Singapore’s ‘1965’ Sacrifices a Good Story and History at the Altar of Nationalism

The Singaporean period film1965 goes some way to answer the question: just how many clichés can you pack into two hours and ten minutes? Released to coincide with Singapore’s golden jubilee celebrations, branded as SG50 (the acronym par excellence this past year), 1965 was announced with great fanfare. Expectations grew about whether this would be Singapore’s own historical epic.

The hype now seems ridiculously misguided, since 1965 will not join the league of acclaimed historical films. If anything, critics, who bothered to review the film, have consigned it to the rubbish bin of history. You might even call it a straight to YouTube production.

Whereas the film critic can rip 1965 into more confetti bits than would be thrown around Singapore on 9 August, the historian cannot just cavil. Excavating through a prosaic crust, a subterranean analysis brings into sharp relief insouciance towards Singapore’s history or its past as it actually occurred (what the Father of History Leopold von Ranke calls: wie es eigentlich gewesen). Taking a cue from the Five Cs (a popular coinage from the ’90s to describe material aspirations in Singapore: car, cash, career, condominium, and credit card), three problems plague the film: conflations, copouts, and confusions – the Three Cs. The result is a kitschy commemorative paean that will struggle to shrug off accusations of being propaganda.

The procrustean plot of 1965 is a threadbare fictional episode that jumps out from the pages of the Singapore Story – as the official history of the city-state is commonly known. The narrative center, if you can find one, is the communal tension between the majority Chinese and minority Malays in Singapore, from late 1964 leading up to the eponymous year when Singapore separated from its brief federal union with Malaysia on 9 August. The historical fiction is dramatized around relations between Chinese and Malay families caught in the communal crossfire, interspersed with re-enactments of political leaders intervening to reassure both communities. Using selective verisimilitude, the film tries to convince us that it is a serious historical drama but ends up looking puerile and pedestrian.

In the hands of the best technicians, cinema can be a time machine. Every aspect of the mise en scène in a good period film should overflow with verisimilitude. However, many important communities, groups, and political forces are given short thrift in 1965. Notably absent is the culturally and historically significant Indian community who settled in Singapore since early colonial times. To be fair, there is a South Asian character in the film, Raj, but he is not even a Singaporean Indian but a Pakistani journalist. This is not to say that there were no Pakistanis in Singapore in that milieu nor that there should not be Pakistanis in a Singapore film, but in order to achieve authenticity and realism – ostensible goals of any historical fiction no less – greater indexing of actual social conditions is to be expected.

The faux pas is ironic, given the state’s pedantic insistence on multiculturalism and equal representation of all four races in Singapore: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Eurasians. By this logic, substituting a South Asian with no roots to the country (Raj who covered Pakistan’s independence, talks about cows back home in Pakistan!) for a Singapore Indian appears disingenuous. Unless the goal was to carelessly plant a stock South Asian character as a perfunctory and placatory nod to Singapore’s Indian community. Maybe having two Singaporean Chinese brothers on opposite sides of the law was supposed to be a subtle homage to a popular trope in Indian cinema, but that would be to give the film too much credit. And what of the Eurasians? Were the British characters in the film supposed to loosely represent them?

A visual ethnic cleansing is at work in 1965, marked by irresponsibility towards veracity and the past as it was. There are even mock-ups of old cinemas shown in the film but no Tamil or Hindi films being advertised, an unthinkable omission given how popular Indian cinema was by the ’60s in Singapore. Indian film billboards were a common sight alongside those of films from Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the United States. More importantly, it betrays an obsession with triumphalism to showcase the state’s successful management of communal harmony between the two largest communities that also constitute an important vote bank for the ruling elite.

Worst still, 1965 mutilates Marxist theory to conflate the proletariat with the lumpenproletariat. Chinese secret societies were undeniably a major social problem in Singapore in the ’60s. They were criminal havens of ethnic chauvinism, and displayed greater allegiance to their clan affiliations than to the state. Portrayed on screen as igniting the riots and fanning the flames of discord with Malay chauvinists, their propensity for violence is an important plot device. Just who are these gangsters, and where do they get their manpower? We are told to believe that they came from Student Unions and Workers Unions, angry young men who have no real grievances other than rabblerousing for the sake of it. The characters carrying pamphlets and banners stating ‘Fairness’ and ‘Equality’, common Leftist slogans in the ’50s and ’60s, drop their placards to join the thugs in street fights against the Malays.

Of course, the film cannot go into detail because facts would get in the way of what, the filmmakers think, is a good story. The history of the Communist Front and Left Wing mobilization is a complex one (whether these were one and the same constitutes an entirely different debate not just in Singapore but throughout the world during the global Cold War) and the simplifications in 1965 are not deft. The Leftists, while prominently Chinese, were also multicultural, and it is incredulous to suggest intentional collusion with triad mobsters.

Besides, most of the Trade Union leaders and activists, Leftist party members, and those suspected of being communists, were incarcerated after 1963 when an internal security dragnet arrested most of them and defanged the movement. In the penultimate scene, the Left Wing activist turned language chauvinist turned triad member character, repents, and dies together with any remaining subtlety left in the film. His brother, the middle class cop, lives ‘happily ever after’ upholding law and order; sledgehammering into your cranium the moral parable home just in case you missed it.

Maybe somewhere along the way the filmmakers decided that this was not a period family drama but a political thriller. Staying clear of controversy about the structural causes behind worsening ethnic relations, the communal riot depicted on film is not even the major one from July 1964 but the relapse in September 1964. Yet, there is no attempt at retrospection or introspection into an emotional and sensitive period in Singapore when “racial suspicions had spread” and communal ties had turned “tinder dry”. [Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 1998), p.576.] Instead, the account is dumbed down to soap opera style caricatures. In most advanced industrialized societies, 50 years would be enough for state records to be declassified, official records to be made public, and for historical controversies to be clarified; it might take longer in Singapore. Here’s hoping the SG100 film does more justice to Singapore’s turbulent postwar years.

A good political thriller needs a conspiratorial pretext loosely tied to plausible reality, so the film turns to Southeast Asian politics during the Cold War. From 1962 to 1966, Indonesia, under growing communist influence, began a process of confrontation with the nascent Malaysian state, calling Malaysia a neo-imperial plot. In 1965, Indonesian commandos bombed the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank building known as the MacDonald House, the biggest of 42 bombings across Singapore.

However, in a flight of fancy, 1965 suggests that the Indonesians also caused the September 1964 riots with the help of Chinese secret societies that have recruited Left Wing activists. While the official stand is that agent provocateurs from Indonesia were to be held responsible, there is insufficient evidence to hold local mobsters guilty for abetting a nefarious Indonesian design. Besides the badly staged climactic shootout between Singaporean cops and foreign saboteurs with local henchmen, the conspiratorial associations appear bloated.

There are further copouts. When initially announced, 1965 was intended to be a biopic of Singapore’s founding father, the late former Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Staying true to Lee’s larger than life presence in Singapore’s postwar politics, thespian Lim Kay Tong was roped in to play Lee. A feat Lim pulled off with panache. The sole merit of the film is Lim’s portrayal of Lee. In particular, Lim’s interpretation of Lee’s tearful speech during the media press conference on 9 August when Singapore was divorced by Malaysia is a fitting tribute to a critical ontological moment.

Yet, they neither build on Lim’s talents nor continue Lee’s story. How Lee turned around Singapore’s fortunes, engineered Singapore’s economic miracle, and made an ‘exceptional’ city-state would make a great film in the hands of a shrewd storyteller. There are even glimpses of Lim as an aging Lee at the height of his colossal leadership in the ’70s and ’80s, but these are ephemeral. In 1965, Lee is reduced to a deux ex machina who saves the day in cameos, nothing else. There is no attempt to create any depth to Lee’s character and the film’s fullest potential is curtailed.

Rarely does a film so openly admit that it does not know what it will be. In an interview, the co-director and producer says:

So let me say what it’s not about. It’s not a biopic of Mr Lee Kuan Yew. It’s not a political film nor a propaganda film. It’s not a docu-drama. It’s not a movie about the independence of Singapore. So what is it really about? It’s about how fragile racial harmony can be and how we can take it for granted.

If you walked out of the screening feeling confused about the genre, the entire project appears to be burdened by a lack of artistic certitude. The only definitive goal they could agree on it seems, is to have a clean finish celebrating Singapore’s successes. After a weak screenplay and a non-existent narrative arc, with episodic treatments of troubled Singapore fraught with inter-communal angst, Singapore survives thanks to visionary leadership to achieve prosperity and progress. In the denouement of 1965, you are invited to get high on glossy images of hypermodern Singapore, mostly intended to gratify the establishment, and climaxes with an explosion of jingoism on the faces of the viewing audience.

Here’s what 1965 is, if not a propaganda film: it’s a nationalistic film; more specifically it is a National Education film. National Education is a programme in all government schools in Singapore that function in a similar way to citizenship education elsewhere. If 1965 is a didactic motion picture with a monosemic message, it is because that is what it was intended to be. The end credits provide more details: the Singapore Film Commission, the film division of the Media Development Authority, the state body for censorship and media regulation, was one of the main sponsors of 1965. It would be naïve to expect anything else but a conservative, innocuous, and easily palatable interpretation of Singapore’s past.

There are other clues about the intentions behind producing 1965. After the opening credits end, the background music uses the credit theme of The Diary of a Nation, an ancestor and progenitor of 1965. The made for television documentary series about Singapore form the ’50s to the ’60s was produced by the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation and supported by the Ministry of Communications and Information in late 1988. There were multiple television reruns of The Diary of a Nation well into the ’90s and videocassettes of the series were played in schools as part of both the National Education programme, as well as during History and Social Studies lessons.

The documentary was part of a concerted effort by state agencies in the ’80s to ensure that only an official view of Singapore’s history was propagated. The introduction of Singapore history in secondary schools, the widespread promotion of academic texts that pander the ruling party’s version of the narrative, and public exhibitions to promote an elite-endorsed view of the past were also very much a part of this campaign. [Kevin Blackburn, “Mary Turnbull’s History Textbook for the Singapore Nation” in C.M. Turnbull and the History of Modern Singapore, edited by Nicholas Tarling, (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012), pp. 75 – 76.]]

To truly uncover the most important reasons for 1965, one has to enter the dark cul-de-sacs of the island-nation’s past. When the production of 1965 first went public, another film’s release was being stalled. The provocatively named documentary To Singapore With Love (Dir. Tan Pin Pin, 2013) records an oral history of Singapore as recounted by political exiles who left to settle in Malaysia, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. It was shown at international film festivals in 2013 to critical acclaim. However, in September 2014, the Media Development Authority deemed the film to be a threat to national security and it was banned from being shown in any form in Singapore, ostensibly because “the individuals in the film have given distorted and untruthful accounts
” and since some were members of the outlawed Communist Party of Malaya.

What else could 1965 be but an attempt to counter the challenge from To Singapore With Love? Bulldozing feel good nationalism into theatres to reassert the predominance of the preponderant view might sound like a winning strategy but if reviews of the latter are anything to go by there is no-contest, good art wins.

The history of Singapore, like that of any other nation, is a contested site, and remains an ongoing struggle between the status quo and those in search for a more balanced and accurate objective truth. The panoptical state keeps close surveillance over the national archives as though it were a Pandora’s box and it will be some time before Singapore has its own glasnost. The official Singapore Story is carefully curated, and any challenge to the accepted version is subsumed, sublated, or silenced because it is deemed a political threat. Nevertheless, as the widely divergent reviews of 1965 and To Singapore With Love show, the winners might write history, but art that inspires comes from the underdogs.