wife and aides, play the main and supporting characters in a drama-thriller genre film, a murder story with romance spices.
The first episode, which featured a shootout between two of Ferdy's aides, managed to dupe the audience into thinking about the supposedly accidental death of an aide named Brigadier Nopriansyah Yosua Hutabarat. But in the next episode, the audience finally found out that Yosua was executed by his commanding superior and other aides.
The reconstruction of the murder case on Wednesday was very much awaited like a premiere by the Indonesian audience, although the 78 scenes performed did not clarify the real motive behind the premeditated murder.
What we have seen from the reenactment of the murder case is like the “plot hole” in horror movies, in which there are often missing scenes that keep the audience curious until the end of the play.
The drama-thriller of the Ferdy case reenactment is an example of Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory, with the object of the story being the police institution.
