SHALL WE DANCE? TOMORROW AND I A SPECTRAL/SPECULATIVE REVIEW
by Verita Sriratana
Donald K. Emmerson characterises the very idea of “Southeast Asia” as “a kind of science fiction,” capable of both representing and imaginatively constructing reality. After having watched the four episodes of the Thai Netflix series Tomorrow and I, [1] released on December 4th 2024, I propose that Emmerson’s description may be applied to the present and future of Thailand.
The country’s (sur)reality is not only “simultaneously described and (re)invented,” but also perpetually speculated, by and through real repetitive coups and White-Lotusesque exoticisation, as well as under the Kafkaesque non-fictional world's harshest Lèse-majesté laws. Such “fabulatedness” and “speculativeness” of Thailand are depicted by Kong Rithdee, a respected critic, translator, and screenwriter, as a dystopian country which exceeds even the bleakness of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) in their criticism of the 20-year national strategy bill, enacted by the military government after its 2014 coup and codified into law in 2018. This 20-year plan, far exceeding Stalin’s, is protected by the undemocratic Article 65 of the 2017 Constitution, rendering deviation from the strategy potentially illegal, with legal consequences for officials who fail to comply.
When a country par science fiction creates science fiction in the form of a sci-fi Netflix series, can it even avoid cloning or reproducing its mundane self? Imagine the pressure of producing a plot that is more sci-fi than sci-fi itself and more apocalyptic than the apocalyptic: a sci-fi apocalypse on steroids, if you will. The answer lies in an interview statement made by Paween Purijitpanya, the director: “Thai sci-fi probably won’t feature laser guns or world-saving heroics. We don’t go down that path because, frankly, Thai people are already battling the realities of everyday life or struggles that don’t quite fit with those grand, futuristic narratives. Honestly, given the state of our current living conditions, where the heck would we even find the clarity of mind or the strength to fight aliens or AI bent on world domination?” The four self-contained episodes of Tomorrow and I are นิราศแกะดำ (Black Sheep), เทคโนโยนี (Paradistopia), ศาสดาต้า (Buddha Data), and เด็กหญิงปลาหมึก (Octopus Girl). In this article, I will focus on the first and the last episodes.
In Black Sheep, Noon (Waruntorn Paonil), an astronaut at the end of her three-year mission at a NASA-inspired ISA space station, has finally perfected her 3D-printed artificial heart, which could only be created in space’s weightlessness, and is ready to travel back to Earth to her cloned pet dog and her husband Nont. However, while on the shuttle back to Earth, Noon is killed in an accident. Her body is cryogenically preserved during her family’s 100 days of mourning prior to cremation as per Thai Buddhist tradition. Nont, bereaved, wants to clone Noon and so turns to Vee, his wife’s best friend, who clones family pets. Vee outright refuses because, while animal cloning is legal, human cloning is not. However, having stolen Noon’s brain (literally speaking) from her family, Nont manages to persuade Vee by arguing that restoring Noon’s life will be for the greater good and is therefore supposedly justified (though Noon would have probably disagreed). During the cloning process, where Nont is suddenly given full authority to select which memories and identity of his wife to keep or discard, Vee and Nont are met with surprise when it dawns on them that Noon has always wished to live her life as a (trans)man. The viewers are invited to think back to the scene where Nont is arguing with Noon’s parents, who appear to firmly uphold the Buddhist notion that death means an end to their daughter’s misery and therefore refuse to give up her body for cloning: a choice made not due to Buddhism but, rather, the heteronormative values which they firmly uphold, as they believe that it is better for their daughter to be a dead cisgender, heterosexual female, than a living transman. Nont decides to choose male afterlife for Noon out of unconditional love (and because transgender and/or intersex afterlife is not even an option) before being arrested by the police. The whole drama revolves around their romance and a husband’s self-effacing love, which is problematic. We are now back to the rigid gender binary as Nont is faced with two options: to have his wife back (along with her usual closet—literal and epistemological) or to let go of his wife so she can live life as a stranger, assigned “male at rebirth.” Despite casting Thailand’s renowned transgender woman in the role of Vee (who utters perhaps the most memorable lines on behalf of transgender persons in Thailand and beyond: “Not liking your own body is torture: it’s like being homeless, you know”), Tomorrow and I producers unfortunately erase and reduce diverse spectrum of gender and sexuality to genotypical sex, selectively curated to fit the desires of a cisgender, heterosexual male character presented as a loving husband who, even in a futuristic setting, continues to hold all the power. Thai science fiction thus succeeds only in reproducing its fundamentally patriarchal nature.
Necropolitics (Mbembe 2019) is a poignant theme in Octopus Girl, where the poor suffer and perish from natural disasters brought about by climate change to a far greater extent than the rich.
In this cyberpunk version of Bangkok, which has endured two years of global nonstop rain, the capital city of Thailand remains as stratified and segregated as ever.
The wealthy live in elevated districts, while the poor barely survive in flooded and cockroach-infested slums, one of which is called “Neo Khlong Toei.” A sci-fi version of the real and existing Khlong Toei slum, this undercity is infected with disease and despair, receiving little government support and attention. The protagonists are two schoolgirls, the extrovert “Mook” (Thai for pearl) and the more reserved “Kalapangha” (Thai for Gorgoniidae), or Pang in short, who remain besties come rain or shine. Trapped in their half-submerged ghetto due to “rainpocalypse,” a global disaster where rain has not stopped for two long years straight, ushering in deadly malaria pandemic as a bonus, Mook, Pang, and their fellow Neo Khlong Toei slumdwellers can only curse at their indifferent government and its Leader, (again, an unwelcome spectral resurgence of Thailand’s recent Junta leader, which is evident in the actor’s deliberate mime and im/personation). The only salvation from the malaria pandemic is a vaccine called AquaVac, derived and formulated from compounds found in octopuses and tardigrades.
But here is the absurd rub. As a side effect of AquaVac, recipients develop octopus-like tentacles beneath the chin. The leader, in his strongman address, ridicules such absurdity and declares that AquaVac will never be distributed to heal his people, only to reveal, in the end, that underneath his facemask lie the tiny tentacles. The plot is reminiscent of the Covid-19 pandemic corruption and necropolitical indifference in Thailand, where all the elites had access to the vaccines while the poor were left to suffer and perish in grotesque silence.
In the imagined futurity where sensational media content still moves mountains, it is only after Pang, a talented singer, manages to win the hearts of the judges and the audience gathered at a widely broadcast The Voice-like reality show called “Singing in the Heavy Rain,” [2] that her voice comes to matter. The clips of her performance become viral, causing public sensation. The leader, wishing to gain popularity, makes the effort of coming to see Pang at the evacuation centre (by that time the slums are fully submerged). It is at the evacuation centre that his true colours—and tentacles—are exposed in front of cameras and an angry mob. As a result, the Leader is later forced to resign. AquaVac is finally distributed to save people’s lives. This coming-of-age tale seems to veer towards a happy ending, where girls are turned into unseemly “octopus girls” but—looking on the bright side of life, Monty Python style—will potentially outlive the flood and malaria. The rain eventually stops, and octopus children can once again run to the playground and bask in the much-yearned sun. However, as they are enjoying this sunny turn of fate, fire suddenly breaks out, consuming everything in its path. Recalling the image of grilled octopus on a street vendor’s tray in one of the early scenes, the episode’s ending leaves us with the memory of burnt tentacles on human chins and the more explicit visual presentation of two small, charred hands clutching each other expectant of besties through life and death. Pang’s memorable lines: “Why do they use up the world, damn, and leave nothing for us?” hauntingly echo into the abyss after the world has finally ended for everyone—both girls or gentiles alike.
This dance of sci-fi and speculative fiction has just been led by the Siamese (if you please—or don’t please—a nod to “The Siamese Cat Song” in Disney’s 1955 Lady and the Tramp). The tables have turned. If one should subscribe to Sarah E. Truman’s observation that mainstream speculative fiction, and science fiction in particular, has historically inclined towards whiteness and ethnically homogeneous narratives, frequently reproducing imperialist ideologies and the figure of the solitary white male saviour, Tomorrow and I refreshingly offers a different picture which not only subverts the extreme poles of the simplified and reductive binary opposition of coloniser vs colonised other.
It invites viewers not only to defamiliarise the genre of science fiction, but also to take part in “speculative fabulation,” which Donna Haraway defines in Staying with the Trouble (2016) as a way of thinking about history, a way of imagining worlds, and a way of paying attention. If speculative fabulation works by unsettling familiar ideas, shifting perception, and challenging dominant ways of knowing, Tomorrow and I offers an excellent speculative platform through which we take active part in “worldings,” part of a tactic to imagine and enact alternative realities that resist dominant narratives—even if we are talking about a Thai sci-fi Netflix series which presents itself as already resisting dominant narratives. Tomorrow and I can be seen as an opening (mis)step, mirroring the moment when King Mongkut in The King and I issues a firm request at the end of the iconic dance number: “Come! We do it again!”
Verita Sriratana is Associate Professor of Literary Studies at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, and a former CAPAS Fellow.
[1] The series title can be read as the spectral return of the 1951 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I, and, particularly, its popular 1956 film version, where Victorian governess Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr) dances and sings “shall we dance?” with the exotic(ised) Siamese King Mongkut (Yul Brynner) in perhaps the most famous sequence where Anna teaches the benighted King to polka.
[2] A spectral return of the happier tune set by Gene Kelly’s iconic performance in the 1952 musical romantic comedy.