The Dream Merchants

I was sitting in Rick’s Cafe Americaine last night. As part of my new resolve to cut down on my drinking, I was trying to make a beer last longer than a cigarette. In order to drink more slowly I gave my attention to the big color TV over the bar, and when I saw Sylvester Stallone wandering around a Buddhist monastery, I new that I’d happened onto the beginning of “Rambo III”.

If you’ve never suffered through this particular chapter in the saga of John Rambo, Sensitive Psychopath, it begins with our hero beating the hell out of some steroid-infused Neanderthal in a Bangkok warehouse, to the amusement a couple of hundred Thai extras. As if presenting this misleading and demeaning picture of our hosts wasn’t bad enough, after he wins the fight Nature Boy goes down to the canal, where some monks wait in a longtail boat to take him back to the temple, where we are supposed to believe this violence-addicted sociopath is “getting his head together”. As the boat zooms up the klong Rambo hands over the blood-smeared money he’s just won to a smiling monk.

This, the screenwriter would have it, is how our man is paying for his keep. Can you imagine? Picture this: a Thai movie company comes to your hometown, making a movie about a young girl, orphaned and cared for by the nuns at a convent. Once a week the nuns drive the waif into town, and drop her off at the local brothel, where she turns tricks with goatherds and chimney sweeps for a night, and in the morning she presents her earnings to the Mother Superior, who smiles beatifically and says, “Bless you, child”. Imagine Julie Andrews doing that in “The Sound of Music”.

At a table behind me, a group of “See Seven Asian Cities in Eleven Days!” tourists were wondering aloud if the temple Rambo stayed at was one of the dozen or so they’d sped through on their tour of Bangkok. As Rambo flew to Afghanistan to begin misrepresenting Afghan culture, with scenes of ever-increasing mayhem and ever more expensive props, I took one small sip of my beer and mused over a few nominees for the Golden Coconut Award for Best Foreign Movie Made In or About Thailand.

Strictly on the basis of showing off the local beauty, “Air America” wins hands down, although it does try to pass of northern Thailand as Laos. The movie is worth seeing if only for one incredible stunt where a light plane lands and takes off from a strip carved almost vertically up the side of a mountain.

On the basis of how successfully movie-makers have made Thailand look like other parts of Asia, it’s a toss-up between “Casualties of War” and “Good Morning Vietnam”, though the latter presents us with a Saigon where the street signs are all in Thai. “The Killing Fields” did a credible job of making Phuket look like Cambodia, but for my money the real treat is “Swimming to Cambodia”, Spalding Gray’s one-man-show about what it was like to make “The Killing Fields”. (Did you know that the hotels on Karon Bay used to have barbed wire fences to keep out the stray dogs and bandits?) And of course, the art department on “Heaven and Earth” did a fantastic job of making Phuket look like Vietnam, but since Oliver Stone chose to shoot the whole movie in extreme close-up, you’d never know it.

The first look at the Kingdom in a foreign film, to my knowledge, was in “The Ugly American” in 1963, wherein Bangkok was dressed up as the mythical kingdom of Sarkhan. M.R. Kukrit Pramoj makes Marlon Brando look like a clown, something which hadn’t yet become easy to do, and while I’m on the subject of clowns, somebody should have told Yul Brynner that he’d been cast as the king, and not as the court jester, and that’s all I have to say about that tired old “classic”.

In recent years we’ve seen Phuket uglied up to look like Malaysia in “Turtle Beach”, an Aussie flick so beset with production problems that the producers made up T-shirts that said “I survived Total Bitch”. But then the Aussie dream merchants had already done the Thai Tourism Authority a favor by making Phuket look more idyllic than it really is in “Echoes of Paradise”, a soap opera about a vacationing housewife who gets revenge on her philandering husband by having an affair with a Balinese dancer. (Played by John Lone in his screen debut.) I’ve been here for quite a while and never met any Balinese dancers, but heck, it’s only a movie, and the only movie that has ever presented Phuket as Phuket.

David Lean wins the prize for making Ceylon look like Thailand in The “Bridge on the River Kwai”, a pretty good movie adapted from a truly awful book, and a favorite of audiences sitting in front of guesthouse TV’s, killing time before the discos open. Thais love this one, because the Thai female extras speak in an unforgivably rude way to Jack Hawkins, who plays an Oxford don specializing in Oriental Languages who leads the mission to blow up the bridge. At one point the Thai guide tells Hawkins, in painfully clear textbook Thai, that the bridge is another nine hours’ hike, and Hawkins turns to his commandos and says, “C’mon lads, only five hours to go!” Every busboy and waiter in this country can count to 10 in English and can understand the mistake he’s made, and they roll on the floor with mirth every time the film is shown. Oxford lost nothing when this linguist joined the army.

As I mentally awarded “The Man With The Golden Gun” the prize for the movie most-often-cited as reason to take a boat tour of some pretty uninteresting rocks, a terrific explosion erupted over the bar. I looked up to see that Rambo had just destroyed the last Russian helicopter with an arrow. Or maybe it was a battleship with a rock. Before the end credits rolled our perpetually sweaty hero gave his jade Buddha amulet, a gift from his Vietnamese girlfriend in “Rambo II”, to the adolescent muhajadin fighter who saved his life in Afghanistan. You try to get a Muslim to wear a Buddha, see where it gets you. It gets Stallone US$20 million per picture.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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