Ghost in the Machine

In Shutter, Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom present a world in which men are more monstrous than the phii tai tong they create, namely because of their analagous distortion of reality, triggering in its victims what is psychoanalytically considered psychosis or a psychotic disorder. Since the narrative structure allows the audience to most closely identify with Jane, the film is attempting to reflect the ubiquity of gendered abuse within a(n ableist) patriarchal society and how this is always simultaneously concealed and revealed to its victims; however, photography also presents an analogous technological manipulation of reality in which everyone- but particularly men and ghosts- conceals certain facts by revealing others, and vice versa, to the audience. This places the audience in a permanent state of psychosis all too common within ghost and other horror stories- where one cannot fully delineate the bounds of reality with what they are cinematically presented- but rather than this being the result of some supernatural or heretofore unknown entity or event, it is caused by men’s manipulation of photography and reality within the story. The karmic function of ghosts in Thai Buddhism (Ancuta 153), combined with the psychoanalytical and cross-cultural function of ghosts globally (147), thus allows for a reading of Natre’s ghost as simultaneously a supernatural being and a manifestation of Tun’s repressed guilt- as both the “legacy of abuse” that prevents any of these men from finding love or peace and an especially feminine disruption of patriarchal order- through photography (Walter 18). This is best shown in Jane’s dream and the flashback scenes, where Natre and Tun’s relationship is fully explored and her hatred of photography fully explained.

We are not presented with the first flashback of Tun and Natre’s relationship until he is the only “friend” alive. This structuring of current events in contradistinction to the revelation of past events- for both the audience and Jane, whose level of awareness posits her as the audience’s greatest point of identification- identifies Tun as the primary malefactor within both the narrative and Natre’s mind. Yet his positioning as the antagonist, aptly so in a film titled Shutter, is inextricable from also being the primary photog. This is first signified in Jane’s dream, when she searches for Tun in his darkroom and finds Natre instead. Here, Natre clearly ties the scene of the rape (a science, perhaps zoology, lab) to Tun’s darkroom (a photography lab), offering the film’s earliest and most direct reference to the globally ghostly belief that, as Walter explains, “recorded images, both still and moving, might retain an element of the subject’s soul.” (20) Just as the students experiment on cadavers and dead animals- most of them only bones and pieces- Tun experiments on fragmented subjects, the former frozen and fragmented in space (a reptile tail takes up literal space) and the latter frozen and fragmented in time (the subject of a picture is a fragment of that person and their soul at that time). Natre’s haunting-cum-possession of Tun’s darkroom (and thus all of his phototechnology, from the camera’s interior processes to the baths he develops his film in) is thus all but solidified when she rises out of the photo bath as an onryō before crying for Tun. The law of the dream/scene is thus fragmentation: most of these connections- Natre’s identity, the science lab and its doorknob, the assault- are not even revealed until later in the film; the room itself is partitioned; the cut to her crying for Tun; and (most importantly) Natre is now introduced as a Japanese onryō despite being expected to adhere to karmic Thai beliefs of the afterlife, and she haunts the darkroom despite not having physically died there. Even though this is merely a dream, the film circularly and climactically bringing Jane back to the developing bath in order for her and us to learn the truth about Tun and Natre confirms that a piece of her does rest here, and as a Thai ghost she had to bring some sense of order to this cinematic universe to finally rest; in addition to her killing the two unnamed friends and later appearing for Jane in the science lab, this proves that within the afterlife her being is fragmented throughout space and time because of the events that took place. Thus, Natre must bring order to these events for us and Jane in order to reach nirvana, but her refusal to go is precisely because of her undying loyalty to Tun.

This undying loyalty was foregrounded in the first flashback scene, as Natre would rather have died than been without Tun. To introduce the flashback (and again later with the third) Jane confronts him with a picture of Natre, and instead of simply answering her question he becomes extremely defensive and asks where did you get that? Each time he gets very visibly anxious and scared, “as if his exposure in the present is somehow more horrifying than the forced exposure of Natre on the laboratory floor and on the film in Jane’s hands.” (Walter 22) Walter’s quote is specifically in reference to the photo of Natre’s rape, but it is important to circle back and remember this is also his same response when confronted with the first photograph of her smiling next to him, although he refuses fully explain why. The one photograph he took but never looked at or developed is haunting him even when he looks at other photos; he so badly wants to convince himself that he never took it so that the assault never happened. 

Remembering this perspective in analyzing the first flashback, the lack of dialogue audio reflects Tun’s unwillingness to fully explain his relationship and breakup with Natre to us and Jane; the flashback thus leaves even more questions unanswered. The only audio is the music, and the switch from romantic to dreadful is when Natre gifts Tun the camera he was window shopping. After this, his friends harass her in the elevator right in front of him as he does nothing; then he breaks up with her. Why could he not appreciate the camera, and why did he suddenly break up with her after she was harassed? Either Tun does not remember- or does not want Jane to know- the specifics of the arguments and conversations that would answer these questions, but either way he still presents a fractured reality that culminates in his darkroom, both literally with her suicide attempt and figuratively by developing all of his pictures here. His darkroom then, is itself a place of ambiguity and uncertain reality (also where Jane’s dream took place) with his literal and figurative photographic memory being called into question. Did Natre really slit her wrists, or was there simply a threat? Furthermore, was there a threat at all, or was this a cover-up fabricated after she disappeared? He couldn’t even explain what Tonn exactly did, and so the ambiguity of red extends beyond the darkroom to blood itself, not simply with the hypothetical posed above but also the blood on Natre and Tonn at the scene of the rape. From Tun’s perspective, he would have had no idea of knowing whether all the blood all over Tonn’s neck and her body was his or hers, and yet he still undoubtedly chose to assist Tonn. 

This presents a segway into discussing the second flashback, because this scene along with Natre’s ghostly representation as an onryō presents a specifically Thai struggle against the tides of Japanese and Western modernity within both a Southeast Asian and horror context, despite Ancuta and Walter’s insistence otherwise. Claiming that Natre “discharge[s] her wrath on the guilty and innocent,” Walter corrobates Ancuta’s claim that global ghosts such as Natre “tend to favour the Asian model, allowing for the randomisation of their actions and abandoning the ‘save the virtuous and punish the wicked’ pedagogical principle of much traditional Western horror.” (Walter 20; Ancuta 154) What “innocent(s)” did Natre harm? Was her pattern not one of punishment (retribution)? She had ample opportunity to kill Jane but simply used her to get closer to Tun and kill the rest of her abusers. Apparently Western modernity does not recognize a ghost seeking vengeance against her abusers who drove her to suicide as simply ‘punishing the wicked,’ which extends the film’s apparent struggle against traditional Thai Buddhist beliefs that “premature depature” by accident, suicide, or murder is the accrual of bad karma in “one’s current and previous lives.” (Acunta 150) Not only does Natre explicitly disrespect her funeral rites by haunting Tun during the rituals and refusing to rest afterwards, but on a metacinematic level we actually sympathize with her suicide and support her revenge. Furthermore, her revenge is actually provoked by a(n almost-)gang rape which transmogrifies her into an onryō. This further complicates the cross-cultural connections, wherein traditional Thai Buddhist culture suicide is always deplored, in traditional Japanese culture Natre would be expected to commit suicide “rather than live with the shame.” (Balmain 95) 

The phii tai hong is already “the most terrifying of Thai ghosts,” (Ancuta 145) but it unfortunately would not have garnered international success without at least amalgamating some Western and Japanese filmic horror conventions, and so a hybridized modernist phii tai hong is created out of the (gendered) assault on a young (modernist) Thai culture, still struggling to negotiate the terms of its traditional Buddhist culture. The manifestation of this modernist culture is at once the film itself and Natre. Tun emphasizing that Natre had no friends is very ironic considering that, when it matters, he and his friends aren’t that close: he didn’t even know the other two committed suicide when Tonn’s wife told him, and all of their closest moments are shrouded in lies and misogyny. How could he insist that Natre is the weird girl for not having friends when none of his closest “relationships” are even healthy? This contradiction- alongside the gang’s harassment and assault of Natre, subsequently transforming her into a hybridized onryō and phii tai hong- filmically and formally represents Japanese modernism attempting to subsume Thailand under the sea of Western globalization, while her mother and the Buddhist temple/funeral represent traditional Buddhist culture’s disapproval of suicide upholding ableist stigmas, both of which this Thai modernist horror is attempting to subvert. Jane (and Tonn’s wife) must then represent this nascent modern Thai culture in need of safeguard, being protected by another victim and cultural referent: Natre. 

Natre crying for Tun’s help- and his choice to instead take her picture- thus represents Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom’s reflection of technology and (film) photography’s roles in this “plough[ing] down” (19:55) of the Thai past to amalgamate a globalized future, using the framing devices of abuse and technology/photography’s correlative--codependent ubiquity. A plotline of abuse and rape under patriarchal violence ensures that gendered politics consume the narrative; on the surface this may be a rape-revenge narrative in which Natre’s plea and Tun’s neglect does simply reflect the extremely pervasive and underreported (so similar to American) rape culture in Thailand, with Jirada Phetlam explaining the “data black hole” on sexual and gendered based violence (SGBV) within the country and its underlining trivialization on the cultural level; just two years ago  #ข่มขืนผ่านจอพอกันที (#NoMoreRapeOnScreen) was trending on Twitter (Phetlam 2022). Not only does this culture reflect a similar American problem as reflected in Ochiai’s remake, but this film also uses abuse as a similarly ubiquitous danger to society as technology and photography because of its (and of their) manipulation of the latter (and of reality), not just because of actual abusers (rapists- Tonn and the other two) but also their enablers (Tun and almost Jane). The challenging of this voyeuristic neglect that upholds SGBV begins in the first two scenes: because Jane sticks out as the woman laughing along with these men about infidelity and sexism, Natre pretends to get run over to test if Jane would want to leave like Tun or actually care for her. This then sets off her investigaton which causes her to confront and leave Tun: like Tonn’s wife, she will have learned the red flags for men/monsters like this. At a metacinematic level- of both photography and modernism- Natre and Shuttter reflect a nascent Thai modernism straddling the grounds between traditionalist throes of ableist self-destruction within karmic cycles and globalized modernist conventions of Japanese--Western hegemony, represented in the silent ubiquity of support for abuse (rape and erasure, individual and cultural) of peoples, technology, and photography.

Works Cited

Ancuta, Katarzyna. “Ghost Skins: Globalising the Supernatural in Contemporary Thai Horror Film.” Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, Manchester University Press, 2013, pp. 144–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18mbfxg.16. 

Walter, Brenda S. Gardenour. ‘Ghastly Transmissions: The Horror of Connectivity and the Transnational Flow of Fear.’ Transnational Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies, edited by Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer, New York: Routledge, 2014. pp. 17-29.

Balmain, Colette. “The Rape-Revenge Film: From Violation to Vengeance.” Introduction to Japanese Horror Film, Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp. 93–112. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09x15.12. 

Phetlam, Jirada. “Spinning in the Void: The Data Black Hole of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Thailand.” Heinrich Böll Stiftung Southeast Asia, 20 October 2022, https://th.boell.org/en/2022/10/20/sexual-and-gender-violence-thailand.