志异 Draft by Drama box July 2014 (english) | Page 30

his screenplays are always maudlin
and predictable, his humour broad
and slapstick, the cinematography
in his films flat and ugly, and there
is no sense of mise-en-scène at all.
Yet, all these quality indicators are
those that have been passed down
to us through a very HollywoodEuropean tradition, a Western
way of looking at art and cinema.
People argue that Neo’s films lack
sophistication, but this very idea
of sophistication comes from a
specific cultural context that is
foreign to our own. We use Western
ideas to evaluate a native product,
and of course, because of that, the
native product will always fall short,
simply for the fact that it is not, and
does not want to be, Western.

identifies and achieves catharsis
for their everyday problems. Neo’s
films represented the population
that had been left behind by
the government’s increasingly
alienating policies, giving voice to
the people’s complaints. It is for
that reason that he was greatly
popular with the ‘heartlanders’ (a
term popularised by then Prime
Minister Goh Chok Tong in 1992
to differentiate the working-class
English-as-second-language
population from Singapore’s
‘cosmopolitan’ population, the
younger generation who spoke
English, or rather Singlish, as its
native language), the people who
had no interest in the ‘high culture’
the government was promoting.

Neo’s films are generally in the
colloquial language that his
working class Chinese characters
speak – a mélange of Hokkien,
Singdarin (the Mandarin equivalent
of Singlish), and ‘bad’ English
(Singlish). His films are constructed
from the melodrama that has
been a staple of Southeast Asian
television and cinema, featuring
ordinary characters (here the
working class Chinese who are the
majority population in Singapore)
through whom the audience

So how did this shift happen? How
did Neo go from government critic
to government mouthpiece? The
scariest reason, and the reason I’m
afraid to admit to myself, is that
Neo was always a government
mouthpiece to begin with. Let me
explain. Neo came from television,
a medium that has to maintain its
broad appeal to the audience by
representing – or at X\