Southeast Asian Inferno: Evolutions of Dante in Mee Pok Man and A Land Imagined

In the same year as Fincher’s Se7en (1995), Singaporean auteur Eric Khoo directed his debut feature film Mee Pok Man. Two decades later, neo-noir mystery A Land Imagined (Yeo Siew Hua, 2018) embraced a similar journey into the underworld of Southeast Asia. Both Singaporean filmmakers distributed their award-winning films in Europe with Khoo scoring accolades from Moscow International Film Festival and Yeo winning the Golden Leopard at Locarno Film Festival.

This paper proposes an unexamined area of research: the influence of Dante Alighieri in Southeast Asia. Like Dante’s first Canto, Mee Pok Man depicts a dark moral tale, while with Yeo’s Singapore-France-Netherlands co-funding, came received ideas of an iconic European hell. By comparing and contrasting the two Asian masterworks, the paper asks: how does Dante Alighieri’s iconographic tradition proliferate and regenerate through films conceived in Southeast Asia?

The paper challenges the limits of Western art by incorporating Southeast Asian folklore in cinematic representation while investigating East-West cultural relationships. Research consults Asian film theorists, in particular Edna Lim’s Celluloid Singapore (2018); Singapore Cinema by Raphaël Millet (2006); and Gerald Sim’s Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability. As Kenneth Paul Tan suggests in Cinema and Television in Singapore, descent into the underworld also represents a ‘political scientist’s attempt to understand the political significance, possibilities and limitations of art and popular culture in contemporary Singapore,…’ (2008, p. ix). With a complimentary Western influence based on the author’s own work Underbelly Inferno, the paper employs Margaret Wertheim’s comparison of Internet space to Dante’s vision in The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (2000). With reference to Dante’s influential The Divine Comedy (1320), research also consults Amedeo D’Adamo’s analysis of Dantean space in film: a collapse of past, present, and future.