Mapping spectral tropicality in The Maid and Return to Pontianak

Sophia Siddique Harvey 

Department of Communication and Theatre Arts, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA

Correspondence to Sophia Siddique Harvey (email: sophfeline@earthlink.net)

KEYWORDS

spectral tropicality • Singapore • The Maid • Return to Pontianak • horror • folk beliefs • the uncanny

ABSTRACT

Contemporary, postcolonial Singapore has tamed, managed, and essentially disavowed its tropicality, aptly captured symbolically as the 'air-conditioned nation'. This essay traces how two recent Singapore horror films, The Maid (2005) and Return to Pontianak (2001), evoke the 'return of the repressed' as a form of haunting that I call 'spectral tropicality'. The films image and imagine this spectral return through unruly bodies (citizen subjects, female domestic workers, ghosts and vampire-ghosts) and uncanny landscapes (the jungle and city). In particular, the films and this analysis examine two sociocultural spectres lurking beneath Singapore as a tropical urban city-nation: the female domestic worker (The Maid) and ethnoracial folk beliefs (The Maid and Return to Pontianak). The Maid features the Hungry Ghosts Festival in the Chinese religious calendar, ghost marriages and an engagement with yin and yang energies, while Return to Pontianak deals with Malay folk beliefs of semangat ('life force'), and the pontianak, a female vampire-ghost. The Maid attempts to integrate Chinese folk beliefs into contemporary Singapore's cityscape, particularly the architecturally conserved Chinatown shophouses, while Return to Pontianak displaces Malay folk beliefs onto the tropical forest, which is mapped as a threatening other(ed) space and serves as Singapore's tropical doppelganger. Both films suggest that these folk beliefs have an unruly presence within the state's seemingly harmonious and meritocratic ethnoracial ideologies.

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The above text is from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume 29 Issue 1, Pages 24 - 33

Published Online: 13 Mar 2008

Journal compilation © 2009 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd