The temporal city: Spectral topographies and the ephemeral performance of Bangkok

2014

This chapter discusses Bangkok time in line with the studies of city life that draw attention to the everyday experience, urban practices, movement, memory and performing the city, this paper engages in a discussion of temporal cities realized through the symbolic, ritualistic performance of their inhabitants and manifestations of collective memory on the example of Bangkok, a mega-metropolis known for its rather precarious relationship with reality. Though all four of Pile’s phantasmagorias can be successfully applied to a reimagining of Bangkok, this chapter will focus on the two most obvious categories – ghosts and magic, exploring their connection to the city’s past and present and the lingering temporalities they leave behind.

Love, death and laughter in the city of different angels:S.P. Somtow’s Bangkok Gothic

2019

S.P. Somtow’s novel The Other City of Angels (2008) portrays Bangkok as a Gothic metropolis: a city stuck between illusion and reality, where dreams and nightmares come to life, simultaneously backwards and modern, spiritual and material, and full of peculiarities that make one doubt whether such a place exists at all. It is a temple to consumerism filled with fortune tellers and high society serial killers that for Somtow, a composer himself, can best be expressed through the jarringly haunting sounds of Béla Bartók’s music. The Other City of Angels (2008) is a modern retelling of the Gothic tale of Bluebeard’s wife and her fatal discovery of her husband’s dark secret, and – true to its Gothic origins – it is filled with romance, terror, and laughter. This paper focuses on the novel’s comic dimension and discusses Somtow’s use of dark humour and the Gothic grotesque as a strategy to exoticize Bangkok for foreign readers by simultaneously reinforcing and defying Western stereotypes of Bangkok as the Oriental city, once (in)famously described as the city of temples and prostitutes. The paper also explores the way comic elements are used to offset the critical commentary on class division and social inequality that are seen as ingrained in the fabric of Thai culture and further aggravated by the materialism and consumerism characteristic of contemporary Thai society.

Communal after-living: Asian ghosts and the city

2020

The chapter looks at three distinct themes in what we could loosely term Asian ‘apartment horror’ films that are characteristic of the specific sociocultural contexts and urban cultural economies they represent: (1) the portrayal of the contiguous community where ghosts co-habit the space alongside the living; (2) the alienating character of modern urban communal lifestyles, where ghosts are more visible than the living, and the biggest fear of both groups is that of loneliness and isolation; and finally (3) the placement of the ghost as a representation of a failed dream of economic success that continues to drive the migration of Asian rural populations to the cities.

Beyond the vampire: Revamping Thai monsters for the urban age

2017

This article revisits two of the most iconic Thai monstrosities, phi pop and phi krasue, whose changing representation owes equally as much to local folklore, as to their ongoing reinterpretations in popular culture texts, particularly in film and television. The paper discusses two such considerations, Paul Spurrier’s P (2005) and Yuthlert Sippapak’s Krasue Valentine (2006), films that reject the long-standing notion that animistic creatures belong in the countryside and portray phi pop and phi krasue’s adaptation to city life. Though commonplace, animistic beliefs and practices have been deemed incompatible with the dominant discourses of modernization and urbanization that characterise twenty-first century Thailand. Creatures like phi pop and phi krasue have been branded as uncivilised superstition and ridiculed through their unflattering portrayals in oddball comedies. This article argues that by inviting these monsters to relocate to contemporary Bangkok, Spurrier and Sippapak redefine their attributes for the modern urban setting and create hybrids by blending local beliefs and cinematic conventions. The creatures’ predatory character is additionally augmented by the portrayal of the city as itself vampiric. The article therefore reads these predatory spirits in parallel with the metaphor of the female vampire – a sexually aggressive voracious creature that threatens male patriarchal order and redefines motherhood.