抄録
In the work of Thai film director Apichatpong Werasethakul, the problematic nature of contemporary citizenship is anchored in images of health and political authority. His first feature-length film, Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), frames culture and political community around a doctor’s prescription of a hearing aid. This same physician and doctor’s office provides the backdrop for a transnational migrant seeking a work permit in the director’s second film, Blissfully Yours (2002). In the controversial Syndromes And A Century (2007), initially banned in Thailand, these provincial scenes give way to hierarchical images of control in a Bangkok hospital where its residents are rigidly organized amid symbols of national authority. The director’s most recent film, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), moves from the hospital of previous films to hospitality by positioning a Laotion migrant worker as primary caretaker of the film’s lead character, a former soldier. From these examples, political theory is better positioned to connect health with an enlarged concept of “care” for the Other, precisely because their medical settings reimagine the assemblage of guests, strangers and hosts as an encounter between doctors and patients. These images place the viewer into an ethical engagement with caregiving and caretaking in the Thai political present, a tenuous moral regime of well-being where an unsettled nation-state struggles to retain its oversight.
