How to Think Death as Unpredicting in Late Capitalist Temporal Regimes With Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit's Die Tomorrow
Abstract
Die Tomorrow (2017) presents six short episodes, each filmed in a different style, based on Thai newspaper reports of somewhat uncommon occurrences of death. Death is presented as something that is part of the mundane, yet always coming from elsewhere - a disruption of quotidian rhythms of time.
Examining reactions to unexpected events under the generally internalized biopolitical pressures of the unified time of late capitalism in conjunction with the general condition of saturation with media technologies and the related ease in producing images, as pockets of memory that seemingly eluded death, decay and change, has been a consistent presence in the work of the young director. Nawapol's cinema is one of the fragmented mundane, actualizing Buddhist principles for a generation raised in constant technological connectivity.
The fact that the mediatized image of the body lives on, potentially eternally, as the living body changes is a split common to the experience of the technological contemporary. This condition takes on a range of possibilities.
Die Tomorrow is an exploration of the specific disturbance brought about by death as an unpredicting of certainty under a cosmology built on the illusion, however contradictory as Marxists like to point out, of constant increase and singular progression. Death, while a necessary part of it, is left out as the eternal other.
The film suggests that the concrete event of death is something that has to remain not just outside of the imageric regimes constructed through cinema, but even for living bodies themselves (not unlike Deleuzian thought) precisely because it is a form of unpredicting - the exact moment can never be fully grasped in advance. In this contribution, I will think with the tools offered by this particularly middle-class urban Thai grappling with the problem of the unexpected in times built on the unification of all.
Special consideration will be given to the lines of flight that suggest a different cosmological assembling, one that is open toward its own outside and thus able to adapt to the catastrophes to come.