Thai soap operas: lives of the rich and fatuous
This goes out to all Have You Sayers with Thai families. Do you, like me, find your evening perusal of The Nation distracted by “lakorn” soap operas blasting forth from the TV? Much as I try to resist these portrayals of the miserable lives of Bangkok’s hi-so, I find myself drawn like a moth to a flame.
Last Tuesday, the long-running love triangle drama “Kanya” reached its final episode. After weeks of the usual adultery, screaming, hospital scenes, violence against women, and industrial quantities of botox, male make-up and typhoon-resistant hair lacquer, this one fizzled out in an unusual “everyone lived happily ever after” anticlimax of vomit-inducing sentimentality. Inexplicably, the key character, Kanya, got written out of the script in an early scene when she went off to America.
If the ghastly serial ever sees the light of day as a rerun, I suggest a more realistic, Tarantino-esque final episode that goes like this. The heroine and her new bloke take off for a romantic interlude at Khao Yai National Park where they are cut down in a hail of bullets – collateral damage from an ongoing black leopard shoot – while the smartphone-obsessed hero gets imprisoned and tortured under the Computer Crime Act. Their squeaky, precocious child loses her footing at a crocodile farm, and Kanya gets knocked down by an amphetamine-fuelled Number 8 bus on her way to the airport. Sorted.
Should the scriptwriters require some reality input into their next effort, I am happy to oblige.
Nigel Pike
Phang Nga
