Money No Enough Film Analysis

Money No Enough, Jack Neo’s first directorial feature, is a 1998 Singaporean comedy film about three friends with financial problems who start a car polishing business together. The film reflects Singapore as a capitalist state which the government asserts its hegemony over. It attempts to challenge the hegemonic ideology of capitalism in Singapore, through its criticism of materialism. However it fails to achieve this and instead, the film reinforces the hegemonic ideology on the proletariat through its promotion of meritocracy. Effectively, any attempts that seemingly resist the influence of the dominant ideology serves only to reinforce the capitalist ideology of the dominant class on the proletariat.

As a piece of mimetic culture, Money

However, the superficial criticism calculated to draw quick laughs from the audience does not come to any tangible critique of the political and socioeconomic conditions in Singapore. Instead, the film’s stronghold on capitalism seems to prevent the formation of more fundamental desires. According to the Frankfurt School of Thought: “The culture industry thus stunts the political imagination”. This can be seen from the opening scene of the movie which depicts the three protagonists conversing at the coffeeshop. In this scene, the three characters were shown to be more obsessed with materialism and the pursuit of superficial needs (with their engrossment in the lottery results in the newspaper rather than the articles about the offensive actions made to tarnish Singapore’s reputation overseas) instead of wordly affairs and political matters concerning the state. Money No Enough loses its credibility as a counter-hegemonic tool with Neo’s brand of slapstick comedy consisting of stereotypes; an overly commercialized approach to filmmaking as evidenced by the numerous consumerist products advertised in the film, the most prominant of which will be Sentosa Development Corporation, where many scenes in the movie were clearly shot there. However, these political criticisms, though witty, remain superficial and barely scratches the surface of many issues affecting the Singaporean society today. These counter-hegemonic attempts by the proletariat ultimately prove to be unsuccessful, as they also tend to reinforce the dominant capitalist ideology on the