reduced and recycled

I didn’t believe someone came up with a whole 20-minute’s worth of footage on the mysterious “18?”. The last time I was up in KL, Martin and I were walking from Petaling Street hunting down Jalan Ampang, and that was the first time I saw it. It was plastered on an old wall, spray-painted and looking so out of place in that area. What ‘jalan’ was it? I can’t remember, now. I remembered thinking, ‘what the hell?’ because it wasn’t, well, normal.

I won’t pretend to know graffiti much, but the graffiti I’ve seen gave me the impression that it tended toward extremes, was more flamboyant, more colourful. But there it was, in black and whatever the wall’s colour was - puce, I believe? - almost rudely in the middle of old-skool KL. Martin took one look at it, and he didn’t give himself time to stop.

“Stupid kids,” he muttered.

“What’s so stupid about it,” I said, trying to catch up.

“Whiny snots who have nothing better to do with their time painting graffiti and not out there trying to survive,” he said, not looking back. I think I knew the type he meant: snotty, middle-class, educated, and rolling in their parents’ money. I didn’t know if I agreed with him at that point, because I didn’t really know what it all meant, this “18?”.

That’s until Swifty pointed out that a documentary based on this mysterious “18?” had been vetoed out of a screening at the EBS International Documentary festival at Seoul, South Korea.

I thought: if the government’s tried to silence it, like it banned Lelaki Komunis Terakhir, it’s got to be worth watching. And it was. I like the way Danny Lim explored the various meanings connected to the mysterious “18?” by juxtaposition.

It is therefore ironic, if not unexpected, that the tension inherent in his juxtapositions of meaning derived from this singular symbol has translated into a dilemma on one level, at least: that of the government’s intervention in this documentary’s screening.

Which, if you’ll allow me, is even funnier. It’s like watching a great big machine slipping backside-first down a well-laid, but unintentional – hence, well-laid – trap.

Although Mr Lim is careful to feature differing opinions about the symbol, thus muddying the waters about its intended meaning, he goes so far as to feature people whose own interpretations of the offending graffiti veer toward that dangerous subject in these confusing times: freedom of expression.

His interview of an activist at court after Anwar Ibrahim’s judgement was quashed was the only explicit gesture toward partisanship, but Mr Lim’s documentary is, by the very nature of its subject, inherently political because, get this, freedom of expression is political, and it has always been since independence.

And there you have it: the reason the documentary cannot be shown, must not be shown. Because allowing the documentary its screening amongst its East Asian neighbours and foreign attendees is some sort of admission. Maybe.

But that’s the joke, isn’t it? It would’ve been easy to invalidate notions that the public space for discourse and expression in Malaysia was restrictive and tightly controlled: all the government had to do was allow that documentary’s screening – here in Malaysia and everywhere else.

A pity They’ve chosen to do it the hard way.