Thursday, October 03, 2013
Identity Thieves
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
King of Pain
I saw Pepeng Kaliwete starring Fernando Poe, Jr. when I was a first-grader. In those days, Mother was fond of movies that on weekends, she would bring her children to downtown Naga and there we watched all kinds of movies—in Emily, Bichara, Alex or Vic—the movie theaters owned by the Bicharas in Naga City.
Nothing reminds me of the movie except cringing at the sight of Pepe’s hands being twisted by a moving wooden motor—by the goons of the kontrabida led by the proverbial villain Paquito Diaz. Who can ever forget the ngilo just watching that scene? Since then, I have looked forward to watching FPJ’s movies.
Enough said.
Some thirty years later, I feel fine because it is now official. This year, President Benigno Aquino III conferred a posthumous National Artist award to the late Fernando Poe, Jr., King of Philippine Movies. Aquino’s Proclamation No. 435 only confirmed an earlier declaration of Poe as National Artist in 2006, two years after Poe’s death. But at the time controversy took over.
I recall the award was refused by FPJ’s family from then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, whom they thought, rigged the 2004 elections in which FPJ ran for president. This year, the family has accepted the recognition from the current president.
I suppose the national recognition of this prolific artist is appropriate. For one, a National Artist is one who has helped “build a Filipino sense of nationhood through the content and form of their works.” Through some 50 years of his career in the movie industry, FPJ had been a household word for his honest portrayals of the plight of the Filipino, particularly the underprivileged and the marginalized.
An average Filipino like me knows an FPJ movie or the role he portrayed simply because he portrayed the life of the ordinary people, who compose the lot of the population. Whether in film biographies—from Pepeng Kaliwete to Eseng ng Tondo or other movies he produced, directed and acted in, it's he who sacrifices for the other person.
Up to his sixties, FPJ’s roles had been consistently that—particularly favoring the underprivileged or defending the marginalized, but all the while lionizing the good. If at all, FPJ’s movies melodramas helped define the generation to which I belong. But because his roles have been mimicked and parodied by other fellow actors, it only goes to show they touched a chord in the Filipino everyman.
In some 250 movies where he probably punched all the thugs and gave back the stolen candy bars to their rightful owners, his character was not only our muscle but also our soul, a Robin Hood of sorts in our part of the world who delivered justice for the poor because it was denied them by the privileged and the greedy. His manner of delivering justice the Christian way did not only save us from boredom or tedium, but also “redeemed” us. And for this, FPJ can hardly be replicated.
We confer on him the award because we seek to immortalize a paragon of the good—whose pains and struggles inspire us to always seek what is just. We choose to do this because we humans need a(nother) Christ-like figure whom we can emulate. We take to placing one FPJ as such only because we need to remind ourselves that in everything we do, or despite our perennial struggles, we can always choose to do the good.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
The Grey
Rating: | ★★★ |
Category: | Movies |
Genre: | Mystery & Suspense |
Guardia kan sarong oil drill team sa Alaska si John Ottway. An apod niya sa trabahong ini—“job at the end of the world,” kun sain an kairiba niya mga “fugitives, ex-cons, assholes, men unfit for mankind.” Kadaklan na mga yaraon duman mga pusakal, tibaad mga hinarabuan kan sociedad ta nagdulot sinda nin danyos bako sana sa propriedad kundi pati moralidad.
Patapos na an kontrata ni Ottway, pinapauli na siya. Alagad kan solo-solo siya sarong banggi, nagsurat siya sa agom niya, dangan nagprobar siyang maghugot. Kan babadilon niya na an sadiri nin shotgun sa kadikloman kan niyebe, nag-alulong an mga lobo (wolves). Nakulbaan siya kaini. Dai siya nadagos maghugot.
Pauruli na sinda kan kairiba sa drill team; tapos nag-crash an eroplano. Sa gabos na sakay, walo sana sainda an nagkaburuhay. Sa wreckage, an ibang nagkaburuhay naghaharadit nagngungurulngol ta nagkagaradan sa impact an mga pag-iriba ninda. Si Ottway nakaapon sa harayo. Pero pagkagimata niya, hinaranap niya si iba. Nakabalik siya sa binagsakan.
Dinulok niya si Lewenden, sarong kaibahan na nagtuturawis an dugo sa tulak. Naghaharadit na an ibang mga amigo ninda. Nagngunguruyngoy. Hinapot ni Lewenden si Ottway kun ano an nangyayari. Sabi ni Ottway saiya na magagadan na siya. Pinabagol ni Ottway an luong kan lalaki. Kinaulay niya ni kag pighapot kun siisay an saiyang namomotan. Kinaulay niya pa astang dai nagdugay, nautsan na ni.
Dai naghaloy, pinangenotan ni Ottway an grupo. Hinambal niya sa ilang maggibo sinda nin kalayo, nganing dai sinda magkaragadan sa lipot. Magharanap pagkakan dangan magharali sa crash site.
Pagharanap ninda nin mga nagkataradang kakanon sa wreckage sagkod mga bagay na magagamit, nahiling ni Ottway na ginuguyod kan lobo an sarong pasaherong babae, nag-uungol pa ni kan sagpangon kan layas na ayam. Sinaklolohan kuta ni Ottway alagad gadan na an biktima. Dinulak niya an ayam kaya kinaragat siya kaini. Nagkadarangog kan iba kaya nasaklolohan si Ottway. Kinarne kan lobo an tuhod niya pagkatapos.
Sabi ni Ottway na tibaad kuta nin mga wolves an lugar kun saen nag-crash an saindang eroplano. Piggagadan kan mga hayop na ini an mga tawong nararabay sa saindang balwarte. Hambal pa ni John Ottway sa iba, dai man kinakakan kan mga sapat na ini an mga tawo. Kinakaragat man lang ninda, sagkod ginagadan, sabi niya. Sa layas na kadlagan, tibaad mayo sindang ibang madalaganan.
Minaray logod nindang magharali, magparalarakaw maghanap nin rescue ta harayoon an saindang natubragan. Bago sinda naghali sa crash site ta nganing madulagan an mga wolves na nag-atake sainda, nanganam si Hendrick, sarong doctor. Iyo ni an sabi niya, “I feel like we should say something. I feel like with all these bodies all people have died, it doesn’t seem right for us to walk away. “God bless these men. Some of them are friends we could be lying here with them.” Nagtingag siya dangan naghambal, “Thank you for sparing us; and helping us. O, and keep that up, if you can.” Alagad, sa katapusan kan istorya, mayong naginibo an pangadie kan sarong survivor na doctor. Gabos sinda sa dalan nagkagaradan.
Sobra sa kabanga kan pelikula, nagparararalakaw nagparadurulag nagparatarandayag an mga survivor parayo sa mga lobo; alagad bago man ini natapos, saro saro sindang nagkaurubos. Kan saiya nang toka pagbantay pagka enot na banggi, inatake kan lobo si Hernandez pag-ihi kaini. Siya an enot na nagadan sa grupo. Kaya sabi ni Ottway magharali na sinda duman. Pagparalarakaw kan grupo parayo sa crash site, nawalat man si Flannery sa tahaw kan yelo kawasa dai nakayahan an lipot sagkod an halawig na lakaw. Nawalat-walat siya dangan inatake kan mga lobo.
Pag-camping na ninda sa taas kan kabukidan, nahangog sa halangkaw na altitude an negrong si Burke. Sa saindang pigtuytuyan, magdamlag nagparaduros nin makusogon. Pagkaaga, nakua si Burke kan pag-iribang saro nang yeladong bangkay. Si Talget napilay kan makasabit ni sa kahoy pagrulukso ninda pabalyo sa halangkawon na salog. Kan buminagsak na siya sa daga, hiniribunan tulos siya kan mga ayam dangan ginuruyod. Si Diaz napagal na sana man magparalakaw kaya nagpawalat na sa may gilid kan suba.
Sa kadudulag sa naghahapag na mga lobo, naglumpat si Hendrick sa suba tapos nagpaatong sa sulog, nakairarom siya sa dakulang gapo saka duman nalamos. Si Ottway iyo an nakahampang kan alpha male, an pinakahade kan mga wolves sa mismo kaining kuta. Dai na pinahiling an saindang pagdinulak, kan inatake ni Ottway nin kutsilyo an ido. Sa huring ritrato kan pelikula, nakahandusay si Ottway, sagkod an maisog na hadi kan mga ido.
Sa pagdulag kan mga survivor, ginuyod ninda an pamimilosopiya kan kagsurat kan istorya. Linangkaba kan pelikula an konseptong naturalismo na pinadaba kan Pranses na manugsulat na si Emile Zola, sarong pagtubod na an tawo oripon kan saiyang sadiring natura. Mayo nin magigibo an inaapod kan ibang free will, o fighting spirit. Para ki Zola, sagkod sa mga nagsurunod saiya, mayong ibang minapaitok sa buhay kan tawo kundi an saiyang Kalibutan, an gabos-gabos na mga bagay-bagay sa saiyang kinaban. Garo man sana sinabi kaini na mayo nin kapas an kalag na magpapangyari para an tawo maparahay o mabanhaw an saiyang kaugalingon sa katibaadan.
Linangkaba man kan pelikula an vulgarized na konsepto kan survival of the fittest. Sa naturalistang kinaban, an hadi kan kadlagan iyo an layas na ayam. Garo daing kapas an tawong lampas an an isog kan mga hinayupak na mga ayam. Dawa gurano kaisog kan tawong hampangon an saiyang kaiwal niyang ini sa kadlagan, magagadan siya ta magagadan.
Sa climax kan sugilanon, nagprobar si Ottway na tampadan an bagsik kag an isog kan mga lobo. Nagtrayumpo man kuta siya alagad, kawasa an tawo sagkod hayop parehong nagadan, lininaw sa pelikula na nungka madudulagan kan tawo an ungis kan kadlagan, an layas na kabihasnan, kun sain tibaad an hayop, bakong an tawo—an hadi kan kagabsan.
Sinurublian sa Hiligaynon
nakulbaan, nakilaghanan
kag, sagkod
sa ilang, saindang
naghambal, nagsabi
naglumpat, luminukso
manugsulat, parasurat
mabanhaw, masalbar
kaugalingon, sadiri
sugilanon, istorya
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang
Rating: | ★★ |
Category: | Movies |
Genre: | Horror |
Directed by Richard Somes
Skylight Films, 2012
Save for one poignant scene in Richard Somes’s Corazon: Ang Unang Aswang, the rest of the movie leaves a number of unresolved scenes, let’s call them clutter, that rather only puzzle the audience.
This scene involves Erich Gonzales’s Corazon fleeing the townsfolk and Derek Ramsey’s Daniel escaping the personal army of the landlord Matias (Mark Gil) in the post-World War II sakadas, most probably in the vast lands of Negros. (Immediately this mention of probability is only one among the many unresolved elements that cloud the essence of the movie. Aside from the landlord-tenant relationship which was prevalent elsewhere in the post-war Philippines, no other elements in the movie can make us infer it happened particularly there.)
In the village of Magdalena, Daniel, the loving farmer husband of the innocently beautiful Corazon, has just murdered the landlord Matias in his own mansion after the couple’s house was burned down by the goons. And the wounded Corazon, after being shot by Matias when she devoured his daughter Melissa in her bed, has also been found (and found out) by one of Daniel’s friends to be the one responsible for the killings of children in the village.
Both Daniel and Corazon are fleeing the enraged townsfolk who want to kill the village murderer. The scene rips your heart because both characters are rather fleeing their own created monsters. Daniel has murdered the landlord in retaliation for having burned down their house; while Corazon has just been found out responsible for having devoured the children in the village.
What rips your heart more is that the couple only wanted to have a child but the wife’s devotion to San Gerardo failed them—after Corazon delivered a stillborn. So the reality of a dead baby drove the main character Corazon (the could-have been mother) to curse God and throw her faith away to the dark.
The man-on-the-road element in this work of fiction is rendered well in this climactic scene, with the score swelling as the couple flees their pursuers heightening the drama and resolving it to the conclusion—as in the French term denouement (day-no-man)—when the couple vanish in the dark. So there.
In the 1960s, American writer Susan Sontag was brought to the world limelight after she pinpointed that camp is the “love of the unnatural, the artifice and exaggeration.”
Well, we have seen camp movies proliferate in the horror flicks of the Filipino directors in the 80s—Shake, Rattle and Roll series and tons of other films in the same vein that entertained the generation of that decade.
Through time, we have seen tendencies of Filipino movies to make use of camp, which refers to the effects that the film made to scare the audience by propping monsters and supernaturals so they look hideous or horrible only to make them appear outrageously odd or simply outrageous.
In Corazon, these include madwoman Melinda’s (Tetchie Agbayani) over-disheveled wig which rather exaggerates Diana Ross’s afro look. When I saw this, prizewinning fictionist critic Rosario Cruz-Lucero came to mind. In cases like this, Cruz-Lucero hints at the creative sense that an author needs not “overkill” the essence of what he is portraying by overdoing descriptions and attributes that have already been established.
The movie was trapped in the premise that a madwoman must really appear overly unkempt and dirty with her tattered outfit, teeth and all—or totally taong grasa so audience knows she is mad. And mad. And really mad. But there is just no need for Agbayani’s Melinda to appear this ridiculous so she could portray her Sisa character [she’s looking for her daughter who disappeared during the war]. I suppose Agbayani is fairly a good actress that her delivery of lines or a dramatic monologue alone could make us infer without a doubt she is a Sisa who was driven mad because she lost her child to the war.
Furthermore, we cannot see the relevance of Eric Gonzales’s Corazon putting on a baboy-damo mask to cloud her real intentions that she is village monster preying on the innocent victims. What is Corazon’s reason for doing that? In the first place, where did she get the mask? Too implausible. Even the metallic effect of the face of the mask strikes us like it was stolen from the set of Kate Beckinsale’s Underworld which is too European to be accepted into the Filipino sensibility. Employing all these is more than camp, but more appropriately a rushed second-year high school drama production.
The movie also suffers from the complicated plot which requires more show time for them to be unraveled and resolved. Questions. Is Melinda the lost mother of Matias’s daughter Melissa? Or is Corazon the lost daughter of Melinda? We do not know. But it seemed as if the movie showed we knew they were.
While it could have just dwelt on the legend of the aswang, or how the first human-eating human being came to be—initially called halimaw in the film—the movie touched on other sensibilities and opened territories where the other characters dwelt but which it did not pursue or explore at all.
At the time the halimaw devours the village children one by one, Corazon contorts her head like the way it is done in the Asian horror flicks that became the norm made popular by the Japanese original Ring in early 2000s. Sadly, the movie reeks of this hackneyed style which looked fresh only the first time it’s done in those days.
While the supporting characters of Mon Confiado’s and Epy Quizon’s are comfortable, Maria Isabel Lopez’s Aling Herminia is a revelation. Her portrayal of the relihiyosa in the less-than-two-minuter scene as the partera (quack midwife) is eerie and astonishingly original. The rest is unmemorable.
In some instances, also, both of the main characters deliver their intense scenes well. For one, Erich Gonzales’s childbirth is more convincing than other women who fake their
ires and arrays in most films; while Ramsay’s macho tendencies and naturalness are without question.
The mestiza face of Erich Gonzales may be deemed realistic because she was said to be the love child of her mother and an American soldier during the war.
But the placing of Derek Ramsay as the farmer Daniel, whose roots we barely know, is farcical. If at all, the movie does not make clear the background of Daniel. He is too sculpted to be just a humble farmer in the barrio—he hunts boars after he works out in the Fil-Am-Jap bodybuilding gym. Funny. Mon Confiado would be the more believable Daniel.
Further, the lead actors' metropolitan or cosmopolitan twang, could have been reworked to render their rustic characters more realistic. Talk of George VI doing the entire movie reworking his tongue in The King’s Speech. They are too beautiful to be monstrous because they look too polished for these rustic roles. Ultimately they appear ridiculous. Sadly camp.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Miss Julie
Rating: | ★★★★ |
Category: | Movies |
Genre: | Other |
May 2005
Unsolvable—this is what August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” and Leoncio Deriada’s “The Dog Eaters” make clear about the woman problem.
In both works, the woman is portrayed as the modern tragic hero, powerless and insignificant character, who is not able to achieve her full person and make the best use of her existence, for it is largely hinged on her being smothered, silenced, suppressed, and considered insignificant.
In the two plays, women are depicted in a desperate state—not being able to do what their hearts desire or when they do, rather suffer their consequences in the most dismal forms. The powerlessness of a woman is highlighted by her futile attempts in antagonizing the male ego and is suppressed, regardless of her status in any society—aristocratic or urban poor. The patriarchal society constituting the male order presses too hard on their lives, and pushes them to despair and eventually, downfall.
One dismal reality is common in both plays. Both works bring to light the battle of the sexes—for domination—in an effort to create an order in a given society. When, at the end of the day, the question is asked—who survives? Certainly, it is not the woman. And more interestingly enough, both have naturalistic treatments of the same subject: the suppressed female sensibility never—if at all—triumphs over the otherwise impersonal male order. Her fate is largely determined by her enclosed, cloistered and restrained status in any given social setting where the male reigns supreme, intact, unmoved.
In the Strindberg classic, Miss Julie, a count’s daughter in the turn-of-the-century Sweden, seduces her father’s footman Jean, but succumbs to the dire consequences of her action that leads to her own ruin. In Deriada’s social realist piece written in the late 1960s, one cloistered wife Mariana realizes the stark poverty she consciously drew herself into, where her husband Victor lives the dog-like existence with his dog-eating friends. Desperate and resigned, her existence disintegrates within the filth of the slums.
Both dramatic tragedies spell the inevitability of the protagonist’s disintegration and ruin. In each of these works, the protagonist’s fate is inexorable, something that no one can escape. When we see the woman as the victim of a superior force, it arouses our pity. When we realize that the action demonstrates universal truths and that we feel that the victim could just as easily be ourselves—it arouses our fear. In the tragic hero’s death, we feel a sense of loss, but only because she has demonstrated his great worth. It is said that in tragedy, the forces of life being what they are, and human nature what it is, the protagonist wrestles with these forces, but he can never hope to win over them, and ultimately he is defeated.
“Miss Julie” delineates a series of unfortunate events for its protagonist, Countess Julie. We come to know that Miss Julie is the daughter of a count and that this affords her the blessings of a good life. We also get to know that Miss Julie has been brought up by her mother to hate men. When she—to express her contempt for them—forced her fiancé to jump over a horsewhip at her command, the man broke the engagement. Then, Miss Julie joins in a servants’ party and flirts with Jean, a footman. Through the entire unfolding of events, the countess seduces him and, unable to live with the conflicts this act creates in her, commits suicide.
In “The Dog Eaters”, Mariana laments the fact that hers is not a good life and scorns her husband Victor for not having a permanent job. She nags him for their poor life, and blames him for their sorry living conditions. Like a mad dog, she is hysterical at her husband: “I am mad because I want my husband to have a steady job… I want my husband to make a man of himself.” Mariana is cloistered within dismal poor circumstances which virtually dictate her sense of values. When she finally resorts to aborting her second child, it is because despair and resignation spell her entire character. She becomes irresponsible in her acts—hardly recognizing its consequences.
While making a problematic of the woman’s issue, Julie’s character emphasizes the dilemma that men and women are different—they want different things; and each is determined to dominate. In Miss Julie,” the battle of sexes is depicted very intensely ravishing (Krutch, 1953). Countess Julie, who belongs to the highly privileged class “plays with fire with the working-class constituent Jean who rather appears refined and even schooled. Bit by bit, through the play, we see how their respective roles are reversed on grounds of the more dominant sex. The male gradually dominates the female sex—regardless of where he is situated in the society, or economically determined.
Ruled by her instincts, on a frenzied mardi gras, Julie gets attracted to his father’s valet Jean—composed but virile and ambitious—but later fails to recognize the consequences of her wild act. She starts to engage him in a verbal war, and later an intimate affair—
Julie: Kiss my hand first!
Jean: Don’t you realize that playing with fire is dangerous?
Julie: Not for me. I’m insured.
Jean: No, you’re not! And even if you are, there’s combustible material nearby.
Julie: Meaning you?
Jean: Yes! Not because I am who I am, but just because I’m a young man…
Here, the male character very well recognizes the male-female chemistry is highly combustible; the woman hardly knows the male hormones are highly excitable, fact which never has been familiar to an otherwise naïve Julie who subconsciously desires to subdue the male sex. She has done so to her former fiancée who later broke off engagement with her on grounds of her wild domineering act—making him jump on a horsewhip.
Jean: And so you got engaged to the country commissioner!
Julie: Exactly—so that he should become my slave.
Jean: And he wasn’t willing?
Julie: He was willing enough, but he didn’t get the chance. I grew tired of him.
Early on, Julie, the count’s daughter utterly declares her domination of the other sex to her father’s footman, Jean, who patronizes such seduction until Julie furthers on to flirt with him:
Julie: What incredible conceit! A Don Juan, perhaps? Or a Joseph? I’m prepared to believe you’re a Joseph!
Jean: You think so?
Julie: I almost fear so.
[Jean makes a bold move to embrace and kiss her.]
Julie: [Slaps him] Insolence!
Jean: Serious or joking?
Julie: Serious.
In this part, Julie does not the consequences of her actions until the time Jean plays his part to poke fun at her, being lured in turn by her “statutory” seduction—one imposed to the male servant by her female master.
Julie: Have you ever been in love?
Jean: That’s not the word we’d use. But I have run after plenty of girls. And once, when I couldn’t have the one girl I wanted, I became sick. Really sick, I tell you, like those princes in the Arabian nights who could neither eat nor drink for love.
Julie: Who was she? [Jean is silent.] Who was she?
Jean: You can’t make me answer that.
Julie: If I ask you as an equal? As a—friend? Who was she?
Jean: You.
Julie: [Sits] Priceless!
An ambitious member of the working-class serving the aristocrats Julie and her father count, Jean is now compelled to make use of his being male to obtain what he desires—to become himself the powerful though anonymous Count who has control on everything in the household. And after several instances of seduction by his female master, the male servant becomes the male usurper who affords himself the chance to use his sex and sexuality and prey on her female sensitive character to conquer her.
When footman Jean becomes the abuser, he delineates a potent character of the patriarchal order. He represents the virile but unfeeling phallus, seeking its own pleasure and self-preservation. He serves the entire purpose of the masculine sensibility—sheer sex and bodily satisfaction—attaining for the male order its clout and control.
After the seduction results in consummation, whether compelled or otherwise, Julie realizes what she has drawn herself into. The subservient Jean is now someone who says much about the real story about parents of the countess herself. He then makes her realize that like her mother who hated men, she is also crazy. She is definitely crazy—
Jean: It’s what comes of getting mixed up with women. Miss Julie, I know you’re suffering but I cannot understand you. I think you’re sick. Yes, you’re definitely sick.
Julie: Please be kind to me. Speak to me like a human being.
And when they both realize that their action is shameful before the whole household, the woman character has something clear in mind—she’d run away with the footman to escape disgrace.
Jean: So what do we do then?
Julie: Go away together!
Jean: To torment each other to death?
Julie: No—to enjoy ourselves for two days, or a week, or for as long as it’s possible to enjoy oneself. And then—die.
Here is proven that the man-woman disparity is perennial as that of life and death. Though Julie foresees harmony in their coexistence, Jean does not share this idea, especially with Julie, who he considers not his equal, but now someone lower than him—after committing such an act. Jean very well knows how it works for the aristocrat—a member of the aristocrat cannot simply commit what Julie has brought for herself. Now he considers himself “higher” than Julie herself—not only because he is a male, but because the act has—as if—reversed their status. Truth now dawns upon Julie that with such an act, she could never regain her purity—or even honor—again. The male character’s rhetoric is working so much against the female’s sensitivity whose worth and sensibility is as though hinged on what the patriarchal order declares.
And when Julie summons him to join her in her plans to flee the Count’s household to establish their lives some place else, the male stands his ground to make her see—he has only fooled her as much as she did him prior to the consummation of the sexual act.
Julie: Come up with me!
Jean: To your room? Now you’ve lost your mind again! Go, at once!
Julie: Speak kindly to me, Jean.
Now disillusioned and given to disgrace and later death, Julie’s character is transformed as it is disintegrated. Here she appears to be the sorriest character after the swift turn of events. Jean only made her believe that he desired her—after patronizing her own seduction of him. The woman becomes the unwanted sex—the pathetic sex that pulled to itself its own ruin.
Julie: What would you do in my place?
Jean: In your place? Let me think. As a Count’s daughter, as a woman, after this kind of mistake. I don’t know. Yes, now I do know.
Julie: [makes a gesture] Like this?
Jean: Yes. But I wouldn’t do it—be clear about that! There’s a difference between us.
Julie: Because you’re a man and I’m a woman? What difference does that make?
Jean: Same difference as between—a man and a woman!
Close to her suicide, the naïve Julie does not recognize the difference of the two sexes insinuated and illustrated by the footman—that in her parent’s marriage, it is the Count, her father himself who ruled after all—not her mother. It is the man who has dominated.
These final exchanges of rhetoric between the male and the female highlight the failure of the woman to attempt at changing her own destiny. It is the male that still defines the female. It is he on whom she will hinge her existence into. Her existence is largely defined by how he allows [or not] it to be. Rendered immobile by everything surrounding her, Julie succumbs to her own ruin, and the male dominates in the end—
Julie: I’m unable to do anything any longer! Unable to feel remorse, unable to run, unable to stay, unable to live—unable to die! Help me! Order me, and I’ll obey you like a dog. Do me this last service, save my honor, save my name! You know what I should do, but can’t—will me to do it. Order me to do it!
Jean: I don’t know why—but now I can’t, either—I don’t understand it. It’s as though this jacket here actually kept me—from being able to order you—and now, since the Count spoke to me—now—how can I explain it—ah—it’s this damned servant boy sitting on my back! I think if the Count were to come down here right now—and he ordered me to cut my throat—I’d do it on the spot.
Here, Julie realizes that her existence cannot at all be given meaning beyond this thing she’s “ordered to do.” Everything has dawned on her, thus—
Julie: Then make believe you’re my father, and I’m you. You were such a good actor before, when you got down on your knees—you were the gentleman then—or haven’t you ever been to the theater and watched a hypnotist? He says to the subject, take the broom! And the subject takes it. He says, sweep! And the subject sweeps—
Jean: But the other one has to be asleep.
Julie: I’m already asleep.
The woman is given to accepting her destined place in the world where man reigns powerful and prevails. We come to realize that the woman problem is perennially unsolvable—irresolvable, or fixed in a number of ways. It declares that the woman is a predictable social character whose ill destiny in the patriarchal society can never be less than tragic or devastating.
We can infer a number of things about the predictable plight of the woman in an otherwise irregular reality put forth by the existing patriarchy. The fact that Julie approaches derangement, prior to her self-murder, tells us that a woman is doomed for life. When Julie approaches derangement, Julie both desires and rejects the male ego. She both abhors and adores Jean, the male culture constituent, the phallus that lures an otherwise reluctant female crevice into its traps. When Julie sets out to kill herself as per hypnotism by the animal, brusque Jean, the female sensibility succumbs to the male, phallic, patriarchal order—and reaffirms its control over human affairs.
Because “Miss Julie” illustrates a love-hate relationship between a noblewoman and one of her servants, reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, this presupposes that the woman character is hinged on the male’s animal nature. Nothing much more can be said about this work but about its author’s strong aversion against women. The stark reality unfolds in this brazen work that depicts one gruesome male ego that stalks and preys on the female sensibility as it seeks to elevate itself by way if raping the female—physically and subconsciously.
In Leoncio Deriada’s “The Dog Eaters”, we see the tragic fate of Mariana, the wife of a jobless Victor who prefers drinking with his dog-eating friends to finding a stable job that could support his family. When Mariana recalls her expectations when she eloped with Victor, she is frustrated when she realizes that her dreams of having things she didn’t possess did not materialize after her elopement.
Mariana: Do we have to be like this all the time? Why don’t you get a steady job like any other decent husband?
Victor: You don’t have to complain, Mariana. True, my job is not permanent but I think we have enough. We are not starving, are we?
Mariana (with a flourish): You call this enough? You call this rat’s nest of a house, this hell of a neighborhood—enough? You call these tin plates and cheap curtains enough? (Bitterly.) This is not the kind of life I expected…
Mariana becomes the pathetic icon of irony when she pastes pictures on the walls so their house could get some sense of cheerfulness of the rather gloomy living conditions. Of course, the pasted pictures and plastic fixtures in the house all the more emphasized their destitution.
Mariana is the morally upright, goal-oriented, perhaps sensible modern woman who becomes a misfit—she has to indeed fall into despair—for she doesn’t belong to the slime of the slums. She despises the dog-like existence inasmuch as she abhors her husband’s affinity with their dog-eating neighbors. She prefers a better life. But she is living with the likes of Aling Elpidia, the vegetable vendor who sells her a concoction that can abort her unborn. Along with these characters, Mariana fails to realize that the worst that can happen to them is to become human refuse—yielding to their animal nature.
Aling Elpidia: (one hand still flat on Mariana’s belly) Are you sure you do not want another child?
Mariana: I don’t want another child. (She moves away and holds the bottle like a trophy.)
Aling Elpidia: Well, it’s your decision. The bottle is yours.
Mariana: How shall I take this?
As for the woman’s act or attempt to kill her unborn—moralists would immediately retort—the end does not justify the means—and perhaps make comments to the same effect. Mariana will never be judged by her intention—but primarily by the act. In the play, the act of abortion was never executed but Mariana’s attempt to do so has already propelled the worse circumstances and consequences for her. Though Mariana initially posed as a catalyst for change in that desperate part of the world, her being a wife to a macho Filipino husband more clearly draws her real fate—helplessness and despair altogether cause her downfall.
Mariana: One spoonful in the morning and one spoonful in the evening. It’s bitter, Victor, but I can bear it. I will be safe.
Victor: What’s that? (Then the truth dawning upon him) What? What? My baby! You? You!
Mariana: Yes! And I’m not afraid!
Victor: You won’t do it.
Mariana: No!
Victor: What kind of woman are you?
Mariana: And what kind of man are you?
Victor: It’s my baby!
Mariana: It’s mine. I have the right to dispose of it. I don’t want another child.
Victor: Why, Mariana, why?
Mariana: Because you cannot afford it! What would you feed another child, ha, Victor? Tuba for milk? Dog meat for rice?
Though Mariana appears to be a good woman, she is the quintessential woman whose morals are sacrificed—falling prey to an unrelenting male ego-dictated society, one that is hostile and aloof, cruel and impersonal, unkind and stern. Like the countess Julie—and like Ramir whom she butchers—Mariana succumbs to the slavering tongues of the dog-eat-dog society where she finds herself in.
When Victor tells Mariana, “Behave, you woman,” he articulates a macho rhetoric that attempts or obviously, starkly impose silence or seek to silence the woman and her possibilities. But to Mariana, Victor’s macho image is not in fact masculinity, but otherwise. She tells him she’s a coward because he hardly could provide for his growing family. For her, the measure of manhood is not something between his pants, it is his being able to provide and provide well and enough for his family.
The man-woman clash is caused by the male’s skewed sense of himself, his virility that makes not a sensible sense to the other sex. Mariana has a husband who has no ambitions, who never makes efforts to alleviate them from their stark poverty. Her natural circumstances largely determine her character, thus her story, thus her destiny.
Mariana: You men can talk because you don’t have to bear children. You cowards!
Victor: Shut up!
Mariana: Go away from me! Go away from me! Get out! Get out! Leave me alone!
(Victor goes out…She goes to the kitchen and comes back with the basket of vegetables and throws everything out of the window. Ramir barks.)
Mariana: Shut up, you miserable dog! (Pauses) Ramir—ah yes, Ramir. Now I know what to do.
(She goes to the kitchen and returns with a huge kitchen knife. Kicking the scattered tin plates on her way, she crosses to the room to the right exit.)
Enclosed in a strongly patriarchal structure, Mariana cannot just achieve her full potential as a person, much more a moral agent who strives to do what is right, or morally upright. Though she consciously takes chances and risks to change her husband’s disposition, she fails. In the process she loses herself. And in the end, she loses her self.
Mariana: here, Ramir. Come, come, Ramir. Come. Victor loves you very much. Perhaps more than he loves me. Come, Ramir. Do you see this knife? (The dog growls.) I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you, Ramir. I’ll slit your throat and drink your blood and cut you to pieces and stew you and eat you. Damn you, Victor. Damn this child. Damn everything. I’ll kill you, Ramir. (Final yelp.) I’ll cook you and eat you and eat you and eat you! Uhu! Uhu! Uhu! (And for the first time, Mariana cries.)
Very well, both texts highlight that the woman problem can never be solved because the unrelenting male sensibility will perennially make ways—consciously or otherwise—to suppress it, and make it realize its own insignificance, its unimportance.
Man [read: man and woman] is said to be the victim of conflicting desires, and the strongest of them, like his desire for a member of the opposite sex, are irrational and yet stronger than reason. He despises himself for not being able to cease desiring what he also hates (Krutch, 1953). Such generalization rings true in these two characters. Miss Julie obviously cannot do away with her desire for her father’s footman. So she desires him incessantly, while she also abhors his sex because she has been taught by her mother to hate men. This puts her in an irrevocable dilemma from which she could hardly get out one piece. Mariana, meanwhile, is a female sensibility which unconsciously or unknowingly brings upon herself her own ruin. The moment she decided to elope with a good looking animal named Victor instead of finishing her college course, she already degraded herself inasmuch as she belonged to a society where poverty defines the majority of its constituent. When she yielded to Victor’s virility and sex, she also stole from herself the right to a better status in an even more male-dictated society.
The essence of man’s tragic dilemma is that there is no rational—only an irrational solution of this dilemma (Krutch, 1953). Highlighted by the two tragic women characters and their sorry plights, the two works pursue a naturalistic tragedy that highlights pity, fear, and catharsis. Pity is aroused in us by the women’s inherent weaknesses and the social class structures they inhabit. Fear is evoked when we realize that the same fate could overcome any of us.
Both plays highlight the weak woman spirit. The plays enunciate that the woman indeed is a weak species—cloistered in the midst of the male-dominated society. Women are rendered to have tragic lives. Their fate—determined by the egoistic male society where they are situated—or where they are rather placed—is highly predictable. But the fact that these women characters defy such destiny is what makes their lives worth telling. The fact that they defied the boundaries of the oppressive, brusque, virile, and unfeeling patriarchal order—altogether redefines the character of a woman.
In the bigger picture, it is the woman who is put in bad light—or is she? Mariana rebels against the stifling patriarchal structure—antagonizing Victor when she resorts to aborting the second child and hurting his male ego when she kills his pet dog Ramir. Mariana resorts to abortion to spite Victor and perhaps make him aware of his responsibility. By wanting to kill her second child, for they cannot practically feed them well, she would rather redeem him from earthly suffering and damnation. Here the modern woman is one admirable character for she seeks to challenge an otherwise dismal structure that oppresses more her inane existence, and transforms her very sensibilities.
“I told you I didn’t want another child. You broke that bottle but I will look for other means. I’ll starve myself. I’ll jump out of the window. I’ll fall down the stairs,” runs the litany of despair, of Mariana’s exasperated existence as well defined by the male world of Victor’s. This makes clear the nature of woman to liberate herself from the restrictions of the male structure that encloses her—or rather defines her—one that subjects her as a wife or that subjugates her as a woman [secondary or insignificant to man]. Only by rebelling against such dismal structure can the woman afford herself her liberty, her individuality, her self.
In Mike Figgis’s rendition of Strindberg’s masterpiece, Saffron Burrows’ Julie is one unforgettable tragedy in literary and cinema consciousness. Her sexually hungry, angst-ridden female countenance spells the female nature—”vessel and damsel” but defiant and irreverent. She delineates one discontented and disturbing female character, a bored individual whose hollow existence is not compelled or desired but naturally determined. She has been taught by her mother to hold grudges against men; she is a man-hater gone haywire.
Both Julie and Mariana do not recognize the futility of their actions to free themselves from these patriarchal enclosures until they actually succumb to it. In both works, there’s an attempt to define a helpless, ill-fated woman whose existence is hinged on the brusque and indifferent male feeling, the two characters clarify that the patriarchal setups such as family largely determines their very sensibilities. Neither of them triumphs in their attempt to resist the patriarchal vacuum. It sucks up their persons, influences their consciousness, and determines their destinies.
Works Cited and Sources Consulted
Deriada, Leoncio P. The Dog Eaters and Other Plays. Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1986.
Dickinson, Leo T. A Guide to Literary Study. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1987.
Jurilla, Jonathan P. “Socio-Cultural Conflict Depicted in Selected Short Stories of Leoncio Deriada.” Iloilo City: University of the Philippines in the Visayas, 1996. Undergraduate thesis.
Krutch, Joseph W. Modernism in Modern Drama. New York: Cornell University Press, 1953.
Nato Eligio, Generosa. “Some Recent Writers and The Times: A Socio-Critical Study of Selected Short Stories in English Anthologized in the 1980’s.” Manila: University of Santo Tomas, 1991. Doctoral dissertation.
Picart, Roland M. “Social Commentary in Leoncio P. Deriada’s The Road to Mawab and Other Stories.” Baguio City: Baguio Colleges Foundation, 1986. Graduate thesis.
Rose, Phyllis. Writing of Women: Essays in a Renaissance. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.
Szondi, Peter. Theory of the Modern Drama. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Sunday, May 13, 2007
The Lady In the Water
Rating: | ★★★ |
Category: | Movies |
Genre: | Science Fiction & Fantasy |
Previously called “unusual but charmless” film, the mysterious Lady in the Water by India-born American film director M. Night Shyamalan [read: Sha-ma-lan] deserves a second look, asking us to dive and swim deeper into that pool [of water brimming with] meanings and insights.
METAFICTION
An experimental and unconventional work, Lady in the Water falls under metafiction, a work of fiction whose primary “concern is the nature of fiction itself.” A metafiction contains—as one of its structural and thematic dimensions—a testing of fiction itself. The film rolls out as the anatomy of fiction, in the strictest sense of the word—a naming of parts, the structure of [a] Story.
This means that the film itself presents in all its frames what constitutes fiction. For instance, the chief character’s name itself is Story, who just comes to the life of one building manager Cleveland Heep, who later will help resolve her problem, much as a reader would have to make sense of a story that [he reads].
In the film, Story [literary text] and Heep [reader] have a literal encounter. Cleveland Heep, an ordinary man, is thrown the task [so he desperately asks people how] to help Story go back to her own Blue World, just like the common reader who reads a story and has to finish reading [understanding] it.
Featuring fiction within fiction, characteristic of postmodern works, Lady in the Water presents two plots—the first plot is the narf’s incredible story; the second is the story being woven out of the narf’s presence to the life of the building tenants. In all, the film itself presents in all its frames what constitutes fiction, laying out the elements that compose the whimsical and wonderful world of fiction. Whimsical, meaning the author freely makes use of fantastic elements to carry out his purpose; and wonderful, meaning the insights and plethora of realizations we can get from it.
BEDTIME STORY
As stated by the makers of the film itself, Lady in the Water is “a bedtime story.” Therefore, it is indeed a story told to children at bedtime; therefore, a story that entails “a pleasant but unconvincing account or explanation.” More particularly, a bedtime story is something told to lull us into slumber, or usher us in to the dreamland, where we will see more disjointed characters and plots, more insensible events and phantasmagoric images that all defy explanation. Thus, a bedtime story does not seek to convince anyone. And by being a seemingly “unconvincing” film, Lady in the Water delivers its very purpose.
Using bedtime story as its narrative vehicle, though, the film is a potent illustration of a few literary concepts. For one it is fantasy—the literary genre that designates a conscious breaking free from reality. Fantasy applies to a work that “takes place in a nonexistent and unreal world, such as fairyland, or concerns incredible and unreal characters.” Considering the film a fantasy, then, we the audience have to work out their “suspension of disbelief.” This means our willingness to withhold questions about truth, accuracy, or probability in a work.
Taking root from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Bibliographia Literaria, which describes “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes the poetic faith,” it simply means that our willingness to suspend doubt makes possible the temporary acceptance of an author’s imaginative world—however ridiculous it is.
We are transported to the time and place, people and events all created by the author. The relaxed Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) dealing with a young woman stranger Story (Howard) literally illustrates the suspension of disbelief.
Significantly, the film illustrates full suspension of disbelief in the lack of skepticism—acquiescent attitudes—by the other building tenants when Cleveland Heep just turns up with a strange woman Story, and later involves all of them to helping the stranger return to her Blue World.
All throughout the film, we the audience are asked to make sense out of the seemingly insensible things presented in the work. In fact, M. Night Shyamalan seeks to suspend our disbelief to the extremes, asking us to just believe everything in front of our noses. We can also say the film is a fairy tale, “a story relating mysterious pranks and adventures of spirits who possess supernatural wisdom and foresight, a mischievous temperament, the power to regulate the affairs of human beings for good or evil, and the capacity to change their shape.”
In the film, the fantastic character Story obviously lands into the world of men, bothering their very silences, especially Heep and The Cookbook author (the film director himself) and later, comes to effect change in them, conscious or otherwise.
HEEP HELPS NARF, READER MAKES STORY
By and large, we cannot judge a piece of work based on our failure to grasp its meaning. If we cannot particularly make sense of the work because of our lack of knowledge, or our refusal to be open to forms which do not fit or dwell in our comfort zones, we cannot really have a more valuable scrutiny of the work. We cannot care much about the author or director’s sensibility as much as we must interpret meanings for ourselves.
A literary theory called reader-response criticism says that a piece of writing—here translated into film [previously called cinema, or celluloid literature] scarcely exists except as a text designed to be read [in this case—watched]. Shyamalan seemingly disjointed frames to other people can just make sense to the informed reader—the real reader who can appreciate it. The symbolic rescue of Story from the dog monster who ate up the film critic who was talking out a definition of one character tells us that any story therefore is the product of the one who reads it—a film’s meaning is made out by the moviegoer themselves. Considering the film a serious work of art, then, we say it is not the work of the author.
For some literary theorists, the author is dead—what he wrote or made, after being written, is not anymore his. For reader-response theorists, it’s the reader’s perception about the work that says what it is. Nevertheless, the makers of the film can be lauded for their daring to break the stereotypes associated with film and filmmaking.
Risking commercial success for the sake of bringing out some learning in art and literature, M. Night Shyamalan proves consistent to his credo of experimentation that gives the educated audience not just essential points of discussion but also countless insights.
The Departed
Rating: | ★★★★ |
Category: | Movies |
Genre: | Drama |
It is just right that the bidas die since the film tackles an 80s Boston mobsters’ story, or because the film is done by Scorsese [who is world-famous for his sense of gore and glory]. After watching the film, you get a feel that it’s for real, meaning—it is realistic that the main characters die because right from the very start, they have just tricked each other.
While the movie title is perhaps stating the obvious—the word “departed” there connotes another sense. “Departed”—as in the sense of the dead, thus the phrase “our faithful departed”—rather translates into a more sensible meaning of isolation, since every mobster or law enforcer there—and the ones caught in between [Caprio and Damon]—seems to be rallying for his own cause, advancing his own cause, sadly solitarily.
Each one of them is trying to penetrate another’s territory—that inevitably the movie climaxes at the part when the “mole” or the “rat,” who makes a lot of trouble between the outlaws and the pursuers cannot just be easily caught—so confused their characters are they are that they end up pursuing and killing each other. They all end up being isolated. They, indeed, end up departed. Abandoned.
Scorsese’s film provides us similar insights into the present-world realities. The whole drama in this piece spells out man’s isolation which is deeply rooted in his self-interest, if not outright egotism.
At the height of the campaign for his partymates the US Midterm polls this week, US President George W. Bush, for instance, skirted the Iraq issue—instead persuading Americans that the main issues are taxes and terrorism. For this inconsolable war freak, nothing else is new—or worth addressing—but how he wants to get even with Al-Qaeda, or how to make Americans fat so they could forever patronize his war-freak whims.
Meanwhile, in a recent UN report on climate change, renowned economist Nicholas Stern points to the guilt of the industrial countries who have the biggest culpability and liability on the greenhouse gases issue, but who do not staunchly or surely address it. Countries like China, India and the US, so-called the biggest polluters of the world, have yet to be held liable for this.
Having no clear policies in place to address the environmental concern, the Bush administration is not being vocal or straightforward how to address this. International media are skeptical that the issue might not be touched in the president’s remaining term.
And while Indian citizens can only express their personal concern to address global warming, the government will have yet to list it as one of their priorities. But certainly time cannot wait for people to do something in their own time to resuscitate the endangered environment. Time waits for no one, and Mother Earth cannot tarry, either.
In a larger scale, we just await for realities in the films “Waterworld” and The Day After Tomorrow to happen. So any culture of indifference, self-interest or unrest will certainly not make things better.
Our world is continuously at war—the Sri Lankan conflict, Al-Qaeda’s recent attack in Pakistan, among others—the world doesn’t change. All news—we observe—spell discontent and hatred, or plainly, one’s lack of sensitivity to the needs of others.
The world may seem to be at peace when it is not. Isolation, that worst sense of existence caused by not being able to get our message across or seek understanding between and among ourselves—but just standing one’s ground because this is good for us, and only us—may not, at all, get us anywhere. These grim instances of self-interest will only pose to us more adversities in the future.
Man is in the brink because of his own isolation—he is the last ace he has to save himself, but he hardly realizes it. He is too “departed” to know what he must really want, or care for—he ends up needing endlessly.
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