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Pawo Choyning Dorji (director), The Monk and the Gun, 2023. 107 min.
The Kingdom of Bhutan, 2006. Bhutan enters the modern world, becoming the last country in the world to connect to the internet and television, and now the biggest change of all: democracy. To teach the people how to vote, the authorities organise a mock election, but the locals seem puzzled about the changes to come. At the same time, an American man travels to Bhutan in search of a valuable antique rifle and crosses paths with a young monk who wanders through the majestic mountains, instructed by his teacher that his plan is to “make things right again”.
In a nutshell, the film The Monk and the Gun presents a low-key, humorous and satirical jab at American democracy, but also shows the difficulties of changing a society that has largely been separated from outside influences and has seen no need to change. Bhutan’s transition to democracy was initiated by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, the absolute monarch who voluntarily abdicated the throne in 2006 and introduced reforms aimed at creating “a more inclusive and representative government.” Rather than being driven by grassroots demands, this move represented a “top-down” imposition of democracy. This brings me to something I heard in a talk by historian Timothy Snyder on democracy, its retreat in the West today and the current tendency towards authoritarianism.
According to Snyder, democracy should be thought of as a verb rather than a noun, and “democracy, if it exists at all, exists inside us. Democracy has to begin with a desire for the people to rule”. That is if you think democracy is being brought to you, you lose the sense that democracy is a struggle, which it has largely been if you study the development of many Western states. While a government official says that democracy will contribute to “gross national happiness” (a term/policy coined in Bhutan for its seemingly bucolic Buddhist mindset of harmony), a local then replies, “is it worth having if one does not fight for it?” I tend to agree with this view.
The election official travelling to a village to carry out the mock election says, “soon it will pass and everyone will be happy and prosperous”, while a local says, “Madame… we have always been happy”—thus the puzzlement over sessions with villagers being taught about “competition”, which leads to discord between two candidates who are standing in the upcoming mock election.
The film poses the question of whether “political freedom” is worth the cost of familial or social discord. Maybe not in this context, in light of the Buddhism practised in the country. As one who has studied and written about democracy and democratisation in Hong Kong and the constraints on its “full flowering” in the city, this film gives me mixed feelings about whether the Bhutanese should have democracy “imposed” on them, without any previous knowledge of it—and in particular when others want it so much but cannot get it. While in Hong Kong “gradual and orderly progress” and “according to the actual situation” were often repeated as a way to ensure stability, this was largely used as a mechanism for delaying democratic progress. Hong Kong was well aware of the basic principles of democracy. Perhaps in Bhutan’s case, “gradual and orderly progress” would be much more suitable, since the citizens had no concept of democracy in the first place.
We often want a place like Bhutan (or undiscovered jungle tribes) to remain statically in the past, unchanged perhaps forever, seeing it as pristine and “uncontaminated” by the West, feeding on our fantasies of a kind of “Shangri-La” that we cannot have in our own societies. Inevitably, in the modern world, Bhutan was unlikely to remain unaffected by the West for long.
As the election official and her team travel by car to the village where the mock election will take place, they spot a monk—a young monk with a gun—walking in the countryside, a somewhat ironic image that poses many questions. This forms the other storyline in the film. The monk is on his way to see his teacher, the lama, who has instructed him to purchase firearms in preparation for “making things right again.” To fund this, the lama plans to sell a valuable old rifle that had “killed hundreds of Tibetans” in the past. Meanwhile, American visitor Ron Coleman arrives in the country, seeking to acquire the same antique rifle for a weapons collector—a rifle that had previously been promised to him by the lama. However, Coleman discovers that the lama has changed his plans, prompting him and his driver to urgently track down the young monk to buy the rifle from him.
The storyline with the American attempting to going to such lengths to find and buy the antique guns seems rather contrived; movie buffs might notice that the name of the American “Ron Coleman” is almost identical to the name of the actor Ronald Colman, star of the classic 1930s Hollywood film Lost Horizon, in which survivors of a plane crash in the Himalayas are taken to Shangri-La, an idyllic and green valley sheltered from the bitter cold. The contented inhabitants there are led by the mysterious High Lama. The locals there seem youthful and full of vigour, but once they leave Shangri-La they age rapidly and ultimately die. I’m not sure that many would get the allegory: intrusion equals destruction. As I mentioned earlier, we assume the “grass is greener” elsewhere, like in Bhutan before democracy and the dilution of traditional culture, and maybe it is, who knows.
For most of the film we do not know what the Lama and the monk want the guns for, only that the former wants to make things “right again” by performing a certain ritual where the local villagers are invited to join in. I can’t give away the ending, an ending that seems to imply that all will not be lost despite the changes that the West has brought.
Perhaps the monk and the gun represent traditional practices (Buddhism) and Western destruction (guns, democracy). I’ve made this sound rather heavy, but actually the film treats its subject with amusement and light satire.
How to cite: Eagleton, Jennifer. “”Democracy Should Be Thought of as a Verb: Pawo Choyning Dorji’s The Monk and the Gun.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 6 Sept. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/09/06/the-monk.
Jennifer Eagleton, a Hong Kong resident since October 1997, is a close observer of Hong Kong society and politics. Jennifer has written for Hong Kong Free Press, Mekong Review, and Education about Asia. Her first book is Discursive Change in Hong Kong (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and she is currently writing another book on Hong Kong political discourse for Palgrave MacMillan. Her poetry has appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, People, Pandemic & ####### (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), and Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art (Cart Noodles Press, 2023). A past president of the Hong Kong Women in Publishing Society, Jennifer teaches and researches part-time at a number of universities in Hong Kong. [All contributions by Jennifer Eagleton.]