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A poster for the 1999 film Nang Nak introduces the problem of the story in two lines of poetry: "Mae sin lorn sinjai / rue ja sin alai sineha" (Although she was dead / her desire persisted)1 (figure 1). The film poster summarizes the predicament of the ghost, who aims to prolong her love life beyond her death. Throughout the film, Nak faces a problem of temporal incongruity when she attempts to reclaim her lover, a situation that is productive of great agony for her.2
Nonzee Nimibutr's Nang Nak reinterprets the story of a woman thought to have resided in the Phra Khanong district of Bangkok over one hundred years ago. According to the legend, Nak dies in childbirth while her lover, Mak, is away at war. When the unsuspecting Mak returns to Phra Khanong, Nak awaits him as a ghost, accompanied by her ghost infant. The temporal incongruities that result - she's dead, he's alive; she knows, he doesn't; and both lovers want something that they can no longer have - usually produce comical effects in the story.3 Nonzee's horror-ghost remake, however, brings an entirely novel perspective to the more than two dozen previous film versions of the story.4 Nonzee's translation of the legend into a Buddhist parable excises many of the fearsome and sexual, as well as comedie, aspects of Nak's haunting and instead turns on the grand emotions of love, loss, and Buddhist detachment.5 Nang NaKs period setting in the nineteenth century, a feature that the director advertises as constituting the film's historical accuracy, further works to present the legend with the pathos of nationalist historiography.6
This essay examines Nang Nak's rendering of the temporal incongruities of haunting in relation to struggles over Thai sexual contemporaneity in the late 1990s and 2000s. Specifically, it concentrates on anachronisms that cultural and social policy makers aimed to install at the core of new bourgeois conceptions of Thai sexualities. In Nonzee Nimibutr's Nang Nak, the revenant's desirous gaze from the ghostly sphere onto the life that she could have had outlines a model of heterosexual femininity of the present. This essay argues that Nonzee's novel, Buddhist framing of the legend is especially instructive for understanding how, since the late 1990s, state agencies and bourgeois publics...