Negative Affects in the Dark Intervals of <em>A Land Imagined</em>

Introduction Yeo Siew Hua’s 2018 film A Land Imagined encompasses the “experiential and immersive” aspects of land reclamation, construction projects, and related issues pertaining to the treatment of migrant labour, as the director sought to capture “what [he] saw and felt during each visit” to the worksites. The mistreatment of migrant labour workers (MLWs) in Singapore has long been documented by both local and international groups (Chin 536-37). Despite the Singaporean government conducting steps to improve the treatment and living conditions of migrant labour workers, its request for Singaporeans’ tolerance of living near dormitories underscores the spatial divide between the communities and the “social quarantine” of the MLWs despite being “a permanent part of the workforce” (Chin 531). Yeo’s film reflects such harsh conditions and triggers of negative affect in several ways. The desert-like setting, as “a test of character”, gestures at the “unhealthiness of industrialised modernity” on the reclaimed land (Smith 160; 164). The MLWs’ discontent is presented through verbal visuals such as the “ANGER IN PROGRESS” sign (in lieu of “DANGER”; 42:55) on the worksite. A recipient and nominee for multiple local and international awards (Lundberg and Peer 222), A Land Imagined is a cultural artefact that unveils the silenced stories of MLWs, especially after the shattering of the myth of racial harmony in Singapore by the 2013 Little India Riot. This article echoes Yeo’s point that “the people on this imaginary land are at the same time equally imagined” (Voelcker). The shared sense of being imagined and reified is thematised through the depicted lived experiences of MLWs and police officers in Singapore alike. In the film, middle-aged police investigator Lok (Peter Yu), who is nameless in the film, is tasked with finding a missing lorry. To do so, he must locate its driver, MLW Wang Bi Chen (Liu Xiaoyi). The non-linear plot shows an insomniac Wang who is worried about being repatriated after being injured at work. As if imagined by Lok in the film and by Yeo in the real world, Wang represents the latter’s observations of MLWs: “these indentured workers live in [sic] the outskirts of the restless city; existing in the blind spot of larger society; their exploitation remains unseen. They are the invisible and imaginary – they are the sleepless, the dreamless (“A Land Imagined”). Indeed, alienated and sleepless, Wang spends his nights at “a dreamy cybercafé” with 24-hour air-conditioning opposite his dormitory, where he seeks physical and virtual connections with the cybercafé assistant, undocumented Chinese Mindy (Luna Kwok) and online gamers, respectively (“A Land Imagined”). After the disappearance of his dormitory acquaintance, Ajit (Ishtiaque Zico), Wang becomes increasingly paranoid about Ajit’s possible murder by the construction company – a reflection of Yeo’s remark that MLWs “live in precarity” and are “entrapped in their wretched situation” with no way of reporting their mistreatment (“A Land Imagined”). Wang increasingly dissolves into a spectre reminiscent of the MLWs’ “unseen and unheard” existence (Peer 41) before fully disappearing from the construction site. To solve the case at hand, Lok enters the everyday spaces of MLWs and perceives, to use Yeo’s words, in an “experiential and immersive” manner the harsh living and working conditions on the reclaimed sites of Singapore. Addressing the social divide (Tan 1), cultural artefacts such as Yeo’s A Land Imagined undercut the myth of the “fine” city by foregrounding the experiences of those on whose back the country is built (Lundberg and Peer 206). Hence films like A Land Imagined “impact upon the social landscape – bringing awareness of the ethical issues the state and society either buries or uncovers as it constructs its futuristic city” (Lundberg and Peer 222-23). Employing the Deleuzian notion of assemblages the role of shared transsensoria amongst the characters, affordances in the scenes, and the audience in supporting their sense-making process of the case and the film (Sim), this article examines the theme of the alienating realities of MLWs and police officers in A Land Imagined and the impact of the film on the audience by applying the approach of embodied cognition and affect to moments of dark intervals in the film. Dark intervals are strange instances of “stillness, detachment and suspended time” that shape the indeterminacy of noir and its impact on viewers’ “embodied and sensorial experience, underlining the irreducible relational interactions of the human organism within its environment” (Killeen 1; 4). The study of film noir through affect in dark intervals unveils “the restless tumult of [the human’s] own becoming”, which occurs when the intervallic protagonist experiences a “distinctive exposure and attentiveness to this passionate affective state” and undergoes “radical receptivity to the unfolding of [their] own existence and to the potential inherent in that existence” (Killeen 4-5). Their potential, which includes the virtual, is the affective enactment of actions, challenges the “constrictive and hegemonic manifestations of power” (Killeen 6). Such effects are especially potent when the dark intervals disrupt the eurhythmia of capitalist cities such as Singapore. Suspense and violence are indelible triggers of affect in noir. Yeo’s A Land Imagined evokes affect and reflective empathy by employing gripping dark intervals in liminal spaces while realistically reflecting the non-violent local atmosphere. Such dark intervals include the eternal land reclamation that sustains the Singapore Dream using sand from neighbouring countries, the 24-hour air-conditioned cybercafé that offers the possibility of enacting other roles through violent RPGs and online sexual encounters, highways linking worksites to workers’ dwellings in centrifugal space, and the intertidal beach zone that affords pseudo-escapes from the strictly controlled Singapore. The liminal spaces in the film are accessible via the emblematic iconography of highways in film noir that reiterates the dispersal – and denial – of MLWs’ lives in Singapore. Akin to “in-between spaces of modernity”, such non-places (Augé) defy traditional systems of meaning and are associated with outsiders such as “labourers … and the multiethnic” (Breu and Hatmaker 4). The affective enactment of ‘becoming’ in film noir lures viewers to imagine characters’ consciousness, a process that disrupts the audience’s patterned behaviours and elicits shifts in their perceptions of the world (Flory 319). Cavallian characters who are “simultaneously mysterious and convincing” especially trigger such embodied changes in viewers (Flory 78). Viewers who enact Cavallian characters’ consciousness and actions experience “anxious curiosity” while broadening their imagination about possibilities in the world (Flory 9; 78). The main characters of A Land Imagined are Cavallian characters with complex but comprehensible affective responses to the engulfing urban alienation in the city-state, as both figures work as invisible but vital cogs in the backend of the ever-spinning capitalist wheel. Besides increasingly recognising MLWs as fellow humans, viewers learn to acknowledge both differences and similarities between them. Through this process, they can attain “a more developed sense of tolerance as well as the human itself, and the need to take responsibility for [their] actions, even when doing so will cost [them] dearly” (Flory 321). Moreover, spectators’ reflective empathy, which often occurs through “considered thought” post-viewing, alters their perception of themselves and their place in the world (Flory 319). While Flory’s work pertains to black noir films, the same embodied processes and subjective changes occur in viewers of A Land Imagined through their encounters with the Cavallian Wang, Lok, and Mindy in dark intervals. Dreaming about Escapes to Elsewheres on Reclaimed Land One key dark interval depicts Mindy’s conversation with Wang on the intertidal zone of the reclaimed beach. The sequence commences with the two leaving the cybercafé together for the first time and suggests a potential sexual rendezvous should Wang win their swimming contest. Despite the suggestive atmosphere during the van ride and on the beach, the possibility of intimacy fades as strict gender expectations become subverted. Mindy saves the injured Wang from drowning. Acknowledging Mindy’s unexpected dominance, viewers experience new affective responses as “transsensorial and affective valences are carried through cinematic form through moments where impasse occurs” (Sim 48). The affective impact is evoked not by physical intimacy but by the characters’ honest commiseration about their pursuit of freedom from their lives in Singapore. While Mindy is trapped by her undocumented status, Wang’s movements are mired by his employer’s confiscation of his passport, a practice associated with forced labour. This dark interval particularly presents the characters’ affective enactment of prioprioception (i.e., “a sense that provides information about the location of various parts of the body in relation to each other and the surroundings” (Blumer et al.) through the motif of travelling on the intertidal zone constructed by sand imported from neighbouring countries. The sand implies the “flow of territory”, which is “incorporated within cultural global flows and situated within the flexible practices of neoliberal globalisation” (Lundberg and Peer 216). Repose on the liminal intertidal zone thus affords Wang and Mindy the possibility of imagining their escapes to multiple elsewhere. Their perception of the city lights from afar, however, recalls the forever unattainable green light in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. By embodying the migrants’ situations, spectators see that their notion of freedom diverges from the Singaporean ideal.