THE question isn’t a chicken-or-egg predicament. That is a real conflict which has beset the entertainment industry. When a film or a TV show is about to be crafted or shown, it is common for producers/directors to point to Filipino audiences as their basis for the kind of movie or TV show they would fund and put out. Show business being driven by commerce, producers and, to a certain degree, the artists employed by them believe that there is a market out there that has to be satisfied. That this market is composed of people whose sole reason for going to the movies or turning on their TV sets is to have fun and for entertainment. That these people work very hard every day so that when they have free time to go to theaters or sit in front of the TV, they don’t want films or shows that would stress them out emotionally and mentally. This very amorphous market apparently is populated by people who just want to indulge in mindless entertainment. These audiences don’t have faces but they have tastes that run from the simplistic to the gross, from the atrocious to the vulgar. This is at worst a judgment; at best, an ignorance borne out of generalization.
Producers and their, if we may, rent boys and girls believe that this market exists—and this market only.
No studies, as far as I know, have ever been done to indicate where we can find these individuals. But the discourse continues about this force, this preference, this propensity.
The proof of the presence of this kind of aesthetic is the kind of films and TV shows that flow onto screens big and small unimpeded and even buttressed by big numbers at the box office and ratings surveys. The side dish to this market description is the notion that there is also an elitist/artistic/insufferably snobbish group that looks down on this kind of films and TV shows. If we approach this crisis from the side of labels, then we grapple with the idea and practice of mainstream programming versus or vis-à-vis the alternative or artistic programming.
Still, the history of the Filipino cinema, in particular, will bear out that from the late 1950s to the early 197os and going on till the 1990s, the movies being shown followed a formula. These made use of stereotypes and stories that were unrealistic as they were illusory in terms of the real crisis that the nation was facing back then.
The films during this period had characters that were rigidly black or white, evil antagonist or saintly protagonist. The gray areas could not be explored because if they were, they would pose problems to a society that was prescriptive in its moral guidance and was not tolerant of alternative lifestyles and, yes, different valuations about society and life.
In these films, the leading lady is always of the mestiza variety and the leading man, generally handsome. The woman always gets to a point of distress and the men are divided into those who will save the damsel and those who will abuse her. There are women also in these films who are wrong and wronged socially. They are fatale and if they remain so, then they are punished. If they repent, they are forgiven although for the most part, their repentance has to be anointed with their own blood. The list of these women is long and notorious. But let me just name the immortal villainesses who glamorized hell on this earth: Carol Varga, Miriam Jurado, Zeny Zabala and Bella Flores, she who died only physically but whose memories rose from the dead to haunt those women who persist to be good.
It took the rise of the independent cinema to offer us a way out of this boring universe into the worlds where real pains and real people exist.
Which brings me to a question as important as the questionable aesthetics of mainstream films and TV shows and their influence on people.
Let me begin with embraces. When did we begin embracing each other after a performance or a demonstration of approbation? This act of quasi-love, so physical and so exaggerated between strangers, is, I believe, a result of reality shows. These kinds of shows have spawned emotionalism and confessions about anything tawdry and furtive in real life. I mean, we don’t really open up our secret lives and secret selves to people we don’t know. And yet, in a generation where people are menacingly connected to the world by social media and yet are disconnected emotionally from kin and friends, an embrace to punctuate a revelation is indeed needed. The embrace given in surplus does not mean this population is more aware of their moods. If ever there is a meaning that we can attach to two persons attaching themselves to each other, it is that when they separate, they can go to another embrace. There is no commitment there, just an exhibitionism of feelings that have been displaced by emoticons and sad languages of happiness like “lols” and “mwahs”.
In cafes, I often wonder how young girls, in particular, feel comfortable with their two legs crossed and all up on the chair. I know now where they get this pose of sophistication. From actresses on TV programs and films where insouciance and aloofness are represented by bad manners and bad conduct and the wrong use of furniture items.
In the classroom, I always encounter students—mostly females, although I also had the grace to see some young boys do it—who restrain their breakdown or control their tears by bringing both hands up close to their temples and waving them repeatedly against their eyes. The action is like someone trying to ease the pain from having doused rubbing alcohol on a fresh open wound, only that there is no alcohol and there is no open wound. This action has been popularized by actresses onscreen or onstage trying very hard not to stain their faces with makeup in the torrent of tears. Again, some young people think that is true and charming.
The scriptwriters are the culprits when depicting regular people, especially those they label “the poor.” In telenovelas and in dramatic movies, the poor are rendered in broad strokes. They shout and curse the high heavens as if our farmers trace their lineage to Medea and Antigone. The mouths of the actors playing the poor grimace and go into contortions. Then we believe the poor are like that.
The middle-class husband and wife in these so-called entertainment offerings slap each other as in tribute to memories of—well, not even of that priceless and galvanizing slapping encounter between Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown (1974), but of boxing bouts. The children shout and curse each other. It is a horrible world, these societies pictured to us in television and films. The two wives meet and go into wrestling match. The husband caught between two wives cannot decide because he just loves them both.
I recall fondly my favorite Pauline Kael whose comment on the ending and resolution about the labor-union drama that was Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. Kael tells us to go to a real waterfront if we want the real ending to the saga of laborers.
As for the lies and hypocrisy of our scriptwriters, we should go to cities and towns where fathers are caught between two families. There in those situations, the shameless father leaves the first family and goes to the second wife, where the latter keeps quiet because the first wife is also quiet about the whole event. As for farmers and other disenfranchised class, they do not act like Greek choruses writhing like illegal Furies onstage when faced with loss; instead they keep quiet also as they look at the horizon and contemplate why land reform is not possible in the Aquino administration past and present. In fact, these poor people don’t even know a certain celebrity, a so-called queen of all the media, whatever that malignant title means, and how she tweeted about her family losing their land. In a bad screenplay, the woman of poverty would climb the mountain and in the baddest performance of them all, scream “Hayup! Hayup!” as white carabaos graze on the quietest field. Sure, we love these lies. With regards to all this embracing going on, writers and producers and directors should stop watching shows like The Voice of the Philippines, where every eliminated singer is embraced, and where every accepted singer is also embraced.
As to which comes first—the bad taste proffered by producers out of their flawed social analysis or their reading of the ignorance of the people who support their wealth and surpluses—I like to believe the lies come first before the truth. The better to continue to fool the constituents, the audience. The way out, and this is not original, is to have enlightened producers and directors. We find them in independent and alternative cinema before they are co-opted by big media companies.
It is an old story, as ancient as our fine and bad tastes in arts, as well as in life.