Affectless Cinema
By Edisa Yeo

There are a few ways that a person may suddenly develop an over-keen
awareness of how absurd living really is. While this disruptive thought can
usually be pushed aside so as not to obstruct our view on life, three short
films this year – Nothing in the Cries of Cicadas, New Abnormal and A Man
Trembles – are steeped in its dangerous and dreadful contemplation. More
interestingly, the films also propose the same point of origin for this
crisis of meaning: a paternal government whose total power blunts any sense
of autonomy that its national subjects might possess.
In response to their unjust existence, the characters display a strange
moodlessness. Their mute civility amidst their oppressive circumstances
achieves the opposite effect of assimilation, as they only become further
separated from reality. They look out at their lives and into the audience
with an affectless gaze that is ultimately deeply affecting.

As it turns out, this non-committal gaze is the perfect defiance of meaning
itself. As our searching eyes are met with their empty glares, we are able
to see that the life they lead is as unintelligible as the emotion in the
shot is for us.
In Nothing in the Cries of Cicadas, the protagonist, an unnamed middle-aged
Chinese man, resolves to visit a loved one’s grave for one last time before
it is exhumed according to a land redevelopment policy by the Singapore
government. As he takes a long drive to the unpopulated periphery of the
city and slowly ambles across the large arid cemetery, the atmosphere in the
film also begins to feel suffocatingly dry – barren of discernible meaning.
He watches listlessly as migrant workers, of a race and culture different
from his, demolish the tomb into brick, until it is finally rubble.

We do not know if he is a religious man but still, we feel a deep loss of
dignity on his end because even as the ground beneath him literally upends,
he can only stand by and relent to the bulldoze of policy. His stoicism,
while short of mournfulness, carries with it an unspecifiable melancholy.
In fact, he never speaks, even once. The film, strikingly, has no dialogue.
The only words we ever hear are from a disembodied government source – a
news reporter who announces the land redevelopment policy on the local
radio. Everyone else is voiceless. Everyone else has to lug their body
around, burdened by the degrading fact that it will never be buried.
Because there is no interlocution, it is only at the halfway mark of the
film, when the camera pans tentatively over the protagonist’s shoulder as he
sleeps, that we suspect he is being accompanied by someone. On this note,
the filmmaker, Chiang Wei Liang, indicates that the film is actually from
his point-of-view and that the protagonist is his own real-life father. But
even without this clarification, the camera hangs in such a way that we are
able to recognise the perspective of a cautious child who tails behind a
father as he leads familial rituals.

With this realisation, the suffocating silence in the film suddenly
intersects with our expectation of stern father tropes in Asian households.
We begin to understand why his actions and emotions thus far are so opaque
to us. We even accept it as a show of strength, his insistence on witnessing
every detail of the desecration being a self-inflicted suffering.
Sadly, the film ends before catharsis is achieved for anyone. In the end,
everything remains uncommunicable between father and son. Staid and patient,
the film is an exercise in observance. It shows exactly how the demolition
of historical sites leads to the loss of context for one man and since he is
unable to articulate his loss to his son, the loss of heritage forever.
In New Abnormal, the characters seem to be afflicted by the same drowsiness
we see in Nothing in the Cries of Cicadas. The film caricatures Thai society
during the pandemic and each scene acts as a capsule exploring various
aspects of this outlandish world. Cumulatively, they mirror the
fragmentation and isolation of mass quarantine. Its protest imagery, instead
of rallying us, is portrayed from such a static and cynical perspective that
it almost immobilises us.
The characters lambast their government and articulate their grievances
directly to the camera, yet their tirades are tonally dead. If the
affectless gaze in Nothing in the Cries of Cicadas was a demonstration of
obstinance, this expressionlessness in New Abnormal is an outright affront
to the state. More than just a refusal to expend anger, it is a controlled
presentation of their suffering as pure, inviolable fact.

New Abnormal also takes a sideways look at how Thai protesters have borrowed
from popular culture to theme their protests – a surreal phenomenon of life
imitating art. In real life, they dress up effigies as Lord Voldemort,
drawing similarities between the Harry Potter villain with the Heads of
State in the country. The film directly responds with a scene of Voldemort
relaxing in a bubble bath, still pristine and untouched. In another scene,
an impersonator of Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha acts out an
imagined scenario of his office behind closed doors. Trifling and
unqualified, he passes a new policy on a whim and then spends the rest of
his time online shopping. A grim perspective of authoritarian frivolity
emerges.
In the face of brute political power, human constructs of meaning and
attempts to relate to each other completely collapse. The incorporation of
fiction into real life only highlights the latter’s absurd and artificial
nature. The film even seems to criticise the inauthenticity of co-opting
these foreign symbols for a national movement. It introduces a recurrent
motif of plastic disposables that has become interwoven into Thai culture –
rubber duck floats to shield against police water guns, bubble tea straws
and cups, and at one point, it even floods the screen with plastic bags
flying in from behind the camera.

In New Abnormal, it seems that there is no sensible response to a situation
where your planet, your nation and your society suddenly becomes unsuitable
for living. This abject homelessness advances toward its inevitable
conclusion – suicide – in A Man Trembles.
In A Man Trembles, a family suffering from economic hardship because of the
Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) decides to leave their worldly concerns behind
them. They wait for the arrival of an alien mothership to remove them from
Earth. Its premise parallels the tragic phenomenon in the actual aftermath
of the AFC where people were taking their lives because they could no longer
bear the burden of crushing debt.
In Nothing in the Cries of Cicadas and New Abnormal, the disenfranchised
characters find themselves languishing in their stupor, but the family in A
Man Trembles become galvanised by the closeness of death. The film suggests
that the only true release we may achieve from the oppressiveness of living
must be a spiritual one, because as the Mother affirms, “God also know, we
not for this world”. In contrast to the consumerist escapism that the
characters seek in New Abnormal, the film repudiates such material solutions
to an existential problem.
The film is also unabashedly gendered. The UFO which the family encounters
is shaped in the form of a vagina, signifying a return to the womb from
which we have been helplessly ejected. The mother also reminds the family of
their Catholic faith, making sure her son has his rosary and that they
should not be unshaken because God is with them, the absolute embodiment of
the spiritual.

Contrarily, the father is a representation of the material world that is separated from salvation. In a scene that bears striking similarities to one in Moonlight by Barry Jenkins, the father holds his son up in the water. While the scene in Moonlight submerges the audience in the dynamically-moving waves and represents a profound baptism of manhood for its protagonist, the water here is stagnant. The father looks into the camera with a glazed expression, completely cut off from the metaphysical potential of the water around him.


On the morning of the planned abduction, he goes back into the hotel room for
cash “just in case”, even as he knows that they will no longer have any use
for it. In the end, the fact that he flees from the unknown and abandons his
family is an adroit metaphor for the unreliability and illusory
trustworthiness of paternalistic financial institutions.
More than just the filmmaker’s practical defence against effusiveness, the
affectless gaze in cinema can embody many things – the final reserve of
power for an oppressed individual, wilful defiance against a surveillant
government or simply, a profoundly disengaged human being.