A peek into the life of...

Fire Bird

Author: Perumal Murugan

(translated from Tamil by Janani Kannan)

In my opinion, this is how a novel should be written. From a mundane job of riding on the bullock cart, traversing the country roads, looking for suitable land to start farming and hence to prosper his young family, he manages to tell the whole shebang of his family politics and the people and politics of the land he was passing through to scout. 

Kuppan decides to take a long ride to the edge of the state with his faithful handyman, Muthu, in search of land to buy after a family feud. Being the youngest male child, he got the short end of the stick. His elder brothers decided that their father's land had to be divided. Perumal tells how the division of ancestral land works. Even the parents were given a measly piece of land. Kuppan, the timid one in the family who grew in awe of his brothers, did not fight back as it was not his colour to clash head-on despite his wife's constant nagging. 

Through flashbacks and soliloquies, the readers learn tiny titbits about farming, traditional inheritance practices in some Tamil communities and that the whole of South India is not a monolith. Each part of the state has its peculiarities. Through his master storytelling, Perumal brings his viewer into the depth of its interiors to share Kuppan's sometimes hair-raising quest to start the right footing for his young family.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Not all so chirpy!

Love Me or Leave Me (1955)
Director: Charles Vidor

The world remembers Doris Day as the chirpy, bright, toothy blonde who would brighten up anyone's morning. The pose that strikes most people is her rendition of the song 'Que Sera Sera' in Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'. However, in real life, hers was not all sunshine and blue skies.

Growing up from 10 with her single mother, after her father walked on them, Doris Day wanted to be a dancer. After a car accident and a broken leg, she had to abandon her dream. During convalescence, she taught herself to sing. Seeing much potential, her mother sent her to singing classes. Doris soon got singing gigs on the radio and at dinners.

At 20, she delivered her only child. Her husband turned out to be a violent schizophrenic who committed suicide. She had four marriages altogether. Her third husband got her deeply into debt. Her son went on to become a famous record producer and almost signed up Marilyn Manson, the eccentric killer.

In this movie, Doris Day plays the role of Ruth Etting, a famous singer of the swinging twenties. Etting's life story is equally stormy. Starting as a dancing girl, with the help of a mobster, Snyder, she gained fame and fortune as a singer at the prestigious Ziegfeld Follies. She acted in a few short talkies. Even though Etting's love interest is her pianist, she marries Synder out of fear. Synder's frequent anger outbursts and paranoia finally led him to shoot the pianist.

Etting later divorces Snyder and leaves the music scene.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The Monsterverse that lurks beneath us

Monarch Legend of Monsters (2023)
Miniseries S1, E1-10.

There was a time in our childhood when gigantic creatures roamed the streets of Tokyo, and superheroes like Ultraman and Golda manifested to save the day. The storyline was predictable. A benign creature, having been exposed to the effects of the A-bombs, undergoes mutation but stays underground. A freak event would bring it to the surface. The beast then would go on a rampage. Just when there is no hope, the Japanese superhero appears to save the day. Yay!

Looks like much has changed since I last viewed them.

Godzilla and contemporaries, MUTOs, massive unidentified terrestrial organisms from Japan, have gone mainstream. A narrative has been created to link many seismic events worldwide over the years to these monsters' activities. It is called the Monsterverse. For example, the H-bomb detonation at Bikini Atoll was not a military exercise. It was meant to neutralise one of these monsters, but it had got away.

The story timeline flip-flops from 1952 through 1982 to 2015. A little background knowledge about King Kong, his encounter with Godzilla in 2014, and Skull Island would help. Otherwise, the film would be a confusing mishmash of incoherent storytelling.

The miniseries tells about Monarch, a secret global organisation that supposedly tries to track MUTOs, predict their appearance and prevent human casualties. Many endeavours thus far over the years have proved futile. These creatures go underground through unique portals beneath the Earth's surface. There is an alternate living space beneath Earth where time moves slowly. One month spent there could be equivalent to 50 years on Earth! It creates a lot of confusion when one of the characters falls into a portal but returns later.

Snake Plissken

The miniseries tells the story of a pair of half-siblings who discover each other when they receive news that their father is dead. They discover that their father led a double life with two families and a secret expedition with international ramifications. The saga spans three generations and is a whirlpool of twists and adventures.

The exciting idea employed in the miniseries is using a father-son combination to tell a character's story at different times. Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell act out this role.

Interestingly, Malaysians were first exposed to Kurt Russell in the Western TV series Quest (1976). Here, Russell, kidnapped by Cheyenne, met his long-lost brother to team up to track down their sister. Later, he was famous as the eye patch-donning tough guy Snake Plissken in Escape from New York (1981). 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Syukur, our schools have no random shootings!

Tiger Stripes (2023)
Written and Directed by Amanda Nell Eu

This movie reminds me of P Ramlee's not-so-famous film, 'Sitora Harimau Jadian'. Sitora was 1964 Malaya's answer to the European folklore of werewolves. Instead of werewolves, he created a story about a were-tiger. Made in black and white with a limited budget for the make-up department, it failed both in awe and in its gore aspects.

'Tiger Stripes', on the other hand, is not much of a scary movie. It is more of a social commentary. It highlights bullying in schools, the confusing hormones-laden pubertal era, the uninspiring methods of teaching, and maybe many more.

International viewers will wonder why girls in that all-girls school suddenly go haywire, shrieking and falling down simultaneously with jerky hand and body movements like a person possessed. Yes, the film also showcases the problem of mass hysteria, a peculiar phenomenon that is seen in many all-female Malaysian schools and hostels.

Another glaring thing shown here is the dismal standard of English taught in Malaysian schools. Imagine 13-year-olds still struggling with grammar and tenses. That is not fiction, but very much a common site in many schools in the interior parts of the country and also in the poorer section of towns. My sister, who used to mark public examination papers, would be testimony to this. She could not believe what was written (or not written) on exam papers.

My beloved secondary school headmaster used to advocate that 'academic excellence is no substitute to poverty of character'. It may be true when academic achievements are par excellence. One can explore other avenues to mould a holistic student who can withstand the challenges of adult life. Here, what I see is another wrapped hollow package. The country values the presentation, not its content, quantity not quality, and racial aspirations, not national development.

Mass hysteria is a poorly understood collective psychogenic illness. It is not even listed in the DSM, the manual of all psychiatric and psychological ailments. South East Asia is labelled as the world capital for this illness. Many medical experts failed to identify a single cause for this condition. Stress has been suggested as the prominent cause. Most of the time, faith healers are called in, as is seen in this movie, with comical outcomes. In 2015, a local university in the state of Pahang came out with an anti-hysteria kit that was sold at a whopping RM 8,750. This kit, created after years of research, could allegedly ward off evil spirits. For that sum, the kit came with just chopsticks, salt, lime, vinegar, pepper spray and formic acid.

(P.S. Syukur (thank God), our schools have no random shootings!)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Till death do us part?

Over the past few years, a couple of my childhood friends had the misfortune of having lost their spouses to cancer. One of them fought the deadly disease tooth and nail, but unfortunately, after three long years, the disease got the better of her. He lost the good fight. My devastated friend went awol for an entire year, deciding that solitaire was the best remedy for a broken heart. The societal expectation for the grieved to open up his emotions and replay them like a broken record was not for him. 

One year after her demise, at 60, he introduced his new other half to the world. Conversations and felicitations on his plunge revealed that it was a necessary indulgence for him. Even though his children were married and he was a grandfather three times over, he felt the need for intimate touch and passion. He is a happy man. The memory of his old wife is very much alive, and he will cherish them till the end of time.

Another friend with a couple of late teenage, young adult daughters, lost his wife after a long tiring battle with ovarian malignancy. Still reeling from the loss, he was still not out of the woods yet when I spoke to him six months after her demise. He still felt her presence around the house, and his mind kept playing, reminiscing the good times, playing back obscure events in their wedded bliss to miss her more. 

I slowly introduced the idea of finding a replacement to fill the void; he asserted that he was pretty sure. At that juncture, he only wanted to spend the rest of his years living in dear memory of his duly departed. He feels complete without a need to build a new one. 

Out of curiosity, I enquired from another dear childhood buddy whose wife is hearty, healthy, and kicking. Heaven forbids, if his partner were to die, what would he do? Is remarriage on the plate? Without batting an eyelid, he said he would envisage himself taking a new partner. It is not as much for physical gratification but for social interaction and communication. He felt that was necessary for healthy mental health. 

Yet, when posed with a similar question, another pessimistic realist friend viewed his one stint in matrimony as enough to last his whole lifetime. Gone are the days when intimacy and husband-wife interaction played a pivotal role in his daily life. He had started enjoying the company of he and himself, exploring new frontiers to expand his knowledge and experience. He guesses that his wife is in the same boat, too. Over the years, embroiled in the hard knocks of life, they grew apart, from being co-dependent to interdependent to independent, sometimes contradictory just for the kick of it, able to stand alone to face the music. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

3 for the party of 2?

Past Lives (Korean/English; 2023)

Director: Celine Song

One thing that created the rift between two men who dared to venture into the crypt of our mind and try to explain why we act and react the way we do remains unresolved. 

Sigmund Freud posited, in simpler terms, that our learnt experiences, together with unresolved pervasive sexual desires, are the main reasons for actions, inaction and maladies. His mentee, Karl Jung, thought some external events and forces might manifest as meaningful coincidences.

The question is whether we have only one life, just here and now and then we die, or we come here again and again. The film is selling the Korean Buddhist idea of 'In Yun'. We are all somehow connected cosmologically through reincarnation. When we meet people and feel we know them, we may do. There may be some unsettled business that needed to be settled, left from our previous encounters, god knows when. This could be our umpteenth trans-birth meet. Or it could be a ruse to get into each other's pants. 

The Mahabharata is full of these stories of paying back the evil deeds of past lives. King Shantanu's first wife, the mighty Ganga, drowned seven of her newborns. The eight escaped. Her justification was that her eight children were the eight elements that acquired a curse from a sage for coveting a cow in their previous lives. Like that, every action and reaction in this epic has its roots in the past.

As it turns out, in the film, a thirty-something Korean girl whose family had migrated to North America has a chance to meet her childhood friend. The last time they met, they were twelve-year-old classmates who shared something of a puppy love. After migrating to Canada, the girl, No Young, changed her name to Nora and started life anew in her newfound home. The boy, Hae Sung, stayed and progressed in his own way. Out of sight, but not really out of mind. The lost touch.

3 for the party of 2?

With the help of social media, they reconnected twelve years later. Life took its course; Nora got married, Hae Sung went to study in China, got into a relationship and failed. Another twelve years later, Hae Sung announced his arrival in the USA. This created an awkward situation between the three in the party of two. Nora's white husband worries she might return to her first love. Nora fears rekindling the old relationship, and Hae Sung is probably a forlorn romantic. 

The story is about how they resolve an issue that is a non-issue. After being tied down in a relationship, it is human nature to wonder how life would be if we had taken a different path. That is when we should slap ourselves awake, douse water on our faces and remind ourselves that whichever path we take, the journey and the outcome are invariably the same. The paths may vary, but both would be filled with ups, downs, joy, heartbreaks, achievements and letdowns. Just eat what we have, enjoy the flavour served and stop wondering what another flavour would have tasted. The end result, we know.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Control is key!

La Luna (2023)

Director: M. Raihan Halim

It is not just confined to one religion; it so happens that Islam is the reference in this film. Leaders of any religion, way of life, or cult take it upon themselves to be the de facto spokesperson on how the religion should be practised. They want to have the final say as if they had an audience with the Almighty, who whispered the secrets of life in their ears. 

To the young and restless, they give the impression that their lifelong purpose in life is to screw up everybody's happiness. Just to show who is the boss. 

Take this example. Occasionally, at the temple I sometimes frequent, there will be public service announcements of some good news or achievements. Naturally, the congregation would display their pleasure and admiration by clapping. That was the most natural thing for us humans to do. "But no!" said one elder, who raised his hands angrily to stop them from clapping. Strangely, a few minutes later, everyone was seen ecstatic, clapping and chanting to chants of 'Hare Rama Hare Krishna'. Nobody seems to know that there is such a rule and the rationale for having one when I ask around. After all, how does clapping in felicitations differ from the one during the recital of hymns? Finally, a very senior attendee just said that it was traditional. Period.

The lesson from this example is that people put rules and regulations in place because they can and want to. It is all about control and showing who is the boss.

This film got many of the religious people hot under the garbs. This comedy questions our blind faith and how leaders use it for selfish needs.

Kampong Bras Basah is a closely knitted village overseen by the conservative local holy man. He determines what is preached in the Friday prayers and micromanages peoples' affairs. Troubles come knocking when a plucky young lady starts her lingerie business in the village. Even though initially the villagers looked at the shop with scorn, they eventually flocked to the shop when one of the couples in the village showed remarkable improvement in their intimate relationships. The holy man digs up his sleeves to shut down the business. The storyline includes hints of spousal abuse, women empowerment, and the need to stand your ground and not blindly follow rules. 4/5.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.