http://www.metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 195• 67represses the less palatable features of his childhood in order
to avoid destabilising his carefully curated identity. The erosion
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path towards personal acceptance – a path that requires hon
est engagement with his past.
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attain such acceptance himself, but must be led there through
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peaceful disposition even extends to his own mortality, as he
tells his new companion, ‘I’m going to join my brother in heaven
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gest an antidote to Thana’s anxiety: to embrace internal peace,
rather than fretting over one’s purpose and legacy. But, just as
Tan’s direction refuses to simplify her titular animal into a signi
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refuses to simplify him into solely a symbol (though he is argu
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The two men are separated shortly after meeting when
Popeye escapes outside a local supermarket and is detained
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for ‘negligence and violating urban tidiness’. This subplot, in
which a pair of policemen escort Thana and Popeye down the
road at ‘elephant speed’, is a showcase for the screenplay’s
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as he meets a fatal end in an accident while riding Thana’s mo
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sweetheart out for a ride.
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the director’s words – ‘existential themes’,but rather what
Thana discovers when he sets out to honour his erstwhile
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to borrow a truck from her, which allows him to complete his
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nist’s own denial about his past: memories that he’s edited
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Hitting home
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One: his childhood home has been remade by developers into
a generic apartment building. Two: Thana sold Popeye to a
circus prior to leaving for Bangkok, to fund his architectural
studies there. And three: the elephant Thana has travelled with
for over several hundred kilometres is not, in fact, Popeye, but
an unrelated elephant. Popeye, we’re reliably informed, was put
down years earlier after he was injured at the circus.
These last two developments clarify the thematic thrust of
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tunity to travel down memory lane during a dark time. ‘Popeye’
represented the possibility of redemption, the chance to salve a
guilt that had clearly lingered for decades. But Thana’s arrival in
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the optimism of the youth – and the elephant, besides – for the
ashen failure of adulthood. His legacy is a crumbling marriage
and a building scheduled for destruction.
/NO XDdoesn’t cushion the force of this blow – but,
critically, we come to understand that Thana’s journey to
this point has prepared him to accept the bitterness of his
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built this’. It’s a bittersweet conclusion. Thana has returned to
Bangkok, where his journey began, with no greater sense of
purpose, though now he’s blessed with the ability to accept
his circumstances in all their imperfections. It brings to mind
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because it happened,’ which surely isn’t accidental if this pas
sage from Tan’s director statement is anything to go by: ‘Time
is the witness to it all and when time shows its hand, do we
laugh or do we cry?’
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Thana’s personal journey./NO XDis, more broadly, a story
about our inability to craft our personal histories – about how
our legacies are not our own, and how our pasts aren’t neat
narratives bent to our wills. In fact, it’s also a story about
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whose experience of Thailand comes from two years of having
lived there. This experience – and, presumably, her work with
7KDL FUHDWLYHV OLNH /HH &KDWDPHWLNRRO/NO XD’s editor and a
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and the replacement of Thana’s rural home with an apartment
building both hint at the encroaching arm of development, while
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lessness’ in a country increasingly stripped of forest environ
ments^6 – as the titular character nods to the consequences
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6XFK IDFWRUV OHQG/NO XDthe same lingering melancholy
seen in the elephant’s big, sad eyes. This isn’t a grandstanding
work that overemphasises its political messages, and it resists
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(^6) Tan, quoted in Elphick, op. cit.