1 15: The Singapore Failure Story, âSlanged Upâ
Song Hwee Lim
Released in 2003, Royston Tanâs debut feature film 15 can be situated in the context of a revival in Singaporean film-making that began in the early 1990s. Following the closure of the Shaw and Cathay studios in the late 1960s and early 1970s respectively, not a single film was made in Singapore until the abysmal Medium Rare (Arthur Smith) in 1991.1 While there were attempts at making genre films aimed at the mass market in the subsequent years, resulting in films such as the comedy Army Daze (Ong Keng Sen, 1996), the thriller God or Dog (Hugo Ng, 1997), the disco-inspired Forever Fever (Glen Goei, 1998) and the teen movie The Teenage Textbook Movie (Philip Lim, 1998), all of which enjoyed varying degrees of box-office success, two noteworthy trends emerged outside of this genre-based milieu. The first is what Olivia Khoo calls âlocal content filmsâ that centre around the comedian Jack Neo,2 such as Money No Enough (Tay Teck Lock, 1998), Liang Po Po: The Movie (Teng Bee Lian, 1999) and the Neo-directed hits, I Not Stupid (2002) and Home-run (2003). These films typically target a Mandarin-speaking audience who are already familiar with Neoâs television work,3 and are also well received in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.4 The second consists of more self-consciously stylised films, including Eric Khooâs Mee Pok Man (1995), 12 Storeys (1997) and Be with Me (2005); Eating Air (1999) by Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng; and Tanâs 15 and 4:30 (2005). These have begun to break into international film festival and arthouse cinema circuits in the West. Both groups of films are similarly invested in representing the underbelly of Singapore society that is at odds with the countryâs sparkling clean image, giving voice to different marginalised groups and to the officially censured Chinese dialects (in particular Hokkien) and Singlish (a local version of ungrammatical English mixed with other languages and dialects, including Malay). In their different ways, these films engender a cinematic social realism that implicitly and at times explicitly performs a social critique function in a country whose government is not known for its tolerance of dissenting views.
It has been argued that the artistic sphere, to which the films of Eric Khoo and Jack Neo belong, has emerged as âa âprivilegedâ space for critical reflection on societyâ, and that the all-pervasive presence of the Peopleâs Action Party government âmakes itself a relatively easy target for critiqueâ that is âalmost too good to pass upâ.5 However, if it is accurate to say that, in Singapore, âas in all authoritarian regimes, artists have a tendency to embed their work within quite explicit critiques of politicsâ,6 it must be emphasised that such a critical stance plays well not just locally but also globally. In this regard, there is a shared tendency for discourses on Singapore and the Peopleâs Republic of China (and their respective cinemas) to interrogate excessively (if not exclusively) issues surrounding official censure, alternative artistic practices and potential for resistance, sometimes leading to the specificities of films being conveniently overlooked, as Geremie BarmĂ© has demonstrated in his dismissal of the early works of the PRC filmmaker Zhang Yuan as âbankable dissentâ, while leaving the âoppressedâ film-maker with no viable position other than that of a âdissidentâ.7Within this dynamic, dissent or dissidence becomes what global audiences now expect of any film from countries with a presumed authoritarian regime, and simultaneously serves as the film-makerâs almost compulsory passport to global recognition.
Appearing almost a decade after those of Khoo and Neo, Tanâs film-making can be located in this tradition yet departs from it. On the one hand, Tan said in an interview about his debut film that âItâs time we washed some of our dirty linen in publicâ,8 thus locating 15 as a cinematic discourse of social critique. On the other hand, while his films to date, including his latest, 881 (2007), featuring song-and-dance street performances that proliferate in the âghostlyâ seventh month of the Chinese calendar, share the theme of social marginalisation, what distinguishes them is the manner in which this critical reflection on society is represented on screen. Aesthetically, Tan is not only unmistakably of the MTV generation for whom post-modern pastiche and parody, rather than social realism, reigns, but, like the American director Spike Jonze, Tan also âcut his teeth on music videosâ,9 winning awards for his music videos as early as his late teens.10What is paradoxical, as I want to suggest in this chapter and illustrate below, is that 15 does not totally eschew social realism but rather pushes it to an extreme documentary realism. Nevertheless, rather than present a linear narrative in which the bleak reality of the marginalised is played out for social critique, 15 fragments the narrative with a pastiche of musical interludes, arcade-game simulation and animation that playfully puts any sense of realism into relief. The result is a film that cannot be read merely as social-realist critique, but rather is full of contradiction and ambivalence in its effect and affect.
With the release of 15 in 2003, Tan immediately became the enfant terrible of Singapore film-making. Based on his eponymous 25-minute short film that won the Special Achievement Award at the Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF) in 2002, the 90-minute feature-length 15 premiered uncut at the 2003 SIFF where all 1,200 tickets were snapped up in just four days.11 It subsequently stirred up a controversy when, for its general release, the Board of Film Censors granted the film an R(A) (Restricted [Artistic], for audiences aged twenty-one and above only) rating but demanded twenty-seven cuts.12 As a result, Tan became, in his own words, âthe poster-boy of the anti-censorship movementâ13 and was named in 2004 by Time Asia magazine on its â20 Under 40â list of âAsian heroesâ, in which he was categorised as an âiconoclastâ.14 He also responded to the cutting of 15 by poking fun at the censorship system with a short film Cut (2004), which includes a musical item sung to the tune of Abbaâs Thank You for the Music: âThank you to the censors/The scenes youâre chopping/Thanks for all the crime youâre stoppingâ.15 Predictably, the authorities, represented by the Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts, were not amused, nor did they âappreciate such unbecoming attempts to undermine the standing of a public institutionâ.16
Based on the experiences of the real-life street kids who assume the lead roles, 15âs narrative centres on the lives of five fifteen-year-old boys as they play truant, devise gangsta raps in preparation for a school singing competition, engage in gang fights, endure the pain of tattoo and body piercing, smuggle drugs from Malaysia into Singapore, search for buildings to jump off and commit suicide, watch porn on video and on the Internet, and role-play with a blow-up sex doll while worrying about their maths test, not having a celebration birthday cake and being thrown out by their parents. The film presents the flip side of a stereotypical Singapore in which economic growth is âalmost always the backdrop of both international and local constructions of the Singapore Story as synonymous with Successâ.17 As with Khoo and Neo, Tanâs interest is not so much in the Singapore Success Story as in the Singapore Failure Story, with success and failure measured chiefly in academic and economic terms. The best education prospect for the teenagers in 15, as one of them discloses his aspiration in the film, is the Institute of Technical Education, whose acronym ITE signifies colloquially as âItâs The Endâ.18
Drawing upon âelements of the marginalised and the ready-to-be-discardedâ like Khoo and Neo do can be seen as an âintentional act of subversionâ that deflates âthe triumphalism by pointing to the underbelly of the nation where failures are too well hidden under the new affluenceâ.19 However, Tanâs version of the Singapore Failure Story is aestheticised in ways that make the measure of its subversive force difficult to ascertain. Following the opening credits, the film begins with a low-angle shot of a high-rise housing estate in the background and a lower round tower in the middle of the foreground. Two of the characters, Melvin and Vynn, sit atop the roof of the entrance to the tower, and Melvin sings two lines of a song about Vynn committing suicide by jumping off a building and becoming flattened like a roti prata (a popular Singaporean Indian dough pancake dish).20 The tune of the song is taken from the Singapore national anthem whose original lyrics are in Malay, Singaporeâs national language. It is safe to presume that the boys, like many Chinese Singaporeans, do not understand the meaning of the Malay lyrics in the anthem.21 With Melvinâs miscomprehension and mischievous adaptation of the ...