COLD FIRE: GENDER, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE FILM INDUSTRY IN COLD WAR THAILAND A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Rebecca Townsend January 2017 © 2017 Rebecca Townsend COLD FIRE: GENDER, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE FILM INDUSTRY IN COLD WAR THAILAND Rebecca Townsend, Ph. D. Cornell University 2017 Cold Fire is a study of how the international film industry in Thailand became a productive site for expressions of gendered cultural nationalism from the 1950s to the 1970s. National development projects expanded both state power and commercial markets for foreign and domestic film distribution. Those changes were facilitated by the domestic rise of military authoritarianism, intensive US political and economic intervention, rapid industrialization, and the communist threat in Asia. The United States and Thai governments used film as an instrument of psychological warfare to propagate conservative representations of Thai culture and society aimed at combating Communist sympathy. In doing so, they produced gendered representations of political behavior. Political consciousness was a masculine threat to the state. Thai women were positioned as inherently non-political, and therefore impervious to the threats of communism. The core values of Thai society promoted during this period, namely loyalty, passivity, and peacefulness, were implicitly feminine. Meanwhile, a new generation of filmmakers drew on the international discourse of modernization theory to promote technological advancement in Thai national cinema. The movement also articulated popular concerns, particularly towards the expanding presence of the United States and commercial development of the countryside. With the importation of commercial popular culture promoting alternative models for women and the visibility of prostitution alongside military bases, elite expressions of Thai femininity were used to delineate national difference in opposition to the United States. As such, Thai women were viewed as deeply vulnerable to the threat of Americanization. Indeed, government censors and filmmakers alike increasingly focused on representations of gender and sexuality in commercial films. With the 1970s, a small group of filmmakers brought to prominence a conservative national cinema that drew on elite notions of a romanticized agrarianism and traditional femininity to assert an image of Thai authenticity. I therefore argue that during the Cold War communism and Americanization functioned as mutually constitutive threats within a gendered Thai political and social discourse. Cinematic regulation and representation of Thai women as wives, mothers, lovers, and prostitutes produced the gendered boundaries of the modern state. National cultural identity was predicated on women’s unique and unequal status. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Rebecca Townsend was born in Mountain View, California to Paul and Catherine Townsend. Her father was working towards a Ph.D at the time, and it had an effect. Rebecca has three siblings: Clarissa, David, and Ann. She received her B.A. in History from Arizona State University in 2008 and her M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies in 2010. She now lives with her partner Matt and son Paul in Wellington, New Zealand, and is learning to enjoy wind. iii For Matt and Paul iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In the time that I have spent as a doctoral student at Cornell, I have been fortunate to receive the support of an inspiring and dedicated community of people. I am grateful to my advisor Professor Tamara Loos, who gave me exactly the right encouragement to explore how gender operated in Thai history while at the same time working that question out in my own life as a scholar and mother. I also embarked on the often challenging task of learning to teach, and I have Professor Eric Tagliacozzo to thank for motivating me on that journey. Ajan Thak Chaloemtiarana allowed me to gain from his incredible experience in Thailand, and was always an enjoyable dinner companion at the Kahin Center. I am also incredibly grateful to Ajan Ngampit Jagacinski, who made it possible for me to conduct my research in Thai and was willing to watch all the films in this study along with me. I would like to acknowledge Professors Lorraine Paterson, who helped me in the painful early stages of this project, as well as Professors Arnika Fuhmann and Aaron Sachs, who both challenged me to think about how I wrote and conceptualized key chapters. Tita Thess contributed to my love of the Philippines, and spent a very enjoyable semester discussing the 2016 Philippines election with me. I would also like to remember Professor Don Fredericksen, who sadly passed away in 2015, but helped to ensure that even after a dissertation I would still enjoy watching films. I would not have enjoyed my years in Ithaca and Bangkok nearly so much without the company of friends to share conversation and wine with. Matt Reeder not only provided inspiration for the type of scholar that I would like to become, but also made going to the archives at a somewhat nerve-racking stage in my life a daily enjoyment. Jenny Goodman, Mood Sudcharoen, and Chairat Polmuk all made me feel very fortunate to be included in Thai Studies with Cornell. The entire group of v graduate students in the Southeast Asia program were consistently a pleasure to be around, and made Kahin a warm place to be. My cohort in the History Department provided some comradery there. Jackie Reynoso and Molly Reed made me feel inspired to be a woman in academia. I also have Lee Schrauben, Ashley Krause, Jamie Opsommer and many other friends around the world to thank for providing some much needed normalcy. I have also benefitted enormously from institutional and financial support throughout the years. The Southeast Asia Program supported my work with the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship, as well as with a dissertation write-up grant. The Program’s aid to me has gone well beyond the financial. The Fulbright Program provided me with essential support for my research in Thailand, and the staff with Fulbright Thailand were always incredibly helpful. The Cornell Graduate School, Mario Einaudi Center, American Studies program and several more programs at Cornell also provided me with the financial support to see this project through. I am also grateful to the staff at the National Archives of Thailand, National Library of Thailand, the US National Archives, whose work enabled this project. I would like to acknowledge Dome Sukwong and the staff at the Thai Film Archive, who have achieved an incredible task in film preservation and spreading awareness of Thai cinema. Finally, I cannot express the extent of my gratitude to my family: my dad and mom, who gave me strength. Also to Clare, Brent, David, Ann, Zhu Yi, Emma-Kate, Yeads, Andy, Barbara, and Ian, who all provided encouragement. My darling godson James was always happy to give a dance whenever I felt down. My partner Matt has helped by making me a better person, but also by reading every word dozens of times. My son Paul helped charm every person on our street in Bangkok, and kept me smiling through every page. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch ....................................................................................................... iii List of Figures .............................................................................................................. viii List of Tables ................................................................................................................. ix List of Abbreviations ...................................................................................................... x Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 The Diamond Finger: Monarchy And Exhibition ....................................... 24 Chapter 2 Cold Fire: Mobile Information And The Thai Village ................................ 63 Chapter 3 The Adulterer: Censorship, Morality, And Foreign Films ......................... 112 Chapter 4 Hotel Hell: Rat Pettanyi And The Creation Of A National Film Industry 160 Chapter 5 Hotel Angel: Gender, Class, and Authenticity in the First New Wave ...... 208 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 246 References…………………………………………………………………………...264 vii LIST OF FIGURES 2.1 Literacy of Population Aged 10 Years and Over by Sex, 1960 and 1970………..94 2.2 Sources of News according to Gender………………………………..…………..97 3.1 Censorship of Films from Major Import Countries……………………………..135 4.1 National Origin of Films shown in Bangkok First-Run Theaters per 100 Seats (1969)………………………………………………………………………………..204 viii LIST OF TABLES 5.1 The Growing per Capita Income Gap of Farmers and City People in Thailand...221 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BBFC British Board of Film Classification IIFF International Information Film Festival MIT Mobile Information Team MPAA Motion Picture Association of America MPEAA Motion Picture Export Association of America PCA Production Code Administration RTA Royal Thai Army SEATO Southeast Asia Treaty Organization TMPPA Thai Motion Picture Producers Association USIA United States Information Agency USIS United States Information Service x INTRODUCTION Scene One: In the 1957 Rat Pettanyi film Rongraem narok (lit. Hotel Hell), a glamorous female