Un-Thai Sakon: The Scandal of Teen Cinema

Abstract

This article explores the cycle of Thai teen movies that emerged in 1985, reaching the height of their box-office success with the first phase of urban multiplex expansion, before fizzling out around 1999 as prestigious heritage films took over. Widely dismissed as a culturally impoverished period in Thai film history, the teen movies provide immensely rich material for analysing the cultural politics of contemporary Thailand. They were reviled because the more attractively their defining signatures – the ‘music video’ rite-of-passage drama and the ‘school skirts and shorts' comedy – appeared to appropriate the sakon (global, international) vernacular of pop culture, the less thai and the more ‘imitative’ such films seemed to be. This article traces the period in Thai cinema history from the consolidation of the conglomerate ‘music video’ teen movies to the moment of their delegitimization at the onset of the 1997 economic crisis. It is grounded in the hypothesis that there is nothing in industrial terms, or in terms of the underlying aesthetic mode, substantially to differentiate heritage films from the conglomerate teen films that precipitated them. The connection between the two genres of film is there in the same monopolistically integrated mode of production as well as in the personnel responsible for them; in the primacy in each case of marketing and promotional tactics; and in a textual mode distinguished by pastiche and a strong degree of visual excess, rendering ‘Thailand’ in each case a fantastical dream space displaying a certain ‘look’. In lieu of such similarities, the contrasting cultural status of heritage films and teen films underlines the point that the idea of quality in Thai cinema is overdetermined by the ideal of displaying an appropriate combination of the thai and the sakon. By visiting the teen cycle as an illegitimate, though industrially formative moment of contemporary Thai cinema, the paper asks to what extent the yoking of that connotation of the national self, thaithai (‘Thai-style’), to filmic form, and of the Thai subject to cinema spectatorship, implies a bourgeois speaking position alone.