ABSTRACT
The geography of the Thai Western This chapter begins our study of the Asian Western with the placement of the Western form in Southeast Asia. If Western setting is ‘a matter of geography and costume’, according to Cawelti (Cawelti 1984, 62), the geography evident in the Thai Western that we will discuss below is as incongruous a setting as one can imagine for a generic Western. Monument Valley and its arid landscapes are hardly the kind of topography that fits into the jungles of Southeast Asia. However, the focus of this chapter is the variation of the Western in the Thai, or Southeast Asian, context. Following Francaviglia’s vison of an ‘Orientalized West’ (see Francaviglia 2011), one might think of the film in this chapter as a standard Orientalised Western. Yet, in Thailand, the Western can be seen as part of the ‘Ambiguous Allure of the West’, to quote the title of a volume of essays on Thailand’s encounters with the geopolitical West of Europe and America edited by Harrison and Jackson (2010). The Western signifies an Occidentalist tradition in the Thai arts. According to this tradition, the ‘East’ constructs and commoditises the ‘West’ all along emphasising the ‘importance of ambiguity’ (Harrison and Jackson 2010, 2). Ambiguity is crucial to our understanding of this chapter. It arises out of a need to engage with the West while remaining true to one’s local culture. The process of this engagement necessitates reinvention and reinterpretation. It goes without saying that Tears of the Black Tiger, directed by Wisit Sasanatieng, is an ambiguous work due to its obvious Occidentalism. The sheer audacity of its Occidentalist enterprise and its bizarre quality might lead some Western experts to attack the film. Philip French, for example, has described the costume, a sign of its ‘Western-ness’, as ‘fancy dress’ worn as if the protagonists were ‘working on a dude ranch or playing in a blue grass band’ (French 2005, 190). Effectively, this is a critique of the film’s Occidentalism-a case of a Western critic objecting to an Asian film’s depiction of Western cultural symbols just as an Asian critic might object to a Western film’s depiction of Oriental cultural signs and behaviour. There is perhaps some irony to be had in such a reversal of roles.
