OH, boy. What a one month it has been for Malaysian cultural politics – specifically for the so-called “creative arts” (a tautology because all arts are creative).

I don’t need to go on about what’s been happening unless, of course, you’ve been living under a rock or only read the sports or financial sections of your newspapers or new outlets.

Here are the key players in the news: Spilt Gravy, Mat Kilau, and Crackhouse Comedy Club.

While the latter two are still making headlines as I write, the film Spilt Gravy has also been forgotten amidst the furore over the three triggering words: “misrepresentation”, “Islam”, and “ethnocentrism”. I’m not dwelling on this as many have already given their two-sen in lengthy ed-ops and social media posts.

I’d like to connect how these key players in the news explore two very different visions of not only Malaysia (or pre-Malaysia in the case of Mat Kilau) but also what it mean to be Malay. Right-wing chest thumping and liberal fears aside, I find this area of inquiry fascinating both as an artist and academic.

As an artist in Malaysia, you cannot escape being defined by your race, which in turn also dictates what sort of material you are expected to produce or avoid.

What race you are chiefly determines in which language your songs are composed and your films are written.

If one considers philosopher Michel Foucault’s assertion that language is both a form and an instrument of power, then the choice of language of a writer will decide whether he will toe the line with the ideology of the day or wield it as subversive tool to challenge the status quo.

Take the two films in question. Spilt Gravy and Mat Kilau are diametrically opposed in not only content and subject matter but also in representation: the Malay presented in Spilt Gravy is urban and upper-middle class while the figure in Mat Kilau is decidedly rural and feudal.

Spilt Gravy ruffled some feathers by representing two different Malay male protagonists with LGBT backgrounds but the controversy should have been over the normalising of a Malay man with four wives who fathered his four children (although I’m sure that was not the intention of the late Jit Murad, whose play was the source material for the film).

Nevertheless, the film, which was shot in 2011 and only released four years later due to censorship,  was both a delight and a document of an increasingly under-represented representation of “Malayness” on screen.

But because the language of the film was primarily in English and urban, it flew over the heads of many to whom the film should have been an eye opener: the Mat Kilau crowd.

Mat Kilau is at heart a boisterous, full-blooded blockbuster film. Ten minutes into the film, its relentless pace and over-dramatisation (not to mention gratuitous violence) make you feel like you are on a rollercoaster ride that you have been coerced to take.

Aside from the ideological underpinnings of its ethnocentric subtext – which was unapologetically declared from the start – the problem is its binary representation of “good” and “evil” using a historical figure and setting which are conveniently “fictionalised”.

Set against a backdrop of colonial Malaya (Pahang, specifically), it does not attempt to move away from the stereotyped portrayals of race – it’s essentially an ethnocentric Star Wars in which the Sikh soldiers (themselves also oppressed colonial subjects) are presented as Stormtroopers with no personality or backstory, just brutes on command and fodder for the violence.

The Sikh community had every right to be concerned.

The irony is, in spite of the repeated portrayals of the “evil British”, not a single British soldier or officer is killed onscreen or offscreen.

This crass subtext in the guise of “nationalism” is problematic as it also stokes the flames of the usual “threat to public order” to pander to a particular audience.

Spilt Gravy, however, does not pander and leaves it to the audience to interpret the narrative and subtext.

That being said, the film also has a very specific urban and middle-class and higher target audience, and for better or worse, it may be shunned by the Mat Kilau audience which, includes families with kids, despite the latter’s graphic violence, including the brutal murders of children and a pregnant woman).  

I won’t patronise you, dear reader, and presume to tell you which movie is “better” or “worse”. You can decide on your own.

The sole connecting thread of both films, which most pundits overlook (fortunately or unfortunately), is the great Rahim Razali, who appears in very different characters in each film but has a more central role in Spilt Gravy.

I don’t think his legacy would either be tarnished or burnished by his appearances in either film (he made his stamp a long while ago). To me, he is the last great Malay actor whose commanding charisma is a symbol of rationality amid increasing “bebalism”, to quote the late great Syed Hussein Alatas. – July 15, 2022.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.