The afterimage – traces of otherness in recent Singaporean cinema

Abstract

In this essay, Ho Tzu Nyen attempts to unearth a subterranean narrative that threads through three films produced by three male Singaporean directors – namely Mee Pok Man (1995) by Eric Khoo, 15 (2003) by Royston Tan, and Zombie Dogs (2004) by Toh Hai Leong. This narrative of unconsciously repeated motifs that migrate from film to film is in turn analyzed as a recurrent symptom that haunts a number of Singaporean cinematic productions from the 1990s onwards. This symptom, which can be summarily described as a paranoid relationship to ‘otherness’, makes manifest a variety of psychic tendencies such as morbid fear of impotence, misogyny, and fetishization of the social other. For Ho, such impulses are in turn intricately linked to what he, following the literary critic Harold Bloom, calls ‘The Anxiety of Influence’. For Bloom, every poet embarks upon his career after a prior encounter with another poet, or poem. As a result, the ‘late‐coming’ poet inevitably suffers from a sense of threatened autonomy, because his profoundest insights and deepest desires are always already elucidated by another. For the Singaporean filmmaker, Ho argues that this ‘anxiety’ in relation to the cinematic tradition takes on a peculiar nature and a doubled pressure, for the canon that inspires them is perceived as being something essentially foreign. Hence the Singaporean filmmaker makes cinema as though he is stuttering in a foreign tongue. Therefore, the concept of ‘the anxiety of influence’ is modulated and compounded with a ‘postcolonial anxiety’. In addition, Ho also draws upon the concepts of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze in an attempt to sketch out an ontology of cinema that at once functions in a deconstructive relationship to ‘auteur‐driven’ modes of analyses, while avoiding what he perceives as the overly ‘sociological’ bent that characterizes much of the existing corpus of writings on Singaporean cinema.