Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. xii, 255 pp. (Illustrations.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6155-8.
The moving image’s affinity with the spectral is at least as old as cinema, and just as global. In Asia, the strength of that bond—as evident in constant innovation in the horror genre—has not escaped notice. Introducing a recent edited volume, Ghost Movies in Southeast Asia and Beyond (Brill, 2016), Peter Bräunlein’s survey of the expanding literature gives a sense of its breadth, of Southeast Asia’s prominence in it, and of Thailand’s preponderance within that. However, at this busy academic intersection, efforts from the direction of film studies tend to still be contained by the horizon of “national cinema,” seldom straying beyond industrial-style productions; while those from the social sciences put films to illustrative purposes, describing sociological shifts whose proofs will always lie outside the frame. In neither strand is it common to find arguments that begin and end in reckonings with the aesthetic strategies of the most challenging artists.
Arnika Fuhrmann’s Ghostly Desires breaks those moulds, without forgetting the lessons they offer. Her book offers focused case studies, but includes a wide variety of genres—from mainstream transnational movies, through smaller art-house productions, to non-narrative video art and experimental documentary—providing a range that is likely to push film studies readers beyond their comfort zones. Exemplary works are examined on their own terms; each points to mindsets operative in contemporary Thai society and expressed in bourgeois institutional norms, without necessarily standing for general cultural or artistic trends. They are sequenced so as to open, and progressively mine, interpretive shafts revealing the cultural-historical underpinnings of a fairly recent, illiberal turn in Thailand’s public culture. Focusing on the period since the Asian financial crisis (1997–1998), Fuhrmann mobilizes works made with transnational markets and diverse audiences in mind, yet manages to define a contemporaneity utterly specific to the dysfunctional Thai polity in those two decades.
Fuhrmann is unafraid of abstraction, but explains herself thoroughly. Her prose rewards patient reading. Passing between formal analysis, nuanced contextualization, and confident interpretation, her argument is anything but linear, composed of loops and refrains that sustain and deepen the book’s central claims. She is most compelling when arguing through close treatments. The first, devoted to Nonzee Nimibutr’s romantic horror movie Nang Nak (1999), consolidates the historical backdrop for the study: the confluence of official discourses of moderation, national solidarity, and cultural recovery in the wake of the crisis, and the resulting inflections of gender norms (57–58). Thus, an exorcism scene, for all its appeals to a purportedly timeless but clearly “invented traditional femininity” (47), is shown to be the product of very contemporary struggles, in which such “truisms of Thainess” have come to gain “ascendancy over pluralist and egalitarian values” (71). Anachronism turns out to be fertile ground for filmmakers, but also for the critic.
At its philosophical crux, this is a study of how highly localized discourses of negativity, such as (old and new) “rhetorics of loss and injury,” have been on one hand deployed by conservative institutions devising illiberal new “modes of sexual regulation” (123), and at the same time hijacked or reclaimed, to critical and liberating ends, by artists. This contest locates the limits of Western liberalism—not just its geo-cultural thresholds, but its interplay with other ideals that absorb or prevail over it. Fuhrmann traces liberalism’s layered reflections in non-Western practices, whilst remaining alert to its mutations outside the legislative and political discourses tended by the state and mooted by activists. She likewise gives amplitude to “traditional” religious norms anchored outside Buddhism’s doctrinal mainstream, but which thrive in vernacular and popular cultures. A liberal might like to think, for instance, that we are all equal in death, but in the karmic economy of Thai Buddhism this is far from true. Death may be a mere way-station on the path to a more (or less) enlightened state of being; and even the hapless departed are fair game for moralists, as when the clergy prescribes meditation on female corpses to demonstrate the law of impermanence and the futility of desire. But as Fuhrmann argues, the discursive spaces engendered by such practices accommodate more than just preaching and negativity. The “deferral of detachment” also “provides a space of possibility, and the belatedness of desire … creates a domain for fantasy” (69). With a theoretical agility uncommon in Southeast Asian cultural studies, she shows how artists and filmmakers exploit this ambivalence.
Aside from burgeoning anthropological interest in media and mediumship, spectrality has also reared up as a more general, historiological condition, with the apparent demise of communism, and in attempts to reanimate internationalist ideals in the face of an unjust globalization. Again, Southeast Asia seems haunted by Cold War spectres, but it has largely fallen to artists and filmmakers to engage them in places where critical history, and historically informed criticism, remain dangerous pursuits. Their engagements range from cryptic allegory (such as the video installations of Singapore’s Ho Tzu Nyen) to documentary experiments in theatre and film (such as the reeanactments of Rithy Pan in Cambodia, or Joshua Oppenheimer in Indonesia). Thailand has been ably represented by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the region’s most celebrated auteur, whose roundly “hauntological” oeuvre has inspired social scientists and historically minded artists alike. His displacements of national history, by turns transnational and local, mobilize the everyday oral and folk idioms of Thailand’s Northeast, cultures less bound by national norms and imperatives than those of the capital. Fuhrmann follows Apichatpong into this dilated theatre—he is a key protagonist of the book—devoting subsequent chapters to the experiments of Araya Rasdjamrearnsook and Thunska Pansittivorakul, both pivotal artists working outside the capital who have received precious little scholarly attention.
Notwithstanding its compact subtitle, Ghostly Desires is about much more than Thai cinema. Fuhrmann pursues these diverse moving image-makers far beyond the nation’s moral-institutional architecture; and their “queering” of that architecture takes her far beyond the critical conventions of gender studies. This adventure confirms what any observer of contemporary Thailand, however engrossed in mainstream evidence, should know: that a genuinely progressive cultural politics, one that refuses to breathe the stifling atmosphere of bourgeois nationalism, has for years been practised there under the mantle of vanguard art. Meanwhile, the parochial culture industry lumbers on like a zombie, in thrall to self-serving elites and their now unashamedly despotic status quo.
David Teh
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 189-192