Pontianaks, Ghosts and the Possessed:

Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety

in Singapore Cinema

KENNETH PAUL TAN*

National University of Singapore

Abstract: In its self-conscious transformation into a global city with a nationalculture that strains to include post-industrial values, contemporary Singapore hashad to struggle with the repressed anxieties that threaten to return and disrupt itsentry into the advanced stages of global capitalism. This article argues that suchstruggles are ritually performed in a selection of contemporary Singapore filmsthat feature female monstrosity. By adopting the psychoanalytic theory of themonstrous-feminine developed by Barbara Creed (1993), this article analyses thepontianak of Malay folklore in Return to Pontianak (2001), the vengeful ghostof a murdered Filipina domestic worker in The Maid (2005), and the beautifulfemale psychologist possessed by the spirit of a tiger in Tiger’s Whip (1998). Thethree Singapore films are modern rituals that serve to bring Singapore’s nationalanxieties under control by subjecting female monstrosity – their grotesqueembodiment – to patriarchal discipline.

Keywords: Singapore cinema, monstrous-feminine, castration anxiety, nationalanxiety, patriarchal society

National Anxieties, Singapore Cinema and Horror Films

Singapore’s national psyche is a conflicted one: marked on the one hand by pride inthe country’s accelerated progress ‘‘from third world to first’’ (the title, in fact, ofSingapore’s first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs in 2000), and on the otherhand by nervous sensitivity to the fragility of its achievements in conditions ofpermanent vulnerability. This tension between national pride and apprehension isheightened by an acute awareness of Malaysia and Indonesia as volatile neighbours;fault lines in a multiethnic, multi-religious, and increasingly class-conscious society;externally induced economic crises; the impact of global pandemics and natural as

*Correspondence Address: Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore,

469C Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 259772. Email: spptank@nus.edu.sg

Asian Studies ReviewJune 2010, Vol. 34, pp. 151–170

ISSN 1035-7823 print/ISSN 1467-8403 online/10/020151-20 � 2010 Asian Studies Association of AustraliaDOI: 10.1080/10357821003802037

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

well as man-made disasters; and terrorism as a non-traditional threat to nationalsecurity. ‘‘Overnight,’’ Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong once said, an ‘‘oasis canbecome a desert’’ (quoted in Leifer, 2001, p. 33). In its self-conscious transformationinto a global city with a national culture that strains to include post-industrialvalues, contemporary Singapore has had to struggle with the repressed anxieties thatthreaten to return and disrupt its entry into the advanced stages of global capitalism.This article argues that such struggles are played out quite vividly, thoughdifferently, in a selection of Singapore films that feature female monstrosity. In thesefilms, a pontianak (female monster from Malay folklore and the subject of manycommercially successful Malay horror films made in pre-independent Singapore), afemale ghost, and a possessed woman are grotesque embodiments of bothpatriarchal violence and national anxieties.

From 1947 to 1972, Singapore experienced a ‘‘golden age’’ of studio filmmaking,during which time it ‘‘dominated . . . quite a large part of the Asian film industry’’(Millet, 2006, p. 12, p. 67). The Shaw and Cathay film production studios producedhundreds of commercially successful films, mostly in the Malay language. Withfilmmaking talent originating from Malaysia, Indonesia, India and the Philippines,the film industry contributed significantly to Singapore’s modern and cosmopolitancharacter. After Singapore separated from Malaysia in 1965, its golden age ofcinema went into decline. The studios were already facing problems with a militantlyunionised workforce, competition from high-quality colour films coming from Indiaand the Philippines, and competition from television which was introduced in 1963(Cheah, 2002, p. 381; Millet, 2006, pp. 64–67; Uhde and Uhde, 2000, p. 27). Politicalconfrontation between Malaysia and Indonesia in 1963–66 badly affectedSingapore’s export of films to Indonesia (Uhde and Uhde, 2000, p. 25). Shaw andCathay closed down their Singapore studios in 1967 and 1972, respectively, theformer buying out Merdeka Film Productions in Malaysia, which had alreadybegun to attract industry talent from Singapore, including the iconic filmmaker,actor, singer and composer P. Ramlee. By the 1970s, films that featured Malayvillage settings, ways of life, and myths already seemed out of place in the context ofSingapore’s rapid urbanisation and increasingly modern lifestyles. Raphael Milletobserves that, in independent Singapore, ‘‘Malayness’’ was no longer dominant as a‘‘cultural reference’’ (Millet, 2006, p. 70). Subsequently, Malayness and thecinematic golden age were forgotten – even repressed – by Singapore’s officialhistory.

In the late 1980s, there began a slow revival of the film industry in Singapore, ledin part by government strategies to upgrade its services sector in an economy thatcould no longer compete with low-wage and low-cost economies in the region. Thegovernment was keen to invest in infrastructure and loosen bureaucratic restrictionsin order to attract film industry talent from Hong Kong, given its impending‘‘handover’’ to China in 1997. These early attempts were not generally successful,but the government continued in the 1990s to recognise the need to develop newcapabilities in the services sector, information and communications technologysector, research and development (particularly in the field of biotechnology), andcreative sectors. In 1998, Raintree Pictures was set up as a fully owned filmmakingsubsidiary of Singapore’s newly privatised broadcaster MediaCorp. Collaboratingmainly with East Asian production companies, Raintree has been attempting to

152 Kenneth Paul Tan

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

produce bigger-budget films that appeal to an international, and not just aSingaporean or Southeast Asian, audience. Its output has been entirely made up ofChinese- and English-language films. Today, Raintree describes itself as a‘‘pioneering movie company in Singapore’’ (MediaCorp Raintree Pictures, 2007)and its then-CEO Daniel Yun observed that Singapore does not ‘‘have the[filmmaking] heritage here, we don’t have the expertise’’ (Yun, 2005): both claimsserve to further repress Singapore’s cinematic golden age, its Malayness, and itsSoutheast Asian context. Of the three films analysed in this article, The Maid (2005)was a Raintree production, while Tiger’s Whip (1998) and Return to Pontianak(2001) were independent productions.

Singapore’s commercial and independent films demonstrate a certain ‘‘excess’’that may, particularly in these three contemporary films, be read as occasions forcoping with the dramatic return of repressed national anxieties. In Singapore’snational rhetoric, ‘‘over-the-top’’ expressions point to a ‘‘culture of excess’’ (Yao,2007) that painfully tells and re-tells official history as a cautionary tale ofvulnerability, continually revisiting a historical moment of trauma: Singaporebecame an independent state in 1965 only after a failure of political merger withMalaya, its birth enacted by its political ejection from Malaysia. According to localhistorian Albert Lau, this birth was a ‘‘moment of anguish’’ (Lau, 1998). Accountsof ‘‘communist’’ and ethnic ‘‘communalist’’ violence from the late 1940s to the 1970sare regularly re-presented in official speeches, television documentaries, and schoolcurricula as cautionary tales whose lessons suggest the need for Singaporeans toendorse fully a strong state mounted by the People’s Action Party (PAP), theincumbent party in government since 1959.

Today, Singaporeans – materially affluent and accustomed to a culture of comfortin an ‘‘air-conditioned nation’’ (George, 2000) – continue to repress a variety ofnational anxieties. First, there are anxieties associated with being a first-world globalcity precariously located within the less developed and conflict-prone circumstancesof the Southeast Asian region, continually reminding Singaporeans of what theyused to be and what they can become if they fail to maintain their hard-earned‘‘modernity’’. Return to Pontianak, this article argues, marks a return of this first setof repressed anxieties. Secondly, there are anxieties that arise from the presence ofunderpaid migrant labourers who are crucial for Singapore’s economic growth butalso a blight on the conscience of an exploitative middle-class society. The Maid, thisarticle argues, reflects this particular tension. And thirdly, there are anxieties relatingto the inferiority complex that Singaporeans grapple with in relation to thegrudgingly admired West (and, in particular, the United States), anxieties that arereflected in Tiger’s Whip. These three ‘‘horror’’ films – in creating a paradoxicalfeeling of familiarity amid strangeness, or a sense of the uncanny – reflect bothSingapore’s repulsion by and attraction to its repressed anxieties.

The Monstrous-Feminine in a Patriarchal Society

The construction of these monsters as female is not incidental and should be read inthe specific context of Singapore’s modern patriarchal society and its underlyinganxieties. Singapore’s first female cabinet minister, Lim Hwee Hua, has said that the‘‘women of Singapore today have it so good – with access to education and

Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema 153

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

employment opportunities – compared to their counterparts in the region’’ (quotedin Today, 18 December 2006). Indeed, it would be difficult today to find in Singaporemany examples of women who are systematically and institutionally victimised,especially through any form of physical violence or exclusion from opportunitiesand resources for personal advancement. Lim is one of several high-profile andsuccessful women showcased as evidence of Singapore’s gender-blind meritocracy.

And yet, Singapore does not have laws that protect women against informalpractices of gender discrimination in the workplace. The law does not recognisemarital rape. Differences in salary, benefits and prospects, though not huge, are – atleast symbolically – effective in maintaining a gender hierarchy supported by culturalconservatism that is often dressed up as ‘‘Asian values’’. Some policies, particularlythose dealing with immigration, place women in an inferior and disadvantagedposition in comparison to their male counterparts (Lyons, 2004, p. 27). I argueelsewhere that Singapore women, in politics and the workplace,

must negotiate an ambivalent space between behaving like a man in order tobe taken seriously, and masquerading as feminine so as not to provoke thecastration anxieties of their male peers. However, this ambivalence isunsatisfactory as it forces women to enter a man’s world with slightly bowedheads, speaking enough of a male voice to be admitted but not so deeply as tobe regarded as a threat to male egos (Tan, 2009, p. 45).

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s ‘‘founding Father’’, has in retrospect openly questionedthe wisdom of his own government’s policies in the 1970s to encourage women tojoin the workforce in an effort to ease the tightening labour market. In his speech tothe nation in 1983, Lee lamented how more educated women did not seem to wantto get married and have children (The Straits Times, 1983). The government at thetime sought to create – by implementing policies informed by the pseudo-science ofeugenics – an incentive structure for graduate mothers to have more children andless educated mothers to opt for sterilisation. This extreme form of paternalismtreated women as baby-making machines and blamed them principally for not doingtheir national duty to reproduce the nation and produce much needed talent. Today,with 5 million people, falling birth rates, and an ageing population, Singapore isunable to reproduce itself biologically, and has to rely on immigrant talent toreplenish the pool of human resources. This has been a major source of nationalanxiety, with women implicitly held to blame.

In the last decade, women’s reproductive bodies have been made the subject ofmore nuanced regulation through policies on work-life balance and ‘‘baby bonus’’schemes (Tan, 2003). In the raising of families, not much is expected of the father.The civil service, for instance, provides eight to 12 weeks of maternity leave but onlythree days of paternity leave. For male Singaporeans, mandatory military servicerepresents the highest national duty. By harnessing masculine power to the defenceof a nation whose self-image is marked by insecurity, women appear even moreculpable for failing to reproduce the nation. In fact, Singapore women aresometimes treated with great condescension by the paternalistic government: aformer health minister, for instance, advised women to ‘‘save on one hairdo and usethe money for breast screening’’ in response to a request from a female

154 Kenneth Paul Tan

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

parliamentarian to make breast cancer screening more affordable for the public. As Ihave argued elsewhere,

Singapore’s patriarchal society has, through its phallogocentric ideology,constructed a basic image of its women as selfish, materialistic, frivolous,demanding, and excessive, an image that is simply the negative elaboration of themasculine subject, constructed in support of male narcissism (Tan, 2009, p. 46).

The three horror films that feature female monstrosity can best be understood in thecontext of this patriarchal society and its phallogocentric ideology, which gives themasculine voice a privileged position around which social meanings and relationsare articulated. Through these films, repressed anxieties are reconstructed andembodied in female monsters that are then confronted and ultimately controlled toenable the patriarchal symbolic order to survive.

Barbara Creed’s (1993) work is particularly insightful for explaining how the‘‘monstrous-feminine’’ is cinematically constructed in the service of patriarchy.Creed builds upon Julia Kristeva’s (1982) theory of abjection, particularly as itapplies to the maternal figure and her significance in psychoanalytical accounts ofhow the child proceeds from the ‘‘semiotic’’ stage – a pre-oedipal, pre-linguistic, andpurely physical space where the child experiences fullness and oneness with itssurroundings and its mother – into the ‘‘symbolic’’ stage where the prevailing law ofthe Father structures the social and cultural order, presenting it with a language forindividuation. For the subject to be constituted as individual, it must reject and beseparated from the undifferentiated universe of its mother. However, the mother,expelled from this symbolic universe, is reluctant to let her child go, and is thereforealways threatening to return and disrupt as an ambiguous and boundary-transgressing ‘‘abject’’. Her ever-present threat uncomfortably reminds patriarchythat repression is never perfect, the paternal law is perpetually fragile, andsymbolically constituted subject positions are never stable. The cinematic experienceis the modern-day ritual that purifies the symbolic realm by forcing a re-engagementwith the abject – in the form of the monstrous-feminine – in order for it to bedisavowed and banished once again as the boundaries between the semiotic(maternal) and symbolic (paternal) are redrawn.

The monstrous-feminine is readily interpreted using the Freudian notion ofcastration anxiety: the misreading of female genitalia as a castrated state that createsanxiety for the male subject who gazes upon the possibility of his own castration.The intensity of this anxiety may be represented by the vagina dentata (‘‘toothedvagina’’) that is both sexually attractive and dangerous. Creed, diverging somewhatfrom Kristeva, also discusses the primal fear of the self being devoured by the‘‘womb’’ of the ‘‘archaic mother’’ – the source of life that is totally outsidethe symbolic order – or of being reincorporated into the undifferentiated fullness ofthe womb, signifying death. To cope with this most primal fear, the archaic motheris reconstructed – or re-inscribed into the symbolic language of the Father – as a lessthreatening pre-oedipal mother, whose castrated phallus can now be replaced by afetish. In many horror films, this fetish is the monstrous-feminine.

Female monstrosity in Southeast Asian cinema – the pontianak of Malaysia, thekuntilanak of Indonesia, the aswang or manananggal of the Philippines, and Nang

Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema 155

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

Nak of Thailand – has been analysed to a modest degree. Studies have focused ondifferent cultural explanations of these phenomena, and those that focus on anxietieshave identified different ones from the Singapore case analysed in this article. MayAdadol Ingawanij (2007), for instance, discusses the Thai film Nang Nak – directedby Nonzee Nimibutr two years after the Asian economic crisis of 1997 – as a‘‘heritage film . . . of an international/Western calibre’’ that appeals to the country’sbourgeois audience yearning for both ‘‘Thainess’’ and ‘‘global prestige’’ (May,2007). Adam Knee (2005) interprets Nonzee’s Nang Nak as a text haunted by pasttraditions that relate to women’s oppression. The film links these sources of anxietywith the supernatural, and then chooses ‘‘variously to exorcise or come to termswith’’ them (Knee, 2005, p. 142). Adeline Kueh (2003) analyses a range of femalemonstrosity in Southeast Asian popular culture, and uses some of Kristeva’sthought to bring insight to the pontianak figure, although she does not provide asustained analysis of this.

This article analyses the horror of monstrously dehumanised and eroticised femalefigures as constituted in cinema by a phallogocentric ideology. Through the moderncinematic ritual, the abject is summoned in order to be rejected again, the boundariesbetween the semiotic and the symbolic are redrawn, and patriarchal control andorder are reasserted. In Return to Pontianak, the pontianak of Malay folklore isirresistible, protective and vengefully aggressive. She is the fetishised phallus of thearchaic mother whose womb is represented by the dark, wet and engulfing jungles ofSoutheast Asia. Contemporary Singapore represses its Malayan/Southeast Asianmaternal origins; just as its re-nascent film industry, now dominated by English- andChinese-language films, represses its golden age of Malay cinema. In The Maid, theghost of a murdered Filipina domestic worker returns to avenge her own death and toprotect her replacement. In Tiger’s Whip, a beautiful female psychiatrist is possessedby the spirit of a castrated tiger and becomes the castrating female or the vaginadentata. In The Maid, the monstrous-feminine is an exploited low-skilled immigrantwho represents the return of repressed guilt in an affluent society; while in Tiger’sWhip, the monstrous-feminine is instrumental in intensifying the castration anxiety ofa foreigner from the advanced West. Both reveal the anxieties of a global citydependent on migratory flows.

A Developed State in Southeast Asia

Singapore’s acute sense of its own resource limitations has led to a pragmaticapproach to policy-making and governance that involves learning from, copyingand adapting anything that its leaders regard as best practice from anywhere in theworld, and making changes whenever policies do not seem to ‘‘work’’ any more(Neo and Chen, 2007). Globalisation, for similar reasons, is embraced enthusias-tically by a small state that needs desperately to be connected to the larger networksand flows of goods and services, capital, workers, consumers, talent, tourists, ideas,images and audiences. Singapore, for these reasons, comes across as one of the mostwesternised countries in Asia, with an economy that is one of the most open andcompetitive in the world, an English-speaking labour force that is hardworking andreliable, and an efficient and business-friendly government committed to ensuringthat the country is able to attract international capital and talent to sustain the level

156 Kenneth Paul Tan

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

of economic growth and development that its people have come to expect and onwhich its political legitimacy is based.

Michael Leifer observes how the ‘‘pairing of vulnerability with excellence serves toregister the basis of Singapore’s exceptionalism and its distinctiveness’’ (Leifer, 2000,p. 12). Singapore’s starkly successful image has been a cause of political tension in itsrelationships with its giant neighbours Indonesia and Malaysia. While thepopulations of Indonesia and Malaysia consist mainly of Malay-Muslims, 75 percent of Singapore’s resident population comprises ethnic Chinese. One in every threepersons in Singapore is a foreigner. Singapore’s identity, it would appear, is more‘‘East Asian’’ (like Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan) and ‘‘western’’ (like the UnitedStates) than ‘‘Southeast Asian’’, making it seem an anomaly – what Janadas Devan(2007) describes as the ‘‘odd man’’ – in the Southeast Asian region.

Some of the anxieties associated with being a thoroughly modern, developed andurbanised country located in the heart of a still traditional and largely ruralSoutheast Asia are enacted in Return to Pontianak, Singaporean director Ong LayJinn’s first feature film. The film is about four young and clearly cosmopolitanurbanites from Singapore who travel to the vast rainforested jungles of Borneo, anisland that is mostly made up of Malaysian and Indonesian territories. The groupconsists of Charity (Hiep Thi Le), an Asian-American protagonist who is adoptedand goes on a quest to find her Southeast Asian birth mother; Raymond (VictorKhong), a geeky and loud-mouthed Chinese-Singaporean technology enthusiast;Uzi (Eleanor Lee), a single mother and former air stewardess; and her boyfriend Luc(Stephen Banks), a whingeing sceptic from Britain. The group employs a youngMalay man, Eye (Fadali), to be their guide.

When their vehicle breaks down, the hikers continue their journey on foot insearch of Kampong Raya, a village that they soon discover burnt down many yearsago. In spite of a warning from an old man they meet along the way that the jungle ishaunted, the hikers continue their journey, losing their way as their technologicalgadgets begin to fail. They eventually meet an old Malay witchdoctor or bomoh(Jafar Aris) who lives in a dilapidated hut with a young female companion(Fadzlinda Mohamad Shafie) whom he canes mercilessly. In spite of her dishevelledappearance and unearthly shrieks, the young woman emits a seductiveness thatinspires both fear and attraction. Hoping that the bomoh will give them directions,the hikers spend the night near the hut, but wake up in the morning to find Eye, theirbelongings, and the bomoh all missing. In a panic, the hikers begin to turn on oneanother and are killed off one by one by the young woman, who turns out to be apontianak. Charity is the last survivor, who realises the horrific truth that thepontianak is her mother.

Charity is a particularly interesting figure: ethnically and racially ambiguous, sheis an embodiment of the West through her American father, of East Asia as sheembraces ultra-modern Singapore as her adopted home, and of Southeast Asiawhere she believes her birth mother disappeared 25 years earlier in the Borneojungle. In dreams, her mother beckons to her from this jungle:

Ini sebuah nyanyian dari ibu. Ini juga nyanyian yang terakhir untuk ibu. Kauadalah darah keturunan ibu. Kaulah satu-satunya. Kau telah dilahirkan dariperut ibumu. Pulanglah ke tempat asal. Pulanglah ke tempat asal. [Author’s

Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema 157

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

translation: This is a song from your mother. This is also her last song. Youare your mother’s only offspring, born of her womb. Return to your origins.]

Returning to the seemingly formless jungles of Borneo from highly urbanised andordered Singapore is analogous to a temporal regression to a primal order: a returnto the semiotic stage where the child experiences plenitude in its instinctive anduninhibited connection to its mother.

When the child enters the symbolic stage, where the law of the Father prevails, itbecomes an individuated subject and secures this subjectivity by radically excludingand disavowing the mother, who remains reluctant to release her child – ‘‘the subjectmust exclude the abject, [but] the abject must, nevertheless, be tolerated for thatwhich threatens to destroy life also helps to define life’’ (Creed, 1993, p. 9). Thematernal is the home from which the individual subject emerges and to which iteventually returns; its tenaciously residual presence in the phallic order continueslike a palimpsest to remind the individual subject of its own death and reintegration.Like other modern and successful Singaporeans decades after a traumatic nationalseparation from the ‘‘plenitude’’ of Mother Malaysia, Charity has entered into theordered realm of the Father and disavowed her Southeast Asian maternal origins:the abject is exiled beyond Singapore’s shores. But Singapore’s modernity andsuccess are both defined and threatened by the surrounding presence of the ‘‘pre-modern’’ Southeast Asian Other, the constant seduction of an unrepressed lifegoverned only by the pleasure principle expressed in the myth of the lazy native. Theexiled mother beckons seductively in dreams/nightmares.

The Southeast Asian jungle – primal, fertile and dangerous – can be viewed, interms of the psychoanalytical lens this paper adopts, as the abject maternal thathighly developed Singapore must, but cannot fully, exclude from its urbanised,industrialised, hyper-individualistic and legal-rationalistic society. The infantiledrives, instincts and energies appropriate to the semiotic stage and deemed to bedangerous and unsuited to civilisation are vigorously repressed beyond what thereality principle requires: an obsession with economic productivity and adherence tothe ‘‘performance principle’’ that stratifies contemporary capitalist society ‘‘accord-ing to the competitive economic performances of its members’’ have led to whatHerbert Marcuse (1955/1966, p. 44) calls ‘‘surplus repression’’. Charity feelsunsettled in this alienating society and longs for her original home, respondingobediently to the call of her mother, who refuses to let her child go. The Borneojungle uncannily recalls the mother’s womb: dark, wet, fertile, organic, engulfing,and also comforting, familiar, pleasurable and attractive as a place of nourishment,freedom and origins. But the jungle is also overwhelming and suffocating: the soundof insects that dominates the film’s soundtrack (layered with ‘‘low frequency soundeffects’’) rises in a gradual crescendo that renders the dialogue nearly inaudible bythe second half of the film. The jungles of Southeast Asia, Singapore’s archaicmother, are both loathsome and irresistible.

The notional relationship between technologically advanced Singapore and thehaunted jungles of Southeast Asia also points to the efforts of postcolonialSingapore to distance and differentiate itself from its primal origins, repressing intoits national unconscious the untamed sexual and aggressive drives of its infancy,along with the superstitions, traditions and other irrational propensities not

158 Kenneth Paul Tan

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

conducive to sustainable economic development and progress. Singaporeans areregularly exhorted to make sacrifices for their nation, whether this meanscontributing to compulsory savings for retirement (and hence withholdingimmediate gratification), taking salary reductions during periods of economic crisis,or complying with mandatory military service. The jungles of Borneo are ametaphor for oedipalised Singapore’s national unconscious, geographically ex-ternalised as an unmapped, dark and mysterious jungle-island from where therepressed desires exiled with the abject mother threaten to reappear.

At about the same time that the film opened in Singapore, the international mediawere reporting on an outbreak of ethnic violence in Pontianak, also the name of acity in West Kalimantan, Borneo (England, 3 July 2001), and separately aboutdangerous smoke (euphemistically called ‘‘haze’’) that choked Pontianak due toindiscriminate land clearing activities. Interestingly, Agence France-Presse (10 July2001) titled its news report ‘Smoke haze returns to haunt Indonesia and neighbours’(emphasis added). The Singapore government, noted for its successful multiracialand clean-and-green policies, was critical of the Indonesian government’s efforts todeal with the haze, but basically helpless to do anything about it (Agence France-Presse, 7 July 2001). The repressed and exiled destructive energy of Southeast Asia,it might have seemed, threatened a violent return to well-planned and well-orderedSingapore.

In Return to Pontianak, the fates of two characters demonstrate the extent of thisthreat. Raymond is confident that his technological expertise and gadgetry will guidethe hikers safely through the jungle, but he ends up being the first victim in the film,his decapitation a violent symbol of nature’s ultimate dominance over technologicalrationality. Luc trips over a gravestone but, when advised to apologise to the spiritsaccording to local custom, refuses to participate in superstitious practices, kickingthe stone instead in defiance. He eventually turns feverish; coughs up a mixture ofvomit, blood and insects; strangles his girlfriend, Uzi; and dies violently.

The fear of the pre-modern is also a racialised discourse. Today, Singapore’sofficial history begins with its colonial founding: the birth of modern Singapore in1819. The country’s pre-colonial history, as part of the Malay world, is consigned tothe realm of myth and legend, useful mainly as materials distorted for the tourismindustry. In independent Singapore, the Chinese majority – generally and inleadership positions – has appropriated colonial power structures and ideologies ofracial difference for a totally administered state, whose disciplined, industrious,thrifty and self-controlled citizens are terrified that the re-colonised and repressedindigenous Malay threat will return to weaken the neo-colonial order. LilyZubaidah Rahim (1998) observes how a ‘‘cultural deficit thesis’’ has evolved toexplain how the Malays have not succeeded in meritocratic Singapore because theirculture and attitude have not prepared them for modern life. According to thisthinking, Malays have only themselves to blame for their marginal position insociety. While Raymond (Chinese) and Luc (British) represent technologicalmastery and scientific rationality, Eye – their Malay/Southeast Asian guide – isstereotypically incompetent, dishonest and weak. He endangers them and lets themdown when they need him most.

The film itself provides definitions of the geographical Pontianak as ‘‘a town thatlies directly across the equator on the island of Borneo’’ and of the mythical

Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema 159

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

pontianak monster as a ‘‘Malay woman who dies after childbirth or abuse by manand returns as an undead controlled by a bomoh (witchdoctor)’’. According tolegend, the eighteenth-century founder of Pontianak named it after the monster hefought to defend his people. However, Ong has taken some artistic licence to forgethe Pontianak/pontianak connection in his film: first, Pontianak – which Ongportrays as a haunted tropical jungle – is today the capital city of West Kalimantan(Indonesia), a trading centre with a shipbuilding industry; second, Indonesians havetheir own version of the pontianak, which they call kuntilanak; and third, thebomoh’s control over the pontianak deviates from standard folklore.

This artistic licence allows the Pontianak/pontianak connection to reflect therelationship between passive and active sources of anxiety for the oedipalisedsubject. As explained earlier, Creed describes the maternal as both castrated(passive) and castrating (active). Pontianak in Southeast Asia as Singapore’sarchaic mother – warm, dark, damp and mysterious – presents itself toSingapore’s phallic symbolic order as castrated female and therefore a passivesource of castration anxiety. The terrifyingly speechless (pre-verbal) pontianak isthe fetishised phallus of the Pontianak jungle in Southeast Asia, named in orderthat she may be dealt with and the threat eliminated through violent punishmentby the patriarchal order. Indeed, the audience discovers that it was the malevillagers’ moral condemnation and physical violence that turned Charity’s birthmother (Olin Ahmad) into a pontianak, and she now only responds to the ritualsand disciplinary violence of a male bomoh. Pontianak in Southeast Asia can alsobe interpreted as an actively castrating mother, ‘‘the cannibalizing black holefrom which all life comes and to which all life returns’’ (Creed, 1993, p. 25). Thepontianak is the deadly castrating teeth of a cannibalising mother. It is SoutheastAsia’s vagina dentata, an irresistibly seductive and yet frighteningly destructivebasis of the castration complex.

Singapore’s authoritarian modernity requires the repression of primal desires,instincts and drives, yielding a disciplined and self-sacrificing citizen-workforce.Being surrounded by Southeast Asian neighbours whom Singaporeans perceive tobe sometimes hostile, hazardous and seductively languorous serves as a constantreminder to Singaporeans of their hard-earned success, which can so easily be lost ifthe people turn soft. In so many ways, the monstrous pontianak from Pontianak is amanifestation of these anxieties, never letting Singaporeans completely forget theirSoutheast Asian ‘‘past’’ and the threat of an undisciplined, disorderly andsuffocating Southeast Asian future.

The film itself is described as an homage (or ‘‘return’’) to the pontianak films thatwere very popular during Singapore’s golden age of studio film production. In B.N.Rao’s Sumpah Pontianak (1958), for example, Maria (Salmah Ahmad) has visions ofher mother (Maria Menado) and wanders off into the forest to look for her. Maria’smother, a pontianak, uses her monstrous powers to protect Maria from her maleattackers, and finally advises her to return to her husband as mother and daughtercannot be together as long as she has the pontianak’s curse. Ong’s art-house styledfilm pays respect to the original genre by self-consciously deriving features of it, butstruggles to maintain artistic autonomy and originality by ‘‘swerving’’ away fromthe ‘‘canon’’, at the very least by excluding the characteristic slapstick comic reliefand musical numbers of the golden-age films. Although Ho Tzu Nyen (2007) uses

160 Kenneth Paul Tan

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

Harold Bloom’s notion of the ‘‘anxiety of influence’’ to critique three othercontemporary Singapore films, Bloom’s notion may also go some way towardsexplaining Return to Pontianak as a slightly menacing return of the golden-agepontianak Malay films, Singapore’s historical abject summoned in order to bedisavowed as the revived contemporary film industry seeks to redraw the boundariesbetween its low-budget Southeast Asian past and its present aspirations towardsglobal recognition and success.

Southeast Asian Migrant Workers in Singapore

While Return to Pontianak locates modern Singapore within a primal Southeast Asiathat is fatally attractive, Kelvin Tong’s The Maid features female domestic workersfrom the Philippines as economically necessary and yet troubling Southeast Asianpenetrations into Singapore’s culture and society.

The sixteenth-century Sejarah Melayu, or, Malay Annals (1970), describedSingapore as a thriving centre of trade, and T.N. Harper (1999, pp. 15–16) noteshow the ‘‘civilisations of the [pre-colonial] Malay world are founded on movementsof people’’. But the image of Singapore as an immigrant society is most firmlyembedded in its nineteenth-century colonial founding when – as Singaporeans aretaught in school – the free port attracted traders from the Malay archipelago, Chinaand India, and entrepot trade drew middlemen who were mainly migrants escapingthe famines, wars and political uncertainties of feudal China. The inflow of socio-culturally diverse peoples and segregationist residential planning policies created aplural society in which people from the different colonially demarcated ethniccommunities lived separately in ethnic zones but interacted across ethnic linesmainly in the marketplace (Furnivall, 1948). This colonial practice has left animprint on Singapore’s contemporary ‘‘multiracial’’ policies based on a model ofSingapore society as consisting officially of four racial groups – Chinese (75 percent), Malay (15 per cent), Indian (8 per cent) and other – no longer residentiallysegregated but treated as categorically distinct and proportionally constantcomponents of a synthetic national identity.

Migration continues to be a central feature of contemporary Singapore; but, forpublic policy makers, it has been starkly differentiated into two sets of flows:migrant (or guest) workers who accept lower-skilled jobs that do not pay well andthat most Singaporeans are unwilling to do, and foreign (or global) talent who bringspecific expertise and skill-sets that not enough Singaporeans possess but that arenecessary for higher-order economic activity. Lee Kuan Yew (quoted in The StraitsTimes, 2 July 2007) explains:

For Singapore to thrive, we must attract foreign talent and foreign workers.Foreign talent will create more jobs for Singaporeans. Foreign workers willdo the jobs that Singaporeans are not willing to do. During a recession, theforeign workers will bear the brunt of retrenchments as in the past,buffering Singaporean workers. The more talent – local and foreign – wehave, the more dynamic our economy and the better off Singaporeans willbe. The less talent we have, the less our economic vitality with fewer jobs,and more unemployed.

Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema 161

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

As Singapore’s economy grew in the 1970s, the labour market tightened and wagelevels were kept low for Singapore to continue being attractive for foreigninvestment. The growing demand for labour was met by women who wereencouraged to re-enter or fully enter the workforce and an inflow of relatively cheapforeign workers, particularly in construction and domestic services. In recent years,Singaporeans have employed more than 150,000 female domestic workers from lessdeveloped Asian countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand,Myanmar and India, who have left the conditions of poverty and unemployment intheir own countries in order to do a job in Singapore that middle-incomeSingaporeans are less willing to do themselves (Gee and Ho, 2006, pp. 8–9). Thisinternational flow of labour also maps onto a global network of patriarchal powerrelations. For instance, the Philippines (as third-world exporter of female labour)gains from the remittances that constitute a significant percentage of its GDP.Singapore (as first-world host country) enjoys the cheaply obtained labour forhousework that frees up its citizens, male and female, to be more economicallyproductive and to pursue their dreams of upward mobility. And the low-salaried‘‘maids’’ are ‘‘excluded from the rights and considerations that other workers take tobe theirs almost as a matter of course’’ (Gee and Ho, 2006, p. vi). This capitalistarrangement is facilitated by patriarchal violence practised in both exporting andimporting countries, an arrangement that exploits women who are not onlydisplaced from their homes, but also made vulnerable to many levels of abuse.

In Singapore, domestic workers are in effect excluded from protection under theEmployment Act. Licensing practices under the Employment Agencies Act arevague and unsupported by clear standards and guidelines. Domestic workersthemselves are too disempowered and dependent on their employers to be able toreport abuses meaningfully to the authorities. An informal study has concluded thatphysical injury is significantly the most common form of abuse when compared tosexual offences, overwork, malnourishment, and underpayment; and that manydomestic workers in Singapore face ‘‘embedded injustice’’ at nearly every stage oftheir careers: recruitment, training, documentation, salary and dismissal (Gee andHo, 2006). Within the castrating confines of Singapore’s authoritarian capitalism,vulnerable maids as sexualised objects of possession can make Singapore men feelmore masculine. Singapore women, frustrated by the challenges of a dual career thatgenerally pays them less than their male counterparts in the workplace and nothingat all in the home, may vent their frustrations with the patriarchal order byphysically and psychologically abusing the weaker and lower-status women theyemploy. Yet, these tendencies and behaviours are repressed by Singaporeans, whohave become very dependent on cheap domestic workers and who want to projectthemselves as having achieved an affluent and decent middle-class society withproper ‘‘Asian values’’. Smugly, Singaporean employers often explain how foreignmaids should feel fortunate to work in Singapore, where they can earn enoughmoney to return home wealthy.

The foreign maid, then, becomes for Singaporeans a means to pursue careers anddemonstrate social status; but the maid is also a punching bag for the frustrated, acause of repressed personal shame at being responsible for such exploitation, and adaily source of anxiety as they read sensationalised news reports and watch dramaticre-enactments on television crime shows about maids who invite strangers into the

162 Kenneth Paul Tan

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

house, steal, get pregnant, and even physically abuse and kill little children.Singaporeans still remember the diplomatic row between Singapore and thePhilippines in 1995 when a Filipina domestic worker, Flor Contemplacion, wasfound guilty by the Singapore courts of murdering another Filipina domestic workerand a Singaporean child under her care. Although the President of the Philippinespersonally appealed to the Singapore government for clemency, the governmentflexed its muscles and went ahead with her execution. She was subsequently treatedas a hero in her home country, where Singapore flags and effigies were burnt. Theincident reinforced stereotypes of legalistic and orderly Singapore as an exceptionalcountry in an emotionally and politically flammable Southeast Asia. Contempla-cion’s case was also a spectacle that highlighted not so much the plight of foreigndomestic workers in Singapore (low wages, poor working conditions, and thehardship of being separated from family and friends), but the dangers that they canpose to middle-class society. The spectacular figure of a murderous maid serves toconduct the repressed guilt of Singaporeans who put their familial responsibilities inthe hands of poorly paid labourers and to divert moral indignation away from theexploitation of third-world women and onto this monstrous behaviour from a less‘‘civilised’’ Southeast Asian region.

The Maid, released a decade after the Contemplacion case, begins with the arrivalin Singapore of Filipina domestic worker Rosa Dimaano (Alessandra de Rossi). Inthis scene, the audience hears a female voiceover narrating the arrival and assumesthat they are listening in on Rosa’s thoughts:

I was so frightened to be suddenly alone in a strange, new city, far away frommy friends and family . . . here I am, in Singapore, a place I have always heardabout. The tall buildings, the beautiful streets. Everything was so clean andwonderful. This was my new home and the start of my new life.

In fact, the entire film – clearly aiming to appeal to an international audience – looks(even marvels) at Singapore mainly from a foreigner’s point of view. Rosa is sent byher maid agency to work for the Teo family, a traditional Chinese family whomanage a renowned Teochew opera troupe and live in a shop-house in an olderdistrict of Singapore. Rosa is initially made to feel quite welcome by the slightly oddbut kindly family, which consists of husband (Chen Shu Cheng), wife (Hong HuiFang), and their grown-up but mentally disabled son Ah Soon (Benny Goh).However, Rosa soon has terrifying ghostly encounters: she sees spirits of the deadwho occupy the front row at an opera performance, the spirit of a boy who has diedin a road accident, the ghosts of a schoolboy and schoolgirl who have jumped off anoverhead bridge, and worst of all, a strangely disfigured woman who haunts Rosa inher dreams.

The film is set during the seventh lunar month – the ‘‘Hungry Ghost Month’’ –when Chinese believers typically make ritual offerings of food, effigies and burnt‘‘Bank of Hell’’ notes to the spirits of their dead relatives released from Hell duringthis time. These spirits return to their family homes, sometimes to take care ofunfinished business including revenge. Rosa is told that her ghostly encounters areprobably the result of not observing the customary rules of the Ghost Month in spiteof the Teo family’s efforts to warn her: she once attempted to sweep away the

Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema 163

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

family’s burnt offerings that had been left outside their house. Singaporeanemployers, who often complain about maids who repeatedly make mistakes becausethey are stubborn or slow to learn, will relate to this scene, and will take somepleasure in the ghostly ‘‘punishment’’ that Rosa receives for her mistake.

Rosa and the audience eventually realise that the disfigured woman in her dreamsis the ghost of Esther Santos (Nur Awal’liyah Ja’afar), the Teo family’s previousFilipina maid who died exactly one year ago, also during the Ghost Month. As thefamily maid, Esther had performed the (paid) nurturing role of a mother to the pre-oedipal Ah Soon; but because of her subservient position in the family, she could notfully undertake to teach the ‘‘boy’’ about his body and the difference between ‘‘cleanand unclean’’, ‘‘proper and improper’’, which Kristeva describes as the exercise of‘‘maternal authority’’ during the semiotic stage. With an incomplete ‘‘primalmapping of the body’’ and unable to fully enter the symbolic order where the laws ofcivilisation prevail, the mentally challenged Ah Soon one day acted intuitively on hissexual desires and raped Esther, his maid and surrogate mother. To preserve thehonour of the family, Ah Soon’s parents burnt Esther to death; but a distraught AhSoon jumped to his death not long after. Rosa and the audience realise at this pointin the film that Ah Soon is also a ghost who has returned to the family during theGhost Month in order to look for Esther, who bears a remarkable, though notaccidental, resemblance to Rosa. It turns out that Ah Soon’s parents hired Rosa inorder to make her a ‘‘ghost bride’’ for Ah Soon. Ghost marriage is an obscurepractice in Chinese societies, usually arranged by family members of a deceased manor woman or both, in order – very often – to obtain advantage or escapedisadvantage in the patriarchal order.

But this ghost marriage requires Rosa’s consent, and that she be put to death. TheTeo couple, agents of a deep-seated violence associated with patriarchal norms andexpectations, attempt to bribe Rosa with money to pay for Singapore’s modernmedical facilities, which can save her sick brother in the Philippines. When this fails,they physically torture her. But Esther’s ghost comes to Rosa’s rescue – the fatherburns to death and the mother dies in a shocking road accident as she chases afterthe fleeing Rosa. The heroic Filipina ghost Esther – wronged by the violence of thepatriarchal order – has also returned during the Ghost Month to take revenge on theTeo family, to warn and rescue her fellow Filipina exploited by the same global logicof patriarchal capitalism, and to enlist Rosa’s help to return her remains to her homein the Philippines: ‘‘It is done . . . I am contented. And, now, Rosa. Take me home’’.As she leaves for home, Rosa thinks to herself:

A month ago, I came to Singapore. I came here to see the world. I ended uplooking into the darkest and saddest part of a human heart. Here, my journeyends. I am finally going back. So is another girl who has been away from homefor a long, long time.

Interestingly, the audience hears these thoughts in a double-layered voiceover,unsure which voice belongs to Rosa and which to Esther, in fact calling intoquestion whether it was Rosa’s voice at all that the audience heard at the beginningof the film. This device suggests strong parallels in the trajectories of both women: inboth cases, one trajectory is a gruesome resolution of the other as both women help

164 Kenneth Paul Tan

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

each other to find their way home. The relationship between Esther and Rosa –marked by an uncomfortable mix of vengeful desires and maternal protectiveness –is also mirrored in the relationship between the pontianak and Charity. Alsointeresting is the way in which The Maid offers a second monstrous-feminine figurein Mrs Teo, the living mother of a dead son who returns as a ghost. What is commonin these sutured pairings – Mrs Teo and Ah Soon, Esther and Rosa, the pontianakand Charity – is the love that the mother has for the child, so intense that she cannotlet go but must, as an abject, transgress the boundaries of the living and the dead tocommit the most gruesome murders.

The Maid portrays Singapore as an exotic place: mysterious, enticing anddangerous. This exoticised space – visually exploited in order to appeal to aninternational audience, in accordance with Raintree’s business plans – is, however,safely contained within a specific geography of ‘‘traditional old Singapore’’ thatexcludes the ultra-modern and highly urbanised areas of the global-city belt as wellas the modern public housing estates, a manoeuvre that is enacted vividly in theopening scene when Rosa rides a bus from the international airport through themodern cityscape and finally into traditional Singapore – ‘‘the darkest and saddestpart of a human heart’’ – where the Teo family and the supernatural reside. In thistraditional space, the residents speak Teochew, a major Chinese dialect thatlanguage policy has actively endeavoured to replace with the more economicallyuseful Mandarin. Presenting the human and ghostly inhabitants of this ‘‘traditional’’space as modern Singapore’s Other could be a reflection of middle-classSingaporeans’ fear of the ‘‘pre-modern’’ and irrational desires that urbanisation,development and progress have repressed into the nation’s unconscious.

Locating the narrative within this ‘‘internally foreign’’ space and turning maidabuse into a fantastic horror spectacle are strategies that present urbanised middle-class Singaporean audiences with the pleasure of being able to acknowledge andeven righteously condemn the exploitation and abuse of foreign maids, but also todisavow their personal culpability. The film features two foreign maids who embodySingaporeans’ repressed fear and guilt returning monstrously from the nationalunconscious, only to be exiled back to maternal Southeast Asia once the‘‘traditional’’ cause of this guilt, embodied by evil exoticised characters from whomurbanised Singaporeans can distance themselves, are killed off in a satisfying act ofjustice.

Asian Values and the Degenerate West

While a perception of Southeast Asian backwardness and excess has givenSingaporeans cause for anxiety, the idea of Asia itself – and East Asia implicitly –has been a rich source of cultural materials that Singapore’s thoroughly modern,state-driven nation-building project has attempted to rationalise and transform intocapitalist values that support economic development and growth. It was popular inthe 1980s to suggest that the economic miracle of Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwanand Singapore – the ‘‘Asian Tigers’’ – was related to, possibly even explained by,their common East Asian culture and ethic. Ezra F. Vogel (1991, pp. 83–101)explains how these economies’ Confucian institutions and practices such as a meri-tocratic elite, entrance examination system, group orientation, and self-cultivation

Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema 165

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

provided the right conditions for economic success, although he also identifies someimportant historical-situational factors. Also in the 1980s, the Singapore stateattempted to re-enchant a people thoroughly socialised for industry by deliberatelyconstructing national identity and values that were anchored to an imagined andhighly syncretic Asian heritage, bureaucratically forged together from fragments ofConfucian thought, Taoist practices, and generalised notions of Asian valuesacceptable to the three major ethnic groups that make up its society. This Asianvalues talk also provided ideological resources for responding to the criticisms ofwestern human rights groups and for constructing an alternative to liberaldemocracy that threatened to erode the moral authority of Singapore’s authoritar-ian government.

In spite of the potentially chauvinistic rhetoric of Asian values, particularlypronounced in the 1980s and 1990s, Singaporeans are today somewhat ambivalent –even schizophrenic – about their western orientation and Asian identity, as theanxieties manifested in Return to Pontianak and The Maid would suggest. Thegovernment also demonstrates this schizophrenia when it keeps a thoroughly openeconomy, makes itself useful on so many fronts to powerful western countries, anddevelops Singapore into another global-city clone; and yet continues to produce aself-righteous spin on the superiority of Singapore’s conservative value-system andits illiberal practice of democracy. Such a strategy seems to be consistent with thedictates of neoliberal globalisation that Singapore opportunistically embraces as asmall, externally dependent nation-state with inadequate resources and markets ofits own. Proponents of neoliberalism in the advanced capitalist economies welcomeSingapore’s economic liberalisation where openness to international flows of capitaland talent are concerned, but – unlike their human rights movements – tacitly (andironically) support the social conservatism and political authoritarianism that,through their integrative powers, are able to protect these flows from the disruptivepolitics that can emerge from economic and social divisions amplified byglobalisation. In an increasingly interconnected global economy, the more frequentoccurrence of economic crises makes this logic more compelling.

Released a year after the outbreak of the 1997 Asian economic crisis (oftendescribed as a ‘‘contagion’’), Victor Khoo’s only feature film Tiger’s Whip looks atanother mostly Asian ‘‘disease’’ called koro. The disease results from an individualand even social ‘‘[b]elief in fatally retracting genitals, or a belief in genital theft’’(Vaughan, 2002), often attributed to supernatural causes. A koro epidemic is widelyreported to have occurred in Singapore in 1967 (two years after Singapore gainedindependence through a traumatic separation in a ‘‘moment of anguish’’), anincident that forms the background to this film, whose central motif is castrationanxiety.

The film’s protagonist, Dick Winner (David Calig), is a hyper-masculineAmerican porn actor whose name alone points to his well-endowed physical andsexual attributes. One day, on an exotic film set in Los Angeles, an escaped snakebites the loud and obnoxious Dick on his scrotum when he goes to the toilet – hisfirst experience of ‘‘castration’’. Lying in hospital, he realises to his horror that hispenis has shrunk considerably and discovers that he has contracted the dreadedkoro – his second experience of castration. He flies to Singapore to find a cure and isassisted by two Singaporeans whom he meets separately: the buffoonish taxi driver

166 Kenneth Paul Tan

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

Krishna (R. Chandran) and the beautiful psychiatrist Maria Lee (Andrea D’Cruz),with whom he eventually falls in love. The obnoxious Dick is quickly tamed byMaria’s kind and gracious ways and her superior professional status – his thirdexperience of castration. Dick is taken by his new sidekick Krishna to a Taoisttemple, a Hindu temple, and then a traditional Chinese medicine shop, but everyexpert they encounter regards koro as merely a psychosomatic problem. Dick finallylearns about an alternative cure: drinking a brew made from a tiger’s penis (or‘‘whip’’). He eventually captures and castrates an escaped tiger on the offshore andstill largely rural island of Pulau Ubin (another ‘‘internally foreign’’ space), but thebrew does not work. Instead, Dick regains his manhood when Maria’s femalecharms turn him on. One night, though, Maria is possessed by the castrated tiger’sspirit and proceeds to castrate Dick as karmic revenge for killing the tiger – this isDick’s fourth and most literal experience of castration. Dick survives the attack buttries to drown himself. He is saved by a stereotypical oriental guru (Choon KongCheong), who spews forth wise sayings such as ‘‘the fewer the desires the greater thefreedom’’. Dick eventually comes to terms with himself; he reconciles with andmarries Maria, and they both move to the United States where they live happily everafter.

The film was released shortly after the government began to make publicdeclarations of policies aimed at turning Singapore into a more attractive place forforeign talent (for example, Goh, 1997). Singapore’s small population and its acutesense of its own limited resources have made it most welcoming of foreigners able tobring capital, technology and skills. However, the popular belief that Singapore willbend over backwards to bring in foreign talent has been a cause of unhappinessamong ordinary Singaporeans, who worry about losing their jobs and promotionprospects to equally – or even less – talented people who they suspect areindiscriminately given overblown perks and incentives to live and work in Singaporejust because they are foreign (Srilal, 28 March 1999). Although Singapore is notgenerally considered to be a xenophobic country, Tiger’s Whip – through itsslapstick and over-the-top comedy – appears to appeal to anti-foreign/Westsentiments raised by a combination of anxieties provoked by foreign talent policiesand the chauvinism built up through years of Asian values talk.

Dick Winner – a big, loud-mouthed and arrogant American working in an‘‘immoral’’ industry – embodies the perceived moral and cultural degeneracy thatthreatens to penetrate Singapore via its economy. In the film, Singaporedeliberately and exaggeratedly takes on the self-exoticising role of oriental Otherin the western imagination, gratifying Singapore audiences frustrated with neo-colonial attitudes by threatening the offending foreigner with castration: first, thefilm gives Dick a castrating disease with ‘‘origins’’ in Singapore; then, it makeshis helplessness in exotic Singapore a symbolic castration; and, finally, it providesa monstrous Singaporean woman to physically castrate him with a pair ofscissors. The film turns Singapore’s seductive opening to foreigners into a vaginadentata, causing deep anxiety even as they forcefully enter the country via theeconomic passage.

In the colonial gaze, Asian Singapore was a virgin territory in need of masculinecultivation and civilisation, a territory occupied by the languorous and lazy native inneed of colonial tutelage and discipline. Asian Singapore, feminised and

Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema 167

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

misrecognised as castrated, gave the oedipalised and colonising western subject afrightening vision and threat of castration. Through the film, modern andindependent Singapore, when threatened by a new inflow of ‘‘superior’’ foreign-ers/westerners, mimics and re-appropriates its colonial subject position, deliberatelydisplaying its castrated genitals (koro, exoticism, superstition, mysticism, and so on)to provoke fear and shrinkage in the phallic intruders. Maria, when possessed by thespirit of the tiger castrated by Dick, performs the most visually violent moment ofcastration in the film and is clearly the fetishised phallus.

But Maria’s status as an independent-minded professional, her refusal of thesubservient Asian female stereotype, and her sexual attraction to an American pornstar also threaten the patriarchal Asian society. To cope with this castration threat,the film de-humanises Maria as a monstrous woman (exaggerating the ‘‘out-of-control’’ quality that phallogocentrism attributes to females), makes her theinstrument of a humiliating act of violence perpetrated usefully against the offendingforeigner (thus creating a vivid cautionary image of the Asian vagina dentata),domesticates her through marriage, and sends her off to the US. Having committedsuch violence against the American man (and employing the Asian notion of karmato link his misfortunes directly to his own actions), the film finally provides an‘‘eastern’’ cure for all levels of his castration, sending him back to the US a betterman. For a Singaporean/Asian audience, the pleasures of the film lie in its enactmentof how the immoral, degenerate and arrogant ‘‘West’’ can be both emasculated andcured by the mysterious healing powers of the ‘‘East’’.

Tiger’s Whip and The Maid are both thoroughly self-exoticising films that portraySingapore as strange, inscrutable, wondrous, alluring and dangerous. In showcasingthe cliches of ‘‘traditional’’ architecture, occupations, festivals, rituals, superstitionsand wise sayings, self-exoticisation creates a grotesque and camp aesthetic thatmight itself be a kind of abject ‘‘monstrous-feminine’’, summoned in order to beritually rejected, so that patriarchal order and the seriousness of Singapore’sdetermination to survive and succeed as a nation may be restored as the frontiersdividing semiotic and symbolic are reasserted.

Conclusion

Female monstrosity in these three contemporary Singapore films is produced withina phallogocentric ideology, helping audiences to cope and deal with their anxietiesand the patriarchal order to be reinstated. The mythical pontianak in Return toPontianak is either the fetishised phallus of the abject mother that primal SoutheastAsia is to modern Singapore, or the seductive yet dangerous toothed vagina of aSoutheast Asian mother actively threatening to castrate its Singaporean offspring.The vengeful ghost of murdered Filipina maid Esther in The Maid marks the returnof middle-class guilt due to exploitation of powerless third-world women and fear ofthe danger that these women can bring to middle-class homes, both repressed by theperceived economic need for cheap domestic workers in Singapore. In Tiger’s Whip,the female psychiatrist Maria, possessed by a tiger’s spirit, castrates her Americanlover, who has just recovered from a mythical genital disease associated withSingapore. In refusing the subservient Asian stereotype, she offends the patriarchalsociety, is turned into the castrating instrument of this society that is sceptical and

168 Kenneth Paul Tan

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

resentful of foreign talent even as it grudgingly admires the West, and is thenmarried off to the American and sent (in a sense, ‘‘exiled’’) to the US to live.

These three Singapore films – elaborations of the problems, dilemmas andanxieties of a materially successful nation entering a higher stage of advanced globalcapitalism – are modern rituals that serve to bring these national anxieties undercontrol by subjecting female monstrosity – their grotesque embodiment – topatriarchal discipline.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the 59th Political StudiesAssociation (UK) Annual Conference held at the University of Manchester on 7–9April 2009. The author wishes to thank Alfian Bin Sa’at and two anonymousreviewers for their very insightful suggestions.

References

Agence France-Presse (2001) Smoke haze returns to haunt Indonesia and neighbours. 10 July.

Agence France-Presse (2001) Choking haze covers city of Pontianak. 7 July.

Cheah, Philip (2002) Singapore: Starting over, in Aruna Vasudev, Latika Padgaonkar and Rashmi

Doraiswamy (eds), Being and becoming: The cinemas of Asia, pp. 380–91 (New Delhi: Macmillan

India Limited).

Creed, Barbara (1993) The monstrous-feminine: Film, feminism, psychoanalysis (London: Routledge).

Devan, Janadas (2007) Odd man in, in Kenneth Paul Tan (ed.), Renaissance Singapore? Economy, culture,

and politics, pp. 37–44 (Singapore: NUS Press).

England, Vaudine (2001) Refugees live in fear as ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’ continues. South China Morning Post,

3 July.

Furnivall, John S. (1948) Colonial policy and practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Gee, John and Elaine Ho (2006) Dignity overdue (Singapore: Select).

George, Cherian (2000) Singapore: The air-conditioned nation: Essays on the politics of comfort and control

1990–2000 (Singapore: Landmark).

Goh, Chok Tong (1997) Global city, best home (Prime Minister’s National Day Rally speech). 24 August.

Harper, T.N. (1999) The end of empire and the making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press).

Ho, Tzu Nyen (2007) The afterimage – traces of otherness in recent Singaporean cinema. Inter-Asia

Cultural Studies 8(2), pp. 310–26.

Knee, Adam (2005) Thailand haunted: The power of the past in contemporary Thai horror film, in Steven

J. Schneider and T. Williams (eds),Horror international, pp. 141–59 (Detroit: Wayne State University

Press).

Kristeva, Julia (1982) The powers of horror: An essay on abjection (New York: Columbia University Press).

Kueh, Adeline S.-H. (2003) Pontianak and her sisters: Representations of monstrosity in Southeast Asian

popular culture. Paper presented at What Lies Beneath (Postgraduate Conference 2003), Melbourne,

Australia, 6 November.

Lau, Albert (1998) A moment of anguish: Singapore in Malaysia and the politics of disengagement

(Singapore: Times Academic Press).

Lee, Kuan Yew (2000) From third world to first: The Singapore story: 1965–2000: Memoirs of Lee Kuan

Yew (Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings, Times Editions).

Leifer, Michael (2000) Singapore’s foreign policy: Coping with vulnerability (London: Routledge).

Leifer, Michael (2001) Dictionary of the modern politics of Southeast Asia, 3rd edition (London:

Routledge).

Lyons, Lenore (2004) A state of ambivalence: The feminist movement in Singapore (Leiden, The

Netherlands: Brill).

Female Monstrosity and National Anxiety in Singapore Cinema 169

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010

Marcuse, Herbert (1955/1966) Eros and civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud, reprint (Boston,

MA: Beacon Press).

May Adadol Ingawanij (2007) Nang Nak: Thai bourgeois heritage cinema. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

8(2), pp. 180–93.

MediaCorp Raintree Pictures (2007) Corporate profile. Available at http://www.mediacorpraintree.com/

about_us/abt_us.htm, accessed 24 May 2009.

Millet, Raphael (2006) Singapore cinema (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet).

Neo, Boon Siong and Geraldine Chen (2007) Dynamic governance: Embedding culture, capabilities and

change in Singapore (Singapore: World Scientific).

Rahim (Ishak), Lily Zubaidah (1998) The Singapore dilemma: The political and educational marginality of

the Malay community (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press).

Sejarah Melayu, or, Malay annals (1970) trans. C.C. Brown (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press).

Srilal, Mohan (1999) Singapore: Resentment towards foreigners growing. Inter Press Service, 29 March.

Reproduced on the Singapore Window resource website. Available at http://www.singapore-

window.org/sw99/90329ip.htm, accessed 24 May 2009.

Tan, Kenneth Paul (2003) Sexing up Singapore. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6(4), pp. 403–23.

Tan, Kenneth Paul (2009) Who’s afraid of Catherine Lim? The state in patriarchal Singapore. Asian

Studies Review 33(1), pp. 43–62.

The Straits Times (1983) Talent for the future (full text of Lee Kuan Yew’s speech). 15 August, pp. 10–11.

The Straits Times (2007) ‘‘Non-stop politicking’’ in bid to deny credit to leaders. 2 July, p. 17.

Today (2006) Where are the women – pantsuits and all? 18 December.

Uhde, Jan and Yvonne Ng Uhde (2000) Latent images: Film in Singapore (Singapore: Oxford University

Press).

Vaughan (2002) Koro: A natural history of penis panics. Kuro5hin: Technology and culture, from the

trenches. Available at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/9/16/81843/6555, accessed 24 May 2009.

Vogel, Ezra F. (1991) The four little dragons: The spread of industrialization in East Asia (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press).

Yao, Souchou (2007) Singapore: The state and the culture of excess (London: Routledge).

Yun, Daniel (2005) Presentation on the ‘Transnational/Transcultural Asian Cinema’ panel at Forum on

Asian Cinema, Singapore, 16 September.

Films Cited

Nang Nak (1999) Nonzee Nimibutr (Director and Producer), Visute Poolvoralaks (Producer) and Wisit

Sasanatieng (Writer). DVD, distributed by Kino Video.

Return to Pontianak (2001) Ong Lay Jinn (Director and Writer), Juan Foo (Producer) and Duncan Jepson

(Producer). DVD, distributed by Alliance Entertainment Singapore Pte Ltd.

Sumpah Pontianak (1958) B.N. Rao (Director). VCD, distributed by Music Valley Sdn Bhd.

The Maid (2005) Kelvin Tong (Director and Writer), Pui Yin Chan (Producer), Titus Ho (Producer) and

Saw Yam Seah (Producer). DVD, distributed by Scorpio East Entertainment Pte Ltd.

Tiger’s Whip (1998) Victor Khoo (Director and Writer) and Tony Yeow (Director). DVD, distributed by

Warner Home Video.

170 Kenneth Paul Tan

Downloaded By: [National University Of Singapore] At: 06:07 17 May 2010