Social theory, documentary film and distant others : simplicity and subversion in The Good Woman of Bangkok

Framed by the ethical considerations of Martha Nussbaum on `the lives of distant others' and Zygmunt Bauman on `being-for' the Other, this article critically analyses Australian director Denis O'Rourke's `documentary fiction film' The Good Woman of Bangkok, the story of Aoi, a woman from a rural village in Udon in the northeast of Thailand who works in the Bangkok sex trade. The analysis attempts to give specificity and critical precision to what is too often a more intuitive and generalized critique of the contribution of current affairs programmes to the quality of understanding in the public sphere. The article combines textual analysis and social theory — two forms of analysis too often kept apart — to analyse the relationship between the text of the documentary per se and the conceptualization of social reality within that text. I argue that The Good Woman of Bangkok contains two tales or narratives, a simple one with a simple moral, and a more sophisticated, subversive one that is more attuned — albeit imperfectly — to the requirements of a mature public sphere. The more subversive thread undermines the simple tale by disrupting our belief in the overly naïve picture of social reality that the latter depends upon. The article incorporates an argument for more dialogue between social theorists and documentary film makers.