Liminal Thai Identities: Challenging Ideology in Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Monrak Transistor

In 2001, Five Star Production released Monrak Transistor directed by Pen-ek Ratanaruang. The film was enormously popular with Thai audiences; it won three Thailand National Film Association Awards in 2002 and it was nominated for two others. On the surface, the film appears to be merely the next in a population of post-1997 films that celebrated an ideology of the idyllic Thai rural setting. In her essay, “Transistor and Temporality: the Rural as Modern Thai Cinema's Pastoral,” Adadol Ingawanij makes clear that Pen-ek’s adaptation from its 1981 source novel “divorces itself from the concerns of the novel’s own time” and relocates the narrative into a post-1997 crisis, although the source text was not examined under the scope of research undertaken for this paper (Ingawanij “Transistor” 90-1). However, one need not look to the book to see how Monrak Transistor redefines post-1997 Thai film aesthetics. In her essay, “Challenging Grand Narratives on the Nation: ASEAN independent Filmmaker’s Indirect Participation in Development Discourses,” Veronica Isla concisely outlines how the 1997 Financial Crisis motivated a series of Thai films that idealized the Thai countryside and the ideology of domestic bliss, as well as identifying urban centres, particularly Bangkok, with Western corruption (Isla 15). Isla includes Pen-ek’s Monrak Transistor in this population of films, describing it as a film that idealized “the countryside as a place where Thai tradition is maintained in its purity, unsullied by the corrosive modern influences in the West, influences that have gripped the cities like Bangkok” (Isla 16). However, by defining Monrak Transistor in this way, Isla has overlooked the fundamental aesthetic and the satire in the film that challenge notions of a rural ideal. For all its superficial romance, tragedy, and convention, the film is quite comic and openly satiric. In Monrak Tansistor, Pen-ek Ratanaruang depicts an unsettling and ambiguous Thai culture in which both economic security and domestic security are absent, and the romantic hero cannot create a satisfying affirmative identity, challenging the dominant film ideology that celebrates a rural ideal.
Before the financial crisis of 1997, a schism already existed in Thai culture that polarized an illusion of urban superiority against rural idealism (Ingawanij “Blissfully” 121). Popular Thai film demonstrates ample evidence of the rural/urban dichotomy that was rising in Thai culture before 1997. According to Anchalee Chaiworaporn in his essay “Thailand: Endearing Afterglow” such films as those produced by Cherd Songsri, for example, attempted “to delineate Thai national identity with its basis in rural life and traditions” (Anchalee 454). However, following 1997, the tension within the rural/urban ideologies was overcome by the rural ideology. Poorly managed international (specifically Western) investment in Bangkok-based financial and real estate ventures was the underlying cause of the crisis (Siamwallat 69-70). The financial crisis effectively eliminated the ideology of urban pride and the rural ideal was empowered.
In this state of economic despair, the Thai populace turned to film for solace. A wave of movies emerged that celebrated the rural ideal as the only remaining vestige of national pride. This population of films includes Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Fun Bar Karaoke (1997) and 6ixty-nin9 (1999), Thanit Jitnakul’s Bang Rajan (2000), Yuthlert Sippapak’s Killer Tattoo (2001), and Prachya Pinkaew’s Ong Bak (2003). This initial film reaction to the panic caused by the financial crisis may or may not have served the purpose of soothing the populace. In any case, the fervor eventually gave way to the beginnings of a new film ideology marked by Pen-ek’s Monrak Transistor. This new ideology interrogates the rural ideal and renders the rural romantic hero risible, thereby robbing the Thai populace of its rural security blanket.
On the surface, Monrak Transistor is a romantic tragedy that upholds the depiction of the urban setting as corrupt and the rural setting as idyllic. At the outset of the movie, the young rural hero Pan is in the throes of passing a necklace that he has been arrested for stealing and that he swallowed in an effort to conceal it. The story is narrated by one of the prison guards who knows Pan from his village. The narrative then flashes back to the point at which Pan first met his wife Sadaw while singing at a local fair. At her home, he expresses his affection in song. Her father chases him off with a shotgun but he continues to pursue Sadaw with the gifts of a beautiful blue blouse and a transistor radio. Even in the face of Sadaw’s father’s rejection of Pan, they are eventually married. As they are expecting their first child, Pan is drafted into the army. Upon seeing an advertisement for a singing contest, Pan goes AWOL from the military to pursue a fantasy of fame and fortune as a singer. Pan wins the contest and is whisked away to the offices of a music producer named Suwat. Suwat is stereotypically corrupt and exploitative. Suwat houses Pan in a closet and sets Pan to work mopping floors for some 27 months. Pan finally gets a break when another established singer fails to show up for a scheduled concert. Having finally located her absent husband, Sadaw has travelled to see the performance. Pan and Sadaw enjoy a brief reunion before he is once again swept away by Suwat. At Suwat’s home, Suwat attempts a sexual assault on Pan. In their struggle, Pan accidentally kills Suwat. Pan escapes to a plantation where he labours in the most severe conditions. Sadaw sees this latest abandonment as a betrayal and denounces Pan as a traitor. Sadaw begins a romance with a playboy travelling salesman and eventually he fathers Sadaw’s second child with her. At the plantation, Pan befriends another labourer named Siew. While gambling with the plantation warden, Siew gets into a conflict from which Pan rescues him. They barely escape with their lives and return to the city, starving and bereft. Siew unloads a stolen necklace on Pan. Pan is chased by the police at which time he swallows the necklace to conceal it. The chase ends when Pan is hit by a car and sustains an injury to his leg. Pan is arrested and imprisoned. Here the narrative catches up with the opening scene of the movie. Pan passes the necklace he has swallowed only to be ridiculed that it is a fake. Following his two-year prison term, he rejects an offer by Siew to become a drug dealer and returns to Sadaw in the rural village. The narrative concludes with a sort of reconciliation between Pan and Sadaw in which she breaks down and sobs in his arms. The plotline superficially participates with the wave of films that idealize rural settings and valorize Thai conventions of national pride.
However, in Monrak Transistor, Pen-ek takes aim at a series of traditional Thai symbols of national pride. Pen-ek satirizes the political slogan that identifies Thailand as the “land of smiles” (Poshyananda 48). Pan maintains a relentless grin throughout the first part of the movie, even when facing the verbal wrath of Sadaw’s father. However, Pan is a paradigm of the Thai romantic fool. He picks a losing fight at the fair during the opening scenes of the movie. He swims in toxic water. He abandons his mandatory military service to follow a foolish fantasy of fame as a singer. When it is clear that the glory promised him by the corrupt music producer Suwat is not forthcoming, Pan continues mopping floors for over a year. When Suwat brings Pan to his home Pan is blind to the blatant homo-erotic seduction that Suwat attempts. Throughout the movie Pan ignores his own longing to return to his wife and child when there is no clear narrative contrivance barring him from doing so. After being imprisoned, he trips on his own injured leg and falls into a vat of human urine and feces. Pan is a buffoon of the most ridiculous nature. By locating the Thailand smile in such a romantic fool, Pen-ek criticizes the illusion that the slogan tries to uphold.
The romantic-tragedy in Monrak Transistor is openly satiric. It is peppered with musical interludes that Pen-ek borrows from the Bollywood convention in which disparate cast members participate in individual songs. However, the songs are incongruent. For example, in the soldier’s lament Pan sings of promising to return to Sadaw the following new year. He doesn’t. In his courtship song, he promises his heart. He fails to be entirely loyal. In the musical interlude sung by the soldiers, they celebrate the ideal of never forgetting. Pan seems to entirely forget the wife and child he has left behind. Once locked in the offices of the music producer, Pan sings another song about not forgetting and about the moon. “Don’t forget, don’t forget, as the moon never forgets the sky” (Ratanaruang). These songs romanticize loyalty and memory. Pan exemplifies neither of these tenets. Moreover, the songs are often inconsistent with the mood of the scenes in which they occur. They effectively interrupt the narrative and render their romantic content ridiculous.
Equally inconsistent with any interpretation of the narrative as serious is Pen-ek’s use of asides in which characters directly address the camera. At one point while gambling in the plantation camp, Yot looks directly at the camera and brags to the audience of his winnings. “I’ve got them!” (Ratanaruang). After a time ellipsis of “Two hours and forty minutes,” Siew gloats in a similar fashion, addressing the audience with “I got him!” (Ratanaruang). Following these comic moments, the drama resumes the fourth-wall and returns to an ostensibly realist style. However, these apostrophes displace the illusion of authenticity and satirically highlight the contrivance of the narrative. Any notion of the romantic or tragic aspects of the story line as realistic or credible cannot be taken seriously.
Using the framework of the romanticized rural/urban/rural journey, Pen-ek satirizes not only the rural romantic hero, but the entire rural ideal. Pen-ek’s rural setting in Monrak Transistor is far from ideal. Using visual aesthetics, Pen-ek suggests that the rural environment as toxic. Perhaps the most startling scene of the film depicts Pan swimming through the rural village river towards a clandestine evening rendezvous with Sadaw. The water through which he swims is a neon-green colour. The image is jarring and intimates that the water is toxic in some way. The pastel colour of the water is at the very least “unnatural” (Ingawanij “Transistor” 92). In this unnatural elixir, Pan writhes in comic ecstasy. The image of Pan swimming through it is unsettling and gives rise to a concern as to how he could survive in such a visibly unnatural setting, much less writhe in dance-like ecstasy, grinning all the while.
Pen-ek extends his interrogation of the rural ideal by creating a rural world rife with sickness and decay. There is no ideal healing power in the rural village. Quite the contrary, everyone is sick. Sadaw’s father complains of aches and pains. Pan replaces the labourer hired by Sadaw’s father because, according to Pan, he is “sick” (Ratanaruang). All this rural illness attracts a playboy travelling medicine salesman who occupies himself with healing local peasant children. The illness of Pan’s and Sadaw’s infant is the catalyst that allows the salesman to begin his seduction of Sadaw. By the end of the film, it appears that Sadaw’s father has succumbed to illness and died. Even the materialistic and consumerist symbols of enduring romance that Pan gave Sadaw during their fantasy courtship have succumbed to the toxicity of their environment. The transistor radio is rusted and beyond repair. The blue blouse is tattered and discarded. There is no satisfying resolution to the tragedy Pan and Sadaw have endured.
Pen-ek depicts a world poisoned by the feces of its own inhabitants. The opening scene shows Pan in the background during a humiliating interrogation in which he is attempting to pass the stolen necklace he had swallowed. Pen-ek ties his ‘shit’ motif to the toxic pollution in which Pan was swimming during his stay in prison. Pan is put to the hard labour of fertilizing fields with a mixture made of the feces and urine of the inmates. Stumbling over his injured leg under the weight of the yoke of his burden, he falls headlong into the foul mixture. Early in the film Pan is swimming in toxic rural water. At the end of Pan’s urban economic odyssey he finds himself literally swimming in his own feces. There seems no satisfying or healthy place for poor Pan in the world Pen-ek has created for him.
Caught between corrupt economic forces and a toxic rural environment, Pan is subject to a Thai culture that affords him no affirmative identity. He is not a soldier, nor a singer. He is not a janitor, nor a plantation labourer. He is neither a father nor a husband. He is no longer an imprisoned criminal. The only resolving identity Pan can construct for himself is a liminal one. Throughout the narrative, Pen-ek’s romantic hero is always on the run from the toxic culture that surrounds him, and he is never satisfied. Pen-ek at least provides Pan with a rural location to which to return, but it remains toxic and affords him no security, either romantic or financial. His relationship with Sadaw is far from recovered and his tenancy with her is questionable. He is expected to sleep on the porch in a home which houses both his own child and another child that is not his own. It is only in the liminal space in which Pan abandons both his desire to escape the toxic poverty of the rural setting and the hopeless oppression of the urban space where he achieves any sense of stability and the narrative can conclude.
While other post-1997 movies attempt to create a tangible identity for the Thai citizen based on rural ideal, Pen-ek challenges the ideology and unsettles any false security found in these illusions. Monrak Transistor repeats a motif of romantic ideology in song and desire, but none of these ideals is ever achieved. Pen-ek’s combination of satire and liminality conflate into an unsettling theme: the illusions of comfort - rural romance, urban corruption - can afford no affirmative identity for the Thai subject. Only in the unstable realm of liminality can Pan find an identity with which he is at peace, and only after an economic odyssey in which his illusions and fantasies are dispelled.
Monrak Transistor marks a shift in the post-1997 film aesthetic. The popularity of the film suggests Thai audiences were no longer seeking a filmic security blanket in the form of the rural ideal. By 2001, the wave of films celebrating the rural ideal had run their gamut and Thai audiences were ready for real, albeit unsettling, cultural solutions. Pen-ek addresses the issue by interrogating the rural ideal on screen with its own romantic structure. Pen-ek offers no solutions in Monrak Transistor. He certainly does not redeem the urban side of the urban/rural dichotomy but rather highlights the notion that idealization of any kind affords no affirmative cultural or economic solutions for Thai citizens. Monrak Transistor is a world rife with corruption, slavery, exploitation, and death. Pen-ek demonstrates the tragedy that has befallen a people preying on themselves in a divided urban/rural disharmony. In this way the film calls for unity and solidarity by unsettling a population in such dire need of a post-crisis security blanket.






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