I Not Stupid

Recently, I had to watch I Not Stupid the movie for my SS module. It’s a Lit module. Some of you would know how much I detest Lit…I had thought that I would be out of its grasp aft the ‘O’s but I ended up taking Introduction to Literary Studies in Year 1 Sem 1 because I was outbidded for Introduction to Social Work and am taking this module now because the other one that Anna and I had wanted was too expensive. Bleah.

Anyway, the main point is about the movie. Today, I was discussing with Anna our part of the project – characterization, and I had a better understanding of how its director, Jack Neo, had used its characters to convey his ideas in the movie.

I’ll just cite Terry Khoo because his use is the point I want to talk about here. The Terry shown in the initial part of the movie is the typical Singaporean who is timid and too obedient for his own good and at the end of the movie, he becomes a “better” (in inverted commas because this word is only used from the director’s point of view) Singaporean who is braver and more willing to speak up for himself.

I could tell throughout the movie that Mr Neo was trying to tell us to not be blindly obedient to the authorities. There are many scenes which depict this, and one of them is when Boon Hock told Terry not to obey his kidnapper. Sounds reasonable but Terry had wanted to obey his kidnapper initially “like a typical Singaporean who obeys blindly”, in his Chinese kidnapper’s words, you see. The deeper political ideas that Mr Neo had wanted to convey are also masked by humour (so that the movie would be more light-hearted), like when Terry blindly obeys his mother and ends up being laughed at by us, the audience, and being mocked at by his friends.

If we could all become intelligent Singaporeans who make wise and informed and responsible decisions (like the Swiss…that’s why they can have direct democracy….oh…), that would be great. However, if we are neither wise not responsible but disobey rules because we don’t like them or because they don’t benefit us, we might end up being an anarchy.

Rules are there for our own good. Some rules may be there to benefit the ruling power, but if you think about it, if such rules didn’t exist, the authority of the ruling power would not be firmly in place for there to be order in a country.

Of course, it also depends on how good the ruling power is. If it is bad and leaves its people to fend for themselves (for example), of course we ought to do something about it. That’s not the point though. I think what I want to say is what I had mentioned in my fifth paragraph.

Bleah. DO YOU KNOW I HAD TYPED OUT A COMPREHENSIVE ESSAY THAT CONVEYED PRECISELY WHAT I HAD WANTED TO SAY? Then I think I accidentally pressed the wrong button. Think it was Backspace. And there went all my hard work. Down the drain just like that. I’m really sorry that this post is so lousy. My previous post was a hundred times better than this horrible post. I shall type on Microsoft Word regardless of the length of my posts from now on. At least even if I accidentally close this window, the programme would ask if I want to save my work, and if my laptop crashes, it would still save a backup copy.