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Using two recent films— Long Long Time Ago  and  Diam Diam Era —this article analyses how Jack Neo communicates a sanitized nostalgia for the “kampong spirit” through his films, which calibrates willing acceptance of the Singapore government’s authoritarian rule. In supporting the state’s presentist historiography, the films of Jack Neo induce a depoliticization of unpleasant memories arising from the ruling party’s unpopular housing and language policies of the past. The nostalgia mediated in both films is aligned towards an imaginary geography and mental map of a First World nation, which exhorts Singaporeans to disavow “the tropics” by nostalgizing the state’s modernization efforts. The cumulative thrust of an evidence-free and presentist nostalgia ostensible in both films, this work argues, satisfies the paternalistic state’s obsession with the public legitimation of its ruling mandate.

Legitimizing viewing publics through nostalgia: the mediated tropicality of Singapore’s ‘kampong spirit’