Colonialism, Decadence and Orientalism: Problematizing Southeast Asian Cinema and Literature

Copyright © 2010 by Chester B Cabalza. All Rights Reserved.

“Three months afterwards Don Jacinto, straight as a lance, his blue eyes sparkling, his hair like young maize, was the cynosure of attention in the drinking houses and drawing rooms in the Walled City and the object of adoring glances from senoritas in the vicinity of the Guardia Civil barracks in Cabildo. His manners and education had won him a lieutenant’s commission in the service of Queen Isabela.” - Written by F. Sionil based from the Short Story (The Heirs)

Southeast Asian cinema and literature have always been an orientalist discourse. This is because Southeast Asian societies have been colonized by western powers for the longest time. The Philippines was the first country in the ‘Orient’ and the world to suffer from western colonialism through the Spanish conquistadors and later by the Americans. The Portuguese went to dominate the Spice Island. While the Dutch captured what was known as Batavia which the colonizers concocted as an ‘imagined community’ now called Indonesia, the largest archipelago and Muslim populated country in the world. The British ruled from Malaya to Burma through the British East India Company and the French reigned throughout what was known as the ‘French Indo-China’.

Stories of colonialism, decadence and orientalism in cinema and literature have been apparent in written and visual artifacts of this most diverse region [Southeast Asia] in the world. Furthermore, Southeast Asia is emphatically a heaven of heterogenous cultures and languages.

Themes bring us face to face with questions of power, ideology, truth and decadence and situates us at the center of some vital and invigorating debates taking within the domain of modern cultural studies. Much of the dilemmas and conflicts in Southeast Asian cinema and literature also narrate personal or communal issues, whether they are moral, ethical or economic.

Cinema and literature as artforms in Southeast Asia are well-loved in the region and the world as well. Cinema is not indigenous form of entertainment in Southeast Asia however, before long, this imported western artform was able to sink roots in the national soil and the conciousness of the people to assume the status of a national art. At the same time, literature represents a language or a people: culture and tradition. But all in all, literature is more important than just a historical or cultural artifact. Literature introduces us to new worlds of experience.

I tried to look at cinema and literature in Southeast Asia because both artforms compliment each other. Both are powerful tools to rekindle the depth of cultures. Cinema and literature are universals. Although, culture is shared (Kotak, 1991:144), still all cultures have divisive as well as unifying forces. Afterall, culture deals with universals, generalities and uniqueness. Hence, in Vietnam and Indonesia the roles of culture and cinema are very important and symbiotic that it contribute to the nation-building (Charlot, 2003).

For instance, poetry [literature] is at the center of Vietnamese culture and sensibilities, and cinema cannot be divorced from it. Although, poetic sense separates their creations clearly from conventional socialist realism. Poetry and musical lyrics are in fact often central elements in Vietnamese cinematic plots and scenes (Charlton, 2003:116). This was apparent in the film, Fairy Tale for 17-Year Olds, where a young girl reveals her feelings while reciting a poem in class. The story is about a girl who escapes into fantasies about a young soldier at the front, while her family and friends, urge her to face reality. The soldier is killed, but his last letter expresses his gratitude for her love for him.

Objective

My paper aims to study the narrative conventions and thematically problematic discourses that prevail in Southeast Asian cinema and literature notably stories presented by filmmakers and creative writers and its impact in each country’s society and culture.

Methodology and Framework of Analysis

The research methodology for this paper is basically textual analyses about written documents on various case studies on Southeast Asian feature films that impacted to the society and examples of literary works [short stories, novels and poems] written by fictionists and poets in the region, thus dissecting ‘dramaturgical perspective’ based from the themes of colonialism, decadence and orientalism.

Dramaturgical perspective, first coined by Erving Goffman, is one of the several sociological paradigms separated from sociological theories because it does not examine the cause of human behavior but the context. In this sense, dramaturgy is a process which is determined by consensus between individuals. At the same time, dramaturgy emphasizes expressiveness as the main component of interactions.

Furthermore, in Annette Hamilton’s (2003) analysis on Thai cinema, she attributed this paradigm by alluding that Thailand is an example of Dramaturgical Society based from varying structures of recognizable narrative and performance, some of which are based on much older forms and others of which are a product of the more recent events.

Colonialism in Southeast Asian Cinema and Literature

One of the major themes that are problematized in Southeast Asia’s cinema and literature is colonialism. Colonialism (Disssaanayake, 2003) is a form of violence and domination, a state of mind, a cultural practice, a multivalent discourse, and an ideology of expansion. Meanwhile, some countries in Southeast Asia have been recovering from a traumatic experience of colonialism, that has affected not only the minds of the Southeast Asians, but also their languages, cultures and lifestyles (Salleh, 1996).

Asian cinema is increasingly attracting the attention of film critics, scholars of cinema, and specialist in cultural studies. Numerous thematizations closely associated with the growth of cinema are being explored from diverse theoretical vantage points. Wimal Dissanayake (2003) scrutinizes the work of an illustrious Filipino director to understand the effects of colonialism from an Asian perspective and this is what he has to say:

“A filmmaker like the late Lino Brocka of the Philippines sought to demonstrate that the façade of a totalizing and consensual nationhood is maintained at the cost of repressing and silencing the dispossessed. In Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim (My Country: Clutching the Knife), Brocka textualizes the numerous economic and social problems encountered by the workers in the context of an authoritarian nationhood. He juxtaposes the private and public agonies of the downtrodden to dramatically underscore how one cannot be understood in isolation from the other. He effectively uses film clips from the people’s power revolution taking place in the streets to enforce this point. It is Brocka’s intention to bring out into the open the false unity of the nation-state and enforced through diverse strategies of exclusion and repression”.

In fact, cinema in most Southeast Asian countries was brought by and immensely influenced by western colonists and powers. Like the cases of Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia wherein the elites or bourgeoisie classes became first patrons of the film industry. Hence, Christine Fugate (2003) in Annette Hamilton’s article on Dilemmas of Representation in Thailand summons the idea that the elites have a hand in filmmaking, thus classifying audiences or film viewers in Thai cinema as Bangkorians or the urban elites, provincial viewers and the foreign audience. Apparently, films are mostly made for the urban elites and the foreign audiences. Thus, affirming the dichotomy in Thai society as the ‘elite Bangkorians’ (khon muang luang) and everybody else (khon baan nork).

On the other hand in Southeast Asian creative writing, relfected in the post-colonial trauma are the themes, which delineate real experiences that must be faced, examples are by Malaysian writer, Keri Mas’ They Do not Understand and by Filipino leading fictionist, F. Sionil’s The Heirs that in a very subversive literary act deconstructs the colonial past through the watering down of the colonial blood, and leaving a stump of a human being at the end of the line.

Revolutionary novels of national hero Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo triggered the flame of Filipino revolution that gave birth to the first Republic in Asia. Hence, Rizal’s literary works achieved greater access through scholarly discourses throughout the entire [Malayan] archipelago and his life or works turned into popular and critical movies.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary Ho Chi Minh was literally and realistically suppressed with freedom in which he was even put into prison and suffered from the hands of French colonist and defeated the superpower United States. In his struggle for freedom, he expressed his feelings through poems. These are three examples of his works, which are short yet very expressive, during the colonization period of Vietnam:

Prison Meal

At every meal, only bowl of red rice,
Without vegetables, without salt, and even no broth
to go with it
Those who get food brought in to them can sometimes
eat their fill.
But without help from outside the jail we groan with
hunger.


Autumn Night

In front of the gate, the guard stands with his rifle.
Above, untidy clouds are carrying away the moon.
The bed-bugs are swarming round like army-tanks on
maneuvers,
While the mosquitoes from squadrons, attacking like
Fighter-planes.
My heart travels a thousand li towards my native land.
My dream intertwines with sadness like a skein of a
Thousand threads.
Innocent, I have now endured a whole year in prison.
Using my tears for ink, I turn my thoughts into verses.


Listening to the Rice-Pounding

How much the rice must suffer under the pestle!
But, after the pounding, it comes out white like
cotton.
The same thing often happens to men in this world:
Misfortunes workshop turns into polished jade.

Decadence in Southeast Asian Cinema and Literature

Sexual pleasure within the western psyche is always associated with the notion of Original sin, within the Catholic psyche it retains the implication that the only perfect life is the celibate life, sex always has the overtones of sin and temptation (Sardar, 1999:6).

Films centering on sex and crimes (despotism) were and are box-office hits in most Southeast Asian cinematic historiography, incongruously, in a very conservative region.

Themes on sex have become prevalent in Southeast Asian cinema, thus Indonesia, being a pre-dominantly Muslim country, have issues on sexuality in movies where true kissing, handholding, and form-revealing clothing are prevalent in Indonesian films of the last decade (Heider, 2003). Furthermore, based from Thailand’s Act of Cinema of 1930, it prohibits feature films on notorious criminals, cold-blooded murder or execution, all that is sexually obscene, and films showing immoral behavior (Hamilton, 2003).

Thailand as a center for sex tourism and prostitution has been documented through films, example of which, is the native Thai artfilm like Jan Dara, directed by Nonzee Nimibutr made in 2001 which has become a hit among foreign audiences and international film critics. Jan Dara is an adaptation of a Thai novel set between the world wars and the subject matter might be argued to mirror pre-existing perceptions of Thailand as a site of sexual decadence. In Thailand, the film was controversial because of its sex scenes tested that the censorship bounds of the 1930 Film Act.

In this controversial, erotic and period plot of Jan Dara, Jan is a young man growing up in 1930s Siam (Thailand) in a wealthy, dysfunctional family where sex has a huge impact on everyone’s lives. Jan Dara is viewed by his father, Khun Luang, as cursed, since his mother died in childbirth and discreetly raped by a gangster. The abusive Luang is a womanizer who has sex with many woman in front of the portrait of his late wife. The younger sister of Jan’s mother, Aunt Waad, is brought in to care for Jan. Later on, Luang has sexual relations with her, which causes young Jan to be jealous, since he has developed feelings for Waad. But Waad and Luang have a daughter, who is the apple of Luang’s eye. Then, another of Khun Luang’s women, the sophisticated nymphomaniac Boonlueang, moves into a guesthouse on the estate, and she taught Jan his first lessons in the ways of love. Then, Jan is framed for the rape of his half-sister Kaew, who was having relations with the son of one of the family’s maids. But it is Jan who ends up punished for Kaew’s transgressions. It emerges that Kaew is pregnant. To smooth over the damage to the family’s reputation, Jan is asked to return to the family’s estate and is forced into an arranged marriage with his half-sister Kaew. He does so, as long as he’s promised the deed to the estate, which he views as a vindication against his father for the abuse he endured from him during his childhood. Kaew, meanwhile, enters into a lesbian relationship with Boonlueang. Further, she refuses to have the baby she’s carrying, and with Boonlueang’s assistance, performs a bloody, self-administered abortion. Jan subsequently finds himself repeating the libidinous patterns of his father, going as far as having sex with a maid in his father’s sitting room, in front of the portrait of his mother. Jan wonders why he can’t escape the cycle of sexual abuse started by his father. At the end, it was revealed to him that his father’s sexual decadence was the product of a gang rape of his mother.

Other Hollywood movies that use Thailand as backdrops having exotic landscapes, verdant nature, serene sensuality and explosive cuisine are The Beach (2000), Bridget Jones 2: The Edge of Reason (2004), among others.

In the Philippines, the period of ‘bomba’ films became popular in 70’s where sexual penetration is rampant. Now most Filipino films dwell on migration and overseas labors showing Filipino hardships and loneliness in foreign lands like commercial as well as critical full-length movies such as Anak (2000), Milan (2004), and Dubai (2005). These films aspire values such as hope and perseverance, having been mired in a situation of abject poverty from which there appears to be no easy solution. Today, according to the Philippine government’s own 2003 Family Income and Expenditure Survey, 68 million Filipinos live on only Php96 and less a day (as cited in Ibon Media, 2007b), which amounts to roughly US$2. Wealth is distributed inequitably. Whereas 53% of the combined annual income of all Filipinos is concentrated in the richest 20% of the population, the income of the poorest 20% comprises only 4.63% of the total (Ibon, 2007a). Similarly, the net worth of the richest 10% is equivalent to the combined annual income of the poorest 9.8 million households (Ibon, 2007c). Worse, as of 2007, there are estimated to be 86.794 million Filipinos, a figure that continues to grow at an alarming rate of around 2.35% each year. With unemployment at 7.8% of the eligible labor force and underemployment at 21.5%, about 10.5 million Filipinos are either unemployed or underemployed (National Statistics Office, 2007).

In Anak, Josie (Vilma Santos), the main character, is a domestic helper in Hong Kong who has been away from her family in the Philippines for six years. When she finally arrives home, she is a stranger to her children. Her youngest, Michael and Daday, fetch her at the airport but she fails to recognize them. Despite the length of their separation, they are not exactly overjoyed to see her and instead act shy towards her. In fact, Daday is frightened of her at first and hides behind her brother Michael and her aunt, Josie’s sister who has played surrogate mother to her children. On the other hand, Josie’s eldest daughter, Carla (Claudine Barretto), appears to harbor some deep resentment towards Josie and treats her insolently. There are many things Josie does not know about them. One of her gifts to Michael is a pair of basketball shoes when Michael’s lone sport is actually chess. In addition, she tries to serve Daday eggs for breakfast only to be told that her daughter is allergic to eggs. Carla criticizes her mother for not knowing her family because she was away in Hong Kong while they were growing up. She curtly asks when Josie will leave again and angrily remarks that she should not even bother calling them her children since she will forget about her and her siblings once she leaves again.

In Milan, The protagonist Lino (Piolo Pascual), leaves his idle life in the Philippines behind to search for his pretty young wife Mary Grace, who has relocated to Milan for work but no longer replies to his letters. Upon arriving at the train station in Milan, he tries reaching Mary Grace’s uncle by phone but cannot communicate without any knowledge of Italian. His pleas for assistance rudely rejected, he becomes bewildered and desperate. He does not know anyone else in Italy, except for the seemingly snobbish Jenny (Claudine Barretto), whom he first encounters on the train and initially mistakes for an Italian but who is actually a Filipino willing to help. When Lino is brought to the apartment Jenny shares with other Filipinos, he stands at the doorway frozen. Although he is witness to the cordial interactions between Jenny and her housemates, he is unable to participate in their lives as migrant workers. Unlike them, who have relocated to Milan to strive for a better life, he has gone there out of a self-serving motive, to plug the aching absence left by his wife. This is probably the same reason why Lino would rather spend his days loafing around instead of working hard. While his childishness may be the main obstacle to his financial survival in both Manila and Milan, however, it is his childlike naiveté that allows him to appreciate the beauty of Italy, which his Filipino compatriots have so far disregarded due to their hectic lives.

In Dubai, bosom brothers Raffy (Aga Mulach) and Andrew (John Lloyd Cruz) have been apart for nine years. They are reunited when Andrew relocates to Dubai, Raffy’s home for the past decade, so that the brothers can finally realize their lifelong dream of migrating to Canada. Andrew starts off as a tourist, spending his early days exploring the different parts of the city. At first, Dubai seems like an alien, exotic land as the film opens with shots of golden sand dunes extending to the horizon and a long, desolate highway that cuts through them. In attempting to convince Andrew that Dubai is a wonderful place to stay, however, Raffy and his Filipino friends enthusiastically describe it as a progressive, crime-free city where Filipinos are treated well. According to them, Dubai is more open than other Arab states in that residents can have picnics by the beach and drink alcohol with a permit. In fact, Andrew ends up meeting Faye (Claudine Barretto), the brothers’ common love interest in the film, when his mistaken assumption that is Dubai is as dangerous as Manila impels him to return to her the bag she left on the public bench by the river.

Overseas Filipinos have already reached eight million in number. They include what the Asian Development Bank calls permanent migrants, those who have obtained permanent residency, landed immigrant status, or even foreign citizenship, and whose stay in another country is not dependent on work contracts (2004, p. 3). An NGO based in the Netherlands, the Commission for Filipino Migrant Workers, says that among the Filipinos living abroad, 32% would fall under this category (“Surviving Europe,” 2004). They also encompass both the temporary migrants commonly referred to as Overseas Filipino Workers or OFWs, whose stay is determined by a formal or informal contract of employment and who comprise 40% of all overseas Filipinos; and the undocumented irregular migrants, who have no passport or documents like work permits or residency papers or who have overstayed (ADB, 2004, p. 4). The latter constitutes the remaining 26.6% (“Surviving Europe,” 2004). For this reason, the larger term Overseas Filipino should not be confused with Overseas Filipino Worker, which is the Philippine government’s preferred designation for the migrant workers who submit themselves to its strictly regulated system of recruitment, training, and deployment and are extolled as the new national heroes for the remittances they send home.

On the other hand, sexual decadence is also true with Southeast Asian literature like this short story written by a Filipino fictionist, entitled Pina, which is about the sexual awakening of an impoverished lass with his American boyfriend (a western exploitation). Here power becomes an ingredient of exoticism. And exoticism/orientalism justified both the exploitation of Asian people and their political subjugation. Below is the excerpt of Pina’s sexual awakening:

“That afternoon Sammy [American boyfriend] brought Pina to his luxurious hotel room…he approached her and embraced her tightly. Their bodies stuck together and she felt a growing hardness inside Sammy’s pants, pressing insistently against her belly… Ahhh! What was this? Her body convulsed in flame, her hips jerking upward as his tongue slithered out of her mouth, and his lips glided down to her breasts, kissing, nibbling, sucking one then the other alternately, streaking them with saliva…”

In Thailand the commercial success of gangster movies modeled after the popular Hong Kong genre dominated the scene in Thai cinemas. Westerners who see these despotic changes in Asian societies through movies can be paralleled to the opinion of Sardar where he wrote that Oriental despotism was a product of the absence of institutions of civil society without which it was not possible to break free from feudalism. The absence of civic society not only promoted Oriental despotism, it also ensured that Asian societies could not develop economically.

This is not divorced in most literary works in the region, especially in Thailand based from the short story entitled, We Lived Here…In the Same Soi, written by Vanich Charoongkij-anant, translated into English by Sermsuk Hussein.

“My house is located in a Soi, one of the countless thousand of lanes in the forever densely-populated Bangkok…In this Soi there are also drug pushers and drug addicts. The latter include people who are addicted to pain killers, cannabis, opium and even pain thinner. There are also big thieves and petty thieves and all those whose specialisation is centered around stealing…”

Meanwhile, decadence synonymously looks at poverty and depravity of societies and human interactions. In a poem entitled Twilight at a Little Harbor [translated by Burton Raffel and Nurdin Salam] written by an Indonesian poet, Chairil Anwar looks the theme of poverty in the urban jungles of Jakarta that coats his feelings with bleak emotions, thus this has led him to rethink his journey and return to his melancholic and impoverished coastal hometown in Sumatra.

Pondering, pondering on you dear…

It’s Sunday morning, here. The excitement
of the pushing, crowded city, heaping problems
onto problems – whether spinning or spun –
seems to have quieted down; we’re lying in bed, naked
We’re out of words, now, we’ve said it all, before,
in the darkness.

There’s no one else. I’m alone. Walking.
combing the cape, still drowning the hope
of just once getting to the end of it and saying goodbye to
everything
from the forth beach, where the last sob could be hugged tightly
to me


Orientalism in Southeast Asian Cinema and Literature

Orientalism is thus constructed ignorance, a deliberate self-deception, which is projected on the Orient (Sardar, 1999:444). This racism and ethnocentrism was what Said termed ’Orientalism.' Past studies had only served as credence for the west to assert its dominance over the east, Said suggested.

Textual analysis based from J.C. Koch’s novel and Peter Weir’s adapted movie in the same title, The Year of Living Dangerously, present cultural sensitivities that may be categorized as exotic and oriental by western writers and filmmakers.

Early in the novel, Billy Kwan discusses the wayang with Guy. Here is the excerpt from the novel:

“Did you see my wayang puppets?…If you want to understand Java, Ham, you’ll have to understand the wayang. Look at Bima, here-he’s a bit crude and kasar, although he’s a goodie. See the round, staring eyes? Like a Westerner. But the more aristocratic heroes, like his brother Prince Arjuna-they’re alus types. That means refines; courteous…They look into the ground because it’s kasar [crude] to stare into people’s faces. And they have almond eyes, see?” (Koch 81-82).

In the movie version, several dialogues capture this fear and orientalist view as Billy doubted Guy and says, “you have changed: you are capable of betrayal. I sense the invasion of Durgas anger in you: she turns time into sleep, and love into lust, and life into death: The Black One, the dancer in the burial ground”
Guy confronts Billy while Billy who at that time plays like a god and puts his friend to test, “I put you on course; I made you see things; I gave you the woman I loved, who loved you, who is carrying your child; she needed all you understanding, all your constancy. I created you…”

At the end of the story, the narrator passes judgment on the story and says, “the struggle of the right and left never ends, because neither side is wholly bad or good”.

In those texts, following the disposition of Sardar, it can be inferred about the symbolism of orientalism: the violent and barbaric Muslim male and the sensual, passive female, come together to represent the perfect Orient of Western perception: they fuse together to produce a concrete image of sexuality and despotism and thus inferiority.

Meanwhile, Thai royalty has also been favorite subjects among western plays and movies. This is notable in plays like The King and I that has been turned into feature film entitled, Ana and the King.

One of the provisions in the Act of Cinema of 1930 is forbidding Thai filmmakers to create movies showing acts of lese majeste. In other words, the sacralization of Thai Royal family is given importance in this pre-dominantly Mahayana Buddhist society in Southeast Asia.

Since the Thai royalty has been part of the rich Thai culture and society, it could not be divorced from common Thai people particularly western fimmakers to devote creative as well as critical ideas on how to portray their revered king and his family through relevant art like cinema that represents their daily spiritual, cultural and political lives.

This kind of reverence and high respect attributed to the Thai Royal Family is regarded as special for many Thai people. But what if foreign cultures or ‘outsiders’ like Hollywood portrays their king differently from an orientalist perspective, fleshing out the human side of the deva-raja such as in the plays “The King and I” that became a classic stage play for avant-garde western theater viewers. Hence, the issue of “orientalism” or “exoticism” depicting oriental cultures, viewed and consumed by occidental culture, is vivid in this portrayal. From play, it has also been turned into a major Hollywood production and to animation. This production caused so much hysteria and criticisms from people within the Thai royalty and Thai society. On the other hand, Thai authorities even blocked the showing of the movie to give what is due for the longest reigning monarch in the world.

Apparently, in the article written by Annette Hamilton on “Dilemmas of Representation in Thailand”, she chronicled the fondness of the royalty as well as the Bangkorian elites about foreign movies (farang) in which the first foreign film in Bangkok was even showed in Prince Alangkard Theater. This fondness stretched back to early days of filmmaking, when King Chulalongkorn's 1897 visit to Berne, Switzerland was recorded by Francois-Henri Lavancy-Clarke. The film was then brought to Bangkok, where it was exhibited. This sparked more interest in film by the Thai Royal Family and local businessmen, who brought in filmmaking equipment and started to exhibit foreign films.

Now the problem is, are there really dilemmas in the representation of Thai Royal Family in Thai Cinema especially if this sacred institution is well-revered? Is it really a taboo to document the lives of the king and his family through cinema and ‘mass media’? From an orientalist standpoint, there are dilemmas for royal families who truly support the Thai film industry but do not want their significant lives to be documented for the consumption of hungry Thai society and the avid world viewers as well.

Meanwhile, Asian women have also become favorite themes like in Miss Saigon and Heaven and Earth. Here, John Charlot (2003) narrates that the suffering of women is depicted as the most powerful means of presenting that of the people as a whole (where women occupy central roles in all Vietnamese features).

Conclusion

Themes on colonialism, decadence and orientalism in cinema, prose and poetry [literature] by Southeast Asian artists and writers as well as western critics and scholars of Southeast Asia are variants of taste and imagery or representation.

Decadence externalized through poverty can be seen when people [from developing or poor countries] become migrant workers to search for better opportunities in other countries. Parting with their families unwillingly, they struggle to subsist in an alien and at times hostile land, a harrowing experience that the others back home can never fully comprehend.

Orientalism, as Said maintains, consists of nothing but representation which has little to do with ‘real Orient’, how was it possible for this imaginary construction and its knowledge to be put in the service of real imperialism, colonial conquest, occupation and administration?

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