Movie listing websites almost always classify Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern as drama, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. This isn’t your regular Chinese concubine drama. Judging by how horrified I was by the time the credits started rolling, and how upon watching it again around eight years later I was still as terrified as ever, the subtle fear factor puts it more under psychological horror. While people don’t often go out of their way to argue the genre of a film, I haven’t seen anyone discuss about how downright scary Raise the Red Lantern is, and its horror is as much a part of it as its intrigue and drama. Without further ado, here are 5 terrifying things about Raise the Red Lantern.
The Chen Household
As soon as Songlian steps into the Chen house, the outside world becomes a distant memory. It’s mentioned here and there, but it feels like it doesn’t exist anymore. The sprawling, labyrinthine Chen house seems to stretch out over the entire horizon and up high into the sky. It has its own authoritarian system of government and its own feudal laws under the guise of “family tradition”. Note: simple family tradition doesn’t usually cover details of executing women. Raise the Red Lantern takes place in 1920s China, but the highly traditional Chen house seems to exist in a different time and place from the rest of the world.
The isolation and otherworldliness of the Chen Household give it a claustrophobic feel of a place with no escape, like being trapped far away from home in another dimension. And in this other world, only one man rules, and everything is live or die. Think of being thrust into the Coliseum’s bowels to fight to the death the next day.
Chen Zuoqian
Master Chen himself is an enigma, and the decision never to show his face clearly really adds to his terrifying mystery. Who is he? What kind of business does he run? How does he get away with literal murder? And despite all this, why do his workers seem to love him so much? The hold he has on people is frightening to say the least, and the fact that he pretty much rules over his own city-state with an iron fist doesn’t help make anything easier.
His mystery makes him seem almost omnipotent, that he could be lurking in the shadows in every corner, behind every wall. Given all the eyes, ears, and hands he has under his command, his ultimate power becomes a great terrifying reality, almost like a cruel god.
The Colors
Raise the Red Lantern is visually stunning, but in an overall depressing kind of way. The Chen house has all the beauty of a traditional Chinese house but with a thick layer of gloom on top. Everything looks so drab next to the bright red lanterns, but there’s so many red lanterns that it actually starts to feel ominous whenever they are lit. And given that the red lanterns here determine life or death, it’s no wonder they start to become more threatening than beautiful as the film goes on. Lit lanterns are weapons, after all, in more ways than one. To raise them high is to declare war.
The Chen household is full of people, and yet seems so lifeless and cold, just like its residents. Only small joys exist in the Chen household, because anything more is cruelly stripped away. The lantern to person ratio is insanely high, and that just makes every room feel so unsettling, not to mention that as the seasons pass and the days get darker, the red of the lanterns seems to grow more and more intense.
Songlian’s Transformation
Songlian is the kind of person who, if forced to do something, will do it well. She starts off as an independent, headstrong university student, but when her family can’t afford it, she then goes off to marry perhaps the richest man in the area. She plays ball with his other mistresses, even openly admitting that she plays to win, and can’t resist a challenge.
But this self-determined attitude is also the downfall of her character; intent on playing the wife game well, and fakes her pregnancy in the process. The failure of this plan sends her down a deadly spiral of depression, suicidal thoughts, vengeance, guilt, and finally madness. What makes this so horrifying is how easy and fast it is to be stripped of your soul and left as a husk in Master Chen’s deadly game of wives and concubines, and how Meishan and Songlian, two inherently good people who were trying to make the best of their situation somehow, as Meishan ominously predicted, ended up with the same fate: dead.
The Cycle
So if Meishan’s murder and Songlian’s madness wasn’t shocking enough, in little more than half a year later, we now have to deal with the realization that Master Chen bought a new robe to wear and take off whenever he pleases. Mistresses are so easily replaceable that the loss of two in one go doesn’t even seem to faze anyone. The thought of more women falling victim to this game and losing themselves in the war is almost unbearable. Watching Songlian walk aimlessly in circles as the credits roll shows the Chen house for what it is: a gilded gladiatorial prison, where people fight, some win, some die, but everyone is left trapped until their time is done.
Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria: How a one-take film does away with illusions
The Ayala area in Makati features a plethora of shopping malls, restaurants, museums, and world-class office buildings. But there’s another common sight that isn’t quite as pretty: young Filipinas with old white men that look 80...minutes away from dying. It’s a distressing sight, knowing that it’s an unfair trade—in exchange for some cash to send home, these women are entirely at the mercy of their more-often-than-not-abusive foreign partners. What more for mail-order Filipina brides who go abroad to marry strangers in order to support their families? Yes, it still happens; it’s an issue kept mostly under wraps, but it’s still a nightmarish reality here.
Cebuano flick Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria, often translated to “the Dream of Eleuteria,” has its own secret: a friend of mine from Tacloban City said that “damgo” can also refer to some kind of nightmare, similar to the Tagalog “bangungot”. But the difference with this nightmare is that it unfolds in real time; Ang Damgo ni Eleuteria is a one-take full-length film, something I’ve never seen done before, and just for that the experience of watching movies is completely transformed.
Damgo takes place around an hour and a half before Eleuteria, a young girl on the island of Olango, is set to leave for Germany to marry elderly Hans as a mail-order bride. The movie being shot in one take makes the stress of time pressure very real, as we too begin to dread the time of departure with the hope that Eleuteria’s fate magically changes within the span of an hour or two.
Terya, as she is “lovingly” called, is barraged by her own conflicting emotions and that of her nagging money-faced mother Suping, who goes on and on about how she should have pity on their poor family. Suping’s attempts to convince both Terya and her father, who is more reasonable and doesn’t want her to go because, one, she doesn’t want to (duh), and two, he has no idea if it’s safe. Suping’s increasing desperation inceases exponentially in real time and quickly reveals her true character: she starts by telling Terya it’s for her own good, but later on talks about how poor they are, how shameful it would be to back out of the arrangement now, and even how Terya’s dad Carding can stop fishing once she gets married, clearly showing how Suping sees Terya as a moneymaking tool and plans to have the entire family rely solely on the money she sends back home instead of continuing to work and supplementing the family income. It’s disheartening, but many Filipino families see their children as piggy banks; put some money in them, save up for them, then break them when the time is right and force them to support the entire family. Seeing Suping go down that slippery slope so fast in real time really cements the kind of greed and selfishness she had all this time, thinly veiled by claims of doing this for Terya’s own good.
Damgo ends with a long, long walk from the village to the pier, and as this walk goes on in real time, the time pressure is even greater, and the overarching feeling grows increasingly imminently dangerous—it starts to become clear that no happy ending and magical change of mind is going to happen for Terya. As recruiter Susie constantly hurries Terya along so as not to miss the boat, she becomes more and more suspicious; by the end of the movie, not just Terya’s happiness but her actual life is at stake, as Susie’s scheming nature begins showing. We also see how quickly Terya gives up on happiness for herself. Up to the point of the final walk, she was still trying to run away with some hope of staying, but upon knowing that she is unwanted, she resigns herself to a life of sadness, and as she walks down the pier the hopelessness in her actions and words grows with every step.
A real-time movie introduces time as a new but subtle enemy; as our feelings wrestle with some mental countdown, hoping for a turnabout but stressed about the knowledge that it HAS to happen sometime within an hour and a half, we also watch the descent of characters into their true selves. The person they reveal themselves to be in less than an hour is the person they were all along. And while a movie with time jumps has some ambiguity between events, Damgo does not; everything is undeniably real, and that makes the nightmare frighteningly inescapable.
Images from oggsmoggs.blogspot, Inquirer entertainment, Sunstar Weekend, Medium, movianalysis.blogspot
Mano Po, the Liminality of Identity, and Mythbusting Chinese-Filipino Culture
(Note: Chinese-Filipino refers to Filipinos of Chinese descent. Chinese refers to the people of Chinese ethnicity or the Chinese diaspora specifically depending on the context. Filipino refers to either Filipino citizens of Filipino ethnicity or Filipino people in general (regardless of race) depending on the context.)
I never cared much about being represented in mainstream media; being a Chinese-Filipino, I didn’t think it would ever happen. Funny enough, as popular as the Mano Po series is here in the Philippines, I had no idea it would actually be a story about, well, me. It was the first time I saw myself onscreen, and I must say, it was a surreal experience, and I reacted to it by basically bawling my eyes out and annoying everyone in the vicinity. Ever have an existential crisis in the middle of a class film viewing? It’s really heavy.
Unlike most Chinese-Filipino families, mine has been here for much longer, going back six generations to the time of the Spaniards in the mid-1800s. And while we are as Filipino as Filipino gets, our Chinese roots are still very much alive in words, thoughts, and deeds. That being said, all my life, I’ve identified as Filipino, but here in the Philippines, people consider me Chinese. I have begun to make peace with the truth that my home is in many places, and also nowhere. This crisis of the self is nothing new to any immigrant of any generation. Yet, I am proud that my identity is complete in its liminality.
What is identity? Perhaps it is too simple to define it as something that makes a person. It isn’t exactly synonymous to the self either, but it isn’t a distinct aspect of humanity. I personally like to define identity as an infinitely extensive image of the self limited to the temporal and spatial dimensions we live in. We ourselves cannot fully identify every aspect of our identity; there are countless factors that make us who we are, and none of them are truly mutually exclusive. But we do put tags and labels on the parts we can easily define–gender, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, views, belief system, culture–because these are at least somewhat rooted in time and space.
I love the concept of identity because just the act of thinking about it already alters it a bit. Every time we perform introspection, we make subconscious, minute changes to our self-image. The challenge for Mano Po’s Go family is to reconcile all these little differences and accept the Philippines as home. And the challenge for native Filipinos is to accept the Chinese-Filipinos as their own, as Filipinos.
Perhaps the best way to go about it is to establish trust and understanding, so right now, we’re going to use Mano Po to bust three common myths about the Chinese in the Philippines.
Chinese families require their children to speak a Chinese language: Myth
It’s family-specific, but based on my experience, it’s not a requirement, just a preference. This isn’t true for all Chinese families, of course. Whether it’s Mandarin, Fukienese, Cantonese, or whatever, it’s not unheard of for a family to take language seriously. After all, what are after-school/weekend Chinese classes for? However, it is highly unlikely that a family will outright shun a child who cannot speak any Chinese language, especially if they did not communicate in said languages much at home. The Go sisters, for instance, all have Filipino as their first language due to childhood interaction with their household help. It’s likely that Richelle misunderstood the reason behind her family’s animosity towards her. She thinks it’s because her Fukienese isn’t that good, but for many families with more than three generations of immigrants, fluency in a Chinese language is understandably quite rare.
The reason Richelle’s family consider her problematic is that, well, she is. She disrespects her elders, hangs out with the wrong crowd, gets into legal trouble, doesn’t help out in the family, and generally lives her life selfishly. Language isn’t even on the radar, it’s just easier to use that to mask all the obvious reasons.
The Great Wall is fueled by racism: Myth
Not this one.
This one.
The Great Wall is the metaphorical strictly-imposed limitation on the ethnicity of a Chinese person’s romantic partners. Specifically, “Chinese women for Chinese men,” as Mano Po clearly states. Richelle and Linda both experienced flak for being in relationships with Filipino men. In recent years, non-Chinese wishing to date people of Chinese descent have complained about getting their hopes dashed by an impassable Great Wall. This bitterness and the fact that the reasons behind it are never really explained are perhaps the reasons why many people, including the Chinese youth themselves, see the Great Wall as a racist purification device. The Great Wall resists just a single explanation; it’s a complex cultural phenomenon, but racism is not one of its driving forces.
For one, the Chinese-Filipino diaspora in the Philippines is relatively small, and many families are familiar with other Chinese families. Knowing the family history of romantic partners is of utmost importance for the Chinese, and that simply isn’t possible with a non-Chinese family. This knowledge is crucial because, more often than not, people take after their families. A family of crooks will likely produce crooks, while one of scholars will likely be made up of professionals. It’s to avoid not just conflict but also abuse; sending your child off in marriage to a shady character is highly risky and most unwise. It’s less discrimination and more of caution.
The Chinese are also afraid of acculturation, and really, the centuries-old Chinese culture is often looked down upon for being discriminatory or backward by newer cultures. But it is this same longevity of culture that allows the Chinese culture to have not just a strong foundation backed by thousands of years of wisdom and technological advancement, but flexibility and fluidity in the face of change. The Chinese culture evolves fast, and it evolves well, but certain valuable traits stay forever. The pursuit of knowledge, for instance, is constant, but its expression in the Chinese peoples evolves as education changes. The sense of duty to family, the willingness to delay gratification, the value of planning…these are things that built a civilization, and these are things the Chinese cannot afford to lose, especially in places that do not put as much importance into these values.
The Great Wall is by no means an end-all be-all ultimatum. Many don’t have it; I, for instance, have no such requirement. Richelle was allowed to marry Rafael because the Go family learned they could trust him. Vera understandably insinuated he was a gold digger at first; Filipino cops are known for not just bribery, but also for actually being the perpetrators of crimes, or at least being in on them. And yes, like it or not, there are indeed instances of marrying into Chinese families for money. Vera would rather be safe in a generalization than give anyone the benefit of the doubt, but Rafael proves to be an honest man without any intent to cash in on some good old inheritance. In the end, the Great Wall is not fueled by racism but by some suspicion stemming from a lack of knowledge of the individual in question.
Chinese-Filipinos consider themselves more Chinese than Filipino: Myth
Last semester, I performed an ethnographic study of Chinese-Filipino students in my university. All of them said they call themselves Chinese-Filipino, even to foreigners, and all of them consider themselves Filipino. Again, when it comes to identity, there is no more x than y, nor is there a half-half; the liminality of identity allows a kind of superposition of existence. Cultures are exchanged, not erased, and this allows identities to develop, grow, and change in beautiful ways.
After seeing all the heroes of Chinese blood who fought for and served the country, past and present, it’s impossible to say Chinese-Filipinos don’t see themselves as fully Filipino. We are Filipino, and despite current political tensions between the Philippines and China, we will always be Filipino. The question now is: do you accept our identity?
Images from TFC, Colourbox, Esquire Philippines, worldatlas.com, ChinesePod
5 things that made me fall in love with Slumdog Millionaire
It is written…that Slumdog Millionaire is one of my all-time favorite movies. Although it’s a British production, I have a soft spot in my heart for Indian and Indian-inspired cinema, and while Slumdog Millionaire raised some eyebrows due to its depiction of the lower class in India, and I too found it rather problematic in its etic romanticization of real pressing issues in India, I personally feel its overarching narrative captures the concept of life as a journey guided by destiny. From the bottom of my heart, I present five things that made me fall in love with Slumdog Millionaire.
Salim and the Complexity of Man
Salim’s character is beautifully complex in an undeniably tragic way. People deal with pain typically in one of two ways–by spreading the pain to others, or by ensuring no one else experiences what they went through. While Jamal clearly went for the second route, Salim is interesting in that he went both ways. Older children typically have a harder time dealing with loss or a traumatic event due to the extent of their maturity and their responsibility to care for their siblings. Having to take the lead, Salim would understandably do what is necessary to ensure their survival, and due to their embroilment with gangs, Salim would almost definitely spiral into violence. This would definitely corrupt his character. But now and again, his humanity shines through, and his yoyo molarity ends with an astounding display of remorse and sacrifice. While it doesn’t fully justify his selfish actions, it does show the moral conflict within himself since his first crime. Society failed Salim, but in the end Salim chose not to fail himself and his family.
Destiny and the Individual
Destiny is not just fate; it’s the culmination of all that makes you you up to this point in time. Destiny is dynamic and changes as you live your life. Jamal’s destiny was not to win Who Wants to be a Millionaire; his destiny was everything that had happened in his life up to that point, especially his pain and how he became the person he is now because of it all. His destiny allowed him to win. “It is written” not that Jamal would win, but that he would build himself up on the suffering in his life.
Jai Ho and the Nature of Life
I cannot express how much I love dance sequences in Indian movies, and even in a foreign production, Slumdog Millionaire’s ending song Jai Ho has its own magic that really brings the film together. I have an intense hatred for the Pussycat Dolls version of Jai Ho for essentially ruining the whole message of the song (and for shamelessly pronouncing it as “jey hoe”). The fact that it’s the more popular version (at least where I live) makes matters worse. But A.R. Rahman’s Jai Ho is a message of hope and a celebration of life and pain.
Bit by bit, I have lost my life, in faith
I’ve passed this night dancing on coals
I blew away the sleep that was in my eyes
I counted the stars till my finger burned
Come, come my Life, under the canopy
Come under the blue brocade sky!
It’s poetic and jubilant in ways the English language just can’t really do justice. Jai Ho places joy and pain under one roof, as they are inseparable parts of life, but sees suffering not as a setback but as a cultivator of hope.
Arvind and Acceptance
Blind beggar Arvind is perhaps my favorite minor character. His maturity and ability to accept tragedy are admirable, and his outlook on fortune serves as a lesson to us who tend to berate or shame those in better positions than us. Unwarranted privilege-shaming is as rampant as ever and does more harm than good; half the time, it’s just thinly-veiled ad hominem, wherein the privileged doesn’t even have a chance to explain their side before we pounce on them and claim that they don’t understand, they’ll never understand, and that they’re part of the problem. Really, unless they’re the 1%, they’re likely entangled in the same flawed system as well, and that’s the real problem. It’s difficult to respect someone we feel doesn’t deserve their luck, but luck doesn’t make them any less insightful, any less understanding, and any less human. If a child can come to terms with it so quickly, it’d be a shame if we couldn’t.
The Question of Knowledge
It could be the ingrained residues of caste psychology, or perhaps just the tendency of societies to stratify people by profession, but in an incredibly true-to-life depiction, Jamal is repeatedly treated as little more than dirt throughout the film. Clearly the most blatant crime is the inspector’s immediate conclusion that he had cheated, saying that experts and professionals alike have never gotten that far in the game show.
Here’s the thing: Who Wants to be a Millionaire is an all-around trivia game, not requiring any kind of expertise or understanding of concepts. And yet, simply for being a slum boy, Jamal’s winning streak is seen as an actual impossibility. This begs the question: do we, as a society, deem the poor unfit for any kind of intelligence? Have we gotten to the point where we see formal education as the only possible way to know things?
In this way, we sell ourselves short as a species. Human minds are far more sophisticated than we give ourselves credit for. Formal education is valuable precisely because it allows us to understand things from a conceptual, theoretical point, and this kind of fundamental comprehension of knowledge is the key to applying theory to human creation. However, this does not mean that those without access to education have no ability to think; to equate factual knowledge to human intelligence or an understanding of concepts to human comprehension is a ridiculous notion. Human intelligence is a spectrum, most of it immeasurable and transformed by the lives we live more so than anything else. As humans, we are thinking beings; we are constantly studying, processing information, and basing our response on whatever we know. To remove intelligence from the image of a man is to remove their very humanity, and if we think we can do this to the less fortunate, than we are the ones with so much to learn.
Slumdog Millionaire is beautiful because it asks the real questions and builds its narrative around them. Why is life suffering? What is destiny? What does it mean to be human in a fundamentally limiting society? What is knowledge, and what is intelligence? It’s a polished, well-thought out movie that deals with the human as an individual and as a part of society, which is something that many narratives revolving around social commentary tend to leave out in favor of strong political stances. Slumdog Millionaire is, at its core, a celebration of the human, and that’s why I love it.
She’s a Boy I Knew and how demarcations do more harm than good
When Gwen Haworth came out as a trans female lesbian to her family and friends, her confession was met with shock, but no real opposition. Her wife Malgosia was more concerned over the fact Gwen hid this important part of her identity from her for so long, but eventually understood and helped her get through the transition. Gwen’s parents had quite the conservative background, growing up religious in a time that didn’t have the current ideas of gender and sexuality we do now, so they at first were understandably confused and afraid, thinking it was something they could have prevented or should have seen, fearing for her life and safety (with good reason), but when they understood what it all meant, they were much more accepting and supportive than expected, forcing themselves to get used to using Gwen instead of her dead name Steve.
What allowed Gwen to transition and live her life as her true self is what allowed everyone to not only accept but truly love her not for what she was but who she is: an understanding that identity is a spectrum, and that to be human is not to be a specific point in that range but a kind of sub-spectrum of our own. We are too complex to be labelled as just one thing; there aren’t enough words in any language to describe any one individual. The acceptance of gender as a spectrum is a new idea, but it is psychologically and biologically backed, and people are starting to truly understand who they are and where they fit in all this.
This idea of identity as a spectrum extends beyond gender, too. She’s a Boy I Knew is a movie that delves into the concept of identity as a spectrum and fully embraces the validity and beauty of not fitting into the standard or expectation, a fluidity that is central to our being human yet so often frowned upon. Here are some aspects of identity that should never be dichotomized or demarcated.
Abilities
Oftentimes, we associate certain jobs to certain personalities, and thus cannot imagine people simultaneously having two occupations with clashing “characters”. But humans are complex creatures with multifaceted psyches, and part of the innate creativity of man is that all of us can do multiple things well. That’s because all disciplines and pursuits are interconnected and overlapped, and our minds aren’t segmented but meshed together in a similar way. Why is the idea of a scientist-model or doctor-illustrator or programmer/dancer so jarring, when all of these are simply different forms of the same human creativity? There’s no reason a person can’t do more than one thing. The concept of division of labor, originally a means to allow the growth of a society in all aspects from the economic and political to the artistic and scientific, has become a limiting force on a world of systems and connectivity. There’s more than enough people in the world for us all to do more than one thing and still have the productivity we need to progress. I’d argue that removing the idealization of specialization would in fact advance societies faster and more permanently, while allowing for individual self-actualization.
Intelligence and Creativity
The US seems to really, really love the concept of the IQ (Intelligence Quotient), and having a low IQ immediately brands someone as stupid. But while the IQ measures certain aspects of intelligence, like picking up context or observing patterns, it can’t measure much else, especially not creativity, which is in itself the culmination of intelligence. Every now and then news pops up of some kid having a higher IQ than Einstein’s, but it doesn’t mean they can do what he did, because Einstein’s genius is not a measurable kind of intelligence.
Intelligence comes in many forms–creativity, artistry, imagination, talent, perception, wit, insight, understanding, reasoning–all of which blend and melt into each other to form the complex workings of the human mind. It inherently cannot be measured. To treat technical intelligence as incompatible with artistic ability stems from a severe misunderstanding of what intelligence is. Some perfectly intelligent individuals seem to have no place in the world because society is an amorphous system haphazardly divided into rigid shapes that isn’t flexible enough for the human mind. Do away with the IQ, the high school tracks, the right-brain-left-brain hypothesis, and I guarantee the freedom of thought will advance societies faster than ever.
Gender Roles
Aside from gender itself, gender roles are infinitely fluid and really can easily be taken out of the social paradigm without much negative effect. In fact, they tend to be harmful when taken too seriously, to the point where biological sex somehow becomes a predetermining factor for hobbies, interests, and occupations. Gender roles extend to personality as well; males and females are not biologically different enough to have a great personality difference, so any observable difference in the population probably comes from societal norms and not from hormones and genes. To address gender roles as a fluid spectrum allows an equalization of genders in any discipline, which in a practical sense increases productivity and efficiency. It also is the key to a healthy work-life balance for partners in a marriage or relationship, since both help around the house and take care of children as well as pursue their individual careers. It also prevents any one gender from taking advantage of individuals of minority or socially repressed genders. Women hold up half the sky, so give them the tools to do it.
Disciplines
My biochemistry professor once told me that just a few decades ago, it was unheard of to teach physics topics in a chemistry class, or vice versa. The reductionist method was just recently evolved into systems biology, a holistic approach to studying biology as an interaction of parts. As more and more discoveries are made, it’s impossible to deny the natural interconnectedness of things. Now, it’s paramount to relate various fields to each other to truly understand a certain concept or idea. The atom cannot be fully understood without an idea of quantum physics and an appreciation of how these building blocks make up life.
Philosophy majors get a lot of flak, but philosophy is where all sciences are born, and where they all lead back to in the end. Theoretical physics is beginning to question the existence of God and the nature of the universe, anthropology began as an outside description of tribal peoples but ends as a question of what it means to be human, and chemistry has gone from understanding the natural world to trying to change it in marvelous ways that benefit humanity. Creativity comes in so many forms, from visual arts, performing arts, natural sciences, engineering, philosophy, social sciences, and the like, but they all are fields fueled by the same energy of the human mind, and so to separate them from each other would be to sell ourselves short. Everything ever discovered, imagined, and invented–the light bulb, the rocket, the theory of everything, the structure of DNA–is as artistic as it is scientific.
Identity
It is a liberating feeling to see yourself as a spectrum, to stop focusing on the labels given to you and start reinventing yourself as the person you really are. Make the most of all the abilities you have, and study the world as a system and not a set of points. Whatever you make is the product of everything that you are. Humans are too complex for just one of anything, after all, so just do it all.
Images from popoptiq.com, fandor.com, ParentMap.com, edX.org, amust.com.au, careerconnections.nj.gov, abia-state-uni.net
Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmare) and how the American Dream lied to us
(Note: in this blog post, America is used synonymously with the United States of America. “West” is used to describe Western cultures, which would include the US and certain parts of Western Europe.)
I was born at the tail end of the American Dream, in the late 90s. Even until now, the West is the dream of so many people from developing nations, the Philippines included. But the American Dream is a perfumed nightmare, one that the world is only now starting to wake up from.
The awakening came early for Kidlat Tahimik, jeepney driver of Balian, Laguna, whose love of the American Space Program, the Apollo Moon Landing, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (for whom he started a fan club), and all things space, bloomed into a love of America as a whole. He learned about all of these through radio program the Voice of America, not unlike the sensationalized promotion of the US in today’s media. Too many of us lie to ourselves, mistaking our love for American music, American pop culture, American technology, American business, American this and that as a love for America as a whole. This is how the Dream always starts
Kidlat meets a foreigner who offers to bring him to the States with a year-long stopover in Paris, where he has a chewing gum business. Excited, Kidlat agrees, and upon arrival immediately comes to admire the advancement of technology and infrastructure in the developed world, a kind of progress he half-enviously wishes his home country could have as well. The same sentiments are still very present in the Philippines today. But there is a turning point; he becomes disillusioned in progress when he sees how the common man is left in the dust when construction of supermarket Centre George Pompidou begins smoking out street vendors and small marketplaces, with whom Kidlat made friends with. To realize the sacrifices of blind progress is to understand the fallacy of freedom in the West.
Progress and development naturally happen as technology advances, populations grow, and demands increase. There really is no stopping progress, and really, there’s nothing wrong with it inherently, because progress drives progress. It advances science, the arts, the economy, and society as a whole. Humanity depends on it. But in many parts of the West, where capitalism is at its purest, there is a kind of mentality driven only by profit that benefits only a small handful of bigwigs, without promoting any kind of scientific, artistic, or societal development. To perpetuate the American Dream is to lie to the world in order to attract foreign talent and intelligence that can boost profits for American corporations. Before they left, the foreigner asked Kidlat why he loves the States so much, to which he replied, “In America, I could become an astronaut. Here, I am just a jeepney driver.” The illusion of freedom is one perpetuated by the West for so, so long, it’s a lie almost impossible to distinguish from truth. The United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave, is one of the most cowardly countries in the world, without any freedom to speak of other than the right to misinformation and manipulation. It was a nation founded by invasion and murder, whose wealth came from colonization and exploitation of countries around the world that were actually more developed than itself. And now that they have turned to neocolonialism through economic and political control, it’s become clearer than ever that the association of freedom with the US is really just painful irony.
America isn’t even free for Americans. In the States, there is an ungodly number of public shootings, one for almost every day this year alone, but somehow, the lives of innocents don’t even come close to the right to purchase and possess firearms without any kind of license. Gun control should have been established decades ago. The prices of medicine and healthcare are so high that people actually avoid getting treatment for anything. The education system is run on money, with ridiculously underpaid teachers who have to work multiple jobs and shell out their own money for classroom supplies and a crippling student loan crisis unheard of anywhere else in the world. And don’t even think for a second that racism in America is dead; it is alive now more than ever, with hate crimes left unpunished and murders swept under the rug. Migrant children are imprisoned in what they call detention centers, which is little more than a euphemism for jails. How can a country that violates its own citizens’ right to life, education, and health, a country with no equality to speak of, be free?
As the now disillusioned but wiser Kidlat’s imagined chimney-rocket zooms off into the sky, it is clear he had not stopped dreaming, but simply moved his dreams back home, back to himself, to the world he belonged to. There is a difference in dreams based on the promises of others (like the American Dream) and the dreams we make for ourselves. I gained a newfound appreciation for dreaming our own dreams. Daydreamers are automatically branded useless, but really there those of us who learned to dream and work at the same time. I’m 21, college student, still as avid a daydreamer as ever, struggling to find ways to realize my dreams in a harsh world. But I have too many dreams, most of which are unrealistic; there’s little chance I could make all of them happen in the short life I have. Dreams, attainable or not, are a source of hope, some kind of self-made happiness. Our dreams and our realities can coexist even when they aren’t anything alike. And at the lowest points in our lives, retreating into dreams is perhaps the only way to stay sane, to live for something when all seems lost. Never be afraid to dream your own dreams, achievable or otherwise, because those are real to you. Those aren’t lies. Those aren’t nightmares.
Kidlat Tahimik’s “Perfumed Nightmare” explores the dangers of pure profit-driven capitalism, neocolonialism, and neoimperialism, while showing how dreamers can be rooted in reality and live life to the fullest even when things don’t go as planned. Just as daydreaming sets our sights on things important to us, there’s nothing wrong with chasing dreams in a foreign land, but we should always be mindful that these dreams are for us, and not for any foreign country. These dreams aren’t promises or certainties; if anything, to achieve so-called success, we must be willing to become little more than small cogs in the machine. Whether success comes to those who go West isn’t the point; some of us are destined to stay, and others to go. The point is that the American Dream is a nightmare that instead of falling into we should wake up from, and that freedom and happiness are achieved despite it, not because of it.
Sources:
Mass Shootings in 2019. Gun Violence Archive. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
Prasad, R. (March 14 2019). The human cost of insulin in America. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47491964
Berman, J. (June 28 2019). Here’s why America’s $1.5 trillion student-loan crisis has spiralled out of control. MarketWatch. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-financial-education-wont-solve-the-15-trillion-student-loan-crisis-2019-06-27
Reilly, K. (September 13 2018). Exactly how teachers came to be so underpaid in America. TIme. https://time.com/longform/teaching-in-america/
FBI: Spike in US hate crimes for third year in a row. (November 13 2018). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46189391
2017 Hate Crime Statistics. United States Department of Justice. https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/hate-crime-statistics
Some images of Perfumed Nightmare from filmforum.org, berlinale.de, imdb.com, redcat.org, and other Tumblr blogs.
A deeper look at what Rosebud meant to Charles Foster Kane
Citizen Kane went down in history as one of the greatest films ever made, with its title made synonymous to something of amazing quality. Aside from its cinematographic innovations, it mastered the art of storytelling with an almost poetic kind of narrative that started and ended with one little wooden sled, the elusive Rosebud.
But why a sled? What was Rosebud to a man who had it all, and at the same time, had nothing?
For starters, Rosebud was Kane’s only friend.
Underneath the guise of a confident bigshot lies little more than a scared boy. Kane, the quintessential manchild, was blinded by an intense desire for love from other people and could thus never see eye to eye with anyone. His idea of love is a kind of return with investment, a kind of reward system, whittled down to “if I show I love them, then they’ll love me forever.” All the decisions in his life revolved around an aching need for a warped version of the human connection he missed out on as a child.
And just like a child, his dreams tend to balloon beyond reality; he yearns to be ruler of an empire all on his own, to always be in control. Thus, not only does he use the Inquirer to further his ambitions to influence the general public, not only does he build the perfect personal yet wasteful playhouse in the form of Xanadu, but he dominates in all his relationships as well, forcing Leland to play second fiddle to his ambitions, cheating on his wife, and building Susan a life dictated by himself and forcing her into it, without giving her a chance to live in it for herself.
Because Kane is fundamentally unable to forge meaningful relations with people, and those he considers friends were not really friends but tools and love banks, he escapes into objects. And yet, even among those, he cannot form any kind of lasting attachment to any of his marble statues and golden treasures. His first, last, and only friend was Rosebud, a friend from a simpler time, when he was a child both in mind and body.
And so his friendship with Rosebud became his basis for all relationships in the future; he would take control, they would follow, and give him his love back as they went along. Of course, humans aren’t planks of wood, and this worked on no one. To the world, he was a powerful tycoon. To the media, he was an emperor. To the people, he was deserving of awe and wonder. To those close to him, he was always the boss, but he was never a friend.
Rosebud was Kane’s last stand against a life that turned sour. Kane literally used Rosebud to drive Thatcher away. In effect, it was the thing he put between his life now and his life with Thatcher. Of course, Kane wasn’t likely aware of this, but subconsciously, he saw Rosebud not only as the trademark of his better, simpler days but the fork in the road that, in his youth, he once thought turned out well, but towards the end of his life realized was a life of lost opportunities. Would he have been happier as a simple country boy? Would he have made real connections with people? Would he have friends? Perhaps he unwittingly sees Rosebud as the only one who came to his defense against a life he was forced into. Whenever he holds his snow globe, he remembers winters spent with his best friend, and his memories lead him to Rosebud and that fateful day.
Rosebud was Kane’s only family. Kane’s father was abusive, and his mother was unnaturally cold towards him, even as he left their home forever. Winter wasn’t always around, so Kane spent most of his young years lonely and distant. Perhaps it’s less that he was robbed of a childhood, and more that he never knew what childhood was. He existed on the edge, not really loved nor looked after, perhaps with only winter to look forward to. He built his own world, even lonelier than before. And in the winter of his life he saw how empty it was, and that he only ever experienced true happiness playing with Rosebud in the snow.
Citizen Kane’s legendary plot twist is one that cannot be overanalyzed, yet can never be analyzed enough. But all it points to is a lonely child living as a man until the end, when he abandons the world and longs for his home inside a snow globe.
Serbis and how Philippine law and culture betray the family
“Why are you fighting? You’re siblings!”
Where would you expect to hear a question like this? Perhaps from an exasperated mother just trying her best? From a concerned uncle at a partially forced family gathering?
In the Philippines, you hear this question in court from judges and lawyers trying to justify a crime against family by searching for imaginary moral ties in blood relations. In the Philippines, crimes committed by siblings against each other are scoffed at and treated as little more than a kindergarten squabble, no matter the crime. Did your sibling smash your car on purpose? Steal money from the family corporation? Forge your father’s will? Doesn’t matter, in the Philippines not even the highest court officials can fathom the reality of a family feud. You’re gonna have to search real hard for a lawyer who takes your case seriously, and if you’re a parent wronged by your child, you can forget about justice altogether. For some reason, people here believe that being related by blood immediately necessitates some kind of undying love. News flash: it doesn’t.
The law speaks for itself. Article 332 of the Revised Penal Code states:
No criminal liability, but only civil liability shall result from the commission of the crime of theft, swindling, or malicious mischief committed or caused mutually by the following persons:
1.Spouses, ascendants and descendants, or relatives by affinity in the same line;
2.The widowed spouse with respect to the property which belonged to the deceased spouse before the same shall have passed into the possession of another; and
3.Brothers and sisters and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, if living together.
As Filipino children, we are taught that having “close family ties” is highly upheld and valued in our culture, something to be proud of, if you will. But growing up in this country, I soon realized that this was a cover-up to hide dysfunction beneath the guise of a good Christian family with the end goal of appearing pleasing to the eyes of society. But it’s always the people closest to you that hurt you.
Beneath the hurried blowjobs at the back of a rundown movie theater, Brillante Mendoza’s Serbis is a testament to how Filipino culture and laws betray the family instead of protecting it. This is a point merely glossed over by reviewers, but I come from a shaky family myself, and I know what I’m talking about. Matriarch Nanay Flor is embroiled in a bigamy case against her husband Edwin, who at the time of this film has a whole other set of children with a younger woman. Flor’s own children Nayda, who helps run the theater, Jerome, who spends way too much time with his father’s other family, and Danny, a mechanical engineer who just died, are dead set on making sure their father doesn’t go to jail (for only 4 years and 2 months maximum, I might add), but their reasons are far from noble.
Nayda is perhaps the most sincere about not wanting her father behind bars. She shares these feelings with her mother, who sternly tells her, “your father is not above the law”. And she’s right. He has every reason to go to jail; bigamy is highly illegal in the Philippines and it’s quite easy to prove if you have the right documents. Flor has confidence in her lawyer and the judge, but loses the case anyway because, guess what, Jerome testifies against her. Clearly, the judge has also been bribed, as he changes his tune from support for Flor to immediately acquitting Edwin, guilty of a crime as serious and perjurious as bigamy, in just one hearing, and with only one supporting testimony.
Jerome later explains that he and his siblings agreed that proving his father was guilty of bigamy would be akin to legitimizing his children with his other wife, meaning they would also inherit his assets upon death. First of all, Jerome clearly is out to get money from his father while he is still alive, or else he wouldn’t be going to Jollibee with his father’s second family and spending an ungodly amount of time with the people who ruined his mother’s life. Second, this reasoning is absolute bullshit; under Philippine law, Edwin’s illegitimate children immediately gain the equivalent of half the shares given to a legitimate child regardless of whether Edwin is proven guilty of bigamy or not. Yes, ours is a country that protects children out of wedlock or illegal unions for some bizarre reason (perhaps because many of our senators are bastards themselves). Jerome’s misunderstanding of the law needlessly ended Nanay Flor’s life right then and there; she cannot divorce Edwin, because divorce is illegal in the Philippines (no joke, it’s just us and the Vatican left with a divorce ban). She intended to use bigamy as grounds for legal separation, which of course by law means that they are still married, but Flor’s goal was not money but justice. She was irrevocably hurt by Edwin’s actions, as she is now left trying to save a rundown theater from shutting down while at the same time taking care of her huge extended family: her daughter Nayda, son-in law Lando, grandson Jonas, adopted daughter Jewel, nephews Ronald and Alan, and now Alan’s impregnated girlfriend Merly, whose baby will be yet another mouth to feed, as abortion is also illegal in the Philippines.
Alan decides to leave the family to live with Merly instead of marrying her. Live-in couples are commonplace here. But this comes with its own complications: for one, live-in couples are not married and thus not protected by any marriage laws. Alan or Merly can just up and leave the other to take care of their child without any consequence. On the other hand, marriage is a life sentence because divorce is illegal, and grounds for annulment are few. The process of annulment is lengthy and highly expensive as well. In the end, thousands of broken Filipino families are forced to stay together and prevented from a second chance at life by the greed of an all too powerful Church and a weak government with incompetent lawmakers. Abusive marriages and teenage mothers are all too common here.
Flor is old. She wants little more than justice for herself and security for her family. She cares little about herself and tries her best to make things work for her family. But the laws and the culture of the Philippines prevent her from doing so, banning her to live the rest of her days in bitter regret. Merly, not even an adult, will have to shoulder the responsibility of raising a child all on her own as Alan will have to find a job. God knows if she can continue to go to school. Their lives ends here. There is no second chance for Flor or Merly or for anyone else in this godforsaken country.
I have met hundreds of Flors and Merlys in my 21 years of living here. They mask the sadness in their eyes with forced smiles so that people don’t suspect, don’t talk, don’t whisper among themselves. Society hides their problems behind Sunday masses and a stream of cheaply-produced entertainment on TV full of even more dysfunctional families.
The Philippines is a country that bans second chances for everyone but the criminals.
Before you sucker punch the self-righteous asshole talking about how he doesn’t drink or do drugs because he’s “high on life”, ask him what that really means.
For now, let’s not focus on the inherent nature of vice as a health and safety hazard to both the users and the people around them. The general disdain for drugs, booze, and consensual (but way too frequent, and often unprotected) sex stems mostly from concerns of endangering oneself and others, it’s true. Addictive, they can quickly turn from recreation to addiction. But a lot of us also question the authenticity of the chemical happiness that people engage in vice for–that “high”, if you will. Most would say it is a fake, fleeting joy from purely carnal pleasures, the kind of temporary delight that leaves a gaping emptiness when the brain starts its molecular cleanup after a night of fun. Compared to the happiness of a personal triumph, of a life achievement, of falling in love, or of career success, it simply doesn’t hold a candle to that kind of fulfillment. But really, are they any different? Is the dichotomy of happiness as clear-cut as we think?
It sounds like a stupid question; of course they’re different. But all stupid questions are worth asking twice. To really answer this, let’s take a look at erotic drama film Y Tu Mamá También, highly controversial due to its excessive and unhindered display of sex and drugs, but one hiding a great deal of wisdom beneath the cigarette smoke and cheap weed. Luisa, an Española who feels trapped in a marriage with an accomplished but condescending and insecure academic named Jano, does not belong in his world of faux-intellectual discourse and thinks of leaving. She learns of his infidelity and decides to go with Julio and his partner-in-vice Tenoch to a beach dubbed Boca del Cielo, a made-up place they had offered to bring her to when they first met. What ensues is a road trip fueled by stories told in between puffs of smoke and swigs of beer, with some comfort sex littered along the way. As fate would have it, there is, in fact, a beach named Boca del Cielo, and the three discover it almost by accident. Their trip culminates in a drink, a dance, and perhaps one of the most famous threesomes ever shown on screen. Luisa stays behind to explore the surrounding beaches, the boys return home and drift apart, and at the end it is revealed that Luisa dies a few months later from a completely metastasized cancer she had known about the entire time.
It suddenly becomes clear that in the last days of her young life, a life she had lived for others but never for herself, all she wanted was to be free to live the way she wanted: traveling, exploring, seeing the world. Yet Luisa, a woman with an incredible sex drive and alcohol tolerance, would in her times of sorrow engage in vice to ease the pain, and in her times of joy do the same to augment her good vibe. Her happiest conversation with the boys was by far the most drunken one, her most intimate interaction with them by far the most sexual.
For Luisa, sex, smoking, and alcohol opened her up to a world of freedom and brought her to a place of true happiness before her untimely death. Luisa, who used to drink to forget, later would drink to remember; the chemical stimulation from a night of drinking with friends was not a separate feeling altogether from the kind of happiness she felt when exploring nearby beaches.
Most importantly, Luisa’s fulfillment came from freedom, living in the now, doing what she feels like. “Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea.” Unstable, ever-changing, unpredictable, an unstructured but free life. Vice helped release her from inhibition, blurring the painful parts of her reality but not beyond recognition; it was a kind of freedom in itself that did not remove her from the truth of her situation yet helped her deal with it before the end. In essence, to Tenoch and Julio, drugs and sex were just chemical highs, and so they gained no fulfillment from them; their lives up to that point had no direction, so vice put their responsibilities, dreams, and duties on hold, and thus turned them into quintessential bums, in effect.
But Luisa’s attitude towards sex, drugs, and alcohol was different; she knew what she wanted in life, and had this opportunity to seize it. They were not an escape or a quick fix but a source of comfort and good memories, to be shared with other free spirits like herself. Tenoch and Julio were the dying Luisa’s angels, first reintroducing to her the freedom of vice, then bringing her to a place of happiness, the Mouth of Heaven, and dropping her off there. Now it is they who must find their lives.
Perhaps the difference in the chemical happiness of vice and the spiritual happiness of achieving dreams lies in the current state of our lives, and maybe the dichotomy isn’t as black-and-white as it seems. Sex for sex and sex for love are so disparate, and yet they’re both sex. We are embodied souls, such that our minds are altered by our physical state, so out carnal pleasures and joys in life can and do overlap, or they can be worlds apart, depending on how we live and interact as humans.
After all, there’s only joy at the bottom of the shotglass if there’s something, or someone, to toast to.
Splices of film piling up by the projector contained little Toto’s dreams, a treasure hoard secreted away in the gilded shrine that was Cinema Paradiso. He had learned to operate the machines day in and day out through the years of his young life and became the master of paradise in Giancaldo, a small town destitute not only of entertainment but also of any real hope for the future.
And then, there he was; all of a sudden he had grown into an adult, and a legendary filmmaker. From spliced frames to bigger and bigger screens, sounding too much like an inspirational graduation speech given by some big shot who “made it” in life. But Cinema Paradiso is less a journey of chasing dreams and more of the sacrifices of any small-town soul whose destiny has grown too large for little Sicilian towns. It is a journey of a man leaving Eden and writing his own new testament, with only a encompassing passion bridging his humble past life to his celebrated present.
“There’s nothing for me back home”. Why don’t people admit this enough? Perhaps leaving the motherland is too painful, too much like betrayal or abandonment, too risky, or too expensive. People scoff at the idea and talk themselves into fear and apathy. Perhaps we lie too much to our children when we promise them that lives can be fulfilling when played out in the comfort of home. Or even worse, perhaps we do not even explain what a fulfilling life is supposed to be at all.
But it’s time we cut the bullshit; we live in a world of many, many Giancaldos with a tiny handful of Romes scattered about. Humanity’s greatest, noblest pursuits have flourished in only a few places and in the hands of only a few people, and it is a natural consequence of the magnetic movements of people, money, and ideas. Just like early river civilizations were always the most prosperous, the cultural and economic capitals of the world–usually only one or two per country at any given time–have exciting, freely developing, quickly evolving industries in the arts and sciences. If you’re not there, to the rest of the world, you’re nowhere. You can make the most beautiful things from the back of a garden shed but in a global society there is value in sharing just as there is in creating. How happy will you be knowing that your magnum opus is just gathering dust inside a box in your closet? We are all capable of degrees of greatness, but how fulfilling can it possibly be when our work impacts none?
Leaving is not abandonment, wherein others need you, and you vanish. There is value in leaving for those who are held back, who feel they can do more, be more, somewhere else, and whose loved ones, if any, can take care of themselves and live full lives even without them.
No movie I have ever watched was anywhere near as unwavering about this than Cinema Paradiso. Old man Alfredo, a father to Toto in every sense except biological, had taken every step necessary to ensure he leaves without looking back.
Every. Step. Necessary.
Giancaldo is destined to never change, except for the worse; where people die as they lived, never happier; where there is no place, time, or loose change for dreams, and paradise steadily falls into decay. Toto, already so much more exposed to the world outside, would never have a place there, nor find “his people”. Like Sodom, Giancaldo was cursed, and looking back meant death. Lot’s wife looked back to Sodom and was punished, for deep inside she perhaps longed for the comfort of stagnancy and simple pleasures. But that is not what life is about.
Heartbroken at first, both Toto’s mother and his old love Elena came to understand that he was born to create something beautiful that the world would fall in love with.
In this way, he left but did not abandon them, for he gave them something wonderful in exchange for his physical absence.
It isn’t like this for everyone. Some circumstances prevent others from leaving. Some, the George Baileys of the world, find that they can’t leave, but come to realize that they do have a life at home, and a wonderful one at that. But we should not brand those like Toto, who can and do leave, as turning their back on home and country. On the contrary, Toto’s leaving was an act of gratitude to those who gave him all he had, to his mother who raised him on her own, to his town that showed him paradise and happily let him rule it, to Elena who gave him an understanding of love he no doubt used in his films, and to Alfredo, who gave him his life and dreams. To stay would have been a disservice to them all.
Cinema Paradiso is a story of a paradise lost, and a new one forged by the hands of fate and of men. Perhaps it had to be that way. Perhaps Eden was meant to be left behind so that man could find his own way in the world.
