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[1]
The author would like to express his gratitude to Nirattisai
Kaljareuk, for granting an interview and supplying a
videotape of his subtitled print of the film; to Pornpun
Sungsilchai, for coordinating the interview and providing
interpretation; to Pornpisuth Osathanond, for likewise
coordinating and interpreting, as well as providing further
(and patient) explanations of aspects of Thai language and
culture; and to Chalida Uabumrungjit, for her helpful
suggestions on pursuing the study of Thai film. One of the most
startling groups of images in the visually arresting Thai
science fiction film Kawow tee Bangpleng (1994,
directed by Nirattisai Kaljareuk)[2]
occurs a few minutes after it opens, as a massive spacecraft
hovers over a Thai village, shining a beam which, we later
learn, is impregnating village women. During this sequence
the camera returns repeatedly to shots which pointedly
juxtapose the local Buddhist temple with the spacecraft; the
image of an ancient statue of Buddha with the craft visible
through windows behind it in particular stands as a striking
and fertile emblem for the film, forcing a negotiation
between Asian and alien, ancient and modern, static and
mobile. Alien images - in the sense of Hollywood film
products - are of course often found "framed" on Asian
screens just as the alien craft is framed in the temple's
windows, and one unsurprising corollary of the success of
these products in many Asian film markets has been the
importation of Western generic forms into Eastern film
production. In the popular cinemas of Hong Kong and India,
for example, it is not in the least unusual to see Hollywood
genre productions alluded to through a variety of means -
sometimes parody, sometimes wholesale (even unacknowledged)
borrowing. While on one level such borrowings would seem to
reassert the cultural hegemony of Western cinema, part of
what makes them of interest in the analysis of the cultural
dynamics of globalisation is how they often suggest the
appropriation of Western or global trends for specifically
Asian purposes, demonstrating a translation or reworking of
Hollywood generic forms to render them more germane to the
local context. [2]
The title is usually translated as Blackbirds at
Bangpleng. A more faithful (and germane) translation
sometimes used is Cuckoos at Bangpleng, as the
kawow is a subspecies within the cuckoo family
(specifically, the Malaysian koel) which is known to leave
its eggs in others' nests. This essay will
offer an analysis of Kawow tee Bangpleng as one such
case of generic appropriation in the context of Thai cinema.
Thailand's box office was, like many others, dominated by
Hollywood productions throughout the 1990s, and there are
clear Western influences (as well as, it should be
mentioned, Hong Kong influences) in many domestic Thai
films. The distinctly Western genre of science fiction,
however, is rather uncommon in Thai cinema, perhaps in part
because of the financial and technical resources required to
achieve special effects at contemporary Hollywood standards.
In any event, Kawow did exceptionally well in terms
of its box-office gross, and was one of the most successful
releases (among both Thai and Hollywood films
screening in Thailand) up to its time.[3]
It would not be surprising if some of the film's success was
owed to its relatively high production values - in
particular its special effects technology - and to the
popularity of Hollywood science fiction films generally.
Part of what is quite striking about Kawow, however,
is the way in which it diverges from Western science
fiction, in effect localising an alien form by shifting the
genre's concerns to give them a distinctly Thai resonance -
in this case literally putting the alien into an encounter
with the Buddha. This analysis, then, will be concerned with
showing how Kawow makes over science fiction's alien
invasion subgenre in such a way that its narrative,
iconographic, and thematic elements all speak more directly
to a Thai cultural context. [3]
"Top ten grossing films in Thailand," Cinemag,
September 1996. Cited in Stephen McElhinney, "Globalisation
of film and television: a comparison of the preferences of
adolescents in Australia and Thailand," Revisioning the
Future Conference, Macquarie University, Australia, 14 April
1999. Owing to the
relative unavailability of the film outside of Thailand,
this discussion will be prefaced by a brief plot summary. In
the midst of a small-town festival, revellers suddenly
become frozen in place. A spacecraft appears and shines a
beam throughout the town, and when it departs people begin
to move again, with no memory of what has happened. Within a
day, it is discovered that all of the women in the town,
whether sexually active or not, have become pregnant.
Professor Somsak (who is sterile but whose wife, too, has
become pregnant), has a biologist acquaintance, Siri, come
from a university in Bangkok to examine the phenomenon, and
they soon suspect alien involvement in the pregnancies.
Within a relatively short time, the women all give birth to
seemingly normal babies. The children grow and learn their
school lessons at an unnaturally rapid pace. They seem
overly obedient, but also oddly unaffectionate with their
parents, and they begin to demonstrate the ability to
communicate telepathically amongst themselves. Tensions grow
as the children start to show physical differences with the
evident onset of their adolescence (pointy ears, triangular
dot patterns on their faces, eyes that sometimes turn blue
and blink from the lower lids) and to spend most of their
time isolated from their families - often at the schoolhouse
- and under the evident leadership of one child, Somporn.
Livestock begins to disappear, as, unbeknownst to the
townspeople, the youths are consuming it, and in two
instances individual townspeople are killed (after
apparently being hypnotised) when they find out too much
about the group. Somporn pays occasional visits to the
town's head monk to question him (scornfully and
condescendingly) about human habits and discovers that the
monk, too, can communicate telepathically, through Buddhist
meditation. This communication is put to use on one occasion
when the youths have massed at the town police station,
angered that some among them have been detained for
questioning, and the monk appears to intervene
telepathically to stem any violence. Incidents such as
this make it clearer to the townspeople that the adolescents
are of alien origin, that they are the source of many of the
mysterious goings-on, and that they are to be feared; at the
same time, however, the parents are for the most part deeply
attached to their "offspring" and want no actions taken
against them. Tensions become still worse when one father,
drunk and in a rage about the ostracism that his alien son
is bringing to his family, tries to burn his son alive. It
becomes clear to Siri and others, moreover, that the
eventual alien goal is to take over the nation and the
planet; and Somporn admits as much to the monk, indicating
that people were dying out on his home planet. The monk
continues to try to convince Somporn, however, of the
importance of keeping his emotions in check, as well as of
"extending compassion" to others, along the lines of
Buddhist teachings. Somporn generally scoffs at these
suggestions, and is concerned that Yuwasak, the son of Prof.
Somsak, is gaining too human a sense of filial empathy and
obligation. Somporn nevertheless grudgingly agrees to let
some of the youths use their alien powers to help the humans
when floods threaten the town. As an indirect result of
their exertions, however, the youths start to fall ill and
die; an autopsy reveals that another physical difference--a
lack of a spleen--has rendered them susceptible to earthly
diseases. The aliens realise that the planet will not
sustain their race and that the survivors must return to the
ship; Somporn now comes to appreciate the monk's message of
empathy and bids him an affectionate farewell, as do the
other alien children to their sobbing human parents, before
ascending to the sky. The film's
reference to and use of Western cinematic conventions are
clear from its plot premise - humans give birth to alien
beings - and from some of its science fiction iconography
and special effects technique. While, as Carlos Clarens
points out, the theme of non-human birth from humans extends
back to antiquity, in various myths of immaculate conception
for example, and across cultures,[4]
the science fiction thematic of aliens from other planets
(rather than supernatural beings) somehow colonising the
human reproductive process came to prominence more
specifically in science fiction film and literature of the
1950s - in particular in the American film Invasion of
the body snatchers (1956, based in turn on Jack Finney's
serial and novel The body snatchers) and the British
film Village of the damned (1960, based on John
Wyndham's novel The Midwich cuckoos), but also in
such less-celebrated 1950s science fiction films as I
married a monster from outer space (US 1958) and
Night of the blood beast (US 1958); in subsequent
decades there appeared a host of other more graphic US and
British science fiction films depicting alien/human birthing
processes, for example Alien (US 1979),
Inseminoid (Britain 1980), Xtro (Britain
1982), various remakes of Invasion of the body
snatchers (US 1978, US 1993), and a remake of Village
of the damned (US 1995). The plot of Kawow has
particularly striking similarities to that of Village of
the damned (1960), as that earlier film also concerns a
period of mass unconsciousness in a small town, followed by
mass unexplained pregnancies and mass births of
telepathically-communicative, unemotional alien children who
end up taking up residence in the schoolhouse and whose eyes
glow when they turn on townspeople. It could also be noted
that the author of the novel on which the Thai film was
based, Oxford-educated Kukrit Pramoj (later the Thai Prime
Minister), was in the West - indeed, working for Hollywood
as an actor (on the film The ugly American (US 1963))
- not too long after the release of Village of the
damned, so he might well have had occasion to see or
hear about the film and certainly could have had opportunity
to read the novel. The film's director indicates that he
himself had not been familiar with the earlier
film[5]
- but for the sake of the argument to be made here, however,
it does not matter if in fact neither the novelist nor the
director happened to know of that specific earlier novel and
film; what is pertinent, rather, is that some of the
discourses of an anglophone science fiction tradition made
their way into the Thai film, as is evidenced for example in
several plot elements, no matter by what specific route they
arrived there. [4]
Carlos Clarens, An illustrated history of horror
films (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1967),
136. [5]
This and all subsequent attributions to Nirattisai Kaljareuk
are from an interview with the author in Nonthaburi,
Thailand in July 1998. The influence of
an alien (in two senses of the term) genre is also evident
in certain aspects of the look of Kawow tee
Bangpleng, in particular in the design of the enormously
detailed "mother ship" which appears at the opening and
close of the film; the look and the scale of the spacecraft
- as well as the narrative context of its second appearance,
in which emotion-wrought but not terrified earthlings are
bathed in the craft's light - bring to mind certain scenes
from Close encounters of the third kind (US 1977), a
film for which the director, who played a major part in
designing his own special effects, has expressed his
admiration.[6]
One might note as well a couple of details vaguely
reminiscent of the perennially popular sixties American
science fiction television series Star trek; the
bright green t-shirts the alien youths wear recall the
simple and brightly colored skin-tight tops of the
Enterprise crew, while their pointy ears readily
bring to mind those of the alien member of that crew, Dr.
Spock. [6]
Nirattisai interview. But while the
engagement with a foreign generic tradition is immediately
clear enough, the dislocation of that form, in several
senses, is rendered equally obvious, as should be suggested
by the description of the spacecraft/Buddha shots above. The
opening of the film is set not at a generic small town -
often the target of choice for invading aliens - but at one
well immersed in symbols of "Thai-ness," a setting in which
markers of the "local" are foregrounded. We see the
upcountry village of Bangpleng in the midst of the uniquely
Thai Loy Kratong festival, in which little floats are
constructed and sent out on the river in hopes that the
goddess of the waters will answer the senders' prayers. The
ritual is also intended to ask forgiveness for the abuse of
the river over the course of the year - a fact which points
to the traditional and on-going importance of Thai waterways
to village life in providing sustenance, helping with
agriculture, and so on. The film cross-cuts between this
culturally specific festival (which in this instance also
includes exhibitions of Thai boxing and Thai dance) and
another culturally-loaded site, the local wat
(temple), at which young novice monks are experiencing
difficulty focussing on their meditation, with the
excitement of the festival so near. The abbot notices their
distraction, but he responds not with severity, but with an
easy-going response many would characterise as distinctively
Thai, granting the children leave to enjoy themselves at the
festival. As a small town, moreover, Bangpleng is
distinctively beyond the reach of the international currents
of cosmopolitan Bangkok; it is also not distinguished as a
border town. The alien invasion which ensues, then, is into
a space which has been marked as distinctively and purely
Thai. Given this
nationally connotative set-up, it is not surprising that the
narrative focuses on characterising the aliens (and
implicitly, through opposition, the Thais), revealing the
nature of their incursion, and providing an exposition of
Bangpleng's response (and by extension Thailand's response)
to the alien presence. This premise of invasion (and the
subsequent discovery of and response to the alien) is of
course the stuff of many an anglophone alien invasion or
visitation film, shared, for example, by most of the science
fiction films cited earlier, as well as by such classics of
the genre as The thing (US 1951 and the 1982 remake),
Invaders from Mars (US 1953), It came from outer
space (US 1953), The war of the worlds (US 1953),
The Quatermass xperiment (Britain 1955),
Quatermass 2 (Britain 1957), and E.T. the
extra-terrestrial (US 1982). Kawow certainly has
in common with these films a concern with what defines the
alien and what kind of threat to nation it may pose--yet it
is also precisely in this realm that the film's operations
of generic dislocation become most pronounced. Western
science fiction films have tended to contain within them
ideological traces of the Cold War 1950s, the paranoid
heyday and key defining moment of the science fiction genre,
and as a function of this even those films which position
the alien visitors as relatively benign figures (It came
from outer space) if not downright divine ones
(E.T.) include sequences which nevertheless
bespeak a profound revulsion for and fear of an alien body
that is irreducibly other and give voice to human alarm
(justified or not) over the alien presence. In Kawow,
on the other hand, while the aliens give rise to some in
fact justified anxieties over possible harm to
Thailand and to the planet, they do not precipitate the kind
of profound revulsion and fear of the other evidenced in the
Western films. In terms of
figurations of bodily difference, an instructive comparison
can be made between the Thai film and the two films of
Village of the damned. In all three films human
mothers give birth to alien children through some unknown
process of reproductive colonisation, and in all three films
the children are initially human in appearance (and
evidently share genetic characteristics with their parents
commonly understood as racial), if also intellectually
precocious and unaffectionate in their behavior. In the case
of the Western films, certain physical characteristics -
specifically, shocks of white-blonde hair and eyes with
strange powers - distinguish the alien children from
relatively early on, but in the Thai film, too, adolescence
brings on certain corporeal markers of difference (as
described earlier). Yet in the Thai film these quirky traits
do not so strongly mark the offspring as racially (if not
species-wise) alien as do those in the British and US films;
these are relatively subtle characteristics, not so
immediately and strikingly noticeable as the strange coifs
of the anglophone films. More importantly in the
Village films, doctors discover early on from
microscopic examination that the children have shared
unusual hair and nail patterns--that is to say, that at a
hidden, cellular level they are a priori alien, that their
very systems are inhuman, as is their genetic make-up; in
the 1995 version of the film there is the further suggestion
that the human appearance hides an alien one, the latter
being visible in an autopsied alien fetus and also through
the skin of all the youths when they exert their mental
energies at the film's climax. In the Thai film, on the
other hand, the alien's physical difference proves to be not
such a profound systemic one; what is ultimately revealed is
not a cellular or global difference, but a flaw in
structure, the lack of a spleen. As the Western
films, in keeping with dominant science fiction conventions,
figure the alien body as profoundly, irreconcilably other,
so do they figure the alien race as beyond any political
reconciliation with the human race; in both versions of
Village of the damned, relationships between the
interlopers and other town residents become increasingly
suspicious and hostile as the children's difference becomes
more evident, and interactions between the two groups result
in the deaths of a number of townspeople, victims of the
children's developing powers. After efforts to inculcate
human values and feelings of empathy in the alien youth
fail, the main protagonist - the terrestrial "father" of one
of the aliens - eventually sets aside his paternal feelings
and sacrifices his own life in order to blow up the alien
youths under his charge, thereby preventing the colonisation
and dominance of the earth clearly planned by the intruding
race. In Kawow tee
Bangpleng, on the other hand, the alien youths are
presented as not beyond redemption, and while a few of the
more informed characters do surmise that they are part of an
alien plan to take over the village and then the nation,
even they are not so alarmed that they feel the youths must
be immediately destroyed. This is not to say that the town
accepts the strange youths in their midst with open arms;
after the youths start exhibiting physical differences and
isolating themselves in particular, they clearly evoke much
the same hostile reaction from many of the townspeople as do
their counterparts in the Village films.
Nevertheless, the town seems prepared to tolerate their
presence and their terrestrial "parents" for the most part
prepared to defend them as their own. The narrative does
include a few deadly encounters - but it emphasises just as
much a mutual process of learning and adjustment on the part
of the villagers and the youths. The alien children do
successfully complete their schooling - albeit with
unaccustomed speed - in the village school, a key place for
the inculcation of national values in all Thai children (a
connection alluded to in a scene of a school flag-raising).
The parents do come to realise their profound attachment to
their children, in spite of the youths' aloofness and
strangeness. And some of the children evidently come to
realise their own sense of empathy and obligation towards
their terrestrial parents - a distinctively Thai sense of
obligation sufficiently strong that when flood waters
threaten the town, they are willing to put themselves at
risk and to delay work on an alien-dictated colonisation
plan in order to help hold back the
waters.[7] [7]
On the nature of Thai family obligations, see, for example,
Bencha Yoddumnern-Attig, "Thai family structure and
organization: changing roles and duties in historical
perspective," in Bencha Yoddumnern-Attig, Kerry Richter, et
al, [eds.] Changing roles and statuses of women
in Thailand: a documentary assessment, (Nakhonpathom,
Thailand: Institute for Population and Social Research,
Mahidol University at Salaya, 1992), 8-24; and Niels Mulder,
Inside Thai society: interpretations of everyday
life, 5th ed. (Amsterdam: The Pepin Press,
1996), 77-79, 89-93. The emphasis in
Kawow then--very unlike that of most Western science
fiction films--is on local adaptation to rather than
expulsion of the alien, which is met in turn by learning and
adaptation on the part of the alien. This is made most
explicit in the extensive scenes of interaction between the
abbot and Somporn, the leader of the alien group and
correspondingly the most recalcitrant, as well as the most
disdainful of human habits and, more specifically, the
Thai-Buddhist worldview. His constant returns to the monk,
however, suggest a certain curiosity about this worldview,
as well as, perhaps, a desire for terrestrial parental
guidance. Somporn scoffs at the calm Buddhist acceptance of
suffering and death as inevitable aspects of the cycle of
life in which all beings and events are profoundly
interconnected, at Buddhist teachings of extending
compassion in order to diffuse possible conflict, and at
Buddhist notions of achievement through a selfless on-going
performance of good deeds, rather than a focussed pursuit of
personal gains.[8]
"That's weak," the youth insists regarding the Buddhist
acceptance of life's inevitabilities, "You all give up. This
is the planet of the powerless." Somporn's contrastingly
aggressive, hot-blooded attitudes are illustrated in his
decision to blow up a threatening snake (using his mental
powers) rather than, as the monk suggests, extending
compassion to it and avoiding violence. [8]
For overviews of Buddhist precepts as understood in
Thailand, see Mulder, chapter 2, and Pinit Ratanakul, "The
dynamics of tradition and change in Theravada Buddhism," in
Pinit Ratanakul and U. Kyaw Than, [eds.]
Development, modernization, and tradition in southeast
Asia: lessons from Thailand, (Bangkok: Mahidol
University, 1990), 115-52. Somporn, however,
is himself eventually forced to come face-to-face with
life's inevitabilities, and with the intertwining and
interdependence of people's fates, as sickness overwhelms
the alien group (because of their missing spleens), their
colonising goals notwithstanding, and they are forced to
seek assistance from the town hospital and then return to
their ship to save their lives. By this time most of the
aliens have begun to appreciate (along the lines of Buddhist
precepts) the inescapability of fate, the interrelatedness
of all beings' existences, and, hence, the need for
extending kindness and compassion to others; and they have
also come to feel profound attachments towards their
terrestrial parents, so the departure is both tearful and,
in that the ascending visitors have now attained a new level
of wisdom, quite literally uplifting. This particular
deus ex machina readily recalls that of another
Hollywood science fiction film, The war of the
worlds, in which invading aliens are likewise suddenly
dispatched by terrestrial germs. The differences, however,
are again striking and illuminating. In the American film,
the defeat of the aliens is presented as rather directly
resulting from the hand of God, the narrator telling us that
they are destroyed by "the littlest things that God in His
wisdom" chose to create on the planet; it marks the
inevitable achievement of America's Manifest Destiny. In
Kawow, on the other hand, the disease is not figured
as an act of divine intervention, but rather simply a
manifestation of the continuing, natural cycle of life, in
which, as the abbot reminds, everyone has to face pain,
sickness, and death at some point. There is no emphasis on
human triumph over an evil invading force (although the
narrative economy does in fact now obviate the problem of
the alien threat to human existence); the main sense of
resolution, rather, is in the alien youths' (and especially
Somporn's) learning to appreciate the Buddhist order of
things on Earth. In another
related divergence from the climax of a Hollywood narrative,
there is no ultimate focus here on the individual
achievements of a clearly delineated main protagonist. Some
of the functions of the main protagonist of the Hollywood
model, rather, are dispersed among a number of
characters--in particular the abbot, the school principal,
Siri, and Somsak and his wife--and this is interestingly in
keeping with the film's Buddhist preaching against
individualistic, self-centered drives and goals. Certainly
there are distinct struggles and tensions between certain
key protagonists and antagonists, but these seem to be more
in the service of a portrait of broader tensions, exchanges,
and compromises both within and between two key character
groupings--the villagers and the aliens. This focus on
collectivities and on collective consciousness is also a
feature of the Western science fiction film--especially
those of the 1950s--but there the figuration is almost
invariably a negative one: What marks the alien as
unforgivably other (as well as akin to invading communists
and/or oppressive McCarthyites) in such films as The war
of the worlds, Invasion of the body snatchers,
and Village of the damned is its propensity for
group-think, the extinguishing of all individualistic drives
and desires in the service of collective needs. In
Kawow on the other hand, collective thinking is not
presented as a necessarily evil or wholly alien venture; the
problem with the aliens, for example, stems not from the
fact that they share thoughts collectively and
telepathically, but that they are initially unwilling to
share thoughts beyond their immediate grouping, to extend
their considerations to the larger Thai community in which
they have been reared. The fact that the abbot is able to
also share thoughts with the alien collective telepathically
through his Buddhist meditation is shown as an affirmation
of the monk's strength of character, rather than something
which casts doubt upon his sympathies (as it would most
likely have been represented in a Hollywood
film).[9]
Again, the film's conclusion, in which the aliens, forced of
necessity to seek help from the townspeople, come to a
deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of the larger
community, affirms the importance of a broader collective
awareness over individual achievement and selfish drives.
(The film's striking camerawork, which includes a number of
impressively choreographed tracking shots, operates to
highlight the importance of this collectivity as well: The
more extended tracking shots are specifically employed in
sequences of broader community interaction, such as at the
festival and at the village hospital, and function to
visually draw connections among members of the
community.) [9]
This notion of using Buddhist meditation to telepathically
communicate with visiting aliens is not unique to the film;
it is a concept often articulated within UFO enthusiast
subcultures in Thailand (much akin to similar UFO enthusiast
subcultures in the US). Indeed, time and location details of
possible UFO visitations are sometimes disseminated in
advance to enthusiasts by those who claim to have such
telepathic connections with aliens. It is hoped that
the foregoing discussion has begun to suggest some of the
ways that Kawow tee Bangpleng makes adjustments in
characterisation and plot which appear to render the science
fiction narrative more germane to Thai contexts. Western
abhorrence of otherness gives way to relative tolerance and
adjustment, with violent confrontation diffused to allow for
an emphasis on the dissemination of a distinctively Buddhist
wisdom,[10]
and all of this occurs within a Thai-specific visual and
cultural field. I would now like to look more closely and
concretely at the cultural logic behind some of these
adjustments, to suggest more exactly their ramifications and
resonances in the particular national and historical
contexts of Kawow's production. More specifically, I
would like to now go further in suggesting why it is
that the representation of alien visitation takes the form
it does and what relationships this representation bears to
Thai history and culture. [10]
This is not at all to argue that there are no Thai films
which emphasise violence or that all Thai films focus on
Buddhist teachings; rather, I am claiming that this
particular film's adjustments to a Western model suggest
these particular aspects of "Thai-ness." As I have earlier
indicated, the preoccupation with the defining of, and the
response to, things understood as foreign/alien/other is a
key area of both continuity with and divergence from the
Western alien invasion subgenre. Again, where Kawow tee
Bangpleng appears to diverge from Western precedents is
in figuring alien beings not only as corporeally similar to
the Thais but also, ultimately, as spiritually and
politically compatible after sufficient mutual Thai-alien
interaction. And just as anglophone science fiction's
abhorrence of the other resonates with contemporary negative
cultural discourses about persons considered politically,
nationally, racially, or sexually other (e.g., the fear of
Russians and communists in the 1950s or the denigration of
immigrants in the 1980s), so can Kawow's narrative of
adjustment to alien visitors be seen as having
culturally-specific resonances. Thailand's history of
interaction with outsiders in its midst - both from
elsewhere in Asia and from the West - is a lengthy and
complex one, and Thailand is, significantly, a country with
a history of heterogeneity, a tradition of both adopting and
adapting to foreign entities of various kinds. The
development of Thailand involved the migration and
incorporation of peoples from various neighboring nations -
notably from regions of China and Laos.[11]
As elsewhere, the involvement of ethnic Chinese in trade,
dating back to the turn of the last century, has been
particularly important - but significantly without the same
level of anti-Chinese sentiment which has been and continues
to be witnessed in other countries in the region (such as
Indonesia and Malaysia). While there have been anti-Chinese
policies under the more nationalistic Thai administrations
of the 20th century, the Sino-Thais have nevertheless
retained a general social acceptance if not a high social
standing within Thailand, and they today remain a central
part of both Bangkok's commercial world and its more
financially well-off social classes.[12] [11]
Craig J. Reynolds, "Globalization and cultural nationalism
in modern Thailand," in Joel S. Kahn, [ed.]
Southeast Asian identities: culture and the politics of
representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and
Thailand, (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies, 1998), 120-22. [12]
Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thailand's boom and
bust (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1998),
172-76. A far
better-known tradition of Thai survival through adjustment
to foreign influences is that of Thailand's response to the
West. It is commonly understood that Thailand's distinction
of having avoided the sweep of Western colonisation through
Asia (just as it holds off a colonisation by intermittently
blue-eyed aliens in Kawow) rested in substantial
measure upon its canny acceptance of a measured amount of
trade and diplomatic interaction with the Western powers, as
well as the delimited importation of Western technologies,
styles, customs, laws. By giving in to some of the West's
desires, Thailand thus diffused some of the usual economic
and political motivations for colonisation while, in
providing the appearance of Western-style "civilisation,"
lessening the usual justifications for foreign conquest. (It
is ironic that, in a further Thai adoption of Western
perspectives, the power of that very monarchy which
initially fostered interaction with the West as a
self-protective measure was significantly decreased, when
Thais presumably influenced by Western ideas successfully
agitated for an end to absolute monarchic rule in
1932.) As important as
these interactions with foreign influences were to the
development of modern Thailand, outside forces were once
again very much in the minds of Thais at the time Kawow
tee Bangpleng was being made, as this was at the crest
of an historically unprecedented amount of foreign
investment in the country (from the late 1980s up to the
economic crash of 1997), both Western and, quite
substantially, Japanese.[13]
As at the turn of the century, it was Thailand's cheap
resources and economic potentials which attracted outsiders,
while Thailand's malleability (in terms of trade policies)
made it an easy country for outsiders to interact with.
While Thailand managed to benefit from the monumental influx
of foreign capital, there were also concerns about the
extent and range of foreign influence, about the atrophy of
Thai culture in the face of foreign products and fast foods
and media, which led in turn to efforts to promote local
businesses and products. Along similar lines, a burgeoning
Western and Japanese tourist trade in this boom period was
also seen as providing welcome economic benefits, while
posing a potential danger if left fully
unregulated--specifically in the form of foreign cultural
influence and, in the case of sex tourism, the exploitation
of Thais as sex-workers. [13]
Phongpaichit and Baker, 1-5, 28-43. Kawow tee
Bangpleng appears to draw considerably from these
various Thai discourses about the nature and history of
Thai-foreign interaction. The aliens, like many outsiders in
Thai history, come to the Kingdom to take advantage of Thai
resources and bodies - suggested here in their plundering of
livestock for nourishment and their use of Thai women's
reproductive systems for the gestation of their young.
Indeed, we learn that the alien motivation for their
procreative excursion is the failure of child-bearing on
their own planet; Thailand is thus figured to stand in on
several levels as a realm of fertility and nourishment, both
physically and (through Buddhist teachings) spiritually, as
that with the potential to provide what is lacking in barren
lands elsewhere. Yet at the same time, in a kind of
reciprocity, the alien visitation appears to increase Thai
fertility, giving babies to couples who, owing to age or
sterility, have not been able to have children. In a similar
kind of duality, the Thai community is threatened by the
alien intruders, but also is protected by them when floods
arrive (just as, for example, the US threatens economic
domination but also protects through extensive investment
and advisement, as well as military cooperation and
training); and the Thai parents of alien children are not
willing to give up their feelings of love and affection for
them, be they potential colonisers or not - just as, I think
it can be readily argued, the Thais have their own deep and
historically significant long-standing fascination with
various foreign cultures which are nevertheless also
potentially dominating or exploitative. The alien threat is
held off both because of Thai compromise and malleability
(which makes the villagers not immediately worrisome for the
aliens) and because of the Thai ability to impart some of
its own values and perspectives to the aliens, who become
more and more humanised. This sense of a bi-directional
influence also jibes with the economic analogy: as foreign
funds flowed into Thailand during the boom period, so did
Thai products flow outward, followed soon afterwards by Thai
capital - from more successful Thai companies making
international investments.[14] [14]
Phongpaichit and Baker, 50-54. On an
extra-diegetic level, this whole Thai-foreign dynamic can be
seen to resonate in the production context of Kawow tee
Bangpleng as well. It is the work of a Thai production
company, which adopts and adjusts an "alien" form in order
to succeed in a realm (Thai film exhibition) in which
foreign elements and foreign funds have come to dominate.
This large-budgeted Thai production was only able to come
into existence, moreover, because of the kinds of funds that
were available at the time of the alien-driven economic
boom. And the production company itself (the Kantana Group)
is one of those Thai businesses which, doing sufficiently
well in strong economic times, chose to start sending its
own Thai monies and influence outward--not only in the form
of the film at hand (which made the rounds of international
film festivals and was eventually shown on Australian
television), but, more substantially, in selling and
acquiring television programming internationally and in
operating a Cambodian-based television station. While the film's
encounter with the alien appears to engage most centrally
discourses about the historical dynamic of Thai-foreign
relations, a number of other important and related metaphors
suggest themselves as well. Perhaps the most explicitly
articulated of these is the alien interaction as a metaphor
for the Thai encounter with modernity. Again, that opening
Buddha/spacecraft juxtaposition highlights this thematic,
the technology being worlds apart from Thai village
existence, either of the 1930s (when the film seems to be
set) or the 1990s. The sense of the aliens as not just a
foreign, but also a specifically modern force is suggested
as well in some of the exchanges between Somporn and the
abbot, where the alien scoffs at the village's old-world
instrumentality, its reliance on metal, paper, and gunpowder
for data-storage and weaponry purposes, rather than on the
energy fields the aliens have learned to manipulate; the
clear reference to computers and modern weaponry,
technologies which Thailand has been eager to have but for
which it has depended on foreigners, readily link the
foreign and modern analogies. In the film's terms, these
would seem to be tools of speed, aggression, and violence,
linked to Somporn's colonising drives and his disdain for
Buddhist reflection and pacifism. (The connection thus
suggested between technological advancement on the one hand
and spiritual impoverishment and physical devolution (here,
in lacking a spleen) on the other is interestingly shared in
the alien representations of a number of 1950s Hollywood
science fiction films, such as Rocketship X-M (1950)
and Invaders from Mars (1953).) Yet the aliens'
powers are put to good use when helping stave off the
floods: It would appear that a proper balance is required
between foreign technology and local spirituality. On an
extra-diegetic level again, the film itself constitutes
another effort at such balance, as it makes use of alien
film technology for local expression; and this relationship
is redoubled in the film's special effects technology, the
key tool for visually representing the modern, developed by
the film's Thai director--an admirer of a number of
Hollywood UFO narratives--after consultation with a Western
special effects technician.[15] [15]
Nirattisai interview. A third, somewhat
more implicit opposition lined up with those between the
traditional and the modern and between Thai and foreign is
that between non-urban and urban--more specifically, of
course, between village existence and Bangkok. Bangkok is
itself a ready emblem for Thailand's often awkward and often
incomplete embrace of the modern, with its notoriously
unruly traffic flows, its long-stalled urban rail projects
intended to partially take over from its 10-cent-fare
ramshackle public buses, its chaotic growth of skyscrapers
and shopping malls, centred over several areas (or, rather,
over no one area in particular), many projects halted midway
due to poor financial planning. And Bangkok is also plainly
linked to Thailand's foreign encounters, it being the modern
port of entry for most foreign visitors, as well as the
place most visibly reshaped by global influences. The
opposition between the village and Bangkok is a
long-standing and central one in Thai politics, culture, and
social existence--so even a passing textual reference to it
is worth noting, particularly if, as in the case of Kawow
tee Bangpleng, it operates in conjunction with these
other related thematic oppositions. By the time of the
film's production, moreover, the forces of globalisation had
made the capital city's presence in village existence even
more acute; as Craig Reynolds describes (in 1998), "As
Thailand's economic boom has pushed Bangkok-based business
to the far corners of the country over the past decade, it
has become increasingly difficult to speak of any part of
the country as remote."[16] [16]
Reynolds, 116. Bangkok's
importance as the nation's economic centre, its population
growing and shrinking substantially with the numbers of
villagers who travel there for work in more difficult times,
is alluded to very near the film's opening (and moments
before the alien visitation) as a young man tells his
girlfriend he wants to return to Bangkok to work some more
years before returning again to start a family with her; the
initial reference to the capital city is thus not only
syntactically linked to the alien visitation, but also
causally tied to fertility and enrichment (the economic
ability to rear children) and, paradoxically, to bodily
exploitation (the village man's urban labor). The opposition
between Bangpleng and Bangkok is figured again when Somsak
goes to the larger city to fetch Siri--the possessor of
modern knowledge - and his position in the village (as a
Bangkokian) remains one of outside observer throughout the
film. Even Somsak's wife, in a moment of emotion, deprecates
Siri as an outsider in their home (where he takes lodging
during his investigations) because he is prepared to blame
the village's livestock disappearances on their (alien)
children. Siri becomes aligned with another outsider (one
who is also critical of the aliens) because of his status -
specifically, the school principal, who is away in Nakhom
Pathom (a more developed province close to Bangkok) during
the alien visitation and hence does not fall pregnant, a
fact which makes the other villagers oddly wary of her. Even
when the extent of the potential alien danger becomes
clearer, the village chooses not to call upon Bangkok for
assistance, but to face its problems at the local level. It
is interesting in this regard that the problem with which
the aliens assist the villagers is flooding--as flood
control is an area in which villages are largely dependent
on the administration in Bangkok, while at the same time
water management policy (especially the construction of
dams) has been a central source of political tension between
the villages and Bangkok. Thematically relevant as well is
the fact that the river is set up in Kawow as not
only a potential threat, but also as a key transportation
link - a literal line of connection - between Bangpleng and
the urban realm, and by extension the global
realm. As the aliens are
metaphorically aligned with foreigners, with modernity, and
with the urban, they are linked still more concretely with
adolescence; again, they look very much like Thai
teens, and their key markings of alien difference arrive as
typically adolescent body developments: an unexpected
nocturnal protrusion (of the ears), accompanied by small
spots on the face. Indeed, the foregoing account should
strongly suggest similarities between Kawow and quite
a number of "teens gone wild" films: the film focuses on a
group of juvenile delinquents who choose the company of
their school peers over their families, share rigidly
conformist codes of dress and behavior, indulge in their
carnal desires by cover of night, and openly flaunt their
disrespect of community authority figures. But while these
traits might recall the fears of 1950s America, they are
quite germane to 1990s Thailand. Thai fears about changing -
and increasingly Westernised - mores and lifestyles in the
1990s, in part a fallout of the accelerated development
brought on by the economic boom, naturally often centered
around young people and teens in particular: Thais often
took note of the decline of old niceties, such as a
lessening of traditional respect for elders (as exemplified
by Somporn in the film) in conjunction with a decline of the
Thai custom of immediately wai-ing one's
elders,[17]
and a falling away of fairly recent taboos against touching
members of the opposite sex in public. And just as 1950s
American fears of juvenile delinquency arose in conjunction
with the delineation of a new, distinct teen subculture and
identity, so too did Thailand's 1990s fears arise at the
same time as the appearance of a new Thai youth culture - a
distinctively urban, individualistic, globally-influenced
identity counter to many traditional Thai
currents.[18]
The film's thematic of "alien as teenager" thus readily
meshes with those of "alien as foreign/modern/urban". The
theme also has an analogue once more in the film's
industrial context: Thai filmmakers in the 1990s felt
pressures to cater to the new economic force of teen
consumers, and teen-oriented film projects thus displaced
others.[19]
Kawow's own existence, then, with the teen emphasis
of its storyline, may have been predicated in part on this
new youthful "invasion" of the audience demographic, which
likely also contributed to the film's box-office
success. [17]
The wai is the traditional Thai greeting, with the
palms pressed together, fingers pointing upwards, and the
head bowed. [18]
Phongpaichit and Baker, 154-58. [19]
Anchalee Chaiworaporn, "Behind Thailand's silver screen,"
Sawasdee 26, no. 9 (1997): 24-28; Annette Hamilton,
"Cinema and nation: dilemmas of representation in Thailand,"
East-west film journal 7, no. 1 (1993): 92; Boonrak
Boonyaketmala, "The rise and fall of the film industry in
Thailand, 1897-1992," East-west film journal 6, no. 2
(1992): 90-93. One further
thematic resonance of the aliens does not quite fit into the
constellation of meanings suggested above, but is strongly
delineated and culturally relevant nevertheless. While
engaging these other references, the aliens are also figured
in such a way as to bring to mind a military unit. The
youths move in regimented (and, in some sequences, highly
choreographed) fashion, following the orders of their
leader, and wear uniform, earth-toned (army green?)
clothing. In fact, as gradually becomes clear, they are a
foreign army of sorts, an advance party to spearhead an
alien colonisation. In anglophone science fiction, alien
groups are also often figured as like terrestrial
battalions--as in, for example, The war of the
worlds, Independence Day (US 1996), and
Starship troopers (US 1997)--and in many of the 1950s
examples explicit connections are drawn between alien armies
and armies from behind the Iron Curtain, with which they are
sometimes initially confused by earthlings. The important
difference in the Thai film is that its alien army does not
appear particularly foreign, that its soldiers look very
much like Thai teens. In the Thai context, however, the
intrusion of a Thai military into civilian life has strong
and immediate historical resonance. Without going into
substantial detail, it should suffice for the sake of the
present argument to point out that the history of Thai
government in the 20th century has included quite a few
coups, often with direct military involvement, and that Thai
rule has, since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932,
involved negotiations among a number of centres of
power--the civilian government, the military, and the
monarchy, with the last of these three sometimes interceding
in cases of intractable tensions between the former two. At
the time of Kawow's release, the violent,
military-backed coup of 1992 would have been still fresh in
the minds of Thai audiences. As a result of this failed
coup, the military lost much of its influence, but, as one
Thai commentator describes it in the mid-1990s,
"authoritarian forces within the military and remnants of
rightist groups and their allies in political parties remain
important elements in the private sector and media and are
standing in the wings," though they have learned that "in
the age of globalisation, the territory and sovereignty of
the nation-state are not so easily
controlled."[20] [20]
Chai-Anan Samudavanija, "Old soldiers never die, they are
just bypassed: the military, bureaucracy, and
globalisation," in Kevin Hewison, [ed.] ,
Political change in Thailand: democracy and
participation, (London: Routledge, 1997), 57. In pointing to
this concatenation of resonances, it has not been the aim of
this essay to impose a single, distinct reading upon
Kawow tee Bangpleng, which undoubtedly holds multiple
competing and possibly even contradictory significations -
particularly when examined by viewers from both within and
outside the originating culture. Such a multiplicity would
appear all the more likely given the differing perspectives
on the narrative material held by the two key "authors"
linked with the text: the writer of the original novel,
having been a Thai leader during a number of particularly
turbulent times, was himself directly involved in quite a
few of the historical events cited above and has been
outspoken in his own concerns about the evolution of Thai
identity in the face of foreign
influence,[21]
while the director of the film, beyond any concerns he might
have about issues of Thai identity, also holds a genuine
personal interest in alien visitation.[22]
The aim here, rather, has been to show the presence of a
number of Thai-specific discourses operating within the
text, such as those pertaining to the centrality of Buddhist
precepts in the Thai worldview, the Thai experience of
foreign powers and of modernity, the opposition between
village and capital city, the changing status of teenagers,
and the role of the military in Thai life. This has been
undertaken in order to make the case that, rather than
merely adopting (or, more to the point, being colonised by)
alien generic forms, Kawow tee Bangpleng puts such
forms under the sway of a range of Thai discourses. To
return to this essay's opening image, the alien vehicle is
viewed through the window of the Thai temple, not
vice-versa. As Annette Hamilton has argued, because Thailand
has never been colonised, "the idea of being confirmed in
the eyes of an Other has never loomed
large."[23]
In the case of Thai film, as in many other realms of Thai
culture and life, the alien presence is nevertheless a real
and potentially deleterious one. What Kawow offers us
is an illustration of one possible--and distinctly
Thai--response to such global currents: a modest gesture of
inclusion, but one predicated upon an alien adaptation to
Thai perspectives. [21]
For some of Kukrit's commentaries on issues of Thai
identity, see the collected English-language writings in
Steve Van Beek, ed., M.R. Kukrit Pramoj: his wit and
wisdom (Bangkok: Editions Duang Kamol, 1983). In his
introduction to the paperback edition of the novel (in
Thai), Kukrit comments explicitly on his interest in
exploring the interaction of Western forms and Thai culture;
Kawow tee Bangpleng (Bangkok: Siam Rath,
1989). [22]
Nirattisai interview. [23]
Hamilton, 93.
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