On ‘Jay’ and indie films
‘Miserablism’ and other urgent observations
By J. Neil C. Garcia
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 05:22:00 10/03/2008
Filed Under: Cinema, Entertainment (general)
MANILA, Philippines — Strangely enough, the uncanny resemblance between Francis Xavier Pasion’s award-winning digital feature “Jay” and Jeffrey Jeturian’s equally interesting, more technically accomplished but less celebrated “Tuhog” has gone largely unnoticed among many local critics, in the wake of the hubbub and fanfare that was Cinemalaya 2008.
In both films, the awesome power of media to manipulate and exploit the lives of the downtrodden in order to create efficacious and profitable fictions is brought to the fore, becomes dramatically unmasked, and in the case of “Jay” in particular, gets rendered as the inescapable condition and grounding assumption of all media representations, even the supposedly nobler and well-meaning kind.
Indeed, the most crucial difference between “Tuhog” and “Jay” lies not in the particular medium being scrutinized — sensational biopics in the former, reality-based and forensics-oriented television programs in the latter — but rather in the degree of ironic skepticism to which their respective visions may be seen to subscribe.
Unlike “Jay’s” self-reflexive and “metacinematic” ending (in which, following the customary postmodern procedure, what frames the view within the view becomes unceremoniously revealed to be yet another exploitative and complicit window), “Tuhog” ends on a more plainly mimetic and “realist” note, although it is one whose grating sound means to elicit not the defeatist shoulder-shrugging resignation of “Jay,” but rather something more kinetic and possibly primal — for instance, a collective moan of sadness if not a scream of righteous indignation.
We cannot help but wonder if this difference in attitude merely indicates a troubling divergence in cultural and age-specific worldviews: Are our young filmmakers, visibly quickened and made newly viable and “independent” by the relative accessibility of digital technology (as well as of private and institutional largesse), simply more blasé and non-confrontational than their more politically engaged forebears?
Indeed, mindful of the activist background of many of our country’s traditional filmmakers, we may perhaps also ask, as a corollary to this, the following brutally frank query: In the absence of a self-conscious ideological position and an avowed political affiliation, just what sorts of ideals, what dreams, what ambitions are motivating this new generation’s frenzied “generativeness,” as far as the production of certain kinds of filmic images is concerned?
The cool skepticism of its self-awareness notwithstanding, we can easily see that “Jay” indeed belongs to the Philippines’ current crop of independent digital features: Like many of its contemporaries, it traffics in the sexually nonconformist, the socioeconomically depressed, and the cinematically shocking. To be more specific, like so many recent films, “Jay” trains its pixilated eye on the predictably outré and oft-depicted intersections between the (homo)sexually idiosyncratic on the one hand, and all the vexing passages of financial privation on the other.
Basically, in “Jay,” we see how the impoverished family of the murdered Kapampangan gay teacher Jay becomes easy prey for the ratings-hungry gay television producer Jay (acted with just the right amount of languid charm, ennui, panache, and lubricious guile by the surprisingly adept Baron Geisler), who orchestrates, choreographs, and indeed literally produces the 15-minute television episode with which “Jay” the film opens, and which it subsequently demystifies and explains step by step. In the process, we are made to witness the ridiculous and horrendous depths to which local media practitioners will go, just to churn out the kind of sensational product that their viewers compulsively crave.
And yet, “Jay” also takes pains to register the volitional participation of the “victims” in their “victimization,” as when the late Jay’s dolorous mother (performed admirably by the amazingly competent but unheralded Flor Salanga) willingly reenacts the histrionics of her maternal grief, and even refers to her compact mirror once or twice to fix the mass-media presentability of her dolorous face.
Like many other films that treat the reality of our country’s grinding poverty, the narrative power of “Jay” derives from the force of its ethical judgment: By and large, Filipinos lead morally contradictory lives, and while this is indeed unacceptable what we must remember is that for the majority of us who are unspeakably poor, this isn’t anything they can help; regarding the rich, however, we shouldn’t ever be as magnanimous.
The late film director Lino Brocka may well have been the first to happen upon this two-pronged insight, and to a large extent, it was his neorealist films depicting the moral ambivalence of our country’s destitute masses as well as the hypocrisy, abusiveness, and indifference of its elite that inaugurated the slum-dwelling and squalor-specific tradition of Filipino cinema, which a significant number in this new batch of digital filmmakers are apparently still eagerly — often, overeagerly — following.
“Apparently” is the operative word, for there are very crucial distinctions that we do need to draw between Brocka and these more recent digital film directors, after all. Unlike many filmmakers now, during his time Brocka was never to be caught being cleverly aloof and apolitical — not in the least. Indeed, quite often, his filmic vision emerged out of a clear ideological position regarding specific social issues, mostly concerning the intricate and interleaving lives inside Manila’s dank and teeming slums. Moreover, while he eventually received international acclaim, he was also a commercially successful director, whose numerous films enjoyed a massive viewership in the Philippines.
By contrast, even as the independent film audience is arguably expanding, the current crop of indie directors and writers would seem to have thrown their collective hands in the air and practically given up on the local in favor of the translocal (which is to say, the international).
Also, while they may seem to be delving into and moving around the same relative areas of the national experience as their neorealist predecessors did, rarely do we see in these recent films the kind of sympathy and intensely probing and critical consciousness that was par for the course in the works of older progressive directors (like Brocka.)
Rarely do we sense in these recent cinematic endeavors the desire on their makers’ part to gesture towards a solution or to proffer an answer to the complex and multifarious questions raised by their own troubled and troubling visions of our country’s worsening dilemmas.
Because it is a sad fact that many of our writers and filmmakers nowadays look abroad for affirmation, none of the films they consequently produce may be said to truly communicate with and to matter to the great majority of our people, who remain ignorant, unaided, and luckless in their all-too-real misery.
More often than not, these cinematic artists do not even grant our poor their inherent dignity, for the economic deprivation that we see in many of their recent offerings is, quite often, simply a one-dimensional spectacle: for instance, rather than a painful but finally incidental givenness, most of the time it is their crushing poverty that fundamentally defines these filmic characters and defeats them most definitively by movie’s end.
For these filmmakers, then, it isn’t the sympathetic and artful “narrativizing” of the lives of the poor but rather the spectacular rendition of poverty that is invariably the be-all and the end-all of their projects. Indeed, it is entirely the case that many of them do not even make an attempt to philosophically reach out to and understand the admittedly urgent realities they have chosen to depict.
Instead, they typically resort to voyeuristic pandering and “miserablism” — perhaps best understood, in this case, as a variety of the neorealist mode that crams every imaginable misfortune, hardship, and yes, misery in the space of two cinematic hours, so much so that the pitiful protagonist not only suffers from being economically underprivileged, middle-aged, overweight, asthmatic, unhappily married, orphaned of a favorite child, and deprived of security and love, she is also the handy victim of police extortion even as she daily ekes out a dangerous living, finds her slippered foot stuck in dubious-looking mud, and, by movie’s end, discovers to her shock that her shoulder has been grazed by a random bullet in the middle of a frantic street one overcast All Souls’ Day.
But for the intricate and densely enmeshed lives of slum-dwellers as well as the consoling ghostly presence gracing its protagonist’s dour and dreary world, Jeturian’s “Kubrador” — the particular film that this catalogue of tragedies literally emplots—would’ve indeed been utterly and irredeemably “miserablist.” At the very least, the idea that our beloved dead do not abandon us, and that their dear presence informs and possibly protects our own wakeful existence, does succeed in grounding this film’s vision in our own spiritual tradition, and renders it finally culturally valid and poignantly resonant.
It is this kind of deep cultural understanding—or at least, as is the case with many of Jeturian’s works, an earnest and always laudable attempt to arrive at such—that seems to be lacking in so many of the more recent independent films. “Jay”, for instance, draws its energy from the judgment it so casually and assuredly passes from beginning to end: the media-spurred and self-conscious performance of grief by the murdered gay man’s family empties this selfsame grief of inherent substance and renders it, to all intents and purposes, inauthentic and suspect.
And yet, it’s clear that this judgment and what it assumes—namely, that true grief is necessarily private and solitary and suffered in silence—come out of a reactionary bourgeois moralism that can certainly stand further scrutiny. For indeed, aren’t the great masses of Filipinos generally performative in their everyday rituals of grieving and spirituality, after all? To think otherwise would be to believe that our countrymen’s Lenten rites of penitential bloodletting are not in truth coming out of genuine piety and spiritual fervor on the bloody penitents’ part.
The fact of the matter is that, at many crucial moments, and as a consequence perhaps of the Baroque religious rituals and images which we imbibed from three centuries of Hispanization, we as Filipinos do perform our inner lives in very “theatrical” and publicly communal ways. Thus, rather than dwell on the spectacle of the unspontaneous artificiality and rehearsed “outwardness” of a bereaved family’s lamentation, a film like “Jay” could well have tried to contextualize this self-conscious enactment within the bigger frame that is the culturally sanctioned and ritualized performativity characterizing so many of countrymen’s lives.
Perhaps the problem is that works like “Jay” are not even interested in this kind of conceptual complication and painstaking cultural self-examination anymore. Indeed, given the “exoticizing” trend of so many recent indie films, we are almost tempted to suggest that what in fact motivates all this anxious image-making is nothing if not the neocolonialist desire to become affirmed internationally and get picked up by the global film festival circuits, invariably housed in the cosmopolitan and “capital-endowed” centers of the First World.
It’s a truly troubling thought, but perhaps the time has come to blow the whistle on this seemingly unstoppable “horrorfest” of unremitting Third World squalor and its gratuitous baring of exotically anguished nut-brown flesh — all the for the sake of pandering to the peculiarly Euro-American sense of fancied horripilation at all things desperate, depraved, and deprived.
While there can certainly be exceptions, the rule would seem to be that since the local crowds can no longer be relied upon to show up in our movie houses, one makes independent films these days in order to receive notice and possibly praise from the First World audience of “discerning” film critics — an audience that precisely craves such outlandish and horrifying simulacra, if only to remind themselves that they can still experience shock and revulsion and rage and thus possibly sympathize and feel fellowship for the immiserated multitudes who manage to endure in the immiserated corners of our increasingly immiserated world.
None of this willful and frantic self-exoticism on the part of our cinematic artists would be a problem, really, if only it were not perpetrated at the expense of our own people and their brutally lived and endured realities, and if only it could truly transform the unequal power-relations between the global North and the global South. Of course, the painful irony is that, among other things, it is the former’s art-film-loving and independent-movie-going lifestyle itself — as propelled by a leisurely and fetishistic fascination with all things filthy, luridly violent, and disturbing in the latter’s seediest hovels, crannies, and nooks — that will, alas, continue to pauper the already paupered wretched of this earth.
In the end, we can only hope that this enchantment with the vainglories and vagaries of international acclaim will spend itself soon, and that in the proximate rather than the remote future, Filipino independent films will be truly sovereign and confident in their own innate value and worth — which is to say, they will be truly valuable and worthy in the eyes of the Filipino masses, whose lives they will no longer simply filmically capture and objectify but also, ultimately come to illuminate, understand, and serve.
J. Neil C. Garcia is a professor at theUniversity of the Philippines, Diliman
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