( re
Killing Imagination’s Children)
I’m
going to start with a quote from George Stevens’ epic, ‘The Greatest Story
Ever Told’: “It is the child of the imagination that I fear. When you
become king after me, my son, if you ever do, always remember this.”
That’s
King Herod to his son on the reason for his baby-killing spree. The child of
the imagination being an idea—an idea that God has sent down his son to rid the
world of tyranny, as foretold by the stars, as the people believed. So he must
kill every new-born child—of the people’s imagination.
Last
Friday, Khao Khon Kon Khao, the highest-rated daily news show on Thai
television, signed off from TV Channel 9 for the last time, and was replaced
starting this week by a show hosted by Thaksin’s Voice TV’s star anchor, Jom
Petrpradab. Censorship, official and self-imposed, is the literal order of the
day in this climate of fear. Given the direness of the situation and such
high-profile victims as Khao Khon Kon Khao, why should we care about the
banning of films like ‘Insects in the Backyard’, a so-called
pornographic indie, and ‘Shakespeare Must Die’, a low-budget horror
movie?
Regardless
of the fate of Khao Khon Kon Khao, all other mass media are at least
legally protected. In theory, TV, radio, newspapers are free. But film is not.
Movies can be banned. The brainchildren of filmmakers can be prejudged as
social poison by seven faceless people in a dark room and summarily executed.
Why are
movies so feared? In modern times, the cinema of a nation is the child of that
culture’s imagination. Like King Herod,
the rulers of this country know that they can control us if they can control
our imagination. Our film legislation is supposed to protect the public from
cultural poison, yet its effects have been exactly the opposite. It harms not
just filmmakers like us, but the public. We have an enormous untapped wealth of
stories to tell, but we’re forced by law and by fear to limit ourselves to
shallow themes and treatments. We are not permitted to examine ourselves: our cultures,
our wounds of history, our very soul. The public is fed a diet of superficial
dramas, horror and action. Imagine not being allowed to use chillies in Thai
cooking because it is deemed too strong for our stomach, and being force-fed
the mental equivalent of kiddie meals all your life. This is the state of Thai
cinema, and therefore the state of the Thai public imagination. Censorship keeps us bland and weak, stupid,
slow-witted and hypocritical—all the things that Thai people are traditionally
not supposed to be.
By
trying to control our imagination, the Thai state sees all the arts and media
through the prism of propaganda and social engineering. It’s no exaggeration
that in cultural terms, we are still ruled by the Thai Joseph Goebbels, Luang
Vichit Vadhakarn, Field Marshall P Pibulsongkram’s propaganda chief. The state believes that you can socially
engineer The People to be Good by showing examples of Goodness and Decency and
suppressing all examples of Evil and Indecency.
This is
why the censors think my version of ‘Macbeth’ is a “disgrace to Thai
public morality and the Patriotic Dignity of the nation,” as well as being
violent and divisive. They really don’t understand that you can learn from a
bad example: a man who could have been great who loses it all through his
insatiable greed and ambition. In ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Shakespeare Must
Die’, we essentially watch a man examine himself and then deciding to
self-destruct. That’s exactly why I chose to do ‘Macbeth’. Shakespeare
does have the potential to be especially disturbing for Thai people, precisely
because he is the best antidote to propaganda, to the bombastic mindset.
Shakespeare is deeply spiritual, deeply moral, yet totally non-judgemental,
non-moralistic. This is the way Thai people used to be. But we have been for
the past eighty years steeped in relentless, overwhelming, fascistic,
moralistic, “nationalistic” propaganda—this poisonous mindset has been
systematically socially engineered into our moral fabric, despite being
entirely incompatible with our true nature.
Countries
that enjoy freedom of expression in all the arts, including cinema, are able to
counterbalance, and build up social immunity against, the overwhelming
onslaught of mindless commercialism and political manipulation. There’s almost
nothing in Thailand to counterbalance the seductive power of advertising and
the spin of corporate and political PR machines. So most Thai people are not
media literate. We’re fed a constant diet of TV soaps, gameshows and
advertising. We don’t stand a chance.
To me,
this is the root cause of our current problems. How can we have a peaceful
society with real democracy without media literacy? This is why film is deadly
serious for me.
I want
to leave you with a really nauseating vision: on TV, Madame Rabiab-rat, former
senator and self-appointed moral crusader, inhaling the cheeks of ‘Film’ the
movie star, in an act of reconciliation after a public spat over his refusal to
acknowledge paternity of a starlet’s child. (She wears these mud-mhee silk suits
and he’s like a Korean pop star Ken.) My first thought was: OMG! It was like
watching the interaction of emoticons.
Then
there’s Mrs Sukumal Khunpleum, our Cultural Minister, daughter-in-law of a
fugitive mafia figure, who was so demure over the banning of a Shakespearean
film, yet so voluble and fearless over the staged Body Painting Hysteria on ‘Thailand’s
Got Talent’.
To such
people, Khun Golf Tanwarin is obscene, and I am an immoral cultural terrorist.
But what is obscene? In the Body Painting episode, all of it is obscene—the
staging of it by the show for ratings, the knee-jerk outcry. Only the
toplessness is not obscene. Hypocrisy is obscene. Power abuse is
obscene. Oppression is obscene. Banning the first and only Thai Shakespearean
film that they funded themselves is obscene. Censorship—is obscene.
Anything
motivated by things that shun the light of day, of truth, is obscene. Denial of
the truth, denial of self-knowledge, is obscene. That is what art is for: to
know ourselves. That is what true artists are supposed to do; to help us
explore ourselves, especially our darkest, darkest dreams, so we can be
horrified by them and know ourselves. Thailand is lost precisely because it
keeps its imagination in chains. Without
a free national cinema, a country cannot ever be free.
- Ing
K
director
of banned film ‘Shakespeare Must Die’, on ‘Art and Censorship’
panel at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand, 5 July 2012