ABSTRACT
My title refers to a recent offering of the infant Singapore film industry. First released in 2002, it has proved to be hugely popular, earning $3.2 million, more than three times the cost of production. Despite its popularity, it is not a good film. The characters lack subtlety, and the plot lines are somewhat predictable; it is in fact a relentlessly didactic film. But didacticism fits the theme like a glove, dealing as it does with the nagging concern of Singapore society: the State’s excessive actions and their damaging effects on people’s lives. The film is thus a political critique of a sort that directly confronts the State and its policies. Holding up the ‘original story’ of the PAP State, I Not Stupid tells it directly, without sophistry or Beckettian reticence. To the local audience, much of the viewing pleasure comes from revisiting the home ground, and hearing the tales of their lives under the PAP rule: pleasure, in short, that comes from the endearing accuracy of the narrative. A didactic note sits quietly behind all this. And the central message appeals to what people know so well: that the State is the ‘cause’ of the emotional sterility and oppressive anxiety one feels about life – even if it has also brought wealth and political stability. If I Not Stupid indeed depicts with startling accuracy the travail of life in Singapore, then we are made to rethink the nature of the ‘critique’ at the centre of the film. The fidelity of the film in treading the familiar ground, in retelling
the ‘original story’ about Singapore in all its truthfulness, raises the difficult idea of translation. And translation is about ‘the kinship of languages’, as Walter Benjamin puts it, that conveys ‘the form and meaning of the original as accurately as possible’.1 But this ‘kinship’ of the original and translation is never straightforward; translation always tends to undo the ‘form and meaning’ of both. What then, we may ask, is the nature of a political critique that assumes that there is an ‘original story’ to tell, one that everyone knows and that can be translated truthfully?
