Mahathirism as discourse and hegemonic effect in Malaysian cinema, 1980s and 1990s

This study argues that Malaysian films of the 1980s and 1990s contain and reflect specific discourses described as Mahathirism, an ideology formulated by Malaysian scholar Khoo Boo Teik. This central thesis is derived from Khoo Boo Teik’s argument in Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An Intellectual Biography of Mahathir Mohamad (1995), which focuses on the presence of paradoxes among the components of Mahathirism that include capitalism, nationalism, Islam, authoritarianism, and populism. This study suggests that Malaysian films of the 1980s and 1990s should not be viewed as a hegemonic apparatus/medium of Mahathirism; instead, these films should be examined as products or effects of the Mahathirist hegemony. Gramsci illuminated hegemony as the domination of the ruling class towards the dominated class through consensus, although, at the same time, force co-existed. The effects of the hegemony of Mahathirism in the cinematic texts are the existence of contradictory standpoints between approving and disapproving Mahathirism in the same film. I then argue this contradictory standpoint towards Mahathirism as a “contradictory consciousness” referring to Antonio Gramsci’s argument. For Gramsci, “contradictory consciousness” refers to the contradiction between “implicit consciousness” and “explicit consciousness” of the subordinate (in the case of this study, the filmmaker). To reveal the projection and reflection of “contradictory consciousness” in the cinematic texts, I use Foucauldian Discourse Analysis as a method of analysis to reveal the competing discourses within one film. For this study, I select films from the eras of the 1980s and 1990s because those were the decades of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s premiership as Malaysia's fourth Prime Minister and longest serving Prime Minister of the country.