Wow PM Lee. Your comments on why 'To Singapore With Love' should be banned is so many levels of wow. It's what comes out from someone's mouth when the brain is thinking 'we should ban it because only the Party has the right to determine what is truth and history' but last minute realises that it is addressing an audience.
"A movie is different from a book. You write a book, I can write a counter book, the book you can read together with a counter book," he added. "You watch the movie, you think it's a documentary, it may be like Farenheit 9/11 - very convincing, but it's not a documentary. And I think we have to understand this in order to understand how to deal with these issues."
1) "A movie is different from a book."
No way, really? But let's try to figure out what you're saying here. I think you're expressing two fears here. One is that the movie medium is capable of greater emotional manipulation than books, possibly because it has at its disposal certain extra elements that can arouse emotion--like music, and images. Oh, how you underestimate the power of text alone. (Ever read a break-up SMS?) But never mind. The other fear is that movies generally reach a wider audience than books, and we'll give you that. This kind of scaredy-scaredy is the hantu that has been lurking in the MDA offices for years.
2) "You write a book, I can write a counter book, the book you can read together with a counter book."
Oh, that's not what you meant. Gave you too much credit there! I'm starting to get confused here. How does this statement link to the one before? Because "you make a movie, I make a counter movie, the movie you can watch together with a counter movie" also holds true. Are you saying that people who read a book will then actively seek out another book that contradicts it, whereas those who watch a movie will not? Do you really think that all those who read your father's memoirs also read 'Lee's Law', 'To Catch a Tartar', 'A Comet In The Sky', 'Dark Clouds At Dawn', 'Beyond The Blue Gate', 'Escape From The Lion's Paw' etc?
3) "You watch the movie, you think it's a documentary, it may be like Farenheit 9/11 - very convincing, but it's not a documentary."
Fahrenheit 9/11 is a documentary. It may be one-sided and polemical, but because it uses interviews with real people involved in real events, this makes it a documentary. The same thing with 'To Singapore With Love'--'Tan Wah Piow', for example, is a real person once arrested on charges of 'rioting', and not Jack Neo playing 'Tan Wah Piow', an astronaut who was the first Singaporean to land on the moon. No right-thinking person watches a documentary thinking that because it is labeled as such, then you have to accept everything in it as the truth. We live in an age where people are sophisticated enough to enjoy the choreography between truth and fiction in a mockumentary like 'Borat', for example.
Incidentally, in 1987, the Singapore Broadcasting Corporation produced a two-part series called 'Tracing the Conspiracy' that was billed as a documentary. The interviewees later issued a statement to say they uttered certain things on camera under duress, which severely undermined the truth claims of the supposed documentary.
4) "And I think we have to understand this in order to understand how to deal with these issues."
What is it that you want Singaporeans to understand? If you want us to develop critical analytical skills, to distinguish between the 'biased' and the 'balanced', then the solution is greater media literacy, not more censorship. Otherwise it's the same old paternalistic 'read the right thing' rubbish, instead of 'read and decide what is the right thing'. Of course the risk, to you, of greater media literacy is that Singaporeans can apply those same tools to decide whether or not *your* truth claims hold water. But this would mean that you would be compelled to adhere to the same standards of objectivity and non-partisanship that you haughtily demand of others.
Alfian Sa'at
Playwright at Wild Rice
*Article first appeared on https://www.facebook.com/alfiansaat