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KRITIKA KULTURA 19, AUGUST 2012
INTERNATIONAL BOARD OF EDITORS
GUEST EDITOR
Forum Kritika: A Closer Look at
Manila by Night
Jan Baetens
Cultural Studies Institute
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Joel David
Inha University, South Korea
EDITORIAL STAFF
Maria Luisa F. Torres Reyes
Editor-in-Chief
mreyes@ateneo.edu
Vincenz Serrano
Senior Associate Editor
vserrano@ateneo.edu
Oscar V. Campomanes
Editor (Review Essays)
ocampomanes@ateneo.edu
Ma. Soccoro Q. Perez
Editor (Monograph Series)
maperez@ateneo.edu
Mark Anthony Cayanan
Associate Editor (Literary Section)
mcayanan@gmail.com
Louie Jon A. Sanchez
Associate Editor (Communications)
louiejonasanchez@gmail.com
Michael Denning
Yale University, USA
Faruk
Cultural Studies Center
Gadja Mada University, Indonesia
Regenia Gagnier
University of Exeter, UK
Leela Gandhi
University of Chicago, USA
Inderpal Grewal
Yale University, USA
Peter Horn
University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
Anette Horn
University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
David Lloyd
University of Southern California, USA
Bienvenido Lumbera
National Artist for Literature
Professor Emeritus
University of the Philippines
Rajeev S. Patke
Department of English Language and Literature
National University of Singapore
Ivery del Campo
idelcampo@ateneo.edu
Mayel Martin
kritikakultura_mayel@yahoo.com
Managing Editors
Vicente L. Rafael
University of Washington, USA
Roy Tristan Agustin
Francis Sollano
Carlo Antonio Rivera IV
Pamela Punzalan
Editorial Assistants
Temario Rivera
International Relations
International Christian University, Japan
Vaidehi Ramanathan
Linguistics Department
University of California, Davis
E. San Juan, Jr.
Philippine Cultural Studies Center, USA
Neferti X. M. Tadiar
Columbia University, USA
Antony Tatlow
University of Dublin, Ireland
Table of Contents
Forum Kritika: A Closer Look at Manila by Night
Guest Editor: Joel David
6Introduction
Joel David
14Bernal as Auteur: Primary Biographical Notes
Bayani Santos, Jr.
36Film Plastics in Manila by Night
Joel David
70The Long Take: Passage as Form in the Philippine Film
Patrick D. Flores
90To Conform or Not to Conform, That is the Genderqueer Question:
Re-examining the Lesbian Identity in Bernal’s Manila by Night
Libay Linsangan Cantor
115 Marcos, Brocka, Bernal, City Films, and the Contestation for Imagery of Nation
Rolando B. Tolentino
138 Manila by Night as Thirdspace
Patrick F. Campos
LITERARY SECTION: Manila by Night
166Ishma
Reuel Molina Aguila
English Translation by Marne Kilates
172 Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night
Transcription and Notes by Joel David
English Translation by Alfred A. Yuson
KOLUM KRITIKA
273 Editor’s Introduction
274Kahulugan, Katotohanan, Katwiran: Pagpapakilala sa Semiotika ni
Charles Sanders Peirce
E. San Juan, Jr.
292 Si E. San Juan Bilang “Interpretant”
Virgilio S. Almario
297 Ang Dapat Mabatid ng Planetaryong Filipino: San Juan versus Almario
Charlie Samuya Veric
LITERARY SECTION
313 Excerpts from Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog (Eight Muses of the Fall)
Edgar Calabia Samar
English Translation by Sasha Martinez and Mikael de Lara Co
324 Poems from “The Difference Between Abundance and Grace”
Christine V. Lao
NEW SCHOLARS FORUM
330 Discursive Formations and the Ambivalent Nation in Gina Apostol’s
The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata
Jillian Joyce Ong Tan
349Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera
John Barth’s Death-Defying Art of Writing
Farideh Pourgiv
Mahsa Hashemi
Forum Kritika: A Closer Look at Manila by Night
An Introduction
Joel David
Inha University, South Korea
joeldavid@inha.ac.kr
Forum Editor’s Note
Partial financial support for the project was provided by Inha University, as well as the
authors’ home institutions, specifically Manuel L. Quezon University and the University of
the Philippines (UP ). The Asian Cinema Studies Society provided a venue for reworking early
drafts of these articles, with Julia Lesage and Chuck Kleinhans giving helpful pointers and
encouragement; the authors acknowledge the cooperation of Gina Marchetti and Natalie
Siu-Lam Wong of the University of Hong Kong. The forum editor is grateful to Marilou
Diaz-Abaya and Ricardo Lee for providing additional insights into Pinoy multicharacter
film productions; Violeda A. Umali, Director of the UP Research Dissemination and
Utilization Office, for helping round out a list of reviewers; Theo Pie and Rochit Tañedo for
providing crucial liaison functions; and Melanie Joy C. Garduño and Rowena Raganit for
assisting with earlier data gathering and analyses.
From the several exchanges I had with the authors who contributed to the
current forum, one common response was how Manila by Night, more than three
decades since its completion, has maintained an ability to startle and amuse — not
so much in the original sense that the typically humorless martial-law “interim”
military censors perceived it, but in the more appropriately postmodernist manner
of proving impossible to pin down for a once-and-for-all evaluation. All to the
good, we (as far as I hoped I could speak for everyone) concluded: as the first and
way-overdue intensive single-title inspection in Philippine film scholarship, the
present forum would have performed its historical function by proffering a model
for other future studies to emulate, improve on, even reject if necessary.1
From the beginning, Manila by Night had been fraught with crises of identity.
It was proposed and completed in 1979, the same year that Ishmael Bernal (fig.
1) first devised stylistically similar but structurally simpler exercises for his longterm producer up to that point, Jesse Ejercito. It was submitted in early 1980 to the
Interim Board of Censors for Motion Pictures for a screening permit but was slapped
instead with an outright ban — as rare then as approvals with cuts and deletions
were common. After the Berlin International Film Festival director-general, Moritz
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deHadeln, determined that it was good enough to compete (agreeing with local
and foreign observers that it had the strongest chance to win top prize), Bernal
and Regal Films made representations with First Lady Imelda Marcos, preparing a
print with a voiced-over epilogue that described how the major characters either
were punished or had reformed, but to no avail. DeHadeln issued statements
denouncing the Marcos dictatorship’s hypocrisy regarding its self-proclaimed
benevolent authoritarianism vis-à-vis the reality of its censorship policies. The
film was approved for local release with its title changed (to City After Dark) and a
record-length four-page listing of cuts and deletions.2
Five years later, after the assassination of opposition senator Benigno S. Aquino,
Jr. had the regime desperate for indubitable proof of its democratic credentials, the
government’s film agency, Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, acquired an
uncensored print for an exclusive run at the Manila Film Center, thus containing
not just the integral version’s release but also its profits. Other versions of the film
also appeared in various video formats: an arbitrarily shortened two-hour cut on
Betamax, an integral version missing two scenes (the first sauna-parlor quarrel
scene and the toilet pick-up scene) on VHS , and the epilogue-laced “for Madame’s
eyes only” version (shown during the MFC premiere) on DVD .
The standard cinephile query may be raised at this point: Was there ever a
“director’s cut” of Manila by Night? The closest possible official answer would be
the DVD version — minus the awkwardly inserted and narrated epilogue — which
is the basis of the “script” that appears in the literary section of this journal issue.
(Again, another unstable referent: the movie had no real [shooting] script to speak
of, although the finished product, after being properly transcribed, would of
course yield a Manila by Night screenplay.) The fuller answer to the director’s-cut
question would be the narrative shared by Bernal when he and I were finalizing the
transcription (fig. 2) and I was completing an English-language German subtitler’s
guide (a now-lost transliteration, not meant for publication). He remarked how
he had responded to Moritz deHadeln’s news about the movie’s inclusion in the
Berlinale by offering to recut and rescore the film; he suggested trimming the
portions that critics would later find excessive — the sex scenes as well as the
draggy/druggie bayside frolic. He mentioned that the films of Lino Brocka had been
similarly revised in preparation for their screenings at the Cannes Film Festival; but
to his surprise, deHadeln insisted on screening for the festival audience and judges
“exactly what the Filipino audience will be seeing.”
DeHadeln’s position was admirable, and Bernal acknowledged as much then. Yet
one effect of it is that at present, for better or worse, we have no definitive Manila
by Night version other than the one he had cut for commercial release — before
it was further butchered by local moralists, for whom he had no further regard
beyond utter contempt.
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Figure 1. Standard publicity shot of Ishmael Bernal. (Mowelfund Film Institute Archive,
used with permission)
Six Perspectives
The articles in the forum demonstrate the huge difficulty of determining what
exactly Manila by Night, or even Ishmael Bernal, represents. Bayani Santos, Jr.’s
“Bernal as Auteur” argues that in relation to his public demeanor, Bernal’s familial
persona departed in some ways — deferential, respectful, appreciative of tradition,
selectively conservative even in terms of his leftist inclinations. At the same time it
explains how such a potentially intimidating set of domestic circumstances actually
provided him with an unusually privileged foundation for a career as film auteur:
Bernal was so casually yet excessively gifted because the large clan in which he had
matured (and to which he returned, toward the end of his life) was, almost to a
person, artistically ambitious, unapologetically urbane, socially transgressive, and
willing to accept the financial instabilities that their choices entailed.3
The next article, “Film Plastics in Manila by Night,” attempts to explain why the
movie’s most heavily panned element, its technical surface, deserves a different set
of evaluative measures rather than the standard terms of polish now de rigueur
in film schools all over the world. Although discussions of the movie’s awardworthiness were originally compounded by the release print’s heavily mangled
condition, its losses in the technical categories of the Philippine film critics circle’s
prizes (including, amazingly, for direction4) were regarded as objective aesthetic
judgments then and have persisted to the present. The article tracks Bernal’s
training and continuing interest in ethnographic cinema, and suggests that he had
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Figure 2. First page of the original transcription of Manila by Night, with corrections by
and a note from Ishmael Bernal.
arrived at a “look” for his films during this period via a synthesis of his preference
for narrative complexities (exemplified in the multicharacter format) and his
prescription that the Philippines’ Third Cinema challenge may best be served by
documentary stylistics.
With “The Long Take,” Patrick D. Flores initiates a bravura close reading,
previously unattempted in Philippine film criticism, of a seemingly throwaway
sequence in Manila by Night: the real-time stroll (with corresponding meandering
dialogue) down Misericordia, the seedy red-light street in Manila Chinatown.
Rather than the obsessive shot-by-shot analysis popularized by Raymond Bellour
(cf. The Analysis of Film), the article reconsiders the opposition between montage
and the long take in order to interrogate the possibilities of an apparently useless
device’s effectiveness as textual passage or interval. Similar sequences in other
Philippine productions provide a means of further evaluating what the author
cogently describes as “the ‘political’ as a procedure of truth in time and space.”
In “To Conform or Not to Conform,” Libay Linsangan Cantor performs an
equivalent close reading — of a character this time, rather than of a sequence. In a
movie crammed with all kinds of urban Others, she zeroes in on the Otherest of them
all: a woman, vagrant whenever she shows up onscreen (without even a daytime or
household scene for her to appear in), engaging in the criminalized activity of drug
dealing, cross-dressed all the way down to her underwear, helplessly in love with
another woman — whom she pimps to her clients, and who betrays her in the end.
Even her name, Kano (clipped from “Amerikano”), denotes a liminal existence: as
a rural migrant, materializing from the (now-terminated) US naval base, possibly
one of the so-called “GI [government-issue] babies” fathered by servicemen with
some of the native residents (including sex workers), teasingly described by her
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girlfriend as a fugitive who fled to Manila to avoid getting busted. Cantor inspects
the intersection of the character with the lesbian construct in Philippine society,
with Kano as one of the rare instances of a presence that has been largely invisible
in cultural texts.
Rolando B. Tolentino’s comprehensively titled “Marcos, Brocka, Bernal,
City Films, and the Contestation for Imagery of Nation” takes the collection in
a different direction, away from increasingly detailed formal analyses toward
comparative textual studies, naming all the elements instantaneously for the
readers’ convenience. In the present instance, Bernal is seen to triangulate the
conventional historical narrative of the Marcos couple exploiting popular culture
as their way of demonstrating the absence of authoritarian repression and Lino
Brocka challenging their account by asserting a contrary version of Philippine
reality. Since film was the venue whereby the Marcoses opted to showcase their
claims, Brocka was almost reflexively the go-to person for corrective disclaimers
about the regime, with his 1975 city film, Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag
(Manila: In the Talons of Light), embodying the basic tenets of his anti-dictatorship
politics. Tolentino situates Manila by Night, after configuring it as Bernal’s city
film contribution, in the context of the mortal struggle between the regime and the
progressive artists that Brocka had opted to represent.
In the final article, “Manila by Night as Thirdspace,” Patrick F. Campos takes
a different tack by deploying recent theoretical paradigms on urban spaces,
specifically those of Edward Soja, and finds (perhaps unsurprisingly, in the end)
that Bernal’s film-text accommodates and even enhances the sophisticated terms of
these conceptual updates. The film, Campos asserts at one point, “is a reclamation
of panorama — [similar to the technocrat’s] in its desire for legibility and aesthetic
pleasure…. [Though unlike] the blindness of the walker … the film projects the
vision of a process.” Via the article, Campos re-enacts in scholarly terms the same
process of re-envisionment that Bernal unleashed on film observers in 1980, and
that students of cinema still find themselves grappling with even up to the present.
That Open Ending
Each article creates its own version of Bernal and his film(s), with occasionally
wide-enough divergences that suggest that film and filmmaker might have been
different things to as many people, but were more likely capable of holding
contradictory traits in the same body. Yet half of the pieces dwell on the same
property that made Manila by Night unfinished, in a manner of speaking: an open
ending, hanging with admirable perversity at the close of a text that seemed to
suggest definitive positions and directions (and provoked exactly those responses
in the cultural establishment), as if to caution its evaluators to keep returning to
its previous statements and to reconsider whether any reading can be made with
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finality. Deconstructive methods in criticism and the arts became prevalent in
Philippine popular culture several years later, after the Marcoses had been ousted
by the 1986 people-power uprising. Yet here was a technique, one among several,
that may be seen as serving a similar function.
That may also have been an assurance bequeathed by the movie: that it can
continue engendering productive dialogue, just as it has in the current exercise,
where generally like-minded people (all Filipinos, all scholars, all studying film)
find different messages, values, and intentions in the text and realize that, amid
their strongest convictions, other views that challenge their own also make just
as much sense. Manila by Night has proved difficult for people, Filipinos and
foreigners alike, to hold close to their hearts the way that many other Filipino (and
Third Cinema) films allow. The present forum may or may not change that state of
affairs, but if it makes the film and its effects more comprehensible, then its goal
will have been met.
Notes
1. While I was proofreading my contribution to the first complete draft of the
first anthology of the local critics organization, the editor showed me how one
of the chapters was intended to be a folio on an earlier Ishmael Bernal movie,
Nunal sa Tubig (Mole on the Water), which several members had written on and
argued about in print. The exchanges were highly informed and passionate, but
when the book came out, it contained only the meta-critical report written by
Bienvenido Lumbera. It may be possible, in a future study, to trace how some
of the issues that had divided the local critical community in this earlier film
sample, where even the people who expressed strong reservations nevertheless
acknowledged the film’s superiority, carried over during the release of Manila
by Night.
2. I had tried to retrieve a copy of the original censors permit but, as of 1999, the
new office (Board of Review for Motion Pictures and Television) could only
provide a two-page consolidated version. This last available permit certificate
(fig. 3) was made out to Regal Films by the acting secretary of the Interim
Board of Censors for Motion Pictures; a date of approval (different presumably
from date of issue) was given as 14 November 1980, but the original four-page
permit, also typewritten but with smaller margins, could no longer be found
except in the memory of people who had seen it. The two-page release does not
indicate a whole lot of other originally censored details; for example, an entire
sequence, where a gay character follows his object of desire into a rest room
in order to proposition him, was described as “the toilet pick-up scene” and
deleted in the original local release, but is not included in the current list. (As
of 2012, the present office does not even have such a file anymore. It had turned
over its records — including its collection of publicity materials approved for
release — to the archives of the Movie Workers Welfare Fund [Mowelfund] Film
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David / A Closer Look at Manila by Night: An Introduction
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Institute, which holds a total of four stills and one poster of Manila by Night/
City After Dark.)
Figure 3. Copy of the IBCMP permit for City After Dark (censored title of Manila by Night),
ca. 1999.
3. Santos’s source material, a biographical study of Bernal (his uncle), contained
a powerful first-hand account of the last moments of the director. After much
back-and-forth between us, I determined (and advised him accordingly) that
if the episode were included in the present article, it would overpower the
discussion and detract from the focus on Bernal’s auteurist origins. Santos’s
book-length study will be finalized and published in a still-to-be-specified
future time.
4. In my first year as member of the Filipino film critics circle, I was witness to
and participant in the turbulence that marked discussions of the film. Following
rules for qualification, only the censored version, City After Dark, could be
considered for awards. I belonged to a minority that insisted on recognizing
only Manila by Night, effectively the preview (test-audience) version, as an
exceptional case, as a symbolic rejection of film censorship. The mangled
condition of the official release rendered it incapable of meeting acceptable
technical standards, and accounted in large measure for Ishmael Bernal’s loss
in the category for direction. Bernal was gracious about accepting his trophies
for screenplay and film, even joking during the televised ceremony about how
the producer, “Mother” Lily Monteverde, deserved the fullest thanks “for
having the money” for the project. Yet tabloid accounts presently reported how
a recent critics’ award winner complained to friends that, among other things,
his most vital achievement had been overlooked. During the organization’s postawards assessment, the chair, Bienvenido Lumbera, said that Bernal had sent
him a note for the group, admitting his statements and apologizing for them.
Further discussions with Bernal and other practitioners, partly as research for
my dissertation, led me to conclude that (in my specific instance) awards would
be irrelevant to the practice of Third Cinema criticism and scholarship.
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Works Cited
Bellour, Raymond. The Analysis of Film. Ed. Constance Penley. Bloomington: Indiana
UP , 2000. Print.
Bernal, Ishmael, dir. and screenplay. Manila by Night [a.k.a. City After Dark]. Regal
Films, 1980. Film.
——— , dir. Nunal sa Tubig [Mole on the Water]. Screenplay by Jorge Arago. Crown
Seven Film Productions, 1976. Film.
Brocka, Lino, dir. Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag [Manila: In the Talons of Light].
Screenplay by Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr. Cinema Artists, 1975. Film.
Interim Board of Censors for Motion Pictures (IBCMP ). Office of the President,
Republic of the Philippines. Permit Certificate 19937–38 for Regal Films’ City After
Dark. 27 Nov. 1980.
Lumbera, Bienvenido. “Nunal sa Tubig Revisited.” The Urian Anthology: 1970–1979. Ed.
Nicanor G. Tiongson. Manila: Morato, 1983. 240–45. Print.
Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Print.
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Forum Kritika: A Closer Look at Manila by Night
Bernal as Auteur:
Primary Biographical Notes
Bayani Santos, Jr.
Manuel L. Quezon University
bayanisantosjr@gmail.com
Abstract
The paper discloses selected author-considered details on Ishmael Bernal’s family and
clan background that can provide further insights on his stature as an auteur, culled from
a detailed clan story, which describes the values, problems, conflicts, quirks, and gifts
of the clan that nurtured Bernal. It also considers a number of Bernal films and several
previously unavailable writings in terms of their content, which indicate confluences in
Bernal’s thinking with those of other family members. The paper uses the politique des
auteurs, whose proponents uphold the primacy of the director as the creative force behind
the creation of a film, although they also recognize filmmaking as a collaborative project.
The paper strives to articulate certain manifestations of the visions which were manifest in
Bernal’s films as well as his literary output.
Keywords
auteur criticism, Bernal films, Bernal-Santos family history, Philippine cinema
About the Author
Bayani Santos, Jr. is a PhD candidate at Manuel L. Quezon University in Manila, where he
also acquired his MA . He also holds degrees in journalism (cum laude) from the University
of the Philippines and Business and Sector Tech Management from the Netherlands
International Institute of Management (RBV ) Maastricht. He has won six Anvil and Quill
Awards for communications programs in the 1980s and 1990s. He is the founding editor of
Who Magazine, and has served as editor of several national publications and at the Spanish
International News Agency Agencia EFE .
Author’s Note
The author would like to thank his reviewers for providing guidance in the interpretation
of certain texts (especially in the Spanish language), and for pointing out directions for
further scholarship.
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François Truffaut, who was arguably the most prominent critic-turned-
director during the French New Wave, accepted the reality of film as an industrial
or collaborative creation, but asserted the possibility of a director-auteur who could
mold such a collective industrial project into a vehicle for artistic and philosophical
vision (233–35). It would be advisable, however, to caution against certain possible
excesses of auteur criticism. The theory has lionized the director at the expense
of the other talents in filmmaking, in the process also distorting values among
practitioners who have become enamored of aspiring to director status instead of
mastering critical thinking and theorizing.
Ishmael Bernal, this paper will assert, is an auteur according to the originary
definition, a conceptual and philosophical director who came of age just as the
French New Wave was influencing cinema beyond France and Europe, to the point
of challenging and winning over Hollywood practice. Following the prescription of
Alexandre Astruc, he molded film as a writer uses a pen (Monaco 5) and, through
his mise en scène, imprinted his vision on the work. The writerly simile is even
more apt in Bernal, as he had displayed the strongest literary potential among
Philippine directors and started as critic, essayist, and fictionist. Inasmuch as there
could be little doubt in Philippine film scholarship about his stature as auteur, this
paper attempts a study of Bernal via his biographical background, the way that
auteurs had done with filmmakers they had championed — i.e., Alfred Hitchcock,
Howard Hawks, Jean Renoir — with the same approach eventually being applied to
the auteurs themselves, starting with Truffaut.
Prior to filmmaking which he formally studied in Poona, India (fig. 1) — possibly
the first Filipino to take up formal studies in film) — Bernal was a writer whose first
short story at the University of the Philippines impressed even Francisco Arcellana1
(Arago, “Partying in Horseshoe” 7). Heretofore unknown stories about Bernal and
his family and clan background will enhance knowledge and appreciation of his
status as film artist, as these stories will also serve to put in sharper perspective the
manifestations of his philosophical and directorial visions.
Possible Auteur-Perspective Determinants
When National Artist for Film Ishmael Bernal referred to this author’s2 domestic
partner as his “brother-in-law” in 1994, he signaled a shift in the way he would like
to deal with his closest relative: he preferred to treat the author, not anymore as
nephew, but as “brother.” To this new “brother” eight months before his passing in
1996, he would also confide his desire “to go back to family.” He was hurting that
friends had deserted him, and a lover had left him with neither word nor curse.
This author was the only immediate family member to whom he could relate with
comfort his most guarded losses and fears. He feared his mother was dying, and
that, as Jorge Arago attested, was the greatest of his dread (“Father and Son” 14).
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Figure 1. Bernal in Poona, India. (Bernal-Santos collection, used with permission)
At that time, this author felt Bernal was unsure if people still appreciated him.
In 1994, he was feeling a financial crunch. He said he “was tired of being poor,” but
despite the penury, he believed he had been honest and true to his convictions. He
said he had just turned down a project, a television series that could temporarily
offer relief from the poverty that had by then gripped him. But after the author
suggested that he could allow some flexibility via a compromised acceptance of
the project, the author experienced for the first time becoming the object of his ire.
Panting and breathing heavily in anger, Bernal said that the author was dragging
him even further down the gutter. He declared that “blood would be flowing on the
set” if he would accept the project.
Previously he had wondered if his directorial adventures had seen better days,
or whether his career was meant to end in the classroom. He was offered the
directorship of the University of the Philippines Film Center (now an institute),
but was quite unsure if the offer also meant the end of his career as movie director.
In his last two years, he had not directed any film at all. Wating (1992) was his last.
He had confided in various conversations with the author that he was hoping yet
to make films on comfort women, victims forced into prostitution by the Japanese
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army during their occupation of the country; he had in fact started his research
on the subject. He sensed something mysterious about the friendship between
two Philippine-Spanish War figures, Generals Gregorio del Pilar (so-called “Boy
General” who perished in defending a mountain pass from American invaders)
and Emilio Aguinaldo (for whom del Pilar had died — the controversial leader of
anti-colonial resistance movements who eventually surrendered to the Americans
and became President). He had confided his wish to make a film on the Filipino
homosexual, and on one occasion, he said he was planning to put up a theater
version of the socialist novel Banaag at Sikat (From Early Dawn to Full Light),
integrating into the narrative the life and times of its author Lope K. Santos, who
was uncle cum grandfather and patriarch to him — his most idolized and revered
family figure, after his mother. Those films would never be realized if he would
become a full-fledged academic.
Certain friends like Jorge Arago and Marilou Diaz-Abaya knew that personal
side of Ishmael: he loved his mother, whose values he deeply revered. “The thought
of his mother Elena preceding him unto death scared him most,” Jorge Arago
accurately attested.3 Ishmael would cut short any warnings from his mother about
her mortality when she would scold him about his occasional financial excesses. He
would display a genuine expression of horror at the mere thought of its inevitability:
“Deje de hablar de ello, por favor, Mamá” (“Stop this discussion, please, Mother”),
he would say. In the clan story, the present author had written that it could have
been a fateful recognition of that fear that permitted him to accept the eventuality
of dying ahead of his mother (see also Arago, “Father and Son” 14).
Bernal can be described as free-spirited, like everyone in the family; but
unknown to the public, he also appreciated the conservative values of his own
family, and both his own clan and immediate family were (and still are) essentially
conservative. When friends came to visit him at home, and their conversation
would verge on the risqué, he would advise them that his elders kept conversations
within the parameters of decency, and not because family members were hesitant
on such issues as sex and morals, of which the family had its share of transgressions.
The family simply wished to keep bedroom matters in the bedroom. This nonjudgmental attitude would be familiar to anyone who had studied the characters of
his films: Bernal always insisted on presenting his characters’ saving grace, even as
he was depicting their vices.
On love, Ishmael’s mother would tell her grandchildren that “it is the strongest
emotion of life, and one who falls in love would swim simmering seas for its sake.”
She had explained it in those terms to the young Ishmael who had once timorously
asked her about his biological father. That was also her advice to two grandnieces
who were then undergoing unwanted pregnancies. It was the author’s privilege to
have been a part of Ishmael’s family, and in the belief that these and other familial
insights could make Bernal better understood, the author wrote a clan story that
could shed light on the people who had surrounded him and who could have thereby
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helped shape his political, moral, and artistic values. In the course of reviewing
selected Bernal films for a thesis, a realization came to the author that Bernal’s
sensibilities were identical or related to those of family elders whose opinions and
ideas Ishmael shared. Many of those views — apparent in his films, his philosophy,
his satirical insights — were strikingly similar to those held by family members.4
In pursuit of this depiction of the subject, this paper will posit two interrelated
phenomena: first and primarily, the description of the family circumstances where
Bernal grew up and flourished, to account for the exceptional talent and ambition
that he had exhibited in his career as filmmaker; and secondarily, the manifestation
of these circumstances whenever relevant in the movies that he had become known
for. The near-literal though inadequate regard for Bernal as primarily a literary
innovator in film (his first award was for the screenplay of his first film, and he also
won the same award, not direction, for his most highly acclaimed film, Manila
by Night) was further reinforced by his reputation for writing or co-writing his
films — 13 credits in the Internet Movie Database (as of June 2012), the most of
any prominent Filipino director — plus the admission (sometimes resentful) of his
credited scriptwriters that he had extensively revised their material.
Quarrels and Mean Bones, Heroes and Heels
Bernal’s mother Elena often used the Spanish word noble to describe her eldest
nephew named Bayani (Senior, father of the present author) because she thought he
was a fair man who stood by her when her elder sister, Manang Patrocinio, treated
her with less tact. Bayani’s mother Patrocinio was not above scolding the much
younger mother of Ishmael, who had her own share of locuras (“eccentricities,”
“personality quirks”) that drove her elder sister to censure her. For one thing, Elena
was stubborn: she would surreptitiously add water to the rice her elder sister was
cooking, as she preferred to have the rice soft and sticky, rather than the usual dry
and loose preparation appropriate to the tropical variety. (“She could have simply
cooked her own rice,” Patrocinio complained.) The elder Bernals, particularly the
father Ventura, provincial treasurer of Nueva Vizcaya’s Bagabag town during Lope
K. Santos’ tenure there as Governor, were so extremely tolerant that they were
branded by Bernal’s own grandparents as consentidores (“indulgent”).
Family conflicts, however, never lasted: in minutes matters would return to
normal as if nothing had happened. However, it was also expected that conflicts
could arise after an extended togetherness. As Ishmael himself had once put it in
his characteristic hyperbole: “Don’t make me stay with Nena [the endearment he
used for his mother], we will kill each other.” In the few times that Ishmael went
against Nena’s wishes, she would end the impasse with a firm resolution: “Estoy
mandando solamente en esta casa” (“I alone make decisions in this house; literally,
I am only ordering in this house, implying that no one else may do so”). Noel Vera,
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in an essay on Manila by Night, wondered if the scene where a mother erupted into
cataclysmic violence against a son whom she discovered was into drugs could be
biographical, something Bernal himself had experienced first-hand. The answer,
from close first-hand observation, is a categorical no. Ishmael’s mother would never
raise her voice beyond hearing distance. The worst thing she had ever done was to
tie a rooster string around a foot of the young, pet-loving Ishmael when he kept
setting a rooster free in their Sta. Mesa residence in the late 1940s. The animal was
creating havoc in the garden of her Tita Patrocinio, who was herself unaccustomed,
like anyone else in the household, to meting out physical punishment.
It was an uncustomary fact that the Bernal-Santos family, whose dinner
conversations were about solving the problems of Filipino existence and of the
world in general, could make big deals of such minor matters as how much water
to use in cooking rice. Among the dinner topics the author could remember
were: the nobleza (“nobility”) of then-President Sergio Osmeña (favorite proof:
the Cebuano statesman’s frank admission he could not promise war veterans
their back-pay), Recto’s anti-American nationalism, or the impossibility of Rizal’s
retraction — among the many topics on which each member had practically the
same opinion. Mean bones sometimes took the better of their legendary tempers,
and practically everyone shared that common weakness. Ishmael’s mother herself
had wondered aloud to this author what could be behind those moments when
perfectly intelligent and reasonable people could turn unreasonable.
But on fundamentals the Bernal-Santos family displayed a more recognizably
typical unanimity (fig. 2). Dinner conversations among elders defined for the
younger family members who their heroes and anti-heroes should be. Names
familiar to students of Philippine history belonged in their Pantheon: Jose Rizal,
Andres Bonifacio, Apolinario Mabini, Claro M. Recto, Marcelo del Pilar; Antonio
Luna, Sergio Osmeña, and Manuel Quezon; the religious reformer Gregorio
Aglipay and the ill-fated bandolero Macario Sacay. As to who the anti-heroes were:
Emilio S. Aguinaldo, who stole the leadership of the Revolution against Spain from
Andres Bonifacio; President Ramon Magsaysay, who was allegedly an American
puppet and creation; the Iglesia ni Cristo (“Church of Christ”), which was
admired for its discipline but criticized for its exploitation of religion in politics.
Catholicism as a faith was respected, but this was always qualified with a historical
reminder of its political and economic crimes against the nation. Liberal Spain
and its culture were respected and admired. Everyone looked up to France and the
French, and to Europe and Europeans in general. (Note that Bernal toward the end
was a confirmed and esteemed “secret” member of the Communist underground
movement, a subject that is tackled in detail in the clan biography.)
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Figure 2. The Bernals in their younger years. Standing: Felipe; seated (left to right):
an unidentified cousin, Patrocinio, and Elena. (Bernal-Santos collection, used with
permission)
Manila Roots
Bernal’s clan and family were rooted in Manila, and were thereby expressively
proud of its lore. Even when everyone had moved out to the “suburbs” (now part
of the National Capital Region known as Metro Manila), everyone trooped back to
Manila to vote, and remained Manila voters even after their having settled elsewhere.
“Everyone was leaving Manila, everyone is coming back to Manila,” Bernal wrote
down in one of several scribbled notes kept in the family memorabilia, which he
could have intended to expand into an essay. No wonder his affection for Manila
would someday show in one of his masterpieces, Manila by Night (1980), which
exposed the rot that was slowly creeping into the city of his affections — even as he
asserted the eventual return of the next morning to the city. Inevitably, it would be
banaag at sikat (“dawn and sunrise,” alluding to Lope K. Santos’s ground-breaking
novel, Banaag at Sikat). His very first film project was in fact titled Ah Ewan, Basta
sa Maynila Pa rin Ako! (I Don’t Care, I Am for Manila All the Way!), a comedy that
he himself had conceptualized but from which he was replaced as director.
In Himala (Miracle), a character named Nimia, failing to find life and opportunity
in her town, looked forward to heading back to Manila; in Hinugot sa Langit
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(Snatched from Heaven), a provincial from Davao refused to go back there because
she believed in life in Manila and preferred its challenges; in Manila by Night, the
city was depicted as a synecdoche of urban duality, the light of its night inviting
Filipinos from all walks of life into a free self-made world. Many of those leanings
traceable to his family orientation would reveal themselves in Bernal’s films, in his
philosophy, principles, and affections, in ways that family members viewing his
films would sense a “fuller” familiarity than non-family members who might have
understood them from another perspective.
In Relasyon (The Affair), for example, Marilou, the querida (“common-law wife”)
was the conceptual opposite of the stereotype in Philippine movies. She was a homebuilder rather than a wrecker, a victim and not a victimizer. Such characterization
may be subversive to the Catholicized society outside Bernal’s home, but most
family members had always shared those views anyway, and what was queer to
them was that “others” failed to see the issues as the family had seen them. Again,
in many of his films, Bernal had comically depicted hypocritical religious piety. In
Wating, an extremely pious “philanthropist” suddenly slaps a maid, and in Manila
by Night, a couple who routinely cheated on each other makes love as religious icons
peer over them. The views Ishmael shared in these films are strikingly similar to
those that family elders articulated in sundry conversations. Bernal’s mother Elena
had a term for religious zealots who brandished their religiosity with scapulars and
other trappings: she called them manangs or old-fashioned matrons.
Among family elders the “superiority” and “logic” of family perceptions — such as
Ishmael’s view of skin-deep Catholicism among Filipinos — were facts of Philippine
life. In contrast, non-family members (including film critics) had perceived Bernal’s
subtle jibes against superficial religiosity as primarily satire. What this author is
keen to explain is that the satire is merely the manifestation of an honest attempt
at Bernal’s documentation of Filipino sensibilities. It was likely that Bernal, as
did most of the elders of the family, would have seen these portrayals as accurate
descriptions, as synecdochical of Philippine reality, but the satirical impact arrives
after a realization by the audience that, indeed, the descriptions are “us.”
The Bernal-Santos elders were not prudish but, as mentioned earlier, they did
not openly discuss sexual matters among themselves. They looked the other way
regarding the misdemeanor of adult members, and the younger set who asked
about sex would normally be told that the “right time would come” when they
would be mature enough to understand. This indulgent and non-invasive liberality,
however, seemed to reverse itself when it came to the certainty with which their
elders defined for the younger what they considered vulgar. For example, practically
everyone could not stand vulgarities in Philippine television, even during the
1960s and 1970s when Philippine TV was still better than in succeeding decades.
Patrocinio would turn off the television whenever an otherwise wholesome actress
would appear in her backless gown. The author could recall one instance when
elders switched off the television, and that was when the featured Tagalog movie
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involved some rural characters peeking at the silhouette of a woman undressing
behind a capiz window. They also turned it off during scenes that involved violence
and slapstick jokes.
Reacting to a neighbor’s suggestion that the clan matriarch would do better if
she did handicraft rather than crocheting, Bernal’s Kuya Bayani sharply rebuffed
the unsolicited adviser: “Magpaturo na lamang po kayo sa Inay ng literatura”
(“It would be better if you learned literature from Mother”), in effect telling the
neighbor that crocheting was his mother’s diversion from other intellectually
stimulating tasks. Ishmael’s mother could be even less forgiving on infractions on
social decorum. Ishmael had to put his foot down when she scolded his assistant
for lack of refinement at the dinner table, scratching his legs and eating without
the use of cutlery. In Castilian, Ishmael argued that his assistant, with his rural
coarseness, did not sense the failure in manners, a limitation of social background.
She rejected that excuse and frankly asked the man to do as she had instructed.5
(In Wating, this scene was replicated when the female head of the syndicate group
sneered at the table manners of one of the recruits.)
The author could remember a neighbor who dropped by to share the latest
gossip in the community, and got cold-shouldered by her prospective listeners.
“We have enough problems with ourselves to bother about what is happening in our
neighbors’ houses” was the curt remark of Ishmael’s elder cousin Ligaya. (In Manila
by Night, the gossip session of gay character Manay Sharon [Bernardo Bernardo]
with Evita Vasquez [Maya Valdes] depicts Bernal’s sympathy for the subject of their
exchanges: the former prostitute Virgie [Charito Solis], who had barged into the
scene as a concerned mother in search of her son.)
When the Patriarch Met His Match
The grand patriarch of the Bernal-Santos clan was Lope K. Santos (fig. 3), considered
the spiritual father of Tagalog as the Philippines’ national language, the person
that Jorge Arago described as the man who dominated Tagalog literature after
Balagtas (“Partying in Horseshoe” 11). He sired two sons and six daughters with
wife Patrocinio (Inyong) Bernal. Ishmael was as much a part of this brood — he
was their only maternal cousin, and the youngest among them. Lope had two
daughters, Lualhati and Lakambini, and a son, Makaaraw, with first wife, Lola
Simeona (Salazar), who died in 1953. The present author knew and had met at
least another son and daughter: Vito Santos, and the linguist-educator Paraluman
Santos Aspillera, Lope’s daughter by Gregoria Anunciacion.
It was Lope’s plan to formally marry Patrocinio in 1954, a year after his first wife
Simeona’s death, but she refused to accede to his plan. Ishmael’s mother said Lope
had begged her to talk to her Manang Patrocinio about the ceremony, but the lady
refused to listen. “El amor es más fuerte” (“Love is what really binds”; literally, love
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Figure 3. Lope K. Santos in his earlier years. (Public domain)
is something stronger), she had so explained her disposition to this author, which
Ishmael’s mother had in turn described as loca (”crazy”). Once decided on an issue,
it was difficult to convince her to change her mind. Even in financial matters, she
did not allow Lope to share expenses to the point where she would have become
totally dependent on him. On the first family piano, she had asked Lope to shoulder
only the downpayment. She paid for the monthly amortizations from her own
income, supplemented with voluntary contributions from other family members.
When she lectured her grandchildren on good manners, she defined her ultimate
expectation. She did not want them to be “just good,” she demanded “nobility.”
Several granddaughters got a scolding from her when she overheard them talking
about a well-heeled suitor. “A poor but good man is infinitely better than a rich
cad,” she lectured them. “No eres noble!” (“You are not being noble!”) was the worst
criticism her husband could ever get from her, to which he would then immediately
reply, in remorseful Tagalog, “Nahihiya ako sa iyo, Inyong” (“I apologize in shame,
Inyong”).
A pre-war teacher of English, Patrocinio had learned the language from
pioneering American teachers; she read the English-language newspapers but
said her prayers in Spanish. Lope and Inyong normally talked to each other in
Spanish, as it leveled the language field for them. Patrocinio often rebuked Lope,
but when she would already describe him as lacking in nobleza, he would stop
cracking naughty jokes, knowing that she had reached her limits. The old man was,
bluntly put, an inveterate ladies’ man, whose stories were probably meant to make
Patrocinio jealous, but the lady was not biting. Patrocinio was a wife in control:
she simply loved and accepted Lope for what he was. After all, she had long before
decided to leave Nueva Vizcaya for Manila with him in the mid-1920s when his
term as governor ended. When the present author asked her why she loved a man
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known as a babaero, when she could have her pick of numerous suitors, her answer
was curt: “Mahal ko si Lope” (“I just love Lope”).
Soon Patrocinio would get tired of Lope’s inability to rein in his affairs. She
decided firmly to stop Lope from seeing her. He pleaded with their eldest daughter
Ligaya to ask her mother to reconsider, but the reconciliation was doomed: the
devoted “mama’s girl” sided, uncharacteristically and openly, with her mother.
They would see each other on Lope’s deathbed a full decade hence, in 1963, when
he was confined at the University of the East Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical
Center in Sta. Mesa. Ishmael’s Ate Ligaya, however, had so firmly distanced herself
from her father that she did not even present her groom to Lope when she married
in 1961. Lola Patrocinio would warn her that the hard-headed stance did not augur
well for a successful and happy marriage. She was prophetic: the marriage of Ligaya
ended bitterly, the husband absent from her deathbed when she died of cancer
in 1972.
The impact of this family reality could have caused agony for Bernal’s idolized
Ate Ligaya, who was “a very handsome woman, and a lady of impeccable dignity
and manners,” as Ishmael described her in his lost autobiography. Ligaya resented
even the smallest slight on her mother, as she was closest to her. She begrudged
her father’s handling of the plurality of his families, though not necessarily the
plurality of his wives. Essentially, the problem was in just one of the branches of the
family that lived on the other side of the Pasig River — it seemed, from this side of
the story, that that family was too jealous of his other family, that the lady virtually
kept Lope imprisoned so that he had to escape from her each time he would leave
for other family branches. When Lope managed to escape, in a Hollywood-like
suspense narrative, to finally settle in the legitimate household in San Juan, the
family talked about the story with a mix of good humor and measured laughter. The
question however is: could Ishmael have felt something akin to how his idolized
Ate Ligaya felt?
In one of his articles on Bernal, bosom buddy Jorge Arago related that he had
once asked Ishmael how he coped with the fact that the clan patriarch had several
wives (“Father and Son” 14). Bernal’s answer was that he chose not to know. When
the author asked Pangarap, the youngest son of Lope, how he could have reconciled
Lope’s principles with the multiplicity of his families, the son answered: “He simply
did not believe in the Catholic position on monogamy.” (Apparently, neither did
Bernal agree with the universal applicability of that value. In Manila by Night, the
two major straight male characters, Alex [William Martinez] and Febrero [Orestes
Ojeda], are sexually opportunistic to the extent that both even knowingly shared
a gay lover.) Nevertheless, like everyone in the younger group, Ishmael looked the
other way when it came to such matters. The family ethos was clear: it was usapan
ng matanda, the concern of the elders. Lope K. Santos’s infidelities, as well as the
fact that Ishmael himself was a love child, certainly must have had an impact on the
young man. They might disagree and express concern, but they would never dare
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disrespect an adult’s decision. After all, practically everyone would have their way,
like the character played by Vilma Santos in Relasyon: “Hayaan mo siya sa desisyon
niya” (“Leave her to live with her decision”).
On the family’s history of patriarchal promiscuity, there seems to be enough
indication that the sensibility had crept into several Bernal films that tackled and
dissected the male’s innate polygamous tendencies and the female response to this
nature: Huwag Tularan: Pito ang Asawa Ko (Bad Example: I Have Seven Spouses,
1974), Mister Mo, Lover Boy Ko (Your Husband, My Lover, 1974), Nunal sa Tubig
(Speck in the Lake, 1976), Lagi na Lamang Ba Akong Babae? (Will I Be a Woman
Forever? 1978), Isang Gabi sa Iyo, Isang Gabi sa Akin (One Night for You, One Night
for Me, 1978), Ikaw Ay Akin (You Are Mine, 1978), Bakit May Pag-ibig Pa? (Why
Is There Love? 1979), Salawahan (Unfaithful, 1979), Relasyon (The Affair, 1982),
Broken Marriage (1983), Pahiram ng Isang Umaga (Lend Me One Morning, 1989).
These would be among the relevant titles in his 50-entry filmography.
In the Sta. Mesa house, Patrocinio and Elena were not the only women of strong
character. All the other four women of Ishmael’s family were just as headstrong
as the existentialist characters in Ishmael’s works, who knew what they want, and
who made decisions on their own. Undoubtedly, they left a strong impression on
the young Ishmael, who had described his mother as a “remarkable woman.” He
worshipped his Ate Ligaya and Patrocinio inspired him, as he knew by heart that
only she could level off with Lope in the way that she loved and censured him. Not
surprisingly, in practically all of Ishmael’s films, women were the assertive equals
of men. It had always been on them that Ishmael focused his compassion and
sympathy. Even in the philosophical and religious epic Himala, a world-renowned
scholar had noted that the film was primarily “about women” (Panisnick 23). In
Ishmael’s world, women dominate, and the world revolves around their wishes,
whims, and caprices. They shape values, families, and nations.
Patrocinio and Bernal’s own mother, Elena, could very well have been Ishmael’s
inspiration for several classics of Philippine movies. In Relasyon, Vilma Santos
played the querida who lived up to her name as the beloved, a lady of intellect and
fine sensibility; the virtually separated Emil truly loved and preferred her to his
legal wife. In Dalawang Pugad, Isang Ibon (Two Nests, One Bird), Bernal explored
the male’s polygamous nature, and pitted him against gritty female characters. In
these films, Bernal recast the querida different from the stereotype of a family
wrecker toward a clear-headed case-by-case realist delineation of the ­commonlaw wife. In Relasyon, Bernal can arguably be shown as a champion of the querida
as a Filipino director, in depicting Marilou as a principled martyr in a society that
wrongfully extols man’s false claim to moral ascendancy. As would be evident in
the film, Ishmael saw the injustice done to women in male-dominated society, as he
also saw and questioned the morality and rationality of institutionalized but falsely
monogamist families.
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Eccentric and Remarkable Mother
“She must be as nutty as her fruitcake to have given me my name” was how Ishmael
had described to Jorge Arago his mother’s choice of name. In fact, “Ishmael” as a
name suggests her level of literary culture and keen understanding of Biblical and
Quranic scripture: Ishmael was the son of Arab-Jewish patriarch Abraham with
his second wife Hagar, and it was clear the choice reflected Nena’s assertion of the
spiritual legitimacy of her son. She in fact called him dulce fruta del amor (“the
sweet fruit of love”). In the family, the men would often be quoted as saying: there
is no such thing as an illegitimate child, but rather there are illegitimate parents.
Dulce fruta del amor is a confident and firm rejection of Philippine society’s
standard descriptions of the love child: anak sa pagkakasala (“child of perfidy”),
putok sa buho (“spurious offspring”), illegitimate.
Ishmael’s mother Elena, Nena, or Lena (fig. 4) was a stickler for discipline.
Although she had imposed her strict views on financial readiness on grandnephews
and grandnieces, she was at her most insistent in imbuing the culture of frugality
and integrity in her only son. She had her own ways of challenging him to behave
according to her standards. For example, Ishmael learned to swim in a few days,
but the first day was a mess. Lena saw him splashing pool water all around him, but
she deferred dishing out her criticism at the right time. That night she suggested
to Ishmael that he should observe those swimmers who swam without splashing
water all over the pool. He got the message quickly enough so that on day two, he
could say, “Look ma, no splashing.”
Ishmael’s mother had told the author that parental lectures should be clearly
and constructively formulated. When Ishmael was to leave for Paris to pursue
his studies on French language and literature, Nena lectured him on behaving
during cocktails and parties. “You could never be ahead of the ladies and the
senior personalities around you,” she would remind him. “And no topics that are
controversial like politics or religion should be touched on.” She would tell this
author proudly that she was sure of her son’s breeding, so that he “could mix even
with the members of the diplomatic corps.” That conversation cropped up when
family friend Lino Brocka went overboard in the critics’ awards ceremony in 1980
by returning the trophy given by the sponsors, publicly humiliating his hosts. It
was a no-no, Ishmael’s mom would tell Ishmael, who quietly took her word. The
lady would intervene each time she feared that Ishmael might embroil himself in
potential controversy, to advise him that silence sometimes is the best answer to
somebody else’s lack of scruple.
Ishmael was apprehensive of his mother, but the basis of fear was moral censure
rather than verbal or physical violence, inasmuch as his mother always spoke with
moral assurance. This lady, who had never been known to raise her voice, could be
so packed with authority that she could make the infamously overbearing Ishmael
Bernal defer to her. That was the power she displayed against the thieves who
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Figure 4. Elena (also Lena and Nena) Bernal Toledo, Ishmael’s mother.
(Bernal-Santos collection, used with permission)
barged into the Grey November Café in Malate in the mid-1960s. “Why are you
doing this?” she asked the robbers. “You can surely get all this money, but of course
you know that we don’t keep everything here but in the bank. And what we have
here is not enough for the risk you are taking.” Ishmael could not believe his mother
could so calmly reprimand the robbers, under such circumstances, complete with
knitted eyebrows — the customary indication of her disappointment.
On the day of the burial of her son, her stoic reserve surprised a family
friend — the late National Artist Rolando Tinio — who stood beside the seated
lady, and inquired if she was all right. When she looked up to acknowledge the
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well-wisher, she realized it was the famous poet-friend and one-time scriptwriter
and performer of Ishmael. (Distantly related to the Santoses, Tinio was proclaimed
National Artist for Theater, also after his death, in 1997.) Elena recited an entire
stanza from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as her way of telling him she was in control of
her heartbreak. When she was learning French in the 1960s and 1970s, she made
sure her letters to Ishmael were in French; Ishmael gamely wrote back to her also in
French. At one point when she was close to mastering conversational French, she
kidded Ishmael that she could one day overtake an Aix-en-Provence licentiate. To
which Ishmael riposted: “Ce n’est pas possible, maman” (“It’s not possible, Mom”).6
Jorge Arago wrote that when Ishmael introduced himself to his biological father
before he left for Paris in the 1960s, Ishmael was armed with the certainty that he
would be recognized. It was impossible that Antonio Ledesma would not recognize
him if he presented himself, Ishmael believed. His reason: “My mother was such a
remarkable woman he certainly could not have forgotten her.” With Elena Bernal as
mother, and Lope K. Santos’s wife Patrocinio as his surrogate mom, and a circle of
strong women like his idolized Ate Ligaya in Ishmael’s life, it becomes possible to
account for Bernal’s strong feminist orientation. In Manila by Night as with most
of his films, Bernal’s women characters fight for decisions and navigate their way
against or out of social, economic, and spatial limits. That women command and
rule the world in Ishmael’s worldview could easily be seen in the stark contrast
between the strong-willed women in Manila by Night vis-à-vis the resigned,
helpless main female character in Lino Brocka’s interpretation of Maynila: Sa mga
Kuko ng Liwanag.
Ishmael Bernal came from a clan many of whose members’ idea of financial
stability was through employment in the professions. Practically everyone died
with just enough to pay for hospital and funeral expenses, and it was a tradition
for those with resources to help those with less. Ishmael was not an exception: he
died with just enough to get by. In his last years, it seemed fated that Bernal would
also be beset by financial woes. Some two years before his passing, Ishmael was
frantically trying to raise funds, and had asked the present author to sell two titled
lots. There was an interested buyer, but he had misplaced the title to one of the lots,
and the deal fizzled out as the buyer had wanted to purchase the two together.
Practically everyone had experienced poverty and penury in the clan, and Lope
K. Santos was most prone to this as a writer. He lost the few properties he had
when he self-published Banaag at Sikat, his most important novel. Such clan value
would achieve national focus in the 1960s when the impoverished and sick Santos
would refuse a congressional pension of one thousand pesos monthly, proposed
in a bill written in Tagalog and sponsored by Congressman Rogaciano Mercado,
which House Speaker Cornelio Villareal had rejected because it was not written in
either English or Spanish.
Santos turned down the pension. Daughter Paraluman Santos Aspillera7 wrote
Congress: “Not until Tagalog is given its rightful place in Congress, and is respected
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as a constitutional mandate … would he like his name dragged in its deliberations”
(Aspillera 97). Santos, it must be said, had been critical of the dishonesty in calling
the national language Pilipino or Filipino, arguing that the name was linguistically
dishonest, akin to renaming English “American” or “Australian.” The attitude, not
the name of the language, should be changed, he argued. He also did not believe
that Filipinos would reject Tagalog as national language simply because it is Tagalog
(Aspillera 294–303). He believed that the unresolvable debates on whether Tagalog
and Filipino are the same or two different languages would have been non-issues, if
politicians had been as honest as he was. In the clan that nurtured Bernal, honesty
was the right foot to start a trek, whether in finance or in linguistics. Ishmael Bernal
would echo the same clan value in his film philosophy: his films had to be, for better
or worse, honest depictions of life.
House as Root of Pride
The Sta. Mesa household where Ishmael Bernal spent his youth had five bedrooms,
capiz and decorated glass windows, a sala with a piano (a mark of the Manila
middle class then), and a narra dinner table for twelve. In several corners were
antique cases with glass panels lined with books on philosophy, languages, and
literature. Crocheted linen decked the piano, the dinner table, and the hi-fi, as the
home music system then was called; a 21-inch black-and-white Zenith television
set was added, a prized appliance in the 1960s. Only austere drapes and curtains
were used. Ligaya and Ishmael’s second mother Inyong disdained any furnishing
that betrayed a preference for opulence. The home interior had the atmosphere
similar to the old houses in Bernal’s films, with Hinugot sa Langit, Relasyon, and
Bakit May Pag-ibig Pa? (Why is There Love?) as exemplary samples.
It may be of childhood nostalgia for the Bernal-Santos ancestral house in Sta.
Mesa that Ishmael’s choice of setting in many of his films was typically an old house.
Bernal’s films are replete with a lot of metaphorical and allegorical meanings for
residences. In Relasyon, for example, and in Bakit May Pag-ibig Pa?, the act of
closing doors or windows seems to signify an end as well as a new beginning. In
Hinugot sa Langit, the demolition of shanties is a strong indictment of Catholic
insensitivity, and in Manila by Night, the ongoing night-time repair of Virgie’s house
portends the sense of a city and its people about to be overcome by decadence.
Ishmael’s surrogate mother Patrocinio had described her “son,” Ishmael, and
daughters as paragons of courtesy whenever they faced Lope. She said everyone
in the family revered the patriarch. And even when they disagreed with him, the
siblings quietly accepted his lectures with restrained politeness. Inasmuch as
they were widely read, family members knew that they lived with someone who
had contributed immensely to Filipino language, literature, and culture. Santos’s
dignity and poise, his patrician Old World personality, overwhelmed them. They
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appreciated his family lectures during which they were made aware of their roots,
language, and culture. They were guided toward an early appreciation of his views
on the importance of using Tagalog or Filipino names for their children.
This was the family whose patriarch Bienvenido Lumbera, during a symposium
on the centennial of Lope K. Santos, had aptly described as the “man behind the
preeminence of Tagalog among our local languages” — because only Tagalog had
someone like him, who had taken care to cultivate and defend it in the epical manner
he struggled in order to ensure its literary and political eminence. The English
language may have had Shakespeare, its greatest bard and dramatist, but Santos
did more: he codified Tagalog grammar, providing it with original vocabulary. He
simplified its orthography, and gave the world its nearly perfect spelling system.
He was a grammarian, novelist, writer, essayist, editor-journalist, philosopher,
language and labor activist, and nationalist.
Ishmael’s reverence for his cultural father was not just about those achievements,
it was also about the magnetic and strong personality of the clan patriarch. Lope
could have been short at a height of five feet, but his was a persona that immediately
commanded respect. Despite his having already been a national figure, he did not
mind taking the jeepney or bus, to the consternation of his grandsons who were
embarrassed by the public attention he elicited in those conveyances. Worse, he
seemed totally oblivious to the attention. Bernal’s awe of Santos would show in his
warnings to his nephews against some perceived wrongs or failed judgments, when
he would ask them to drop the “Santos” from their name.
One significant Santos impact on Bernal was the elder’s pro-poor politics, which
would be enhanced with Ishmael’s stint at the University of the Philippines as an
undergraduate student of English. His college days coincided with the 1950s-60s
nationalist ferment when the various nationalist ideologies were competing for
adherents among the country’s younger intellectuals. Those were the years when
Ishmael’s collegiate confreres were debating nationalism, US interference in and
domination of Philippine politics, and the relevance of Catholicism. It was also the
time when socialist (now-orthodox) Marxism was starting to attract the core of
its would-be adherents. Bernal would be among the closest friends of Philippine
Communist Party founder Jose Ma. Sison, to whom he even gamely served as
courier of love letters to Julia, who eventually became Sison’s wife.
As a literary mind concerned with his craft, and who belonged to that generation
of writers who guarded against the dangers of one’s politics overwhelming his art,
Bernal was wary of being drowned in the ideological excesses of orthodox Marxism
in his works. In 1979, the present author was chastised by Bernal when he had asked
about political elements in his movies. “I understand what you want to elicit from
me, but you will not get it,” he warned. “If we are discussing my art, we must discuss
[only that] and not my politics.” He would not be tempted to digress on that line.
After a second, more subtle question was advanced, he was stern: “The problem is
your question is political and I am talking from the point of view of an artist.”
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Bernal’s politics are deeply buried in many of his works. In Manila by Night,
the corruption of martial-law governance and police-judiciary collusion is quietly
manifested in a dinner conversation, and the police’s ineptitude is seen in their
subsequent difficulty in apprehending a minor drug pusher. The police tong
(“extortion”) system is revealed in a detail when an aging prostitute appeals for
help from a “retired” comrade, by then already married to an implicitly influential
lawyer. In two other films, Sugat sa Ugat (Wound in the Root), and Hinugot sa Langit,
Bernal showed the desperate situation of the poor, in a script that scrupulously
avoided overt political commentary. In Himala, Bernal posited a Marxist view
of religion as an opiate, within the framework of a post-Marxist script written by
Ricardo Lee, but he rejected any notion of ramming down such commentary on his
audience and adhered instead to the classic humanist complexion of the story. The
Marxist bent comes to the fore in the final plot twist, when Elsa’s death becomes a
dismaying reversion to mass hysteria and fanaticism.
Cultural Powerhouse
Even the recently deceased Jorge Arago may not have fully known that Ishmael’s
family and clan had more members whose contributions to Philippine culture
are well worth noting, and that some of these members did have a hand in the
formation of his character and gifts. In the Sta. Mesa residence, the renowned
composer Constancio Canseco de Guzman — Lope’s favorite cousin (Lope’s middle
initial was his Filipinization of the Spanish name “Canseco”) — was a regular visitor
who relished conversations with Patrocinio, who in turn ardently admired his
musical talents. In the 1980s, his famous kundiman “Bayan Ko” (“My Country”)
would become the signature anti-dictatorship protest song, virtually an alternative
national anthem. De Guzman often played the piano in Sta. Mesa to the delight
of everyone, particularly Ishmael and his mother, whose affinity to music was
inherent. Lena’s father, Ventura Bernal, the provincial treasurer of Bagabag town in
his time, was a versatile musician who played not just the piano but also the guitar
and violin. It may have been in Sta. Mesa where Ishmael nurtured his partiality to
opera and classical music. It was also there where he began his interest in film, as
he always watched double features in the nearby Embassy Theater on Pureza Street,
as he had written in his now-lost autobiography.
In addition to de Guzman, the late George Canseco, another famous composer
and relative on the Canseco side, was a grandnephew of Lope. He composed
Basil Valdez’s biggest hit “Ngayon at Kailanman” (“Now and Evermore”) and Pilita
Corrales’s signature song “Kapantay ay Langit” (“As High as Heaven”). In literature,
Mang Binong, known to posterity as Severino Reyes, gave the nation the beloved
children’s stories of Lola Basyang — in fact a fictitious character inspired by a real
Lola Pashang of the clan, who had actually related all those tales, according to
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Ishmael’s cousin Pangarap. Ishmael Bernal as well was not the first movie director
in the clan. That distinction belonged to the first woman film director of the country,
Susana Canseco de Guzman, herself a noted writer and novelist in Tagalog, a
cousin of the Santoses. Servando de los Angeles, or Bandong, known for a major
Tagalog novel, Ang Huling Timawa (The Last Freeman), was almost family, and his
friendship with Lope extended to providing several of his daughters with stable
employment as office secretaries and staff, and who delivered the family response
to eulogies for Lope K. Santos’s memorial in May 1963.
In lexicography, language experts maintain that the best thesaurus-dictionary
of the Tagalog language was the work of Vito C. Santos. In the philology of the
Tagalog language, among the pioneers were the clan’s Paraluman Santos Aspillera
of the Philippine Women’s University and Ligaya Santos Tuazon of the University of
the East who learned Tagalog grammar and linguistics directly from Lope himself.
It was a household and clan where Filipino and Western musical classics defined
the tastes of the Bernal-Santos brood, as could be suggested by the pieces everyone
was playing on the piano. Everyone displayed varying levels of expertise, and
Ishmael, whose off-key voice provoked smiles from his cousins, envied their skill at
the instrument. To illustrate how music sometimes became a language in Bernal’s
family: Ishmael’s mother Elena had criticized some of his films by comparing them
to music. “The tendency is always forte or fortissimo,” Elena would tell him, using
technical terms. After Nunal sa Tubig, Bernal proudly reported to his mother,
“Watch this film, Nena, this time you will have a lot of pianissimo.” Both Ishmael
and Elena also loved the opera, and both went to the extent of studying Italian
just to make sure they understood the original language. To be able to participate
in the activities of the musical family, Ishmael took to the guitar. When his Ate
Ligaya played Antonio Molina’s “Hatinggabi” (“Midnight”), the young appreciative
Ishmael Bernal would hearten her with his enthusiastic clapping and bravos.
There was a strong consciousness in the clan of pride in being Filipino, rooted
in shared decencies, values, and loyalty to the nation. This explains the insistence
among the older members of the clan to use Tagalog names. (Lope K. Santos had
told them that the Japanese, the Thais, and the Chinese kept to their own language
in their names so why, he asked, should we not?) In the clan mindset, Filipinos
were the equals, if not the better, of other nationalities. On this topic, Ishmael’s
mother liked to retell two family anecdotes to her grandnephews and nieces as a
lesson on Filipino pride. One of these anecdotes occurred at the set of Pagdating
sa Dulo (Reaching the Top) in 1971, Ishmael’s debut film. The director hurled a chair
at an American soldier after the latter insulted a Filipina. The American called for
the police, but when an officer came to investigate, the new director shot back:
“Take that American away from this place, he called a Filipina a bitch!” Ishmael’s
mother Nena had her own story about an American engineer who once gave her
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equivocal praise in his description of her as a “rarity among [Filipinos].” Nena told
the offending engineer that, as in his country, the more intelligent Filipinos were in
business firms and universities. That person since then became her friend.
The Attribution of Genius
“There can be no definitive criticism of genius or talent which does not take into
consideration the social determinism, the historical combination of circumstances,
and the technical background which to a large extent determine it.” André Bazin’s
summarization of the attribution of genius (251) presents a reasoned justification of
how to treat fairly not just the gift but the social institutions and other considerations
that allow a talent to grow and develop.
In Bernal’s case, as suggested in several cited instances in the referenced and
primary biographical essay, the supreme reality of being a love child could and
would have been a bitter experience had he been born in a family that had not
provided him with both pride in himself as well as those values and resources that
were shared with him in his childhood. In a culture that stigmatizes the love child,
Bernal on the contrary rose as a proud and confident person, an exponent not only
of his family values, but even of feminist and gay rights, a proud film poet of the city
and the country which he held in affection.
While this paper dealt mainly with the family influence on Bernal that helped
shape his talent, much more needs to be understood in other social aspects. The
salient historical developments from the year of his birth in 1938, to his childhood
experience of World War II in the early 1940s, to the political and philosophical
developments in the country from his age of maturity — 1955 to the mid-1960s — are
important areas of scholarly consideration in the discipline of Bernalia, the study
of his philosophy and art.
Another important area which should not be missed is the literary Ishmael
Bernal, as he was a writer before he studied film in India in 1966. Up to the early
1970s when he directed his first film Pagdating sa Dulo, Bernal was a writer of note
in several national publications and magazines. An earlier study of his works reveals
a precise literary orientation, much of which is traceable to Kenneth Burke’s theory
on symbolic action. A deeper study of his Marxist orientation presents a formidable
opportunity to unearth many of those hidden progressive insights that were buried
in his output. Crucial to this project would be a more intensive consideration of
the political economy that he had operationalized in his films, as a way of further
understanding and contextualizing the instability of his social standing and class
position — and possibly a way as well of looking at the artist as Filipino.
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Notes
1. Ishmael wrote his first short story, “That House,” in his third year at the
University of the Philippines, which subsequent National Artist for Literature
Francisco Arcellana praised and discussed in class in lieu of the day’s planned
short story of Jose Garcia Villa. The young Bernal was so elated at Arcellana’s
recognition of his writing talent that he rushed home to report the feat proudly
to his mother, announcing “I am now celebrity!”
2. In his last will and testament, Ishmael Bernal assigned two trustees: director
Marilou Diaz-Abaya on the professional side, and the present author on the
family side.
3. Bernal wrote the draft of his biography and gave the task of improving what
he had written to Jorge Arago. The present author found the manuscript with
written instructions for Arago, so the author turned over the Bernal-typed
biography to Arago some time in 2000. However, it got burned when fire razed
the house of Jorge’s family, along with several of Arago’s Bernal memorabilia.
See Arago, “Pro-Bernal Anti-Bio.”
4. The study includes selected writings published in national newspapers and
magazines, as well as some extant Bernal-written manuscripts.
5. As a result of this incident, Ishmael left Grace Park to settle in his own place,
to avoid further confrontations with his mother. He was keenly aware that her
word held sway at home, and that she would not give up that maternal right.
After the issue cooled down, he asked leave, with the excuse that he had to be
close to the area where he worked.
6. One of the officials of the French Embassy had then said of Ishmael’s fluency
that he spoke and wrote like a Frenchman.
7. Paraluman Santos Aspillera, an educator, linguist, and Tagalog expert, was the
offspring of Lope K. Santos with Gregoria Anunciación, who lived in Pandacan,
Manila, just south across the Pasig River from where the Bernal-Santoses lived
in the northern side of the river, in Sta. Mesa district.
Works Cited
Arago, Jorge. “Father and Son.” Manila Out 3.5 (2001): 7–11. Print.
——— . “Partying in Horseshoe.” Manila Out 3.5 (2001): 11–15. Print.
——— . “Pro-Bernal Anti-Bio.” Agimat. Web. 28 Feb. 2012.
Aspillera, Paraluman S. Talambuhay ni Lope K. Santos: Paham ng Wika [Biography of
Lope K. Santos: Sage of Language]. [Quezon City]: Capitol Publishing House, 1972.
Print.
Bazin, André. “On the politique des auteurs.” Trans. Peter Graham. Cahiers du Cinéma,
the 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave. Ed. Jim Hillier. Cambridge: Harvard
UP , 1985. 248–59. Print.
Bernal, Ishmael, dir. Broken Marriage. Screenplay by Jose N. Carreon and Bing
Caballero. Regal Films, 1983. Film.
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——— , dir. and screenplay. Dalawang Pugad, Isang Ibon [Two Nests, One Bird]. Lea
Productions, 1977. Film.
——— , dir. Himala [Miracle]. Screenplay by Ricardo Lee. Experimental Cinema of the
Philippines, 1982. Film.
——— . Hinugot sa Langit [Snatched from Heaven]. Story by Amado Lacuesta. Regal
Films, 1985. Film.
——— , dir. and screenplay. Huwag Tularan: Pito ang Asawa Ko [Bad Example: I Have
Seven Spouses]. Story by Rinna Pido. Screenplay also by Desi Dizon. VP Pictures,
1974. Film.
——— , dir. Ikaw Ay Akin [You Are Mine]. Screenplay by Jose N. Carreon. Tagalog IlangIlang, 1978. Film.
——— . Isang Gabi sa Iyo, Isang Gabi sa Akin [One Night for You, One Night for Me].
Screenplay by Oscar Miranda. AA Productions, 1978. Film.
——— . Lagi na Lamang Ba Akong Babae? [Will I Be a Woman Forever?]. Screenplay by
Orlando Nadres. Regal Films, 1978. Film.
——— , dir. and screenplay. Manila by Night. Regal Films, 1980. Film.
——— , dir. Mister Mo, Lover Boy Ko [Your Husband, My Lover]. Story by Efren Abueg.
Screenplay by Antonio S. Mortel and Diego Cagahastian. Crown Seven Film
Productions, 1975. Film.
——— . Nunal sa Tubig [Mole on the Water]. Screenplay by Jorge Arago. Crown Seven
Film Productions, 1976. Film.
——— . Pahiram ng Isang Umaga [Lend Me One Morning]. Screenplay by Jose Javier
Reyes. Regal Films, 1989. Film.
——— , dir. and screenplay. Pagdating sa Dulo [Reaching the Top]. Mever and Frankesa,
1971. Film.
——— . Relasyon [The Affair]. Screenplay also by Ricardo Lee and Raquel N.
Villavicencio. Regal Films, 1982. Film.
——— , dir. Salawahan [Unfaithful]. Story by Jose N. Carreon. Regal Films, 1979. Film.
——— . Sugat sa Ugat [Wound in the Root]. Screenplay by Diego Cagahastian and Jorge
Arago. Sampaguita Pictures, 1983. Film.
——— . Wating. Screenplay by Floy Quintos. MAQ , 1994. Film.
Bernal, Ishmael, and Celso Ad. Castillo, dirs. Bakit May Pag-ibig Pa? [Why Is There
Love?]. AA Productions, 1979. Film.
Brocka, Lino, dir. Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag [Manila: In the Talons of Light].
Screenplay by Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr. Cinema Artists, 1975. Film.
Monaco, James. The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. New York:
Oxford UP , 1976. Print.
Panisnick, David. “Himala: The Secret of Elsa.” Monograph. Manoa: Dept. of Religion,
U of Hawai’i at Manoa, n.d. Rpt. in the commemorative brochure of the Berlin Film
Festival, 1983. Print.
Santos, Lope K. Banaag at Sikat [From Early Dawn to Full Light]. 1906. Manila:
Bookmark, 1988. Print.
Truffaut, Francois. “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” Movies and Methods:
An Anthology. Ed. Bill Nichols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976. 224–37. Print.
Vera, Noel. “Call Him Ishmael.” Yahoo Group: noelmoviereviews. 13 June 1999. Web. 21
May 2012.
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Forum Kritika: A Closer Look at Manila by Night
Film Plastics in Manila by Night
Joel David
Inha University, South Korea
joeldavid@inha.ac.kr
Abstract
As a sample of Third World cinema, Manila by Night (and by association its director,
Ishmael Bernal) endured a reputation for technical inadequacy—an ironic assessment,
considering its top-rank status in the Philippine film canon. This paper will attempt to
revaluate the movie’s aesthetic stature vis-à-vis movements specific to Third Cinema,
focusing on ethnographic filmmaking. First will be an analysis of the film’s visual surface,
with a consideration of scene selections/limitations/restrictions, the limiting and liberating
aspect of night shooting, and the independent-minded spirit which refused to conform to
standards of surface polish in filmmaking, as dictated by critics and practitioners. Second
will be a consideration of sound, particularly its director’s successful adaptation of the
multi-channel recording system to convey overlapping and even simultaneous lines of
dialogue. By this means the paper hopes to argue that, contrary to received impressions,
Bernal devoted as much aesthetic deliberation to Manila by Night as he did to its justly
celebrated narratological and ideological elements.
Keywords
ethnographic films, film censorship, film documentation, multicharacter narrative
About the Author
Joel David is Associate Professor for Cultural Studies at Inha University in Incheon, Korea.
He is the author of a number of books on Philippine cinema. He is the author of a number
of books on Philippine cinema and holds a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at New York University,
where he had a Fulbright scholarship..
Author’s Note
The author acknowledges the support provided by a faculty research grant from Inha
University toward the completion of this paper. An earlier version was presented at the
Asian Cinema Studies Conference. Thanks are also owed to Bryan Quesada, for the image
processing of the video source for frame capturing; Lorelei Adle-Gotinga, for insights on
the musical soundtrack; and Alex Granada, who successfully identified specific musical
sections. (In memory of Aaron David, who had assisted with my first transcription of
Manila by Night.)
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David / Film Plastics in Manila by Night37
Manila by Night holds a peculiar position among films contending for top rank in
the canon of Philippine cinema. Even in relation to the other output of its director,
Ishmael Bernal, and through no fault of its own, it had been unable to make an
impact in any major international festival, the usual first venue among Third World
countries for movies seeking global recognition. More curiously, its local record
indicates some hesitation on the part of film evaluators in acknowledging its
accomplishments as a technological product: in the only awards body (the Manunuri
ng Pelikulang Pilipino, or Filipino Film Critics Circle) that opted to recognize it,
not only did the film not get a nomination for cinematography, editing, or sound,
it actually lost in the best direction category despite winning prizes for production
design, lead male performance, screenplay, and film. In the organization’s official
anthology for the 1980s, the Manila by Night review concludes that “The film’s
technical aspects are not exactly first rate but they are well above average” (Bautista
158); it then qualifies the statement by starting with “What is more important is”
and referring thereafter to the film’s political content.
Despite the fact that the film has continued to gain critical ground since its
initial release in 1980, it (and its director) has continued to suffer from the critics’
institutional judgment regarding its alleged technical shortcomings. Appreciation
tends to center on its narratological achievement as well as the political response
it generated — a year-long ban by the martial law-era censorship board that also
precluded its participation as competition entry at the Berlin International Film
Festival. It is not the intention of this paper to recuperate the stature of Manila by
Night as a sample of technical excellence in cinema; rather, the paper will begin with
a recap of the tradition of documentary filmmaking that its director exploited as a
strategy for industrial survival, and inspect how with Manila by Night this mode
managed to attain an exemplary application in Philippine film practice, despite
being misrecognized — and consequently undervalued — by local evaluators.
The Second Golden Age opposition between Bernal and Lino Brocka (whose
Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag is the only other serious contender for all-timebest stature in the Philippine film canon) echoed an earlier rivalry, circa the First
Golden Age and later, between Gerardo de Leon and Lamberto V. Avellana. While
the latter had been criticized for currying favor with the martial-law government
(accounting for his winning the government’s National Artist Award ahead of de
Leon), the former was held by local (and subsequently foreign) critics in higher
regard. In fact, the MPP members effectively punished Avellana by withholding
their Natatanging Gawad Urian (lifetime achievement prize) for him until two other
directors, who specialized in musicals and comedies, were handed the recognition.
Fortuitously, Avellana received his critics’ award (which, during the televised
program, he admitted to have highly coveted) the same year that Manila by Night
was in the running. The greetings and congratulations between him and Bernal
served to remind cultural observers of how Bernal’s industry apprenticeship
proceeded from an association with Avellana — who at that late period of his career
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had focused almost exclusively on documentary production.1 Yet it was at this
same program that Bernal would be deprived of his recognition as director, for a
film that had generated enough buzz so that it had been widely anticipated to win
the grand prize in Berlin, had its participation in it pushed through.
One matter that further complicated the deliberations for that year’s critics’
awards was the fact that the commercially released version of the film was severely
mangled, owing to a record number of visual cuts (mostly sex scenes) and aural
deletions (cusswords and all mention, directly or otherwise, of Manila) (Interim
Board of Censors for Motion Pictures). In fact, the record of deliberations
maintained that the film could not be provided with nominations for editorial
elements (specifically film editing and sound) because of the condition of the print
shown in local theaters (Dormiendo). The confusion had been so extensive and
unprecedented that during the awards ceremonies, then MPP chair Bienvenido
Lumbera read a statement from the organization that maintained how the integral
version demonstrated clear superiority over the other entries and deserved to be
released despite the government’s disapproval. One implication of the statement is
that if the release had been uncensored, Manila by Night would have won in more
categories and have acquired a few more technical nominations; nevertheless,
the damage to the film’s plastic reputation had been done, and would never be
recovered since then.
By way of clarification, the use in this paper of the term “plastics” departs
from the original sense used by early film enthusiasts (cf. Canudo) who sought to
lionize the medium as the synthesis of the Western art forms that had preceded
it. Instead, the term as used here would be the more delimited current sense of
the “surface” audiovisual elements, through which the work signifies its meaning.
The semiological implication that this process implies will not be the direction of
the present study; it will, however, focus on a more specialized mode of practice,
following the career trajectory observed by the auteur (Bernal) prior to, through,
and after coming up with the film-text in question.
Directorial Motivation
Ironically, in the earlier phase of his career, Bernal had been regarded as an astute
intellectual filmmaker (with a prior career in film criticism [Vasudev 17] — perhaps
the most successful critic-turned-filmmaker in the country) who had the capability
of executing his choice of occasionally cutting-edge subject matter with technical
flourish. In fact, he was the critics circle’s second Best Director awardee, when his
star vehicle Dalawang Pugad, Isang Ibon intercepted 1977’s best film winner, Robert
Ylagan’s Hubad na Bayani, on its way to sweeping the usual clutch of major prizes.
His next-year contender, an even more ambitious European art-film handling of
a big-star love triangle titled Ikaw Ay Akin, won prizes for production design and
music and had its advocates for major prizes as well.
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By this stage in his career, nevertheless, Bernal was regarded as a narratological
innovator, perhaps the country’s finest, but not necessarily a major cinematographic
talent on the order of other critically acclaimed Filipino filmmakers such as Lino
Brocka, Celso Ad. Castillo, and Mike de Leon; again, going by the evidence of critics’
awards (cf. MPP website), the work of these filmmakers consistently cornered the
technical categories, with Bernal films able to wangle only “secondary” prizes
such as the previously mentioned ones for production design (a latter-day spin-off
from cinematography) and music (essentially a sub-category of sound). The logical
expectation was that Bernal would be fortifying his potential in these categories,
in order to prove himself the equal, by film-plastic standards, of his peers, just as
he might be tempering his tendency to depict shocking sexual kinks and verbal
obscenities in order to alleviate his standing with the militarized censorship board.
Instead, Bernal seemed to have decided on an insistence on these liabilities,
intensifying them to an extent that may be termed “perverse” (in more ways than
one). The turning point was in 1979, when Bernal’s entry, Aliw, displayed several
characteristics that would be further amplified in Manila by Night, from urbanlumpen material (with concomitant salty lingo) to multicharacter narrative structure
to apparent slap-dash technique. Aliw was regarded as a triumph of content over
plastic surface, although a minor controversy erupted when its scriptwriter,
Cecille Lardizabal, complained in a letter to print media that her script had been
bowdlerized by the director and that she was therefore refusing the critics’ best
screenplay nomination; the awards ceremony (and subsequent records) identified
Bernal and Franklin Cabaluna instead as the movie’s scriptwriters (cf. MPP ).
The sudden emergence of Aliw coincided with a flurry of prolific filmmaking on
the part of Bernal, where he would come up with four or more completed projects
annually, up to the mid-1980s. The logical conclusion — that this (apparent absence
of ) style was his way of coping with a heavy workload — would be evinced in the
minimal recognition his output received. With the introduction around this time
to the Cannes Film Festival of Lino Brocka and Mike de Leon, who were renowned
for their technical polish (the latter in fact won best director the year that Manila
by Night was in contention), Bernal eventually took pains to abandon the style he
had initiated with Aliw and returned to his less controversial “polished” filmmaking
style. Not surprisingly, his winning streak with the critics’ awards returned, and he
wound up copping four best director prizes, more than any other Filipino winner.
Ironically, none of the films he had won for share the same prominent canonical
stature that Manila by Night, Nunal sa Tubig, Himala, and even relatively smallscale works like Aliw and Pagdating sa Dulo (his first film) enjoy.
A more plausible explanation for Bernal’s resort to “flawed” technique in Aliw
can be inferred from the fact that it was produced by the same person, but not
the same production company, that financed his 1976 fishing-village epic Nunal
sa Tubig. The production company could not be the same because Nunal sa Tubig
had caused Jessie Ejercito’s Crown Seven Film Productions to collapse. The movie
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deployed a severe, distant, highly visual, and open-ended treatment that could not
surmount the presence of “sexy” performers playing out a roundelay of lust and
subsequent guilt. One may reasonably speculate that Ejercito, whose record of
risk-taking contrasted with the safer sensibility of his more famous brother (and
eventual Philippine President) Joseph Estrada, decided to gamble once more with
a Bernal project once he had launched his new company, Seven Star Productions.
Bernal had, after all, provided Ejercito with several critically acclaimed
blockbusters, notably Ligaw na Bulaklak (immediately preceding Nunal sa Tubig).
With Aliw, Ejercito’s trust in Bernal paid off in spades once more — so much so
that Regal Films, in scouting around for a project that would mark its second
anniversary as a production outfit (after several years as film distributor), offered
Bernal carte blanche if he presumably could pull off the same feat, but on a larger
scale, as Aliw. Manila by Night, like its predecessor, could therefore be seen as
opposed to Nunal sa Tubig, in the sense that it partook of a formulaic approach
that had already proved commercially successful; yet Aliw and Manila by Night
also surprisingly share several elements with the earlier project, starting with their
intense ethnographic interest in dispossessed underclass populations.
The difference lay in Bernal’s approach to the material. Where Nunal sa Tubig
was shot only after extensive research and scriptwriting, with every set-up subjected
to as thorough a measure of control as could be mustered on a distant out-oftown location, Aliw (to the chagrin, as mentioned, of the original scriptwriter) and
Manila by Night were essentially improvised on the set; the later film, in fact, had no
shooting script to work from, relying instead on a fairly loose single-page sequence
list (Bernal, Personal interview). Six people were credited as “script consultants,”
all of whom had worked and/or would be working with Bernal, all with an avowed
willingness to participate in improvisatory activity on his film sets. Among the
six were Jorge Arago, who had scripted Nunal sa Tubig; Peque Gallaga, who was
also production designer for Manila by Night; and Ricardo Lee and Toto Belano,
who would write a few other scripts for Bernal, including some of his subsequent
multicharacter projects.
The Documentarian Imperative
That Bernal had an apprenticeship in documentary production, and approached
Manila by Night in a documentary-realist manner — holding off on actual production
activity until he had extracted information from actual milieu personalities on
what their everyday concerns were and how they responded to events outside the
ordinary — ought to suffice in arguing that Bernal had worked out his technical
choices with more careful deliberation than he had been given credit for. Coming
of age during the flourishing of direct cinema, and eventually being offered the
directorship of the University of the Philippines Film Center (which had pioneered
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in cinéma-direct workshops in the country), he had been pondering the most
effective way to shape film technique in the face of the Philippines’ decline from
developing to underdeveloped nation, a distinction it shared in reverse with
other Asian countries which had experienced similar authoritarian systems of
government.
The fact that he determined that documentary aesthetics would provide the
most apposite (or the least objectionable) way of matching what was after all
Western-sourced technology with Third-World realities bespeaks a certain level of
integrity, considering that this was also the period when international film festival
agents were discovering talents from countries like the Philippines — talents who
could be packaged as anti-authoritarian personalities who happened to be “gifted”
in the medium. For Cannes representative Pierre Rissient (who was in effect the
Asian region’s gatekeeper to the festival), this resulted in the exclusion of people
like Bernal, who was allegedly “sloppy” as film craftsperson.2
No help for Bernal’s situation was forthcoming from the end of Third Cinema
advocates. If any consensus were to be drawn from the anthology Questions of
Third Cinema, it would be that non- or anti-Western films ought to be exempt
from the challenges of plastic aesthetic innovation. The closest to a pro-aesthetic
utterance would be that of Teshome H. Gabriel, who maintained that folklore, as
repository of popular memory, would most effectively counterpose the dominant
versions of “official history” that Hollywood promotes and circulates (54–56). The
several problematic implications of this assertion — the reconfiguration of tradition
(as embodied in and exemplified by folklore) as a force for progressivity vis-à-vis
Western culture, and the conflation of everything represented as “Hollywood” into
a mode of reaction, among other possible issues — could not have been part of
the aesthetic issues weighing on Bernal; otherwise, he would have gone the same
direction as his contemporaries, i.e., into highly accomplished anti-authoritarian
film provocations that would have been rewarded with foreign-festival acclaim and
marketability.3
In fact, the trajectory of filmed ethnography (as distinct from its literal
documentary counterpart, film ethnography) represented by a continuum from
Nunal sa Tubig through Aliw and Manila by Night (with a return to the earlier
position in Himala4) bypasses the strict delineation of the domain of documentary
filmmaking outlined in what may be construed as the standard mainstream text,
Bill Nichols’s Representing Reality. A more useful starting point would be the same
author’s somewhat melodramatic description, in “The Voice of Documentary,” of
what he champions as observational filmmaking:
Even those obvious marks of documentary textuality — muddy sound, blurred
or racked focus, the grainy, poorly lit figures of social actors caught on the
run — function paradoxically. Their presence testifies to an apparently more
basic absence: such films sacrifice conventional, polished artistic expression in
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order to bring back, as best they can, the actual texture of history in the making.
If the camera gyrates wildly or ceases functioning, this is not an expression of
personal style. It is a signifier of personal danger … or even death. (Nichols 52)
Further confirmation of Bernal’s observational strategy lies in the narrative sample
he openly avowed as his inspiration: Robert Altman’s Nashville (an American
production, it must be noted) (David, “Primates” 86). The movie’s scriptwriter, Joan
Tewkesbury, achieved her ambitiously structured 24-character opus by spending
several months immersing in the city’s country-music culture (Stuart 46–48), the
same process observed by Bernal in his preparations for Nunal sa Tubig and Himala.
When this approach proved inadequate in the case of Nunal sa Tubig (in the sense
that local audiences felt alienated by the result), Bernal did not jettison Altman’s
example altogether just yet; instead, he took the same extra step that Altman did,
and introduced on-the-set improvisation to an extreme degree, with the boxoffice results of Aliw and another multicharacter Seven Star film, Menor de Edad,
confirming the effectiveness of the approach. Beyond the pragmatic rationale, the
strategy also serves to confirm the
narrowing of the gap between the languages of documentary and fiction…. Those
same lightweight, silent-running cameras and recorders, plus film emulsions
whose sensitivity obviates the need for extra lighting in most situations, have
led to the production of films whose fluency of camerawork and naturalness
of performances … have opened up an unprecedented range of stylistic choice.
(Vaughan 104–05)
At this point, in order to demonstrate Bernal’s utilization of certain then-prevalent
devices in film anthropology in Manila by Night, this paper will be inspecting first
the film’s visual elements, then its aural properties (sound first, then music). The
discussion of the film’s visual properties will observe a basic division that may be
described as content followed by form — a problematic and admittedly artificial
division but one that is necessitated by the separation made possible during the
production process, wherein substance and technique may still be distinct from
each other prior to their synthesis in the final product. Specifically, the film’s
observational elements, definable as the constituents in documentary practice
that allow observers, even laypersons, to recognize its presence even without any
awareness of film technique, will be broken down into a number of discussable
subcategories. This will be followed by Manila by Night’s documentary effects,
the technical strategies, drawn from a wide range “allowed” by documentary
practitioners but from which most conventional feature-film practitioners
(epitomized by Classical Hollywood style) are discouraged.
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Observational Elements
Proceeding from the blanket definition by John Grierson of the documentary as a
“creative treatment of actuality” providing aesthetic satisfaction while articulating
a social purpose (Hardy 35–46), one must also instantly qualify that, as a generic
instance, the markers of documentary film necessarily remain unstable. Louise
Spence and Vinicius Navarro, in discussing Nichols’s essay, maintain that
These days we think of handheld camera, obscured views, and overlapping sound
as markers of documentary truth. And a general “messiness”…, unbalanced
compositions, and an aesthetic of visual and aural clutter are easily read as
signifiers of immediacy, instantaneity, and authenticity…. Yet these different
markers, and realism as a style, have changed over time.
To better apprehend Bernal’s documentarian strategies in Manila by Night, visual
samples in the form of frame captures will be presented alongside then (and perhaps
still) contemporary markers, alongside a cursory discussion of the same technical
elements. In focusing on the film’s plastics, rather than on its narrative structure,
the paper does not intend to valorize one exclusive (or at the expense) of the other,
even in relation to anthropological discourse. Manila by Night’s narratological
accomplishments have been discussed more extensively elsewhere, over the years
since its emergence, and as previously noted, as the likeliest way of “excusing” its
supposed technical limitations. Yet even in viewing the movie as an ethnographic
text, we can see how it confronts the charge that “the visual record remains ‘thin,’
while the written record allows for ‘thick’ description by the method of ‘languageshadows’” (Ardener 112, qtd. in Hastrup 15).5
1. Clinical Distance
Kirsten Hastrup maintained that, in addition to photography’s ability to provide
a unique system of disclosures (as asserted by Susan Sontag — cf. Hastrup 11), the
camera also has the more important advantage of restoring “commonplaces,” details
that the researcher may have ignored or taken for granted (12). The resultant clinical
gaze, as attributed to Michel Foucault, was “until recently … the sole guarantee
asked for…. We have come to terms with the fact that a ‘bias’ is not necessarily an
evil … because it is informed by intuition and implicit knowledge” (12). In Manila
by Night, this method is most pronounced in scenes involving the type of character
who would have shown up in Nunal sa Tubig and Himala, a naïve waitress, Baby,
who is sweet-talked into yielding her virginity to Febrero, a promiscuous gay-forpay taxi driver. In fig. 1, Baby had been accosted by Sonny, a customer who offers to
pimp her to Japanese customers; she refuses and instead tells Febrero how the man
had disrespected her, which leads to a confrontation between the two men. The
scene unfolds in a single take.
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Figure 1. Clockwise from top left: Febrero arrives at the restaurant where Baby works; Baby
tells Febrero about Sonny so Febrero heads for Sonny’s table; Febrero challenges Sonny to
a fistfight; at the restaurant entrance, Febrero begins the showdown, but will be eventually
overpowered by Sonny. (Regal Films, frame captures by author)
The “rhyme” to this sequence is provided later, when Baby discovers her
pregnancy and is abandoned by Febrero. She agrees to go with Sonny to the
whorehouse, where Febrero’s common-law wife, Adelina Macapinlac, works.
After being threatened by Adelina, Baby is selected by the Japanese customer that
Sonny brings. In fig. 2, Baby is overpowered by nausea, deriving from a number
of possible causes — her abandonment by Febrero, the threats uttered by Adelina
(whom, mistaken for a nurse, Baby had earlier approached for help), and her own
pregnant condition.
Because of the deliberate avoidance of closeness, both sequences “read” as
amusing, if not outright comic. Pathos and resignation respectively follow in Baby’s
next appearances, when she screams invectives at a fleeing Febrero, and later goes
home from work, alone and pregnant.
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Figure 2. Left to right: Upon being embraced by her first-ever john, a Japanese customer,
Baby hurls on him; the customer helps Baby clean herself up but fails to notice and wipe
off her vomit on himself; while being escorted back from the toilet to the bedroom, Baby
loses consciousness. (Regal Films, frame captures by author)
2. Ironic Contrast
A quality that indicates politicized positions in cinema in general, ironic
contrast straddles the distinction between film fictions and non-fiction cinema;
in fact, certain “purist” positions would eye this device with suspicion, on the
(problematic and problematizable) assumption that ethnographic films should
present wholenesses — of persons, objects, and actions (Heider 47–48). Vaughan
criticizes such approaches as impaired by “the positivist naïveté of the traditional
functionalist perspective — how ‘whole’ is ‘whole’?” and endorses instead “the ideal
of ethnographic intentionality” (119). By this measure, ironic contrast, although
more “cinematographic” than “ethnographic” (assuming that these distinctions,
per Vaughan, can be opposed to each other), may still work if it were, to use
another potentially controversial term, organic to the locale being documented.
In Manila by Night, the device is handled with a casualness that could almost be
accidental — in fact, Bernal made the claim that the set-ups were discovered on
location, occasionally pointed out by members of his staff or by the subjects he was
interviewing prior to improvising (Bernal, Personal interview). Fig. 3 provides a
few examples drawn from various sequences in the movie.
All four examples also figure in sequences with shots that provide clinical
distance. The technical difference is that distantiation is effected within the terms of
a static composition, rather than situations (as in figs. 1 and 2) that require camera
movements or cuts. This may be ascribed to the “ethnographic intentionality”
mentioned earlier — i.e., since the contrast is inherent in the situation, then the
contrast can be perceived even in a single frame.
3. Confessional Moment
A much-abused technique of the manipulative media interview, confessions in
fiction films derive their power from the substitution of the camera (to which
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Figure 3. Clockwise from top left: Adelina Macapinlac, in her nurse’s masquerade, is a
small figure on the right, her clean white uniform contrasting with the garbage truck; Bea
(a blind masseuse) and an unidentified streetwalker pray before a street altar in the redlight section of Chinatown; at a formal and well-appointed Christmas dinner (minus her
drug-addicted eldest son), Virgie nullifies her husband’s attempts at pleasant storytelling
by slamming her daughter’s plate for some minor childish infraction; attempting to escape
from her lover Greg Williams’s insistence on performing live sex as an occupation, Bea
feels her way alongside a parked vehicle that her blindness will never enable her to drive,
but which also helps Greg recapture her. (Regal Films, frame captures by author)
the subject relates her intimate thoughts and feelings) with another character
in the text.6 This provides the viewer with several possible options rather than
the sometimes-uncomfortable position of omniscience in the direct interview:
identifying with either the confessing character or the one being confessed to, or
maintaining distance from both without the “guilt” of having intruded into another
person’s privacy. Among several possible scenes in Manila by Night, only two
(fig. 4) stand out from the rest because of the characters’ sincerity in giving and
receiving the confessions.
Exceptional as these scenes are, they also resolve in the larger pattern of
betrayal and heartbreak, with perhaps the worst outcomes in the narrative for
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Figure 4. Adelina talks to Manay about Febrero, the lover they share, saying how much she
loves him for providing her with a refuge from the harshness of the city; Kano, despite her
disapproval of Manay’s preference for men, begins opening up about how Bea, the blind
masseuse whom Manay is planning to introduce to Adelina, is her true love. (Regal Films,
frame captures by author)
each character: Adelina turns out to be a fake nurse, while Bea assists narcotics
agents in pursuing Kano. With several people resentful of her deceit, Adelina dies
from strangulation by an unknown assailant; Kano is arrested; and Manay suffers
a nervous breakdown.
4. Illicit Activity
A variation on the confessional moment, scenes of illicit acts have been the stockin-trade of television exposés and police procedurals. The usual context tends to
uphold the notion of law and order premised on the disapprobation of socially
unacceptable transgressions. The practice evolved from early documentary’s
so-called victim tradition, which necessitated the development of now-standard
documentation technology “that allowed a degree of intrusion into ordinary
people’s lives that was not previously possible” (Winston 275), resulting in a tense
balance between “the established right of the public to know and of the media
to publish” (285). With the advantage of fictionalization, illicit events may be
depicted, as they are in Manila by Night (fig. 5), sans editorializing, with verbal
comments articulated afterward and relegated to certain characters according to
their particular sets of values.
The primary difference between confessional moments and the depiction of
illicit acts is that the former rely on the utterance of disclosure, whereas the latter
remain primarily visual, with dialog a secondary, incidental, or sometimes even
irrelevant component. In the preceding examples, the audience member is invited
to identify with the character performing the activity, and by doing so overlook
the immorality or illegality of the situation, with the viewer in effect suspending
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Figure 5. Clockwise from top left: Alex and his girlfriend Vanessa, a college student, check
into a hotel and use poppers to get high prior to resuming sexual activity; Kano, in order
to finalize street-level transactions with Alex and his friends, engages an underage runner
to fetch some illegal drugs; having nurtured a crush on Alex during his short-lived folksinging career, Manay follows him into the restroom of a disco and succeeds in seducing
him; in order to comfort her girlfriend Bea, who’s depressed after finding out that Adelina,
the nurse Manay sought out for her, was a fake, Kano provides some cough syrup to get
her high, then necks with her in a pushcart beside a waterway; meanwhile Bea’s girl Friday,
Gaying, amuses herself by hooking a bra from someone’s clothesline and trying it on;
having discovered his drug habit, Alex’s parents gang up on him in an excessively abusive
manner, prompting their son to run away from home and live with his gay lover, Manay.
(Regal Films, frame captures by author)
her judgment. Since the characters are animated by their pursuit of happiness and
material fulfillment (goals presumably shared by us, the viewers), we allow them to
take their risk-taking opportunities and await the consequences, with the question
of how far they might be able to succeed, providing a measure of suspense normally
unavailable in (pre-judged) non-fictional presentations.
5. Symbolic Juxtaposition
Drawn from the tradition of Soviet montage, the placement of a succeeding shot
intended to qualify a preceding one, whether by affirming, contradicting, or
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Figure 6. Top: Baby tells Febrero that he had gotten her pregnant but is dismayed when he
erupts in anger, castigating her failure to use birth control; meanwhile in a car accident
nearby, one of the victims, a young girl, is hauled out of the wreck by passersby. Bottom:
Sonny informs Baby that Febrero will never return, now that her pregnancy has given him
reason to avoid her; their conversation is interrupted by a commotion in the restaurant,
wherein the Chinese proprietor throws out his girlfriend, one of the waitresses, for flirting
with a customer. (Regal Films, frame captures by author)
amplifying it, has proved less effective in documentary owing to its attributability
to editorial intervention. As with the confessional moment, fiction has the
advantage of plausibility, i.e., in enabling the filmmaker to argue that the related
incident happened to be in the same vicinity, if not within the same frame. The
juxtapositions in fig. 6 pertain to Baby, the provincial waitress undergoing the
process of realizing the painful realities of urban existence.
A different series of juxtapositions, providing ironic contrasts, occurs through
two chronological sequences in fig. 7. Here the filmmaker would have been
anticipating the possibility of resistant readings on the part of the audience,
commonly observed among audiences (mainly students) of ethnographic films
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Figure 7. Clockwise from top left: Adelina Macapinlac is strangled by an unknown
assailant; the sound of her struggle is drowned in the din of New Year’s Eve fireworks;
Febrero, accompanied by Manay and his friends (plus another of Manay’s lovers, Alex),
visits the morgue; Alex is too stoned to participate in the series of events; Manay and
friends find another woman’s body in the coffin, wearing Adelina’s uniform, and quarrel
with the morgue attendant; after the apologetic attendant explains that the woman is really
Avelina Macasaet and Adelina’s body was switched in error, Febrero faints and is initially
hauled by Manay’s friends to the mortuary table. (Regal Films, frame captures by author)
(Martinez 150), and channeling their responses toward a more heightened
awareness of social dynamics. The sequences involve Febrero’s live-in lover, the
fake nurse, Adelina Macapinlac, from her murder up to a startling discovery at the
morgue.
The series provides a more complex interrelationship among the shots, with a
subtle attention to the repetition of cues in order to offset (or more accurately
cushion) the impact of the plot twists: Adelina’s uniform shows up again on the
wrong corpse; Alex’s deathly pallor (due to his worsening drug habit) suggests
that a stint in the morgue might be in store for him sooner than later; Febrero,
whose fainting echoes Baby’s response to her first sex-work assignment (cf. fig. 2),
gets carried around and is almost dumped on the mortuary table, the same way
that Adelina’s body might have been placed there earlier; even Manay’s scream of
frustration and outrage at the end of the sequence recalls the noise that the city had
generated during the murder of Adelina.
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These realist elements, it could be argued, could just as readily characterize
a large number of Third World film products, and do not affect the prevailing
consensus of Bernal’s supposed failure to come up with a classically inflected visual
design for his film; what weakened his standing during this period was the fact that
Lino Brocka’s cinematographer, Conrado Baltazar, specialized in night-time shots
and succeeded in providing an atmosphere that was menacing and melancholy
in the same instance, facilitated by an expert deployment of shadows, filters, and
fog effects. In contrast, the flat and harsh lighting (to the point where star filters
had to be used to lessen the glare of lights and light reflections) in a movie that
consisted almost entirely of night sequences brings up the question of what kind of
innovation Bernal had in mind beyond his multi-narrative conceptual coup.
The answer may be gleaned in the next section, which will inspect several
groups of shots that indicate how Manila by Night utilized not only ethnographic
research techniques to develop content, but also documentary stylistics in order
to present these findings, so to speak, in a proper manner — that is, in a way that
would not be mistaken as film fiction, but that rather could be readily identifiable
as film documentation.
Documentary Effects
Understandably, Manila by Night as a whole could not be shot docu-style, even
if the first step in its location procedure was precisely that of the seasoned
documentarian: block off the actual places where the characters are supposed to
appear, interview the people who live or work in those settings, and note down
as accurately as possible their words and actions. The next stage — feeding the
performers the lines and rehearsing the scenes — suggests the final category in
Peter Ian Crawford’s list of the possible permutations of ethnographic cinema,
starting with rough footage and going through ethnographic films, small-format
TV docus, education and information films, “other non-fiction films,” and ending
with a stand-alone listing for “fiction films and drama documentaries [that] may
be labeled ethnographic because of their subject matter. In recent years, several
fiction films have dealt with ‘typical’ anthropological topics” (“Film as Discourse”
74). While acknowledging that the boundaries among the seven categories “are
obviously fluid and any one film may well fall into several categories,” Crawford
proceeds to focus (understandably, considering the terms of his study) on all types
of ethnographic films except the last.
The following categories then may have been the means by which Bernal, with
minimal theoretical assistance from experts in the field, signaled to his audience
how Manila by Night was supposed to have departed from traditional (Hollywoodinflected) classical filmmaking.
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Figure 8. Clockwise from top left: Febrero and Adelina as seen from the left side of their
bed, facing the wall; the couple, as viewed from the other (wall) side, with their sleeping
children visible beyond them; the couple as viewed from the foot of the bed, with a visible
light source shining through a window (more on this later); the two once more from the
bed’s left side, right before one of the children cries and interrupts their moment.
(Regal Films, frame captures by author)
1. Axis Violations
The so-called 180-degree rule was the means by which Classical Hollywood set
the terms for the use of then-new film technology, during a time when American
cinema not only produced updated technologies, but also demonstrated how
these should be used. The method, wherein a succeeding cut should not cross the
imaginary line between two people in order to show one or the other’s expressions
during the delivery of dialog, became one of the cornerstones of David Bordwell,
Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s monumental study of Hollywood style. It
has proved more durable than another Classical Hollywood tradition — that of
continuity editing, which was one of the technical rules immediately debunked by
the French New Wave, particularly with Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle. The
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only formal mode of filmmaking where any hard-and-fast rule cannot be faithfully
observed would be that of documentary. In fig. 8, where Adelina first gets home (cf.
fig. 3, where she passes by a garbage truck), she proceeds to the bed where she and
Febrero have a bout of lovemaking.
The movie is consistent in crossing the axis between characters in order to
accommodate social commentary in the scene, the way that the previous example
did to show the couple’s proximity to their own children, and then to show how
any voyeur outside the window could easily peek into their bedroom and, as the
camera does, violate their privacy.
2. Handheld Dollies
The few instances where zoom shots are used in Manila by Night, these are so
rare and subtle that they might not be easily perceived at first viewing. Instead,
the movie makes liberal use of handheld camera dolly-ins (fig. 9), starting with
the first public locale, the nightclub where Alex sings “Teach Your Children” to
his admiring family and gay fan (Manay), and where Kano, a drug pusher from
whom he will eventually purchase some contraband, transacts business with some
of Alex’s friends.
Figure 9. Uncut shot: Kano handing over drug merchandise to Alex’s friends. (Regal Films,
frame captures by author)
Although a major studio production that could have easily provided other
options such as tracks or cut-in coverage, Manila by Night makes use of a mobile
camera in most of its “busy” sequences, thus providing the impression of ongoing
actuality captured on-the-fly.
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Figure 10. Left to right: Aware that she is being followed by narcotics agents, Kano slips
into a dark alley, with her figure being highlighted at the end by a partly visible light
source; on the way to bringing Bea (with her assistant Gaying) to Manay’s lover Febrero’s
wife’s supposed hospital workplace, the characters discover that a film shoot is in
progress; chased by narcs in a car, Kano goes to Bea’s workplace to ask for her girlfriend’s
help — which as it turns out will lead to a betrayal. (Regal Films, frame captures by author)
3. Visible Light Sources
Reflexivity is a problematic aspect of documentary film practice. Astutely describing
the condition as one of “anthropological transparency,” James C. Faris traces the
origin of the requisite to the attempt to correct the imbalance of the coverage of
non-Western peoples by Western anthropologists (epitomized in film practice by
Margaret Mead, after whom the longest-running annual ethnographic-film festival
is named). Reflexivity in this context could mean either the deliberate placement of
reminders of the artificiality of media activity in a foreign or pre-modern culture, or
the provision of non-Western peoples with the means to create their own images
and statements.
Although the practice has become a commonplace of postmodernist literature,
it is still securely contained in film practice, in the sense that either the work has to
be a documentary (and therefore reflexive signifiers can be permitted along with
other “errors” in production), or it has to be signaled as a fiction within the fiction
(with Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. as the primordial sample). Yet one of the least
remarked-upon aspects of Nashville is in its closing sequence: when the crowd,
agitated by an assassination, is soothed, comforted, and otherwise mesmerized
by the unexpected emergence of a new talent, the coverage becomes distinctly
documentary-like without warning, with camera and sound personnel captured
moving about and certain “raw” lens and lighting adjustments (e.g., rack-focused
telephoto shots) included in the footage.
In Manila by Night, these indicators appear literally, as light sources directed
straight into the camera (fig. 10; see also one of the shots with a window in the
background in fig. 8). At one point, in fact, the visible light source actually signifies
a reflexive sequence — a film shoot that the characters wander into.
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Figure 11. Clockwise from top left: Psychic informs Bea of her past life; Al Tantay (husband
of Rio Locsin, who plays Bea) prepares for a death scene; Marissa Delgado, who once
played a prostitute in an earlier Bernal film, plays a nurse on the set; in an earlier scene (cf.
fig. 8), the only character slated for death, Adelina (whose masquerade Bea and Manay are
about to uncover), peers anxiously into a mirror. (Regal Films, frame captures by author)
The reflexive sequence (fig. 11) initially appears to be a series of in-jokes that
eventually make theoretical and pop-cultural points. It begins, as shown in fig. 10,
with a floodlight being directed at the camera lens, and then turned around to
illuminate the location shoot. After figuring out what is going on, the trio (Manay,
Bea, and Gaying) are accosted by a clairvoyant woman channeling eighteenthcentury Philippine existence, describing how Bea had been a coquette who frustrated
a lovelorn painter so much that he wound up stealing for her and having his hand
cut off as punishment. She avers that Bea has strong psychic powers — a suspicion
the audience might have been entertaining, judging from the way that Bea could
occasionally sense the presence of her acquaintances even without being alerted
to their arrival. The encounter ends with the psychic identifying Manay as queer
and leaving the trio, whereupon Manay mentions how Manila has been subject
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to a proliferation of crazies. The dismissal by Manay of the psychic lady indirectly
references Teshome H. Gabriel’s prescription of folklore as a way of recuperating
aesthetics for Third Cinema — Bernal’s way of confronting the challenge without
invoking tradition.
The trio then approach the movie set, wherein actors playing a nurse and a
bloodied victim are being prepared for the camera. The actress is identified as
Marissa Delgado, whose most prominent role was that of a whorehouse madam in
Bernal’s Ligaw na Bulaklak. Delgado is seen applying and fixing her own makeup in
a handheld mirror — creating an association between her and Adelina Macapinlac,
whose transition in the film would be in the opposite direction, from nurse to sex
worker; to bolster the connection, the Adelina actress, Alma Moreno, was launched
in Ligaw. The male actor, on the other hand, is played by Al Tantay (whose name is
called out by Gaying), who at that time was the real-life husband of Rio Locsin, the
actress playing Bea; at a later time, the two would break up and Tantay would be
closely identified with Bernal, starring in several of his projects — but this would be
more a retrospective rather than a reflexive detail.
4. Multiplanar Compositions
It is in its compositional aspects that Manila by Night shares the technical premise
of Nashville — which, in turn, enlarged on a long-dormant formal innovation
in film: that of deep focus, hailed by André Bazin as the method that resolved
the earlier debate in film essentialism — whether the medium’s specificity lay in
(originally shallow-focus) shots or in the meaningful juxtaposition of these shots
via montage. The challenge that Altman set for himself — the delineation of about
two dozen protagonists in a regular-length production — could only have been
made possible with the introduction of fast film stock. The fact that it took a few
decades before a Hollywood practitioner figured the obvious question — Why
not compose with characters in depth, instead of inanimate objects in unusual
proximities to individual characters? — may be attributed to the issue, articulated
by Laura Mulvey, wherein audiences were encouraged to identify with one (usually
male) character in a Classical Hollywood text.
Serendipitously for Bernal, Nashville was conceptualized and produced as a
critical response to the then-approaching bicentennial of the USA , about the time
that he was presumably casting about for an effective way to unify his interests in film,
literature, and ethnography. Nashville’s depiction of several characters, sometimes
en masse, also recuperated for commercial American cinema certain elements
that may have proved uncomfortable for nominally conservative mainstream
producers, critics, and audiences: “heroic” crowd scenes were associated not only
with socialist visual expressions, but also with authoritarian propaganda — Leni
Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens, a documentary, being the most notorious
example. In relation to the present study, Nashville demonstrated the feasibility
of composing in depth with (several) characters as the primary subjects, with a
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Figure 12. Left to right: Manay scolds Febrero about his ignorance of Adelina’s secret life
while his friends (literally behind him) talk about how he professes disappointment in
Febrero yet could not help assisting him; Manay returns Alex (who immediately walks
out, still visible in back) to his abusive mother, Virgie, who in turn takes leave of Manay’s
sophisticatedly decadent friends (with an amusedly turbaned Evita Vasquez in foreground);
Baby, having espied and approached Febrero at a city square, shouts curses at him as he
runs away, with the Church and its night-time attendants witnessing her outburst. (Regal
Films, frame captures by author)
Figure 13. Left to right: A security guard (in center, with megaphone) threatens couples—
among them Baby and Febrero—in vehicles with arrest for making out in “private
property”; poet Krip Yuson recites an ode to Manila in foreground, with street children
watching behind him, and a possibly high transvestic dancer twirling in back; an already
heavily addicted Alex attempts to mooch Manay for cash while behind them Manay’s
friends discuss the prospects of taking on Alex’s other friends as lovers, even as gay-bar
dancers attempt to entice other patrons to purchase their services. (Regal Films, frame
captures by author)
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Figure 14. Left to right: Congestion in Bea’s apartment requires that her boyfriend Greg
Williams dress up (in preparation for an overseas job which will turn out to be a swindle)
in the presence of her children as well as her assistant Gaying; Kano, Alex, and his friends
decide to join in the revelry of Halloween masqueraders behind them, some of whom
had already leaped into Manila Bay; Alex, after having been chased by narcotics agents
(who managed to arrest Kano), wanders through the city until the morning sun finds him
directionless and isolated at Rizal Park, with people heading for work before him and
others exercising behind him. (Regal Films, frame captures by author)
social locale (a city) being created via mainly the people in the text, rather than the
traditional signifiers of architecture, government and business markers, flora and
fauna, climate and weather, and other non-human elements. Altman’s innovation
would extend to sound design, which will be discussed in the succeeding sections.
To illustrate the use of multiplanar arrangements in Manila by Night, three
(admittedly arbitrary) sub-groupings will be created: the first (fig. 11) showing
commentary, clashes, and violence; the second (fig. 12), diffusion, distractions, and
negotiations; and the third (fig. 13), congestion, revelry, and isolation.
The design behind these sequences, as noted earlier, could conceivably figure
in European (or Euro-influenced) cinema. What distinguishes the way that Bernal
executes them in Manila by Night — and on a smaller scale, in Aliw earlier — is the
way that he had opted to adapt Altman’s innovation in film sound in Nashville to
the requisites of Third World filmmaking. Before proceeding to a discussion of
sound (including music), however, it would be useful to reconsider the complaint,
mentioned earlier, by ethnographers that film provides a “thinner” description than
does writing (Hastrup 15). The presentation-in-depth of characters (sometimes
literally, through deep-focus), complemented with a multi-channel sound
treatment, not only provides the equivalent of “thick” description; by harnessing
the conceptual merits of writing, by enriching thematic interplay and ensuring that
the multi-protagonist “thickness” is maintained all throughout, it also exceeds the
capability of writing, in the sense of providing emotional discourse and dramatic
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involvement, with generic flexibility and star appeal constituting additional sources
of pleasure and insight.
Sound Logic
The difficulty of isolating the soundtrack of Manila by Night for analysis lies in
more than the standard objection to the separation of the integral elements of the
aural and the visual in film (Burch 200–01). On the one hand, the plastics of the
movie’s soundtrack parallel the efforts of Bernal to shift from a high-art approach
in his prestige productions to something more accessible for a Third World mass
audience. On the other hand, as already mentioned at this stage in Bernal’s career,
his output bypassed the standard Classical Hollywood values that had ironically
enabled other Filipino filmmakers to be noticed and successfully promoted in
foreign film festivals. Aliw, the stylistic and thematic predecessor of Manila by
Night, was entirely unrecognizable when set alongside all of Bernal’s previous
works. It had a rough, seemingly unfinished surface, and it indulged in scenes
of melodramatic excess, alongside the director’s usual unflinching depictions of
expressions of erotic desire. Because of its choice of the milieu of nightclub sex
workers, its use of gutter language was casual and frequent. It also relied on a score
that melded the hard rock and disco preferred by its hard-living characters with the
then-standard over-orchestrated martyr-woman ballad, immediately recognized
as a form of low camp.
Aliw’s most renowned achievement was its interweaving of a triple characterbased narrative, without favoring any single one as exemplary or as representative
of the others. In fact with this multicharacter narrative strategy plus its rough-edged
execution, it can finally be reconfigured as the prequel to Manila by Night. And the
soundtrack to both films, as well as to Bernal’s other multiple-character exercises,
is key, again in the sense that Bernal’s direct inspiration was Robert Altman’s
Nashville: not only was Altman’s movie a musical, with its inevitable emphasis on
sound, it also exemplified the triumph of his Lion’s Gate sound system, in which
several channels would be processed simultaneously in order to yield distinct yet
overlapping aural information, with astute use of the Dolby noise-reduction system
(Schreger 350–51).
This type of technology would have been too costly to replicate, much less
import, in the Philippines, even more so today. In fact, when one listens closely to a
Bernal soundtrack, what is surprisingly evident is that major characters rarely talk
simultaneously. At most, one of the major characters would be delivering dialogue
while one or usually two minor characters would be chatting in the background.
This allows the audience to continue focusing on singular characters, even as it
conveys the impression that the movie “democratically” allows other characters to
emerge, sometimes with eventually equal importance.
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Manila by Night had a sufficiently large ensemble to allow certain characters
to speak in specific ways. Virgie, with whom the film opens, maintains a devout
middle-class motherly aura increasingly disrupted by a neurotic rage, which we
early on understand as coming from her anxiety over a sex-work background that
sometimes returns to haunt her. Bea, the blind masseuse who hopes for the kind
of salvation that Virgie had achieved, wallows in the same frustration and rage, to
the extent of betraying the only person who truly loved her. That person, Kano,
combines the street-smart attributes of a drug peddler with the tenderness of her
being Bea’s naïve and sentimental lover. Adelina is Virgie in reverse, in the senses of
having been unable to rise in social status as well as in accepting and maintaining
her nightlife profession while mimicking the trappings of respectability in her
masquerade as a city-hospital nurse.
In contrast with these openly contradictory women characters, the straight men
are unusual only in the sense that they reject the then-standard Western dictum
of exclusive heterosexuality, and instead (following prison logic — cf. Fleisher and
Krienert) regard their conquest of gay admirers as an enhancement of their sense
of machismo. In other terms, they are indistinguishable one from another. Alex,
Virgie’s son, never runs into the other major male character, Febrero, except at
the end where their mutual gay lover brings them to Adelina’s funeral (see fig. 7),
but the latter can easily be seen as an older version of the younger, irresponsible,
charming, and dissolute Alex.
Manay, the queer male character, is in danger of being read as a stand-in for
Bernal. This is a contestable reading, which Bernal himself had found objectionable,
but it is also understandable, given the extended exchanges that the character has
with Alex, Febrero, Kano, Bea, and Adelina (cf. fig. 4). And while we may on the
whole see characters like Manay and Kano as embodying a middle ground — male
and female in the same presence, in a way that has become increasingly acceptable
even in contemporary mainstream cinema — this kind of compromise-by-definition
is fraught with risk and difficulties, even as it holds a fascination for the way that
Bernal navigates their characterization with a keen understanding of their strengths
as well as their weaknesses.7 In Manay’s case, the exchanges are more in line with
a character trying to cope with a bewildering array of several types of survivors in
the urban jungle, while making sure he gets his share of available beefcake.
Manila by Night arrived at a moment when Hollywood practice had absorbed
enough European-inspired new-cinema innovations to attempt a return to field
recording, in place of extensive studio dubbing. The merits of such a practice
would have been immediately evident to someone trained in documentary
filmmaking like Bernal. However, such a transition would have also encountered
resistance from producers, who would have had to invest in more sophisticated
field-recording equipment and dispense with their extensive and profitable postproduction facilities. (In the case of the movie, this would have been Magna Tech
Omni Studio, as acknowledged in the closing credits.)
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What resulted instead in Bernal films, starting with Aliw and Manila by Night,
was a mergence of seemingly opposed values of documentary “noise” (in the sense
of small talk, rather than of non-human or inanimate dissonant sounds) created
in the studio, just as on the narrative level his characters also embodied severe
and unstable contradictions. In this sense, he had gone a step farther than using
sound within the standard feminist argument of its being the womanly counterpart
of the image (cf. Lawrence). This argument had been subjected to a number of
possible deconstructive qualifiers, in the sense for example that sound per se is also
associated with patriarchal interdiction.
Technical Queering
As mentioned earlier, Bernal during this period was known in industry circles for
being supposedly cavalier when it came to film plastics. Certain of his characters
all throughout his films until the early 1980s would profess an unfamiliarity with
or alienation from media technology, and any individual instance was taken to be
either an extension of the filmmaker’s own anxieties or, more likely, a humorous
self-reference with its own ironic over-simplification, considering that when it
came to questions of narrative technique and thematic development, no one had
equaled him before or since.
Hence his decision to reproduce milieu-specific cacophony by careful observation,
notation, and recording partakes of the same painstaking efforts by which seemingly
randomized high-art output (Jackson Pollock’s abstract-expressionist paintings,
for example) are accomplished. In an interview, he outlined how everything in the
soundtrack would be devised, including the dialogue, since (as mentioned earlier)
all he had had in the beginning was a sequence list rather than a screenplay. His
subsequent multicharacter movies all relied on independent scriptwriters, so it
was only during this period that he had been able, as it were, to do things entirely
his way. Yet the fact that the city (more accurately, its residents) as raw material
went through a phase of recording, processing, and reproduction wound up
strengthening, rather than refining or distilling, its documentary properties. In this
regard one could argue that even more than the visual surface, the sound design
of Manila by Night exemplified a queering of technique, a conflation of unruly
source material with the exacting discipline of studio recording, in order to present
a result that was faithful not to the demands of standard film practice, but to the
nature of the original material itself.8
If we further isolate the music of Manila by Night from the soundtrack, we find
that this seeming rejection of standard filmmaking conventions betrays itself, in
the sense that Bernal’s interest in the merits of modernity becomes apparent (as
upheld in standard prescriptions for film-music analysis [Buhler 44–47]). A casual
listen might lead us to suppose that the musical soundtrack of Manila by Night
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repeats the strategy of Aliw described earlier, with music selected in order to serve
as further illustration and amplification of the diegesis. But the opening credits
begin with a raw jazz-inflected progressive-fusion number, an original composition
by Vanishing Tribe, a band that had won for itself a critics’ prize for its use of
baroque chamber and impressionist piano music in an earlier Bernal movie, Ikaw
Ay Akin.
The first instance of pop music in Manila by Night is an on-site performance
of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Teach Your Children” at a folk-music cafe,
and unlike in Aliw, this separation between diegetic pop and non-diegetic progelectronica is maintained. The pop music selections are also more varied, ranging
from jazz fusion to heavy metal, Christmas carol to Pinoy rock, and even including
spoken word alongside the heartbreak and disco numbers (Raval). Typical of the
wit behind the choices is the insertion of Festival’s harmless-because-fluffy disco
version of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical
Evita (also the name of one of the characters, a customer of Manay) — which had
been banned in the Philippines because of its then-perceived reference to Imelda
Marcos.
As an example we could inspect two samples of how sound and music are
interwoven in order to provide commentary on the dialogue, both of them in this
instance involving the movie’s queer characters. The first is a discussion of true
love between Manay, the gay couturier, and Kano, the lesbian drug pusher (see
frame capture in fig. 4). Here the triangulation between dialogue, sound, and music
is fairly consistent and straightforward. Jeff Beck’s prog-jazz number, “Full Moon
Boogie,” situates the action in the “cool” present, while the sound of the Space
Invaders video arcade game played by Kano portends a more individualist and selfobsessed future, even as the two engage in an ages-old debate on the merits and
failings of true love.
The other example is between Manay and his polyamorous taxi-driver boyfriend,
Febrero (first frame capture in fig. 12). Manay has just discovered that Febrero’s
common-law wife, Adelina, is not the night-shift nurse that she claims to be, and
he worries that she might be engaged in less-wholesome activities, a suspicion
which turns out to be true. Both of them are in an all-night people’s park, the
Luneta. There will be interruptions by friends of Manay as well as by a street poet
and a circle of cultists. In this example the interplay among the sound elements
is more complicated, with some elements, like dialogue, functioning like music
and vice versa, per high-modernist prescriptions (Adorno and Eisler 27–30). The
diegetic disco number, Lipps, Inc.’s “Funkytown,” presumably being played on park
speakers, provides ironic contrast to the anxiety-laden exchange between Manay
and Febrero, the commentary by Manay’s gay friends, and the prayers of the circle
of cultists. At one point a poem, Krip Yuson’s “There is No City but This City,” gets
recited by the real-life poet himself, but in this case it functions as the equivalent
of the Classical Hollywood non-diegetic musical commentary, serving in effect to
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remind the audience that, for all its broken dreams, Manila will continue to endure,
as it had done so in the past.
Open Closure
Bernal had paid a steep price for his decision to attempt an innovation that had not
been validated in any critically accepted mode of film practice up to that point. The
type of material being endorsed by certain gatekeepers to European film festivals
as representative of Philippine cinema displayed a surface polish unusual then for
local products, although the Berlinale’s more progressive-minded festival director
accepted Manila by Night for competition and dissuaded Bernal from producing
a more refined cut. But the outrage of Filipino film censors, compounded by the
personal intervention of Imelda Marcos herself, ensured that the movie would
never be able to make the much-anticipated global debut that observers were
predicting for it.
One final aspect of Manila by Night might enable us to see the extent to which
Bernal had subjected film form to a critical assessment so subtle that even through
the present, commentators have misperceived it as a weakness of the film. Unlike
the model proffered by Nashville and its predecessors in European film and world
literature, Manila by Night does not provide definitive narrative closure. After the
last significant event — the capture of the drug pusher — the film follows Alex, its
“lost-generation” character, as he wanders aimlessly through the now-still red-light
district, encountering night-life characters on their way home and increasingly
numerous regular workers preparing for the arrival of the morning. By sunrise
he finds himself amid another kind of crowd, the normative citizens exercising
or heading to work — the kind of people who rest, unaware of his discoveries and
adventures, during the period when he keeps awake. As he falls, exhausted but also
possibly exhilarated, he lands on a patch of garden surrounded by flowers — a figure
of drug-devastated pathos, directionless and unproductive, but also appearing more
at peace than he had ever been; if the greenery around him were to be associated
with anything similar in Philippine culture, it would be the floral wreaths presented
to mourners during funerals.
This “inability” to end the narrative (also characterizing Aliw) betokens not just
the reality effect of documentary, wherein any life being captured and presented
ethnographically will necessarily persist after the documentation, just as it had
been in existence beforehand; it also acknowledges the then-standard practice of
Philippine film theaters allowing audiences to enter at any point in the presentation,
staying as long as they wish, and exiting similarly at will. The relative commercial
failure of Manila by Night (retitled City After Dark), in contrast with the strong
box-office performance of Aliw, would have been attributable to the excessively
butchered condition of the film print. Yet even the Marcos government capitulated
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to its acclaim and screened it uncensored, to capacity crowds, at the governmentrun Manila Film Center, as part of its campaign to prove its democratic credentials
after the assassination of opposition senator Benigno S. Aquino, Jr. Its release in
videocassette formats (Betamax and VHS ) proved to be highly profitable, and it
continues its lucrative shelf life in the digital disc (DVD ) version, despite the fact
that each format contains a different version from the others, sometimes radically
so, depending on which print had been accessible to the manufacturer.
Yet the burst of creativity that Bernal had nurtured and developed from the
beginning of his career, peaking in Manila by Night, would no longer be evident
soon afterward. In effect, after a series of critical rebukes, Bernal was also pressured
to abandon the technical strategies he had accumulated and rely on the more
acceptable surface polish that brought him further local acclaim, but only limited
foreign exposure. It may be possible now to see this turn toward surface gloss and
sheen as a step back for him as well as for Philippine cinema, and this same turn
might help explain why he was unable to return to the vibrancy and urgency that
marked the movies he had made when he still had a critical perspective on film
technique and signification.
Notes
1. Bernal, in a personal interview, acknowledged the invaluableness of the
apprenticeship that Avellana provided. Since formal college-level film education
did not begin in the Philippines until 1984, when the institution now known
as the University of the Philippines Film Institute first opened its Bachelor of
Arts in Film program, aspirants in earlier generations had to work out their
own preparations and arrangements with individual practitioners (Vasudev 17).
Around the time that Bernal was arranging for his film training, Avellana had
already started to focus on what would turn out to be an extensive specialization
in documentary productions, starting in the mid-1950s with Si Mang Anong
and peaking with an international prize in 1969 for The Survivor (“Alternative
Cinema”), with his brother Jose Avellana and a growing circle of practitioners
similarly devoting themselves to the activity; Bernal, in fact, became secretary
of the Film Society of the Philippines, headed by documentary filmmaker Ben
Pinga (Vasudev 17). A further claim on Bernal’s interest would be the timing of
his studies in literature and philosophy in France, where the impact of cinéma
vérité practitioners would be making itself felt in the stylistic experimentations
of the Nouvelle Vague. Subsequently, as a Colombo Plan scholar about to leave
for the Poona Film Centre in India (“Bernal, Ishmael”), Bernal would have had
a more formal qualification than most Filipino filmmakers up to his generation;
the fact that he opted to train with Avellana bespeaks as much of Bernal’s cinema
interests as it does of Avellana’s openness to young and promising talents. Ina
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Avellana Cosio, Avellana’s granddaughter, confirms in a Facebook message to
the author that it was also Avellana who persuaded Bernal to continue his film
training in Poona.
2. Relayed in confidence by the late film critic and historian Agustin Sotto, during
the same period (1981) when Brocka was able to garner favorable reviews for
the participation of Jaguar in the Cannes competition and was finalizing Bona
also for Cannes participation. The context of the discussion was that the next
Filipino to make a Cannes debut would be Mike de Leon, whose technical
competence was regarded as superior to Bernal’s. Sotto was instrumental in
facilitating the circulation of Brocka’s and de Leon’s films in Europe, assisting
in the subtitling and promotion of their material. (An unarticulated issue never
brought up in any public venue would have to do with the directors’ respective
personas: Brocka, like his serious films, was formal, reserved, masculine
in deportment; Bernal was boisterous, catty, inclined to camp, effeminate.
Although both acknowledged being homosexual, Brocka went through a phase
of being “discreet,” forbidding queer behavior at the Philippine Educational
Theater Association and quarreling with journalists who played up his gay
inclinations. Whether this implied that homophobia played a factor in Cannes
festival gatekeeping would be up to scholars of gender to tease out.)
3. Kirsten Hastrup inadvertently responded to this predicament in her critique of
what she described as “the folklorist tradition of haste: those who really know
are always at the point of dying out…, and scholarship is a constant battle with
time…. It will never be possible for anthropologists to document all histories
serially; at best we can record particular conjunctures in the continuous
development of societies” (15). Hastrup’s other points, notably the distinction
between ethnographic writing and filmmaking, will be brought up presently.
4. After he had accompanied Himala to various festivals in the former Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, Bernal related how observers kept complimenting
him for having successfully pulled off an “ethnographic film” (David, “Filipino
Films” 20). His emphasis on this detail in the reception of the film may further
affirm his motivation as much as his appreciation for audience members who
were able to read his aesthetic intent accurately.
5. It may be necessary at this point to provide a useful description of the highlights
of the narrative in order to allow the reader to track the characters who will
be mentioned in the forthcoming examples. The interwoven stories include
those of Virgie, who tries to maintain a decent middle-class lifestyle despite
reminders of her background as a sex worker; her son, Alex, who gets lured
into the urban underworld via drugs and sexual promiscuity; Kano, the lesbian
drug pusher who supplies Alex and his friends and remains true to her love
for Bea, whom she nevertheless pimps to Alex; Bea, the belligerent masseuse
who looks forward to working in Saudi Arabia with her boyfriend and finding
a cure for her blindness; Greg Williams, Bea’s boyfriend, who’s victimized by
an illegal recruiter and returns to the Philippines, and in desperation arranges
live-sex performances for him and Bea; Manay, a gay couturier who maintains
a gay-for-pay taxi driver, nurtures a crush on Alex and manages to seduce him,
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and is persuaded by his new lover to help find a cure for Bea; Febrero, taxi
driver and Manay’s lover, who lives with Adelina Macapinlac yet sleeps around
with a naïve provincial waitress; Adelina, Febrero’s live-in partner, who’s a
sex worker masquerading as a nurse and whose cover is blown when Manay
brings Bea to the hospital where she pretends to work; Baby, the waitress who
gets impregnated and eventually abandoned by Febrero, and out of frustration
agrees to sex work with Japanese tourists but messes up her first encounter.
Among the major developments is Virgie’s discovery of Alex’s addiction and her
abusive punishment of her son, driving him to run away from home and live
with Manay, from which Virgie has to retrieve him; the death by strangulation
of Adelina, whose murderer is unidentified, and whose corpse is accidentally
switched in the morgue with that of someone else; Manay’s nervous breakdown
after the discovery of the switch — coming after other disappointments in being
unable to cure Bea and watching Alex descend into drug dependency; Bea’s
return to her massage work after refusing Greg’s incitement to perform live sex,
and her betrayal of Kano to narcotics police officers. The movie ends with Alex,
having eluded the pursuing officers, wandering through the city until morning
and lying down, exhausted, in Rizal Park.
6. Calvyn Pryluck refers to the crisis of cinéma vérité, where “the method of
obtaining consent is stacked in the filmmaker’s favor” inasmuch as “the
presence of the film crew with official sanction is subtly coercive” (256). Because
he confines himself to the context of film documentation, Pryluck in effect
locks himself in a mode of hesitancy, stating for instance that the “hazards
posed by direct cinema suggest the necessity for extreme caution on the part
of filmmakers in dealing with potential infringements on the rights of subjects”
(260).
7. The true raconteur in the film would actually be Evita Vasquez, a client of Manay’s
couturier shop, who regales Manay’s friends and visitors with her provocative
and sometimes randy run-ins with actual representatives of Manila’s rich and
famous; at one point she names tourism minister Jose Aspiras and agriculture
minister Arturo “Bong” Tanco, Jr.
8. One of the few though perhaps most convincing arguments for the primacy of
film sound over the image track in film evaluation was advanced by Kathryn
Kalinak, who references Adorno and Eisler in maintaining that “music can
radically critique and even undercut a film’s dominant ideology” (34).
Works Cited
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David / Film Plastics in Manila by Night67
Ardener, Edwin. “Some Outstanding Problems in the Analysis of Events.” Yearbook of
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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. “Teach Your Children.” Comp. Graham Nash. Atlantic,
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——— . “Primates in Paradise: Critical Possibilities of the Milieu Movie.” Kritika Kultura
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Crawford and Turton 171–82.
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Authority.” Crawford and Turton 8–25.
Heider, Karl. Ethnographic Film. Austin: U of Texas P, 1976. Print.
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Republic of the Philippines. Permit Certificate 19937–38 for Regal Films’ City After
Dark. 27 Nov. 1980.
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Lipps, Inc. “Funkytown.” Comp. Steven Greenberg. Casablanca, 1980.
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Pilipino (MPP ). Web. 25 Apr. 2012.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality. Bloomington: Indiana UP , 1991. Print.
——— . “The Voice of Documentary.” Rosenthal 48–63.
Pryluck, Calvin. “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filming.”
Rosenthal 255–68.
Raval, Winston. Message to the author. Sept. 2011. Facebook.
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Will]. Screenplay also by Walter Ruttmann. Leni Riefenstahl-Produktion and
Reichspropagandaleitung der NSDAP , 1935. Documentary.
Rosenthal, Alan, ed. New Challenges for Documentary. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
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Schreger, Charles. “Altman, Dolby, and the Second Sound Revolution.” Film Sound:
Theory and Practice. Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton. New York: Columbia UP ,
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Vaughan, Dai. “The Aesthetics of Ambiguity.” Crawford and Turton 99–115.
Vasudev, Aruna. “Cast in Another Mould.” Interview with Ishmael Bernal. Cinemaya 27
(1995): 16–23. Print.
Wilder, Billy, dir. and screenplay. Sunset Blvd. Screenplay also by Charles Brackett and
D.M. Marshman, Jr. Paramount Pictures, 1950. Film.
Winston, Brian. “The Tradition of the Victim in Griersonian Documentary.” Rosenthal
269–87.
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Teloy Cosme. Rainbow Productions, 1977. Film.
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Forum Kritika: A Closer Look at Manila by Night
The Long Take: Passage as Form
in the Philippine Film
Patrick D. Flores
University of the Philippines
patrickdflores@yahoo.com
Abstract
The essay evolves a thesis around the scene in Manila by Night involving a gay couturier
(Manay Sharon) and a blind masseuse (Bea) who weave through a dark alley in the city
and engage in a meandering exchange. It asks the question: Can Philippine film theory
contemplate a different notion of “passage” or “interval” that is not exclusively a function of
plot or an always-already marker of time? How does this notion reference the heterogeneous
locale intrinsic to it? Using this specific scene as aperture, it probes other examples in the
Philippine oeuvre through such films as Maryo J. de Los Reyes’s Gabun: Ama Mo, Ama Ko
and Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay.
Keywords
editing, development, image, Manila, walking in the city
About the Author
Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University
of the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003, and Curator of the Vargas Museum
in Manila. He is Adjunct Curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore. He was one of the
curators of Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art in 2000 and the Gwangju
Biennale (Position Papers) in 2008. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, DC in 1999 and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his
publications are Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable
Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation
in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010) and a
member of the Advisory Board of the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds
After 1989 (2011) organized by the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, and member of
the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011). He co-edited the Southeast Asian
issue with Joan Kee for Third Text (2011).
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Flores / The Long Take
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The milieu of the nocturnal city of Manila is not mere locus of action in
Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night. It is an aesthetic or a tropic, a sensitivity and
a turning. Manila is space and moment; it is speed, climate, appearance, sound,
habitus of humans. It is darkness, electricity, ablution, drag, the shedding of exterior.
It is through this trajectory of the aesthetic that this essay works on a particular
form in the film that may be co-extensive with a turn in the history of the cinematic
in the Philippines. In other words, this is a study on the history of an aesthetic, of
a form in the film that is provisionally characterized as the “long take,” an accepted
term in film theory referring to a shot that takes longer than usual before it shifts
to another shot.
The long take may be viewed in relation to the classic antinomies of film theory
between montage and mise en scène. We need not belabor here the debate between
the French and Russian filmmakers and theorists and reiterate the premises of the
duality (Bordwell). We might be better served if we look at the long take in relation
to the other modes of editing within the film, so that we could indent its “turning,”
as it were, and elude the classic problematic of the cut and the tableau. The film
historian David Bordwell is of the mind that “we can recognize that both staging
and editing are tactics for guiding our attention…. That is, classical découpage
subordinates staging to editing, so that the master shot establishes and orients;
the space will be articulated primarily through closer views, matches on vision or
movement, and the like. Alternatively, we can think of the mise en scène directors as
generally subordinating editing to staging. Cuts will not only enlarge details … but
may also accentuate an action. We no longer need to see editing as a blemish on
the beauty of an unbroken scene or as a concession to Hollywood’s colonization of
our vision” (Bordwell, “La Nouvelle” 19). Conversely, we no longer need to see the
long take as an uninterrupted lingering, a hovering of the lens over reality without
impediment or strain or struggle. Roland Barthes puts it most felicitously from
a transdisciplinary perspective when he valorizes the tableau as intellectual and
articulate, “simultaneously significant and propaedeutic, impressive and reflexive,
moving and conscious of the channels of emotion. The epic scene in Brecht, the
shot in Eisenstein are so many tableaux” (173).
The essay evolves a thesis around the scene in Manila by Night involving a gay
couturier (Manay Sharon) and a blind masseuse (Bea) who weave through a dark
alley in the city (fig. 1) and engage in a meandering exchange, with the former
remarking in the end that it has proved to be the most useless conversation in
his life. Such impression of seeming purposelessness lends itself to a discussion
of Philippine film form that in the main invests in plot and certain devices that
prompt its movement forward. Can Philippine film theory contemplate a different
notion of “passage” or “interval” that is not exclusively a function of plot or an
always-already marker of time? How does this notion reference the heterogeneous
locale intrinsic to it? Using this specific scene as aperture, it probes other examples
in the Philippine oeuvre through such films as Maryo J. De Los Reyes’s Gabun:
Ama Mo, Ama Ko and Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay.
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Flores / The Long Take
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Figure 1. Manay, Bea, and Gaying (Bea’s assistant) walk through Misericordia in Chinatown
district. (Photo courtesy of Bernardo Bernardo, used with permission)
The meeting between these two characters is prompted by the importuning of
one of Bea’s clients and Manay’s latest fling, Alex, a student who sings in a bar, to
find medical help for the blind woman of whom he is a client. Manay thinks of the
girlfriend of Manay’s other lover, the taxi driver Febrero. Adelina is supposedly a
nurse; this is her masquerade. She is, in fact, a sex worker in a brothel. One night,
Manay visits the massage parlor where Bea works. Here, he strikes a conversation
with Bea’s lesbian lover, the drug dealer Kano. Manay and Bea, accompanied by
her guide Gaying, finally meet and he walks her home through a narrow street.
They first stop by a shrine where Bea, along with another woman, prays and then
proceed. A long shot then captures the locale. The exchange begins with Manay
alerting Bea to a “canal” through which she might fall. In this sequence, there are
four cuts interspersed with dolly shots of the three that either track their movement
or approach them.
Seq. 21: Misericordia. Ext. Night.
Late night. Manay, Bea, and Gaying pray before street altar on Misericordia. A
prostitute joins them momentarily then leaves. A doddering old woman genuflects
before the altar. Presently they leave.
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Flores / The Long Take
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MANAY:
Be careful, there’s a canal. Oh, I’m going crazy. Why? I don’t know.
(Giggles) Funny right? I make my own questions, and I answer them
myself. (Giggles again) How about you, how long have you been
blind?
BEA:
Since childhood.
MANAY:
Really? How did that happen?
BEA:
I was about to turn three then when suddenly my vision blurred
until it dimmed. I was in Olongapo then.
MANAY:
Oh, you don’t realize how lucky you are! Really, you are so lucky. I
mean – that is the tragedy of my life: I see everything. Even those
I’m not supposed to see, I see. Even if there is nothing to see, I still
see it. Crazy!
BEA:
But you might be just imagining what you usually see.
MANAY:
What do you say? It’s true as well. Philosophical! Actually, what I
mean to say, everyone in the world is crazy! Isn’t it? Those faces
that they show us, they are not true their true faces, right? People
have different faces: faces for family, there are faces for friends,
for spouse, for girl friend, for swardfriend (gay friend), etcetera,
etcetera, etcetera, right? They continue changing. One on top of the
other. Like me: when my boyfriend tells me “I love you,” what face is
that? It looks like it’s to get money, right?
They pass by Miriam, Virgie’s prostitute acquaintance, refusing a cheapskate
customer’s bargaining.
BEA:
But why will you pity yourself? Even if everyone is crazy, the world
turns. Every good thing we do comes back to us one day, right?
MANAY:
Whatever. Queen of the Martyrs Part Two.
BEA:
As for me, I will only see what I have to see. The rest, I don’t see, and
I don’t mind.
MANAY:
But what can you see when you’re blind? My God, this is the most
useless conversation I’ve had in my whole life! (They arrive in front
of Bea’s house) Oh, by the way, I have a friend who is a nurse. I will
take you to her; she might be able to help you. I’m sure she has many
friends who are eye specialists. Anyway, I’ve done my good deed for
the day like a good girl scout. (Leaves).
BEA:
Don’t forget to pass by for me.
MANAY:
Yes.
GAYING:
Be careful, there’s a canal.
BEA:
I know.
(Bernal, trans. by author)
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This long take at the outset is a pause in the hectic rhythm, both visual and sonic,
of the film and the city. Deep in the night, and most probably in the liminal hours
after midnight, the cadence of the vicinity changes quite markedly. The passage,
this canal of sorts, may be analyzed as consisting of three parts. It commences
with the empirical notion of sight and the history of its loss, with the blind woman
recounting how she lost her sense of sight when she was a girl in Olongapo, which
used to be a thriving sex city close to the American military bases. Her ability to see
gradually dimmed until it was totally gone. This narrative of blindness terraces into
a reflection on the futility of empirical seeing: that because people take on different
veneers to assume different personas in different situations, their true persons
could never be seen; that seeing is an inadequate discerner of the interior/internal
or inner-ness; and that the veil of the “real” could never be raised. This rhetorical
gesture necessarily implicates human performance in which the agent resorts to
guile in order to establish relationships with others and ultimately permits the
self to mutate for a multitude. In the end, this tale of blindness and the critique
of its ascendancy reach the philosophical insight about vision: the blind woman
makes a claim over vision and the capacity to willfully not see. This confounds
the seeing of Manay and further complicates his idea of the futility of sight. With
this conversation on sight, seeing, spectacle, and vision, the film is able to spin
the thesis on the city as, in the words of Hannah Arendt, a “space of appearance.”
This reworks the locus radically as political because it draws our attention to the
facture, the crafting of the object that is the city. The subjectivity that apprehends
this overdetermination is then led to repeat the maneuver so that, one, the city
disappears in the pause of the long take, only to reappear within it through the
passage, and, two, the city “reappears” in a new conceptual space that is no longer
ocularcentric, with different “techniques of the observer” now shaping the vision.
Manila at the terminus of the long take becomes dubious. It is at this point that the
long take accomplishes the all-important task to disrupt the pace of development,
which is a hegemonic impulse in both the theory of film and the policy of the city of
Manila. The desire for the momentum and the celerity of development is derailed
by the long take and the meditation on the deceit of appearance and the effort
to, according to Jacques Rancière, “redistribute the sensible”: that the aesthetic
reckoning of the city is not the sole faculty of its planners or the potentates of the
day; it is the responsibility of inhabitants to sense the city and to sense what is
wrong with it. The artist Raymundo Albano, who was curator during the seventies
of the visual arts program at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, site of the
film’s fantasy scene of drug-crazed denizens plunging into the fabled bay, intuits
this mindset as “developmentalist” and translated it within the vocabulary of his
art world as “developmental art.” We note how the aesthetic intervenes in the
production of the political as formative, a vital life force that animates both the
structural and the imaginative:
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It should be noted that the word “developmental” was an operative word given
by our government and press to government projects for fast implementation.
Activities that had the nature of being under fast-action plans. The building of
roads, population control, or the establishment of security units for instance,
have to be done quickly, within a period of days…. The implication of a fastaction learning method is similar to that of developmental art…. The use of sand,
junk iron, non-art materials such as raw lumber, rocks, etcetera were common
materials for the artists’ developmental strategies. People were shocked, scared,
delighted, pleased and satisfied even though their preconceived notions of
art did not agree with what they encountered.… It was a powerful curatorial
stance — it created some negative forces, too — but it took the risk in establishing
an attitude that prepared the public towards a more relevant way of seeing. For
instance, bringing pieces of junk to the gallery for aesthetic perception would
lean one to consider virtues of things considered ugly and cheap. It made one
relatively aware of an environment suddenly turning visible. (15)
Albano’s phrase “suddenly turning visible” is interesting because it accords
centrality to “image,” a moving image in more ways than one to be sure, and the
acumen through which it is grasped. The levels of image that are mentioned in
the conversation between Manay and Bea pertain to the range of visions through
which Manila looms in the consciousness of those who must live it. These visions
may have two distinct aspects as surfaced in the long take of this sequence. There
is the concept of beauty that is a ruse; this is represented by Manay who is a trope
of Imelda Marcos: patroness, benefactress, pageant orchestrator, flamboyant,
heedless, and most of all, a veritable gay icon. His eye for beauty in terms of couture
and men is of high quality, and is restless about it. The other is labor: affective
labor through the work of the masseuse as therapist and sex worker and export or
overseas manual labor, which is indexed by Bea’s partner, the hybrid Greg Williams,
who pins his hopes on a stint in Saudi Arabia, only to be conned by an illegal
recruiter and stranded in Bangkok.
These discourses of beauty and labor would constitute the project of Marcosstyle development, which heavily invested in the appearance of progress, of a
Third World developing nation taking off on the wings of tradition and free trade.
In the words of Imelda during the opening of a meeting of bankers and global
noble houses at the Philippine International Convention Center in 1977: “You
have come to our country at a most exciting time though at a somewhat awkward
stage when we are negotiating the challenging transition from a traditional order
to a progressive humanist society. This new complex of buildings erected on land
reclaimed from the sea stands in dramatic contrast to the slum areas that blight our
city. The contrast of shrine and shanty symbolizes the shining future against our
impoverished past” (Stockwin 20). Surely, such a mirage or phantasmagoria raises
confusion among the characters in the city and the film. Still, they place their faith
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squarely in the possibility of true love even as they themselves seem to disbelieve it.
Kano expresses true love to Bea and Manay constantly solicits the same expression
from lovers who go through the motions of professing to it.
Intrinsic in the city, therefore, is a sense of the utopian future, a mélange of
desires for amelioration. Boris Groys contends that “cities originally came about
as projects for the future: People moved from the country into the city in order to
escape the ancient forces of nature and to build a new future that they could shape
and control themselves” (100). But in the course of this cultivation of the city, this
“utopian dream of the total rationality, transparency, and controllability of an urban
environment unleashed a historical dynamism that is manifested in the perpetual
transformation of all realms of urban life: the quest for utopia forces the city into
a permanent process of surpassing and destroying itself — which is why the city
has become the natural venue for revolutions, upheavals, constant beginnings,
fleeting fashions, and incessantly changing lifestyles. Built as a haven of security
the city soon became the stage for criminality, instability, destruction, anarchy, and
terrorism” (100–01). This is the specter that Manila has become in the wistful eyes
of its creatures.
The first moment of this long take is the conversation of strangers. This sustains
the film’s motif of alienation, on the one hand, and its transcendence, on the other.
Manay and Bea are brought together by Alex, who is the entry point of the film’s
narrative. Alex also connects the two to his mother, a former sex worker in the
storied Misericordia, the street on which they walk. This personage elaborates on
the problematic of prostitution as embodied by his mother, Bea, and by extension,
himself. This coming together is salient because it crosses the gap of strangeness
and becomes the condition of possibility for a formation to emerge across class,
history, and biography. The disparate elements are not so much reconciled as they
are positioned along an axis of communication and relationality. In this scenario,
a central philosophical contradiction is laid bare, centering on the vision through
which the characters regard reality. That said, these tensions are worked through
and not construed as irreconcilable antagonisms. Manay and Bea are made to
cohabit a time and space and share relationships. This is what this “walking the
city” significantly offers: an opportunity for difference to emerge as potentially and
tactically affiliative and collaborative. The sight of two queer figures navigating a
street in Manila is an instantiation of a deep dialogue, permitting the film to thread
together some ruminations that hover around the ethical basis of sight and face, for
instance, as well as the ploys of personhood and the authenticity that is negated by
likeness, the imagination of the possible and the recompense of goodness. This said,
the dialogue within the long take is a montage of sorts, or a bricolage of semantic
tableaux, in the sense that the language spun by Manay consists in gayspeak, a
hybrid portmanteau of the gay community, and accommodates nimble codeswitching between English and Filipino.
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The second moment of this passage initiates us to a procedure of truth. First, it
takes in the environment. As Manay and Bea walk, they happen by the everyday life
of a quarter in the city. As mentioned earlier, the street is known for sex workers
plying the trade, and we see them here as suggested by Miriam, former colleague
of Alex’s mother in the trade (fig. 2), making the long take a circuit of continuity
between the dissimilar though not incongruent personal lives of the two and the
collective economy of the setting. There are moments in which the camera strays
away from the characters to integrate the image and soundscape, sometimes
even asynchronously. It is through the long take that this continuum is sutured, a
cognitive mapping, as it were, that foregrounds the “real,” that is, the totality of the
forces at work in the place that is the historical: the social ties that are bound by
the trade of bodies. The second facet of this procedure is the direction of the walk,
a kind of build-up toward the disclosure of the character of Adelina, who happens
to be inauthentic as she is polytropic, a quotidian performance all by herself. The
long take enables the film not only to configure a part of the city; it sets out an
itinerary of a search for Adelina, which leads to the inevitable uncovering of the
truth about her identity. It is through the search for the cure of the blindness of Bea
that the real Adelina is revealed, making the long take a necessary device to mend
the nexus between street and, later on, the hospital that harbors no nurse by the
name of Adelina.
The third moment of the long take is the very aesthetic itself of the movement
in time within the space of the street by the characters. What might be important
to consider here is the spatialization of the moment, not only of the advancement
of plot transpiring in a locality, but of time evoked by space, with the “present
passing” of Manay and Bea rendering Manila as a synchrony of elements. It is no
longer space moving in time; it is space marking the conjuncture of a promiscuous
city. To deem this point allegorical is warranted to the degree that it unveils the
moral of time, embodied by the space inscribed and charged by Manay and Bea in
the very procedure of walking, and that it foretells the moral of a future exposure
of a prostituted life, a condition that subtends several personages in the film. The
next sequence takes Manay and Bea to the hospital where Adelina purportedly
reports nightly; they pass through a shoot of a film featuring a nurse, and when
they reach the reception desk, Manay tussles with a nurse who tells him that no
Adelina Macapinlac exists. This ends in a heated debate with the nurse rattling off
lines in a vernacular. This is perhaps why we could say that this deed of the long
take does not have to rely on “editing” for the film to illumine the strata of its dense
material. As critic Joel David explains the editing style in Manila by Night and
Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Moral, the two films “may be sprawling and ambiguous in
parts, but this could only certainly be ascribed to the necessity of letting go of pure
or perfected technique in order to allow some nonplastic aspect of the material to
develop” (141). This thought resonates with the perception that the potential of the
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Figure 2. Manay, Bea, and Gaying begin their stroll after Bea had prayed at the street shrine
[left]; they pass by Miriam [right], who had earlier requested police protection from her
former colleague Virgie (whose husband is a well-connected lawyer), mother of Alex,
lover-to-be of Manay. (Left photo courtesy of Jojo Devera, used with permission; right
photo frame capture by Joel David)
long take lies in its ability to carve out a latitude for freedom for the viewer to sense
the fullness, the heteroglossia, of cinema.
These three moments concretized by the long take of the walk prompts us
to revisit the antinomies of modernist film theory dwelling on deep focus and
montage and the ethical basis of techniques in filmmaking. For the montage film
artist, the steadfast lens of the long take is a bourgeois lie, a concealment of the
real forces at work that guarantees the impression of coherence. On the other hand,
the mise en scène auteur would argue that montage is naked manipulation; it is an
abuse of the film language that is instrumentalized to distort not only reality but
the experience of the viewer who is led by the nose, so to speak. This discourse
supplements the schemata of truth that is enacted by the long take in the film as
it responds to the various subterfuges in the city. How could the long take, for
instance, be refunctioned as an alternative to the classical Hollywood cross-cutting
to convey contradictions, and could it be interpreted as a disposition of culture
to tell stories longwindedly in the various declensions of rumor, gossip, gayspeak,
self-deprecation, and so on?
As a response, this essay is led to converse with the problematic of the
aestheticization of time and experience. Alison Ross has explored some of its
implications in the study of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger in which
she schematizes the various appropriations of cinematic thinking. First is “the use
of cinema to stage human tales” (40). Then there is “the use of cinema to stage
a confrontation with a received pattern of meaning” (40). The latter could be
“presented as tragic or depicted in critical or rebellious terms” (40). Besides these
two, “there is the use of traditional characters or plots as little more than props or
vehicles to stage aestheticized settings. Here the relationship between meaning and
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cinematic elements in the first two cases is reversed. In the most developed forms
of this use of cinematic techniques, the story line has purely evocative form, and
character is treated in the abbreviated manner of a stereotype” (40). In Manila by
Night, the emphasis might be in the third: to aestheticize the setting itself of the city
through the street trodden by the characters. The plot tends to dissolve into this
passage that is for the most part not purposive nor functioning, in fact, dismissed
by Manay as “useless,” and therefore flits around a possible reflective judgment and
maybe even around “beauty” of the talk and the walk, the sublime status of the
encounter of strangers. This uselessness carves into high relief the landscape that
engulfs the social types of the “gay couturier” and the “blind masseuse.” It could
be that the evocation of the city in the imagination of the characters has to be
demonstrated in the protocol itself of walking and of speaking nearly aimlessly, and
so, perhaps without plot and interiority, which happens as a performance. Ross
explains:
Moral values, motivations, moods, and feelings cannot take a specific form
but may only be “shown.” Meanings of such kind are able to be experiences
in aesthetic presentations, which make accessible ideas to be experienced
discursively. Similarly, temporal characteristics of experience, such as waiting,
or the agency of time as a force of dispersion over identity can be shown in
aesthetic presentations. Film, moreover, is the ideal medium for the presentation
of ideas of time on account of its capacity to spatialize temporal forms. (50)
In other words, it is this evocative nature of the cinematic that transposes the
abstract philosophical project into a political reality of appearance in space. It
departs from the norm of film narrative and in fact may be construed as isolated,
an interval or a pause so that a level of autonomy could be secured. With Antonioni
as exemplar, this is what might take place: “His cinema makes ideas that would be
inaccessible through conventional narrative — such as the ‘project’ to lose identity
or the dispersion of identity in time — available for emphatic experience precisely
through his relative autonomization of aesthetic moments” (Ross 51). As mentioned
earlier, this essay alludes to a turn in the history of form of cinema and imbricates
that turn in Philippine form. The art historian Erwin Panofsky has theorized on
this epochal turn in the founding of an art:
And as movable as the spectator is, as movable is, for the same reason, the
space presented to him. Not only bodies move in space, but space itself does,
approaching, receding, turning, dissolving and recrystallizing as it appears
through the controlled locomotion and focusing of the camera and through the
cutting and editing of the various shots — not to mention such special effects
as visions, transformations, disappearances, slow-motion and fast-motion shots,
reversals, and trick films. (98)
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The other way to consider this question is to look at the long take in Manila by
Night within a comparative frame, more specifically in relationship to sections in
Maryo J. de los Reyes’s Gabun: Ama Mo, Ama Ko and Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay.
This is done to provisionally appraise the pragmatics of editing and the primacy of
image in the Philippine film, and how their alternation might adumbrate a theory
of passage beyond the requirements of plot.
In de los Reyes’s Gabun, the long take, like in Manila by Night, becomes the
place where two women who love the same man finally meet. And in the same
register like in Bernal’s film, it is here in which the procedure of truth is fleshed out
through a “walk” in a park. The time of this meeting is spatialized as well; it is set
in Baguio, which is not a neutral location. It is where the man had put up residence
for his mistress. It is a charged site, one that reminds the wife of her husband’s
transgression; it is a hideaway, an escape, the rendezvous par excellence of the illicit.
MAMENG:
Thank you for saying yes to my invitation. I would like to talk to you
before I go back to Manila. Does he know?
MERCEDES:
No. We didn’t tell him.
MAMENG:
How is he?
MERCEDES:
He is still confused. Locks himself up in a room and keeps on
drinking.
MAMENG:
How about his business? Doesn’t he attend to it?
MERCEDES:
His business is slowing down, Mameng.
MAMENG:
How did you meet him?
MERCEDES:
Why?
MAMENG:
I just want to know.
MERCEDES:
In the market.
MAMENG:
Market?
MERCEDES:
I had a friend who was fond of fruits. One time, she asked me to
go with her to the market to buy stuff. After the chore, my friend
dropped the fruits and Jaime helped us. He was there buying, too.
He is really fond of fruits.
MAMENG:
I know. Did you know he was married?
MERCEDES:
No. Even when we got married in Hong Kong, he didn’t tell me.
MAMENG:
You got married?
MERCEDES:
I only found out about everything when I was pregnant with Adrian.
Mameng, what is on your mind?
MAMENG:
What do you want me to do?
MERCEDES:
I don’t know. You decide. You have the right.
MAMENG:
Do you love him?
MERCEDES:
I need him.
MAMENG:
Answer my question. Do you love him?
MERCEDES:
Yes. What about you?
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MAMENG:
Me? What I know is that we can’t be together again.
But he needs you, Mameng.
MERCEDES:
He needs me? In what way, Mercedes? Can you accept the fact that
MAMENG:
somebody shares his love for you?
I have lasted this long knowing about your relationship, so you don’t
MERCEDES:
have to ask. But he loves you, Mameng, I know.
Love? How can you say he loves me when he was able to fool me for
MAMENG:
a long time? I’m sorry. Please tell him that I can’t accept it.
(De los Reyes, trans. by author)
It is clear that this exchange foregrounds more questions than answers. The long
take facilitates a back and forth that does not avail of the parsing of the dialogue
into discrete scenes through cross cutting. Rather, the lens takes in Mameng and
Mercedes as a conflation of a dilemma, a shared anxiety that cannot be disarticulated.
In fact, this anxiety is rearticulated through a coming to terms with ethical norms.
That Mameng could not accept a love that has been tainted by betrayal does not
vitiate this relationality between the two women; it, in fact, forges a dissensus, a
process of sorting out difference that curiously forms a unique bond of friendship
based on a common partaking of affliction and the prospects of understanding
through dialogue. These ties are confirmed in the end at the funeral of the man they
both love (fig. 3). After his casket is interred, Mameng takes the hand of Mercedes
and leads her beyond the grave, literally and metaphorically. The walk in one of the
scenic sites is a form of an idealization of Baguio as some kind of zone of freedom
for paramours as in Mike de Leon’s Kung Mangarap Ka’t Magi­sing (1977) in which
the married Anna confides in her single lover Joey: “I wish there were such a place.
Where everything is there, clean, cool, there is no dust and nobody will meddle in
your affairs. I wish, if only there were such a place” (qtd. in Cruz 91). It should also
be of interest to observe that the film, and largely through the aforementioned long
take, survives the triangulation attendant to the melodramatic exercise involving
the male hero as embodied in the persona of Eddie Rodriguez. In this instance, the
love triangle formed by the man, the legal wife, and the other woman does not result
in a restoration of the heterosexual norm of the couple with the other woman or
the legal wife exiting the stage. In Gabun, the masculine protagonist wastes away,
stabs a prostitute, and then kills himself. As the journalist Julie Y. Daza writes:
“Usually, the ‘other woman’ recognizes the futility of a three-cornered arrangement,
or she is afflicted with some malignant disease that destroys her in tender ways, or
the wife performs some mighty miracle to win him back and all is forgiven” (174).
Brillante Mendoza’s Kinatay, though strictly speaking does not employ the long
take as a device, tends to quote or cite its effects in the long sequence, practically
half of the film, in which the sex worker Madonna is whisked away from the club
she works in, put into a van, tied and gagged, and brought to an abandoned house in
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Figure 3. Mameng, the affluent wife, and Mercedes, the mistress, at the funeral of the man
they share, in Gabun. (Publicity still by Agrix Films)
a province outside the capital of Manila where she will be hacked to pieces (fig. 4).
From the red-light district in the old quarter, the vehicle goes through the spine
of the city, absorbs its sight and sound, and uncovers the kernel of the abduction.
It appears that she has not paid up a debt and her tormentor Cap, supposedly
a policeman, can no longer wait, feeling that he had been duped. Besides this
intimation of the plot, this sequence probes the emotional weather of one of the
conscripted assistants in the murder, a newly married criminology student named
Peping. It is around his life that the film revolves, with the first part of the film
tracking his routine and configuring his milieu. The insinuation of the long take
works here, aside from disclosing the inner workings of the crime and the mind of
the novice would-be criminal, to aestheticize the time of the trip from the city to
its outskirts, from the center to its limits, as a spatial proposition. It is the highway
of Manila, along which the monorail runs, that morphs as the form of the journey,
the ritual between life and death. Like the street in Manila by Night, the park in
Gabun, here it is the road to perdition that is the artifice not of mere setting, but
the concretization of what Michael Taussig describes as the “culture of terror” and
“space of death” (4), the very procedure of the killing conceptually and temporally
helmed by men called Cap and Sarge, which may well be ranks in a renegade
paramilitary operation not rare in Philippine social life.
The other level of this ominous moment is the critique of the development
of a city, its metropolization beyond the decrepit parts of the city of Manila by
Night. From Bernal’s fetid quarter to Mendoza’s bustling global urbanization, the
city aestheticizes the desire for development as well as its failure, its desire for
renewal as night turns to day to its descent into the madness of murder outside the
purview of the city. In Kinatay, the recently anointed hired killer goes home, just
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Fig. 4. Peping, a criminology student, watches over Madonna, a prostitute awaiting rape
and brutal execution, in Kinatay. (Publicity still by Swift Production and Centerstage
Productions)
like Alex languishing on the grass of the National Park at first light, as morning
breaks and lights up the labyrinth of his neighborhood. The time of night in both
films is finally rendered geopolitically and psychogeographically, mapped out as an
excess of violence in the city, depicting the tenacious corruption and amelioration
by the state. The long take, therefore, invests in this tedium and attenuation a
perfect foil to the alacrity of incessant development and the commodification of
space through billboards, which in the opening scene of Kinatay is the scene of a
planned suicide of a man who has lost his bearings. From a wider perspective, it
can be asserted that the long take enmeshes both place and body, city and people
so that it is able to picture what the Thai scholar Thongchai Winichakul describes
in his study of how the concept of Thainess is inscribed in maps and materializes as
a geobody. The latter is defined as a “technology of territoriality” (16) that creates
a certain structure of feeling like “nationhood” or in this case the “city” spatially.
Extending this concept of Manila as a geobody, along with Baguio as originally an
American colonial hill station and therefore a node in the imperialist urbanization,
and the long take as the technique through which it is imagined, we can state that
the passage of the vehicle laden with criminals and their victim is an anatomy of
a salvage, which is a Filipino neologism for a murder usually by hired assassins,
and the very modus operandi of its perpetration, marking the entire expanse from
city to outskirt as scene of the crime and also the unfolding of either a stricken
conscience or the beginning of an education in the trade of salvage. Indeed, we
can infer from this situation the transformation of the long take from a teleological
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tool to a structure of biopolitical feeling in which, pace Giorgio Agamben, life and
its possibility are at stake. As such, this form-of-life, or its aestheticization in film,
becomes irreducibly political because it fights for the guarantee of this potential,
which the State is obliged to defend. The moment the latter negates this entitlement,
it separates life from its form, stripping it bare or naked and therefore depriving it
of potency and its human-effect. It is “salvaged.”
It is tempting to characterize the vein of this aesthetic as both film noir and
ethnographic to the extent that it attentively draws out the motifs of crime and
simultaneously chronicles the telling nuances of everyday life. This approach is
not without its virtues because it partakes of the politics of ethnographic writing
that has problematized the temporal and the spatial, among other exigencies of
the task of sensing the economy of the everyday across intersecting lifeworlds and
ethnoscapes. The anthropologist George Marcus explains the former in terms of
a “break with the trope of settled community in realist ethnography. A recognition
of the deterritorialization of culture: Its production in many different locales at the
same time, each of differing character” (43). On the latter, he apprehends it as a
“break with the trope of history … the modernist ethnography is interested in the
constitution of collective memory and its expressions, remembering that discourses
are critical and responses to emergent, not yet fully articulated conditions in a
way that the assimilation of ethnography to historical narrative is not” (43). What
may be derived from this poaching on anthropology is the contingent condition of
relationships as well as the tension between structure and agency in social life that
the long take is able to play out with adequate measure of enigma and empiricism.
The aesthetic of the film noir emerges in the evocation of “night” in the city as
it is in Manila by Night and, as Charles Tesson avers, in Lino Brocka’s Maynila:
Sa mga Kulo ng Liwanag in which the search of the lead character Julio Madiaga
of his provincial girlfriend Ligaya Paraiso who is virtually enslaved by a Chinese
man in Misericordia in Manila “uncovers the tragic, nocturnal underside of city
life, a legacy of the film noir” (162). This said, it is not altogether productive to
isolate “night” as the overdetermination of the discourse of the city, for in the time
of Marcos, for instance, night was day as well, or that there was contiguity in the
implementation of development projects: the building of some structures had three
shifts of workers so that the contractors would meet their deadlines. This is the
speed of Manila’s development, the space-time that generated equally breathtaking
displacement. We are reminded, of course, of Walter Benjamin’s figural that it is the
flâneur who is at home with the world and its circulating goods. In a peculiar way,
the film is the flâneur roaming the city of Manila and, like Benjamin’s flâneur, it
might be outdoing the “whore” because it “takes the abstract concept of the whore
for a stroll” (Butler 213).
It could also be said that the long take in the Philippine film may be partly
explained by a cultural disposition. It has been argued, for instance, that the
Hollywood mode of editing the local cinematic tradition has inherited fails to dwell
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on the robust emotional world of the Filipino face. The film historian Agustin Sotto
comments: “This style misses out on something valuable in the Filipino. Because
the Filipino’s face is very sensitive. If he wants to show he’s angry, he doesn’t have
to verbalize it, he just looks at you. If he’s happy to see you, his face says so” (qtd.
in Tiongson 54). The filmmaker Lino Brocka agrees, saying in some of his films the
camera does not move, and he explains: “This is deliberate … because I feel nothing
must intrude. Nothing. It’s as simple as that…. It’s very instinctive on my part. Here
is Hilda Koronel talking, saying something very important and vital, and I just feel
that I should not cut to this and cut to that or speed it up” (qtd. in Tiongson 61). In
these quotes, there is a tendency to invest in the “natural-ness” of the Filipino and
that it should not be violated by the cunning of editing.
This characterization of the long take as more hospitable to, and this is used
with caution here, the Filipino habitus is contrasted with the reception that it is
also experimental and therefore may detract from the “culture,” a vexingly typifying
category as it is, that surrounds and suffuses it. As one reviewer put it in 1980:
The film is susceptible to considerable textual analysis and thematic interpretation.
There are those who would surely compare some of the film’s techniques and
elements to the works of Fellini and Antonioni. That long walking scene for
example where Bernardo Bernardo leads the blind Rio Locsin and they encounter
assorted distractions along the way is sure to elicit all sorts of comments and
speculations. Some will read a lot of meanings into Bernardo’s Oscar Wildish
declarations. Some will dismiss it as another tongue-in-cheek experimentation
that is typically Bernalian. (Bautista 156)
Joel David’s idea of “pure film” as tendency in Philippine cinema in the seventies
and eighties supplements this sentiment. He remarks that Bernal may have been
the “only major Filipino director” who has investigated the exceptional visuality or
ocularity of the cinema as medium. This carries through the legacy of the French
New Wave, which maintained the “visual” nature of the art. According to David:
“Bernal’s essentially silent works — Nunal sa Tubig (1976) as a whole, most aspects
of his portion in Bakit may Pag-ibig Pa? (1978), and the ending of Ikaw Ay Akin
(1978) — raised the question of the appropriateness of a style that was branded
by some members of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino as ‘Western’ in nature”
(20). The idea of “sensibility” in Philippine film as endorsed by these critics has
been questioned by the art critic Alice Guillermo, who gleans in the source of
this Philippine identity in film a colonial, and therefore also a mediated aesthetic
formation.
Furthermore, such experimentation may be construed as deviating from the
more political style of montage, which has to a significant extent been privileged
by the more perceptive critics like Petronilo Bn. Daroy. His view on the editing
of the film Daluyong at Habagat, which explicates the plight of Filipino workers
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after the Pacific War, is instructive. He lauds the director Celso Ad. Castillo for
the potency of his cinematic image but at the same time faults him for failing to
round out the historical context. It can be inferred that the main dynamic of this
antinomy rests on the long take, on the one hand, and montage, on the other. For
the Filipino film critic, the dilemma of the Filipino filmmaker is how to reconcile
the materialities of both. For it is quite obvious in Daroy’s cogent analysis that
both these methodologies of the cinematic propose to viewers the intimacy with
the historical. First, Daroy acknowledges the accomplishments of spatialization in
Castillo’s oeuvre:
Castillo’s genius is in realizing, on film the glaring actuality of place; the lush
countryside in Laguna in Asedillo; the beaches and sunlight in Pinakamagandang
Hayop sa Balat ng Lupa; the sea and the rituals in Ang Madugong Daigdig ni
Salvacion; the noise and anarchy in the slums in Daluyong. In these instances,
Castillo more than revises the sense of reality of a setting but authenticates
it in terms of the aggression of color, sound, and familiarity on our senses. In
Daluyong, he goes beyond the simulation of virtual reality in favor of a more
detailed documentation; a close-up of a “Victory” currency; the re-play of
“Liberation” day’s song; careful costuming, et cetera. (189)
While all this is salutary, Daroy thinks it is not enough mainly because the
spatialization is not able to stir up the image as sufficiently moving. The muchvaunted “moving image” must have a developmentalist, progressive, and perhaps
even teleological logic. According to him: “These details, however, are not sufficient
to complete our sense of the real; reality here has to be sought in the very logical
development of the workers’ situation during those decades, which means we have
to discover it in the very stuff of history. This is where Castillo proves to be deficient”
(189). This lack is a lack of editing and the incommensurate prowess of the image.
The film only redeems itself when it ineluctably resorts to montage, which enables
it to overcome the supposed stasis of space, the mystification of its reality, and
activates the interaction of the contrasting elements in film and society:
Towards the end of the movie, however, Castillo achieves a triumph. Through a
series of intercutting, he shows three related series of sequences — Igus rushing
headlong to meet his adversary, the bourgeois Ricky Belmonte; Igus’ brother
(Rez Cortez) standing at attention in a courtroom listening to a judge render a
sentence on him; and the laborers going on a strike in a factory. Through the
technique of intercutting, Castillo manages to show these sequences are relating
to three forms of violence, namely, the organized workers against the exploitative
system; institutional violence against the individual; and the type of anarchistic
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or senseless violence that man within a given context of society perpetuates
against his own kind. These final sequences are a testimony to Castillo’s power
as an artist and his capacity to make a profound understanding of social issues.
Given this equipment, he really does not have to evade historical truth. (191)
It is important to stress Daroy’s tenor in his insistence on Castillo’s evasion of
historical truth. In its analysis of the long take as a form of historical passage or
the passage of the historical in the Philippine film, this essay tries to refunction
the contradiction as sketched out by Daroy by looking at the long take as a distinct
motion of history, a movement of its own, or better still, a syncopation of the time
of drama or its normative drift from conflict to denouement. It is proposed that
the long take or its kindred techniques are able to confront this historical truth and
not necessarily through the medium of the dialectic or the rhetoric of the struggle
of antagonistic forces. The long take is most productively interpreted as a tropic:
a vector through which things “turn visible” or apparent or ostensible, sometimes
“suddenly” and sometimes ploddingly, but always through an interrogative process
of ethical and philosophical questions and an interval of self-reflection of well-being
and survival. At varying levels, Manila by Night, Gabun, and Kinatay contribute
options in the meditation on the long take as a procedure that, first, concretizes the
process of history through the passage of its agents, conversing and reflexive agents
with discrepant interests, through a parcel of place within an urbanity, and, second,
that references the ontogenesis and current morphology of that said place as a
conjuncture. The latter crosses the gaps of estrangement and initiates conversation,
a revelatory one that does not lead to a dramatic peak. Rather, it moves toward a
confluence of positions, and inexorably to the unraveling of a trompe l’œil or a trick
of the eye, the sleight of hand of a woman who mimics the immaculate whiteness
of a nurse but clutches a synthetic bag of screaming, shimmering red. This said,
the aspiration for a coming together is not to be viewed as a negation of difference.
The long take as it has been demonstrated in these films disseminates the sensible
across the surface of the film, the heightened and competing contingencies of
the transients in the city, relocated by travel or traversal, and may result in the
wrenching of bodies or their equally violent longings for autonomy and integrity.
The “political” as a procedure of truth in time and space, an interrogation of a “fact”
as broadly conceived assumes social thickness and resonance as in such exemplary
works animated by the long take as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), Andy Warhol’s
Empire (1964), and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002). In the Philippine
cinematic corpus, we could examine the works of Lav Diaz and Mes de Guzman
that mingle philosophical and anthropological propensities in their cogitations
mainly on changing Philippine ethnoscapes.
In all this, the long take is sympathetic to the aesthetic goals of a film that gathers
a milieu through an ensemble of figures with the view to configure a socius and a
sociality in which people perform a democratic ethic of participation and solidarity.
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It is a “copresence, a bringing to presence — conceptually, cinematically — of parallel
streams of life” (Shapiro 53). To a certain degree, therefore, the long take and its
consequences of passage as form in the Philippine film overcomes the impasse of
mise en scène and montage of Hollywood editing and the plenitude of the Filipino
face of truth, of the “glaring actuality of space” and the “stuff of history.”
Works Cited
Albano, Raymundo. “Developmental Art of the Philippines.” Philippine Art Supplement
2.4 (1981): 15–16. Print.
Barthes, Roland. “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film
Theory Reader. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia UP , 1986. 10–29. Print.
Bautista, Mario. “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done.” The Urian Anthology 1980–1989. Ed.
Nicanor Tiongson. Manila: Antonio Tuviera, 2001. 153–56. Print.
Bernal, Ishmael, dir. and screenplay. Manila by Night. Perf. Bernardo Bernardo, Cherie
Gil, Rio Locsin, Charito Solis, William Martinez, Gina Alajar, Orestes Ojeda, Lorna
Tolentino, Alma Moreno, Maya Valdes, Sharon Manabat, Johnny Wilson, Jojo
Santiago. Regal Films, 1980. Film.
Bordwell, David. “La Nouvelle Mission de Feuillade; or, What Was Mise-en-Scène?” The
Velvet Light Trap 37 (1996): 10–29. Print.
——— . On the History of Film Style. Mass: Harvard UP , 1998. Print.
Butler, Judith. “Values of Difficulty.” Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public
Arena. Eds. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. Stanford: Stanford UP , 2003. 199–215.
Print.
Cruz, Pamela. “Ang Karanasan ng Nakaraan sa Gunitang Viswal: Pagsusuri sa mga
Pelikulang Romantiko sa Baguio” [“Past Experience in Visual Memory: Considering
Romantic Films Set in Baguio”]. Plaridel 8.2 (2011): 85–108. Print.
Daroy, Petronilo Bn. “Castillo’s Evasion of History.” The Urian Anthology: 1970–1979. Ed.
Nicanor G. Tiongson. Manila: Morato, 1983. 188–91. Print.
David, Joel. Fields of Vision: Critical Applications in Recent Philippine Cinema. Manila:
Ateneo de Manila UP , 1995. Print.
Daza, Julie Y. “The Eddie Rodriguez Syndrome.” Readings in Philippine Cinema. Ed.
Rafael Ma. Guerrero. Manila: Experimental Cinema of the Philippines, 1983. 170–74.
Print.
De los Reyes, Maryo J., dir. Gabun: Ama Mo, Ama Ko. Screenplay by Tom Adrales,
based on a play by Tony Perez. Perf. Liza Lorena, Eddie Rodriguez, Charito Solis,
Lloyd Samartino, Michael Sandico. Agrix, 1979. Film.
Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge: MIT , 2008. Print.
Guillermo, Alice. “Towards Understanding the Film Medium.” Images of Change.
Manila: Kalikasan, 1988. 95–98. Print.
Marcus, George E. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the
Cinematic Metaphor of Montage.” Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R.,
1990–1994. Ed. Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge, 1994. 37–43. Print.
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Mendoza, Brillante, dir. Kinatay. Screenplay by Armando Lao. Perf. Julio Diaz, Maria
Isabel Lopez, Coco Marin, John Regala. Swift Productions and Centerstage
Productions, 2009. Film.
Panofsky, Erwin. Three Essays on Style. Mass.: MIT , 1997. Print.
Ross, Alison. “Michaelangelo Antonioni: The Aestheticization of Time and Experience
in The Passenger.” Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New
Cinema. Ed. James Philipps. Stanford: Stanford UP , 2008. 40–51. Print.
Shapiro, Michael J. “Robert Altman: The West as Countermemory.” Cinematic Thinking:
Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema. Ed. James Philipps. Stanford: Stanford
UP , 2008. 52–67. Print.
Stockwin, Harvey. “Fiesta, the Martial Law Way.” Far Eastern Economic Review (1976):
20. Print.
Taussig, Michael. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and
Healing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.
Tesson, Charles. “The Cult of the Image in Lino: A Review of Tinimbang, Maynila, and
Dung-aw.” Lino Brocka: The Artist and His Times. Ed. Mario A. Hernando. Manila:
Sentrong Pangkultura ng Pilipinas, 1993. 160–62. Print.
Thongchai Winichakul. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Chiang
Mai: Silkworm, 1995. Print.
Tiongson, Nicanor, ed. The Politics of Culture: The Philippine Experience. Manila:
Philippine Educational Theater Association, 1994. Print.
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Forum Kritika: A Closer Look at Manila by Night
To Conform or Not to Conform,
That is the Genderqueer Question:
Re-examining the Lesbian Identity in
Bernal’s Manila by Night
Libay Linsangan Cantor
University of the Philippines Film Institute
libaylc@gmail.com
Abstract
This paper is an attempt to re-read the identity politics surrounding the lesbian character
as presented in Ishmael Bernal’s classic film Manila by Night. In doing so, it hopes to
trace where the identification of the lesbian construct is coming from, and in the process
investigates if the genderqueer construct in Philippine cinema intersects within this
discourse.
Keywords
androgyne, butch-femme dichotomy, depiction of lesbians in Philippine cinema
About the Author
Libay Linsangan Cantor is a feminist/queer advocate who holds an MA in Creative
Writing and a BA in Film at the University of the Philippines. She is a Palanca awardwinning fictionist, a scriptwriter-director of children’s TV programs, a freelance lifestyle/
entertainment journalist, and a recipient of the UP Arts Productivity System Award. She is
also an assistant professor at the UP Film Institute.
The identity and clear identification of a lesbian in Philippine culture has
been reflected in cinema since the 1980s. One of the earliest prominent lesbian
characters in Philippine cinema is the character of Kano [pronounced “Kanô”]
played by Cherie Gil in Ishmael Bernal’s 1980 film Manila by Night. While there are
many nuances in this characterization that leads to the conclusion or impression
of her leaning towards the lesbian butch identity, I posit that such characterization
might have been suggesting the beginnings of gender nonconformity in Philippine
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cinema, an identity concept that has not garnered currency in Philippine lesbian
circles — as also reflected in Philippine cinema — but that has, in essence, been
practiced for several decades already.
This paper, in using this specific portrayal, will attempt to trace these beginnings
to differentiate existing and emerging identity concepts. In order to establish this
premise, the paper will present a brief social mapping of the lesbian identity — and
the challenges confronting it — in Philippine society from the 1980s to the 2010s to
discover how such mappings — especially the specific genderqueer challenge — are
being reflected (or not) in Philippine cinema, beginning with this particular film
and portrayal. A close analysis of the lesbian vis-à-vis genderqueer portrayal of the
character will follow, which will then reconnect with the larger portrayal of lesbian
identities in Philippine cinema and how genderqueerness “fits” the larger picture.
Searching for Lesbian Characters in Philippine Cinema
In order to give context to the appearance of the lesbian identity in Manila by
Night, it is appropriate to investigate the specific time and space wherein the film
was produced and shown, contrasting it with other Sapphic depictions prior to
it, as well as beyond its release. Female characters with implied lesbian identity
presentations had been present in Philippine cinema as early as the touted Golden
Age of the 1940s-1950s. In fact, there have been films that featured females clearly
characterized as a tomboy or tomboyish. However, these tomboys do not carry
overt storylines that pertain to themes with women having women-directed desires/
affection. The most popular example of such a film is the adaptation of popular
comics characters in Mar S. Torres’s Jack en Jill (1954). This gender-bending comedy
storyline involves two siblings: a male body whose gender identity and expression
is that of a woman, and a female whose gender expression (only, not identity) is
that of a man. Usually, the female body carries the storyline as she is presented
to transform from being a tomboyish female to a girl-next-door feminine type
with the introduction of a male bodied romantic interest. As for her male sibling,
sometimes his storyline is not much developed and is left alone to remain as such.
Similar tomboyish characters appeared within that era. Often, these depictions
are of strong-willed female characters that could stand on their own, meaning they
are depicted as tough or toughened persons because of the hardships they face(d)
in life. The sub-theme of being from the province (where rural life is perceived
as slow and females are typecast as subservient) and migrating to Manila (where
urban life is perceived as fast and females are typecast as headstrong) is also
evident. Thus, part of being tough (inside), combined with toughening up (outside,
as part of their self-defense/coping mechanism) when “donning” a Manila lifestyle,
is characterized by their self-presentation of being a mannish tomboy, sometimes
even dressing up for the part. Examples of such characters are the Waray character
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and the comic gender-bending character popularized by Nida Blanca in the films
Waray-Waray and Galawgaw, both directed in 1954 by F. H. Constantino. All of
these 1954 films had sequels or were remade in subsequent decades, often including
the original tomboyish lead character (an older character) and featuring a newer/
younger generation actor that continues the tomboyish depiction.
Following this predominant tomboyish (gender-bending expression) theme,
it was only during the 1980s when more mainstream-produced films featured
predominantly lesbian characters in the lead or highlighted overt lesbian storylines,
and this continued up to the 2000s. The films that had these kinds of depictions
emerged during the 1980s with the production of films in mainstream cinema like
the subject of this study, Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night (1980); Danny Zialcita’s
Si Malakas, si Maganda, at si Mahinhin (1980) and T-Bird at Ako (1982). The next
batch of overt lesbian-themed films came out in the next decades like the sexy
film called Nang Mamulat si Eba Part 2 (1997) helmed by a director who used the
nom de camera Rico Mambo (Abbo Q. de la Cruz, bit player and sound-effects
technician in Manila by Night); Carlitos Siguion-Reyna’s Tatlo Magkasalo (1998);
Baliktaran: Si Ace at si Daisy (2001) directed by Al Tantay; and Joel Lamangan’s
Sabel (2004).
The advent of low-budgeted digitally shot independent films during the mid2000s also produced a handful of films that presented overt lesbian characters
and storylines. These were Aureus Solito’s Tuli (2005) produced under the Digital
Viva production arm; Ned Trespeces’ Trabaho (2005) produced under his own
independent production outfit Dirty Kitchen Productions; Brillante Mendoza’s
Kaleldo (2006), produced under his independent production outfit; and Connie
Macatuno’s Rome and Juliet (2006), produced under the digital filmmaking grant
program of mainstream production company ABS -CBN ’s Cinema One cable
channel.
While it could be argued that filmmakers need not be queer to produce queer
films, it could also be very disconcerting to queer audiences that patronize queer
films if they see what kinds of representations of themselves are being told in such
cinematic stories. While it is also not the aim of every film to be politically correct
or to represent a specific population in a positivist framework, films sometimes
do more harm than good when they propagate negative traits or stereotypes
about certain populations of people in their films, especially those who have been
relegated to the margins of society for a long time — such as women and lesbians,
gays, bisexuals, transgenders, and queers (LGBTQ ).
As Richard Dyer pointed out, the status quo is often reflected in the characters
we see in cinema, in his discussion of stereotypes: “The position behind all these
considerations is that it is not the stereotypes, as an aspect of human thought and
representation, that are wrong, but who controls and defines them, what interests
they serve” (246). Thus, whatever overt images we see in our daily life, films try
to reflect in cinema, larger than life. When it comes to these lesbian depictions,
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stereotypes are often found highlighted in most films, leading to the conclusion
that perhaps Philippine society still views lesbianism in a pejorative manner. It
could also suggest that perhaps the filmmakers and the producers also carry and
present their own understanding of lesbianism as based on these judgmental
depictions. But before looking closely at specific cinematic depictions, let us look
at how lesbianism is generally perceived in Philippine culture.
The Lesbian in Philippine Society
Lesbianism as a concept and identity had already been in the consciousness of
Philippine society since the twentieth century. Filipino lesbians have lived their
lives parallel to their heterosexual counterparts in different ways, regardless
of whether they are out in the open or remain in the closet. In a predominantly
Roman Catholic country, the influence of a highly conservative interpretation of
this religion has had a profound effect on how people perceived to be outside of
normative societal structures live their lives and negotiate their daily existence. The
concept of the Filipino society being generally “tolerant” — that is, recognizing it
but neither deeply accepting nor understanding — of same-sex structures remains
evident now as it was then.
As with realities in other parts of the world, different nuances of the lesbian
identity also exist within Filipino society, and different kinds of interpretations
of this identity have been presented and also challenged. The most predominant
nuance of this identity, as exemplified by lesbian couplings, is still reflected in the
traditional butch-femme dichotomy wherein one lesbian (the butch) takes on the
traditional masculine-male role of a husband and the other lesbian (the femme)
takes on the traditional feminine-female role of a wife (fig. 1). This kind of identity
pairing has been observed in Filipino society whether in the rural provincial areas
or in metropolitan city areas of the country. This observation was — and is — made
obvious by the overt self-presentation of such couples where even the gender roles
are reflected in the way they are dressed.
Perhaps the most prominent challenge to the identity of the Filipino lesbian
was made by women-loving-women who come from the activist spheres of the
local feminist movements, especially within formations created after the fall of
the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. Like an echo of their Western counterparts, most
feminists who happened to be lesbians espouse lesbian feminist politics, where
the main point is to deconstruct the patriarchal notions that govern not only the
genders but those who belong to one gender who happen to love members of their
gender, not the opposite one. In this regard, the butch-femme dichotomy was
seen as a patriarchal mimicry of gender roles that needed to be deconstructed,
challenged, or eradicated altogether.
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Figure 1. Butch and femme lesbians during the 2011 Manila LGBT March. (Photo by author)
While most of those who operate on such a pairing may or may not be aware of
this patriarchal mimicry, critics insist on its being patriarchal without considering
that such subject positions are perhaps also performed as a matter of survival — i.e.,
that one has to conform to a normative identity in order to fit and survive within
a society that insists on propagating fixed, often unchallenged norms. And
since Philippine society highlights dichotomies — meaning the male-female, the
masculine-feminine, the man-woman pairings — those who do not conform to such
divided structures have to find ways to fit. This is perhaps what many butch-femme
pairs do: conform, fit, role-play, in order to survive on a daily basis, in order to make
a living, in order to somehow conform to what society perceives as acceptable.
As Judith Butler pointed out, in a norm-fixated society, roles need to be
performed in order for the normative to be enacted:
gender is not a performance that a prior subject elects to do, but gender is
performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it
appears to express. It is a compulsory performance in the sense that acting out of
line with heterosexual norms brings with it ostracism, punishment, and violence,
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not to mention the transgressive pleasures produced by those very prohibitions.
(314–15, emphasis in original)
This is what critics of the butch-femme pairings have missed during the 1990s — the
fact that perhaps being in a butch-femme set-up is not a deliberate or conscious
mimicry but a form of strategy of survival in a patriarchy wherein the performers
who enact such survival tactics need to find a middle ground as to where they
could exist in their own perceived selves as intersected in the realities where their
selves could actually be found.
Current definitions of the set-up reflect this notion, as cited by the entry of
Theopano:
Criticism of butch-femme was usually based on the claim that these
identifications are an attempt to replicate heterosexuality by designating one
member of a couple as male (the butch) and the other as female (the femme).
Even today this argument is frequently aired. However, it is highly problematic
because of its own underlying assumption of heteronormativity — that is, the
tenet that heterosexuality is normal, and that all other forms of sexuality are only
weak imitations of it. Butch-femme need not be an imitation of anything; it is a
unique way of living and loving. (emphasis in original)
Since in a patriarchy heteronormativity is indeed the “norm,” lesbians who find
themselves living in it need to re-strategize themselves in order to fit this set-up.
Thus, since the butch lesbian is deemed a male/man/husband mimic, she takes
on the role that a traditional heteronormative male takes on, such as being the
economic provider of the household which the femme runs as she, in turn, takes
the traditional heteronormative role of the female/woman/wife. Outside society
somewhat accepts this kind of strategy, for in a patriarchy, whoever enacts such
“familiar” roles could be afforded some “leeway” of tolerance.
This kind of heteronormative assumption also extends to how the butch and
the femme negotiate their desires and enact their passions. Since the butch is
the manly one, she takes on the more active role of being the giver of pleasure
in a sexual relationship, regardless of the absence of the penis (which she “makes
up” for or covers up by hiding her body from her lover, inasmuch as most stone/
hard butches in the Philippines do not even take off their clothes during sexual
intercourse, let alone have their partners touch their private parts). The femme,
on the other hand, takes on the passive role in this one-way sexual relationship
(which, in Western definition, is known as the top-and-bottom structure), and only
receives the pleasure.
Yet like the definition said, being in a butch-femme dichotomy is a form
of expression that could also shed its earlier assumption that it is merely a
heteronormative mimicry, since, as Butler also deconstructed, it is presumptuous
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to call a mimicry a mimicry when the supposed model of that mimicry is a failure
in its own structure in the first place. As Butler elaborated:
If heterosexuality is an impossible imitation of itself, and imitation that
performatively constitutes itself as the original, then the imitative parody of
“heterosexuality” — when and where it exists in gay cultures — is always and only
an imitation of an imitation, a copy of a copy, for which there is no original. (314)
Thus, if this copy of a copy exists, what forms could it actually manifest as, especially
if such manifestations are used as strategies for survival? Or more important, what
happens to inhabitants of this traditional set-up who do not necessarily “follow” its
“guidelines” to the letter, and adjust it to fit their own strategies of survival?
As Butler also pointed out, nuances of an essentialized butch-femme persona do
not — or perhaps should not — exist in such set-ups:
Sexuality is never fully “expressed” in a performance or practice; there will be
passive and butchy femmes, femmey and aggressive butches, and both of those,
and more, will turn out to describe more or less anatomically, stable “males”
and “females.” There are no direct expressive or causal lines between sex, gender,
gender presentation, sexual practice, fantasy and sexuality. None of those terms
captures or determines the rest. Part of what constitutes sexuality is precisely
that which does not appear and that, which, to some degree, can never appear.
This is perhaps the most fundamental reason why sexuality is to some degree
always closeted, especially to the one who will express it through acts of selfdisclosure. (315)
In the Philippines, such essentializing has also been challenged even during the
1990s when the femme-to-femme pairing was the one relationship form being
essentialized as ideal in lesbian advocacy circles. Many lesbian feminists who are
also butch in appearance were quick to clarify that just because they look and
appear masculine does not automatically mean that they espouse the heterosexual
mimicry of a man in their relationships, as being “macho” automatically negates the
“feminist” part of their lesbian feminist principles. The same was espoused by their
femme partners. Thus, there was a differentiation between the butch lesbian and the
butch-looking lesbian, since gender presentation/expression did not automatically
carry gender identity for these butch-looking lesbians. The primary evidence of
this differentiation is the willingness of butch-presented lesbian feminists to be
in two-way relationships, that they are willing to be the top and the bottom in
sexual intercourse, and that they progressively allow their femme partners to be
the same. This also translated into how they lived their lives, since both partners
are encouraged to earn a living and thus, unlike macho-run households where
the man/father figure is usually the sole breadwinner, many lesbian households
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become a two-income generating household — a strategy of survival that is more
practical in a developing-country set-up.
Are similar progressive depictions being reflected in cinema after the proliferation
of the gender-bending mannish tomboys in comedy films?
Trends of Lesbian Depictions in Philippine Cinema
Popular culture products often reflect the biases and objectivities present in a society,
and this holds true for lesbians depicted in Philippine cinema. Since the 1980s,
the very obvious butch-femme lesbian identities began emerging in mainstream
cinema, the kind that is clearly performed based on heterosexual constructs of the
boy-girl/man-woman/husband-wife dichotomy, not the more progressive butchfemme pairing based on a consensus of equality in self-expression. In the 1990s and
2000s, some films presented these progressive pairings of the butch-femme kind
as well as the femme-to-femme kind. However, such “non-normative” pairings are
often used as a plot device to still showcase heterosexist-implied deviant-based
spectacles.
Often, to give the audience a Hollywoodized heterocentric happy ending, the
device that lesbians find themselves entrapped in are those which aim to undo
their self-identification in order for them to transform/transition/go back to
where they are duly assigned by the patriarchy — that of being “natural women”
that perform traditional female gender roles. Thus, most narratives that dwell on
lesbian lives onscreen take the form of this journey, but only if the characters are
willing participants. The aforementioned Jack en Jill and similar gender-bending
storylines embody this kind of journey. It is often the case that the female-bodied
persona of such characters — who are often presented as mannish tomboys, or even
butch lesbians who do not self-identify as such — gets “rescued” or “turned back”
to being heterosexual when a cisgendered-identifying male body expresses his
love for her, tries to woo her back to heterosexuality, and succeeds. The mannish
tomboy is no more, and is replaced by a feminine-dressed leading lady to partner
with her dashing prince charming — a heterosexual picture-perfect ending.
If the wooing does not take the form of a romantic gender-bender comedy film,
then it takes the form of a sexy/titillating film where lesbianism is used to sell that
trite girl-on-girl fantasy as a come-on for heterosexual (read: heterosexist) male
audiences. Such is the storyline — and purpose — of films like Nang Mamulat si
Eba 2 where the clearly lesbian-identifying character gets seduced and “forced” to
have sex with a heterosexual male body, and that changes her sexual orientation
“automatically.” Again, the butch-looking lesbian is no more, and is replaced by a
vixen-looking woman who yearns to have more heterosexual intercourse with her
Adonis-like knight in shining armor — a heterosexual sex fantasy-filled pictureperfect ending.
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Gender role inversion as a comedic device is also used in storylines with clearly
queer-identifying characters like Baliktaran where two children of parents who are
close friends are locked in an arranged marriage set-up, but the children grew up
to be a gay man and a lesbian woman. In this instance, heteronormativity is used
as a device to blackmail the characters in order for them to be accepted by their
families and to get their respective inheritance.
Another twist to the gender role inversion is used in a dramatic form as well
in the film Si Malakas, si Maganda, at si Mahinhin where an openly out soft
butch lesbian and a swishy openly gay man end up having sex during a night of
inebriation. This accidental intercourse introduces an offspring, and the soft butch
and the swishy gay both shed their queerness slowly as the pregnancy ensues, and
they eventually straighten up and settle into familiar heteronormative gender roles
of non-swishy husband and non-butch wife in order to carry on this heterosexual
traditional nuclear family.
If the lesbian-identified character is resolved with who she is and does not
make any move to renegotiate her sexuality, then her storyline finds an unhappy or
tragic ending in this mainstream cinematic scheme of things. In the most popular
lesbian example of Philippine cinema, T-Bird at Ako finds the butch lesbian lawyer
character as a jilted would-be lover whose object of affection — a heterosexual female
client — judges her vehemently and sees her as an objectionable deviant. Sixteen
years later, in Tatlo Magkasalo — the first time Philippine cinema is introduced to
an overt femme-to-femme storyline — it is ironic that a butch lesbian is the one
judging a femme lesbian in the film when this femme abandons the other femme
(her former lover dying of cancer). In the end, heterosexuality claims the femme
again (she leaves her fellow femme lover to become a wife to a man, then leaves the
man temporarily but goes back to him again when she found out she was pregnant)
as her former femme lover is eventually claimed by cancer, leaving the conclusion
that, butch or femme, any lesbian-identifying character in mainstream cinema gets
killed in society, figuratively or literally.
Independent cinema has also produced several lesbian narratives which present
femme-to-femme pairings or overt femmes as main characters. However, even if
their storylines do not remain as tragic as their mainstream predecessors, their
storylines are still enmeshed within sad narratives that do not give their characters
some sense of empowerment (from their own selves of from the society they
inhabit) or their sexuality is renegotiated to fit some semblance of heteronormativity
in order to be palatable. Rome and Juliet is the epitome of this lesbian tragedy.
Taking off from Shakespeare’s original tragic plotlines, two previously heterosexual
women find themselves strongly attracted to each other and decide to explore
their newfound sexual leanings. Once they decided to consume their romantic and
sexual attraction for each other, their respective lives get destroyed plotline after
plotline, affecting their livelihood, their family relations, and even their lives (one
of the women figures in an accident and ends in a coma).
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Similarly, the strong female lead character of Tuli, who falls for a feminine woman
and is willing to be ostracized for it (which her village eventually does to her) is an
example of this renegotiated storyline, where her lesbianism is “bargained” with
her judgmental village mates only when she decides to get impregnated to bear a
child (a form of “partial heterosexual pardon”) as she continues to live her life with
her female lover. Meanwhile, Kaleldo features a butch-looking lesbian who carries
the burden typically thrown at martyred unmarried heterosexual female characters
and her whole filmic struggle revolves around this sad storyline. Trabaho, a multicharacter light comedy, portrays its femme lesbian character as a jilted lover who
tries to discredit her ex-girlfriend’s current boyfriend by seducing him and taking
pictures to show her ex. She also pretends to be straight in order to get a job she
is applying for. Again, partial heterosexual strategies — and traditional gendered
performances — are adapted by strong lesbian-identified characters in order to
negotiate their lives in a cinematic heterosexual world.
Revisiting Manila by Night, it is crucial to see whether its presentation
of the lesbian character also rode the tides of the preceding gender-bending
representations or followed its contemporaries’ patriarchal dichotomy-oriented
depictions.
The Lesbian Identity in Manila by Night
Ishmael Bernal’s classic film Manila by Night is by no means an exception to these
strata of lesbian depictions in Philippine cinema, as it was produced during the
time when the earlier lesbian-themed films cited were produced, and it is definitely
one of the prime examples of a classic lesbian-themed film predecessor often
referenced in connection with the later produced examples, especially those in
the independent cinema realm. Yet perhaps its relevance might be unconsciously
working a different kind of negotiation when it comes to its presentation of the
lesbian identity, as early as the 1980s.
Manila by Night is a multi-character story where many representations of
sexuality are presented and exhibited as they unfold their characterizations, often
intertwined/intersecting with that of others, as often seen and expounded on
during the darkness that envelops the city. In the film, the lesbian is represented by
Kano, a typical transplanted Manila nomad who moved to the capital city from her
hometown of Olongapo. Her name — a shortened and slang version of Amerikano
or American — is in reference to her mixed-race look and combined with the 1980s
reputation of her hometown as a place where Amerasian children were born
(commonly known as “GI babies”) sired by military servicemen who slept with bar
girls near the US military bases, this one the former Subic Naval Base. We do not
see her having a fixed place of residence but she knows how to navigate the dark
alleys and seedy nooks surrounding Manila, especially near its red-light districts.
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She earns a living dealing drugs but it is mostly marijuana she sells. She also acts
as a sideline pimp of a blind sauna masseuse named Bea, her childhood friend and
the reason why she moved to Manila (to follow her), as Bea appears to be the love
of her life.
It is interesting to note that most of the characters presented in this film are
intersected with the lesbian character in one way or another. As soon as the film
opens, we immediately see Kano as she enters the bar where the male college
student plays gigs as a folk singer at night. This college student becomes her drugbuying client later on, and she also pimps the blind masseuse to him as well.
As soon as Bea’s world is unfurled (she works in a sauna but does extra jobs
outside), we immediately see her interaction with Kano as it is established that
they are more than good friends. It is obvious that Kano is in love with Bea and
even jokes about it during their pot-smoking session (where they smoke in an
intimate shotgun style). In this scene, the lesbian serves as the temporary relief of
the masseuse from her harrowing world of maniacal male sauna clients by being a
jester and an ear that listens to her heterosexist-filled whining. But it is also shown
that, like the male sauna clients, Kano also tries to behave like a maniac with Bea
but only in a lighter, playful manner (when she tries to kiss Bea) to which Bea looks
more coy than annoyed, hence more “welcoming” of Kano’s advances. In addition,
the lesbian also serves as a temporary playmate/confidante as Bea reinforces the
information that she will eventually leave the Philippines as soon as her male lover,
a certain Greg Williams (yet another implicitly Amerasian character), takes her to
Saudi Arabia. In between their banter, Kano merely accepts this information as fact.
The next time we see Kano, she is seen hanging out with Manay, the polyamorous
fashion designer and also the most prominent gay character in the film. Similarly,
as with Kano, Manay is also another character that intersects with majority of
the characters in this narrative. At least two major scenes are shared by the two
characters: one inside a club as they discuss the implications of their sexualities and
another during their attempt to help resolve Bea’s eye condition. The next moment
we see Bea and Kano together, the lesbian plays the same playmate/confidante role
to the masseuse during the time Bea feels betrayed by the world that “promised”
her changes (fig. 2). The betrayal she felt this time was the promise of having her
eye condition checked with the help of a nurse who turns out to be a fake medical
practitioner. This becomes the biggest moment for the lesbian in the film as she
takes care of the angst-ridden masseuse, tames her with some cough syrup they
share to get high, and the lesbian eventually caresses her and kisses her angst out
of her — the obvious prelude to making love (which is not shown in the film but
merely hinted at). The moment is tender, the characters’ actions not forced, and
they feel the anticipation of the enactment of their desires — willingly, and openly.
As with their earlier intimate moment, Bea again welcomes Kano’s tender and
careful “advances.”
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Figure 2. Kano hears the story of Bea’s disappointment in her treatment for blindness
(left); Kano comforts Bea with physical intimacy (right). (Left photo courtesy of Bernardo
Bernardo, used with permission; right photo frame capture by Joel David)
The next big scene where we see Kano is when she hangs out near Manila Bay
with the other “city deviants of the night” as they are obviously tripping on some
drugs. They discuss life in Manila and surviving it, until a carnival-like atmosphere
ensues where several flamboyantly dressed individuals — most of whom look like
transgender women club performers in loud and colorful costumes and exaggerated
make-up — join the trippy group until a dare to swim in the water gets passed
around. Here, Kano participates in the revelry as she undresses by removing her
denim jumpers/overalls, revealing that she wears men’s sleeveless undershirts and
men’s briefs — no trace of feminine-identified underwear. As they jump into the
water, they imagine tripping on lights and they see manifestations of that visual trip
in the form of floating lighted candles around them.
Between these major sequences, we see Kano weave in and out of streets
where it is being established that she is being followed or tracked by law enforcers,
presumably undercover police/drug agents. The payoff for these weavings is the
last time we see her, as she gets pursued by the undercover police agents and they
catch up with her. As she is running away from them, two characters get involved
indirectly. She runs to Bea in the sauna to ask for help but her heart gets crushed
when Bea refuses to help her. The male college student, wandering aimlessly while
looking for the chance to hit up some drugs again, gets confused with the chase
and runs also, thinking that he is the one being pursued.
Analyzing the way the lesbian character is presented in the film, Manila
by Night’s strong lesbian theme emerges in the intertwining storylines of the
characters, especially whenever the lesbian character is juxtaposed with other
non-normatively identified characters. However, unlike the bisexual man and
the transgender women — characters who could be classified as still following
traditional/patriarchal gender roles — the lesbian and the gay man, in specific
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scenes, had the “need” to articulate their subject positions as non-normative
characters. It is as if by describing who they are (or trying to assess who they are),
often in juxtaposition with who they desire (romantically and/or sexually), their
strong non-normative identities needed validation that they, too, are present in
society.
In these scenes, however, only Manay utters the clear identity presentation of
being a gay male (uttering “bakla pa rin” [“still gay”] clearly pertaining to himself as
well as “pero pag ibang sward, naku” [“never love another gay”] in another scene to
refer to other gays like him), while Kano does not have any clear-cut claiming of her
non-normative identity as a lesbian (noting the absence of common Filipino terms
for lesbian during that time such as tomboy and tibô to refer to herself ). This may
be because she is not lesbian, after all, but another kind of woman-loving-woman:
the genderqueer. In Philippine society, this is known as the androgynous lesbian.
Was Kano unconsciously feeling that type of identification? And was Bernal
aware of such a depiction as well, as suggested by the presentation of Kano’s
character?
Overlooked Identity, Emerging Identity: The Androgyne
and the Genderqueer
Within the butch-femme and the femme-femme pairings, one distinct identity has
also emerged in the global lesbian circles that is also seen in the local lesbian circles,
and that is the identity of the “in-between” — that lesbian who cannot be overtly
determined as butch or femme, since she appears to be dressed in manly clothes
yet her demeanor is obviously feminine. Or there is no conscious effort to make
an extraordinary effort to mask her female body parts like what other traditional
hard/stone butches do when they wear special binders in an effort to flatten their
breasts or wear layered clothing to make their chests look more evened out (to
appear more manly). Sometimes, this lesbian also wears body-hugging clothes that
make her female figure more flattering to look at, yet she acts and walks with a
“manly swagger” and appearance that makes her look merely “tomboyish” to the
heteronormative world, the tomboyish persona often associated with adolescent
girls where acting boyish is seen as merely a phase that one outgrows in time. This
specific identity is called the androgynous lesbian.
Perhaps the most recognized international celebrity of this time who closely
embodies this androgynous look is American television talk show host Ellen
Degeneres, herself part of the LGBTQ community in the US . Although she
identifies as a lesbian, her appearance in her daily show is somewhat similar
with how androgynous or genderqueer/gender nonconforming women present
themselves; there is no overt masking of her feminine persona (as reflected in her
behavior, countenance, and natural interaction with guests), and at the same time
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her masculine-looking clothes are worn without gender-bending apology. In the
realm of fictional depictions, two close examples of androgynous/genderqueerlooking women could be traced from the Showtime channel-produced American
lesbian-themed television series The L Word (which ran from 2004 and concluded
in 2009) and the BBC channel-produced Scottish lesbian-themed television series
Lip Service (which began in 2010 and its second season concluded in 2012). The L
Word had the lesbian heartthrob character Shane (played by Kate Moennig) whose
self-presentation is that of a genderqueer female body while Lip Service had the
character Frankie (played by Ruta Gedmintas) who was similarly depicted.
The androgyne or “andro” as she is popularly called in Filipino lesbian circles
often finds it harder to negotiate her identity not only to the heterosexual world but
also to the homosexual world (fig. 3). Lesbians caught up in the butch-and-femme
dichotomy — then and even now — still try to re-categorize the andro as part of the
butch spectrum where the identity varies based on the closeness of its manifestation
to the heteronormative masculine, namely the hard or stone butch (closest to the
manly norm), the soft butch, and the andro, which is identified closely to toeing
the gender-bender line which sometimes includes crossing over to the femme side.
Thus, most andros in Filipino lesbian culture still end up being paired with femmelooking lesbians because of their automatic association with the butch spectrum,
regardless of how they present themselves as not merely belonging to any variants
of the butch or femme spectrum but could very well belong to another umbrella
concept — that of being queer. More specifically, being genderqueer, to the point of
being gender-nonconforming.
But androgyny as a concept, regardless of its being pulled toward the butch
spectrum, still retains its gender-bending quality in Philippine lesbian circles.
Most androgynous lesbians continue to present themselves as women who are
more comfortable in a state of nonconformity when it comes to gender expression.
However, it is important to note that most andros in this community often appear
quite “genderless” in the sense that they have lesser manifestations of being
identified as female bodies. Therefore, most andros in the Philippines appear
sexless, usually flat-chested, often with a relatively thin body type, and having less
pronounced hips and buttocks often identified with female body voluptuousness.
Perhaps this is the main reason they are often forced into the butch spectrum, as
they are the perfect candidates who could “easily” morph into the heteronormative
mold carried by the butch-femme dichotomy. On the other hand, those andros
who are not quite genderless in body type are being claimed by the femme side of
the spectrum, as they are encouraged more to become tomboyish lipstick lesbians
in appearance and countenance.
In recent years, the identity of the queer as a clear identifier of persons who
do not want to be typecast with existing terms has emerged. To intersect this
advancement in queer theory and praxis with the developments in gender identity
and expression in recent years, the Western LGB advocates have examined the
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Figure 3. An example of a female-bodied genderqueer self-presentation during the 2008
Manila LGBT Pride March. (Photo by author)
reassessment of the gender-bending qualities of identities found under the
current spectrums and have intersected these with the transgender spectrum.
Now more inclusively termed as LGBTQ (or more, depending on which specific
queer communities add definitions to the acronym), the Western alphabet soup of
sexuality, gender identity, and expression has expanded its scope to accommodate
more labels and categories.
As far as the process of adapting to and assimilating global trends goes, Filipino
lesbians are mostly abreast of global issues and concerns pertaining to the LGBTQ
community in general but somehow, most still need to accept and understand the
concept of the queer, as this term — as accepting as it sounds, regardless of how
“problematic” or controversial it seems to some sectors in the Western world — has
not gained much currency in the Philippine setting, even if some women-lovingwomen click on this label to identify themselves in social networking sites without
the benefit of fully comprehending its nuance. While the queer or genderqueer
identity is somewhat gaining ground in the advocacy and academic circles, it has
yet to cross over into the general lesbian populace in the Philippines.
In the very definitive spectrum of the lesbian identity in Filipino culture, it is
no surprise that no matter how you define or redefine yourself, lesbians would
automatically try to categorize someone based on their perceived gender expression,
not the nuance of their sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI ). The very
concept of being more inclusive and open in terms of identities that the queer
definition carries is somewhat still surprisingly alien to most in the community
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whose primary concern is to automatically box lesbians into masculine and
feminine roles, and then base their identities from their supposed respective box.
Going back to that butch spectrum, however, it is quite evident that there are
those who are within this spectrum — whether by choice or as assigned by the
community (regardless if they accept the assignation or not) — who obviously carry
a more gender-nonconforming stance in terms of their attitude, behavior, and
expression. But when it comes to self-identity, they are still forced to identify as
merely “butch” or “soft butch” and not quite encouraged to be “andro” let alone
encouraged to be “queer” or “genderqueer.” In fact, there are butch-looking and
androgynous lesbians who would rather be “just themselves” without the benefit of
carrying a specific (traditional) label, as they say and feel that they could sometimes
feel both masculine and feminine, and they have no problems with feeling that
way — a very genderqueer approach to self-identification, if one would look at it,
without the benefit of the articulation of that particular label.
The concept of the “genderqueer” is an emerging terminology in Western
gender-focused discourses that aim to either destroy or challenge existing gender
binaries that define one’s personhood, as cited in the entry by Beemyn:
The term “genderqueer” began to be commonly used at the turn of the twenty-first
century by youth who feel that their gender identities and/or gender expressions
do not correspond to the gender assigned to them at birth, but who do not want
to transition to the “opposite” gender. Characterizing themselves as neither
female nor male, as both, or as somewhere in between, genderqueers challenge
binary constructions of gender and traditional images of transgender people.
Often discussed together with the concept of androgyny, genderqueer takes the
dissection of identities in a different discourse by positing that a person could
both inhabit the form of society’s image of a man and a woman, not taking turns
but most times happening at the same time. To blur the lines of sex-based gender
binaries is the simplest explanation to describe such a figure: that one could be
both masculine and feminine, both a man and a woman, yin and yang combined.
Yet this identity of blurred lines is not automatically digested or accepted in
spheres where it should be celebrated, especially in communities outside the
Western constructs. In a typical LGBTQ setting where the main characters often
belong to one distinct identity — whether a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or
queer — genderqueers often find it a struggle to present their category simply
because they present more than one “traditional” category.
To expound on this, imagine how a female-born person whose romantic, sexual
and spiritual connections with a fellow female body would be automatically
prescribed as a lesbian. If this lesbian expresses herself in a traditional male/
masculine expression, then the sub-category of “butch lesbian” will be automatically
ascribed to her. But what if this butch lesbian both embodies male/masculine and
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female/feminine traits at the same time as earlier discussed? If her self-presentation
remains that of the masculine kind, her behavior would automatically be assumed to
reflect this masculinity as well. To apply this categorization to the gender-bending
androgynous lesbians, genderqueer identities still need to be recognized, but it
does not mean that it is not being practiced already, as proven by earlier examples.
Kano as a Performative Butch
It is easy to see how the lesbian character in the film could be construed as a butch
lesbian based on her looks alone — her obvious gender expression that clearly
hones to a male/man appearance. From the way Kano is dressed in the film, we
see similarities with how other lesbians in Philippine cinema had been dressed
since the gender-bending tomboyish times of the 1950s: they usually sport short
hair (or the hair is tied back to appear shorter), don short-sleeved polo clothes
often with printed checkered designs and the front ends tied in a knot to appear
tough-looking (fig. 4). The other cinematic butch-looking lesbians were similarly
depicted/dressed.
In terms of identifying one’s self, there is also some hesitation on the part of
Kano herself, as evident in certain actions in several key sequences, whether to
refer to herself as a lesbian, whether in a defiant or in a defeatist manner we are not
so sure. In fact, we do not really hear her refer to herself as lesbian but it appears
that, since the definition is already out there and is free to be used by those who feel
like using it, she reluctantly takes it and uses it to define not herself but to define
other people’s perspective of her.
This is evident in the first sequence where we see Bea and Kano’s full extent of
their interaction for the first time. When Kano shouts “I love you Manila kahit ano
ka pa man, bata, matanda, mabaho, pangit, babae, lalaki, bakla … o tomboy” before
the pot-smoking session sequence with Bea, Kano playfully shouts practically the
whole sentence (translated as “I love you Manila whatever you are, young, old,
smelly, ugly, woman, man, gay … or lesbian”) yet when it came to her utterance
of the word “tomboy” which is the usual term for lesbian in Philippine society, we
notice her slight pause before saying the term (fig. 5). When she finally says it, it is
like uttering the word together with releasing a deep breath, as she lowers her voice
and removes the playful tone altogether as soon as she says it, as if its utterance is
accompanied by a deep sigh of regret.
The second time we get an intimation of Kano’s hesitation is during the sequence
inside the dimly lit club as she shares a game table with the polyamorous gay Manay.
Out of the blue, perhaps as a way of making conversation or as a way of reaching
out desperately to someone who would listen, Kano starts talking about love with
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Figure 4. Kano and her butch lesbian appearance, more “manly” than other men.
(Publicity still by Regal Films)
him as she asks if he believes in true love, which the gay man caustically answers
with an air of annoyance. Without being asked, she volunteers that Bea is her true
love, and expounds with a simple explanation of her semi-soliloquy. However, she
also sighs as she matter-of-factly concludes, with a heavy heart, that maybe Bea just
really does not like lesbians per se. Note that the word she used to refer to lesbian is
not “tomboy” but the patriarchally implied slang term for lesbian which is “pars” or
short for pare/kumpare, a term males use on each other to refer to deep friendship,
usually bonded through the baptism of one man’s child to whom the other acts as
godfather. However, the term pars, when appropriated by the lesbian community,
simply pertains to the butch lesbian, specifically the stone butch lesbian. (The
female counterpart is “mars” or mare/kumare, to refer to femmes as well.)
Again, since these terms are already there, perhaps Kano simply uses these
terms because it is the only one available that is easiest for others to explain herself
to them, no matter the burden of such a term, or whether she agrees with the
definition or not. This is what Dyer pertains to regarding the use of stereotypes
as prefabricated characters as these prefabrications carry with them prefabricated
meanings and hence, prefabricated implications and connotations:
In fictions, social types and stereotypes can be recognized as distinct by the
different ways in which they can be used. Although constructed iconographically
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Figure 5. Kano as hesitant and anxious figure — with Bea at the sauna rooftop (left) and with
Manay as they discuss true love. (Frame captures by Joel David)
similar to the way stereotypes are constructed (i.e., a few verbal and visual traits
are used to signal the character), social types can be used in a much more open
and flexible way than can stereotypes. This is most clearly seen in relation to plot.
Social types can figure in almost any kind of plot and can have a wide range of
roles in that plot (e.g., as hero, as villain, as helper, as light relief, etc.), whereas
stereotypes always carry within their very representation an implicit narrative.
(248–49)
Thus, it is a plausible hypothesis that perhaps in this film, Kano only performs the
role of a tomboy or butch lesbian because that is the only kind of identity she could
latch on to in reference to how people see her, not necessarily in reference to how
she sees herself.
Another reason why Kano’s butch lesbian appears as a performance only is that
she is also trying to negotiate clashing with patriarchy head-on yet it is obvious that
she already wants to try, though heteronormativity and homonormativity do not
permit her. This is first acted out during the pot-smoking session scene where she
joked about how Bea does not really love her because Bea is set on running away
to Saudi Arabia with Greg Williams. Here, the lesbian feels like she is a substitute
man and playfully asks what her function is in Bea’s life (to which Bea jokes that she
likes Kano because she supplies her with marijuana). Kano later expresses her true
reaction to being Bea’s temporary relief to heterosexuality as she bares her soul to
Manay in the club scene.
Since in this instance the butch lesbian, the pars, the Pinoy tomboy, is very much
burdened with being the heterosexual mimic, Kano does not have much room to
negotiate herself to at least be in sync with Bea’s life since it was Bea herself, her
object of affection, who made a clear distinction as to where Kano could participate
and where she could not participate in her life — and Kano dejectedly accepts that
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in true melodramatic martyr fashion. Thus, she has no recourse but to go along
with how heteronormativity does it: when men act like a maniac with Bea, she
also mimics that but is still careful not to cross any lines. Her behavior is dictated
upon not by how well she adapts to this patriarchal behavior but by how she could
survive being with Bea using nuances of this patriarchal behavior. Again, the butch
lesbian identity as patriarchal mimicry is used as a tool of survival and coping by a
butch lesbian who does not necessarily agree with such an identity — because that
identity was not created by hers to begin with, but by others outside her sphere.
Johven Velasco, in his article on feminized heroes and masculinized heroines,
framed it succinctly when he posited: “People who constantly interact and
communicate define, determine, and create reality, the meaning of their lives,
experiences, and environment, and where there is no shared meaning, they
negotiate for one” (51). In this way, this is what Judith Halberstam also discusses as
being out of sync with the time and space that a queer persona inhabits and occupies
which, to Kano, the time might be nighttime (who knows how she performs in the
daytime, given the chance to explore it) and the space might be Manila, given that
it could be construed that more than being a butch lesbian, Kano is more queer,
or specifically, genderqueer, as evident in the narrative imposed on her in the film.
Obviously not all gay, lesbian and transgender people live their lives in radically
different ways from their heterosexual counterparts, but part of what has made
queerness compelling as a form of self-description in the past decade or so has
to do with the way it has potential to open up new life narratives and alternative
relations to time and space. (Halberstam 2)
Yet since there is still no distinct avenue for being androgynous as a Filipino
lesbian, much more for being queer, lesbians who do not conform to such strictly
gendered lesbian identities are at risk of being dislocated in their own spheres.
Sometimes, they feel this dislocation and they try to adjust to it. Sometimes, they
simply ignore it and try to assimilate as much as they could. Thus, we also see these
strategies reflected in lesbians we see in local films. This “schedule of normativity”
as Halberstam articulates it is the reason why Kano will not be allowed to cross the
lines drawn up by Bea or society in general, because she is completely out of sync
with it — performing as a butch lesbian in a patriarchal time and space that rejects
androgyny and any form of normative or non-normative nonconforming — as
she is assessed in an identity that does not conform to what she truly is, inside
and out. Hence, the tragic outcome of her narrative, as Halberstam points out:
“And the masculine woman in the past has rarely been depicted as an interesting
phenomenon — usually, she has been portrayed as the outcome of failed femininity,
or as the result of pathetic and unsuccessful male mimicry” (17).
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Kano as a Reluctant (Gender)Queer
If given a more concrete chance to be one mesh of a man or a woman, or to
continuously challenge these gender binaries just by being and living, going beyond
androgyny but flowing more into genderqueerness, exhibiting both masculine and
feminine traits without being too self-conscious about the shifts, then perhaps Kano
would have had a better chance of survival in life and in love. Perhaps if she saw that
she was androgynous or genderqueer and accepted it without prejudice — meaning
without the “help” of society’s impositions of still gender-nailed alternative
identities — then maybe she does not need to perform the patriarchal butch lesbian
she tries hard to perform but often fails. Perhaps her narrative would have fared
better; we will never know.
Kano’s butch adaptation strategies could also be seen as continuing the line
of the Second Golden Age’s mannish tomboy strategy for survival: the toughened
and toughening up style as presented in a masculine manner that is more hyped
and hyper than its previous cinematic counterparts. We often see this toughened
persona whenever Kano is in a scene with heterosexual men, as if presenting herself
as “one of the boys.” For a patriarchal society to assess a woman’s level of “readiness”
to negotiate her persona with the world, the othered gender is measured according
to her strategy of “leveling up” with the dominant gender. And since the othered
heterosexual gender also recognizes this gender-biased presentation, heterosexual
women perhaps tend to appreciate better those who don it. Thus, we see Kano’s
toughening up stance whenever she presents herself to Bea, especially when she is
specifically called for to help her chosen damsel-in-distress.
Another evidence of Kano’s (masculine) gender-biased toughening up is connected
to her intersected persona of a Manila nomad — provincial transplant — mixed-race
heritage. Her basic identity contributes highly to how she negotiates herself in the
smaller time and space that she chose to settle in, as dictated not by circumstance
or by opportunity but by her heart. Yet it is not as if she were the only one with an
intersected persona. Her direct competitor for her one true love’s affection — the
aforementioned Greg Williams — could be seen as possessing a “more legitimate”
intersected persona (himself of mixed-race heritage, presumably American like
Kano based on his white mestizo-like looks and American-sounding name) in the
eyes of Bea. But since Greg Williams is a heterosexual man and Kano is presented
as an “imitation man,” patriarchy wins in the end and the heterosexual woman goes
to where the patriarchy dictates her to go, leaving the imitation man betrayed and
loveless.
Note, too, that the only times Kano is seen as embodying both the genderidentified traits of the man and the woman are those when she is with similarly typed
“outcasts,” particularly Manay. The way she narrates her nostalgic lines in reference
to love and life during the sauna scene is dismissed by the gay man, as her opening
up about her emotions could be typecast as a “typical female emotional outburst”
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yet her semi-drunken nearly slurred delivery, complete with tentative pauses,
could be characteristic of a “typical way of a male sharing emotions” pejoratively
termed “being emo” in contemporary slang. In this scene, she unapologetically
unravels herself for who she is — or who she could really be — and curiously, the
unraveling shows a gender-nonconforming person who unconsciously shifts from
being masculine to being feminine and goes back and forth in shifting.
The second time we see this unraveling unconscious shift is during the Manila
Bay scene before she gets really high from drug-tripping. Again, she shares her
thoughts and feelings in that very vocal yet calculating “emo” way as she shares her
opinions about living and surviving life in Manila. The sharing ends up in a literal
stripping away of her self-presentation where we see her shedding her inhibitions
together with her masculine-type clothes as she prepares to jump into the bay.
The literal genderqueer strip could again be perceived as defying the typical stone
butch peg of not shedding manly clothes to reveal an untransformed female body.
Here, Kano does not hesitate to show that she, too, subscribes to the typified butch
peg (as seen in her male underwear) but she is also not reluctant to show that she
sheds this peg easily and thus is not afraid to reveal her female body to the world. In
this scene, she quietly embodies both the man and the woman in demeanor, action,
behavior and expression.
Thus, even if the film does not articulate it loudly — unlike with the gay persona
Manay — a genderqueer persona is evident in the way Kano unconsciously presents
herself.
Manila by Night and Philippine Cinema Days After
Judging by the way women-loving-women were depicted before and after Manila
by Night came out, it is evident that films with the overt lesbian themes/storylines
still follow the typified butch-femme dichotomy. And if the filmmakers do not
follow this dichotomy and opt to do narratives with a non-normative pairing like
the femme-to-femme leads of Tatlo Magkasalo or Rome and Juliet, the stories often
end up in a tragic manner, dangerously prompting audiences to associate tragedy
(specifically violence and death) with lesbian lives, regardless of the lesbian’s
identity politics.
After Manila by Night, perhaps the closest genderqueer female bodied
character was “seen” 25 years later in Tuli. However, like its predecessor, its
genderqueerness is only hinted at — if not covertly characterized — and the female
bodied genderqueer also chose to negotiate her sexuality by willingly playing the
gendered role of a heterosexual woman, specifically the reproductive role (of being
a mother). Whenever she asserts her masculine side, she too gets ostracized (by
the outside world) and even doubted by her female object of affection (especially
during the scene where she was presenting herself as a husband substitute by
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uttering “aasawahin kita” [“I’ll mate with you”] while narrating the typical husband/
masculine partner qualities that she could also perform to her desired “wife”).
Only when she succumbed to this patriarchal dictate of bearing a child was she
“permitted” to pursue her female-directed desire by being “tolerated as a lesbian”
by her village members. The only difference in Solito’s and Bernal’s “unconscious”
genderqueer treatment is that the former’s is femme-presented while the latter’s is
andro-presented.
In this light, Manila by Night could still be considered a pioneer in genderqueer
presentation. However, as much as this film is seen as an out-of-the-box classic,
some storylines — consciously or unconsciously — obviously try to run in line with
boxed expectations, no matter how the filmmakers try to expand the space within
that box. This is a specific challenge with enacting types whose meanings are
somewhat found out of the box of traditional categories, as Dyer expounds on the
non-flexible acceptance of the flexible:
This is the most important function of the stereotype: to maintain sharp boundary
definitions, to define clearly where the pale ends and thus who is clearly within
and who clearly beyond it. Stereotypes do not only, in concert with social types,
map out the boundaries of acceptable and legitimate behavior, they also insist
on boundaries exactly at those points where in reality there are none. Nowhere
is this more clear than with stereotypes dealing with social categories that are
invisible and/or fluid. (249–50)
Still, it could be argued that Manila by Night could have been one of the very
first queer-themed and queer-oriented films in Philippine cinema to unconsciously
present female-bodied genderqueerness. In a way, this specific portrayal of this
character in this particular film obviously points to a presentation of a more
genderqueer identity of a female body that loves female bodies as well, regardless
of their sexual orientation. While androgynous personalities have already been
seen in Philippine society during the time this film was made (but, as mentioned,
were “snatched and claimed” by the patriarchal butch spectrum), it is also evident
that the filmmakers were also trying to negotiate (then-)current concepts of
homonormativity in formulating their queer characters’ storylines during that era,
at least when it came to the lesbian character. However, with the way Bernal let
the genderqueered nuances of Kano emerge in the aforementioned sequences, it
is admirable to note that his consciousness of the limitations of the butch-femme
dichotomy occasionally peeks out from the genderqueer framing of the “closeted”
genderqueer female body hiding in a butch lesbian package.
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Conclusion
Philippine cinema still has to strengthen its participation in the queer cinema
realm by producing more films that depict the various nuances of Filipinos’ existing
personas of sexual orientations and emerging gender identities. While there have
been more examples of male bodied narratives, female bodies are particularly
invisible in this realm of cinematic SOGI presentation. It is thus not surprising that
the female bodied genderqueer is also absent in this realm — or almost absent.
In this light, it is refreshing to discover that Manila by Night had attempts at
such a genderqueer depiction. From its presentation, the film and the filmmaker,
together with the “lesbian” character, are obviously aware of the limitations of
homonormativity as well as the challenge of the articulation of these limitations.
Indeed, the result of this challenge is the genderqueer embodiment of Kano.
Perhaps these unconscious depictions of genderqueerness also reflect the general
unconscious stance of Philippine society about this subject position, as the andro
continuously negotiates her existence in the Philippine lesbian spectrum. Yet while
andros negotiate, they already exist, thrive and function — healthily, successfully,
yet quietly. Maybe this is what Philippine cinema still needs to reflect in future
depictions — that andros, as genderqueers, are already here, but they need not be
depicted as having tragic lives or be typecast as deviants — just like the rest of the
Filipinos that belong to the LGBTQ community.
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Works Cited
Beemyn, Brett Genny. “Genderqueer.” GLBTQ : An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgender, and Queer Culture. 2005. Web. 8 Mar. 2012. <http://www.glbtq.com/
social-sciences/genderqueer.html>.
Bernal, Ishmael, dir. and screenplay. Manila by Night. Perf. Bernardo Bernardo, Cherie
Gil, Rio Locsin, Charito Solis, William Martinez, Gina Alajar, Orestes Ojeda, Lorna
Tolentino, Alma Moreno, Maya Valdes, Sharon Manabat, Johnny Wilson, Jojo
Santiago. Regal Films, 1980. Film
Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies
Reader. Eds. Henry Abelove, Michele Barale, and David Halperin. New York:
Routledge, 1993. 307–20. Print.
Dyer, Richard. “The Role of Stereotypes.” Media Studies: A Reader. Eds. Paul Marris and
Sue Thornham. New York: New York UP , 2000. 245–51. Print.
Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place. New York: New York UP , 2005. Print.
Theopano, Teresa. “Butch-Femme.” GLBTQ : An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgender, and Queer Culture. 2004. Web. 8 Mar. 2012. <http://www.glbtq.com/
social-sciences/butch_femme_ssh.html>.
Velasco, Johven. “‘Feminized’ Heroes and ‘Masculinized’ Heroines.” Huwaran/
Hulmahan Atbp.: The Film Writings of Johven Velasco. Ed. Joel David. Quezon City: U
of the Philippines P, 2009. 41–55. Print.
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Forum Kritika: A Closer Look at Manila by Night
Marcos, Brocka, Bernal, City Films,
and the Contestation for Imagery
of Nation
Rolando B. Tolentino
University of the Philippines, Diliman
rolando.tolentino@gmail.com
Abstract
The essay maps out the contestation for imagery of nation with the Marcoses on the one
hand, and two of the most outstanding filmmakers of the era on the other hand. The
Marcoses set out a megalomania of infrastructures and images that echoed the Imeldific
vision of “the true, the good, and the beautiful.” I counterpose the major city films of Lino
Brocka (Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag) and Ishmael Bernal (Manila by Night) to
provide a contest to the official imagery of the nation. These two films uniquely evoke
an intimate dialog with and critique of the Marcoses’ design of (what eventually became)
Metro Manila and the nation, figuring contrary bodies and responses as consequences of
collective lives under the jurisdiction and administration of the conjugal dictatorship.
Keywords
abject bodies, official imagery, martial law films, modernist film, Philippine art cinema
About the Author
Rolando B. Tolentino is Dean of the University of the Philippines College of Mass
Communication and Professor at the UP Film Institute. He has taught at Osaka University
and the National University of Singapore, has been Distinguished Visitor of the UC Berkeley and UCLA Southeast Asian Studies Consortium, and was recipient of the
Obermann Summer Research Fellowship. He is a member of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang
Pilipino (Filipino Film Critics Group) and chairs the Congress of Teachers and Educators
for Nationalism and Democracy.
Part of the reconsolidation of power that the Marcoses had hoped for in
the declaration of martial rule was to recreate a national legacy that originated and
developed through what they imagined as the magnificence of their bodies and
presences.1 They proliferated their images alongside a robust imagery-building of
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a modern yet traditionally anchored nation. The Marcoses thought of themselves
as the ground zero of Philippine citizen formation. Portraits were done that
mythologized the couple, either borrowing from a popular origin folktale or that
reworked the national costumes to exude hyperfemininity in the case of Imelda
and hypermasculinity in Ferdinand. A gendered face of the city and nation was
developed by the Marcoses, with Ferdinand taking the masculine cudgels for
national development and Imelda for the beautification and enhancement of
national development.
The city was transformed as a showcase of national development, and such
“showcase” or “display” mentality was often labeled megalomaniacal by critics of
the Marcoses. The ego formation of the nation exuded the conjugal leadership,
retrofitting Manila, and later Metropolitan Manila, to showcase a modern
exuberance and to hide its massive poverty. As the Marcos dictatorship transformed
and consolidated its power, an assemblage of protest art rebutted the intensification
of fascist rule, human rights violation and corruption of the national economy.
Literature, visual arts, dramatic arts, and film, among others, colluded to create
a collective voice of dissent even as the Marcoses had used these artistic forms
and expressions as avenues of their own imagery building. In popular music, for
example, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Ole Oak Tree” became the theme song of
the opposition under the elite leadership after Ninoy Aquino’s assassination in 1983.
Signifying the practice of lining up the tree path to one’s home with yellow ribbons,
the song coalesced the sentiment of the elite of a failed return and reunion with
Aquino. The mass movement, however, chose to rework the anti-American colonial
song by Constancio de Guzman from a poem by Jose Corazon de Jesus, “Bayan
Ko” (“My Country”) as their anthem, adding a last stanza to reiterate the need for
greater militancy, “Kay sarap mabuhay sa sariling bayan, kung walang alipin at may
kalayaan; ang bayang sinisiil babangon lalaban din, ang Silanga’y pupula sa timyas
ng paglaya” (“How wonderful to live in one’s own country, when enslavement and
subjugation have been banished; a country oppressed will arise and rebel, and the
East will turn red from the desire for freedom”). Even singer Celeste Legaspi and
composer Nonoy Gallardo’s popular song, “Saranggola ni Pepe” (“Pepe’s Kite”) was
publicly well-received for its enigmatic retelling of Rizal’s (Pepe is his nickname)
unrealized aspiration for a liberated nation.
This essay examines the contestation of imagery of nation, with the Marcoses
on the one hand, and Brocka and Bernal’s most famous city films on the other
hand — Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag and Manila by Night, respectively. The
megalomania of the Marcoses found a counter-articulation in films, particularly
the city film of the two most famous directors of the time. City films provide an
analog of the literal city, in this case Manila, as a pivotal space for negotiating the
film narrative, almost like a character that colludes and entraps other characters.
City films incorporate Manila not just as a site but as a character, able to be
mapped out differentially from the Marcoses’ designs and able to map out the
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disenfranchised characters that inhabit the urban landscape. I first present an
overview of the Marcoses’ imagery building, then discuss how films of this period
uniquely engaged and critiqued these official representations of the nation. I then
focus on the two city films, and how these films uniquely mediated and intervened
in the contestation for the imagery of nation. Having lived through and studied the
period, I believe that such contestation is important in being able to call attention
to the right to represent, in what ways, and in whose interest.
Official Megalomania
Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law on 21 September 1972 to consolidate his
rule amidst the growing public disenchantment. Officially, Marcos echoed both
the advancing Communist threat and the declining morality among Filipinos as
the rationale for the official declaration of martial rule. Interestingly, Marcos hailed
the contrary bodies and identities — the Communist and the immoral citizen as
subversive — and sought to instill a new metropolitan citizen in martial rule
as bannered by its Bagong Lipunan (New Society) theme, slogan (“sa ikauunlad
ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan” [“for national development, discipline will be
essential”]) and programs (anthem, Green Revolution, and sequestering of all
media units for the national government, among others).
Under this program, citizens were to conform to endorsed physical and fashion
types (no long hair for men, no mini-skirt for women), conscripted into programs
such as the Green Revolution to counter food decline and overpopulation, and
obeyed the policy to require curfew violators to clear grass and clean the streets
in the busiest streets of Manila. Having long hair for men was supposed to be
indicative of a degenerative drug culture, and requiring people caught during the
curfew hours to pull up grass was part of a public shame campaign. The type of softcore films that proliferated prior to the declaration of martial rule was banned, and
overtly socially motivated films that had the possibility of providing commentary
were also discouraged because of stricter censorship. What then proliferated in the
early years of martial rule were horror films that were not expected to relate to the
newer social conditions.
In what would be termed a “conjugal dictatorship,” as popularized by Primitivo
Mijares’s eponymously titled exposé in 1976, Ferdinand mainstreamed Imelda
in the political life of the New Society, appointing her as the first governor of a
newly consolidated formation of cities and towns in the National Capitol Region,
Metropolitan Manila, in 1975, and Minister of Human Settlements in 1978, with the
prime task of providing housing along with other needs of the people, such as food,
livelihood, and public works. Imelda transformed the city through megalomaniacal
structures and enclaves, more to display modernist transformation than for the
intended public purpose. Among her projects were the Cultural Center of the
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Philippines (CCP ) complex, the Light Rail Transit in Taft Avenue, and the staging
of global events such as the IMF -World Bank meeting, the Miss Universe and
Mr. Universe contests, and the several editions of the Manila International Film
Festival. Her transformation of the metropolis included the building and literal
whitewashing of walls to hide the communities of the urban poor, especially during
the staging of global events, and to require schoolchildren (a la socialist China) to
line the streets of parade routes to welcome visiting dignitaries.
The Marcoses orchestrated an imagery of their national development drive
along the complementary cultural idiom of the modern yet traditionally grounded.
Policies in politics and economics, and especially in culture, combined a nationalist
and internationalist perspective. In culture, the arts were mobilized to echo the
political and personal megalomania of the Marcoses. Leandro Locsin became
their architect of choice, designing most of the high-end structures that evoked
modern Western aesthetics, assumed First World efficiency, presented aweinspiring façades whose designs integrated the geography of the tropics and, of
course, the unique representability of national power. Locsin espoused a national
architecture that was “the product of two great streams of culture, the Oriental
and the Occidental ... to produce a new object of profound harmony.” His output
has been described as evincing a “synthesis that underlies all his works, with his
achievements in concrete reflecting his mastery of space and scale.” In fact, his
architecture has been exalted even in the post-Marcos era, claiming a branding
that “every Locsin Building is an original, and identifiable as a Locsin with themes
of floating volume, the duality of light and heavy, buoyant and massive running in
his major works” (National Commission for Culture and the Arts).
The Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP ) Complex became the centerpiece
of Locsin’s design and the Marcoses’ visualization of a futurist “city on the hill.”
Locsin designed the CCP ’s main building, embodying Imelda’s metaphysical
aesthetics of “the true, the good, and the beautiful,” a motto she would take to
heart in the gendered task Ferdinand assigned to her in nation-building, and even
thereafter in her political comeback during the 2010s. Imelda’s motto, initially
from Plato but drawing heavily from Christian philosophers, called for a public
aesthetics that was subservient to the larger universal ideals of truth, beauty, and
goodness — largely abstract causes that came into being only as defined by the
Marcoses’ operationalization of national power. Locsin also created in the CCP
complex the Folk Arts Theater, a performance space for traditional arts, which
used sea breeze for ventilation; the Philippine International Convention Center,
the first convention center in Asia; the Philippine Center for International Trade
and Exhibition (Philcite); and the Westin Philippine Plaza Hotel. The propensity
for mastery of the national space of the Marcoses is often referred to as an “edifice
complex,” the penchant to use mega-infrastructure in the conceptualization and
execution of national development objectives.2
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The presidential bodies — rendered in the gendered robustness of thenyoung leaders Ferdinand and Imelda — evoked a consolidated power in various
representations of the nation. Nation-building then became synonymous with the
personalized and highly politicized image-building of the Marcoses. Imelda, for
example, engineered the terno with butterfuly sleeves not only to be fashionable
but also to complement the feminine grandeur of power. Ferdinand made the
short-sleeved, shirt-jacked barong embody the youthful exuberance of a working
and masculine president. In so heralding these gendered variations of fashion, the
Marcoses mobilized an inner circle of trusted personalities in an attempt to expand
their power base. The Marcoses lacked the political and economic pedigree that
often catapulted personalities into political and economic positions. For Ferdinand,
it was the cronies that he gave access to business and political power, and which
instigated what has been referred to as bureaucrat capitalism or the relinquishing
of the national economic sphere to handpicked technocrats and businessmen.
Imelda had her Blue Ladies, a select group of socially affluent women willing to
share their cultural capital with the First Lady, and her group of gay designers and
stylists offering their talent to enhance the distaff personification of the leadership.
The propping up of the national leadership translated into the Marcoses’
ability to concentrate national power in their hands, dispensing favors to their
privileged and willing inner circle of economically and socially mobile male and
female movers of the nation. Other bodies were disenfranchised in this process of
dispensation: properties and business holdings were sequestered from opposition
families, resisters were either incarcerated or converted to the ways of the Marcoses,
and the mass movement was stifled, among other consequences. It was only the
underground movement that was able to thrive, inasmuch as its sites of operation
were located in secret quarters and in the countryside, more distant from the
surveillance and discipline of national power. However, the cultural sphere provided
a counter-valence to the narrative of nation- and image-building of the Marcoses.
Filmic Counter-Imagery of Nation
Discourse is produced by a dialectics of power from above and below. What
has been mapped out so far is the mobilization of representation and culture
by the Marcoses. Film directors joined the fray created by critics of the Marcos
dictatorship. Kidlat Tahimik’s conceptual films interrogated small town life and
global transformation. Nic Deocampo’s documentaries focused on sex-show
performers and other subjects of poverty. Lino Brocka’s social melodramas evoked
the limitations on individual growth and productive transformation. Ishmael
Bernal’s modernist films on social decay and the middle class critiqued the set
yet supposedly limitless boundaries of the national condition. These filmmakers,
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among others, provided counter-articulations in their popular and art films. But
through their engagement with art cinema, the directors introduced the issues to
an international audience. In the case of Brocka and Bernal, they were successful
negotiators of commercial and art cinemas, able to infuse substance even in the
most popular of their projects.
Critics chose to read these directors as intellectuals and artists critical of the
Marcos dictatorship. Together with other artists and groups, cinema through
Brocka and Bernal served to critically engage with the Marcoses and their rule.
Because of the content of their films and their active involvement in anti-censorship
issues, Brocka and Bernal had the most serious entanglements with the Board
of Censors for Motion Pictures (BCMP ). Some of their films were banned, and
permits were not issued, effectively disallowing their films from competing or being
exhibited abroad. Brocka even went to jail for participating in other concerns of the
mass movement. In their long years of engagement with the Marcos dictatorship
and thereafter, the National Democratic Front and the Communist Party of the
Philippines honored Brocka and Bernal after their deaths with tributes worthy of
their participation in the movement’s struggle for people empowerment.
These four directors were in the forefront of direct intervention in Marcos rule.
Tahimik in Mababangong Bangungot (Perfumed Nightmares, 1977) told the story of
a man in search for life’s meaning in a small town, interestingly named San Marcos.
Deocampo’s Oliver (1983) documented a sex-show performer who mimics a spider
spinning its web, and the motivations of survival that had impelled the subject.
Brocka and Bernal equally utilized the topic and theme of poverty under the
dictatorship that had sought to render these scenes as invisible to an international
audience. These directors were also in the forefront of the international art film
festival market that became an important venue for contest and critique of the
Marcos dictatorship.
Other filmmakers also engaged in interesting ways in the contest for imagery
of the nation. Film star Sharon Cuneta’s rise to fame was based on what had been
coined by Imelda as the official aesthetics of the nation, “the true, the good, and
the beautiful,” that presented the mundane ultra-rich teenager’s plight for personal
love and happiness. Over time, the sex-oriented films allowed the greater visibility
of banned body parts, especially female, that disrupted the homogeneity of power
of the film censors, one of the strictest enforcers of the official imagery of the
Marcoses. The action film told biographical stories of glorified criminals that were
popular for their Robin-Hood qualities of “stealing from the rich to give to the
poor” or fictional stories of familiar morally upright street-level (anti-)heroes who
had pro-poor sympathies.
What also became remarkable with the intensification of dictatorial rule was the
proliferation of films of high artistic merit that directly and indirectly engaged with
the Marcoses’ design for the nation and the production of affect in the growing
disenchantment with the dictatorship. This affect in film simulated the abjection
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and incorporation of national bodies in the dictatorship. The affect is produced
in the landscape of poverty that becomes the motivation for characters to be
alienated and confined in film and in the film narrative. Using actual locations
of dump sites, seedy alleys and spaces in urban poor communities, the darkness
of night in the city, the film characters are made to dwell in the abyss of poverty.
This produces a claustrophobic feel of the city and nation, where characters live in
confined spaces and have very little room for social mobility. Brocka and Bernal
became the prime directors who produced the restrictive and alienated affect and
being in mainstream cinema.
Brocka’s City and Nostalgia for Political Struggle
Brocka is often referred as the most political of Filipino filmmakers. Like Bernal,
however, he was allowed to do his own brand of film provided he remained
commercially viable with his popular films. His films can be regarded as bookends
of the Second Golden Age of Philippine cinema, with Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng
Liwanag (Manila in the Claws of Neon, 1975) arguably opening and Orapronobis
(1989) closing the era. Maynila, based on a popular serialized novel in the 1960s
by Edgardo M. Reyes, narrates the quest of Julio Madiaga, a fisherman forced to
leave his place to look for his sweetheart, Ligaya Paraiso, in Manila. Ligaya was
recruited from their fishing community to work in the city, with the promise of
also being able to study, but where she was instead drugged and forced into sexual
slavery. Without any knowledge of her whereabouts, Julio sets out to find her, and
the film follows his search in Manila’s urban poor, working-class, and Chineseenclave communities. He finds Ligaya, and makes a plan with her to escape. Ligaya
is caught and is killed, and Julio avenges her death, killing her Chinese captor. In
the process, Julio is cornered in a dark alley and is killed by bystanders.
Julio, both in the novel and in the film, is a necessary trespassing subject in
the metropolis: a migrant body that provides the city with its cheap reserve
army of labor. For the state, Julio’s body, together with other subjugated bodies,
is to be rendered docile, made productive through service and subservience to
business. It’s a dog-eat-dog world in the narrative, everyone reduced to her most
abject condition by the film’s end: Ligaya is murdered, and so is Julio; Julio’s fellow
construction worker, who daydreams of success as a pop singer, is killed in an onsite accident; a fellow peon is arrested for a minor infraction and is killed while in
jail; his sister, who takes care of their paralyzed father, ends in a casa (a prostitution
den), after the father dies through a fire that had gutted their squatter community.
Only the cunning co-worker who studies and works in an advertising firm survives.
In the film, however, Brocka undertakes to foreground another modality of
corporeal transformation. In two crucial scenes, Brocka introduces the political
possibility of the mass movement as the other recourse for individual and social
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Figure 1. Maynila’s first color shot — Julio watches the Chinatown apartment where he
suspects Ligaya might be held. (Publicity still by Cinema Artists)
transformation, a possibility however suppressed in the Marcos dictatorship during
the film’s production. Maynila’s opening begins with a black-and-white sequence
of early morning life in Chinatown — e.g., people cleaning the streets, jeepneys and
caretelas (horse-drawn carriages) moving along, shops opening, people waking
up and spitting on the streets, among others. The documentary feel of the city
ends with a high-angle introduction of Julio gazing at an apartment unit, where he
suspects Ligaya is held. Color is introduced as he moves slowly in the frame (fig. 1).
His backdrop, however, includes political graffiti and cut-up slogans about workers
and underground organizations of the youth. The political option is reintroduced is
when Julio is about to avenge Ligaya’s death. He bids his friend goodbye and, upon
crossing the street, he sees a rally, complete with a leader exhorting protesters via
megaphone, streamers bearing slogans, red flags, and the mobilization of people.
Even as Julio ignores the rally, the marking of another non-docile political body,
especially a collective sea of bodies, an identity considered subversive, is rendered
visually in film.
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Brocka was reiterating the organized left’s position that the mass movement
of the late 1960s and early 1970s, curtailed during the declaration of martial law,
was the most effective means for individual and social transformation. A choice
between this political option and the brutal killing of/by Julio, when individuals
act based on individualized motives — to run counter to the state’s abjection — is
what is posed in Maynila. The first strike, after all, during the martial-law era,
was by workers of an alcohol distillery company, La Tondeña, in 1975. What is
also represented in Maynila is the serial exploitation of laborers — contractual,
underpaid, concealment of actual salary rate in the payroll, taiwan (a usurious
loan arrangement offered by middle persons when management fails to deliver
the payroll on schedule), dangerous working conditions, and abject living quarters.
Brocka also depicted another system of exploitation, the underground sex economy.
To update the realism of Julio and Ligaya’s being innocents lost in the city, both fell
victim to prostitution and moral degeneracy. Ligaya being forced to marry, have a
baby with, and cohabit with her captor, was one of the worst possible arrangements
befalling a woman. The film is also replete with male sex prostitution, which was
not part of the novel, and because of which the novelist sued and publicly debated
with Brocka. Julio is cruised in a park, is recruited by a male sex worker, and does
sex work himself. While these modalities of degeneracy were the basis for Marcos’s
official declaration of martial rule, these were not eradicated in Manila’s society
and neither in Brocka’s update of the novel for a martial-law audience.
What Brocka was calling attention to in these newer incursions in the film
version was the mobilization of national bodies for dual effects under martial rule.
On the one hand, the sex workers, mainly hidden and working at night, were the
dual-embodied figures mobilized by the Marcoses. The sex workers were integral
to the Marcoses’ official nation, made to attract foreign capital and to stir up the
informal or underground economy on the one hand, and to be rendered invisible
as marginal bodies deemed contrapuntal to the official nation on the other hand.
Ironically, what were deemed immoral bodies that motivated the declaration of
martial law returned in a major fashion, especially through the rise and decline of
the dictatorship. Bodies of young women and men, including even children, were
circuited in red-light districts, servicing the appetites of local and foreign clients,
including American soldiers stationed in various massive military camps and
installations all over the country. This proliferation of bodies performing sex work
was also subsumed under a thriving sex-tourism industry.
On the other hand, the figure of the political protester was also made visible in
Brocka’s film, even at a time when protests were officially banned in the country.
This banning did not break the backbone of protests that thrived prior to martial rule,
but only made it more hidden or rendered in the creation of another underground
sphere: the network of city and rural spaces that retransformed public protest
into a thriving armed insurgency. With mounting international pressures on the
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Marcoses to respect human rights and to tolerate dissent, an increasing number of
protesters marched on the streets. Interestingly, at the height of the anti-Marcos
protests, the first “people power” uprising of 1986 that deposed the dictatorship,
millions convened at the premier highway in Metro Manila. The possibility of
protest and the contrary figure of the protester briefly showcased in Brocka’s film
foregrounded the political hope and recourse initially and officially banned during
martial rule.
The tragic final rendering of Julio Madiaga running for his life after murdering
the Chinese husband of Ligaya — being chased by bystanders and corralled into a
dead-end street while male bystanders picked up whatever they could to maim and
kill him — picked up from the Marcoses’ sterile imaging of national governance of
providing for all, or that their modernization would yield economic redistribution
and social justice. In the 1960s novel and in the 1970s film of Maynila, the place
for the Marcoses’ modern nation had yet to materialize, experienced as a reality
by the citizenry. Taken as a realist film with a social-realism utopia, Maynila can
also be read as a derailing of the Marcosian project of image- and nation-building.
Martial law and the dictatorship had produced only greater hardships, inequality,
and sacrifice among the majority of the people, thus raising the question of who
really benefited from the undertaking.
Bernal’s Trippy City and Its Abject Populace
Brocka’s Maynila is interesting because it was not only in dialogue with the Marcos
dictatorship but it would also become the discursive base of Bernal’s Manila by Night
(1980). By 1980, the Marcos dictatorship remained strong even as the aboveground
and underground mass movements were already beginning to expand. Manila
by Night took on Brocka’s representation of the contradictory function of moral
degeneracy of the Marcos state: one of the bases of martial law, the repressed that
will not go away, the necessary condition of human life that makes possible the
production of docile subjects. Manila by Night, however, pushed the boundaries
of acceptable morality to extremes that had never before been depicted on local
screens.
The film is an ensemble of anti-Marcosian subjects or subjects deemed not
appropriate in the New Society: Alex, an young addict who is clueless about his
life; Manay Sharon, a gay designer who weaves into his daily life the concerns of his
male lovers; Febrero, a taxi driver who impregnates Baby, an innocent night-shift
waitress, but lives in with a female partner, Adelina, who leaves nightly dressed as
a nurse but is actually a sex worker in a bordello for Japanese customers; Bea, a
blind masseuse who has children from other men and supports a failed lover’s trip
to work overseas; Kano, a lesbian drug pusher in love with (but who also pimps)
Bea; and Virgie, Alex’s mother, who winds up popping pills to keep herself sane
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from the memory of her past as a prostitute and from worrying about Alex. Each
one has an intimate relationship or moment with another, or is connected in some
way with the other characters. Drugs and sex are the underlying motivations that
animate the encounters. What is echoed in the film are characters each of whom
regards her life as a “trip” (whatever goes, a consequence of drug use) that runs into
conflict whenever the character is interpolated by other characters when her own
trip is disturbed.
Drug culture — and its aftermath in “trip,” “trippy,” and “trippiness” among other
terms — is one of the sources of destabilization that provided an official basis for the
declaration of martial rule. This subculture was to be have been expunged with the
declaration of martial rule and the regularization of national power of the Marcoses.
In fact, the only person officially executed during martial law was a foreigner who
had been convicted of illegal drug trafficking. Similar to Brocka’s evocation of the
mass movement as a nostalgia for things past and possibilities for the future, Bernal
was evoking drug culture as the anti-thesis of the Marcoses’ construction of the
then-present New Society. Sterilely posed with ruthless implications on the lives of
citizens, the Marcoses’ temporal present was interrogated by Bernal on two fronts:
on ground level, relief was possible in the daily grind of ordinary people, including
their use of prohibited but not prohibitive drugs; and on the level of national
power, the government’s incapacity to put a stop to this subculture resulted in a
resistance at the ground and everyday levels. In other words, the state is also held
accountable for its perpetuation of narcopolitics: that which is tasked to police
narcotics becomes the very hub for production and distribution to a general public
of users. Bernal’s rendition of the prevalence of “trip” and “trippiness” at the height
of martial law implicates and indicts the Marcoses’ state, rendering it powerful yet
inutile, overbearing but absent, historical but not in the everyday.
The trippiness is echoed in various scenes: the addict and his girlfriend make out
in a motel room with poppers, the lesbian and blind masseuse make out in a push
cart beside a garbage dump after taking cough syrup, an assembly of characters
dive into the dark and dirty waters of Manila Bay and hallucinate seeing fireworks
and floating candles, and the addict sleeps off his fatigue in Manila’s premier park,
among others. This is further punctuated with the choice of music (“Don’t Cry for
Me Argentina” disco version, “Teach Your Children,” Filipino ballads and remakes,
and electronica), and the constant over-the-top staging of street scenes: crossdressers constantly on the streets, a minor character in a heart-shaped mascot
costume, transvestites dancing with male partners in a public plaza, and so on.
What the film suggests is that the streets and public spaces, especially those outside
the purview of the elite, are alive and vibrant; and that queer politics counters the
city and the state’s own heteronormative obsession over the New Society.
The trippiness is curtailed in the film’s end with the serial presentation of
individual resolutions into further abjection: the blind masseuse distressfully fights
it out with the lover who wants to force her into a live-sex act; the sex worker,
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Figure 2. Various types of trippiness (clockwise from top left): Manay’s friends, customer,
and lover listen to a socialite’s sexual adventures; cross-dressers at the breakwater of
Manila Bay celebrate, motivating the lesbian drug pusher, addicted student, and their
friends to participate; the blind masseuse resists her lover’s plans to get her to participate
in live sex for money; and the addict refreshes himself with water from a street sweeper.
(Frame captures by Joel David)
who dresses in public as a nurse, is mysteriously murdered; the designer breaks
down from the dreary weight of other people’s lives; the blind masseuse betrays her
lesbian drug-pusher lover; the pusher is chased and caught by undercover police;
and the addict’s mother also develops her own addiction to sedatives (fig. 2). The
trippy undercurrent of the underclass and public ground-level life are curtailed
when one intrudes and trespasses within the ranks of the equally abject individuals,
or when state personnel (undercover police) intervene.
However, the film’s denouement involves one of lingering trippiness, an affect
from the state’s fascism and double-standard implementation of martial rule with
the real society unquoted in the filmic diegesis. As a matter of fact, the polyphony
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of underclass action — exaltation and degeneration of the New Society — is
emphasized in the film’s ending sequence:
After Kano’s arrest, Alex finds himself alone. Some trannies pass by him.
Ay, nakakaloka! E talaga namang luka-luka yon e! [This is crazy. She
TRANNIES:
is really crazy.]
Walking toward Luneta, Alex sees an old man cleaning the sidewalk.
ALEX:
Mama, puwede ho bang makahingi ng tubig ninyo? Maghihilamos
lang ho ako. [Sir, may I have some water? I will just wash my face.]
MAN:
Aba oo, sige hijo. [Surely, kid.]
ALEX:
Salamat ho. [Thank you.]
Alex washes his face from a pail of water.
ALEX:
(after washing) Salamat ho.
MAN:
Okey.
Baby is seen boarding a jeepney, her stomach swollen with child. Jeepney blares
out “Taksil.” Alex lingers by breakwater, where guitarist plays “Teach Your
Children” and trannie in heart-shaped costume loiters. Glimpses of Virgie taking
tranquilizers and Manay arranging religious statues. Alex walks down Luneta,
where exercisers are seen shadow-boxing and doing martial arts exercises to
the breaking dawn. Exhausted, he lies down on the grass, flowers surrounding
him like a halo. The whole park, with early-rising weekend citizens, is then seen
against the morning sun.
(Bernal, Seq. 51: Alex’s wandering; dialogue translation by author.)
The drama of the final scene encapsulates disparate bodies coming into the site of
the national park. The exuberance of bodies exercising at the break of dawn calls
to mind the Marcoses’ kinetic bodies. The body of the young male character is the
contrapuntal figure to the Marcoses’ bodies. Having survived a maddening night of
violence and escape, he is dazed, remaining as the narco-subject critical of the state,
a trespasser in the nation’s equivocation of space and activity.
In the current available DVD version, state intervention is made more pronounced
with the sudden intrusion of the audio of a non-diegetic male voice narrating the
remolding of the characters: the addict goes into rehab and is now hopeful of
getting on track with his life, the drug pusher will rot in jail, the waitress luckily
married a doctor who understood her condition, the addict’s mother becomes a
social worker ministering to sex workers (having once been one herself ), the blind
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masseuse becomes a respected waitress in a restaurant staffed by blind workers, and
the designer turns his back on his gayness after going through a religious seminar.
The moral “re-education” of the abject characters, of course, creates an
illogical spring into the modernist movie: a historical impediment only inducible
through an incursion into the modernist trippy rendition of city and nation.
If in Maynila, the lead characters fall one by one into the tragic wayside of the
nation, the abjection-prone yet uncontrollable characters of Manila by Night are
represented as representable only through their enforced emplacement into a
socially and historically given order: an official social-realist intrusion, incursion
and reinterpretation of another world order rendered in Bernal’s modernist text.
Modernist Filmmaking and Representations of the City
The film remains a cult classic for Filipino cineastes because of its modern and
modernizing treatment, a divergent characterization of national cinema that harps
on realism and its aftermath. Film blogger Adrian Mendizabal wrote:
What Bernal contained in Manila by Night is a series of complex strategies in
filmmaking. Not only did he structure Manila by Night with a temporal divide
of day and night, but he constructs it from the interior by using the character’s
subjective persona to redefine its filmic space. His methods used in the film vary
from the creation of subtle effects such as mise-en-scène entrapment to the
creation of expressionistic effects such as his usage of the red-blue overlay.
What Bernal also achieved was related to the Marcoses’ use of tradition and
modernity in their image- and nation-building strategies. Bernal was negotiating
for an idiom of critique and dissent, from the filmic traditions of realism and
romanticism on the one hand, and Western modernities on the other. For
Mendizabal and other intellectuals who appreciated Bernal and Manila by Night, it
is precisely in the newness of a successfully localized Western film modernity that
is the most significant contribution. This newness of adaptation in Western film
modernity will again be echoed in the advent of the new digital independent film
renaissance in the 2000s.
Brocka’s Maynila will also be exalted for this new idiom of Western film
modernity. The film blog Cinema of the World wrote:
Manila: In the Claws of Darkness is the most impressive of [Brocka’s] films noirs,
made with bows to the American cinema, to Italian neo-realism, and to his own
country’s tradition of star-driven melodramas, but with the force of a ThirdWorld director determined to say something about his own society. It is the
richly romantic but realistic odyssey of a boy named Julio, who arrives in Manila
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from the country to search for his childhood sweetheart. The darkness of the
title refers to the capital itself, which, said Brocka, exerts an invisible force on the
lives of its people. (“Lino Brocka”)
The similar contour of appreciation for Bernal’s film also rests in Brocka — the
capacity to draw from Western film modernities to relocate and rehistoricize the
contemporary overtures and subtleties of Marcosian power. In both films, the
rearticulation of film narrative, and the adapted idioms of renarrativizing social
realities become a powerful site of engagement with the Marcoses.
Bernal’s excessive transcendence of Marcosian morality makes for less overt
political subversion in film, but nonetheless equally stresses the flaws, contradictions,
and excessiveness of the morality of the Marcos dictatorship. Both Brocka and
Bernal countered the megalomania of the Marcos dictatorship that rallied with
the “the true, the good and the beautiful,” a tagline that is still used by Imelda in her
contemporary political comeback, through the proliferation of images and imagery
of mass poverty, individual entrapment, social immobility and abjection, and an
inutile state that is unresponsive to the conditions of its citizenry. What Brocka and
Bernal were representing on film were images of contrary citizenship and countercitizenship claims to Marcos dictatorial governance: that it is failed governance that
leads to the catastrophic resolution of citizens seeking to better themselves. For
Brocka, at least in Maynila, it was a non-choice between the greater deterioration
of people and the then-non-existence of a people’s movement. For Bernal, it was
the relief of jouissance in the time and place of the Marcos dictatorship. While
Bernal proliferated the screen with the abject city and its citizens, Brocka rendered
the abjected political back into the conditions of possibility under the Marcos
dictatorship.
Contestation for the Right to Represent Nation
The production and consumption of images of the nation in the 1970s and 1980s
foregrounded the national power of mobilization of the Marcoses on the one
hand, and the rendering of contrary figures, responses, and representations in
the various arts that had sought to dialogue with and critique official imagery
building. This seriality of representations evokes the time and place of concerned
artists and intellectuals, able to provide a counter-mobilization of the discourse
of representation. What was being made as the impetus in the contestation is the
right to represent the nation. The issue of representation is a foundational issue,
generally officiated by the state and challenged through counter-representations by
anti-state forces and institutions. Through their films, Brocka and Bernal contested
the official representational rights of the Marcoses, going beyond a critique that
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defied official imagery of the nation but provided for filmic representations toward
alternative and oppositional claims.
This right is rendered in socio-civic duties as granted and officiated by the state,
which defines and implements rights based on the exigencies of its leaders and
offices. With the pointed leadership of the Marcoses, the exercise of rights was
subsumed in the regime’s practices of national development. Bernal and Brocka
were attempting to grapple with the exercise of these rights even at a time of fascist
rule under the Marcoses. Through their films, and the success and sufferance of
their films under the Marcoses, the directors were exercising what they thought
were their rights, including the right to free speech, and the right of the artist to
her creative expression. Both took on a more serious leadership of the oppositional
artistic community, becoming members and leaders of the Concerned Artists of the
Philippines, a people’s organization that espoused freedom from censorship and the
right to artistic freedom. Furthermore, both directors were successful in registering
their “contrary rights” as memorialized in national film history — Brocka’s Maynila
becomes the opening film of an imagined glorious film epoch, and Bernal’s Manila
by Night as its most important contribution.
What the two films undertake in their narrativization of abject subjects is
the recognition of the role of the state in subject formation. What the Marcoses
sought to engineer through its emphasis on youth labor for national development,
with projects such as the Kabataang Baranggay (Youth Brigade), construction of
export-processing zones that emplaced youth workers into modes of capitalist
transformation, and the opening of the national economy for foreign capital
penetration, was to place the country — especially its main asset, young inexpensive
workers — into the circuits of global capitalism. On the one hand, as Marx has
mentioned, “We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature
of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day, no
limit to surplus-labor.” This means that the oversupply of labor allows the capitalist
to optimally exploit these bodies. On the other hand, there is what Marx called
“antimony” or “right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of
exchanges,” that in the end, “between equal rights [of the capitalist and laborers]
force decides” (Das Kapital). Value is extracted in laborers, while in other nonlaboring bodies — the non-subjects in Brocka and Bernal’s films — they become
necessarily expendable and disposable bodies, nonetheless integral to the formation
of the discourse of power of the Marcoses.
In Brocka and Bernal, the abject subjects are capable neither of capitalist
transformation nor further aggrandizement by the state machinery. They are
always-already abjected, and therefore are in the subaltern peripheries for any
further state domination and transformation. In Marx’s work, the formation of the
worker is also always-already in a state of impermanence, able to represent both
the cartological figure of worker and the personification of capital in the constant
transformation of the worker. In the Philippine state, the Marcoses sought to create
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an ideal imagery of citizen formation, that which is based on their own politicized
bodies, a kind of synecdochic personification in the masses of their bodies. The
masses, however, like the film characters, are able to circumvent the state
transformation by choosing to remain peripheralized, and in so doing undertake a
contrary project of constructing divergent cartological figures of subaltern beings,
devoid of wanting citizenship claims and direct relations with Marcoses’ state.
The counter-citizenship claims in Brocka and Bernal’s films were a reaction to
the Marcoses’ orchestration of representation that rendered invisible the main
currents of a national culture, giving way to the megalomaniacal self-rendering
of the dictatorship. However, the Marcoses also had personal motivations in
constructing excess for their national imagery building and national development.
Without a political and economic pedigree, the excess stems from a sublimation
of their own feelings of lack. Ferdinand harped on a meteoric rise to power that
also raised questions about his war medals, brilliant performance in the bar exams,
assassination charges, and of course, the massive human rights violation during his
dictatorship in hopes of maintaining the trajectory of rise and control at the top.
Imelda’s own background of coming from an illegitimate family, childhood poverty,
and a controversial beauty title among others were struggled with and eclipsed
through the exercise of excess in the administration of national power.
The gender distinction in the rise to power is informative in explaining the
compensation mechanisms, also gendered, in the maintenance and slippage of
national power in the Marcoses. Similar to popular writing about the modernist
filmmaking style of Brocka and Bernal, a turn to popular political writing and
documentary of the Marcoses allows for the intervention of media institutions and
operations in the formation of the discourse of representationalism of power. In
Napoleon Rama’s essay of Ferdinand as the Philippines Free Press’s 1966 Man of the
Year, the excessive climb to and maintenance of being on top are echoed early on:
To be on top and to stay at the top has been Ferdinand Edralin Marcos’ lifetime
dream. In school, he was always at the head of his class; in the bar examinations,
he was top-notcher; during the war years, he was, according to army records,
the bravest among the brave, the most bemedaled soldier; in the House of
Representatives, he was minority floor leader; in the Senate, he was the Senate
President; in the Liberal Party, he was party president; in the Nacionalista Party,
he was standard-bearer; in Ilocandia, of course, he is the supreme political leader.
Ferdinand’s ascent to power is predicated on a natural trajectory of a lifetime
quest for over-achievement. Imelda also harped on the basis for her thencontemporary megalomaniacal excess with her own compensatory skills for a
massive lack generated by historical circumstances of her birth and cultural origins:
born into poverty, illegitimate, provincial, female, lacking educational support, but
being beautiful. While Marcos utilized his masculine qualities — bar topnotcher,
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bemedaled soldier, astute politician — Imelda used her feminine qualities for
maximum political results. In the official media release of the Biography Channel,
Imelda’s segment is introduced thus:
Portrait of the colorful and controversial former First Lady of the Philippines,
who went on buying sprees that included New York City skyscrapers and 3,000
pairs of shoes. Although once a heroine to the millions of peasants, Imelda and
her dictator husband Ferdinand amassed personal fortunes of billions of dollars
while in power. Many believe the money was stolen from the government and
international loans designed to help the poor. (“Imelda Marcos”)
While Imelda used her feminine attributes and skills, these were also criticized
for a tragic-comic excess, similar to Marie Antoinette’s, that harped on women as
incapable of political positions and analyses. Imelda was vilified for her feminine
excess attributed to her misrecognition and misrepresentation of national power.
The circumstances of government of the Marcoses allowed for the privileging of
their nation-building aspirations. But even with what seemed early on as limitless
projects and financing, their resources dwindled as the crisis of the dictatorship
developed. Brocka directly engaged with this right through a focus on realism
that allowed his city film to foreground the conditions of the possible, including
subversion and dissent and the eminence of political action. The intensification of
the crisis allowed for a wider window of opportunity for Bernal, articulating in his
city film a modernist rendering of subjective interpolation of the metropolis and
its populace.
What Brocka and Bernal enacted in their films was the crisis of representation of
the Marcoses and their dictatorship. On the one hand, the Marcoses’ interiorization
of national power led to an exterior nation on the brink: those that were not part
of the inner circle were slowly yet massively disenfranchised. By a certain point,
from the assassination of oppositionist Benigno Aquino in 1983, the official
representation of national power did not hold any more truth claims. This created
a historical contest to the right to represent the nation. On the one hand, the
people and their movement grew in strength and numbers, able to repoliticize and
remobilize counter-subjects of the nation. On the other hand, the elites coalesced
in Aquino’s widow Corazon to be the centerpiece of a newer alternative to the
Marcoses. Brocka and Bernal early on had called into question the capacity of the
Marcoses and their state to represent the nation.
Brocka and Bernal’s proposition against the Marcoses was attuned to Marx’s
idea that crisis becomes the enforced unity between elements that have become
independent on the one hand, and the enforced separation of the elements that are
essentially coming out of one locus on the other hand. The Marcoses represented
this crisis, so that as their dictatorship progressed and waned, independent
elements started to evolve on their own. These include the rise of the people’s mass
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movement, the armed insurgency, and the the coalescing of opposition political
parties among others on the grand scale of nation-building and transformation.
On the ground level, however, and as shown in the films, the crisis was not so
much felt but already transformed, rendering the conditions of possibilities for
temporal happiness and long-term disenfranchisement in subaltern sites. Such
acts of everyday life and survival remained attuned to the crisis constituency and
management of the Marcoses, coming out of this primordial origin like all things
framed by the Marcoses and their crisis. The crisis management of the state on the
one hand, and the taking-on and making-do of people at the ground and everyday
levels on the other hand, create the hegemony of the Marcoses: an uneasy status
quo where neither the Marcoses are fully in power nor the people fully dominated.
The inevitability of crisis, however, did very little to affect the lives of subaltern
citizens, except to more readily plunge them into the greater abyss of the crisis. As
represented in the films, martial law had done little to enforce its claim to ideal
citizenry and citizen transformation on the ground level. The crisis had been taken
up in the films, as the motivation for Julio to look for his fate in the city, or for
people to easily take into their own hands their quest for individual and social
justice in Maynila; and to savor the jouissance of subaltern life even under state
surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms depicted in Manila by Night. The films
do not reiterate state transformation, only citing the state as primordial source of
the crisis in the everyday. The films, however, implicate the state further, citing its
absence in the ways that the subaltern citizenry had already transformed the crisis
into their familiar negotiations and engagements in the crisis.
Ironically, when the Marcoses were deposed in Febuary 1986, the quality of
film production began to decline. By 1989, as I would argue, Brocka’s Orapronobis
closed the era. The “right to represent” no longer became the preeminent discourse
of representation in the post-Marcos years. Brocka’s death in 1991 and Bernal’s in
1996 closed for the time being the era of a rights-motivated filmmaking practice.
What then proliferated in Philippine art cinema during this intermittent period
were remakes and adaptations of literary classics, and other attempts to redefine
the national cinema without the baggage of the realism of poverty.
The international art film festival market would not concur with a Philippine
cinema-without-poverty, which made local critics call into question — similar to
the response of the Marcoses — the visibility of massive lack and excess of poverty
as self-Orientalism created by Brocka and Bernal. The international film festival
market then reduced the opening for Philippine cinema to its audiences. It would
take the independent cinema movement — pioneered by Lav Diaz using digital
technology and which culminated in nine-hour epic sagas of everyday lives — and
that reemphasized and re-proliferated cinema with poverty scenes and subaltern
characters for Philippine cinema to again be recognized and have access to foreign
circuits. In its worst output, this cinema was accused of “poverty porn,” in the
reified use, magnitude, and depth of exploration of the conditions of poverty in
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the country. In its best productions, this cinema was hailed for bringing Philippine
cinema back to life, which may also come to mean that the national cinema will
again be capable of mobilizing and reinvigorating the rights-based approach and
claims for actual disenfranchised peoples and human conditions.
Post-Marcos, Post-Brocka, Post-Bernal
What the post-era (after Marcos, Brocka and Bernal) effected was a cultural turn
after the crisis of representation in the 1983–86 era, with 1986 being pivotal as the
year the dictatorship was toppled and Corazon Aquino was installed in power. The
cultural turn ironically was an offshoot of the lack of interest in culture as outlined
by Press Secretary Teodoro “Teddy Boy” Locsin, Jr. upon taking office. The negation
of culture in the new national administration was an offshoot of the reaction to the
megalomania of the Marcoses, experienced mostly in the cultural realm. Aquino’s
— antiearlier campaign pronouncement to be the opposite of the Marcoses corruption, anti-people, anti-poverty — also enacted a moral ground in which to
differentially stand. Aquino’s positioning rested primarily on culture, as a kind of
historical and social imagination of life in the post-Marcos era.
This produced a cultural turn in the Aquino era: culture was beyond crisis but
considered negligible and unrepresentable in the moral righteousness of the new
national administration. Puritan morality took over culture, the newer form was
something to be felt, converted into, and considered a cause for transformation of
the self, and eventually of the nation. The unintended dismissal of culture gave rise
to a new moral order that embodied the historical experience and class background
of Aquino and her new technocrats that operationalized national development.
In negotiating with the historical past and legacy of the Marcoses, the highest
cultural award of the state, the National Artist Award, was handed to those who had
collaborated with the dictatorship (Leandro Locsin, 1990; Lucrecia Kasilag, 1989;
Virgilio Almario, 2003; Ramon Obusan, 2006), as well as its critics (Lino Brocka,
1997; Ishmael Bernal, 2001; Bienvenido Lumbera, 2006). The cultural impasse
that developed during Aquino’s administration seeped through the succeeding
administrations. Subsequent presidencies personally included selections not
submitted through the regular screening process: Carlos Quirino, 1997; Alejandro
Roces, 2003; and Adbulmari Asia Imao, 2006. The lingering impasse, at least
in the case of the National Artist selection, erupted with the insertion of three
names and delisting of one recommendation during Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s
administration in 2009.
In the visual arts, however, the cultural impasse was broken in the 1990s in what
Jonathan Beller called “synchretic realism,” with artists like Emmanuel Garibay,
Elmer Borlongan, Julie Lluch, and the later works of Imelda Cajipe-Andaya, who:
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endeavor to return the concept to art practice — that is, the images strive to
transmit conceptual thinking about the world and politics via the artwork. This
(re)politicization of the artwork is at once a response to the perceived shearing
off of social reference in abstract art and to the fact that after abstraction, images
are unavoidably abstract (because, historically speaking, the visual itself has
become a technology of abstraction). (Beller 19)
The political and historical abstraction in the post-Marcos era had to be
reimagined differentially. In film, this reimagination fell in the hands of conceptual
filmmaker Lav Diaz with his first forays into feature filmmaking in Serafin Geronimo:
Kriminal ng Barrio Concepcion (Criminal of Barrio Concepcion, 1998), Hubad sa
Ilalim ng Buwan (Naked Under the Moon, 1999) and Batang West Side (West Side
Kid, 2002), and culminating in his nine-hour films of hyper-neorealism, Ebolusyon
ng Pamilyang Pilipino (Evolution of the Filipino Family, 2004), Heremias: Unang
Aklat (Book One, 2006), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) and Melancholia
(2008). Together with other directors of the pre-independent cinema movement
(Jeffrey Jeturian, Raymond Red, Jon Red, and Mark Meily, among others), officially
mentioned to have started in 2005 with Aureaus Solito’s Ang Pagdadalaga ni
Maximo Oliveros (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros) during the first year of the
Cinemalaya Film Festival, Diaz early on negotiated a film idiom with which to break
free of the cultural impasse of the past.
He articulated his own ideal of filmmaking as a project that draws resonance
from Kidlat Tahimik and Brocka:
I don’t really think about length when I make films. I’m a slave to the process,
following the characters and the story and where they lead. It’s a very organic
process for me, I just keep shooting and shooting once there’s an idea. When
I watch the footage later, if I think there’s still more to be done I have to shoot
it. I don’t think, “Oh, it’s already seven hours” or “There’s already fifty hours
of footage.” Perhaps I think this way because, with regard to the history of my
people, we don’t really have a concept of time, we just have a concept of space.
(Diaz)
The rendering of a new emphasis of Philippine film in Diaz — geography and
space — stresses two issues: first, the new space of Philippine cinema — excess abject
poverty — that grounds the heavy weight of newer social realities; and second, the
transcendence of space over time, space controlling time that anchors the time of
the present as a juncture for social realities.
Diaz’s delineation of his self-aesthetics also characterizes the films of the new
digital independent films or indie cinema. This indie cinema, however, remains
problematic as the funding source and management for this movement remains
vested in business interests and government institutions. The major movers for this
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movement are Cinemalaya, beginning in 2005 as an alliance backed by businessman
Antonio “Tonyboy” Conjuangco, Jr. and the Cultural Center of the Philippines; and
Cinema One, also in 2005, by an affiliate of the largest media conglomerate in the
country, ABS -CBN . Interestingly, a third player, the Film Development Council of
the Philippines, the government arm in charge of stimulating the film industry,
also entered the picture of indie-cinema production in 2012. Even with the issue
of independence, indie cinema has a boutique production look and feel: subaltern
characters, abject poverty, gritty scenes, emblematic Third-Cinema practices,
and day-in-the-life narratives that are in dialogue with Diaz’s articulation of his
aesthetics. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s seminal work on Third Cinema
calls for an anti-imperialist (Hollywood) cinema, both in production and reception,
specifically coming out of the neocolonial and decolonizing conditions of the Third
World. With the independent filmmakers, the direction for a way out of Hollywood
and its surrogate in local commercial cinema is the motivation to come up with
innovations that resonate with Third Cinema.
Two figures of the newer independent cinema movement remade the
masterpieces of Brocka and Bernal in 2009. Omnibus and ominously titled Manila,
it comprises two segments. Manila’s night segment was done by prolific filmmaker
Adolfo Alix, Jr., and was a remake of another masterpiece by Brocka, Jaguar (1979),
starring the most bankable male star in the country then, Piolo Pascual. In the day
segment, art film director Raya Martin remade Bernal’s Manila by Night by starting
with the morning after the addict (Pascual) had lain dazed in the Luneta (Rizal
Park), which was the closing scene of the Bernal film. The remakes proved to be a
major disappointment because they made neither a big leap from the original nor
an interesting take on the earlier directors’ own films. What the younger filmmakers
missed out was the older films’ capacity to undertake a political project outside the
aesthetic domain of film, and provide a cutting-edge political commentary about
the times.
The originary signification (dissent) is made passive in newer independent films
that harp on day-in-the-life focusing of a subaltern character unable to make a
major transformation by the film’s end because of the heavy weight of issues of
poverty. This has been rendered in the aesthetics of a local neorealism, akin to
the Italian promulgators, that however is unable to realize a self-referentiality of
filmic and actual social realities. Oftentimes, too, the subaltern endures and does
not survive the massive weight of poverty issues, representing the subaltern’s
impoverished life as beyond redemption. Nihilism pervades in this batch of newer
independent films.
While the members of this generation of indie filmmakers profess to adore
and emulate Brocka and Bernal, and proliferate their films with equally stunning
images of poverty, subaltern characters, and counter-citizenship claims, very few
are able to orchestrate the political project similar in the ingenuous ways the two
directors have been able to. These films were in resonance with the possibility of
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a Third Cinema, a cut above the modernist ethos and politics of Second Cinema.
The fact that this has been done, at least in the Philippines, until the 1980s, makes
its marginalization in present-day independent cinema a source of concern.
Constrained by the lack of a local cinema-going audience, thereby focusing on an
international art film festival audience, the media to reimagine a contrary nation,
and to draw alternative citizenship claims, remains to be located. In the simultaneity
of these aesthetic development and rights claims in art, in the meantime, the
Marcoses were victorious in the 2010 elections, with Imelda being voted into the
House of Representatives, son Bongbong into the Senate, and daughter Imee as
governor of Ilocos Norte.3 What the discussion on Philippine film and society has
resulted is the inextricable discursive connections and disjunctures among the two.
The aesthetics of dissent in indie cinema has yet to articulate a politics of social
dissent.
Brocka’s Maynila and Bernal’s Manila by Night reiterate Marx’s sentiment on
history making and sense-making:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do
not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing
already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. (The Eighteenth Brumaire)
As Marx has suggested, it is only through a materialist and historical accounting of
history — in terms of nation-building, experimentation in arts and aesthetics, and
creative responses to crises — that the sequence of events can develop into a pivotal
culture of dissent.
Notes
1. For a thorough documentation and periodization of the Marcos era, refer to
“The Philippines: The Marcos Years”; also Tolentino.
2. For a discussion of edifice complex, see Lico. For a similar discussion on creative
contestations, see Balance.
3. For an account of the 2010 elections victory of the Marcoses, see Cerojano.
Works Cited
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and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. 16 July 2010. Web. 25 May 2012.
Beller, Jonathan. “From Social Realism to the Specter of Abstraction: Conceptualizing
the Visual Practices of H. R. Ocampo.” Kritika Kultura 5 (2004): 18–58. Web. 25 May
2012.
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Bernal, Ishmael, dir. and screenplay. Manila by Night. Regal Films, 1980. Film.
Cerojano, Teresa. “Marcoses’ Wins Signal Return to Philippine Politics.” Inquirer.net.
13 May 2010. Web. 25 May 2012.
Diaz, Lav. “Lav Diaz in Conversation with Alexis Tioseco, May Adadol Ingawanij,
Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa, and Graiwoot Chulphonsathorn.” Lumen. Sept. 2009. Web.
25 May 2012.
“Imelda Marcos: Steel Butterfly.” Biography. A & E Television Networks. 24 Oct. 2001.
Television.
Lico, Gerard. Edifice Complex: Power, Myth and Marcos State Architecture. Quezon
City: Ateneo de Manila UP , 2003. Print.
“Lino Brocka — Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag AKA Manila in the Claws of Neon
(1975).” Cinema of the World. July 2010. Web. 25 May 2012.
Marx, Karl. Das Kapital. Vol. 1. 1867. Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 25 May 2012.
——— . The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852. Marxists Internet Archive.
Web. 25 May 2012.
Mendizabal, Adrien. “The Aesthetics of Manila by Night (1980).” Indiociné: A Journal on
Philippine Cinema. 19 Nov. 2011. Web. 25 May 2012.
Mijares, Primitivo. The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. San
Francisco: Union Square, 1976. Print.
National Commission for Culture and the Arts. “National Artists of the Philippines:
Leandro Locsin.” National Commission for Culture and the Arts. Web. 25 May 2012.
“The Philippines: The Marcos Years.” George Washington University Archives. Web.
26 May 2012.
Rama, Napoleon G. “Ferdinand E. Marcos: Man of the Year, 1965.” Philippines Free
Press. 1 Jan. 1966. Web. 25 May 2012.
Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. New Latin American Cinema. Vol. 1. Detroit:
Wayne State UP , 1997. Print.
Tolentino, Roland. “Articulations of the Nation-Space: Cinema, Cultural Politics and
Transnationalism in the Philippines.” Diss. U of Southern California, 1996. Print.
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Forum Kritika: A Closer Look at Manila by Night
Manila by Night as Thirdspace
Patrick F. Campos
University of the Philippines Film Institute
patrick.campos@gmail.com
Abstract
The Marcosian signifier in Manila by Night has been inescapably registered in the
production, distribution, and exhibition of the film and in the film text itself. The paper
revisits these evaluations of the film by using Edward Soja’s broader notion of “thirdspace.”
It rereads Manila by Night as Bernal’s concept of the city which approximates the lived
dimension of urban spaces vis-à-vis the “concept city” of the Marcoses. Such a revaluation
of Manila by Night as thirdspace 1) locates the film at the center of wider spatio-temporal
interrelationship — from “global” to “national” to “cinematic” space, and 2) salvages the
epistemological concerns of Bernal, which previous critiques of Manila by Night tended
to eclipse.
Keywords
city film, cognitive map, lived city, national cinema
About the Author
Patrick F. Campos is a film/literary scholar and a faculty member of the University of the
Philippines Film Institute. He holds an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of
the Philippines and is Director of the Office of Extension and External Relations (formerly
the College Secretary) of the College of Mass Communication. He is also an independent
filmmaker and a musician.
Author’s Note
I am grateful to architects Paulo Alcazaren and Rene Luis Mata for their insights on the
architecture and spaces of middle-class subdivisions discussed in the first part of the paper.
Ishmael Bernal’s Manila by Night has been critically valued in geopolitical
terms and rightly so. Having been first released in 1980, the marks of the Marcoses’
political regime and its machinations are inescapably registered in the production,
distribution, and exhibition of the film and in the film text itself. President Ferdinand
Marcos, having declared martial law on 22 September 1972 (thereby extending his
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term indefinitely), was at this time in the midst of enacting politico-economic
“structural adjustments,” in alliance with the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF ), and accelerating “development” and “national progress”
through technocratic policies (cf. Broad; Dubsky; Boyce).
Correspondingly, the urbanization project of the state was at its height this time
as well (cf. Caoili 111–52). Hence, with Manila as its main setting, Bernal’s film was
irresistibly entwined with the Marcoses’ codification of the modernization of the
city. Meanwhile, these historical developments have fomented politicized critical
and cinematic productions, typified by the writings of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang
Pilipino and the films of Bernal and Lino Brocka, which were rallied around as
counterpoints to the Marcoses’s projection of national development (cf. Campos,
“The Intersection”).
The present paper revisits Manila by Night by deploying political geographer and
urban planner Edward Soja’s notion of “thirdspace,” his recombination of spatial
concepts from different theorists,1 particularly Michel Foucault’s “heterotopia,”
bell hook’s “homeplace,” and Homi Bhabha’s “third space,” among others; these
all refer to a kind of liminal, inconclusive, complex, dynamic, and even counterspace, either literal or symbolic, that is fertile ground for critical activity. As a
critical strategy, the concept is a “thirding,” a way of trying “to open up … spatial
imaginaries to ways of thinking … that respond to all binarisms” (5). In this process
of thirding, “the original binary choice is not dismissed entirely but is subjected to
a creative process of restructuring that draws selectively and strategically from the
two opposing categories to open new alternatives” (5).
In this regard, the present paper recontextualizes the film as thirdspace, located
in between the ideas of “nation” and “national cinema,” in between the necessity
and rejection of creating cognitive maps of the city, and in between the rejection
and adaptation of a vista of the cityscape.
Moreover, as applied particularly to social spaces, the present paper appropriates
Soja’s reworking of the categories of Henri Lefebvre’s “trialectic” of spatialized
thinking (Soja 53–82; cf. Lefebvre). It deploys Lefebvre’s ideas of “perceived space,”
or the material space that can be empirically measured and described; “conceived
space,” or the conceptualized space of artists, social scientists, urban planners,
architects, and technocrats, which is related to the production of and imposition
on space and the governance of spatial signs and codes; and “lived space,” or
what Soja also calls “thirdspace,” which subsumes both perceived and conceived
spaces and simultaneously exceeds them. As Soja argues, lived space as thirdspace
represents the “clandestine or hidden side of social life — as well as an attempt to
emphasize the partial unknowability, the mystery and secretiveness, the nonverbal
subliminality of space of representations” (67).
The paper rereads Manila by Night as Bernal’s concept of the city which
approximates the lived dimension of urban spaces vis-à-vis the “concept city” of the
Marcoses. Such a revaluation of Manila by Night as thirdspace 1) locates the film
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at the center of a wider spatio-temporal interrelationship – from “local” to “global”
and from “national” to “cinematic” spaces, and 2) salvages the epistemological
concerns of Bernal, which previous critiques of Manila by Night tended to eclipse
in favor of only historical-political readings.
The paper is composed of two separate but connected sections. The first part is
a consideration of the historical context of Manila by Night. It examines in detail
the opening sequence of the film as a threshold and what this sequence conceals,
condenses, and betrays vis-à-vis the Marcosian project of modernization and
urbanization. It also contextualizes Manila by Night as a “city film” and discusses
the ambivalent impulses of such a genre relative to the inter-/counter-related
projects of nation formation and national cinema formation.
The second part problematizes the reified association of Manila by Night with
Brocka’s Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (1975) broached in the first part. It
then continues to explicate the text of Manila by Night as a city film, through
the prism of the closing sequences, and demonstrates how the film could be a
“thirding” of — and an engagement of the binarisms that arise from — Kevin Lynch’s
notion of cognitive mapping and Michel de Certeau’s figure of the “walker” vis-àvis the “cityscape.” Taken together, the two parts of the paper assert that Manila by
Night was not (only) a counter-discourse against the Marcosian codification of the
city, but in fact partook of the same impulses of modernization and the desire for
destiny and legibility.
Density and Destiny: Manila by Night in-between
“National” and “Cinema”
Manila and no other city in the Philippines has been most significantly imagined
and represented visually in Philippine media. This preeminence of the city in media
representations, through which the nation is many times focalized and symbolically
imagined, is ironically premised on Manila’s historical overdetermination as the
dominant and primate city.
On the one hand, Manila was transformed by colonial history into the dominant
city (fig. 1). It was established as the site of Spanish colonial rule, the center of
politics, economy, education, and culture, which correspondingly transformed not
only “the indigenous structural characteristics” of Manila, but also the structural
relationship of the rest of the Philippines and the external colonial powers relative
to it (Caoili xix, 22–63). This historical transformation of Manila became the basis
of urban and national politics under American and Japanese rule and conditioned
the city’s trajectory of spatial expansion and development.
On the other hand, due to the relative underdevelopment of the other cities and
regions in the Philippines, the national capital evolved into a primate city. It has
over time increasingly attracted people from other regions and the rural areas with
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Figure 1. Moat surrounding the Walled City of Intramuros, the original Spanish colonial
settlement. (Photo courtesy of Kumchong Lee, used with permission)
the promise of educational, cultural, and, most especially, economic opportunities.
This steady rural-to-urban migration, in turn, has resulted in the formation of the
slum and squatter areas, which have become ever-thickening peripheral spaces
(Caoili 64–109).
The shifting spatial formations of what is central and what is peripheral
have, therefore, yielded a host of many times conflicting media imaginings
and representations of Manila. For one, the capital city has been continually
historicized and/or mythologized for various political causes and aesthetic
purposes (cf. Joaquin, Manila and “Sa Loob”; Lico 39–47, 127–56). Corollary to this,
the relationship of urban spaces as center and rural spaces as periphery has been
a major preoccupation of Filipino literary and cinematic productions (cf. S. Reyes;
Campos, “Ang Pelikulang Rural”). And, as a consequence of continuous rural-tourban migration, the strain on existing public security and services, which has
magnified the marginalization of the urban poor, has also spawned many bleakly
“realist” novels and films (cf. S. Reyes; Campos, “The Intersection”).2 The city’s
conurbations and various zones, in other words, have been inscribed as cultural
signifier across history, and its sociopolitical and psychological dimensions have
been articulated in visual meditations on the plight of the Filipino.
It is exactly this quality of imagining Manila that seduces the artist, the politician,
the citizen, to gaze upon the city with ambivalence — on the one hand, investing
its spaces with grand, profound, and “national” meanings, and on the other hand,
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picturing it as a space of disgust and depravity. In both cases, the fraught question
lies always in how the city is conceived and in who is conceiving the city. As such,
the urban space of Manila is always at least double-coded: concrete and abstract;
historical and mythic; social and psychological; fascinating and terrifying; an object
of governance and a frame of mind; time-bound and space-defined. It is in between
these double-codings that one can productively locate Bernal’s Manila by Night,
which itself does not shrink from the urge to densely render the city onscreen.
Manila by Night — for all its notoriety and critical acclaim in Filipino film
history (cf. Hernando; David, “Ten Best”) — opens with a rather benign, but actually
designing, sequence of stasis and motion. It is dusk, and centrally framed is the
façade of a whitewashed and fluorescent-lit split-level modernist bungalow. In the
foreground, bicycles pedal in and out of the screen, highlighting the spaciousness
of the paved subdivision that follows the model of American suburbia and reflects
developments in the city. Only a few private cars drive by in this apparently
exclusive street. People walking by are presumably on their way home from office
or school, spaces of activity one associates with the middle-class denizens of such a
spatial formation. A group of teenagers carrying a basketball passes by, indicating
that there is a recreation area nearby and that the young are not, as it were, up to
no good.
Darkness has visibly descended, but this first sequence is still Manila by day,
located at the threshold of the film, of time and of space, which at this point is
keeping at bay the texture of Manila by Night as “city film.” The opening sequence
registers a known and knowable middle-class urban space, stripped of any kind
of mystery and indecipherability usually ascribed to a historic city (fig. 2). In fact,
this is the only sequence in the film which, without the ramifications of narrative
and visual complexity, represents in any certain terms a city space that is benign
and, therefore, functions as a foil to what is yet to unfold in terms of narrative
and spatial visualization. At this point in narrative time and screen space, the
sequence is the threshold, where the spectator is located in between the reality
of urbanization outside of the screen and Bernal’s alter-image of the selfsame city
within the boundaries of the screen.
At the time of the film’s production, the “conjugal dictatorship” of President
Ferdinand and First Lady Imelda Marcos had already taken extensive measures in
their bid for national development to cleanse and transform the city, which was the
seat of their power and which they had imbued with mythic aura (cf. Lico 39–47;
127–56). The fateful decree of Ferdinand, Proclamation 1081, or the declaration of
a state of martial law in the Philippines in 1972 and the appointment of Imelda as
governor of Metropolitan Manila in 1975, had legitimized the “beautification” of
Manila and the purging of its “lawless elements” (cf. Lico 53–54; I. Marcos 3).
In his Notes on the New Society, published in 1973, a year after the establishment
of military rule, Ferdinand wrote of the foundations of a “New Society” which
was to be the determiner of the destiny of the nation. And, in the year following
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Figure 2. Ishmael Bernal (seated center) with Charito Solis, who plays the mother
desperately clinging to her hard-fought (yet ironically nondescript) middle-class existence,
on location. (Photo courtesy of Bernardo Bernardo, used with permission)
her assumption as Governor, Imelda published Manila: The City of Man (1976),
in which, with strong allusions to “the glories of Greece and Rome” and other
contemporary First World nations, she compared Manila to “other great cities”
which have “invented human civilization, having first risen as a sanctuary from
barbarism” (2). The conflation of the destinies of the nation and the city found its
profound fruition, on the one hand, in the publication of the multivolume history
of the Philippines, tellingly titled Tadhana: The History of the Filipino People (1976)
and purported to have been singularly authored by Ferdinand and, on the other
hand, in the massive and accelerated modernization of Metro Manila under the
auspices of Imelda.
The image-production of Ferdinand as a strong leader and of the Philippines
as a strong nation in the Third World resulted in the constant comparison of
the local with the global, in the insistence on simulating a transnational reality
within national boundaries, and in desiring modernist development on the basis
of known and knowable modernisms (Tadiar 152–53). And under the strain of
accelerated modernization, the Marcoses “succumbed to an orgy of borrowing
from international financial institutions” (Lico 51) and allowed the World Bank
to maneuver the creation of the metropolitan administration against the interest
of the Filipinos (cf. Bello et al.; Broad). Moreover, the frantic construction of
monolithic edifices at great speed has been highlighted by architect and critic
Gerard Lico in his book, Edifice Complex (2003), where he notes time and time
again how impossible deadlines were set and met under the shadow of the motto,
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“What the First Lady wants, the First Lady gets!” (125). All manner of structures
were built, from hotels and commercial centers to theaters and cultural centers,
each one aimed at attracting foreign attention and foreign investments.
In 1974, the Folk Arts Theater was “constructed within an incredible seventyseven days” in order to host the Miss Universe Pageant, and the massive and stateof-the-art Philippine International Convention Center (PICC ) was completed in less
than two years, in order to host the IMF -World Bank Conference in Manila (Lico
52). All of these efforts were aimed at showcasing Manila as a site of development
that is synchronized with “the universal time of progress of the advanced capitalist
nations and profitably integrate[d] … into the world economy” (Tadiar 157). By 1980,
the year of Manila by Night’s first release, the government had already “invested
over P19 billion in infrastructure” (F. Marcos, The Marcos Revolution 69). In the
process of reckless modernization, thousands of squatters had been evicted and
displaced, and shantytowns had been literally “whitewashed into obscurity” (Lico
53–54).
This state of affairs, with all of the accompanying discursive and physical violence
of cleansing, is the very thing that undergirds the first sequence of Manila by Night.
The consolidation of political and economic drives is contained in this image of a
section of the metropolis, inhabited by the metropolitan bodies governed by state
and city administration. This environment, this image of the clean city, is condensed
in the first few frames of the film, which is silent about its basis and foundations.
What one sees on the surface of the screen is a picture of stability, community, and
affluence in an ostensibly transparent setting that is made attractive by the absence
of filth. What is suspended, of course, is the visualization of the underside of this
misplaced development. What is betrayed are the traces of dependence of Filipinolived spatiality on the United States. And what is concealed is the traditional
visualization of a long line of “city films” of which Manila by Night is a descendant.
In the wake of World War II and following American reoccupation, as
Hollywood began to flood Philippine screens once again (Deocampo 402–03),
the cinematic incarnations of Manila progressively began to be thematized and
visualized in increasingly bleaker terms. For instance, immediately after the war,
Manila was the setting of wartime life-and-death exploits of heroic guerillas, in
films like Luis F. Nolasco’s Fort Santiago (1946) and Gerardo de Leon and Eddie
Romero’s Intramuros (1946). But later on, it became the site of “collaboration
[which] filled the screens with stories of despicable villains who betrayed resistance
fighters” (Deocampo 406), such as in Eddie Romero’s Manila: Open City (1968).
This trend in Filipino city films over a two-decade period is, in fact, closely linked
with historical developments and spatial reconfigurations.
As history moved farther from the time of war, spatial textures became more
perceptible in later city films. Manila and its suburbs were left in ruins after
World War II , and the influx of rural migrants to the city continually reconfigured
urban settlement; in the 1950s, urban centers like Ermita, Malate, Paco, Santa
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Ana, Sampaloc, and Tondo became thickly populated residential areas (Caoili
68). Describing a specific space in the context of this rapid urban transformation,
Manuel Caoili writes of a significant spatial-historical juxtaposition: “Poor migrants
moved into the ruins of Intramuros, squatting on vacant lots and thus converting
the once proud center of Spanish authority and culture into a veritable slum” (68).
These historical developments and spatial reconfigurations are the bases of
city films in which Manila was portrayed as the setting of crime and violence,
such as action and/or true-to-life movies, like Gerardo de Leon’s The Moises
Padilla Story (1961) and Cesar Gallardo’s Geron Busabos (1964). Two of the most
cinematically emblematic examples of how history and space converge in the city
film genre — resonating with Caoili’s evocative image — remain to be Lamberto V.
Avellana’s Anak Dalita (1956) and A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (1965). The
former visualizes postwar Manila and Intramuros in neorealist terms, clearly
setting a standard for later city films. It depicts the expanding squatter areas and
the filth and grit of the primate city, as it follows the story of a soldier exposed to
a life of poverty, underground economy, and corruption. The latter, which is an
adaptation of Nick Joaquin’s play of the same title, visualizes Manila and Intramuros
in postwar ruins once again, but this time in elegiac terms, lamenting the passing
of the glory days of the historic city (and, by extension, the nation), now under
siege by vulgar Americanization. A fulfillment of this vulgarization, so to speak,
can be found in two vital women-dominated multicharacter prototype texts, Tony
Cayado’s film noir Mga Ligaw na Bulaklak (1957) and Gregorio Fernandez’s slumset Malvarosa (1958).
This short historical chronicle of city films paralleled the increasing dependence
of the Philippines on foreign aid and loan and the continued recklessness of the
Marcoses and their cronies in government. In 1950, US President Harry S. Truman
sent an economic survey mission, the Bell Mission, to the Philippines, which
recommended that the Philippines borrow American economic aid amounting to
$250 million. In 1958, the IMF , which was closely linked with the US government,
“made devaluation and decontrol conditions for the grant of a stabilization loan to
the Philippine government.” By 1962, these maneuvers and pressures had resulted
in the devaluation of the peso by nearly 50 percent, in turn resulting in enormous
Philippine debt and dependence on the US (Caoili 59–62).
In 1980, when Manila by Night was first released, the Philippine government
forged a two-year standby arrangement with the IMF amounting to $535 million;
and from 1981 to 1983, the Philippines borrowed about $1.5 billion dollars from
the World Bank, while reducing the wages of ordinary Filipino workers in order
to continually attract foreign investments (Broad 220, 116–27). In spite of all of
these moves, and unlike neighboring Asian countries like South Korea and
Singapore that also borrowed from the IMF and the World Bank, the Philippines
failed to industrialize and produce a sizeable middle-class sector. These moves, in
fact, took their toll on a large section of the population, not least of them on the
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urban-dwellers, whose standard of living plunged below the poverty line (cf. Boyce
13–59, 303–45). As Robin Broad writes:
The fact that most would-be NIC s [newly industrializing countries] experienced
slow growth during this period while the Philippines actually slipped into
reverse indicates that behind the accelerating decline of the Philippine economy
lie not only external but also internal factors. Some observers ... place most
of the blame for the Philippine performance on domestic causes — “years of
reckless Marcos extravagance and corruption,” topped with capital flight and
uncontrolled cronies. (217)
The establishing shot of Manila by Night, hence, conceals, condenses, and
betrays all of these historical developments and spatial reconfigurations. Meant
to geographically situate the spectator, it literally and symbolically regulates the
screen space and crops out all signs of poverty that would tarnish Imelda’s vision
of the City of Man, “an environment within which man can live fully, happily and
with dignity” (J. Nells-Lim qtd. in Lico 52). At the center of the screen space is an
abode in the mold of modern architecture, surrounded by a manicured lawn and
trees impossibly sprouting out of the sidewalk pavement.
Notably, this picture perfect middle-class space is indeterminately located in
the geography of the whole film. As the narrative and locations of Manila by Night
densely unfold, there is an insistence on mapping specific places in the city. The
Sauna Turko, which figures in the development of several main characters in the
film, and its Roxas Boulevard context are specified. The tenements on Harrison
Boulevard, the cocktail lounge row on M. H. del Pilar Street, the drug-dealing
street of Bambang, the Santa Cruz district, the street altar along Misericordia, the
Remedios Circle, the Shakey’s Pizza parlor on Malate, the Breakwater of Manila
Bay, the parking lot behind Philippine International Convention Center, Ospital ng
Maynila, Harrison Plaza, the open canal beside Central Bank, and the Luneta (Rizal
Park) — these are all specifically located as spaces where characters are determined
and developed and their individual plots conceived and arranged. But the chic
middle-class house of the restless youth, Alex, who is the main point of connection
of many characters in Manila by Night, remains indeterminate. That is, it could be
any house, any lot, from any of the subdivisions around Metro Manila. And this is
not the indeterminacy of a mythologized city, but the ironic indeterminacy of the
known and knowable which Alex is always trying to escape. The first sequence then
presents the spectators with that thirdspace in between the Marcosian conceived
space that is “out there” and Bernal’s conception of the space where Alex actually
“lives.”
Past the first sequence, into the second which begins the thematization of
Manila by night and which erupts in chaos after a gunshot is fired in a bar, the film
ravels out densely, with multiple-character networks and conflict trajectories, the
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accumulation of plot time without any immediately decipherable direction, the
mapping of intersecting interior and exterior spaces, and the layering of aural and
visual motifs. Picking up speed in this direction, the film reveals itself to be a “city
film,” a genre with its own “history and a prism through which to address a host of
related and interconnected topics regarding cinema and urbanism” (Mennel 23).
The beginnings of the genre of the city film in Europe in the 1920s, during the
youth of cinema itself, resonate with the notion of the city as terra incognita, a space
that needs to be mapped out in order to be known, but interestingly without, or
taking off from, any sense of the mythic. The space of the cinema screen grappled
with the impact and repercussions of modernization through the urbanity of the
city film (Weihsmann 10).
The example of post-World War I Berlin as modern city thematized in several
films at the time of the birth of the genre is instructive (cf. Mennel 21–45). Berlin
was central to the development of German cinema, not just as location for film
productions and setting for film exhibitions, but more important for being at the
center of visual, narrative, and generic experiments. Karl Grune’s The Street (1923),
F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), G. W. Pabst’s Joyless Street (1925), Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis (1927), Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927),
Robert and Curt Siodmak’s People on Sunday (1928), Joe May’s Asphalt (1929), and
Fritz Lang’s M (1931) all take place in the city, but take on various genres and modes
of visualization/narration, including documentary, science fiction, chamber drama,
new objectivity, psychological horror, and expressionism.
Helmut Weihsmann argues that the depiction of German cities in the 1920s was
the result of the newly emerging mass culture in an urbanizing modernity and the
attendant fascination with “metropolitan motifs, motion, and development” (10).
Such a fascination with the city is foundational to the formation of a “German
cinema” (i.e., a “national cinema”). As Anton Kaes asserts, “[From] its inception
German cinema has been preoccupied by the big city as a site of adventure and
modernity” (qtd. in Mennel 65). In a parallel syntagmatic order in which the city
is deployed in the conception of the discourse of the nation, the city therefore also
figures in the conception of the idea of a “national cinema.”
However, in an important sense, the screen space of the city film bore the
crucible of modernization in ways that ran counter to the mythic idealism of
“national development,” such as the kind projected by the Marcoses. The Berlin
films, as with many city films across history — such as Dziga Vertov’s The Man with
the Movie Camera (1929), Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), Jean-Luc Godard’s
Breathless (1960), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accatone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962),
Perry Henzell’s The Harder They Come (1972), Ali Özgentürk’s The Horse (1982),
Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild (1990), R’anan Alexandrowicz’s James’ Journey
to Jerusalem (2003), and Marjani Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis (2007),
to name just a few — present the contradictions and tensions of urban modernity,
which necessarily marginalizes or even eradicates individuals and whole peoples.
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Such marginalization and eradication, which are signified in the cropping out
of filth and poverty in the first sequence of Manila by Night, consistent with the
misdirected modernization of the Marcoses, are at the heart of city films. Such
films mentioned above, like Manila by Night, center on the dangers, weariness, and
forbidden pleasures of urban life, such as crime, vice, eruptions of violence, the
collapse of families, unemployment, prostitution, and identity and class struggles.
These very themes preoccupy Manila by Night, though at the threshold of the film,
where the family of Alex is shown to be ostensibly closely knit, they are kept at bay.
Manila by Night, of course, is not only a city film of the order of the films mentioned
above. It is also a contribution to the tradition of city films in the Philippines
which have undermined the urbanization project of the Marcoses. In the same
year when Imelda was appointed governor of Metropolitan Manila, Lino Brocka
also visualized urban decay and social unrest in the landmark city film, Maynila:
Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag. Here, again, we can see the impulse of the genre, which
is premised on the very decay and lawlessness that were frequently cited as reasons
for the declaration of martial rule and the consolidation of Metropolitan Manila as
a space of governance and purgation (cf. Tadiar 159–60). In the succeeding years,
from 1976 to 1984, Brocka produced several other films premised exactly on the
same terms (urban decay and lawlessness), notably Insiang (1976), Jaguar (1979),
Bona (1980), and Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim (1984), which were either exhibited
or in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, putting the Philippines back on the
map of world cinema as a center of Third World film production (cf. Sotto).
Local critics, especially the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, whose writings
were politicized, articulated these achievements of Brocka in the genre of the city
film and in his international acclaim as gains for “national cinema.” International
film festivals, especially those positioned against Hollywood hegemony — such as
Cannes, Berlin, and Venice — as critics have explicitly and implicitly demonstrated,
validate national cinemas as they allow films and filmmakers to be culturally
positioned vis-à-vis “world cinema” (cf. de Valck). As Marijke de Valck asserts,
[The] survival of the phenomenon of film festivals and its development into a
global and widespread festival circuit has been dependent on the creation of film
festivals as a zone, a liminal state, where the cinematic products can bask in the
attention they receive for their aesthetic achievements, cultural specificity, or
social relevance. (37)
In this context, Manila by Night is once again caught in between the discursive
engineering of the “nation” and of “national cinema.” The film was invited to compete
at the Berlin International Film Festival, presumably for its value, among others, as
a city film. But the government banned the film for nearly a year for undermining
the supposedly benign authoritarian rule of the Marcoses over the nation and the
city. Manila by Night missed the festival, which could have further validated both
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Figure 3. Current façade of the Manila Film Center, now condemned because of the
dangers of still-continuing subsidence and rented out to a drag-performing entertainment
program. (Photo courtesy of Kumchong Lee, used with permission)
the “Manila film” and “Philippine cinema.” It was eventually released locally under
the new title, City After Dark, practically a different film, with extensive scene and
dialogue deletions.
The Marcoses understood precisely the politics of international film festivals.
The banning of Manila by Night as city film par excellence is testament to this. The
other testament is the construction of the Manila Film Center (fig. 3), roughly at
the same time as the release of Manila by Night, which was to host the first Manila
International Film Festival.3 The festival was to be the point of convergence of 35
countries and over 200 films (Lico 124). Envisioned to be one of the centers of
world cinema, the Parthenon-like state-of-the-art edifice was ordered constructed
by Imelda at an estimated cost of $25 million (Lico 122), to be the node where
prestige and power vis-à-vis culture and cinema could be concentrated (cf. de
Valck 36).
The construction of the cinema space and the founding of the festival relate to
Manila by Night as thirdspace in crucial ways. The frenzy of endless construction
which defies deadlines is hinted at in the opening sequence of Manila by Night,
where carpenters on top of the roof of the house are shown in the first establishing
shot of the film. Alex is addressed by his mother, Virgie, from the doorway,
regarding their family’s plans for the evening. It is already past office hours, and
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when the father of Alex arrives home from work, only then does Virgie realize that
the carpenters are still working in the evening darkness.
The ironic contrast is laid to bare. Virgie is fussing, insisting that no family
member should be left behind for the evening family affair. The siblings must come
in from their personal errands, and everyone must get ready, since the father is
bound to arrive at any moment. What is unspoken is that she has forgotten the
families represented by each of the carpenters still working on the roof to beautify
and improve her own family’s house. And, moreover, that the carpenters do not
and will not complain, because it is through this manual labor that they earn what
they will feed their own families.
This ironic detail in the opening of Manila by Night mirrors a larger-scale tragedy
that subsequently unfolded in the construction of Imelda’s edifice. Froilan Hong,
the architect of the Manila Film Center, in an interview with Lico, recalls, “It was
[Imelda’s] idea to get the essence of the Parthenon’s simplicity and mathematical
proportions…. [We] created a basic module that [was] grand and at the same time
humane” (qtd. in Lico 121). Ironically, Hong recounts that “there were some seven
thousand workers working round the clock between 25 December 1981 and 18
January 1982” (qtd. in Lico 124) in order to beat the deadline and open the space to
the MIFF on 18 January.
The move to construct the space and found the festival implies the state’s
understanding that not only are city films culturally legitimized in international
film festivals, but that the city that hosts such a festival becomes part of a “global
space economy,” where capital and media attention could converge. As Julian
Stringer asserts: “What many festivals actually now market and project not just
‘narrative images,’ but a city’s own ‘festival image,’ its own self-perceptions of the
place it occupies within the global space economy, especially in relation to other
cities and other festivals” (140; cf. de Valck 39–41). But one of the most shocking
international coverage, especially circulated among film cultural communities,
which the Manila Film Center received, was from Film Comment, the official
publication of New York-based Film Society of Lincoln Center, which reported
that on 17 November, “more than 200 persons were buried [in the construction
site] under fast-drying cement” (Stein 48).
Due to the cutting of budget allotment for the next year’s edition of the festival
as a consequence of the tragedy, Lico narrates, “Imelda, therefore, created a
contingency plan to generate funds to keep her festival going — she had censorship
laws circumvented and relaxed in favor of thirteen uncut soft-porn films previewed
in local cinemas and the Manila Film Center, drawing long queues and enormous
profits” (123). More ironically, after the assassination of Senator Benigno S. Aquino,
Jr., one of the Marcoses’ staunchest political opponents, an integral version of
Manila by Night was eventually screened at the Manila Film Center, in the process
generating profit for the state (fig. 4).
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Fig. 4. Poster of the film’s uncensored screening at the Manila Film Center, with the
original title (rather than City After Dark) restored. “Mature Viewership Only” was code
for the venue’s regular patrons that the movie would contain highly censorable sex scenes.
(Mowelfund Film Institute Archive, used with permission)
As with the insistence on defining and validating the city film and national
cinema internationally, the founding of a festival and the construction of a
festival space are anchored on the ramifications of modernization and premised
on ideological and political agenda. The impulse to build the Manila Film Center
and to hold the Manila International Film Festival thus emanates from the same,
though counterpoised, impulse to produce the “Manila film.”
Legibility and Illegibility: The City Space as Cityscape in
Manila by Night
As broached in the first part of this paper, Bernal’s Manila by Night has been
critically associated with two things. On the one hand, the film has been associated
with the Marcosian project of modernization, which was its sociopolitical and
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historical backdrop. On the other hand, it has been many times evaluated side by
side with the city films of Lino Brocka, most especially Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng
Liwanag (cf. Del Mundo; David, “Primates”).
The critical milieu of the period reified this associative and “standard” reading of
Manila by Night and for good reason.4 The desire of the authoritarian government to
turn Manila into a showcase, into a bright and beautiful city, spacious and available
to the policing gaze, is akin to the utopian aspiration of what Michel de Certeau
calls the “concept city.” According to de Certeau, the project of the technocratic
visionary is premised on disciplining the urban object into a governable, abstract,
and idealized form (96–103) — precisely Manila in the context of the Marcoses’ New
Society. The notion of Manila as the City of Man is dependent upon the purging of
urban space and the regimentation of complex everyday practices through which
space is in fact embodied and lived.
The bold visualization, therefore, of Manila by Night and Maynila: Sa mga
Kuko ng Liwanag of the government’s macro-scale oppressive technologies of
regimentation and the micro-scale slippages of individual bodies through these
technologies renders both films veritable oppositions to the idealized but distorted
image of the bright city projected by the Marcoses. Both films expose slums and
mazes hidden beneath the shadows of the magnificent edifices, the underside, the
filth, the poverty, and the overall darkness of Manila.
From local film writings, roughly between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s,
emerged a periodization of a “golden age” or a “new cinema” in the Philippines
(cf. David, “A Second Golden Age”; Torre; Tiongson). And within such a
periodization was specified a canon of films, some of which, including Manila by
Night and Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag, were conceived as being opposed
to the Marcoses’ brand of urbanization (cf. Lumbera 200–03; 208–12). What is
summoned in such a critical reading is an image of Manila that parallels (though
not necessarily represents) counter-cultural radicalism, beginning with the 1960s
onwards.
This kind of critical contextualization of Manila by Night, however, privileges a
historical configuration that does not much account for the spatial dynamism of
Manila by Night; it downplays the film’s dimension as lived space (as understood
in Soja’s terms) in favor of highlighting it as a conceived space to counter Marcos’s
concept city.5 A dynamism, thus, may be activated in the thirdspace if the desire
for control over the city, the drive toward governance, and the presumed response
of Bernal toward these drives are altogether accounted for. If we consider Soja’s
theorizing vis-à-vis the spatial imaginaries of Manila by Night, what emerges is a
correlation between thirdspace and the complex urban maze of Bernal’s imagination
which also partakes of the same desire (though certainly not the same means and
mode) of the Marcoses to map out and create a panoramic vista of Manila.
Manila by Night — more than Maynila: Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag — can be located
at the center of the fascinations which link the city and cinema with the conflicting
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desire for “legibility” and “illegibility.” The desire to frame the city spaces — to make
them legible — and, at the same time, the desire to make them difficult to decipher
through visual-aural excess, in order to correspond to lived spatiality, has been
abiding in cinema history across cultures (as exemplified above).
As such, one cannot easily impute the desire to frame, to put under control,
the city only on the Marcoses. Bernal’s Manila by Night is itself an evidence of
the complexity of this desire. The film orders the disordered in its continued
attempt to introduce binaries of meaning — day and night, exterior and interior,
old and young, cleanliness and filth, objectivity and subjectivity, hypocrisy and
truth, lust and love. But it is in clearing a space for the lived city — rather than the
government’s insistence on the concept city — where Manila by Night’s desire for
control emanates.
In the germinal book of Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960), he prescribes
an antidote to the anxiety, fear, and terror arising from metropolitan life. The “spatial
organization of contemporary life, the speed of movement, and the speed and scale
of new construction” (119) — all of which are reflected in the drive for modernization
of the Marcoses — necessitates a self-conscious reflection on the question of urban
representation vis-à-vis the expansion and continued acceleration of growth of the
urban space. As Lynch argues, “We must learn to see the hidden forms in the vast
sprawl of our cities” (12).
Seeing the hidden in the sprawl is Lynch’s insistence on working out the
“‘legibility’ of the cityscape” (2). And this work of making the city legible is
tantamount to the creation of what he called “cognitive maps,” which are mental
and memorable representations of the form of the city that enable its inhabitants
to cognitively situate themselves within it. I maintain that the desire to develop
cognitive maps to alleviate anxiety, fear, and terror — like ideology — is shared by
both the governor and the governed. But, as Manila by Night demonstrates, the
terms of sharing are not necessarily the same or complementary. Bernal’s project,
in this context, sought to bring social, subjective, and psychological themes to bear
on the formal conceptions of planners, designers, and architects of the city. In the
same way that the Marcoses wrote the myth into the city, like a creative reversal of
eisegesis, Manila by Night wrought a thirdspace, an alternative cognitive map out
of the concept city.
Lynch asserts that the effectiveness of a cognitive map can be measured
by “the ease with which [a city’s] parts can be recognized and can be organized
into a coherent pattern” and its “sense of beauty” (2, 199). Both these values of
measurements suggest that the idea of urban legibility is based on aesthetics and
formal criteria. The patterning and beautification of the City of Man is apparent in
the urban planners’ conception of the city as it is executed onto Manila’s perceived
spaces. Patterning and beautification are exactly the same criteria one encounters
in the ordering of the city in Manila by Night. Out of the ostensibly chaotic,
multicharacter, plotless, unevenly patterned film, the conception of the artist and
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the phenomenological experience of the viewer gel in the self-consistent aesthetics
of actually well-motivated characters with individual plots forming legible patterns.
Lynch’s notion of cognitive mapping rests on the difference between the city
as perceived through maps and other representations and the city as lived within
the material conditions of actual structures and streets. This means that ideal
urban representations should be aligned with the material conditions, which is
impossible because of the unevenness of lived spatiality and undesirable because
a representation that fits perfectly with conceived space conceals much of lived
materiality.
The last two sequences of Manila by Night, which can also be considered as
one long sequence divided into two parts according to the mode of motion of the
characters (walking and running), exemplifies how Bernal comes to terms with the
necessity of mapping.
The sequence begins inside the by now very familiar Sauna Turko, where Alex
is trying to borrow money from the blind masseuse Bea. Kano, the lesbian drug
pusher, who is in love with Bea and from whom Alex buys his drugs, enters from
the streets, as she is being pursued by law enforcers in civilian clothes. Out of
paranoia or founded fear, Alex starts running as well, as if he were the one being
pursued by the police. One of the pursuers inquires with Bea, who, humorously
(for the viewers) but meaningfully gives the man detailed and specific directions on
how to navigate through the interior-to-exterior spaces — to run through a certain
passage and climb up the roof.
The image of people on roofs refers back to an earlier sequence also atop Sauna
Turko’s roof where Kano, with Bea, expresses her love for Manila (not to mention
the opening of the film, in which the carpenters are shown working on the rooftop
of Alex’s house). The scene from the roof down to the narrow alleys and winding
streets, up to Central Bank and Harrison Plaza, where Kano and Alex elect to pass
to lose their pursuers, bespeak of how both have owned the city spaces in a way
that the police have not.
The running, scored with fast and rhythmic music, punctuated by the periodic
pauses of an unfit policeman catching his breath, and concluding with the slowing
down of time and the distortion of sound as Kano is finally captured — epitomizes
the wearisome dimension of lived spatiality at certain moments of acceleration.
This breathless running gives way to the walking once again. As soon as Alex finds
himself free and safe, he begins to pace leisurely, somewhat aimlessly but actually
toward Luneta. On his way to the park, he passes by one of Imelda’s Metro Aides
sweeping in front of a movie-house and another man cleaning the sidewalk.
And toward the final scene we sense symmetry, albeit imperfectly (i.e., an
approximation of symmetry). Alex listens to a guitarist strumming “Teach Your
Children,” the very song that he sang near the beginning of the film. Instead of the
dusk in the opening, it is now approaching the break of dawn. And, as in with the
opening, we see spacious and paved grounds where bikers and joggers, students
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and office employees, are once again passing in and out of the frame. Alex lies
down on well-kept grass and shuts his eyes before Manila by day.
As exemplified by its closing sequences, Manila by Night foregrounds what David
Frisby has identified as characteristics of modernity, which are also characteristics
of city films — “abstraction, circulation and movement, and monumentality” (20).
While the film could be characterized as monumental in quite a number of ways
(e.g., the ambition, the peak in the auteur’s oeuvre, the number of stars in the
cast, etc.), the density, complexity, and symmetry of the narrative that correspond
to the density, complexity, and symmetrical mapping of spaces are the notable
testaments to Manila by Night’s monumentality as city film. The closing sequences
also resonate with many a city film that attempts to equate metropolitan spaces
with fragmented visualization, episodic narratives, and abstract and associative
juxtapositions both in terms of mise en scène and montage (Mennel 25).
It is precisely in representing aspects of lived spatiality, the visualizing of
the failure of creating an ideal, but nevertheless coming up with a recognizable,
cognitive map that Bernal instead bares the feelings of anxiety, weariness, and
fear that conceived spatiality exists to conceal. Bernal’s map of Manila fleshes out
precisely the sprawling urban conditions, so that the senses of urban coherence,
order, and beauty remain as potentials within the screen space and not necessarily
the perceived city spaces.
At the other end of the spectrum from the desire to cognitively map the city is
the complete refusal to depict vistas of cityscapes. This, again, would be an easy
way of construing Manila by Night vis-à-vis the panoramic mapping tendencies of
the Marcoses and the critical milieu that originally received it — that the film is the
dismemberment of the vision of the city that is purportedly whole.
In his essay “Walking in the City,” from The Practice of Everyday Life (1984),
de Certeau writes of a vista of the city seen from above that makes the spaces
appear lifeless (fig. 5). He argues that such a vista of the cityscape is premised
on purging the city of “the obscure interlacings of everyday behavior” (99) — its
multiple encounters, its heterogeneous crowds. “The seeing god created by this
fiction,” de Certeau asserts, must “make himself a stranger” to the lived dimension
of city spaces and “know only corpses” (96). “The city-panorama,” he asserts, “is
a ‘theoretical’ simulacrum: in short, a picture, of which the preconditions for
feasibility are forgetfulness and misunderstanding of processes” (99).
In his discussion of the city, de Certeau privileges instead the “walker”
(Wandersmänner) (100), which resonates with the figure of the flâneur (cf.
Benjamin), who purposelessly appropriates the spaces with little regard for their
original conception by the planners and designers. Much of de Certeau’s essay
characterizes the “many-sided, resilient, cunning and stubborn” “microbial
processes” of the walkers that resist “the purview of the panoptic power” (100).
These walkers exceed and recalibrate pockets of lived spaces (metonymically
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Fig. 5. Lifelessness from above: a recent shot of Manila after night.
(Photo courtesy of Ilsa Malsi, used with permission)
associated with garbage, pollution, noise) and, in the process, interfere with the
project of governance and transparency.
Those who do not cohere with and conform to the official conception of the
City of Man are what Bernal himself centrally conceives in Manila by Night. He
privileges the walkers as well. The camera itself is peripatetic, restless, moving in and
out of spaces, going from place to place through the maze of the streets, the editing
rhythmic, varied and alive. On the one hand, these characters are the incarnations
of lived spatiality. By virtue of framing the city on ground level, we see not corpses
but lived lives — slipping between the spaces of conceived governmentality and
invisible in the cityscape. Hence, if the characters in Manila by Night are walkers,
then they may be productively figured as binary oppositions to the “corpses” bred
by the Marcosian cityscape.
On the other hand, and unlike de Certeau’s idea of the walker, purposeless,
imbibing and adapting the city spaces aimlessly, the characters in Manila by Night
are not romantic walkers. They are also not like Walter Benjamin’s idea of the
flâneur who is pleasantly lured and lost in the city. They are running for their lives,
running after their lives. It is palpable how Bernal denies the viewer any reassuring
“erotics of knowledge” and proffers instead only the “physical, mental and political
pollutions” of the concealed and repressed (de Certeau 92–94). It is at this point
that Manila by Night is nearest and farthest from the project of Maynila: Sa mga
Kuko ng Liwanag. That is, while both films were premised on lifting the veil, on
exposing the contradictions and violence of Marcosian modernization, Maynila
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preferred linearity, chronology, and dramatic development (arguably the same
modes utilized by the Marcoses in their myth-making project, therefore making
Maynila a real counter-discourse), while Manila by Night preferred nonlinearity,
spatiality, and the “configuration of social formation” (cf. David, “Primates” 88–90).
In these terms, we can think of Manila by Night as a “thirding,” as the visualization
of the possibilities and necessities of thirdspace geography. Bernal does more than
to describe (or even prescribe) a resistance to oppression, as does Maynila: Sa
Mga Kuko ng Liwanag. The conventional historico-political reading of Manila by
Night actually recreates binarisms. That is, it argues, in effect, that the illegibility of
Bernal’s film is an opposition to the conceived legibility of authoritarian urbanism.
But Bernal, as mentioned, is on ground level, preoccupied by individual lived
lives. The process of following these individuals as they walk and run around the
city spaces allows us to read these spaces and see how our spatial imaginary takes
shape. The process, the how, the liminality are foregrounded. Manila by Night is
not tragedy but irony.
It is, thus, crucial to sidestep de Certeau’s binarism — as Soja’s “thirding”
demands — of the fossilized vista fictioned by the technocrats and the purposeless
embodiment of spaces by the walkers. In other words, as Soja insists, it cannot be
simply an either/or question. The convergence of the historical significance, the
narrativized sociality, and the production of spatial imaginary in Manila by Night
suggest that instead of a macro-micro binarism, the film comments on both (and
more). It has shifting perspectives of the city projected on the screen space through
various characters’ fields of vision. In fact, the attempt of Bernal to formalize the
illegibility of the city through its multicharacter, plotless, and unevenly patterned
narrative is his attempt at panorama on ground-level, if that is at all possible — and
it is possible in the thirdspace that is Manila by Night. The film is a reclamation of
panorama — different from the technocrat’s panorama but the same in its desire
for legibility and aesthetic pleasure. But it also represents the walker’s inability to
see the cityscape, to see the space from a distance, from above, as she moves in the
midst of noise and filth, unable to view the city as a whole. Even the spectators who
have followed several characters in many different directions throughout the film
still do not have the view of the cityscape but only the dense city spaces. Unlike the
blindness of the walker, however, the film projects the vision of a process.
The film is emblematic of the way in which illegible cities — perceived, conceived,
and lived — occasion the foregrounding of the spatial imaginary as always partial
and open-ended and, therefore, always activated by lived spatiality. The experience
of watching these characters run around narrow city streets, through interiors
and atop roofs, and vicariously living the shortness of breath, the anxiety of being
caught, the tiresomeness of aimlessness ensure that we have both the (desire for
the) vista of the technocrat and the (desire for the) blindness of the walker. That
is, in any case, we desire both, in the same way we desire legibility and illegibility
both. The experience of watching Bernal’s conceived city, as exemplified by the
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final sequence of running and walking which concludes with an open ending, is
also an approximation of the lived city.
The density is registered in the act of movement, but it cannot ultimately
account for the movement itself. This movement of bodies, of the camera, in
Bernal’s Manila by Night makes the experience of Manila dense — almost like the
anthropologist’s idea of “thickness” — and allows space for the ambivalence of
hating and loving Manila, the opposing realities of lightness/day and darkness/
night, the interactions between people and their interiority/exteriority, between
the social and the psychological.
By the end of the film, after Alex has run and walked the city spaces, we are yet
again on another threshold. Manila by Night is revealed to be a threshold — toward
somewhere, to be sure. What is certain is that Alex is not headed — symbolically,
if not literally — back home, the space presented in the opening of the film. But, as
Clodualdo del Mundo asserts, “Whatever Alex does, he will surely be in the city: he
is a creature of the city” (92).
To what altered image of the city Alex exactly wishes to wake up to is anyone’s
guess. Certainly he will awaken with the vision of the same city; but what has become
apparent — in any case, to the viewer, if not to Alex — is the desire for an altered
city. And this desire, registered as a partial and open-ended map, also intimates
the open-ended possibilities and processes of the city. Moreover, the panorama
on ground level, mapped through all the walking and running, is an insistence
that while we cannot have it literally, the view from above is always already being
pursued. In this way, Bernal posits a teleological drive, a destination, represented
by the density of his mapping of the city spaces which does not preclude arrival.
Notes
1.“Heterotopia” refers to spaces of otherness that function in non-hegemonic
conditions. The metaphor that Michel Foucault uses to describe heterotopia is
the mirror, which is a space that creates and conditions an image that is actually
not there. See Foucault. “Homeplace” refers to a haven of a space where one
can be oneself; bell hooks, who coined the term, writes that such a space is
“where we return for renewal and self-recovery, where we can heal our wounds
and become whole” (49), but it also refers to a radical position of resistance and
marginality (152). The “third space of enunciation,” as used by Homi Bhabha,
is a cultural space “where the negotiation of incommensurable differences
[among global and national cultures] creates a tension peculiar to borderline
existences” (218).
2. The themes of rural-versus-urban spaces and the tragic plight of the migrants
in the “big city” have been emblematized by Brocka’s Maynila: Sa mga Kuko
ng Liwanag, to be discussed at length in this paper. This film was adapted from
Edgardo M. Reyes’s Sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag (1968), which typified the same
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themes in the context of Tagalog literature and the novel (cf. S. Reyes). In
Manila by Night, the theme of rural-versus-urban spaces is internalized, as it
were. Or, in Manuel Caoili’s terms, the urban spaces have become “ruralized.”
Rural folk, from places like Olongapo, Cebu, and Iloilo, who have migrated
to the shantytowns of the city, comprise a good number of the primary and
secondary characters, yet there are no references to the rural spaces in idealized
or nostalgic idioms. Interestingly, moreover, a number of these characters also
dream of finding “greener pastures” beyond Manila, such as in Saudi Arabia
and the United States. Notably, this formation of urban-poor spaces in the film
is located in Manila towns formerly and historically occupied by the rich of the
land — Tondo, Santa Cruz, Quiapo, Santa Ana, Ermita, and Malate.
3. The experience of the two Asian nations earlier mentioned provides comparative
insight here. Singapore and South Korea, with the Philippines, were part of
the IMF -World Bank postwar “experiment” in politico-economic structural
adjustment among “less developed countries.” But these two nations’ insistent
protectionism, strategic trade policies, rising wages for their people, coupled
with their efficient bureaucracy and “benevolent dictatorships” (Broad xixxx, 4, 30, 40–47, 117, 189–90, 205), among others, have engendered city films,
like Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore documentaries, and a festival like South Korea’s
Busan (Pusan) International Film Festival. Tan’s works, such as “Moving House”
(2001), Singapore GaGa (2005), and Invisible City (2007), are city films in so far
as they register silenced histories, marginalized figures, repressed voices, and
“alternative visions” (cf. K. P. Tan). But they are unlike many city films in world
cinema history in their brightness, literally and figuratively. For various reasons,
and for better or worse, darkness, filth, and noise are hardly indexed in Tan’s
visualization of urban spaces. Meanwhile, the Busan International Film Festival,
held annually since 1996 in the second biggest city in Korea, has signified the
industrialization and globalization of Korean cinema, both as an Asian cinema
benefactor and as a leading figure in world cinema (cf. Stringer and Shin). The
festival has functioned, among other things, as a showcase of Korean films side
by side with international films, as a “gateway” of the national cinema to the
international circuit, and as a springboard for partnerships and co-production
initiatives (Shin 54–55).
4. For more discussion on the relationship between the MPP and the Marcos
regime and the MPP ’s nationalist programme, see Campos, “The Intersection.”
5. To qualify, the politicized critical milieu of the times defined by critics
such as Lumbera and the rest of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, the
first film critics group in the Philippines, does rely on and may be said to
have championed historicized criticism, especially as a counterpoint to the
“anachronisms” of Ferdinand Marcos’s idea of “democratic revolution” and
accelerated modernization. In fact, the MPP was founded in 1976, in the thick of
the Marcos regime (after the declaration of Martial Law in 1972 and before the
People Power uprising in 1986), and was then only beginning to carve out of the
mass, as it were, a more historically attuned brand of film criticism. As such, its
critical engagements, which appeared mainly in the form of terse and popularly
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legible film reviews published in newspapers and magazines, were primarily
expressed in the language of (many times subtle) politico-ethical engagement
of the Marcosian system meant for the general reader. However, given both the
nascent critical milieu and the threatening state censorship, there had yet been
no space for more nuanced critiques which took to account a more spatialized
understanding of both history and lived experience.
Works Cited
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Special Literary Section: Manila by Night
Ishma
Reuel Molina Aguila
University of the Philippines
Marne Kilates
Ateneo de Manila University
About the Author
Reuel Molina Aguila is a Professor of Filipino and Philippine literature at the University of
the Philippines. He is a Hall of Fame awardee at the Palanca Literary Contest, and has won,
among several other distinctions, lifetime achievement awards from the Unyon ng mga
Manunulat sa Pilipinas [Writers Union of the Philippines], Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino
[Philippine Language Commission], and the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He
was head writer for ABS -CBN Foundation and the scriptwriter of Behn Cervantes’s Sakada
(1976, uncredited; credited as script supervisor) and Bawal na Pag-ibig [Forbidden Love]
(1977) as well as Lino Brocka’s In Dis Korner (1982).
About the Translator
Marne Kilates has published four books of poetry, numerous translations of major works
from Filipino into English, and was recently holder of the Henry Lee Irwin Professorial
Chair for Creative Writing at the Ateneo de Manila University. He has won the Carlos
Palanca Awards, the NBDB -Manila Critics Circle National Book Awards, and the SEA
WRITE Award given by Thai royalty. He publishes and edits the online literary journal The
Electronic Monsoon Magazine at <http://www.electronicmonsoon.com>.
Author’s Note
Haibun is a Japanese verse form that combines poetic prose and short poetry. Matsuo
Basho, pseudonym of Matsuo Manefusa (1644-94), is credited as the inventor of this
form. When Westerners researched his poetry, they simply took away the short poems,
which would then become known as the haiku; they set aside the prose. Unknown to the
Westerners, the prose was integral to the whole poem, which would become known as the
haibun. Only then would the West admit that there was such a thing as a prose poem.
The group known as the Beat poets introduced the haibun to America. They
experimented extensively with the form. Whatever amount of prose, whatever amount of
short poetry, even if the short poem was not a haiku, as long as the prose and the haiku
were combined in one poem, it was a haibun. The Beats’ experiment went as far as creating
the haibun novel — a novel interspersed with poems and whatever else. Thus, as part of
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Filipino poetry, the haibun might combine prose with such short forms as the tanaga,
bugtong, haiku, tanka, etc.
The poem “Ishma” is part of an anthology being refined for publication, perhaps the first
haibun anthology in the Philippines.
Ishma
Siya ang aming waiter ngayong gabi. Walang halong biro, at ngumiti pa siya nang
ulitin niya ang aming inorder na beer. Siya rin ang may-ari ng munting salusaluhang nakausli sa kalye malapit sa Kalayaan; siya, na batikan at iginagalang na
direktor sa pelikula. Siya, na ang salita ay utos na dapat sundin; siya ang susunod sa
aming salita ngayong gabi.
Sanay na raw siya sa ganoong pagsisilbi. Dati sa Grey November, isang joint sa may
Ermita. Kababalik niya raw noon, noon pang dekada sisenta, bata pa s’ya; sabay
nakiupo sa amin, mula sa paghahanap ng sarili, sa Uropa. Tapos nagliwaliw siya
sa pelikula. Akala niya, doon niya makikita ang sarili. Hindi pala, sabay pakawala
ng malagom niyang halakhak na waring pumaimbulog sa gabing mabituin na wari
ding inggit sa ningning ng kanyang mga mata.
Kamakailan lang daw niya nakita ang sarili, pero may ilang taon na rin ang nakakaraan.
Mabilis daw ang panahon tulad ng paglagok ng beer; di mo namamalayan ang
pagkaubos. Pulutan? Bigla niyang putol. On me, sabay tayo na hindi na hinintay
ang aming sagot. Labis ang saya niya ngayong gabi. Basta na lang siya nagkuwento
ng kanyang buhay; at marami kaming napulot.
In love kasi ako. Humalakhak na naman siya. At humalakhak din kami sa muli
niyang pag-upo, dala-dala ang hipon yata iyong nilasing. Hindi raw kami malasinglasing kaya ‘yong hipon na lang. Tawanan uli kami. In love kasi si Ishma.
Kanina, bago umuwi
ang araw sa kung saan man,
habang nagtatalo pa
ang liwanag at dilim …
umibig akong muli.
Isang batang lalaki,
mag-isa, tahimik
sa gitna ng pagmamadali –
pag-aagawan ng masasakyan,
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Aguila (Trans. Kilates) / Ishma
168
ano ang kanyang laban?
May backpack na mas mabigat
kaysa sa kanya, isang payong
sa isang kamay, walang
mababanaag na pagkabalisa;
mabining nakisiksik at nakasakay.
Isang pamilya ang pumuwesto
sa bangketa, pinapasuso ng ina
ang sanggol, ang tatay
naglatag ng hapunan at karton,
nagkamay ang dalawa,
sumandal pa sa pader,
nagkwentuhan habang dinaraanan
ng mga paang nagmamadaling
umuwi sa kani-kanilang bahay.
At ngayon napaibig na naman ako,
sa saliw ng napaagang magbabalot,
sa isang ginabing nagpapasan ng kurus –
isang katre, inilalako sa kalye.
Paano ka ba naman di iirog
sa kapwa Pilipinong nakikimahok
sa dagok ng lipunang bulok,
di nagsisilbi ng kalinga’t ikaiigi.
Bawat pagsisikap ay makislap na sining
ng pakikibaka upang mabuhay:
dingin ang mang-aawit, sa bangketa,
nangangapang tinig sa ihahagis na barya.
Masdan ang mananayaw, sa pilapil,
indak sa kahirapang hindi susukuan;
ang mima, sa daungan at pabrika
sa tunay na trahedyang iniigpawang pilit;
ang makata, sa palengke, sakayan, tindahan,
mga bersong nananawagan ng tangkilik;
ang eskultor, sa tagpi-tagping bahay
ang pintor, sa makulay-madilim na buhay.
Ay, kay sarap silang ibigin.
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Aguila (Trans. Kilates) / Ishma
169
Dahil sa pag-ibig na ito, natuto rin siyang magsilbi; hindi lang sa mga kaibigan niya.
Natuto na rin daw siyang magsilbi sa mga walang kaya, sa mga aba, inaapi, mga
hindi makapagsabi ng kanilang damdamin. Natutunan na niyang maging tinig ng
mga saloobin, ng mga hangarin nila para sa maaliwalas na bukas.
Wala na sa aming tumawa. Lumagok ako ng mahabang lagok ng beer, saka
nagkalakas ng loob para magtanong. Sa isip ko, ilang taon ko na ring nakatrabaho
siya kaya may karapatan na ako, siguro.
Bakit? Paano? Ikaw? Marami akong gustong itanong. Pero hindi ako nagkalakas
ng loob. Basta na lang siya nagkwento nang kwento. Tawanan kami nang tawanan.
Masarap ang ganitong pag-ibig, wika niya; paulit-ulit.
Nagbiro pa siya: Kung gusto ninyo, hugasan ko ang inyong mga paa. Tumagay kami
at namulutan sa di namin akalaing huli niyang hapunan.
. . . . .
He was to become our waiter tonight. No, this is not a joke; he even smiled at us as
he repeated our orders for beer. He’s also part-owner of that tiny joint1 that jutted
out into the street near Kalayaan;2 he who was the famous film director, whose
words were our orders; he was to heed our orders tonight.
He was used to doing such serving, he said. He used to do it at Grey November, a
joint in Ermita. He had just returned then, that was back in the seventies, when he
was young; at this point he sat down with us at our table, back from searching for
himself, in Europe. Then he strayed into film. He thought he would find himself
there. He didn’t, then let out that all-embracing laughter of his, which seemed to
hurtle into the starry night, which in turn seemed resentful of the twinkle in his
eyes.
He had found himself recently, he said, though it could have been a number of years
now. Time flew, he said, like the way we drank our beer; you don’t notice and your
glass is empty. Finger food to go with the beer? He interjected quite abruptly. On
me, he said, as he stood up without waiting for an answer. He was quite so happy
tonight. He simply started opening up, talking about his life; and we learned plenty.
I was in love, you know. He gave that guffaw again. And we laughed in return as he
sat down with us again, bringing that shrimp dish called “drunken.” He couldn’t get
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Aguila (Trans. Kilates) / Ishma
170
us drunk, he half-complained, so he brought the “drunken shrimps” instead. We
laughed some more. Ishma,3 you know, was in love.
This afternoon, before the sun
could go home to wherever,
while day and night
were still quarelling …
I fell in love again.
A young boy,
alone, so quiet
in the middle of all the haste –
the hustle for ride,
how could he survive?
He carried a backpack that looked heavier
than he was, an umbrella
in one hand, he looked
unperturbed;
he calmly and gently pushed into
crowd and took his ride.
A family found their place
on the sidewalk, the mother was nursing
her baby, the father
laid down their dinner over cardboards,
the two of them ate with their hands,
rested their backs against the wall,
conversed amid the many feet
hurrying home.
And now I had fallen in love again,
amid the calls of the early balut vendor,
to someone caught by night carrying his cross –
a bed-frame being hawked on the street.
How would you not love
your fellow Filipino struggling
against the blows of a rotten society
offering no care nor comfort.
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Aguila (Trans. Kilates) / Ishma
171
Every individual effort to live is a shining art
of struggle and survival:
Listen to the singer, on the sidewalk,
groping for coins thrown to him.
Watch the dancer, on the rice field,
stepping to poverty’s rhythm, to which
he will not surrender;
the mime, at the pier and factory
in the true tragedy he must surmount;
the poet, in the marketplace, bus stop, shop,
whose verses call for love;
the sculptor, in patchwork shanty,
the painter, of the colorful-bleak life.
Oh, how sweet it is to love them.
Because of this love he learned to serve; not only his friends. He learned to serve
those who had nothing, the humble, the oppressed, those unable to express
themselves. He learned to become their voice, the voice of their dreams of a better
future.
Then we stopped laughing. I took a long draught at my beer, and felt a bit more
confident to ask him a question. I thought we had spent some years working
together, so I had somehow earned the right to ask, perhaps.
Why? How? You? I had a lot to ask him. But I balked. So he kept talking and talking
about almost anything. We kept laughing and laughing. I love this love, he said,
repeatedly.
He even joked: if you want, I’ll wash your feet. We filled and raised our glasses and
picked our finger food on this we didn’t know was to be his last supper.
Notes
1. Kasalo it was called; meeting place for writers and artists. With Ishma managing
the place were the poet Tomas Agulto and the photographer Alex Baluyut.
2. Kalayaan Street, beside the Quezon City Hall.
3. Ishmael Bernal (one of his nicknames, a diminutive of “Ishmael”).
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 166–171
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Special Literary Section: Manila by Night
Manila By Night
Story, Screenplay, and Direction: Ishmael Bernal
Transcription and Notes: Joel David
English Translation: Alfred A. Yuson
Forum Editor’s Note
Since the film had been improvised from a short sequence list, Ishmael Bernal originally
commissioned me to transcribe the material from low-end cassette tapes, which had to be
returned to the producer in less than a week. When the movie was released with extensive
cuts and deletions, I suggested publishing the transcription to “out,” so to speak, the integral
material, at least in print; when he acceded, I added descriptions from my memory of a
few screenings. The result was titled “A Review Exclusive: Manila by Night” in The Review
(March 1981): 23–41. With the advent of digital recording, I was eventually able to correct
several errors in the original. Many thanks to Theo Pie for scanning and rekeying from
scratch and assisting with vocabulary, to Bryan Quesada for providing the best possible
enhancement of the digital file, and to CorvicBoy Cuizon for processing visual material.
Review editor Celina S. Cristobal took considerable risk in agreeing to publish the original
transcription during martial law, while Bayani Santos, Jr. has been maintaining Bernal’s
legacy with more care and enthusiasm than it had enjoyed during his lifetime; through
their efforts we are able to avail of this opportunity to glimpse the visionary brilliance
and transgressive sensibility of Bernal in Manila by Night. Photo sources (all used with
permission): The Review (through Celina S. Cristobal), everything except for Seqs. 2, 11, 21,
22, 27, 33, & 34 (Bernardo Bernardo); and Seq. 3d (Mowelfund Film Archive).
About the Translator
Krip Yuson is the author of 25 books of poetry, fiction, essays, translation, travel, and stories
for children. He is a Palanca Literary Awards Hall-of-Famer and has won numerous literary
distinctions, including the SEAW rite (Southeast Asian Writers) Award given annually in
Bangkok. A sometime theater and film actor, FAMAS awardee for screenplay, and longtime
member of the Movie and Television Ratings and Classification Board, he also teaches
poetry and fiction in Ateneo de Manila University, writes and edits biographies, corporate
coffee table books and literary anthologies, and contributes a regular arts and culture
column for the national broadsheet The Philippine Star.
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© Ateneo de Manila University
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173
Opening Credits [as presented onscreen,1 over theme music — new frames are
indicated by semi-colons, lines are separated by slash marks, asterisks mark spelling
differences or older names]: Charito Solis; Alma Moreno; Lorna Tolentino; Rio
Locsin; Cherie Gil; Gina Alajar; Orestes Ojeda; William Martinez; Manila by Night;
Bernardo Bernardo; Johnny Wilson; Jojo Santiago; Sharon Manabat; with the special
participation of Maya* Valdes; also starring Rolly Lapid / Rey Tomenes / Bong
Benitez / Roger Saulog; Dante Castro / Tony Angeles / Perry Fajardo / Lucy Guinto*;
Pinky Shotwell / Vangie Labalan / Aida Carmona / Abbo dela* Cruz; story and
screenplay Ishmael Bernal; script consultants Jorge Arago / Toto Belano / Jose
Carreon / Rick* Lee / Peque Gallaga / George Sison; music Vanishing Tribe; director
of photography Sergio Lobo (f.s.c.*); film editor Augusto Salvador; asst film
editors Toto Natividad / Efren Salvador; field soundman Bing de Santos / asst
cameraman Pio Interno; publicity head Bibsy Carballo; publicity staff Lolita
Solis / Rod Samson / Alfie Lorenzo; filmed thru the facilities of Regal Films,
Unit 1 / unit maintenance Jovencio Davad* / Roger Radan; color processing
LVN Laboratories, Inc.; post production facilities Magna-Tech Omni; sound
supervision Vic Macamay; sound effects Abbo dela* Cruz; project coordinator
Douglas Quijano; production manager Felix Dionisio; production design Peque
Gallaga; art director Ronnie Lazaro / costumes Bing Fabregas* / crowd director
Kokoy Jimenez / props Roy Lachica; associate director Warlito M. Teodoro;
executive producer Lily Monteverde; directed by Ishmael Bernal
Seq. 1: Virgie’s house. Early evening. Int.–ext.
Virgie’s house is a typical middle-class subdivision home with a manicured garden. Bicycle
wheels rolling on pavement. People going home from office or school. Alex, Virgie’s eldest
son, 18 years old, is by the fence talking to a friend. Virgie, fresh from a shower, appears in
the doorway.
VIRGIE Alex.
ALEX
Ma?
VIRGIE Akala ko ba may lakad tayo?
ALEX’S FRIEND
Good evening ho.
VIRGIE Good evening.
(To Alex) Sabi mo’y guest mo kami. Aba
ako’y naligo na.
ALEX
Oho ma, sandali lang. Susunod na ako.
VIRGIE
Hindi ba a las nueve ang kanta mo?
Ako, ayoko ng nahuhuli. Ang mga
kapatid mo?
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VIRGIE Alex.
ALEX
Ma?
VIRGIE I thought we were going out?
ALEX’S FRIEND
Good evening, Ma’m.
VIRGIE Good evening.
(To Alex) You said we’d be your guests.
I’m ready to go.
ALEX
Yes, Ma, a minute. I’ll just follow.
VIRGIE
Doesn’t your gig start at 9? I don’t want
to be late. What about your brother and
sister?
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
ALEX
Si Albert po yata nagba-basketball pa.
VIRGIE
Anong nasa basketball? Tawagin mo! Si
Ella?
ALEX
Na kina Menchu ho. Hindi ho yata
sasama e.
VIRGIE
Aba, ayoko ng ganyan. Usapan natin
may lakad tayo, sama-sama tayo,
pagkatapos merong isang hindi
pupwede. Aba hindi maaari! Sige
tawagin mo, nakakabwisit naman.…
(Father’s car horn honks) O ayan na ang
daddy mo. Buksan mo ang gate.
ALEX
O sige pare, sandali lang ha?
174
ALEX
I think Albert’s still in the basketball
court.
VIRGIE
What? Call him then! And Ella?
ALEX
She’s at Menchu’s. I think she’s not
coming along, Ma.
VIRGIE
Uh-oh, I don’t like this. We agreed to
go out, all together. And now someone
can’t make it? That can’t be! Call them!
This is getting irritating.… (Father’s car
horn honks) Oh, that’s your Dad. Open
the gate.
ALEX
Hey, buddy, a minute, okay?
Father’s car enters driveway. Virgie and Alex meet him. We hear sounds of banging on
corrugated iron.
FATHER
O ba’t hindi ka pa nakabihis?
ALEX
Si Mommy naman OA . A las nueve pa
naman yon, Dad.
VIRGIE
O mabuti na yong nauuna kaysa
nahuhuli. Ay punyeta, naririyan pa pala
ang mga karpintero ko! (To carpenters
working on roof ) Mang Romy, madilim
na. Bukas na yan.
MANG ROMY Oho, sandali na lang ito.
VIRGIE O sige ho.
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FATHER
Hey, how come you’re not dressed up
yet?
ALEX
Wow, Mommy’s overacting again. Dad,
it isn’t until 9 p.m.
VIRGIE
Well, it’s better to be early than late.
Aww, darn, my carpenters are still here!
(To carpenters working on roof) Mang
Romy,2 it’s getting dark. Just come back
tomorrow.
MANG ROMY Yes, Ma’m. Just a bit and
we’re done.
VIRGIE Oh, okay.
© Ateneo de Manila University
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175
Seq. 1a: Dining room.
Virgie, her daughter Au-Au, and maid are setting the table.
VIRGIE
Kunin mo yong paboritong achara ng
daddy mo ha?
AU-AUOpo.
VIRGIE (To maid)
Ilagay mo yan diyan ha; kaninong baso
ito?
MAID
Kay Albert po.
VIRGIE Saan nakaupo si Albert?
MAID
Dito po.
VIRGIE Di diyan. Tandaan mo ha?
MAID
Opo.
VIRGIE
Hey, bring out your daddy’s favorite
pickled papaya, okay?
AU-AU Yes, Mom.
VIRGIE (To maid)
Set it there. Now whose glass is this?
MAID
Albert’s, ma’m.
VIRGIE And where does Albert sit?
MAID
Here, ma’m.
VIRGIE
Then set it there. Remember that, okay?
MAID
Yes, ma’m.
Seq. 1b: Bathroom.
Father is taking a shower.
VIRGIE
Daddy? Daddy! Sabi mo a las siete ka
uuwi. Ngayon seven quarter na. Nahuli
ka!
FATHER
Pasensya ka na, ang daldal nung
kliyente ko.
VIRGIE Dalian mo’t kakain na tayo.
FATHER Oo, susunod na ako.
VIRGIE
Daddy? Daddy! You said you’d be home
by 7. It’s 7:15! You’re late!
FATHER
Yes, sorry. My client wouldn’t stop
shooting his mouth off.
VIRGIE Well, hurry as dinner’s ready.
FATHER Okay, go ahead, I’ll catch up.
Seq. 2: Folk music nightclub. Int.–ext. Night.
Alex, accompanying himself on the guitar, sings Graham Nash’s “Teach Your Children.” The
folkhouse is full. Alex’s family watches him proudly. Manay, a couturier with a crush on
Alex, swoons over him. Kano, a lesbian drug pusher, enters and transacts business with
Alex’s friends. Suddenly a gunshot rings out and mayhem ensues.
*FATHER Mommy, pabayaan mo yan!
Ako’ng bahala diyan! Huwag mong
pakialaman yan! Alex, umalis ka diyan
sabi!
*VIRGIE Umalis ka diyan! Alex umalis ka
diyan! Ano’ng ginagawa mo diyan?!
*FATHER Mommy, keep away! Let me
handle it. Leave it to me! Alex, listen to
us! Get away from there!
*VIRGIE Get away from there! Alex, get
away from there! What are you still
doing there?!
Lines marked with an asterisk (*) are simultaneous/overlapping.
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Seq. 2a: Nightclub Driveway.
People pour out of the folkhouse. Manay and other gays converge in driveway.
GAYS
Hintayin niyo ako! Huwag mo akong
hilahin! Nakaka-tense! Ay, nakakaloka!
Ayan, kasi liligaw-ligaw! Ang salamin
ko! Ayan, ang kalandian ninyo (Kano
bumps into them) – ay kiki niyo! Halika
na nga! Halikana kayo.
GAYS
Wait for me! Hey, stop pulling me! This
is terrible! It’s driving me crazy! Must
be a love angle! See what that gets you!
My glasses! See what flirting gets you!
(Kano bumps into them) – Oh you
cunts! C’mon, let’s get away from here!
Let’s go!
Seq. 3: Sauna Turko. Int.–ext. Night.
Kano, listening to Jeff Beck’s “Led Boots” on a portable transistor radio, walks into Sauna
Turko, on Roxas Boulevard.
RECEPTIONIST (On phone)
Hindi ko nga maintindihan kung ano
ang gusto. Matapos akong bugbugin,
gusto akong do-hin. Nung minsan nga,
nasa simbahan kami, sa Santa Cruz pa,
gusto ba naman akong hipuan. Sinipa
ko ngang bigla! (Gets joint from Kano)
TY . (On phone) Sabi ko sa kanya, kung
gano’n ang trip niya, pumatol na lang
siya sa bakla!
KANO (To manager)
Boss, ang siyota ko naman.
MANAGER (Teasing her)
Ang lagay, e….
KANO
Yaan mo, oorosin kita bukas. Sige na o.
RECEPTIONIST (On phone)
I tell you, it’s a headache for me. I don’t
know what he wants. First he beats
me up, then he wants to do me. One
time, we were even in church, in Sta.
Cruz, and he wanted to feel me up. So I
kicked him. (Gets joint from Kano) TY .3
(On phone) Told him if that’s his kind of
trip, then he should hook up with some
gay!
KANO (To manager)
Boss, how’s my darling?
MANAGER (Teasing her)
Well, what’s your offer?...
KANO
Don’t worry, I’ll butt-fuck you
tomorrow. C’mon.
Seq. 3a: Lounging area.
Gaying watches amusedly as Bea, a blind sauna attendant, quarrels with another sauna girl.
BEA
Hoy, burat mong may kupal! Kahit
pinagbili ako ng nanay ko, mabili ako! E
ikaw, ano’ng ginagawa mo rito? Kaya ka
inaamag dito, kasi ang baho mo!
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BEA
Well, fuck you! I may have been sold by
my mother, but I sell! What about you,
what are you doing here? Nobody takes
you, cuz you stink!
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
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Top: Sequence 2; Bottom: Sequence 3b
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
GIRL
Ba putang to, kung magsalita akala mo
kung sino. Para sabihin ko sa yo, ikaw
ang hindi naghuhugas, paano hindi mo
nakikita ang iyo.
BEA
Bruha! Putang to! Akala mo kung sino
ka, nagmamalinis ka pa! Buwisit na
to, pareho lang naman tayo ng kalibre!
Pagkatapos sasabihin mo sa akin –
MANAGER
Tama na yan! Bea, nandiyan si Kano.
BEA
Gaying tara. Huwag kang madaan-daan
sa Misericordia, puta ka!
GIRL
Landi!
178
GIRL
Well, fuck you too, you whore! You
think you’re somebody, the way you
mouth off! I’ll tell you, it’s you who
don’t wash up, cuz you never see yours!
BEA
Bitch! Motherfucker! Who do you think
you are!? You asshole, we’re in the same
fucking business! And you think you’re
somebody?!
MANAGER
Cut that out! Bea, Kano’s here.
BEA
Gaying, let’s go. Don’t you ever find
yourself in Misericordia,4 you bitch!
GIRL
Cunt!
Seq. 3b: Reception area.
BEA
Kano, sama naman ng timing mo, puta
ka e. Nakipag-away ako doon sa loob.
KANO (already high)
Oy mare.
BEA
Mga buwisit, mga leche! (Sniffs) Ang
sarap ng amoy mo, a. Hmp! Akala nila
makakaya nila ako.
KANO My idol.
BEA
O, ano bang idol ang pinagsasasabi mo –
ay! (Kano grabs her)
BEA
Hey, Kano, such bad timing, you
asshole. I was in a fight inside.
KANO (already high)
Howdy, podner.5
BEA
Fucking bitches! (Sniffs) Hey, you smell
good. Hmp! They think they can step all
over me? Assholes.
KANO My idol.
BEA
Hey, what are you saying? Heyy!
(Kano grabs her)
Gaying giggles as Kano and Bea struggle on the floor.
*KANO
Halika nga dito. Ano, lalaban ka?
Bibiyakin kita!
*BEA
Ay, bitiwan mo ako! Naku, kung naging
lalaki ka lang, kinapon na kita! Ano ka
ba! Kung lalaki ka kakapunin kita.
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*KANO
C’mon, give it to me. You wanna fight?
I’ll bang you hard!
*BEA
Hey, let me go! If you were a man I’d
castrate you! Stop that! If you’d been a
man I’d cut your balls off.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
KANO
Halikan mo ko, sige na. May regalo ako
sa yo, e.
BEA
Regalo muna.
KANO Halik muna.
BEA
Basta regalo muna.
KANO Halik muna.
179
KANO
C’mon, give me a kiss. I have something
for you.
BEA
Let me have it.
KANO Kiss me first.
BEA
Give it to me first.
KANO Kiss me first.
Seq. 3c: Corridor.
Kano, Bea, and Gaying walk toward roof.
KANO
First class na first class ang regalo ko sa
yo, mare.
BEA
Hu, yung huling bigay mo, nahilo lang
ako.
KANO
What I have for you is top-rate, podner.
First-class!
BEA
Yeah? What you had the last time just
got me dizzy.
Seq. 3d: Rooftop.
Kano faces city from rooftop and shouts.
KANO
Oowee! I love you Manila, kahit ano ka
pa man: bata, matanda, mabaho, pangit,
babae, lalaki, bakla o – (amused by selfreference) tomboy. Halika, blow tayo!
(Kisses Bea)
BEA
O, hindi ka na nagsawa.
KANO (attempts to light a stick of pot)
Hindi ko ma-light, pa-light nga, o!
(Flicks lighter by Bea’s breasts)
BEA
Sige, sunugin mo’ng suso ko, sige!...
Alam mo, pupunta ako ng Saudi e.
KANO Sasama ka na naman kay Greg
Williams, no?
BEA
Siyempre, pinasusunod yata niya ako.
KANO
Putanginang Greg Williams
na yan! (Leans on rooftop edge)
Magpapakamatay na ako, huwag ninyo
akong aawatin! Magpapakamatay
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KANO
Oowee! I love you Manila, whatever
you are: young, old, stinky, ugly, girl,
boy, homo, or – (amused by selfreference) tomboy. C’mon, let’s blow!
(Kisses Bea)
BEA
Don’t you ever tire of it?
KANO (attempts to light a stick of pot)
Can’t light it up! Hey, can I have a light!
(Flicks lighter by Bea’s breasts)
BEA
Go ahead, burn my tits!... You know
what, I’m going to Saudi.
KANO You’re going with Greg Williams
again, right?
BEA
Of course. He wants me to follow.
KANO
Fuck that Greg Williams! (Leans on
rooftop edge) I’ll kill myself, don’t
anybody stop me! I’ll really kill myself!!
I’m jumping off, I’m killing myself!
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
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Sequence 3d
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
na talaga ako! Tatalon na ako,
magpapakamatay ako!
BEA (pushing her forward, laughing)
Sige, magpakamatay ka, sige!
KANO
Tarantado ka, hindi mo talaga ko mahal,
no?
BEA
Mahal, siyempre. Binibigyan mo ko ng
damo, e…. Shotgun ulit!
181
BEA (pushing her forward, laughing)
Go ahead, kill yourself, do it!
KANO
Why, you fool, you really don’t love me,
do you?
BEA
Of course I love you. You give me dope,
right?... C’mon, another shotgun!6
Kano blows directly from lit end of joint into Bea’s nose, then Gaying’s, who fans away the
smoke. The three, now all high, look out at the city lights of Manila.
Seq. 4: D’ Remark Kitchenette. Int.–ext. Night.
Eva Eugenio’s “Tukso” plays on jukebox, beside which a man flirts with a waitress,
girlfriend of the restaurant’s Chinese owner. Febrero, a taxi driver, arrives and exchanges
smiles with his girl Baby, a waitress.
CHINESE OWNER’S RIVAL
Mamayang labasan aantayin kita diyan
sa may simbahan ha.
WAITRESS
Alam mong may trabaho ako dito e,
hindi ako puwede mamaya.
CHINESE OWNER’S RIVAL
Intindihin mo yung Intsik na yon! Basta
ang importante magkita tayo.
WAITRESS
Hindi nga puwede. Ayan nakatingin na
sa tin!
CHINESE OWNER’S RIVAL
Pambihira ka naman e.
WAITRESS 2 (to a customer)
Hoy ikaw ha, hwag mo akong lolokohin.
Hihipuin ko yung bayag mo!
CHINESE OWNER’S RIVAL
When you’re done here, I’ll wait for you
by the church, okay?
WAITRESS
You know I still have much work here. I
can’t meet you later.
CHINESE OWNER’S RIVAL
Never mind that Chinaman! What’s
important is that we see each other.
WAITRESS
I told you I can’t. He’s already looking
at us!
CHINESE OWNER’S RIVAL
Oh, come on.
WAITRESS 2 (to a customer)
Hey, you, don’t give me any bull. Or I’ll
have you by the balls!
Baby spills some beer on her customer.
WAITRESS 3
Ikaw talaga, hindi ka na natuto.
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WAITRESS 3
Why can’t you ever learn?
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
BABY
E papano? (Spills beer on counter)
WAITRESS 3 Ang burara mo!
182
BABY
But how? (Spills beer on counter)
WAITRESS 3 You’re so clumsy!
Hot Chocolate’s “Sexy Thing” plays on jukebox while Chinese owner signals to waitress to
come over.
WAITRESS
Sabi na sa yo, e. Nakakainis!
WAITRESS
See what I told you. Damn it!
Man shrugs then dances. Chinese brings waitress to kitchen where he tells others to go out
in Chinese before confronting waitress.
CHINESE
O bakit lalandi-landi ka kanina do’n?
WAITRESS
Hindi naman ako naglalandi, kinukulit
lang naman ako. Tsaka maaari ko ba
namang gawin sa yo yon, e ikaw lang
naman ang mahal ko? O sige, para
huwag ka nang magalit, (kisses him) o
ayan. May kiss ka na magagalit ka pa.
CHINESE
So why were you flirting out there?
WAITRESS
I wasn’t. He was pestering me. And how
can I do that to you, when you’re the
only one I care for? Here, so you stop
being pissed, (kisses him) there. You get
a kiss, you’ll still be pissed?
Meanwhile among customers, Baby approaches Febrero.
BABY
Balikan mo ako pag labasan, ha?
FEBRERO
Oo. Ang ganda-ganda mo.
BABY
Come back for me when we’re done for
the night, okay?
FEBRERO
Sure. You’re so beautiful.
Seq 4a. Cocktail lounge row on M. H. del Pilar St.
After closing time, Febrero drives Baby home in his taxi.
BABY
Kailan tayo pakakasal?
FEBRERO Malapit na.
BABY
“Malapit na.” Mamaya mo matulad ako
sa mga babae doon sa restaurant, puro
mga dalagang ina.
FEBRERO
Hindi, naghihintay lang ako. Mag-iponipon lang tayo.
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BABY
When are we getting married?
FEBRERO Soon.
BABY
“Soon.” For all I know, I could wind up
like all those girls in the restaurant, all
of them single mothers.
FEBRERO
No, I’m just biding my time. Until we
have enough saved up.
© Ateneo de Manila University
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Seq. 4b: Baby’s house, a crowded tenement on Harrison Blvd.
Baby alights from Febrero’s cab.
BABY
O sige ha.
FEBRERO Sige ha, ingat ha.
BABY
Okay, see you.
FEBRERO Okay, take care.
Baby walks amid arguing prostitute and pimp toward her house.
PIMP
Bakit beinte pesos lang binigay mo sa
kin kanina?
PROSTITUTE
E hanggang doon ang binayad sa kin, e.
PIMP
Nasa Del Pilar ka na yan lang kinikita
mo?
PROSTITUTE
Alam mo naman hanggang Del Pilar
lang ako e. Alam mong hindi ako
papasa sa Boulevard.
PIMP
Magkano ba ang kinita mo nitong
linggong ito?
PROSTITUTE Siento beinte.
PIMP
Siento beinte lang?
PIMP
So how come I only got 20 pesos from
you?
PROSTITUTE
But that’s what I got paid.
PIMP
You’re already on Del Pilar and you earn
only that?
PROSTITUTE
You know I can only do Del Pilar. You
know I can’t make it to the Boulevard.7
PIMP
So how much was your take this whole
week?
PROSTITUTE Hundred-twenty.
PIMP
That’s all? Hundred-twenty?
Baby enters house.
MOTHER Baby.
BABY
Inay.
MOTHER O, gusto mong magkape?
BABY
Wag na ho, inaantok ho ako.
MOTHER
Tatandaan mo’ng mga sinasabi ko
sa yo, ha. Huwag kang mahihiya pag
nagtitinda ka ng sweepstakes ha.
Sinasabi ko ha.
MOTHER Baby.
BABYMa.
MOTHER You want some coffee?
BABY
It’s all right, ma, I’m sleepy.
MOTHER
Just remember what I tell you, okay? No
shame to be selling sweepstakes tickets,
okay? I’m telling you.
Baby walks through congested room and undresses amid sleeping brothers and sisters.
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Seq. 5: Adel’s house in San Nicholas. Int.–ext. Night.
Adelina Macapinlac,8 in nurse’s uniform and carrying a large red bag, walks toward the
house she shares with Febrero, her live-in lover. She enters courtyard and washes off her
make-up. Febrero, already in underwear, waits on bed. When Adel knocks he pulls a
latch-string to let her in. She washes her face, pausing to look at her reflection, then goes to
Febrero. They kiss passionately.
ADEL
Teka muna, magbibihis muna ako.
ADEL
Wait, I’ll change.
She undresses her nurse’s uniform in front of him, locks her red bag in a cabinet, then
makes love to him. They are interrupted by a crying child, whom Febrero cradles while
Adel prepares some milk formula.
FEBRERO
Tama na. Sumosobra naman ang baby
ko. Pinagtitimpla ka na ng gatas.
FEBRERO
Quiet down, baby, you’re getting a bit
much. Your milk will be ready in a
while.
Seq. 6: Virgie’s house. Int.–ext. Day.
After breakfast, the children are preparing to go to school.
VIRGIE
Au-Au, andiyan na ang sundo mo.
ALEX
Mommy.
VIRGIE (To maid)
Akina iyang baon ng anak ko.… (Notices
maid’s appearance) Talagang hindi tayo
nagkakaintindihan. Di ba sinabi ko na
sa yong lagyan mo ng clip iyang buhok
mo, baka mapunta pa yan sa pagkain ng
anak ko.
MAID
Lalagyan na ho.
ALEX (interrupting)Mommy.
VIRGIEO?
ALEX
Di bale na lang ho.
VIRGIE
Au-Au, the schoolbus is here.
ALEX
Mommy.
VIRGIE (To maid)
Give me my son’s allowance…. (Notices
maid’s appearance) Oh no, we really
don’t understand one another, do we?
Haven’t I told you to use a hair clip?
Your hair could get into my children’s
food.
MAID
I’ll wear it, ma’m.
ALEX (interrupting)Mommy.
VIRGIE Yes?
ALEX
Oh, never mind.
Seq. 6a: Driveway.
Virgie walks Au-Au to gate.
VIRGIE
Hija ito ang baon mo. Yung hotdog,
yung paborito mo. Mamaya pagsundo
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VIRGIE
Here’s your lunchbox, dear. Hotdogs,
your favorite. Listen, when I pick you
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
ko sa yo doon ka na lamang sa may gate
at hindi kung saan-saan kita hinahanap
ha.… Masarap ba ang may mommy?
AU-AU Masarap.
VIRGIE O kiss.
AU-AU Babay!
VIRGIE Babay!
186
up later, just wait by the gate, okay, so I
don’t have to look around for you.... Is it
nice to have a mommy?
AU-AU It’s nice.
VIRGIE Give me a kiss.
AU-AU Bye-bye!
VIRGIE Bye-bye!
Au-Au rushes to schoolbus full of unruly classmates as her sister Ella comes out of the house.
MANG ROMY
Magandang umaga po, Misis.
VIRGIE
Halikayo Mang Romy. (While leading
the carpenters to the side of the house)
Yung bubungan ko naman, bilis-bilisan
nyo naman at may papagawa ako sa
inyo doon sa may likuran. Yung bakod
na nasira no’ng nakaraang bagyo, e
taas-taasan nyo at matibay.
MANG ROMY Oho.
VIRGIE Sige na.
MANG ROMY
Good morning, Missus.
VIRGIE
Come over here, Mang Romy. (While
leading the carpenters to the side of the
house) I really wish you can fix up my
roof faster, as there’s still work to do in
the backyard. The wall got damaged in
the last typhoon. So make it higher and
sronger.
MANG ROMY Yes, ma’m.
VIRGIE Okay.
Seq. 6b: Bathroom – Bedroom.
VIRGIE Albert?
ALBERT
Ma?
VIRGIE
Papano ka ba naman maligo? Basangbasa ito! Baka elepante ang naligo dito a.
Nagdi-disco ka pa yata dito.
ALBERT Paano naman ho akong maliligo
nang hindi mababasa itong banyo?
VIRGIE
Ba’t pag ako ang naliligo, yan lamang
ang nababasa? Talaga kayong dalawang
magkapatid, buong banyo nababasa.
Sige doon ka na. (Walks to kitchen and
sees maid) Aber, tingnan nga kita? (Sees
clips in maid’s hair) O pagkatapos mo
dyan, yung basahan sa banyo iligpit
mo, basang-basa. (Enters her sons’
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VIRGIE Albert?
ALBERT
Ma?
VIRGIE My goodness, how do you take
a shower? It’s all wet in here! Was it an
elephant that washed up here? Or were
you disco-dancing?
ALBERT But how can I take a shower
without the bathroom getting wet?
VIRGIE
Well, how come when I take a shower,
only this part gets wet? But with you
boys, the whole bathroom gets wet.
Anyway. (Walks to kitchen and sees
maid) Well, can I see if you’ve done it?
(Sees clips in maid’s hair) Okay, when
you’re done here, get that rag from
the bathroom, it’s all wet. (Enters her
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Bernal / Manila by Night
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Top: Sequence 6b; Bottom: Sequence 6c
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
room, which is in a mess) Hay naku
Diyos ko, sa tuwing papasok ako sa
kuwarto ninyo, gusto kong himatayin!
Ipikit ko na lang kaya ang mata ko?
(Picks up smut magazine on bed)
Naku, nakakatakot umupo dito, baka
ano pa’ng maupuan ko. O ano kayong
dalawa?
ALBERT Ako mommy, paalis na.
VIRGIE (to Alex) O ikaw?
ALEX
Mommy, hindi ako papasok e.
VIRGIE Bakit?
ALEX
Naubos ko na po yong allowance ko e.
VIRGIE
Naku, na naman? Hindi ka na ba
magbabago? (Performs exasperation)
Ayoko na ayoko na ayoko na! Hindi
ka ba naaawa? Sa ano’ng akala mo sa
daddy mo, tumatae ng pera? Aba e
hirap na hirap na ako sa pagpapalaki sa
inyong magkakapatid a. Ikaw namang
panganay ka, imbis na makatulong ka,
nagpapahirap ka pa!
ALEX
Kaya lang naman po naubos ang pera
ko, e sa pakikisama. Kasi po yung ibang
barkada ko, lagi na lang sila ang nagboblowout. Napahiya ako, siyempre nagblowout na rin ako.
VIRGIE
E why do you live beyond your means?
May allowance ka, magtipid ka! E
kung sabihin ko sa yo ngayon nagblowout ako, wala tayong pambili
ng pagkain, wala tayong kakainin? O
kaya nag-shopping ako, wala kayong
pang-matrikula? Aba kahit hindi tayo
mayaman, pagdating ng matrikula
meron akong ibinibigay sa inyong pera.
Aba, hindi ako katulad ng ibang ina
diyan, kung kani-kanino nangungutang
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188
sons’ room, which is in a mess) Oh my
Lord, every time I come in here, I feel
I’m gonna faint. Should I just close my
eyes? (Picks up smut magazine on bed)
Oh my, I can’t even sit down anywhere
here, can’t tell what I could be sitting
on. Well, you two, what goes?
ALBERT Me, I’m about to go, Mommy.
VIRGIE (to Alex) And you?
ALEX
Mommy, I’m not going to school.
VIRGIE Why not?
ALEX
I got no more allowance.
VIRGIE
What? Again? Won’t you ever change?
(Performs exasperation) I can’t stand
it any more! Have you no mercy?
What do you think your dad does, shit
money? My God, I’m having such a
tough time raising you kids! And you’re
the oldest, and yet instead of helping
out, you make it worse!
ALEX
The only reason I run out of allowance
is because of friendship. All the time,
it’s my gang-mates that pay the bill. I
get embarrassed, so sometimes I have
to pick up the bill too.
VIRGIE
So why do you live beyond your means?
You have an allowance, make it last!
What if I tell you now that I picked
up the bill for some friends, so that
I’ve run out of money for food, and so
we don’t have anything to eat, what
then? Or that I went shopping for
myself and I ran out of money for your
school enrolment? Why, even if we’re
not well off, when matriculation time
comes, I have money to give you so
you can enroll in school. I don’t want
to be like other mothers who have to
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
pag school opening. Ako hindi, palagi
akong handa.… (Turns sentimental)
Hindi lamang nyo nalalaman, gabi-gabi
pinagdadasal ko kayo. E papano, ang
buhay ninyo balu-baluktot. Papano
kung wala na ako, wala ang daddy
ninyo, papano na kayo? (To Albert)
O ano?
ALBERT
Alis na ko, ma. (Kisses Virgie, who
momentarily forgets and smiles)
VIRGIE
Uwi agad pagkatapos ng klase.
(Frowning, to Alex) E papanong hindi
ako magse-sermon, e paulit-ulit ka sa
kasalanan mo? E di paulit-ulit din ako.
Sige, ikukuha na kita!
189
take out loans when school opens. Not
me. I’m ready with the money for your
schooling.… (Turns sentimental) You
may not know it, but every night I pray
for all of you. Because of the way you
lead your lives. What happens when
I’m not around anymore, and your
daddy’s gone, too, how will you cope?
(To Albert) How?
ALBERT I’m going, Ma. (Kisses Virgie,
who momentarily forgets and smiles)
VIRGIE
Come home right after school.
(Frowning, to Alex) So how do I stop
giving sermons, when your sins don’t
stop? So I can’t stop sermonizing, too!
Okay, okay, I’ll get you your allowance.
Seq. 6c: Bedroom.
As Virgie looks for money under stack of boxes inside closet, father, on bed, tickles her side
with his foot.
FATHER ’Ney –
VIRGIE Ano ba!
FATHER (entreating for sex)
Sige na.
VIRGIE Ang aga-aga, e.
FATHER Halika na, ’ney.
VIRGIE Ang aga-aga naman, e.
FATHER Five minutes lang, sige na.
VIRGIE Nakakainis naman, e.
FATHER ’Ney, ’ney, sige na.
VIRGIE Umagang-umaga naman e.
FATHER
Sige na ’ney, ’ney. (Father grabs Virgie
from behind, mashing her breasts, and
hauls her onto bed.) O – ahh!
VIRGIE Ay, nakikiliti ako!
FATHER Ang bango e.
VIRGIE
Tama na! Mamaya na, mamaya na!
FATHER Bango kasi e!
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FATHER Hon –
VIRGIE Hey, stop that!
FATHER (entreating for sex)
Come on.
VIRGIE It’s too early.
FATHER Come here, hon.
VIRGIE Too early for that.
FATHER Just five minutes, come on.
VIRGIE What a bother you are.
FATHER Hon, come on, hon.
VIRGIE But it’s so early in the morning.
FATHER
Come on, hon. (Father grabs Virgie
from behind, mashing her breasts, and
hauls her onto bed.) Oh – ahh!
VIRGIE Hey, you’re tickling me!
FATHER You smell so sweet.
VIRGIE Stop it! Later, later!
FATHER But you smell so sweet!
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
VIRGIE (exchanges kisses with him)
Tama na.
FATHER (Getting aroused)
Halika!
190
VIRGIE (exchanges kisses with him)
Okay, stop it.
FATHER (Getting aroused)
Come on!
Someone knocks on door. Virgie extricates herself and arranges her hair. Father, fly still
open, pretends to sleep.
VIRGIE Ha, e, tuloy.
ELLA
Mommy papasok na ako.
VIRGIE
Tingnan ko’ng mukha mo. (Ella shows
her face is clear of makeup) Sige.
Sunduin kita mamaya ha. A, four-thirty
ha?
ELLA
Opo. Sige po Mommy. Babay!
VIRGIE
Bye. (Father starts up again, Virgie
rejects him) Huwag mo nga akong maganyan-ganyan. Ikaw hindi mo iniisip
kung paano gumastos ang mga anak
mo.
FATHER Ano ba naman –
VIRGIE
E ayoko e. (Knocks are heard again,
Virgie affects formality and Father turns
away) Tuloy.
MAID
May naghahanap hong babae diyan sa
inyo sa labas.
VIRGIE O sige.
VIRGIE Yes? Come in.
ELLA
Mommy, I’m going.
VIRGIE
Let me see your face. (Ella shows her
face is clear of makeup) All right. I’ll
pick you up later. At four-thirty, okay?
ELLA
Yes, okay. Mommy. Bye-bye!
VIRGIE
Bye. (Father starts up again, Virgie
rejects him) Will you stop it? You never
even consider how your children spend
their money.
FATHER What the heck –
VIRGIE
I don’t want, that’s that. (Knocks are
heard again, Virgie affects formality
and Father turns away) Come in.
MAID
Ma’m, a woman’s outside, asking for
you.
VIRGIE Oh, okay.
Seq. 6d: Living Room.
Virgie is stunned at the presence of an overweight elderly woman, in cheap but skimpy
attire, about the same age as her.
MIRIAM
Hoy, Virgie! Hoy!... Nakakainggit ka
naman ngayon. Donyang-donya ka
na. Siguro hindi mo na ako kilala:
si Miriam, yung taga-Misericordia?
O. (Virgie nervously fingers rosary
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MIRIAM
Hey, Virgie! Hey!... How you’ve come
a long way, how I envy you! You’ve
turned into such a queen. Maybe you
don’t even remember me anymore.
I’m Miriam, from way back in
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
beads around her waist) Kasi nung
Miyerkoles nagsimba akong Baclaran.
Naku, nakita ko ba naman ang putang
(Virgie is taken aback by Miriam’s
cusswords) si Minnie. E siya nagsabing
dito ka nakatira. Kaya sugod agad ako,
kasi ang laki ng problema ko e. Ikaw
lang ang makakatulong sa akin e. Magusap naman tayo o.
VIRGIE Ha? Mag-usap tayo?
MIRIAM
Oo.
VIRGIE (goes back and forth between patio
and sala)
Dito tayo. Ah, dito. Ah, dito. Ah, dito,
dito na.
MIRIAM (follows Virgie into sala)
Naku ikaw nga si Virgie, hindi pa
nagbabago ugali mo e.
VIRGIE Upo ka.
MIRIAM
Ang ganda naman ng sala mo. Ang
ganda ng set mo. Ang mga bata? Hindi
ko man lang inabutan Siyanga pala o,
manggang hilaw para sa yo.
VIRGIE (sets the green mangoes on the
table then rubs her hands)
Salamat ha. (To her maid) Osang, ang
alcohol ko!
MIRIAM
Naku alam mo, hirap na hirap na kami
sa Misericordia. Alam mo naman, yung
mga ginagawa namin, ginagawa na
ng mga sauna girls. Tapos yong mga
parak, ang taas ng hinihinging tong.
O, e alam mo naman – trenta pesos
lang ako isang chupa. E sa trenta, dose
lang napupunta sa akin – ano pa’ng
mangyayari sa buhay ko? Ngayon, sabi
ni Minnie, yung asawa mo malakas
ang koneksiyon sa pulis. Baka kako
makatulong sa amin, o.… Ay, ito
palang manggang hilaw – pasensiya
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Misericordia? (Virgie nervously fingers
rosary beads around her waist) You
know what, last Wednesday I heard
Mass in Baclaran.9 And you know
whom I saw? Why, that whore (Virgie
is taken aback by Miriam’s cusswords)
Minnie. And it was she who told me
where you live now. That’s why I rushed
over, cuz I have such a big problem.
And you’re the only one who can help
me. Let’s talk about it, okay?
VIRGIE What? Talk about it?
MIRIAM Yeah.
VIRGIE (goes back and forth between patio
and sala)
Here, let’s stay here. No, here. No, no,
here, here, let’s stay here.
MIRIAM (follows Virgie into sala)
Oh wow, you’re still the same old Virgie,
you haven’t changed.
VIRGIE Sit down.
MIRIAM
What a nice living room you have. Nicelooking sala set, too. Your kids here? A
pity I didn’t catch ’em. Oh, by the way,
here’s some green mango for you.
VIRGIE (sets the green mangoes on the
table then rubs her hands)
Thanks. (To her maid) Osang, get my
alcohol bottle!
MIRIAM
You know what, we’re having such a
miserable life in Misericordia. As you
may know, what we do, the sauna girls
are doing too. And the cops, they’re
charging so high for protection. Now,
as you must know, I only get 30 bucks
for a blowjob. And out of that, only 12
bucks get to me. So how do I live a life?
Now, Minnie said your husband has a
strong connection with the cops. He
might be able to help us, I thought. Oh,
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
ka na, walang bagoong, e. Yun
ba namang putang nagpunta sa
Pangasinan nangako ng bagoong, tapos
nakalimutan.
VIRGIE
Huwag kang magagalit, ha? Bakit
hanggang ngayon nandidiyan ka pa rin?
MIRIAM Talagang gano’n, e.
VIRGIE
Anong talagang ganyan? Mangyari kasi
inisip mong hindi ka na magbabago!
E kung nilagay mo ba naman sa isipan
mo, hinigpitan mo yang utak mo,
susunod yang isipan mo sa pagbabago.
Aba’y tingnan mo ako: mangyari
inisip ko, kaya sumunod ang utak
ko sa pagbabago. Ikaw, tingnan mo:
hanggang ngayon nandidiyan ka pa rin.
Hindi ka na magbabago! Naintindihan
mo ba’ng sinabi ko?
192
so sorry, by the way, I didn’t get to bring
salted shrimp fry for that green mango.
Damn that whore who went home to
Pangasinan,10 she promised to bring
back salted shrimp fry, but she forgot.
VIRGIE
Don’t get upset, okay? But let me ask
you, why are you still there?
MIRIAM Well, that’s life.
VIRGIE
What do you mean that’s life? It’s a
problem if you don’t think you can
ever change. But if you put it in your
head, and you keep it there, then
everything will follow, you can’t help
but change. Why, look at me: I put it in
my head, that I will change, and so I did.
But look at you, until now you’re still
there. You’ll never get to change. You
understand what I’m saying?
Seq.7: Manay’s shop. Int. Day.
MARICHU (knocking on Manay’s door)
Maria Cristina? Hoy. Teresa, ano ba?
Tanghali na. Beth, hoy ano ba. Dali,
bangon na. Maria Cristina, bangon na.
MANAY (still groggy)Hm?
MARICHU (knocking on Manay’s door)
Maria Cristina? Hey, Teresa, c’mon! It’s
noon already. Beth, hey! C’mon, quick,
get up. On your feet, Maria Cristina.11
MANAY (still groggy)Hmm?
Manay, naked except for thong underwear, wakes up beside a similarly naked sleeping
male partner and opens door.
MARICHU (whispers)
Andiyan si Febrero sa labas!
MANAY (awakened by the news)
Puta ka!
MARICHU
At saka si Vasquez, at ang buong
College of Engineering ng La Salle.
MANAY
Hwag kang maingay! I-delay mo muna
sila. Yung gown in Vasquez na kay
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MARICHU (whispers)
Febrero’s out there!
MANAY (awakened by the news)
Oh fuck!
MARICHU
And Vasquez, and the entire College of
Engineering of La Salle.12
MANAY
Hush, quiet down! Hold them there.
Vasquez’s gown is with Caring. Tell her
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
Caring. Sabihin mo i-rush, dali! Naku,
maloloka ako sa inyo – (Gay leaves
but Manay calls him back) Marissa!
(Manay beckons gay back)
MARICHU
O ano yon?
MANAY Huwag mong papapasukin
si Febrero dito ha?
MARICHU
Oo, oo, oo.
MANAY Hintayin mong sabihin ko sa yo.
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to rush it! Rush it! Oh no, I’ll go crazy –
(Gay leaves but Manay calls him back)
Marissa! (Manay beckons Gay back)
MARICHU
What?
MANAY Don’t let Febrero in here,
okay?
MARICHU
Ya, ya, ya.
MANAY Wait until I tell you.
Manay wakes up sleeping man.
MANAY Hoy, kuwan, kuwan – ano
ba’ng pangalan mo? Punta ka sa banyo,
magtago ka agad, nandiyan ang juwawa
ko. Dali, dali! (Manay hides man in
bathroom)
MANAY Hey, you – what’s your name
again? Quick, go to the bathroom, hide
in there, my boyfriend’s here.13 Quick,
quick! (Manay hides man in bathroom)
Evita,4 in living room, holds court amid gays, students, and Febrero.
EVITA (apparently responding to news of Manay’s late awakening)
By the ejaculation of all the saints in heaven, my third husband was also an insomniac,
but he was already up and about – and you know what I mean by “up” especially –
before sunset!
MARICHU
MARICHU
Sandali lang, titingnan ko yung gown
Wait a minute, I’ll check on your gown.
mo. (To gay dressmaker) Caring!
(To gay dressmaker) Caring! Caring,
Caring, yung gown ni Evita kailangan
that gown for Evita is needed tonight.
mamayang gabi.
DRESSMAKER Just some hemming.
DRESSMAKER Lilip na lang.
EVITA
Oh my God, Caring, don’t do what you
EVITA
did to me last week. Why, Aspiras was
Oy por Dios, Caring ha. Huwag mong
my guest, and my back was full of safety
uulitin yong ginawa mo sa kin last week.
pins!14
Aba’y guest ko pa naman si Aspiras,
panay imperdible ang likod ko!
MARICHU
MARICHU
Hey, Caring, that’s needed today, so
O Caring, mamaya yan, dalian mo ha?
rush it, okay?
*EVITA (talking about Manay again)
*EVITA (talking about Manay again)
Ito naman si Manay Sharon, practically
Aww, heck, this Manay Sharon, it’s
turn of the century na, nasa
practically the turn of the century, and
Consciousness Two pa.
he’s still at Consciousness Two.15
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*MARICHU
Febrero, lalabas na yon, naghihilamos
lang.
EVITA (looking at the students)
Gusto na yatang kumanta ng Vienna
Boys Choir.
194
*MARICHU
Febrero, he’ll be out soon, he’s just
washing his face.
EVITA (looking at the students)
I think the Vienna Boys Choir wants to
start singing.
Manay and man are in bathroom where Manay washes his face.
MANAY Hoy, pag andiyan ang juwawa
ko, huwag kang mag-iingay ha. Huwag
kang kikibo. Huwag kang uubo, huwag
kang babahing, huwag kang uutot, ha!
MANOo.
MANAY (looking into mirror after washing
his face) Ay naku, bakla pa rin!
MANAY Hey, if my boyfriend comes in,
just stay quiet, okay? Don’t say a thing,
don’t even cough, don’t sneeze, don’t
fart!
MANYes.
MANAY (looking into mirror after washing
his face) Oh, wow, still gay!
Evita continues talking in living room.
EVITA You know, chica, I met this
funny man last night. He was fixing
the locks of my tocador, and then he
proceeded ba naman to make me
kuwento. He said, “You know Miss
Vasquez, basta mabuhay, gagawin ko
ang lahat.” Ang sabi ko naman, “Really?”
Ang sabi niya, “I can fix radios, stereos,
and television sets.” And then, and
then he says, “Ako marunong magarouse.” “Arouse!” I screamed. Ang sabi
nya, “Kung gusto mo, kukunin ko yung
ubas, ikakabit ko sa wire, at ipapasok
sa –” well I don’t know how to put this
delicately so I’ll put it bluntly na lang “–
anus.” (As her gay audience laughs) Que
deliciously shocking, que horror!
MARICHU
O sinubukan mo naman?
EVITA Yes! (They laugh again)
MANAY (from bedroom)
Marichu, si Febrero papasukin mo na.
MARICHU
O Febrero, pumasok ka na raw.
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EVITA You know, chica, I met this
funny man last night. He was fixing the
locks of my dressing table, and what
do you know, he proceeded to chat me
up. He says, “You know, Miss Vasquez,
just to make a living, I’ll do anything.”
So I say, “Really?” He goes on: “I can
fix radios, stereos, and television
sets.” And then, and then he says, “And
I know how to arouse.” “Arouse!” I
screamed. And he says, “If you want, I
can get some grapes, attach a wire to
them and insert them in your –” well, I
don’t know how to put this delicately
so I’ll just put it bluntly “– anus.” (As
her gay audience laughs) Oh my, how
deliciously shocking, the horror!
MARICHU
So did you try it?
EVITA Yes! (They laugh again)
MANAY (from bedroom)
Marichu, you may tell Febrero to come
in.
MARICHU
Hey, Febrero, you can go in now.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
EVITA (referring to Febrero and the
students)
Naku, between Robert DeNiro and the
Vienna Boys Choir, siguradong panay
imperdible na naman ako mamayang
gabi. (Shouts out to Manay) Hoy Manay
Sharon, Bong Tangco’ng guest ko!
195
EVITA (referring to Febrero and the
students)
Oh my, between Robert DeNiro and
the Vienna Boys Choir, I’m sure I’ll be
full of safety pins again tonight. (Shouts
out to Manay) Hey. Manay Sharon, I
have a special guest, Bong Tangco!
Seq. 7a: Manay’s Bedroom.
Febrero enters Manay bedroom. They kiss.
MANAY (embracing and kissing Febrero)
Hay naku, hmm. (After some kissing)
O, you want some coffee?
FEBRERO Hindi na.
MANAY How about some juice? May
beer dito, malamig.
FEBRERO Hindi na, hindi na.
MANAY I have some chicken here, kung
nagugutom ka.
FEBRERO Mamaya na.
MANAY
Are you sure? Buti naman at dumalaw
ka, nami-miss na kita! Hmm! (Kisses
Febrero again)
FEBRERO (after kissing back)
May sakit ang anak ko e.
MANAY (familiar with the routine)
May sakit ang anak mo o mambababae
ka na naman?
FEBRERO (laughs a bit)
Hindi, may sakit talaga yon.
MANAY Baka naman ika’y
nagsisinungaling lang ha.
FEBRERO (smiling)
Ako ba naman magsisinungaling sa yo?
MANAY
Meron bang taong hindi
nagsisinungaling?
FEBRERO
Ako hindi. (Assumes serious expression)
Hindi, talaga, may sakit.
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MANAY (embracing and kissing Febrero)
Oh, my, hmm. (After some kissing)
You want some coffee?
FEBRERO Never mind.
MANAY How about some juice? There’s
beer, too, ice cold.
FEBRERO No, no more.
MANAY I have some chicken here, if
you’re hungry.
FEBRERO Maybe later.
MANAY
Are you sure? Good thing you dropped
by, I’ve been missing you so much!
Hmm! (Kisses Febrero again)
FEBRERO (after kissing back)
My kid’s sick.
MANAY (familiar with the routine)
Your kid’s sick, or you need it for
women?
FEBRERO (laughs a bit)
No, my kid’s really sick.
MANAY You sure you’re not shitting me?
FEBRERO (smiling) Me, shit you?
MANAY
Is there anyone who doesn’t ever come
up with bullshit?
FEBRERO
Not me. (Assumes serious expression)
Honest, my kid’s sick.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
MANAY
O siya, magdadatung na ako. You love
me?
FEBRERO I love you. (They kiss again)
MANAY
Ay naku, ewan ko ba. Ako kinakabahan
sa yo. Hindi ako naniniwala, e. Baka
akala mo hindi ko nababalitaan ha.
FEBRERO Huus.
MANAY
Ikaw daw may kinalolokohang waitress
ngayon, probinsiyana, sinusundo mo
gabi-gabi. (Febrero laughs nervously)
Itanggi mo. Itanggi mo. Kung hindi
babae siguradong may sward kang
kinalolokohan ngayon. Naku, kabisado
ko kayong mga taxi driver. Hindi mo
maikakaila sa kin yan. O ano, hindi ba
pagka gabi, sumakay sa inyo ang sward,
dadalhin kayo doon sa madilim sa
talahiban, any moment di-disappear na
yung ulo ng sward, makikita mo na lang
ang ulo ng taxi driver, hii-hii. (Mimics
orgasmic euphoria) O ano, itanggi mo.
O, ano’ng sakit ng anak mo?
FEBRERO Tigdas e.
MANAY
Two hundred, tama na yan. Yung kiss
ko. (They kiss again)
196
MANAY
All right, all right, I’ll give you money.
You love me?
FEBRERO I love you. (They kiss again)
MANAY
Oh, hell, I dunno. I get all antsy with
you. I just can’t believe you. You think I
don’t hear about what you do?
FEBRERO Jeez.
MANAY
I hear you’re crazy over some waitress,
some girl fresh from the boondocks,
and you pick her up in your cab every
night. (Febrero laughs nervously) Deny
it. Go ahead, deny it. If it’s not some
girl, it’s another homo. I know all about
you cab drivers. You can’t deny it. That
late at night, when some homo gets
in your cab, the poor wretch will have
you take him to some dark spot by
some empty lot with tall grass. And any
moment his head will disappear, and
only the head of the taxi driver stays
up, hii-hii. (Mimics orgasmic euphoria)
Go on, deny it. Anyway, what’s your kid
sick of?
FEBRERO Measles.
MANAY
Two hundred, that should be okay. How
about my kiss? (They kiss again)
Seq. 8: Girls’ school. Ext. Day.
Dismissal. Girls are going home or being fetched, some by their boyfriends. Among the
latter are Alex and his friends. Alex fetches his girl, Vanessa.
ALEX’S FRIEND
O saan tayo pupunta?
GIRLFRIEND Gusto ko sa Seven
Seas para libre pomada.
ALEX’S FRIEND
Sige!
VANESSA (To Alex) Sabado bukas, ha?
ALEX
Alam ko, magsisimba tayo.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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ALEX’S FRIEND
Where are we going?
GIRLFRIEND I want it at Seven Seas,
where there’s free lubricant.16
ALEX’S FRIEND
Okay!
VANESSA (To Alex) It’s Saturday
tomorrow, right?
ALEX
I know. We’ll go to Mass.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
VANESSA
E nung isang Sabado pumalya ka na, e.
ALEX
Papano kina Gerry ako natulog. Yung
maid ba naman nila hindi ako ginising.
VANESSA
Hm excuses, excuses. Ang taong hindi
marunong humarap sa Diyos, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera.
ALEX
Para ka namang nanay ko. Kaninang
umaga tatlong oras at tatlong oras
akong sinermonan.
VANESSA
Sabi nga sa kin ng nanay ko kaninang
umaga, “Vanessa, kung mag-aasawa
kayo ni Alex, aba’y mag-ipon-ipon
na kayo. At least kumuha kayo ng
lupang mahulugang unti-unti.” Sabi ko
naman, “Saan naman kukuha ng perang
panghulog ng lupa si Alex? E folk singer
lang yung tao – nawalan pa nga ng
trabaho e –” (Jesus freaks accost them
at the gate with leaflets) Oh thank you.
MAN (giving Alex and Vanessa a leaflet
each)
Jesus loves you. Jesus loves you.
WOMAN
Jesus loves you. (In foreign accent)
Mahal kita.
VANESSA
Thank you.
197
VANESSA
Last Saturday you didn’t show up.
ALEX
That’s cuz I slept over at Gerry’s. And
their maid didn’t wake me up.
VANESSA
Hmm, excuses, excuses. Somebody
who can’t face God, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera.
ALEX
You’re starting to sound like my mother.
Hell, this morning I had to listen to her
sermon for three fucking hours!
VANESSA
And my own mother told me this
morning, “Vanessa, if you and Alex are
getting married, you better start saving
up. At least get a piece of property that
you can pay for by installment.” So I
said back, “And where will Alex get the
money for any down payment for a
piece of property? Since he’s just a folk
singer, and he even lost his job –” (Jesus
freaks accost them at the gate with
leaflets) Oh, thank you.
MAN (giving Alex and Vanessa a leaflet
each)
Jesus loves you. Jesus loves you.
WOMAN
Jesus loves you. (In foreign accent)
I love you.
VANESSA
Thank you.
Seq. 9: Motel. Int.
Alex and Vanessa make love in the shower.
VANESSA Teka muna, ang mata ko. Ang
ginaw ng tubig, no?
VANESSA Wait a minute. My eyes! Oh, the
water’s so cold.
When they finish showering, Alex closes the faucet and they get out of the bathroom and
into the bedroom. Alex hands her a towel. They wipe themselves dry. As she combs her hair,
she approaches the bed, where Alex is.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
VANESSA
Urong nga o. (Alex moves aside for
her) Uwi mo akong maaga ha. Mommy
ko nagiging neurotic na sa aming
magkakapatid. Paano ba naman
yung utol ko tatlong araw nang hindi
umuuwi. Ewan ko kung ano ang
gagawin. Ayun, ipapa-Metrocom yata.
ALEX (clicks his fingers then heads for the
phone)
Pucha si Nonong muntik ko nang
makalimutan, tatawagin ko nga pala.
Ubos na yung stuff ko e. (On phone)
Hello, Operator? Outside line please.
(To himself) Buti na lang naalala kong
tawagan. (Sees Vanessa picking up
a sandwich) O, huwag ka munang
kumain, bababa ka. (Hums for a while;
on phone) Hello, Nong? Si Alex to. Oo.
O, yung pinag-usapan natin. Ano? Wow
pare, hassle. Sinabi ko sa barkada kong
meron. Wow…. Pano ngayon to? O sige,
bahala na next week, ha? Thank you na
lang.
VANESSA
Ano, wala ano?
ALEX
Wala. Hassle e. Tena na. (They kiss)
VANESSA
Alex, I love you.
ALEX
I love you also. Sandali ha....
(Gets a small box from his pants, takes
out necklace inside and hangs it on
Vanessa’s neck)
VANESSA
O, saan mo naman nakuha ito?
ALEX
Wala, inartehan ko lang si Mommy.
Sinabi ko ubos na ang allowance ko,
kasi ibo-blowout ko raw ang barkada e.
Bigay siya.
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198
VANESSA
Move over. (Alex moves aside for her)
Take me home early, okay? Mommy’s
turning neurotic over all of us kids.
Imagine, my bro hasn’t come home in
three days. No idea what happens next.
Mommy might sic the police on him.
ALEX (clicks his fingers then heads for the
phone)
Fuck, almost forgot. Gotta give Nonong
a ring. I’ve run out of stuff. (On phone)
Hello, Operator? Outside line, please.
(To himself) Good thing I remembered.
(Sees Vanessa picking up a sandwich)
Hey, hey, don’t eat yet, you’ll lose your
high. (Hums for a while; on phone)
Hello, Nong? Alex here. Yup, what we
talked about, man. What? Wow, man,
hassle. But I told my gang I’d have it.
Wow…. Now what? Oh, okay, next week
then, okay? Thanks anyway.
VANESSA
What, nothing?
ALEX
Ran out. Hassle. C’mon let’s do it.
(They kiss)
VANESSA
Alex, I love you.
ALEX
I love you also. Wait a minute....
(Gets a small box from his pants, takes
out necklace inside and hangs it on
Vanessa’s neck)
VANESSA
Hey, where’d you get this?
ALEX
Simple, I gave Mommy the act. Told
her my allowance had run out, cuz I’ve
been treating the gang. So she handed
me some.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
VANESSA
Hindi naman kaya magkulay-gray ito
pag nabasa?
ALEX
Loka hindi. Baka sa pangalawang beses
puwede pa.
VANESSA (laughs)
Thank you. I love you.
ALEX
I love you also. (They kiss anew, then lie
down to continue when Alex suddenly
gets up)
VANESSA (stopping him)
Alex, sandali…. O?
ALEXSaka muna, sandali lang.
VANESSA
Pambihira ka naman,
bitinero!
ALEXSandali lang.
199
VANESSA
Won’t this tarnish if it gets wet?
ALEX
Course not, crazy. Maybe when it gets
wet a second time.
VANESSA (laughs)
Thank you. I love you.
ALEX
I love you also. (They kiss anew, then lie
down to continue when Alex suddenly
gets up)
VANESSA (stopping him)
Alex, wait…. Hey?
ALEXWait a bit. Just a sec.
VANESSA
You’re leaving me hanging!
ALEXJust a bit.
He gets a popper from his pants’ pocket, they sniff from it alternately, then proceed with
their lovemaking.
Seq. 10: Bea’s House. Int.–ext. Day.
Bea’s house is a one-room affair on Misericordia. Greg Williams prepares for a trip while
Bea and her two kids watch.
BEA
Hoy ikaw Greg Williams ka, baka
naman pagdating mo ng Saudi e wala
na akong marinig sa yo. Pangako mo
ipapakuha mo ako, ha?
GREGOo.
BEA
Pag niloko mo ako, susugurin kita.
GREG
Hinde, mga dalawa-tatlong buwan lang,
pasusunurin na kita.
BEA
At saka itong mga anak ko, huwag
mo naman kakalimutang padalhan
paminsan-minsan. Alam mo naman
ang tatay ng mga ito kung sumipot –
mga luko-luko.
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BEA
Hey, you, Greg Williams, you sure I’ll
still hear from you when you get to
Saudi? You promised to send for me,
right?
GREGYep.
BEA
If you’re shitting me, I’ll go after you.
GREG
Naah, just give me two-three months,
then you follow.
BEA
And my kids, hope you don’t forget to
send ’em something once in a while.
You know how their dad’s forgotten all
about ’em.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
200
Top: Sequence 10; Bottom: Sequence 11
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
GREG
Oo, hindi ko makakalimutan yan,
parang mga anak ko na rin yan e.
GAYING (arriving from outside)
Ate Bea, Ate Bea – ay, Kuya Greg! Ate
Bea puwede bang bumale sa yo kasi
may sakit yung nanay ko e. Pambili lang
ng gamot.
BEA
Magkano?
GAYING Ano, diyes pesos lang.
BEA
Puro ka pera. Ang dami-dami mo nang
advance. Ang dami-dami nang perang
nakukuha sa akin.
*GAYING
Sige na.
*GREG
Sampung piso lang, bigyan mo na!
*BEA
Sige, kunin mo yung pitaka ko.
GREG
Pag nasa Saudi na ako, padadalhan kita,
dollars pa.
BEA (to Gaying)
O magkano yan? Magkano’ng natira?
GAYING Setenta y siete.
BEA
O tama. Sige, ibalik mo na
ang pitaka ko. Bumalik ka agad, ha?
Maliligo pa ako e. Maglilinis ako ng
bahay. Itong mga anak ko, ang dudumi
(sniffs) – hm, mga amoy araw pa. O,
magpaalam ka sa Kuya Greg mo. Aalis
yan, pupunta yan sa Saudi.
GAYING
Kuya Greg ha, yung Avon ko, ha?
GREG
Oo, kung gusto mo, tatambakan pa kita
ng Avon!
GAYING
O sige Ate Bea, thank you. Babalik ako
kaagad ha.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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201
GREG
Yep, sure, I won’t forget ’em, they’re
almost like my kids now, right?
GAYING (arriving from outside)
Ate Bea, Ate Bea – oh, Kuya Greg!17
Ate Bea, may I get an advance from you,
cuz my mom’s sick? Just to buy some
medicine.
BEA
How much?
GAYING Well, just ten pesos, please.
BEA
You’re always after money.
You’ve racked up so much advance pay.
You’ve asked for so much money from
me already.
*GAYING
Please.
*GREG
It’s just ten pesos, give it to her!
*BEA
Okay, get my wallet.
GREG
When I get to Saudi, I’ll send you
money anyway, in dollars at that!
BEA (to Gaying)
Okay, how much is there? How much
is left?
GAYING 77 pesos.
BEA
That’s correct. Okay, put back
my wallet where it was. Come back
right away, okay? I still have to take a
shower. I have to clean up around here.
These kids are so filthy (sniffs) – hmm,
and they stink, too. Hey, say goodbye to
your Kuya Greg. He’s leaving soon, he’s
going to Saudi.
GAYING
Kuya Greg, you promised me Avon
soap, didn’t you?
GREG
Yeah, if you want, I’ll send you tons of
Avon!
GAYING Okay, Ate Bea, thank you. I’ll be
back right away.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
202
Greg approaches Bea and starts kissing her. She starts up.
BEA
Yung mga bata. (To her kids) Mga bata
doon muna kayo sa pasilyo. Huwag
kayong lalayo, ha?
BEA
The kids. (To her kids) Hey, kids, go
over to the alley. But don’t stray too far,
okay?
The kids rush outside and play patty-cake.
SISTERS Juaniyo, Pancho, and Jose Mari / I like coffee, I like tea –
Back in the house, Bea motions to bed where she and Greg neck. Finally Greg gets up and
picks up his bags, but Bea holds him back.
BEA
GREG
BEA
GREG
BEA
ko?
GREG
BEA
GREG
Mahal mo ako?
Oo. (Kisses her)
Ipapakuha mo ako?
Oo. (Kisses her again)
Alam mo ang istorya ng buhay
Oo. (Kisses her for the last time)
Mahal mo ako talaga?
Mahal na mahal.
BEA
GREG
BEA
GREG
BEA
GREG
BEA
GREG
You love me?
Yes. (Kisses her)
You’ll send for me?
Yes. (Kisses her again)
You know the story of my life?
Yes. (Kisses her for the last time)
You really love me?
Love you so much.
Greg walks out of the house, passing by some guys at the corner who sing opening bars of
Florante’s “Pinay.” Bea meanwhile takes a bath, squatting on the floor and pouring water
from a barrel with a tub.
GUYS (singing)Dapat ka bang mangibangbayan? / Dito ba’y wala kang
mapaglagyan? / Tungkol sa bebot, dito’y
maraming okey / Dito ang kelot ay
kulang / Bakit pa iiwanan ang lupang
tinubuan? / Dito ka natutuo ng iyong
mga –
GUYS (singing)Do you have to leave the
country? / Don’t you have a proper
place here? / When it comes to girls,
here so many are okay / Here there
aren’t enough guys / So why leave our
native land? / Here’s where you learned
every –
Seq. 11: Adel’s House. Int.–ext. Night.
Adel steps out of outhouse wrapped in a towel. A neighbor in her congested slum
neighborhood consults with her.
*WOMAN (overheard)
Ella, yung pinsan ko sa Cebu sumulat sa
akin. Aba e akalain mo gusto dito raw
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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*WOMAN (overheard)
Ella, my cousin in Cebu wrote to me.
Imagine, she wants to come over and
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
sa akin tumira. E yung kita ko para sa
amin lang kulang na kulang pa –
*ADEL
O, nakabili ka na ba ng Tempra? O sige
ito, painumin mo four times a day ha.
MAN (to another neighbor)
Eba ano ba, yung mga anak mo nagkalat
sa lansangan. Para kang hindi nanay, a!
203
live with us. But the money I make isn’t
even enough for us here –
*ADEL
Well, did you get to buy Tempra? Okay
then, have the kid take it four times a
day.
MAN (to another neighbor)
Eba, hey, your kids are all over the
street. You’re not being a good mother!
Adel finds Manay and Febrero home. Manay has brought a box of gifts – canned goods,
pots and pans, dresses for the children.
*MANAY
Ito para sa mga bata, wala akong nabili
para kay Ade e.
*ADEL
Hoy Manay, andito ka pala. Ano to?
MANAY
O ayan. Ayan mga gamit, binili ko para
sa inyo, Ade. Ito, para sa yo ito o.
ADEL (holding umbrella)
Naku, ang cute-cute naman nito!
MANAY (gives her an ice bucket)
O ito, magagamit mo yan o. Ganda no?
ADEL
Naku, lalagyan ng ice!
MANAY
Ang dami kong dalang mga kakanin o.
ADEL
Naku may kaldero, may corned beef….
Naku salamat, ha? Sobra-sobra na ata
yan.
MANAY
Hindi. Alam mo na naman ang
gimmick ko sa buhay – Rosa Rosal.
ADEL
Manay, huwag kang magsawa sa amin,
ha? (Begins to groom herself)
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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*MANAY
These are for the kids. I couldn’t find
anything for Ade.
*ADEL
Hey Manay, good to see you here.
What’s this?
MANAY
Here you are. New clothes I bought for
you all, Ade. Here, this one’s for you.
ADEL (holding umbrella)
Oh wow, how cute this is!
MANAY (gives her an ice bucket)
And here, you can use this too. Isn’t that
nice?
ADEL
Wow, it’s for ice!
MANAY And I brought a lot of food.
ADEL
Hey, there’s even corned beef…. Wow,
thanks! This is too much.
MANAY
No. You know me and my life
gimmick – Rosa Rosal.18
ADEL
Manay, don’t ever get tired of us, okay?
(Begins to groom herself)
MANAY (glancing at Febrero)
No I won’t.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
MANAY (glancing at Febrero)
Hindi.
ADEL
Febrero, handa na ang pagkain mo, ha.
FEBRERO (distracted by Manay)
Ha?
ADEL
At saka heto yung polong pinalantsa ko
kanina. Manay, dito ka na lang kumain,
samahan mo si Febrero.
MANAY
Huwag na, may customer ako sa shop
mamaya.
ADEL
Hu, manghahala ka lang e. (Proceeds to
dress up for work)
MANAY Hindi uy! (Febrero laughs)
ADEL
Pakisarado ang bintana.
204
ADEL
Febrero, here, your food’s ready.
FEBRERO (distracted by Manay)
What?
ADEL
And here’s your polo shirt that I ironed
this morning. Manay, why don’t you eat
here too? Join Febrero.
MANAY
No more, I’m expecting a customer at
the shop.
ADEL
Really. Maybe you just have a pick-up.
(Proceeds to dress up for work)
MANAY Of course not! (Febrero laughs)
ADEL
Please close the window.
Manay gets up to provide Adel privacy by shutting the room’s window.
MANAY
Ay naku, hindi ako basta-basta namu­
mulot ng kung sino-sino diyan. Alam
mo na, peperahan ka lang ng mga
hayop na yan. Alam mo na ang mga tao
ngayon, puro mga mukhang pera. Doon
na lang sa shop, pinalayas ko ang lahat
ng mga modista ko ah. Biro mo, ultimo
mga butones pinag-iinteresan! Inuuwi
sa bahay! Kaya ako, pag kukuha ako ng
modista, kailangan may NBI clearance.
Wala akong panahon. (Whispers to
Febrero) I love you.
FEBRERO (whispers back) I love you.
ADEL
Kailangan maaga ako sa ospital e. May
pasyente ako ngayon, bagong opera
sa almoranas, ang lakas-lakas nga ng
agos ng dugo hanggang ngayon. Sabi
ko nga kay Doktor Vicente, baka hindi
na almoranas yon, baka kanser na sa
puwet!
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MANAY
Why, I don’t just pick up anyone out
there. You know how those bastards
just hit you for money. In these times,
everyone’s just out for money. In fact in
my shop, I sent off all my dressmakers.
Can you imagine, even the buttons,
they were filching. Now I demand an
NBI 19 clearance from all applicants.
(Whispers to Febrero) I love you.
FEBRERO (whispers back) I love you.
ADEL
I have to be early at the hospital. A
patient just went under the knife for
hemorrhoids, and he’s been bleeding
like anything. In fact I said to Doctor
Vicente, that might not have been
hemorrhoids, he could have cancer of
the asshole!
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
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Everbody laughs.
MANAY (to Febrero, out of Adel’s earshot)
O, kailan ka pupunta sa shop?
FEBRERO
Sa makalawa. May meeting kami bukas,
e. Tungkol ba doon sa pagbabago ng
kulay ng taxi.
MANAY
Ang corny-corny, bakit dilaw? Dapat
magenta.
FEBRERO Ano’ng magenta?
MANAY Pink, purple.
MANAY (to Febrero, out of Adel’s earshot)
When can you come over to the shop?
FEBRERO
Day after tomorrow. We have a meeting
tomorrow. On changing the cab’s paint
color.
MANAY
It’s so corny, why must it be yellow?
Should be magenta.
FEBRERO What magenta?
MANAY Pink, purple.
Adel goes to the door to talk to a neighboring woman.
ADELAling Viring?
ALING VIRING
Oy?
ADEL
Pagkagising ho ng mga bata, pakainin
ninyo tapos paliguan nyo ho. Si Boboy
ho noong isang gabi nag-alburoto.
Siguro ho nainitan.
ALING VIRING
Ako’ng bahala.
ADEL (to herself) Si Aling Viring
naman, oo. (Addressing Febrero) O ikaw
Febrero, kalian ka naman aalis? (Gets
red bag from closet)
*FEBRERO
E hihintayin ko lang si Aling Nita.
Maliligo pa ako e.
*ADEL (holding her nurse’s cap)
Manay, tulungan mo nga ako dito, o.
ADELAling Viring?20
ALING VIRING
Yes?
ADEL
As soon as the kids get up, feed ’em
and bathe ’em, okay? Boboy pulled a
tantrum the other night. Maybe cuz it’s
so hot.
ALING VIRING
I’ll take care of ’em.
ADEL (to herself) Oh, this Aling Viring.
(Addressing Febrero) And you, Febrero,
what time are you stepping out? (Gets
red bag from closet)
*FEBRERO
I have to wait for Aling Nita. And I still
have to take a shower.
*ADEL (holding her nurse’s cap)
Manay, can you help me with this
please?
Baby cries, Febrero cradles kid.
MANAY (helping Adel with her cap)
Ihahatid na kita, dala ko naman yung
kotse ko e.
ADELSige.
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MANAY (helping Adel with her cap)
I can drop you off, I have my car and
driver anyway.
ADEL
Okay.
© Ateneo de Manila University
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Adel waits for Manay to leave but hesitates outside the hospital.
HOSPITAL INTERCOM ANNOUNCEMENT : Paging Doctor Brigada, emergency room
please. Doctor Brigada, emergency room please.
Seq. 12: D’Remark Kitchenette. Int.–ext. Night.
Baby goes about her work while jukebox plays Anthony Castelo’s “Nang Dahil sa Pag-ibig”
all throughout. When she nears pimp he solicits her.
PIMP
Alam mo mas malaki ang kikitain mo
kung papayag kang ireto kita sa mga
Hapon. Kikita ka hanggang seven
hundred, hindi ka pa pagod. Dito pagod
ka, maliit ang kita, barya-barya.
PIMP
You know, we’ll both make so much
more money if I set you up with some
Japanese. You can make seven hundred,
easy. And it won’t tire you out. Here
you get all used up, for loose change.
Baby wrenches herself free from pimp and complains to Febrero, who’s just arriving.
Febrero goes to pimp and challenges him while the place’s Chinese owner also confronts
the man who flirted with his waitress-girlfriend. Their confrontation is interrupted by the
fighting of Febrero and the pimp outside.
CHINESE OWNER’S RIVAL
O walang aawat ha! Walang aawat!
Sandali!
CHINESE OWNER’S RIVAL
Okay, nobody steps in! Nobody
meddles! Come on!
Febrero is beaten up by pimp. Baby is visibly disappointed.
Seq. 13: Bambang Street. Ext.
Early evening, Alex and his friends are looking to score some drugs. Kano negotiates with
them from outside their car.
KANO Mogs lang, e.
ALEX’S FRIEND
Magkano?
KANO Kagaya din ng dati.
ALEX’S FRIEND
Ilan ba’ng kukunin natin?
ALEX’S FRIEND 2 Tigalawa tayo.
KANO
O sige. Hintayin nyo na lang ako diyan
sa kanto ha.
KANO I only got Mogs.21
ALEX’S FRIEND
How much?
KANO The usual.
ALEX’S FRIEND
So how many do we get?
ALEX’S FRIEND 2 Two each.
KANO
Okay, just wait for me at the corner.
A group of trannies are almost run over by the car of Alex and his gang.
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Bernal / Manila by Night
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Sequence 13
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
TRANNIES
Gemma, Gemma, ano ba Gemma – ay!
Ano ba yan? Putang to! Ay anak ka ng
kabayo! Walanghiya!
ANOTHER TRANNIE (upon seeing Alex
and his friends)
Ay, mga lalake! Ang guwapo!
208
TRANNIES
Gemma, Gemma, what the fuck,
Gemma – hey! What are you doing,
you whore?! Sonafabitch! Jesus Christ!
ANOTHER TRANNIE (upon seeing Alex
and his friends)
Oh, boys! How good-looking!
Seq. 13a: Trannies’ Outdoor cabaret.
Alex and his friends amusedly watch trannies dancing to Lipps, Inc.’s “Funkytown” while
waiting for Kano. Their attention is caught by a dwarf trannie in high heels.
ALEX’S FRIEND (describing the trannies
they just saw)
Pare hayop ang dila nung isang yon!
ALEX’S FRIEND (describing the trannies
they just saw)
Man, dig that tongue!
Seq. 13b: Streets of Sta. Cruz district.
Alex and friends continue talking about the trannies while walking back to car from which
they shoo away a white-robed old man leaning on it. Kano uses a child runner to deliver
the goods, then joins them in their car.
KANO
O ito, kanino? Two hundred forty!
ALEX’S FRIEND
Heto’ng bayad.
KANO (to Alex)
O ikaw, hindi ka na ba kumakanta sa
club?
ALEX
Hindi na. Mula nang nagkaroon ng
barilan nagalit ang ermat ko. Ayaw na e.
KANO (counting payment)
Twenty, forty… Diyos ko, aabutin ako
ng Miyerkoles sa pagbibilang dito.
ALEX’S FRIENDS
Ayos lang yan. Pare okey na to. Okey
na?
KANO
Okey. O pare diyan niyo na lang ako
sa kanto, ha? (She alights from their
car then talks to Alex) Pare, kung sex
trip naman, may barkada akong sauna
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KANO
Here, who picks these up? Two
hundred forty!
ALEX’S FRIEND
Here’s the money.
KANO (to Alex)
Hey, don’t you sing at the club
anymore?
ALEX
Had to quit. After that shooting
incident. My Mom got so pissed and
scared shitless, made me quit.
KANO (counting payment)
Twenty, forty.… My God, it’ll take me a
week to count this.
ALEX’S FRIENDS
Should be no problem. Man,
everything’s A-okay. Right?
KANO
Okay. Guys, you can drop me off at
that corner. (She alights from their car
then talks to Alex) Hey, man, if it’s a
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
attendant sa Sauna Turko, malapit sa
Bayside.
ALEX
Type!
KANO Pare, bulag. (Alex and friends
laugh at the idea) Sige pare, ha.
209
sex trip you want, I have this friend
who’s an attendant at Sauna Turko, near
Bayside.22
ALEX
Type!
KANO She’s blind, man. (Alex and
friends laugh at the idea) Okay, guys,
see you.
Seq 14: Virgie’s house. Int. Night.
Late night, Virgie is massaging her husband in their bedroom.
VIRGIE Wala pa yung panganay mo, a.
FATHER Hwag mong masyadong
higpitan yong mga bata. Lalo na si Alex.
Lalaki yan e.
VIRGIE
Hm!
FATHER Ano’ng mangyayari do’n? Wala!
VIRGIE Maloloka na yata ako, e.
VIRGIE Your eldest isn’t home yet.
FATHER You really shouldn’t be so strict
with the kids. Especially Alex. He’s a
guy.
VIRGIE Hmmph!
FATHER What can happen to him?
Nothing!
VIRGIE Oh, I’ll go crazy.
She rubs her hands with alcohol then takes a valium.
FATHER Tama na yan.
VIRGIE Hm, buti na ito kaysa maghysteria pa ko!
FATHER Stop that.
VIRGIE Hmm, this is better than turning
hysterical!
Seq. 15: Sauna Turko. Int. Night.
Alex has acquiesced to Kano’s inducement. Bea scrubs him vigorously in a tub.
ALEX
May itatanong ako sa yo, huwag kang
magagalit.
BEA
Hu, taas mo nga ang kili-kili mo!
(Raises Alex’s arms to scrub his
underarms) Pare-pareho kayong mga
lalake, iisa lang ang tinatanong ninyo.
Mabuti na rito kaysa mamalimos.
ALEX
Nagtataka lang kasi ako dahil sa mata
mo.
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ALEX
I wanna ask you something. Don’t get
angry, okay?
BEA
C’mon, show me your armpits! (Raises
Alex’s arms to scrub his underarms) You
guys are all alike. You all ask the same
thing. This is better for me than having
to beg.
ALEX
I was just wondering, since you’re
sightless.
© Ateneo de Manila University
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BEA
Ano ba, magpapa-sensation ka o
iinterbyuhin mo ko?
ALEX
Hindi ka ba naaasiwa?
BEA
Ba’t ako maaasiwa? Yung iba nga diyan
nagmamalinis. Kalkalin mo ang buhay
nila ang baho-baho naman. Ako kahit
bulag ako, kumikita ako. Diyan nga ako
hinahangaan e. Saan ka ba nae-L?
ALEX
Diyan, sa suso.
210
BEA
Well, what are we gonna do? Do I
give you a blowjob23 or will you just
interview me?
ALEX
You don’t find it awful?
BEA
Why should I find it awful? I’m no
hypocrite like others around who
pretend to be so clean. But when you
dredge up their lives, they all stink!
Me, even if I’m blind, I’m earning good
money. That’s why I’m admired. Now
where’s your sexy spot?
ALEX
There, my nipples.
Bea soaps his chest. She then pours water on him and they kiss.
Seq. 15a: Cubicle.
BEA (Massaging Alex)
Pero hindi naman ako magtatagal dito,
e. Kasi may nanghula sa akin. Balang
araw raw makakakita raw ako. At saka
pupunta ako ng Saudi. Andoon ang
boyfriend ko e.… O, tihaya.
BEA (Massaging Alex)
But I’m not staying long here.
A fortune-teller told me that I’ll regain
my sight sometime, and that I’ll go to
Saudi. That’s where my boyfriend is.…
Okay, turn over.
Alex turns over for frontal massage, then engages Bea in sex.
Seq. 16: Bambang St. Ext. Night.
Kano deals with some junkies in a car.
KANO Pare mahal talaga ngayon, e.
JUNKIE Mandrax lang, kukuha ako ng
sampu ngayon.
KANO Hindi nga puwede pare, e.
Kuwarenta na lang.
JUNKIE Beinte na lang.
KANO Hindi nga puwede pare, e.
(Notices police car) Pare parak!
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KANO But man, it’s really gotten
expensive.
JUNKIE It’s just Mandrax, I’ll get ten
now.
KANO I can’t give it. It’s forty each.
JUNKIE C’mon, twenty.
KANO No way. (Notices police car) Hey,
cops!
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
KANO (whispering, to warn another
pusher)
Pare parak.
VOICE OF WOMAN RESIDENT 1
Saan ka ba galing? Gabi na, hindi ka pa
umuuwi!
VOICE OF WOMAN RESIDENT 2
Kay Aling Poleng, sa Tondo.
211
KANO (whispering, to warn another
pusher)
Hey man, cops.
VOICE OF WOMAN RESIDENT 1
Where’ve you been? It’s so late, and you
come home only now!
VOICE OF WOMAN RESIDENT 2
I was at Aling Poleng, in Tondo.
Seq. 17: Disco. Int. Night.
Alex, Vanessa, Manay, and his friends dance on the crowded floor to Festival’s “Don’t Cry
For Me, Argentina.” Manay keeps eyeing Alex, who responds with smiles. When Vanessa
notices their flirtation she teases Alex. The couple then take a seat while Manay and
friends continue dancing.
MANAY AND FRIENDS All right! More, more, more, more!
VANESSA
Iuwi mo ako ng maaga, ha? Pano baka
mag-freak out na naman ang nanay
ko. Kanina nagalit, nag-sermon na
naman. Pano nabalitaan yung kapatid
ko nakakita na ng trabaho, kaya nga
lang night shift. Sabi niya, “Anong night
shift – night shift? Kapag nagtatrabaho
dapat sa umaga, hindi sa gabi, dahil sa
gabi, natutulog na.”
ALEX
Sabihin mo sa nanay mo nagpupunta
na tayo sa buwan!
VANESSA
Sus, ito naman! Ako nga din napasama
sa sermon niya kanina. Pinashi-shift ba
naman ako ng course, Nutrition daw.
Sabi niya hindi daw niya malaman kung
ano ang gagawin ko sa, sa Tourism.
Sabi ko naman, “Kung magshi-shift ako
ng course, magshi-shift na lang ako ng
Hotel and Restaurant Management.” Sa
awa ng Dios, naging berde ang mukha
niya!
ALEX
Sandali lang, ji-jingle ako.
VANESSA Sige.
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VANESSA
Take me home early, okay? Mommy
might freak out again. She was pissed
off again today, and we got a sermon.
Coz my sister found a job, but it’s on
the night shift. She kept saying, “What
night shift – night shift? You work in
the daytime, not at night, because at
night, you sleep.”
ALEX
Why don’t you tell your mom that we’ve
been going to the moon?!
VANESSA
Hey, c’mon! I also got it too. Now she
wants me to shift course, and take up
Nutrition. She said she doesn’t know
what I’ll do with Tourism. So I told her,
“If I shift course, I better just go into
Hotel and Restaurant Management.”
Thank God, her face turned green!
ALEX
Give me a minute, I gotta pee.
VANESSA Okay.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
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When gays see Alex go to the rest room, they goad Manay on and cheer when he gets there.
MANAY’S FRIENDS
Manay, go na. Go!
MANAY’S FRIENDS
Manay, go. Go!
In the rest room, Manay pees next to Alex.
MANAY (to Alex)
Magkita tayo mamaya, ha?
ALEX
Kasama ko’ng siyota ko e…. Kung
gusto mo, mamaya ihahatid ko muna.
Magkita tayo sa labas ng a las dos.
MANAY Type.
MANAY (to Alex)
Let’s meet up later, okay?
ALEX
My girl’s with me …. If it’s okay with
you, I’ll take her home first, and we can
meet up by 2 a.m.
MANAY Type.
Seq. 18: Parking lot behind PICC . Ext. Night.
Several vehicles are parked, several voyeurs cruise around. Sounds of couples making out.
In Garpas taxicab are Febrero and Baby, necking in the back seat. Radio plays Victor
Wood’s “Hahabol-habol.”
BABY
Mahal mo ko?
FEBRERO Oo, mahal na mahal kita.
BABY
You love me?
FEBRERO Yeah, love you so much.
They continue necking.
BABY
Hindi mo naman ako ginagalang, e.
FEBRERO
Ginagalang kita. Ikaw lang tong
babaeng ginagalang ko e. Kung hindi ba
naman kita ginagalang, hahalikan pa ba
naman kita?
BABY
But you don’t respect me.
FEBRERO
I respect you. You’re the only woman I
respect. If I didn’t respect you, would I
be kissing you?
They neck some more.
BABY
Yang dila mo naman e, para kang
kumakain ng kuhol e!
FEBRERO
Nandoon ang sarap, e.
BABY
Papakasalan mo ko?
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BABY
Hey, your tongue, it’s digging too deep!24
FEBRERO
But that’s where it tastes so good.
BABY
You’ll marry me?
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
FEBRERO
Oo, pakakasalan kita. Ano bang klaseng
lalake’ng akala mo sa kin?
213
FEBRERO
Yeah, I’ll marry you. What kind of guy
do you think I am?
Their necking turns into heavy petting. Radio plays Sampaguita’s “Laguna.” Suddenly a
whistle blows and people are discombobulated. After whistle blows twice more, security
guard addresses everyone through a megaphone.
GUARD
Hoy, pangkat ng mga malilibog! Bawal
dito yang ginagawa ninyo! Magsilayas
na kayo dito, private property ito.
Magsialis na kayo, binababoy ninyo
ang lugar na ito e. O ano ba? Hindi
pa ba kayo aalis? Kakasuhan namin
kayo! Magsilayas na kayo, puwede ba?
(Vehicles start leaving) Naghahanap
pa yata kayo ng sakit ng ulo e. Wag
ninyong babuyin ang lugar na to,
private property ito!
GUARD
Hey, all you horny people! You can’t
do that here! Get out, this is private
property! You’re making a pigsty of
this place. Go on, scoot! Or we’ll file
cases against all of you! Get out of here
right now, okay? (Vehicles start leaving)
Unless you want trouble. You can’t do
that here, this is private property!
Seq. 19: Manay’s Bedroom. Int. Night.
Manay and Alex, after sex, cuddling and kissing in bed.
MANAY Do you love me?
ALEX
Okey lang.
MANAY (disappointed by Alex’s casual
answer)
You don’t love me?
ALEX
Okey lang, trip lang.
MANAY Pero you don’t love me?
ALEX
Love you siyempre…. (They kiss again)
Ganito pala no?
MANAY Okey lang, di ba?
ALEX
Nung una akala ko mahirap.
Ngayon, okey lang.
MANAY I love you.
ALEX
Me also.
MANAY (takes a deep breath then exhales)
Sana magtagal tayo. (Shifts position
to cradle Alex) Ayoko na ng mga
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MANAY Do you love me?
ALEX
Kinda.
MANAY (disappointed by Alex’s casual
answer)
You don’t love me?
ALEX
Kinda, good trip.
MANAY But you don’t really love me?
ALEX
Of course I love you…. (They kiss again)
Didn’t think it would be like this.
MANAY It’s good, isn’t it?
ALEX
At first I thought it would be
tough. Now, I find it okay.
MANAY I love you.
ALEX
Me also.
MANAY (takes a deep breath then exhales)
I hope it lasts. (Shifts position to cradle
Alex) I don’t care for flings anymore,
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
flings, sawang-sawa na ako sa mga
flings-flings lang. Pag niloko mo ako,
magpapakamatay ako!
ALEX
Pano yan, may siyota ako?
MANAY
Kung mga chicks lang okey. Pero pag
mga ibang swards, naku, susunugin
ko’ng bahay mo! Alam mo naman
ako, neurotica saka tensionada. Sa
lahat ng hindi ko ma-take, yung
nanloloko’t nandadaya e. Marami nang
masasamang tao sa mundo; huwag na
nating dagdagan pa.
ALEX
Sakay lang naman ako ng sakay sa mga
trip, e. Kung ano’ng trip mo, trip ko
na rin. Ang mga barkada ko nga panay
weird e. May barkada akong tomboy.
May barkada akong bulag. (Manay
laughs) Masahista pa sa sauna parlor.
Siyanga pala, baka matulungan mo
yung barkada kong bulag a.
214
I’m sick of flings. If it turns out you’re
just putting me on, I’ll kill myself!
ALEX
But I have a girlfriend.
MANAY
I don’t really mind, if it’s just chicks.
But if they’re other fags, beware, I’ll
burn your house down! You know me,
I’m tense and neurotic. And what I
can’t take is being made a fool of, and
cheated on. Too many bad guys in
the world already; let’s not add to that
number.
ALEX
I just go along for the ride, anyone’s trip.
Whatever’s your trip, it’s my trip too.
My friends are all kinda weird, after
all. One’s a tomboy. One’s a blind girl.
(Manay laughs) Who does massage in a
sauna parlor. That reminds me, maybe
you can help her.
Seq. 20: Sauna Turko. Int. Night.
MANAY (at door, to doorman)
May hinahanap ho akong masahista,
bulag ho siya. Bea ata ang pangalan.
DOORMAN Ah, si Bea.
MANAY (at door, to doorman)
I’m looking for a masseuse, the blind
girl. I think her name’s Bea.
DOORMAN Oh yes, Bea.
Men come out of a cubicle carrying a man, who’s had a heart attack.
MANAY Ay, puta!
MENKasi sa libog, kaya inatake.
Dahan-dahan!
MANAY Oh, fuck!
MENGot too horny and excited,
had an attack. Carry him carefully!
Manay moves inside lobby then bumps into Kano. “Full Moon Boogie” by Jeff Beck with the
Jan Hammer Band plays on.
MANAY (to Kano) Excuse me.
KANO Okey lang. (To man)
Pare ano’ng nangyari diyan?
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MANAY (to Kano) Excuse me.
KANO That’s okay. (To man)
Hey, man, what happened there?
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
MAN
Wala, inatake lang sa puso. Wala ito.
MANAY
Nakaka-tense naman dito ang mga
happenings!
215
MAN
Nothing much, just a heart attack.
That’s all.
MANAY
Oh, what a place. This gets me tense!
Manay and Kano move toward coin-operated Space Invaders cocktail cabinet and sit on
opposite sides.
KANO Pare may coins ka?
MANAY Coins?! Ano’ng palagay mo sa
akin, alkansiya?
KANO Meron ka bang maliit na piso?
MANAY (looks in his shirt pocket)
Meron yata.
KANO (gets a cigarette and offers Manay a
stick) Gusto mong yosi, heto o, kuha
ka.
MANAY Sige; ilan ba’ng kailangan mo?
KANO
Isa lang. Okey ba sa yo ang sounds?
MANAY (finds a coin and hands it to her)
Hindi masyado, medyo maingay, too
much. (Kano lights Manay’s cigarette)
Type! Gentleman! Bongga ang gimmick
mo!
KANO Hey, man, you have any coins?
MANAY Coins?! What do you take me
for, a piggy bank?
KANO You have a small peso?
MANAY (looks in his shirt pocket)
I may have.
KANO (gets a cigarette and offers Manay a
stick) You want a cigarette, here, take
one.
MANAY Okay, how many do you need?
KANO
Just one. The sounds okay with you?
MANAY (finds a coin and hands it to her)
Not really, it’s loud, too much. (Kano
lights Manay’s cigarette) Type!
Gentleman! You got a good gimmick!25
Kano uses the coin to start a game session while Manay smokes his cigarette.
KANO Hinihintay mo si Bea?
MANAY
Oo.
KANO Magpapamasahe ka?
MANAY
Diyos ko day, kung magpapamasahe
ako, bakit naman sa babae pa? Baka
tayo kidlatin!
KANO
Alam mo, nagtataka ako sa mga katulad
mo e.
MANAY I beg your pardon!
KANO
Huwag kang maha-hassle, ha? Kasi
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KANO You waiting for Bea?
MANAY
Yes.
KANO Having a massage?
MANAY
My Lord, if I needed a massage, why
would I get a girl? Lightning might
strike.
KANO
You know what, I wonder about your
kind.
MANAY I beg your pardon!
KANO
Don’t get hassled, okay? Don’t you find
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
hindi ka ba ano? Hindi ka ba.… (Asks
point-blank) Hindi ba matitigas ang
mga lalake?
MANAY
Loka, yon nga’ng masarap, e.
KANO (after a pause)
Naniniwala ka ba sa true love?
MANAY
Ano?
KANO True love!
MANAY Medyo. Oo.
KANO (smiling shyly)
True love ko si Bea e.
MANAY (amused by her confession)
E ikaw, true love ka rin daw ba niya?
KANO
Ewan.
MANAY Pano yan?
KANO
Ewan ko nga e. Ang labo. Matagal ko na
ngang binobosohan yan, noong bata pa
kami sa Olongapo.
MANAY
Malandi ka talaga! Isnabera! E papano
ngayon yan? Ano’ng problema niyo?
KANO
Ewan ko nga! Hindi naman breadtripper si Bea. Siguro hindi lang siya
talaga mahilig sa pars. Bigay-todo na
nga ako sa kanya, e hindi ko pa rin alam
kung ano’ng gusto niya! Ikaw?
MANAY Ako? Ano? Ano pa, di bakla!
KANO
Alam ko. Ang ibig kong sabihin, kung
sino ang true love mo!
MANAY Marami….
KANO Ang pinaka-true true love mo!
MANAY
Meron akong estudyante, meron
akong … ano ba naman ito, True
Confessions ’day, di ko ma-take! Anyway,
meron akong isang estudyante. Okey
naman. Sweet din.
KANO True love ka naman niya?
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216
it…. (Asks point-blank) Don’t you find
guys’ bodies too hard?
MANAY
You fool, that’s what’s pleasurable.
KANO (after a pause)
You believe in true love?
MANAY What?
KANO True love!
MANAY In a way. Yes.
KANO (smiling shyly)
Bea’s my true love, you know.
MANAY (amused by her confession)
And are you her true love, too?
KANO Dunno.
MANAY So how’s that?
KANO
Well, I dunno. It’s complicated. You
know, I used to take a peep at her in the
shower, way back when we were still
kids in Olongapo.26
MANAY
You horny girl! So how’s it now? You’re
having problems with her?
KANO
I really don’t know! Bea’s no breadtripper. Maybe she just doesn’t get it on
with my kind. I give her everything, but
I still don’t know what she wants. And
you?
MANAY Me? What? What else, I’m gay!
KANO
I know. I mean who’s your true love!?
MANAY So many….
KANO Your one true love!?
MANAY
There’s a student, there’s a … hey, what
is this, True Confessions girl,27 what the
hell? But I do have one who’s a student.
He’s okay. Quite sweet too.
KANO But are you his true love?
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
MANAY
Tigilan mo nga ako ng mga true
love – true love manay, hindi na uso
yan! Diyos ko, ’day, hindi ko ma-take
ito. Alam mo yan, ilusyones lang yan!
Ang say nila kapag natrue-true love daw,
gumaganda ang buhay. Pero ako, pag
nai-in love ako, nagkakaputa-puta!
217
MANAY
Will you cut that out? True love – true
love…. Hey, girl, that went out a long
time ago! Omigod, I can’t take this. You
know what, those are simply illusions!
They say when you find your true love,
life becomes so beautiful. But with me,
every time I fall in love, my life gets
ruined!
Seq. 21: Misericordia. Ext. Night.
Late night. Manay, Bea, and Gaying pray before street altar on Misericordia. A prostitute
joints them momentarily then leaves. A doddering old woman genuflects before the altar.
Presently they leave.
MANAY
O, dahan-dahan at may kanal! Hay naku,
maloloka ako! Bakit? Ewan. (Giggles)
Funny no? I make my own questions,
and I answer them myself. (Giggles
again) Ikaw, gaano ka nang katagal na
bulag?
BEA
Mula nang pagkabata.
MANAY Really? Paano nangyari yon?
BEA
Magtatatlong taon ako noon, bigla na
lang lumabo nang lumabo ang aking
paningin hanggang magdilim. Nasa
Olongapo pa ako noon.
MANAY
Ay naku, you don’t realize how lucky
you are! Really, napakasuwerte mo!
I mean – that is the tragedy of my
life: lahat nakikita ko! Maski hindi ko
dapat makita, nakikita ko. Maski wala
namang dapat makita, nakikita ko pa
rin. Loka!
BEA
E baka yung kadalasang nakikita mo,
imahinasyon mo na lamang.
MANAY
Say mo, true rin! Philosophical!
Actually ang ibig kong sabihin, lahat
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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MANAY
Hey, careful, there’s a canal! Oh
wow, I’ll go crazy! Why? I don’t know.
(Giggles) Funny, isn’t it? I make my own
questions, and I answer them myself.
(Giggles again) And you, how long have
you been blind?
BEA
Since early childhood.
MANAY Really? How did it happen?
BEA
I was three years old when my
eyesight went fainter and fainter until
everything turned dark. We were still in
Olongapo then.
MANAY
Well, you don’t realize how lucky you
are! Really, you’ve been very lucky! I
mean – that is the tragedy of my life: I
see everything! Even what I shouldn’t
see, I see! Even when there’s nothing to
see, I still see. Crazy!
BEA
Maybe what you’re seeing is just in your
imagination.
MANAY
You don’t say, how true that is, too!
How philosophical! Actually, what I
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
218
Sequence 21
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<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
ng mga tao sa mundo luko-luko! Hindi
ba? Yang mga mukhang inihaharap sa
atin, hindi naman yon ang tunay nilang
mukha e, di ba? Maraming mukha yang
mga tao: may mukhang pampamilya,
may mukhang pambarkada, pangasawa, pang-girlfriend, pangswardfriend, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera, hindi ba? Iba yan ng iba, di ba?
Patong-patong! Tulad ko: when my
boyfriend tells me “I love you,” anong
mukha yon? If I know, mukhang pangecheng ng datung, di ba?
BEA
E bakit ka naman maaawa sa sarili
mo? Kahit luko-luko ang lahat ng tao,
umiikot naman ang mundo. Lahat ng
kabutihang ginagawa natin bumabalik
din naman sa atin balang araw, hindi
ba?
MANAY Hm kyeme, Reyna ng mga
Martir Part Two.
BEA
Basta ako, makikita ko lang yung dapat
kong makita. Yung iba, yung hindi ko
nakikita, hindi bale na lang.
MANAY
Makikita? E ano ang makikita mo, e
bulag ka? Diyos ko ’day, this is the
most useless conversation I’ve had in
my whole life! (They arrive in front of
Bea’s house) Oy, loka, meron nga pala
akong kaibigang nurse. Sasamahan kita,
baka matulungan ka. I’m sure madami
yong kaibigang specialists or so I think.
Anyway, I’ve done my good deed for
the day like a good girl scout. O siya.
(Leaves)
BEA
Sunduin mo na lang ako, ha?
MANAY O sige.
GAYING O dahan-dahan, may kanal!
BEA
Alam ko.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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219
mean is that everyone on earth is crazy!
Isn’t that right? The faces we see are not
the real faces, isn’t that right? People
have multiple faces: there’s the face for
one’s family, there’s the face for one’s
gang, for the wife, for the girlfriend, for
the gay friend, et cetera, et cetera, et
cetera, isn’t that right? The faces keep
changing, don’t they? Layers of them!
Like me: when my boyfriend tells me “I
love you,” what face is that? If I know,
it’s a face that seeks money,28 right?
BEA
But why feel sorry for yourself? Even
if everyone’s crazy, the world keeps
turning. All the good we do comes back
to us someday, don’t they?
MANAY
Hmm, is that so?29 Queen of the
Martyrs, Part Two.
BEA
As for me, I only see what I must see.
What I don’t see doesn’t matter.
MANAY
What you see? Well, what can you see,
when you’re blind? My God, girl, this is
the most useless conversation I’ve had
in my whole life! (They arrive in front of
Bea’s house) Hey, little girl, by the way, I
have a friend who’s a nurse. I’ll take you
to her, maybe she can help you. I’m sure
she knows many eye specialists or so I
think. Anyway, I’ve done my good deed
for the day like a good girl scout. Okay,
bye. (Leaves)
BEA
Just pick me up when you have the time,
okay?
MANAY Okay.
GAYING Watch it, a canal!
BEA
I know.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
220
Seq. 22: Ospital ng Maynila. Ext.–int. Night.
As Manay, Bea, and Gaying walk toward the hospital, Bea is accosted by shawled female
psychic.
PSYCHIC
Hoy alam mo ikaw, noong eighteenth
century, ang kikay-kikay mo! May
isang pintor, in love na in love sa
iyo, nagnakaw para sa iyo, naputulan
ng kamay! Kaya hanggang ngayon
nagbabayad ka e. Ang lakas-lakas
ng psychic powers mo hija, dapat
ma-develop mo yan! At magdadasal
ka, ha? Kawawa ka naman, ang bigat
ng pinagbabayad mo. Kaya hanggang
ngayon hindi mo pa nakikita ang tatay
mo, e. (To Manay) Ikaw?... Bakla! (She
leaves)
MANAY
Huwag pansinin, uso ngayon yan sa
Maynila – yang mga luka-luka! Tayo na
nga. … dahan-dahan at may bangketa.
PSYCHIC
Hey, you know what, in the eighteenth
century, you were such a flirt! A painter
was so in love with you, even stole for
you, and had his hands cut off! That’s
why you’re still paying for it. You
have such strong psychic powers, girl,
you should develop them. And keep
praying. Poor you, you’re paying for so
much in your past. That’s why you still
haven’t seen your father. (To Manay)
And you?... You’re a faggot! (She leaves)
MANAY
Pay no mind, it’s the fashion here in
Manila – to be off one’s rocker. Let’s go
on … careful, there’s a sidewalk.
They come across a crowd ogling the shooting of a movie in the hospital driveway.
BEA
Bakit ba, ano ba’ng meron
diyan?
MANAY May shooting.
BEA
Sino’ng artista?
GAYING
Ayun si Al Tantay saka si ano o, si
Marissa o. Al! Al!
CREW
Let’s go! Tabi kayo riyan, tabi, tabi!
Pakiusap lang po, huwag pong maingay!
Marissa, ready? Sandali, sandali.
BEA
What’s going on?
MANAY They’re shooting a movie.
BEA
Who’s the star?
GAYING
There’s Al Tantay, and there’s … oh, it’s
Marissa! Al! Al!
CREW
Let’s go! Keep aside, to the side! Quiet,
please! Marissa, ready? Wait, wait.
A make-up artist is pouring fake blood on Al Tantay’s chest; Marissa Delgado, in nurse’s
costume, checks her reflection in a compact mirror.
MANAY Tara, baka makaalis na si
Adelina. Paraan, paraan. Paraan.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
MANAY Let’s go, we might not catch
Adelina. Let us through, let us through.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
POLICE Tabi na kayo riyan. (To Manay
and his companions) O kayo, saan kayo
pupunta?
MANAY Aalis na!
POLICE (to other onlookers)
O kayo diyan, tabi kayo riyan.
MANAY Good evening miss. A Miss,
sandali lang.
NURSE (with an Ilonggo accent)
Good evening.
MANAY Baka puwede ninyo akong
matulungan. I’m looking for ano,
Adelina Macapinlac.
NURSE Sino yon?
MANAY Nurse siya dito, dito siya
nagtatrabaho.
NURSE Wala, walang nurse dito na
ganoong pangalan.
MANAY Inihahatid ko ho siya dito gabigabi. Six-to-twelve yata ang shift niya,
evening shift.
NURSE Wala, sinasabi ko – alam kong
lahat ng nurse dito’t saka walang
Adelina Macapinlac dito.
MANAY You must be making a mistake.
Puwede bang paki-check niyo lang?
NURSE Wala, sinasabi kong wala e.
MANAY Puwede bang paki-check niyo
lang sa logbook, kasi I’m sure she works
here, ako’ng naghahatid sa kanya e. (To
another nurse) A miss, puwede ba?
NURSE Sinasabi ko wala, e. O tingnan
mo, o.
NURSE 2 Ano ba yan?
NURSE (reading names in her logbook)
Magallanes, Mesa.
MANAY Adelina Macapinlac ba, kilala
nyo?
NURSE Adelina Macapinlac daw,
sinasabi kong wala e.
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221
POLICE Keep to the side. (To Manay and
his companions) Hey, you, where do
you think you’re going?
MANAY We’re just going!
POLICE (to other onlookers)
Okay, you there, keep to the side.
MANAY Good evening, Miss. Uhh, Miss,
a moment, please.
NURSE (with an Ilonggo30 accent)
Good evening.
MANAY Can you help us, please? I’m
looking for, uhh, Adelina Macapinlac.
NURSE Who’s she?
MANAY A nurse here, she works here.
NURSE No nurse here by that name.
MANAY I drop her off here every night. I
think her shift’s from six to twelve, the
evening shift.
NURSE No one here by that name, I’m
telling you. I know all the nurses here,
and there’s no Adelina Macapinlac here.
No one.
MANAY You must be making a mistake.
Can you just check it out please?
NURSE I’m telling you, no one!
MANAY Could you please check the
logbook, because I’m sure she works
here, I’m the one who drops her off
here. (To another nurse) Miss, please?
NURSE I’m telling you, no one. Go
ahead and look.
NURSE 2 What is it?
NURSE (reading names in her logbook)
Magallanes, Mesa.
MANAY Would you know Adelina
Macapinlac?
NURSE She insists there’s an Adelina
Macapinlac working here, I’m telling
her, none!
NURSE 2 We know all the nurses here,
but we don’t know the person you’re
looking for.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
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Sequence 22
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
NURSE 2 Kilala namin ang lahat ng nurse
dito, pero yon lang ang hindi namin
kilala.
NURSE Wala o, tingnan mo.
MANAY Kung wala sa evening shift, baka
naman nalipat na sa morning or –
NURSE Wala, dahil alam ko’ng lahat ng
shift dito! Sinasabi kong wala, no, alam
mo ba ang kulit-kulit mo? Sinasabi
kong walang nurse ditong Adelina
Macapinlac! Nandiyan na nga, e: Mesa,
Milan, wala nga. Sinasabi ko nga sa
yo ang kulit-kulit mo, e!
MANAY : Look, I’m sure she works
here, I mean, ano, I wouldn’t come here
kung hindi ako siguradong nandito siya.
Because I need to see her, because yung
kaibigan kong bulag, she needs ano, she
needs a specialist.
MANAY Puwede ba, huwag mo akong
tarayan, huwag mo akong tawagang
makulit? Kung ayaw mo akong
tulungan, get somebody else who could
help me!
NURSE Ginambilan kita gaw, wara ngani
dire gaw Adelina Macapinlac! Nganga
sagad dire kasi disini man! Bwisit nga
agi, ay kasi kasabad ay, magapakita ka
gaaway kaw?
223
NURSE No one, check out the logbook
yourself, here.
MANAY If she’s not on the evening shift,
maybe she works in the morning now –
NURSE No one, cuz I know everyone in
every shift here! I’m telling you! So why
do you insist? I’m telling you there’s no
nurse here named Adelina Macapinlac!
Here’s the list: Mesa, Milan! I’m telling
you, but you still keep insisting! You’re
such a busybody!M ANAY : Look, I’m
sure she works here, I mean, what, I
wouldn’t come here if I wasn’t sure she’s
here. Because I need to see her, because
my friend who’s blind, she needs a
specialist. Will you just please look in
your files for me, because I’m sure her
name’s there!
MANAY Hey, don’t you raise your
voice at me! And don’t you call me a
busybody! If you don’t want to help, get
somebody else who could help me!
NURSE Ginambilan kita gaw, wara ngani
dire gaw Adelina Macapinlac! Nganga
sagad dire kasi disini man! Bwisit nga
agi, ay kasi kasabad ay, magapakita ka
gaaway kaw?31
Seq. 23: Adel’s sugar daddy’s house. Int. Night.
Adel and her sugar daddy are fighting.
ADEL
Ano pa’ng gusto mo sa akin, walanghiya
ka! Ano pa’ng hahanapin mo? Ano
pa talagang hindi ko nagagawa sa
yo? Ano pa’ng serbisyong hindi ko
nagagawa sa yo? At may reklamo
ka pa! Pagbubuhatan mo pa ako ng
kamay! Pasang-pasa na ang katawan
ko sa katatrabaho, pagdating ko dito
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
ADEL
What else do you want from me, you
bastard!? What else are you looking
for? Is there anything I haven’t done
for you? What sort of service haven’t I
done for you? And you’re still griping!
And you still lay a hand on me! My
body’s already so beat up from work,
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
224
Sequence 23
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
bubuwisitin mo pa ang buhay ko?
Leche ka, kung ayaw mo, magpahinog
ka!
*MAN
Pag umalis ka dito, babasagin ko’ng
mukha mo! Babasagin ko…. Wala
kang utang na loob! Ganoon ha? Wala
kang utang na loob! Oo hindi mo ako
kailangan! Kaya pala kung kani-kanino
kumakabit ka, walanghiya ka!
*ADEL
Sige, sige! Pumunta lang ako dito
para mabuhay, dahil namamatay na
ako ng gutom sa probinsiya. Maski
anong klaseng trabaho pinasok ko na
basta mabuhay lang ako! Wala akong
inaasahan basta pera. Sige, sige! Hindi
kita kailangan. Hindi kita kailangan!
225
and when I get here you still give a
rough time? Fuck you, you get a life!
*MAN
Try leaving, and I’ll break your face!
I’ll break.... You ingrate! You have no
fucking gratitude! Sure, you don’t need
me! That’s why you shack up with
everyone, you fucking whore!
*ADEL
Go ahead! Go ahead! I only came here
to have a life, or else I starve to death in
the province. Whatever work there was,
I took it, just so I have a life. I didn’t
rely on anyone for money. Go ahead, go
ahead! I don’t need you! I don’t need
you!
Adel picks up a knife from the dining table.
ADEL
Sige, lumapit ka. Subukan mong
lumapit, sige lumapit ka!
ADEL
Go ahead, try getting any closer. Try it,
come on, try it!
Seq. 24: Luneta. Ext. Night.
Cultists with woman psychic form a prayer circle on the grass. Gay wearing black costume
and boots whirls around to Lipps, Inc.’s “Funkytown.” Manay scolds Febrero while gay
friends talk among themselves.
SISTER MARY Poong Liwanag.
GROUP Poong Liwanag.
SISTER MARY Hugasan mo ang aming
katauhan.
GROUP Hugasan mo ang aming
katauhan.
SISTER MARY Poong Liwanag.
GROUP Poong Liwanag.
SISTER MARY Poong Liwanag.
GROUP Poong Liwanag.
SISTER MARY Pusong mapayapa.
GROUP Pusong mapayapa.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
SISTER MARY O Lord of Light.
GROUP O Lord of Light.
SISTER MARY Cleanse our beings.
GROUP Cleanse our beings.
SISTER MARY O Lord of Light.
GROUP O Lord of Light.
SISTER MARY O Lord of Light.
GROUP O Lord of Light.
SISTER MARY Heart of peace.
GROUP Heart of peace.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
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Sequence 24
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
MANAY (to Febrero)
Niloloko ka, niloloko – saan ba
nanggaling ang babaeng yan? Akala
mo kung sinong tweetie-tweetums
ha, daig pa ang pagkabirhen ng Boots
Anson-Roa! E kamustahin mo naman
ang mga arte, ha: “Ah, ah, naku Manay,
thank you, ha. Alam mo Manay, mahal
na mahal ko si Febrero e.” Tapos – naku
huwag mong ipapakita sa kin yang
babaeng yan, talagang sasagasaan
ko siya! (Distracted by a handsome
passerby) Ay!
GAY (to Manay’s other friends, talking
about Manay)
Eto naman si Marichu, ayaw namang
magpapigil. Hindi lang kaharap
si Febrero kung ano-ano na ang
pinagsasasabi. Kesyo “He doesn’t love
me anymore, he doesn’t need me.
Ginagamit lang niya ako –” (Distracted
by a male stranger) Ang ganda ng legs!
GAY 2 Yan ang legs!
GAY
Pero pag kaharap….
GAY 3 Siyempre dead na dead. Love
Story Part Two.
GAY 2 Bakit ikaw, may kilala kang
baklang hindi neurotic?
MANAY (to Febrero)
Hoy, hindi ako nagmamalinis
ha. Sa lahat ng ayoko sa tao, yung
nagsisinungaling o nanloloko. Aba’y
pag nahuli mo nang nagsinungaling
sa yo, kalimutan mo na! Ano ka, loka?
Ano bang klaseng babae yang kabit mo,
ha? Saang impiyerno mo bang napulot
yang putang demonyitang yan?
227
MANAY (to Febrero)
She dares put one over us, she dares!
Where the hell did that woman come
from? You’d think she’s some tweetietweetums, acts more virginal than
Boots Anson-Roa.32 Oh, how she puts
on the act: “Ahh, ahh, oh, Manay, thank
you. You know, Manay, I love Febrero
so much.” And then – I tell you, don’t
ever let her near me, or I’ll have her
run over! (Distracted by a handsome
passerby) Ayy!
GAY (to Manay’s other friends, talking
about Manay)
And this Marichu, she can’t be
held back. Just cuz Febrero isn’t
here, the things she says. Listen to
her. “He doesn’t love me anymore, he
doesn’t need me. He just uses me –”
(Distracted by a male stranger) Wow,
lovely legs!
GAY 2 Now those are legs!
GAY
But when he’s around….
GAY 3 Of course she’s head over heels.
Love Story Part Two.
GAY 2 Why, you know any faggot who
isn’t neurotic?
MANAY (to Febrero)
Hey, I’m not saying I’m that clean. But
if there’s anything I despise, it’s a liar
or someone who takes me for a fool.
Why, if you catch someone lying to
you, forget it! What are you otherwise,
crazy? What kind of woman is that
mistress of yours? From what side of
hell did you pick up that demon whore?
Krip Yuson, poet, recites to no one and everyone, attracting two tots; costumed gay whirls
by him as he speaks.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
228
KRIP YUSON
There is no city but this city / This is the landscape of your life / Wherever you turn,
black / Ruins of your loves come into view / You wish for other harbors and other
places / But only an echo of the city / The selfsame city / Shimmers in the hearing
glass / There is no city but this city….
SISTER MARY Poong Liwanag.
GROUP Poong Liwanag.
SISTER MARY Punuin mo kami ng
makahulugang init.
GROUP Punuin mo kami ng
makahulugang init.
SISTER MARY Poong Liwanag.
GROUP Poong Liwanag.
FEBRERO (to Manay)
Baka nagkamali lang yung receptionist.
MANAY
Puwede ba? Oy Febrero, walang
Adelina Macapinlac sa putang ospital
na yan ha. Tinarayan ko’ng lahat ng
malalanding nurses doon. Tinilian
ko! Kinalkal ko lahat ng mga official
files doon, wala! Para akong lukoluko.… (Corrects himself) Luka-luka!...
Talagang sa panahong ito, wala kang
mapagkakatiwalaan.
SISTER MARY O Lord of Light.
GROUP O Lord of Light.
SISTER MARY Fill us with meaningful
warmth.
GROUP Fill us with meaningful
warmth.
SISTER MARY O Lord of Light.
GROUP O Lord of Light.
FEBRERO (to Manay)
Maybe the receptionist just made a
mistake.
MANAY
The hell she did. Hey, Febrero, there is
no Adelina Macapinlac in that fucking
hospital. I already bitched at all the
fucking nurses there. I screamed at
them! I went through all the official
files, nada, zilch! I was like some crazy
bastard.… (Corrects himself) Some
crazy bitch!... I tell you, in this day and
age, there’s no one you can trust!
Seq. 25: Ade’s house. Int. Night.
Febrero watches from his bed as Ade kisses him and then strips.
FEBRERO Saan ka galing?
ADEL
Sa ospital, saan pa?
FEBRERO Where’d you come from?
ADEL
The hospital, where else?
Incredulous, Febrero turns away. She starts making love to him but he responds coldly. She
embraces him by his neck, from which a scapular dangles.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
ADEL
Bakit? Ha? Febrero bakit? Ano’ng
nangyayari sa iyo? Bakit?… (Suspects
something is seriously wrong) Febrero,
mahal kita. Kahit ano’ng mangyari,
huwag mo akong iwan. Huwag mo
akong pabayaan….
229
ADEL
Why? Huh? Febrero, what’s wrong?
What’s wrong with you? Bakit?…
(Suspects something is seriously wrong)
Febrero, I love you. Whatever happens,
don’t leave me. Don’t ever let me go….
Febrero softens up and responds to her entreaties.
Seq. 26: Virgie’s house. Int.–ext. Night.
Having taken another tranquilizer, Virgie stops by the hallway, fingering her keys, unable
to look up at a religious statue gazing down at her. Instead she goes straight out to her lawn
and stands by the fence looking out at the rest of the city. Her husband, seeing her, shakes
his head and goes to her. She embraces him tearfully.
VIRGIE Sayang na sayang. Si Alex,
nung ipinanganak ko yan, hindi
ako makapaniwala. Hindi ako
makapaniwala!
VIRGIE Such a pity. That Alex, when I
gave birth to him, I couldn’t believe it. I
just couldn’t believe it!
Seq. 27: Bambang St. open canal. Ext. Night.
Amid a dilapidated movie-advertising vehicle and empty market stalls, Bea and Gaying
cross an open canal (estero). Gaying sees Kano in the distance and calls out to her.
GAYING Kano! Kano! Kano!... Kano!
Kano sees them and runs to embrace Bea.
KANO My idol!
BEA (rejecting her) Heh! Galit ako sa iyo!
Galit ako sa mundo. (Begins sobbing)
GAYING Kanina pa yan.
BEA
Galit ako sa inyong lahat!
KANO Ano na ba to?
BEA
Ano ba to, ano ba to….
GAYING Niloloko raw kasi siya ng mga
tao. Kasi yung kaibigan niyang bakla,
dinala siya sa ospital para patingnan
yung mata niya. Tapos hindi naman
pala totoo yung nurse na doon
nagtatrabaho. Hm, peke pala o.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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BEA (rejecting her) Bah! I’m pissed at you!
I’m pissed at the world. (Begins sobbing)
GAYING She’s been like that.
BEA
I’m pissed at you all!
KANO Why, what’s wrong?
BEA
Why, what’s wrong? Why, what’s
wrong?….
GAYING She says she’s being had by
everyone. Cuz that gay friend of hers
took her to this hospital, so she could
have her eyes checked. But then that
nurse who was supposed to be there
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
KANO Tama na yang drama mo, halika
na. Tama na, halika na. (Takes Bea by
the waist) Halika na, Gaying.
BEA
Hindi bale, aalis naman ako e.
Pupunta na ako ng Saudi.
KANO Oy naalala mo noong nandoon
pa tayo sa Olongapo? Ang baho-baho
mo pa noon, hindi ka kasi naliligo e.
BEA
Hu, mas mabaho ka naman.
230
turns not to be working there at all. She
was a total fake.
KANO Okay, okay, cut the drama. Let’s
go. (Takes Bea by the waist) Let’s go,
Gaying.
BEA
Never mind, I’m leaving anyway.
I’m going to Saudi.
KANO Hey, you remember when we
were still in Olongapo? Boy, did you
stink then, cuz you never had a bath.
BEA
What are you talking about, you
were the stinker.
Kano takes out a bottle of cough syrup, takes a swig and offers some to Bea.
KANO Oy uminom ka muna.
Naalala mo nagtitinda ka pa ng mga
sweepstakes sa mga Amerikano?
Paingles-ingles ka pa noon e.
BEA (returns bottle to Kano) O.
KANO “Hey Joe, wanna try your luck
Joe?” Oow!
BEA (starting to lighten up)
E ikaw naman, tindera ng PX goods
kuno! Saan ka, binubugaw mo yung
mga babae doon pag hindi mo makuha!
KANO
O tarantado!... Ikaw ang idol ko, e.
BEA
Hu, na-bust ka lang sa ’Gapo
kaya ka andito ngayon, e.
KANO O hindi pa ako naba-bust ha!
BEA
Hu, alam ko yata.
KANO Kaya ako nandito sinundan kita.
KANO Here, drink up. You remember
when we were still selling sweepstakes
tickets to the Americans? And you kept
trying out your English?
BEA (returns bottle to Kano) Here.
KANO “Hey Joe, wanna try your luck
Joe?” Oow!
BEA (starting to lighten up)
And what about you, pretending to be
a seller of PX goods! When what you
were really up to was pimping for all
the girls you couldn’t get!
KANO
Crazy!... That’s cuz you were my idol.
BEA
Hah, you just got busted in
’Gapo, that’s why you landed here.
KANO Hey, I’ve never been busted!
BEA
Hah, I know it too.
KANO Reason I’m here is cuz I
followed you.
Kano gives cough syrup bottle to Bea, who takes more swigs from it.
BEA
Sinundan.… Na-bust ka e.
KANO O, o, o tama na yan. Ginagawa
mo naman itong softdrinks e. May
tama ka na no?
BEA
Oo. (Laughs more openly)
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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BEA
Followed me.… You got busted.
KANO Okay, okay, that’s enough. It ain’t
soft drinks. You’re already on a high,
right?
BEA
Yeah. (Laughs more openly)
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
231
Top: Sequence 27; Bottom: Sequence 28
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
232
Kano leads Bea into a pushcart, beside a garbage dump.
KANO
O pahinga ka muna dito, halika.
BEA
Ano ba ito?
KANO
Kariton. Dito muna tayo.
BEA (now high, in a laughing fit)
Ang baho naman dito!
KANO (laughing with her)
E papano basura yan e! Pagtiyagaan mo
na yang amoy. E kasing baho mo naman
yan dati e!
BEA
Hindi oy.… Sarap! (Kano starts
caressing her face, then her arms) Kano
ha, ayoko niyan…. Kano ha! (Kano
mashes Bea’s breasts) Ang hilig mo
naman diyan, e.
KANO
E andiyan ang rhapsody, e.
KANO
Okay, c’mon, you can rest here first.
BEA
What is this?
KANO
A pushcart. We can stay here first.
BEA (now high, in a laughing fit)
It stinks in here!
KANO (laughing with her)
How can it not stink, when it’s trash?!
You can take it, you used to stink like
that.
BEA
Of course not.… Feels good! (Kano
starts caressing her face, then her arms)
Hey, Kano, I don’t like that…. Hey,
Kano! (Kano mashes Bea’s breasts) You
always want to do that.
KANO
Cuz that’s where the rhapsody is.33
As Kano starts kissing Bea, Gaying moves away, giggling, and hooks a bra from a clothesline.
Seq. 28: Street accident. Ext. Night.
Febrero and Baby are caught in a traffic jam caused by a vehicular accident. From the car
men lift bloodied victims.
BABY
Febrero halika sandali –
FEBRERO (distracted by accident)
Oy!
BABY
– mag-usap tayo.
FEBRERO
May aksidente a! (Gets out of the cab for
a closer look)
BABY (follows him)
May importante akong sasabihin sa iyo!
FEBRERO
Ilan kaya ang namatay? Pisang-pisa a!
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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BABY
Febrero, listen –
FEBRERO (distracted by accident)
Oh no!
BABY
– let’s talk.
FEBRERO
An accident! (Gets out of the cab for a
closer look)
BABY (follows him)
I have something important to tell you!
FEBRERO
I wonder how many died? What a
wreck!
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
BABY
Febrero –
FEBRERO Ano ba!
BABY
Buntis ako.
FEBRERO (taken aback by the news)
Ano? Hindi ka ba nag-iingat?
BABY (surprised by his response)
Ha?
FEBRERO Hindi ka ba umiinom ng pills
mo?!
BABY
Hindi.
FEBRERO Napakagaga mo naman pala e.
Hindi ka naman pala umiinom ng pills
mo e. E pano ngayon yan?
BABY
E di pakasal na lang tayo.
233
BABY
Febrero –
FEBRERO What is it?
BABY
I’m pregnant.
FEBRERO (taken aback by the news)
What? You haven’t been safe?
BABY (surprised by his response)
What?
FEBRERO You haven’t been taking pills?!
BABYNo.
FEBRERO How stupid. You haven’t been
taking your pills! So what now?
BABY
We should get married.
More victims are hauled out of the wreck.
FEBRERO
Puro kamalasan ang buhay na to! Bakit
ba napakatanga mo? Ano’ng ipalalamon
ko sa yo? Intindihin mo naman ako!
Ilan beses na natin napag-usapan yan?
Lalaki ako! Hindi kita pakakasalan
tapos pababayaan lang!... Ang gusto
ko sana maghintay-hintay, upang
maka-ipon-ipon. Kung bakit ba naman
napakagaga mo e!
BABY (in tears)
Kasi, mahal na mahal kita, e.
FEBRERO
What a bummer! Why have you been
so stupid? What will I feed you? You
couldn’t care less about me, could you!?
How many times have we discussed
it? I’m a guy! I can’t just marry you and
then not care for you!… I told you to
wait, until I manage some savings. And
what do you do but get stupid.
BABY (in tears)
It’s because I love you so much.
Seq. 29: Virgie’s house. Int. Night.
It is raining when Virgie undertakes a house cleaning. She is typically meticulous about
the activity. When cleaning Alex’s table she drops a box and finds sticks of pot inside as
well as other drugs. Then she and her husband take turns beating up Alex, hitting him with
drawers and boxes, throwing plates at him, as his younger siblings cry.
*VIRGIE
Walanghiya ka! Babasagin ko’ng mukha
mo! Papatayin kita! Papatayin kita!
Daddy pabayaan mo ako. Walanghiya
ka! Walanghiya ka! Papatayin kita!
Papatayin kita! Puro sakit ng ulo’ng
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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*VIRGIE
You bastard! Let me at you! I’ll kill
you! I’ll kill you! Daddy, let me at him!
Let me be! You bastard! I’ll kill you!
I’ll kill you! You give me nothing but
heartache! I’ll kill you! (Alex shouts
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
binibigay mo! Papatayin kita! (Alex
shouts “Mommy!”) Daddy patayin
mo’ng batang yan! Hindi ka na ba
titino? Ha?!
*FATHER
Pabayin mo yan! Pabayaan mo sa akin
ang batang yan! Makakatikim sa akin
yan, ako ang gugulpi diyan! Tatakbo
ka pa, ha. Tangina mo, sinabi ko na sa
iyong huwag kang magda-drugs! Puro
ka kalokohan, wala kang nalalaman.
Saan ka pupunta? Papatayin ka namin
talaga, walanghiya ka! Ako’ng papatay
diyan! Ilang beses ko nang sinabi ko
na sa iyong huwag kang magda-drugs,
huwag kang magda-drugs! Habulin
niyo yan!
234
“Mommy!”) Daddy, kill that bastard!
You’ll never learn, you goddamn
bastard!
*FATHER
Let him be! Leave that goddamned boy
to me! He’ll get it from me! I’ll beat
him to a pulp! You’re gonna run away?
You motherfucker, I told you never to
do drugs! You’re full of shit! You don’t
know anything, do you!? Where do you
think you’re going? We’ll kill you, you
fucker! I’ll kill him! I told you never to
do drugs! Never ever do drugs! Go after
him, get him! Get him!
They chase Alex into his bedroom where, tearful and bloody, he later sneaks away from his
house into the rain.
Seq. 30: D’Remark Kitchenette. Int.–ext. Night.
It is raining. The restaurant is almost empty of customers. Pimp approaches Baby, who is
seated by herself, waiting for Febrero. Imelda Papin’s “Taksil” plays on jukebox.
PIMP
Kawawang Baby, naghihintay na
naman. Alam mo, may matagal na
akong gustong sabihin sa yo, hindi ko
lang masabi-sabi dahil baka masaktan
ka: naghihintay ka sa wala, e. Yung taxi
driver mo may asawa –
PIMP
Poor Baby, waiting for nothing again.
You know, I’ve wanted to tell you
something for the longest time, I
couldn’t do it cuz it might hurt you:
you’re waiting for nothing. Your taxi
driver has a wife –
They are interrupted by the commotion of the Chinese owner expelling his
waitress-girlfriend.
CHINESE
Layas, layas na! Sige ikaw, hindi ikaw
kailangan akin dito a! Sige ikaw, puta
ka, wala kang kuwenta! Sige, alis ka! (He
throws her suitcases out into the street)
O, ito pa damit mo, yan! Dalhin mo yan,
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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CHINESE
Get out of here, get out! You I no need
here, no need you! Go and leave, you
whore, you’re no good! Go on, get out!
(He throws her suitcases out into the
street) There, take your clothes with
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
yan pa, o! Walanghiya ka! Sige layas
ka, huwag ikaw babalik dito! O eto pa,
naiwan mo o, dalhin mo lahat yan!
PIMP (to Baby)
Tingnan mo ang kapalaran ng babaeng
hindi wise sa buhay.
235
you! Take them. You fucker! Go and get
out, and no come back here, you! Here,
take them, you! Go and take all your
things!
PIMP (to Baby)
See what happens to women who don’t
play it smart?
Chinese owner throws more of waitress’s clothes at her in the rain. She picks them up,
crying and wet.
CHINESE
Diyan ka sa ulan! Mabuti nga sa yo
lumayas ka! Parati malandi ka! Ayoko
na sa yo, masyado ka salbahe!
CHINESE
Stay out there in the rain, you! Best
thing you leave! Nothing but a whore,
you! Don’t want you anymore, too
much, you! No good, you!
Seq. 31: Bea’s house. Ext.–int. Day.
Greg Williams, dirty and wearing the same clothes he wore when he left, comes home
amid street guys singing Heber Bartolome’s “Buhay Pinoy.” Meanwhile Bea and her female
neighbor are quarreling.
GUYS (singing)
Tingnan niyo sa bangketa / Pulubi
ay naghilera / Mga kamay laging
nakasahod / Doon sila natutulog….
NEIGHBOR
Bruha, walanghiya, bwisit! Ku, landi!
Puta! Pampam!
BEA
Pagkatapos sisipot ka dito, akala mo
kung sino ka! Gaganyanin mo pa’ng
mga anak ko, akala mo kung sino kang
naghahari-harian sa lugar na ito! Mas
lalo kang pampam! Puta!
NEIGHBOR (after Bea senses Greg’s arrival
and follows him with her kids into the
house) Akala mo, e wala naman talaga
ang hinahanapbuhay niyan, e!
GUYS (singing)
Look at the sidewalk / Where beggars
are all lined up / Their hands always
with palms up / And that’s where they
sleep….
NEIGHBOR
Fucking asshole! You shameless slut!
Bitch! Whore!
BEA
You just show up here, who do you
think you are! And you’ll do that to
my kids, you think you lord it over this
place!? Why, you’re the bigger whore!
You bitch!
NEIGHBOR (after Bea senses Greg’s arrival
and follows him with her kids into the
house) She thinks she’s somebody,
when she’s a worthless do-nothing!
In the house, Greg throws a fit.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
<http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
GREG
Niloko kami ng recruiter namin
sa Bangkok, e! Nawala na lang at
sukat. Nagkagulo nga sa Bangkok
sa kahahanap sa kanya e! Pati yung
tatlong libong bond naming tangaytangay! Nag-waiter nga lang ako para
may makain! E kung hindi ko ginawa
yon, mamamatay kami ng gutom!
Nagkautang-utang pa ako para lang
makauwi dito! Hu, tanginang yan!
GAYING (from outside)
Ate Bea nandito na ko!
BEA (turns on Gaying)
Sa’n ka na naman ba galing?!
GAYING
Di ba nagpaalam naman ako sa yong
bibili ako ng gamot para sa nanay ko?
BEA
Saan ka bumili ng gamot, sa Tarlac?
Ilang oras kang nawala? Ang paalam
mo sa kin sandal ka lang, a! Kanina
pa ko nag-iisa dito, ang tagal-tagal,
nakipag-away na nga ako diyan e!
Tingnan mo nga tong bahay, ang dumidumi, ang baho-baho. Sige, maglinis ka
na diyan!
GAYING (upon seeing Greg)
Kuya Greg yung Avon ko?
GREG
Wala!
GAYING (still in good spirits)
Ay, wala! (Walks away)
BEA
Avon – Avon.… Pag humingi kayo ng
pera ang bilis-bilis niyo. Pag kailangan
kayo nawawala kayo!
GREG
Tanginang buhay to, oo! Balik na
naman tayo sa wala!
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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236
GREG
Our fucking recruiter pulled a fast
one in Bangkok! He just vanished. We
turned Bangkok upside down looking
for the motherfucker! And the bastard
even made away with all our papers!
We had to work as waiters just so we
could eat! Otherwise we would’ve
starved to death! I had to borrow
money left and right just so I could fly
back. Now I’m fucking deep in debt!
Goddamn fuck it!
GAYING (from outside)
Ate Bea, I’m back.
BEA (turns on Gaying)
And where’d you come from this time?!
GAYING
Didn’t I tell you I had to buy medicine
for my mother?
BEA
And where’d you have to buy the
medicine, in Tarlac?34 You’ve been gone
for hours! You said it would only take
you a while. But you made me wait so
long, and I’ve been alone here so I even
get into a fight outside! Look at our
house, it’s so filthy, and it stinks! Will
you start cleaning up!?
GAYING (upon seeing Greg)
Kuya Greg, you have my Avon?
GREG
No, nothing!
GAYING (still in good spirits)
Oh, nothing! (Walks away)
BEA
Avon – Avon.… When you’re asking for
money, you’re so fast. And then you’re
gone!
GREG
Fucking shit! What a life! We’re back to
nothing!
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
237
Bea moves her kids and herself toward Greg on bed.
BEA
Greg, anong klaseng tao ka?
BEA
Greg, what kind of a person are you?
Still angry but silenced by her question, Greg glares at Bea.
Seq. 32: Vanessa’s house. Int. Night.
Devotees sing to Virgin Mary while Virgie talks to Vanessa on porch.
DEVOTEES
Araw-araw kay Maria kami ay
nagdarasal / Si Maria’y aming Ina, ibig
naming marangal. (Rest of the song
overlaps with Virgie and Vanessa’s
conversation)
VIRGIE
Kasi e, umalis si Alex sa bahay. E, wala
naman yon e. Kasi nakagalitan naming
mag-asawa. E pinagtanong ko na sa
kanyang mga kaibigan pero hindi nila
alam kung saan naroroon.
VANESSA
Yan naman ho kasing si Alex, e –
VIRGIE
Kaya lang ako nagpunta rito baka, baka
alam mo kung saan siya.
VANESSA
Matagal na rin ho na –
VIRGIE
Alam, alam ko naman kayong mga teenagers, ma-mga sensitive. E kaunting
mapagalitan lamang, ayun, lumayas
na! E siguro naman nangyayari rin sa
pamilya niyo yan, ano?
VANESSA
Natural lang naman ho yon, e.
VANESSA’S MOTHER (letting devotees in)
Tuloy kayo, pasok.
VANESSA (to Virgie)
Iyan naman hong si Alex niyo,
nakakainis talaga e. Kahit sa akin hindi
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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DEVOTEES
Every day we pray to Mama Mary /
Mama Mary’s our mother, whom we
honor. (Rest of the song overlaps with
Virgie and Vanessa’s conversation)
VIRGIE
Well, you know, Alex left home. It’s
nothing. His Dad and I just scolded
him. I’ve been asking his friends, but
they say they don’t know where he is.
VANESSA
Well, Alex, you know how he is –
VIRGIE
That’s why I came here, you just might
know where he is.
VANESSA
It’s been some time since –
VIRGIE
You know, I know how you teen-agers
are, how sensitive you all are. We just
scolded him, and he left home just like
that! But doesn’t that happen in every
family?
VANESSA
Well, yes, it’s natural for –
VANESSA’S MOTHER (letting devotees in)
Come in, come in.
VANESSA (to Virgie)
But you know, ma’m, that Alex, he can
be such a pain. He hasn’t even shown
up for some time. I even hear he’s with
some swish.
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
nagpapakita. Sabi nila sumama daw sa
bakla e.
VIRGIE Bakla?
VANESSA Oho, sward!
VANESSA’S MOTHER (to Virgie,
interrupting)
Misis, sumama na kayo sa parosaryo
namin sa loob o. Ah siyanga pala, siya
ang mister ko. (To her husband) Siya
ang mommy ni Alex, boyfriend ni Van;
siya ang magiging balae natin. (Giggles)
Ah eto pa ang ibang anak namin.
VANESSA’S FATHER
Tumuloy ho kayo.
VIRGIE
Naku ang suwerte ko naman.
VANESSA’S MOTHER
Bakit?
VIRGIE
May panata rin ako sa Fatima.
VANESSA’S MOTHER
Ah ganoon ho ba? Tuloy kayo, tuloy.
238
VIRGIE Swish?
VANESSA Yes, a gay!35
VANESSA’S MOTHER (to Virgie,
interrupting)
Missus, why don’t you come in and
join us in praying the rosary? Oh, by
the way, here’s my husband. (To her
husband) She’s the mommy of Alex,
Van’s boyfriend; she’ll be our in-law.
(Giggles) And here are the rest of our
kids.
VANESSA’S FATHER
Come in please.
VIRGIE
Oh, how lucky can I get.
VANESSA’S MOTHER
What do you mean?
VIRGIE
I’m also a devotee of Fatima.
VANESSA’S MOTHER
Oh, is that so? Come in, come in.
As they pray, Virgie seems more worried than grateful.
VANESSA’S MOTHER (leading the Hail
Mary)
Aba Ginoong Maria, napupuno ka
ng grasiya, ang Panginoong Diyos ay
sumasaiyo, bukod kang pinagpala sa
babaeng lahat at pinagpala naman ang
iyong anak na si Hesus.
DEVOTEES, VANESSA’S FAMILY, AND
VIRGIE
Santa Maria, Ina ng Diyos, ipanalangin
mo kaming makasalanan ngayon at
kung kami’y mamamatay, amen.
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VANESSA’S MOTHER (leading the Hail
Mary)
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with
thee. Blessed art thou amongst women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
Jesus.
DEVOTEES, VANESSA’S FAMILY, AND
VIRGIE
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for
us sinners, now and at the hour of our
death, amen.
© Ateneo de Manila University
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239
Seq. 33: Manay’s dress shop. Int. Night.
Virgie is seated apart from a group of gays, Manay’s friends, who are listening to Evita,
dressed exotically with a turban on her head.
EVITA (laughing after every statement)
And so let me tell you about how I met Lagdameo, M. D. But first of all I came down
with this dreaded disease called vaginal herpes.
GAY
Que gross.
EVITA Aba hindi, ikaw naman. Vaginal
herpes pala, according to Time
magazine, of all things is – of course
you know where vaginal is?
GAY
Syempre!
EVITA Anyway, vaginal herpes,
according to Time magazine, is due
to either venereal disease or (pause)
emotional stress.
GAY
Maybe it’s the former?
EVITA Both! (Evita and gays laugh) So
there I was, dying with excruciating
pain ha, wheeling into the fourth floor
and Doctor Lagdameo comes and says,
“Four-o-nine!” Boy! Did he examine
me! Started palpating me and talaga
namang I mean everywhere! He started
palpating me everywhere, hanggang
umabot doon sa kailangang kong magJoanne Drew! (They laugh again)
GAY 2 (to Virgie)
Ah misis, maupo muna kayo, bababa na
yon.
EVITA (momentarily distracted by the
reference to Manay)
Manay Sharon yung aking gown! Diyos
ko ten-thirty na ang show ko, para pa
akong Soraya dito!
GAY
How gross.
EVITA Of course not. It isn’t. It turns
out that vaginal herpes, according to
Time magazine, of all things is – of
course you know where vaginal is?
GAY
Of course!
EVITA Anyway, vaginal herpes,
according to Time magazine, is due
to either venereal disease or (pause)
emotional stress.
GAY
Maybe it’s the former?
EVITA Both! (Evita and gays laugh) So
there I was, dying with excruciating
pain, if you must know, being wheeled
up to the fourth floor, and Doctor
Lagdameo comes and says, “Four-onine!” Boy! Did he examine me! Started
palpating me, and boy was he doing it, I
mean everywhere! He started palpating
me everywhere, until he reached that
part where I needed some Joanne
Drew!36 (They laugh again)
GAY 2 (to Virgie)
Oh, missus, take a seat, he’ll be down in
a minute.
EVITA (momentarily distracted by the
reference to Manay)
Oh, Manay Sharon, my gown! My God,
my show’s at ten-thirty, and I’m still
looking like a Soraya here!37
In his bedroom, Manay wakes up Alex.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
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Sequence 33
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 172–272
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
MANAY
Oy gumising ka na, andiyan ang nanay
mo. Naku gumising ka na, andiyan ang
nanay mo’t baka mag-iskandalo pa!
Tumayo na sabi, e!
ALEX
Natutulog pa ang tao, e!
MANAY (cleaning up Alex’s mess)
Ang dami-dami ng kalat, naku! Hwah!
Tumayo na sabi, bilisan mo! Tingnan
mo ang bahay ko, ginagawa mong
parang bahay ng baboy! Ang baho-baho
na!
241
MANAY
Hey, wake up, your mom’s here. Hey,
better get up, your mom’s here and I
don’t want a scandal! I said get up!
ALEX
But I’m still sleeping!
MANAY (cleaning up Alex’s mess)
What a mess you made here! Jeez! I said
get up, this minute! See what you’re
doing here, making a pigsty of my
house! It stinks so much already!
Meanwhile Evita continues to entertain the gays and shock Virgie.
EVITA (continuing her hospital narrative)
I tell you that guy talaga, napaka-sex
maniac! Nando’n ako halos nakatali
doon sa four posts of the hospital bed,
ha, at pagkatapos, gusto pa niya akong,
gustong patungan ng protoscope niya!
GAY
Ano’ng ginawa mo!
EVITA Ha, diring-diri ako sa sarili ko!
EVITA (continuing her hospital narrative)
I tell you, that guy, really, such a sex
maniac! There I was tied up to the four
posts of the hospital bed, mind you,
and he still wanted to mount me with
that protoscope of his!
GAY
So what did you do?
EVITA Omigosh, did I feel so dirty!
Their laughter subsides when Manay comes out, herding Alex before him.
MANAY Misis, ang anak ho ninyo.
GAY (aside) Aw. Fetch ng mother.
MANAY Missus, here’s your son.
GAY (aside) Aww. Fetched by mother.
Fists clenched, Alex leaves the house as gays make snide remarks.
MANAY Mga kaibigan ko ho.
VIRGIE
Ah, e maraming salamat sa inyo ha! Ah
sige, magpapaalam na ako sa inyong
lahat ha! E alam niyo naman ang mga
bata, masyadong sensitive. E, gu-good
night everybody!
GAY (aside)Award!
VIRGIE Thank you. (Rushes out)
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MANAY These are my friends.
VIRGIE
Oh, well, okay, thank you so much, all
of you. We’ll have to go, okay? You
know how it is with kids, they’re so
sensitive. So okay, good night.
GAY (aside)Award!38
VIRGIE Thank you. (Rushes out)
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
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Sequence 34
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
*EVITA
Can you imagine? What’s the problem?
What’s the problem?
*MANAY
O sige, sige. Naku cigarette, cigarette!
Maloloka ako! I have to apologize sa
inyo my darlings – this doesn’t happen
everyday na dinadalaw ako ng aking
mother-in-law! Oy lighter nga, lighter,
lighter. Naku, maloloka ako!
EVITA (eager to hear someone else’s story
for a change)
And so and so and so?
MANAY
Paano naman hindi ka maloloka e kung
titingnan mo, akala mo disentengdisente – mukhang teacher, di ba?
Naku former prosti, my mother-in-law,
my mother-in-law is a former prosti,
manay! (Everyone responds, shocked
but amused) Alam mo ba yang mother
ni Alex, yung boyfriend niya noong
araw, yung hawak niya connected dati
sa pulis, at ang resulta, at ang resulta
nga yang Alex. And before you know
it, ayan – anak kete anak kete anak,
instant family. Naku, maloloka ako! My
mother-in-law, wa na prosti, mother!
243
*EVITA
Can you imagine? What’s the problem?
What’s the problem?
*MANAY
Okay, okay. I need a cigarette, a
cigarette! I’ll go crazy! I have to
apologize to you, my darlings – this
doesn’t happen every day that I get a
visit from my mother-in-law! A lighter,
a lighter! Omigosh, I’ll go crazy!
EVITA (eager to hear someone else’s story
for a change)
And so and so and so?
MANAY
Why won’t I go crazy, when, you
know, if you look at her, she looks
so decent – she looks like a teacher,
doesn’t she? But omigosh, she used
to be a prostitute, my mother-in-law,
my mother-in-law is a former prostie,
imagine that! (Everyone responds,
shocked but amused) You know, that
mother of Alex, her boyfriend before,
he had connections with the police,
and what happened was, the result was
Alex! And before you knew it, voila!
Kid after kid after kid, instant family!
Omigosh I’ll go crazy! My mother-inlaw, no more of a whore!
Seq. 33a: Remedios Circle.
At a street corner Virgie embraces Alex and pleads with him.
VIRGIE Alex, anak, Alex, huwag mo na
kaming iiwan. Huwag mo nang uulitin
yan, ha?
VIRGIE Alex, son, Alex, don’t ever leave
us. Don’t ever do that again, okay?
Seq. 34: Outside Adel’s house. Ext. Night.
Baby is waiting for Adelina in the rain. When Baby sees Adel walking down the street in
her nurse’s uniform and carrying her red bag, she stops Adel.
BABY
Miss, buntis ako. Huwag ka
sanang magagalit sa akin, hindi ko na
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BABY
Miss, I’m pregnant. Please don’t
get angry, but I don’t know what to do
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
kasi alam ang gagawin ko e. Ayaw sana
kitang lapitan pero wala naman akong
ibang malalapitan, e. Ang sakit-sakit!
244
anymore. I didn’t want to bother you,
but there’s no one else I can turn to. I’m
hurting so much!
Ade attempts to leave but Baby, crying, pleads with her.
BABY
Huwag mo akong iiwan! Ang mga
lalake – ang dami-dami kong kapatid –
nanay ko –
ADEL
Sino ka ba?
BABY (answering indirectly)
Si Febrero!
ADEL
Halika nga dito. (They take shelter in a
dark corridor) Ipalaglag mo na yan!
BABY
Wala kaming pera, e.
ADEL
Lalong walang pera si Febrero!
BABY
Sabi niya papakasalan niya ako.
ADEL
Bagong salta ka no?
BABYOo.
ADEL
E bakit ka nagpabuntis? Sana
nag-ingat ka.
BABY
Mahal na mahal ko si Febrero.
ADEL
Lahat ng lalake iyan ang sinasabi.
BABY
Bakit niya ako lolokohin? Hindi
ko naman siya niloloko a.
ADEL
Bakit ba tayong lahat
naglolokohan? Ewan.
BABY
Tulungan mo ako.
ADEL
Papano?
BABY
Kausapin mo si Febrero.
ADEL
Makinig ka sa akin. Paano ka
pakakasalan ni Febrero, e kasal na
yon, dalawa na ang anak no’n? Baka
akala mo ako ang misis niya – hindi,
kabit lang ako. Hindi ko naman
puwedeng ipasa sa yo, di ako naman
ang mawawalan, di ba? Tsaka ipasa ko
sa yo o hindi, pareho lang dahil iyang
mga lalakeng yan, maraming kabit.
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BABY
Please don’t leave me! All the guys – all
my brothers and sisters – my own
mother –
ADEL
Who are you anyway?
BABY (answering indirectly)
It’s Febrero!
ADEL
You come over here. (They take shelter
in a dark corridor) Drop that baby!
BABY
But we have no money.
ADEL
Febrero has none, too!
BABY
He said he’d marry me.
ADEL
You’re new in Manila, aren’t
you?
BABYYes.
ADEL
So why’d you let yourself get
knocked up? You should’ve been
careful.
BABY
I love Febrero so much.
ADEL
All the guys promise that.
BABY
But why would he fool me? I
don’t ever lie to him.
ADEL
Why are we fooling ourselves? I
dunno.
BABY
Help me please.
ADELHow?
BABY
Talk to Febrero.
ADEL
Listen to me. How can Febrero marry
you, when he’s already married, in fact
they have two kids? And I’m not his
wife – no, I’m just his mistress. And
I can’t pass him on to you, right, cuz
it’ll be my loss. And even if I did pass
him on to you, no difference, cuz these
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
Palibhasa bagong salta ka – promdi ka,
napakainosente mo. Ganyan din ako
noong araw nung bagong dating ako
sa Maynila, laging naloloko. Yang si
Febrero, may kabit na bakla yan. Kaya
sa susunod mag-iingat ka bago ka
pumatol! Kung hindi, magkaka-lecheleche ang buhay mo. Kailangan mas
wise ka sa lalake, kung hindi lalamugin
ka ng mga hindot na yan! At saka
huwag mong iiyakan iyang mga lalake,
boring na yan. Tibayan mo ang loob mo,
tapos ipalaglag mo na yan. (Leaves)
245
guys have many mistresses. Heck,
you’re so new here, you’re fresh from
the boondocks, you’re so innocent
That’s how I was too when I just came
to Manila, always getting fooled, by
everyone. That Febrero, he even has
a faggot lover. Next time, be careful
before you hitch up with anyone!
Otherwise your life will just keep on
getting ruined. You have to be smart
with guys, otherwise the bastards will
eat you alive! And never cry over them,
that’s so boring already. Toughen up,
and drop that baby. (Leaves)
Seq. 35: Virgie’s house. Ext. Night.
Alex desperately searches his room, facing the prospect of cold turkey. Since his parents had
probably cleaned the place, he finds nothing. He then seeks relief elsewhere –
Seq. 36: Breakwater trip. Ext. Night.
Alex, his friends, and Kano have apparently just finished a drug session and are passing
the time by the waters of Manila Bay.
ALEX
Alam mo, ang tingin ko sa Maynila
parang, parang ulap, nakalutang; o
minsan nag-iiba ang korte, nag-iiba
ang kulay; minsan naman ang labolabo, parang, parang ang tigas; minsan
naman napakalamig tingnan, okey;
minsan nakakainis, nakakasakit e.
Sakay lang ng sakay: yan ang trip e.
KANO
Alam mo pare, mas maganda ang
Maynila kaysa sa Olongapo. Sa
Maynila – wow pare, sumasabog yan,
pow, wow, kazam, kzzt, ahh! Ang
galing, pare, ang galing. Ikot ng ikot
yan, bira ng bira! Kaya kailangang ikaw,
sakay lang ng sakay kundi maiiwan
ka – kundi pati ikaw sasabog! Kailangan
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ALEX
You know, the way I see Manila, it’s
like a cloud that’s afloat; or sometimes
it changes shape, it changes color;
then sometimes it gets vague, it looks
so hard; and sometimes it looks so
cool and comforting to look at; but
sometimes it’s such a piss-off, so
hurtful. Well, whatever, just ride on:
that’s the trip.
KANO
You know, man, Manila’s so much
better than Olongapo. In Manila – wow,
man, it’s fireworks, pow, wow, kazam,
kzzt, ahh! Great, man, just great. It just
keeps whirling around, and sparkling!
That’s why you just have to ride on, or
you get left behind – or you yourself
explode! You gotta be fast, catch the
© Ateneo de Manila University
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246
mabilis ka, sakay ng sakay, trip lang ng
trip. Okey ba pare? Di ba?
ride, enjoy the trip. Isn’t that okay, man?
Right?
Costumed trannies, apparently having just come from a Halloween party, suddenly emerge
onto the same breakwater portion where Alex, Kano, and friends are. Led Zeppelin’s
“Moby Dick” starts playing.
KANO
O ano, ano? O ano, type niyo bang
mag-join sa tripping?
ALEX’S FRIEND
Pare okey ba, ha?
KANO
Hey, what? Hey, c’mon, don’t you
wanna join the trip?
ALEX’S FRIEND
Yeah, man, okay, right?
Alex, friends, and Kano begin stripping. Kano is wearing a cotton undershirt and briefs
like the boys. Then they jump into the water with lifesavers, one with the design of a horned
demon which they throw about. Soon they begin to see fireworks in the sky and candles
afloat on the water, as the trannies continue to enjoy themselves.
Seq. 37: Baby’s house. Int. Night.
The family is preparing to leave for an All Saints Eve overnight vigil at a cemetery. Baby is
discussing her pregnancy with her mother in a corner.
BABY’S MOTHER (to noisy kid)
Oy ikaw, labas ka! (To Baby) Ilang
buwan na iyan?
MALE HOUSEHOLD MEMBER
Ano ba? Ang gulo mo!
BABY
Tatlong buwan ho.
MOTHER Puwede pa. Ipalaglag mo.
BABY
Wala ho akong naipon na pera.
MOTHER Hindi ikaw, ang lalake mo!
BABY
Hindi ko na ho nakikita e, may
kasama na raw hong ibang babae.
BABY’S MOTHER (to noisy kid)
Hey, you, go outside! (To Baby) How
many months?
MALE HOUSEHOLD MEMBER
Hey! Stop bothering me!
BABY
Three months, Mama.
MOTHER Early enough. Have it dropped.
BABY
I’ve no savings at all.
MOTHER Not you, but your guy!
BABY
I don’t see him anymore, I hear
he’s with another girl.
Outside Baby’s room, the prostitute and her pimp-husband, who were earlier discussing
her earnings, are packing their belongings while other female members of the household
prepare food to take for the all-night cemetery vigils.
PROSTITUTE
Ay naku ang gugulo ng mga batang ito,
oo! Umalis nga kayo diyan! Dalian niyo!
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PROSTITUTE
Oh dammit, these kids are too much!
Will you all get out!? C’mon, scoot!
Right now!
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
OTHER WOMEN
Nagpunta na ba kayo sa semeteryo?
Oho. Anong oras kayo pumunta sa
semeteryo?
PIMP (to his prostitute-wife)
Oy yung dalawang bags ilabas mo ha?
PROSTITUTE
Dalian mo, mata-traffic tayo sa Grace
Park e.
PIMP
Sinabi nang mag-empake e.
ANONYMOUS WOMAN
Esther, ano pa ba’ng kulang dito?
247
OTHER WOMEN
Have you been to the cemetery? What
time did you go to the cemetery?
PIMP (to his prostitute-wife)
Hey, take out the two bags, okay?
PROSTITUTE
C’mon, hurry, there’ll be so much traffic
at Grace Park.
PIMP
I told you to pack already.
ANONYMOUS WOMAN
Esther, what else do we need?
Baby’s father arrives.
BABY’S BROTHER
Mano po, Itay.
MOTHER
O, nakakita ka ng trabaho?
FATHER
Meron – sa Alabang. Labintatlong piso
isang araw, pero napakalayo e! Ang
pamasahe, dos singkuwenta papunta
roon; pabalik, dos singkuwenta. E ang
pagkain pa, di bale wala!
MOTHER
Etong anak mo Tomas, may problema.
BABY’S BROTHER
Mano po, Itay.
MOTHER
O, nakakita ka ng trabaho?
FATHER
Meron – sa Alabang. Labintatlong piso
isang araw, pero napakalayo e! Ang
pamasahe, dos singkuwenta papunta
roon; pabalik, dos singkuwenta. E ang
pagkain pa, di bale wala!
MOTHER
Etong anak mo Tomas, may problema.
Prostitute and her pimp-husband pass by Baby’s family on their way out to take leave.
PROSTITUTE Aling Cora, tutuloy na ho
kami. Lalakad na ho kami.
MOTHER E saan ba ang tungo niyo?
WOMAN Babalik na lang ho kami sa
Pangasinan.
MOTHER E bakit pa kayo babalik doon?
COUPLE
E…. Wala hong mangyayari dito e.
MOTHER O sige.
COUPLE Sige ho, Mang Tomas, Baby sige.
(Baby gives them a wan smile) Tuloy na
kami ha? O sige ho.
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PROSTITUTE Aling Cora, we have to
leave. We’ll just have to go.
MOTHER So where are you going?
WOMAN We’ll just return to Pangasinan.
MOTHER But why do you have to go back
there?
COUPLE
Well…. Nothing will happen to us here.
MOTHER Oh, okay.
COUPLE Okay, Mang Tomas, Baby, okay.
(Baby gives them a wan smile) We’ll
have to go. Okay.
© Ateneo de Manila University
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Seq. 38: Adel’s routine. Ext. Night.
Febrero in his taxi is surreptitiously following Ade, still in nurse’s uniform, and who is in
another cab. Ade enters Aloha Hotel. Meanwhile two prostitutes board Febrero’s cab.
PROSTITUTE 1
Buwisit na punyetang Rudy yan! Akala
ko Hapon ang ibibigay sa atin, yun pala
Bisaya!
PROSTITUTE 2
E oo nga e! Kalbo na, gurang pa!
PROSTITUTES (overlapping)
Seven hundred daw ang ibabayad,
iyon pala kalahati! Naku kawawa yang
Rudy’ng yan!
FEBRERO
Miss … mga miss, hindi ako puwede,
may waiting ako!
PROSTITUTES
E ano ka ba? E kami lang dito ang
kliyente a. Babayaran ka naman a!
FEBRERO
Sinabing hindi ako puwede e, may
waiting ako!
PROSTITUTES
Hu, diyan ka nga nga! Suplado!
PROSTITUTE 1
Fuck that prick Rudy! I thought he was
giving me a Japanese, turned out to be
a Bisaya!39
PROSTITUTE 2
Yeah! And a hairless old man at that!
PROSTITUTES (overlapping)
The fee was supposed to be seven
hundred, turned out to be half! Fuck
that Rudy!
FEBRERO
Miss … hey, I can’t take you, I’m on
waiting time!
PROSTITUTES
Huh, what are you? We’re the only ones
here. And we’ll pay you anyway!
FEBRERO
I told you I can’t, I’m on waiting time!
PROSTITUTES
Hell, fuck it, let’s get out of this stupid
cab! Damn prick!
Suddenly Adel emerges from hotel in full make-up and party dress.
ADEL (to guard)
Pakitawag naman ako ng taxi.
GUARD Taxi!
ADEL (to guard)
Could you get a cab for me please?
GUARD Taxi!
Ade gets into the cab hailed by the guard. Febrero tails them. Adel gets down at a
whorehouse in Leon Guinto.
BOUNCER
Ade –
ADELAko’ng bahala sa inyo.
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BOUNCER
Ade –
ADELI’ll take care of you.
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Bernal / Manila by Night
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Seq. 39: Carnival. Ext. Night.
Sights and sounds of a seedy carnival include an old man peering from a hole at a display,
an upright roulette wheel being turned, and a female impersonator lip-syncing Eruption’s
“One-Way Ticket.” Bea and Greg walk together through these sights and sounds.
GREG
Alam mo dito sa Maynila, abilidad lang
ang kailangan e. Napornada na din lang
yung trabaho ko sa Saudi, naghanap na
ako ng ibang trabaho – mas maganda
pa, magkasama pa tayo.
BEA
Anong trabaho?
GREG
At saka mas malaki ang kikitain natin
dito kaysa sa kinikita mo sa sauna. Two
hundred lang ang dali-dali isang gabi,
wala pang kahirap-hirap. Magkasama
pa tayo.
BEA
Anong klaseng trabaho?
GREG
E basta, may umareglo na. Malapit na
yon. Maghintay ka na lang diyan.
GREG
You know, here in Manila, you just
need some smarts and learn some
tricks. Since nothing came out of my
job prospect in Saudi, I looked for other
work – which turned out better, and
we’re still together.
BEA
What work?
GREG
And I’ll make a lot more than what you
get in the sauna. Two hundred bucks a
night, easy money, no sweat. And we’re
together.
BEA
What sort of work?
GREG
You’ll see, it’s done, someone arranged
it. Just wait, it’ll come soon.
Seq. 40: D’Remark Kitchenette. Int. Night.
Slow night. A blind man passes by the kitchenette. Pimp finishes his drink and walks over
to Baby by the door, waiting for Febrero.
PIMP
Huwag mo nang hintayin yang taxi
driver mo. Hindi na babalik yon, buntis
ka na, e. Alam mo naman ang mga
lalake.… Sumama ka na lang sa akin sa
mga Hapon.
PIMP
Stop waiting for your taxi driver. He
won’t be back, he’s already gotten you
knocked up. You know how guys are.…
Why don’t you just come with me and
take on some Japanese?
Baby looks back at Chinese owner, who leers at her.
Seq. 41: Whorehouse. Int. Night.
Baby’s pimp brings Japanese into living room where Baby sits with other whores. On TV ,
Christian evangelist Rex Humbard preaches.
WHORE Hoy Sonny!
SONNY Reserbado to.
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WHORE Hey, Sonny!
SONNY He’s reserved.
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Bernal / Manila by Night
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Sequence 41
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Bernal / Manila by Night
WHORE (disappointed)Ay….
SONNY Kachi-san, this way please….
WHORE 1
Naalala mo yung Hapon kagabi? Yung
mukhang puwit?
WHORE 2
Hoy Mila, huwag mong kalilimutan
ha! Pupunta tayo sa munisipyo bukas,
magpapaburat na tayo ng ano natin!
Tandaan mo, ha?
WHORE 3
Hindi ako makaihi, nakakainis. Puputok
na ang puson ko!
REX HUMBARD (on TV )
If you read the pages of this book … a
message directly from me, and also
from God’s word….
PIMP (to Japanese)
Kachi-san, you may choose! Choose,
choose, come on.
ADEL (just arriving)
Sonny malandi ka, hindi mo sinabing
maraming Hapon diyan….
WHORE 4 (pointing out the new Japanese
customer) Ade sukiyaki, o.
252
WHORE (disappointed)Aww….
SONNY Kachi-san, this way please….
WHORE 1
You remember that Japanese last night?
The butt-faced one?
WHORE 2
Hey, Mila, don’t forget, okay? We’re
going to the municipal clinic tomorrow,
we gotta have our cunts turned inside
out! Don’t you forget!
WHORE 3
I can’t pee, fuck it. My bladder’s
bursting!
REX HUMBARD (on TV )
If you read the pages of this book … a
message directly from me, and also
from God’s word….
PIMP (to Japanese)
Kachi-san, you may choose! Choose,
choose, come on.
ADEL (just arriving)
Sonny, you prick, you didn’t say there’ll
be a lot of Japanese….
WHORE 4 (pointing out the new Japanese
customer) Ade, sukiyaki.
Adel and Baby see each other. Adel drags her downstairs to the garden.
BABY
Aray ko! Ahh!
ADEL
Leche ka, subukan mong
magsumbong sa asawa ko kung hindi
babaliin ko lahat ang buto sa katawan
mo! Gusto mong madampot kang
nakatakip ng peryodiko? Malandi ka
rin, ano? Hah?!
BABY
Ouch! Ahh!
ADEL
You cunt, you try telling my
husband and I break every bone in your
body! You wanna be picked up wrapped
in newspaper? Why, you cunt!
Seq. 42: Hotel room. Int. Night.
Japanese customer attempts to strip Baby, speaking Japanese throughout. Baby refuses his
advances and offers to undress herself. When customer suddenly embraces her she throws
up on him, rushes to bed and then to bathroom. He helps her clean up and tries to clean up
himself. Then he brings her back to bedroom but she faints on the floor.
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Sequence 42
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Bernal / Manila by Night
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Seq. 43: Vanessa’s house. Ext. Night.
Christmas season. Alex and Vanessa are bickering by the garage. Alex is pallid and dingy,
looking every inch like the addict that he has become. Vanessa is eating an apple.
ALEX
Van may sabit ako, e. May papakiusap
sana ako sa yo: puwede bang mahiram
yang kuwintas na ibinigay ko sa yo?
Isang linggo lang. Kailangan ko lang
kasi ng bread e.
VANESSA
Ano naman ang gagawin mo?
ALEX
Kailangan ko lang ng bread; isasanla ko
ng isang linggo, tapos isasauli ko din sa
isang linggo.
VANESSA
Isasanla mo pagkatapos bibili – bibili ka
ng drugs!
ALEX
Hindi, hindi ako bibili ng drugs,
kailangan ko lang kasi may sabit ako!
VANESSA Hindi!
ALEX
Sige na o.
VANESSA
Hindi! Bakit mo babawiin, pambihira
ka talaga.
ALEX
Kailangang-kailangan ko lang e.
VANESSA Hindi, binigay mo na e.
ALEX
Ano ba! Ba’t ang kulit-kulit mo? Isasauli
ko naman sa yo! Isang linggo ko lang
hihiramin, ano ba –
VANESSA
Ang hirap naman sa iyo e, magdadrugs-drugs ka, pagkatapos ipagpapalit
mo pa ako sa bakla! Ngayong wala kang
pera, ano ba!
ALEX
Isang linggo ko lamang hihiramin sa yo.
VANESSA
Isang linggo, isang linggo…. Hindi ka
na nga nagpapakita –
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ALEX
Van, I got a little problem. A favor,
please: can I borrow that necklace I
gave you? Just for a week. I need some
bread.
VANESSA
So what will you do with it?
ALEX
I just need some bread to tide me over;
I’ll hock it for just a week, then I’ll
return it to you. Just a week.
VANESSA
You’ll hock it – so you can buy drugs!
ALEX
No, no, I won’t get drugs, I just have a
little debt to pay.
VANESSA No!
ALEX
C’mon, please.
VANESSA
No! Why should you take it back from
me, you’re terrible.
ALEX
I really need it.
VANESSA No, you gave it to me.
ALEX
Hey, c’mon! What are you? What the
hell, I told you I’ll return it to you
anyway! I’m just borrowing it for a
week, damn it!
VANESSA
Well, that’s your problem, you get into
drugs, and you even leave me for a
faggot! And now you need money, what
the fuck!
ALEX
I’m only borrowing it for a week.
VANESSA
A week, a week…. You haven’t even
been showing up –
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Christmas carolers sing outside the gate.
CAROLERS
Ang Pasko ay sumapit / Tayo ay
mangagsiawit / Ng magagandang tinig /
Dahil sa ang Diyos ay pag-ibig….
VANESSA (shouts to her brother)
Ronnie, paalisin mo nga itong mga
carolers! Leche!
CAROLERS
Here comes Christmas / Let’s all sing /
Lovely tunes / Because God is love….
VANESSA (shouts to her brother)
Ronnie, will you send those carolers
away!? Fuck!
Ronnie goes to the gate.
ALEXVan.
VANESSA Ano?
ALEX
Yung hinihingi ko.
VANESSA E sa ayoko, e.
ALEX
Pambihira ka naman, parang wala
tayong pinagsamahan!
VANESSA What?
ALEX
What I’m asking.
VANESSA No way.
ALEX
C’mon, what the hell! Don’t you care at
all for me!?
Ronnie dismisses carolers then sees a friend and goes with him as well.
*RONNIE (to carolers)
O kayo, ano’ng ginagawa niyo
diyan? Huwag na kayo diyan, umalis
na kayo.
*CAROLERS Merry Christmas po!
*VANESSA
Anong pinagsamahan? Tumigil ka nga
diyan! Binigay mo na, e. Ano ka, Indian
giver?
ALEX
Sige na, akin naman to, e.
VANESSA Huwag mong hahatakin to!
ALEX
E kailangan ko e!
VANESSA E hindi nga puwede!
ALEX
Akin na yan!
VANESSA
Ano ba – (Necklace falls on floor. They
struggle to retrieve it) Ayan! Ikaw talaga,
bitawan mo yan, akin yan! Tarantado ka
talaga –
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*RONNIE (to carolers)
Hey you, what are you still
doing there? Get out of there,
just go.
*CAROLERS Merry Christmas!
*VANESSA
What do you mean I don’t care? Will
you cut it out!? You gave it to me. What
are you, an Indian giver?
ALEX
C’mon, it came from me anyway.
VANESSA Hey, stop grabbing at it!
ALEX
But I need it!
VANESSA I said no way!
ALEX
Give it to me!
VANESSA
What the fuck – (Necklace falls on floor.
They struggle to retrieve it) Oh, shit!
Give me that! Let go of it! You asshole –
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
VANESSA’S MOTHER
Anong ingay yan? Ano ba’ng nangyayari
diyan? (To Alex) Bitiwan mo’ng anak
ko!
ALEX
Putangina niyo, a!
VANESSA
E kinukuha niya Mommy yung
kuwintas ko e!
ALEX
Akin to, binabawi ko lang, kailangan ko
e!
MOTHER
Tama na yan ha, lumayas ka nga dito!
Lumayas ka na. Halika na, Vangie, doon
na tayo sa loob. Huwag mo nang ipakita
ang pagmumukha mo dito!
VANESSA (to Alex)Tarantado!
ALEXBog!
256
VANESSA’S MOTHER
What’s that noise? What’s happening
here? (To Alex) Leave my daughter
alone!
ALEX
Well, fuck you all!
VANESSA
Mommy, he’s trying to get back my
necklace!
ALEX
It’s mine, I’m just getting it back, cuz I
need it!
MOTHER
Cut it out! Get the hell out of here!
Come over, Vangie, get back inside.
And don’t you ever show your face here
again!
VANESSA (to Alex) You shithead!
ALEXYou too!
Seq. 44: Gay bar. Int.–ext. Night.
Macho dancers in bikini briefs perform to Blondie’s “Call Me.” Gay customers tuck money
inside dancers’ G-strings, kiss their own partners, etc. At one table sit Manay and his
friends, with Alex in the same sorry state.
GAY 1
Oye Cristina, wala ka bang natatype-an diyan sa mga barkada ni Alex?
GAY 2 Alin, iyang mga yan?
GAY 1
Matagal nang tingin ng tingin sa
yo yan!
GAY 2
Noong araw sana, noong preskongpresko sila galing sa kolehiyo. Pero
tingnan mo ngayon: puro mga drug
addicts. Maghirap pa ko sa mga yan!
GAY 1
Ayaw mo niyan, experienced?
GAY 2
Anong experienced? Saan? Sa turok?
GAY 1 (laughs)
Ang suplada naman nito!
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GAY 1
Hey, Cristina, don’t you find anyone
your type among Alex’s friends?
GAY 2 Who, those guys?
GAY 1
They’ve been eyeing you!
GAY 2
Well, maybe if it were sometime ago,
when they were still fresh out of college.
But look at ’em now, they’re all drug
addicts. I’ll just go broke with that type.
GAY 1
But don’t you want ’em with
experience?
GAY 2
What experience? With needles?
GAY 1 (laughs)
Hmm, picky, picky!
© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
ALEX (to Manay)
Manay, two hundred lang naman o.
Babayaran ko naman sa yo.
MANAY Puwede ba?
257
ALEX (to Manay)
Manay, just two hundred. I’ll pay you
back anyway.
MANAY Aww, please.
Gay bar workers and clientele continue their exchanges, oblivious to Alex and Manay’s
deteriorating relations.
ALEX
Manay please lang. Two hundred lang,
kailangang-kailangan ko.
MANAY Aagh!
ALEX
Manay, c’mon please. Just two hundred,
I really need it.
MANAY Aagh!
Manay drags Alex out in the street where he sermonizes in front of Alex’s friends and amid
cruising gays. As he vents, behind him a cruiser succeeds in picking up a guy for the night.
MANAY (to Alex)
Dito ka, dito tayo mag-uusap.Huwag
kang makulit, kakausapin kita. Ako
maloloka na sa yo ha. Tuwing makikita
kita you’re in the worst horrible
conditions: wala kang tulog, wala kang
pera, lasing ka, bangag ka, meron kang
sabit, naku! Anong klaseng buhay yan?
(Alex attempts to leave) Hoy bumalik
ka, kinakausap kita. You cannot spend
your whole life going from botica to
botica to botica. Utang ka ng utang ng
pera, hiram ka ng hiram ng pera; kailan
matatapos yang putanginang lecheng
kaputahang lahat na yan?! Hoy Alex,
tingnan mo’ng sarili mo: batang-bata ka
pa. Guwapo ka naman. May utak ka rin
naman. Bakit sinasayang mo ang buhay
mo sa putanginang drugs na yan? I
mean what’s the point? It’s stupid, that’s
the point! Puro kagaguhan yan, that’s
the whole point! Alam mo ba kung
ano ang nangyayari sa yo, Alex? You’re
useless! Ano ba ang silbi ng buhay
mo dito sa mundong ito? Wala! Wis!
E ano ba ang ine-expect mo? Nakita
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MANAY (to Alex)
Here, you come here, here’s where
we talk. Stop fidgeting, I’ll tell you
something. I’m going crazy, with what’s
happening to you. Every time I see you,
you’re in the worst horrible conditions:
no sleep, no money, drunk, stoned,
you’re in debt, after debt, after debt!
Shit! What kind of life is that? (Alex
attempts to leave) Hey, come back here,
I’m talking to you. You cannot spend
your whole life going from drugstore
to drugstore to drugstore. When the
hell is that fucking stupid cycle gonna
stop?! Hey, Alex, look at yourself:
you’re so young. And you’re so goodlooking. And you have a head on your
shoulders. So why are you wasting your
life away on those stupid drugs? I mean
what’s the point? It’s stupid, that’s the
point! It’s just totally senseless, that’s
the whole point! You know what’s
happening to you, Alex? You’ve turned
useless! So what kind of life do you have
in this world? Nothing! Zilch! And what
do you expect? Have you taken stock
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of yourself? You’re an addict, you’re
insatiable! Omigod, I’m going crazy
because of you! Whatever I say to you
goes out the other ear! I can’t accept
how you’re wasting your life. You’re still
so young. You should still be in school.
You have your whole life ahead of you.
You can plan your career, your future, et
cetera, et cetera, but it’s become zilch!
You’ve become an asshole, and you’re a
wreck, you’re totally wasted. Cuz it’s all
just been drugs! You’re destroying your
whole life because of drugs! It’s just so
stupid!
mo ba ang sarili mo ngayon? You’re
an addict, sugapa! Ay naku, maloloka
ako sa yo! Maski ano pa’ng sabihin ko
sa yo, hindi ka naman nakikinig! Ako
nanghihinayang sa yo. I mean, bata ka
pa. Dapat sa yo nag-aaral. You have
your whole life ahead of you. You can
plan your career, your future, et cetera,
et cetera, pero wala! Luko-luko ka, e.
Kung anong iniisip mo, puro ka drugs.
Sinisira mo’ng buhay mo. Consciously
winawasak mo ang buhay mo sa putang
drugs na yan! Stupid!
Seq. 45: Virgie’s house. Int. Night.
Christmas dinner complete with Christmas tree, blinking lights, gifts on display. Virgie’s
family is complete save for Alex. Beside Virgie, who’s at one end of the table, sits Au-Au;
opposite her is her husband.
VIRGIE (to maid)
Wala ka na bang ibang sinelas? Palitan
mo yan at ke ingay-ingay!
MAID
Opo, senyora.
FATHER
Alam mo may nangyari sa courtroom
nung, nung isang araw. May kliyente
ako, e bakla. Tumingin ba naman siya
kay Feliciano, kay Judge. Sabi niya,
“Acheng!” Umarte na nang umarte!
Merong pa-ganyan pa na pa-ganito, at
gumanyan pa sa ganyan, at may paganire pa. At hinawakan pa ang kilay –
VIRGIE
Au-Au, huwag gamitin ang kamay sa
pagkain.
FATHER (flustered by Virgie’s interruption)
Well anyway, ay, sabi ni Judge Feliciano:
“When you speak in court, you face the
court!” E sabi niya e, “Ache! I’d rather
face my audience!” – yon ang sabi niya.
Nagalit si Judge, kinuha ba naman niya
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VIRGIE (to maid)
Don’t you have another pair of slippers?
Change what you’re wearing, they’re so
noisy!
MAID
Yes, ma’m.
FATHER
You know, we had a courtroom incident
the other day. I had a client, who
happens to be gay. Can you imagine, he
looked at Feliciano, at the judge. And
he said, “Acheng!”40 And he started
acting up, such a swish! Sashaying
this way and that. And flicking his
eyebrows –
VIRGIE
Au-Au, don’t use your hands on the
food.
FATHER (flustered by Virgie’s interruption)
Well, anyway, Judge Feliciano said:
“When you speak in court, you face the
court!” And that swish replied, “A-che!
I’d rather face my audience!” – that’s
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Bernal / Manila by Night
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Bernal / Manila by Night
yung gavel niya, at pagkatapos ipinalo
nang ipinalo nang ipinalo nang ipinalo –
VIRGIE (hitting Au-Au’s hand)
Hindi ba sinabi ko sa iyong huwag
mong gamitin ang kamay mo sa
pagkain? Napakagaga mo, napakatanga
mo, hindi ka na ba matututo?!
260
what he said. The Judge got enraged,
got his gavel and kept pounding it
down hard –
VIRGIE (hitting Au-Au’s hand)
Didn’t I tell you not to use your hands
on the food? Don’t be stupid, don’t you
ever learn!?
Family returns to eating, quietly.
Seq. 46: Roxas Blvd. Ext. Night.
Greg is leading Bea.
BEA
Anong lugar ito?
GREG
Papasok tayo ng trabaho.
BEA
Trabaho?
GREGOo.
BEA
Anong trabaho?
GREG
Basta pera din ito, sayang.
BEA
Teka muna.
GREG
Halika na!
HAWKER Toro, toro!
TOURIST
What’s a toro? Would you want to
explain to me what a toro is, man?
HAWKER It’s fucking.
TOURIST
Hey quit that, man! Give me some girls,
give me some girls.
GREG
Halika na.
BEA
What place is this?
GREG
We’ll go to work.
BEAWork?
GREGYes.
BEA
What work?
GREG
Relax, it means money.
BEA
Wait a minute.
GREG
Come on!
HAWKER Toro, toro!41
TOURIST
What’s a toro? Would you want to
explain to me what a toro is, man?
HAWKER It’s fucking.
TOURIST
Hey quit that, man! Give me some girls,
give me some girls.
GREG
C’mon.
Bea pauses to listen.
HAWKERS (close-up of mouths making
announcements)
Toro, live show sir! Toro, toro, toro!
Toro, live show sir! Live show, live
show! Mister, mister live show!
Magagandang babae! Toro, live show!
HAWKERS (close-up of mouths making
announcements)
Toro, live show, sir! Toro, toro, toro!
Toro, live show, sir! Live show, live
show! Mister, mister, live show!
Beautiful girls! Toro, live show!
Bea realizes Greg’s intentions and attempts to flee. They quarrel violently.
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© Ateneo de Manila University
Bernal / Manila by Night
*BEA
Eee! Ayoko, ayoko! Gagawin mo kong
puta! Bitiwan mo ako! Bitiwan mo ako!
Ayoko! Papatayin muna kita! Ayoko,
ayoko! Bitiwan mo ako, ayoko, ayoko!
Walanghiya ka!
*GREG
Saan ka pupunta? Halika na! Ano ba!
Sandali! Aray ko, ang buhok ko! Ano
ba! Lalaban ka pa? Walanghiya ka!
Halika na!
261
*BEA
Eee! I don’t want! You’ll turn me into
a whore. Let me go! Let me go! I don’t
want! I’ll kill you first! No, no! Let me
go, I don’t want! You bastard!
*GREG
Where you going? Come on! Hey, what
the fuck! Wait! Ouch, my hair! What
the hell! You’re gonna fight me? You
bitch! Come on!
Greg manages to subdue Bea but only for a while. She kicks Greg from behind and manages
to escape his clutches but could not run too far because of her blindness. He recovers and
grabs her once more.
BEA
Bitiwan mo ko! Putangina mo!
Hindot ka!
GREG
O ano? Sasama ka? Putang to!
BEA
Hindot ka!
GREG
Ano? Sasama ka? Putang to,
pinahihirapan mo pa ko!
BEA
Get your hands off me! You sonafabitch!
Fuck you!
GREG
What the fuck! You’re not
coming with me? You bitch!
BEA
Fuck you!
GREG
What? You’re not coming with me?
Fucking whore, you’ll give me a hard
time?
Seq. 47: In front of Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, Malate.
Order is breaking down in the streets, with drugs, crime, and prostitution openly exhibited.
PROSTITUTE
Umalis ka nga diyan, baka ako malasin.
PROSTITUTE
Will you move out of there, so my
fuckin’ luck changes?
Baby, seeing Febrero in distance, rushes toward him.
BABY
Febrero, ano na’ng nangyari sa yo?
Hintay ako ng hintay sa yo, hindi ka
naman dumarating. Tingnan mo, ang
laki-laki na ng tiyan ko! (Febrero runs
away from her) Ano ka ba, hoy! Hoy!
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BABY
Febrero, what’s happening with you?
I keep waiting for you, and you don’t
show up. Look, my belly’s so big
already! (Febrero runs away from her)
Hey, what’s with you! Hey!
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A drugged prostitute accosts Baby.
DRUGGED PROSTITUTE
Hoy simba tayo, samahan mo ako sa
simbahan.
DRUGGED PROSTITUTE
Simba tayo, halika na!
DRUGGED PROSTITUTE
Come on, let’s go to Mass, come with
me to the church.
DRUGGED PROSTITUTE
Let’s go to Mass, come on!
Baby rejects the prostitute but the latter is insistent.
BABY (freeing herself from the drugged
prostitute’s clutches)
Ano ba! (Shouts at Febrero across the
street) Putangina mo! Mamatay ka na
sana, hayop ka! Duwag! Duwag! Ang
asawa mo puta! Call girl! Nando’n sa
Vito Cruz, sawsawan ng mga Hapon!
Ako, malinis na babae! (In tears) Hayop
ka, putangina mo!
BABY (freeing herself from the drugged
prostitute’s clutches)
What the fuck! (Shouts at Febrero across
the street) You sonafabitch! I hope you
die, you prick! Coward! Coward! Your
wife’s a whore! A call girl! She’s there on
Vito Cruz,42 feeding the Japanese with
her body! Me, I’m a clean woman! (In
tears) You prick, you sonafabitch!
Seq. 48: New Year’s Eve. Ext. Night.
As fireworks explosions intensify Adel walks down a narrow alley in her nurse’s uniform
and with her red bag, apparently on her way home. At the end of alley an anonymous
hand grabs her and strangles her. The fireworks, welcoming the New Year, barely illuminate
her lifeless body.
Seq. 49: Morgue. Int.–ext. Night.
Manay, carrying a bouquet, approaches the stocky morgue attendant with his gay friends,
Febrero, and Alex.
MANAY
Mister, mister, yun hong patay namin?
ATTENDANT
Ano’ng pangalan?
MANAY
Adelina Macapinlac.
ATTENDANT (points to a coffin)
Ayun o. (When they hesitate, he goes
to the coffin to clear it of clothes and
papers and open the window) Excuse
me, mga Misis.
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MANAY
Mister, mister, where’s our friend’s
corpse?
ATTENDANT
What name?
MANAY
Adelina Macapinlac.
ATTENDANT (points to a coffin)
Right there. (When they hesitate, he
goes to the coffin to clear it of clothes
and papers and opens the window)
Excuse me, Missus.
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GAYMiss.
ATTENDANT (in good spirits)
Ayan o.
264
GAYMiss.
ATTENDANT (in good spirits)
Here she is.
Manay’s party is dumbfounded.
GAY 2
Manay ano yan?
GAY 2
What the…. What’s that?
Inside the coffin is an old woman in nurse’s uniform. Manay goes over to attendant,
who’s yawning.
MANAY
Mister, hindi yan ang patay namin!
ATTENDANT Ano’ng ibig mong sabihin?
MANAY Iyong sinabi ko!
ATTENDANT Ano ba’ng sinabi mo?
GAY 3
Nakakaloka!
MANAY
Sinasabi nang hindi yan si Adelina,
napakakulit naman e! Nakakaimbiyerna na e!
ATTENDANT
Aba ang mga putang baklang to! Hindi
ba sabi niyo Adelina Macapinlac? Yan si
Adelina Macapinlac!
MANAY
Hoy, mga bakla nga kami pero hindi
kami mga puta ha! At hindi yan si
Adelina Macapinlac!
ATTENDANT Yan si Adelina Macapinlac!
MANAY
Sinasabi nang hindi yan si Adelina
Macapinlac e!
ATTENDANT
Huwag kang sisigaw!
GAYAba!
MANAY (sarcastically whispering)
Hindi yan si Adelina Macapinlac!
ATTENDANT
E kung si Adelina Macapinlac yan,
ano’ng gagawin ko sa inyo?
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MANAY
Mister, that is not our friend’s corpse!
ATTENDANT What do you mean?
MANAY Exactly what I said!
ATTENDANT And what did you say?
GAY 3
Omigosh!
MANAY
I’m saying that is not Adelina, don’t you
get it!? This is terribly infuriating!
ATTENDANT
Wow, these fag whores! Didn’t you
ask for Adelina Macapinlac? That is
Adelina Macapinlac!
MANAY
Hey, we may be fags but we’re not
whores, okay! And that is not Adelina
Macapinlac!
ATTENDANT
That is Adelina Macapinlac!
MANAY
I’m telling you it’s not Adelina
Macapinlac!
ATTENDANT
Don’t shout at me!
GAY
Omigosh!
MANAY (sarcastically whispering)
That is not Adelina Macapinlac!
ATTENDANT
Well, if that’s Adelina Macapinlac, what
do I do to you?
© Ateneo de Manila University
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MANAY
Ay naku, maloloka ako sa inyo! (Turns
away from him)
ATTEDANT
Anak ng putang trabaho ito, oo!
Pambihira din ang mga baklang ito, oo!
Sinabi nang wala, e ang pilit-pilit! Wala
dito, e. (Goes through several files)
GAYS (to Manay)
Relax, take it easy. Easy ka lang.
MANAY
You expect me to be martyr to people
like that? Ay naku! E kung naiimbiyerna ako, ano’ng gagawin ko?
Tigilan mo ko!
GAYS
High blood naman ito. (Attendant
apologetically approaches them) Ayan
na. Appear si Porky.
ATTENDANT Sorry ho, mga misis.
GAY
Miss.
ATTENDANT
Ah, miss. May nagkamali ho e. Kasi
pareho ng pangalan e, nagkapalit ng
damit. Yun ho pala si Avelina Macasaet.
Si Adelina Macapinlac ho napadala
na namin kahapon sa Cagayan, pero
padadalhan namin ng telegrama bukas
para ipabalik dito.
265
MANAY
Omigod, he’s driving me crazy! (Turns
away from him)
ATTENDANT
What a fucking job! These fags are
impossible! Well, if you insist, then your
friend isn’t here! (Goes through several
files)
GAYS (to Manay)
Relax, take it easy. Go easy.
MANAY
You expect me to be a martyr to people
like that? Omigod! If he gets me
infuriated, what the hell should I do?
GAYS
Don’t be so high-blood. (Attendant
apologetically approaches them) Here
he comes. Porky reappears.
ATTENDANT Oh, sorry, missus.
GAY
Miss.
ATTENDANT
Ah, miss. Somebody made a mistake.
Their names are so similar, and their
clothes happened to be exchanged.
Turns out that one is Avelina Macasaet.
We sent off Adelina Macapinlac’s body
yesterday to Cagayan,43 but we’ll send a
telegram tomorrow so it can be brought
back here.
Febrero faints.
GAYS (catching and carrying Febrero)
Ay, ang bigat! Ano ba Manay, tulungan
mo ko dito! Doon, doon natin dalhin!
(Toward embalming table, which
Attendant clears) Ay, huwag diyan, para
sa dead yan! Do’n sa stretcher, dali!
Dahan-dahan lang, baka malaglag ha.
GAYS (catching and carrying Febrero)
Oh wow, he’s so heavy! C’mon, Manay,
help us here! (Toward embalming table,
which Attendant clears) Hey, not there,
not there, that’s for the dead! There on
the stretcher, quick! Steady, he might
fall off.
Overwhelmed, Manay breaks down and rushes out.
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MANAY (over and over)
Ayoko na. (To his approaching friends)
Layuan niyo ko! Ayoko na! Ayoko na!
(He screams in pain) Haaay!
266
MANAY (over and over)
I give up. (To his approaching friends)
Leave me alone! I give up! (He screams
in pain) Haaay!
Seq. 50: Kano’s flight and capture. Int.–ext. Night.
Inside Sauna Turko Alex tries to borrow money from Bea.
BEA
Anong uutang ng pera? Ano’ng palagay
mo sa kin? At magkano ang palagay
mong kinikita ko dito? Pambihira ka
naman e!
GIRLAng ingay naman!
BEA (to girl)
Heh, tumigil ka nga diyan! (Back to
Alex) Talagang buwisit talaga itong
buhay na to! Lagi namang ganyan e.
Pagpunta mo dito mangungutang ka!
Diyos ko, maawa ka –
BEA
What, borrow money from me? What
do you think I am? And how much do
you think I make here? Jeez!
GIRLHow noisy!
BEA (to girl)
Heh, you quiet down! (Back to Alex)
What a fucking life! Always a fucking
life! You come here, and you want to
borrow money!? My God, have pity –
Kano rushes in from the street, scattering a young sampaguita vendor’s wares.
KANO
Bea! Bea, halika itago mo ko!
Hinahanap ako ng mga parak! Itago mo
ko!
BEA
Ah leche, tigilan niyo nga ako! Sawangsawa na ko! Ipahuhuli kita!
KANO
Ba putang to!
KANO
Bea! Bea, hide me, quick! The cops are
after me! Hide me!
BEA
Oh, fuck! Will you guys get off me!? I’ve
had enough! I’ll have ’em arrest you!
KANO
Why, you whore!
Plainclothesmen hurry into sauna from car, passing by the vendor rearranging his leis.
When Kano sees them she runs toward sauna building’s roof. Confused, Alex follows her.
GIRLS
Bakit, ano’ng nangyari? Ewan ko. May
mga pulis ata!
AGENT (to Bea)
Miss, may nakita kang tomboy?
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GIRLS
Why, what’s happening? I dunno. I
think they’re cops!
AGENT (to Bea)
Miss, did you see that tomboy?
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BEA
Nagpunta sa bubong. Doon ang daan,
kanan tapos derecho.
AGENT (calling another agent)
Dodo!
267
BEA
Up the roof. You pass through there,
turn right then straight.
AGENT (calling another agent)
Dodo!
Agents chase Alex and Kano, who throws her stuff in a toilet. They run over roof, into a
basketball court, disrupting a game. An overweight agent, reluctant to jump from the roof,
goes out through the entrance of Sauna Turko and tells other agents.
AGENT
Doon, pare, sa likod! Dali!
AGENT
There, over there, at the back! Quick!
Kano and Alex are chased through Roxas Blvd., past Central Bank’s open canal and
around Harrison Plaza, where a young couple is seen arguing. Occasionally, overweight
agent pauses for breathing.
GIRL
Ayoko sabi e, ayoko nga! Bitiwan mo ko
sabi e! Ayokong sumama. Basta bitiwan
mo ko! Ayoko sabi, walanghiya ka, sabi
na sa yo. Ba’t ka namimilit? (Points
her umbrealla at boy, after running
characters separate them) Walanghiya
ka talaga, yayariin mo lang ako!
BOY
Bakit nagpapakipot ka pa?
GIRL
I told you I don’t want to! Let me go! I
don’t want to go with you. Just let me
go! I don’t want to, you sonafabitch, I
told you. Why do you keep forcing
me? (Points her umbrella at boy, after
running characters separate them) You
sonafabitch, you’ll just fuck me up!
BOY
Why are you playing hard-to-get?
After Kano and Alex turn into Harrison Plaza’s indoor bump-car amusement area, Alex
huddles behind some boxes and rushes out when coast is clear. Agents take a shortcut and
intercept Kano in middle of street.
KANO
Ah! Bitiwan niyo ko! Ayoko, mga
putangina ninyo! Mga burat ninyo!
Ayoko! (Traffic gets blocked)
KANO
Hey! Let me go! Leave me alone, you
sons of bitches! You fucking pricks! Let
me go! (Traffic gets blocked)
Seq. 51: Alex’s wandering. Ext. Night thru morning.
After Kano’s arrest, Alex finds himself alone. Some trannies pass by him.
TRANNIES
Ay, nakakaloka! E talaga namang lukaluka yon e!
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TRANNIES
Oh, how crazy! Well, she’s really crazy,
after all!
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Walking toward Luneta, we see a glimpse of Virgie taking tranquilizers, all dazed out.44
Alex sees an old man cleaning the sidewalk.
ALEX
Mama, puwede ho bang
makahingi ng tubig ninyo?
Maghihilamos lang ho ako.
MAN
Aba oo, sige hijo.
ALEX
Salamat ho
ALEX
Sir, may I bother you for some
water? Just to wash my face a bit?
MAN
Why, sure, son, go ahead.
ALEX
Thank you, sir.
Alex washes his face from a pail of water.
ALEX (after washing)
Salamat ho.
MANOkey.
ALEX (after washing)
Thanks, sir.
MANIt’s okay.
Baby is seen boarding a jeepney, her tummy swollen with child. Jeepney blares out Imelda
Papin’s “Taksil.” Alex lingers by breakwater, where guitarist plays Graham Nash’s “Teach
Your Children” and trannie in heart-shaped costume loiters. We see a glimpse of Manay
arranging a religious statue. Alex walks down Luneta, where exercisers are seen shadowboxing and doing martial arts exercises to the breaking dawn. Exhausted, he lies down on
the grasss, flowers surrounding him like a halo. The whole park, with early-rising weekend
citizens, is then seen against the morning sun.
Closing Credits [see note in Opening Credit section]: The End;
acknowledgements Mile’s Auto Sales Corporation / Hospital* ng Maynila / National
Parks Development Committe* / Turko Sauna Parlor, Roxas Boulevard; Bayside
Incorporated, Roxas Blvd., Pasay City / Aloha Hotel & Restaurant, Roxas Blvd, Manila /
Central College* of the Philippines, Quezon City; Ligaya Lodge, Old Sta. Mesa, Manila /
National Park* Development Committee, Rizal Park, Manila / Ayala Corporation, Ayala
Ave., Makati, Metro Manila / Harrison Plaza Commercial Center, F. B. Harrison, Metro
Manila / Cultural Center of the Philippines, Roxas Blvd., Metro Manila; Shakey’s Pizza
Parlor, Malate, Manila; Shaw Case Restaurant, Shaw Blvd., Pasig, Metro Manila; Hon.
Mayor Ramon D. Bagatsing / Hon. Mayor Pablo Cuneta / Hon. Mayor Adelina Rodriguez
/ Hon. Mayor Ernesto Domingo / Hon. Mayor Emiliano Caruncho / Hon. Mayor
Nemesio Yabut / Hospital ng Maynila [repeated]
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Notes
1. More information, including the roles played by each performer, can be found
at the Internet Movie Database <http://www.imdb.com/search>.
2.“Mang” is the equivalent of “Mister,” but used with the addressee’s first name. Cf.
Seq. 11’s use of “Aling” (note 20).
3. Pronounced “tiway,” abbreviation of “thank you,” occasionally used as a verb
(“tiwayin,” to pay with verbal thanks; to exploit).
4. Red-light street for less-wealthy locals and Chinese visitors in Chinatown
district; this implies that Bea may have started work there and “upgraded” to a
sauna parlor as massage attendant while maintaining her residence in the area.
5. Kano uses the term “mare,” a shortening of “kumare,” feminine of “kumpare”
(from the Italian comare, godmother; and compare, godfather) — best friend;
technically a person who stands as Catholic-baptismal godparent of one’s child,
i.e., someone who’s trusted enough to take care of the godchild if the parent is
incapacitated or dies.
6. Same sense as American slang: weed shotgun is performed with the lit part of
the joint held in the mouth, while the other end is positioned in the recipient’s
mouth or nostril (with hands forming an air tunnel); when the holder blows,
the recipient will be able to inhale a stronger whiff.
7. Del Pilar Street is in central Ermita’s red-light district, which is patronized
by American servicepersons. (Roxas) Boulevard, although running parallel a
few blocks away, directly faces Manila Bay and therefore exudes respectability
because of its ideal location; the US Embassy and a number of five-star hotels
and upscale apartments are located on this strip.
8. Adelina Macapinlac is alternately addressed as Adelina, Adel, and Ade,
presumably depending on the preference of the character addressing her.
9. At the end of the former red-light district, stretching all the way into the seedier
environs of Pasay City, is the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Baclaran;
because of its location, underworld figures (gangsters and sex workers) as well
as working-class citizens attend its novenas and Masses. In a previous Bernal
film, Aliw [Pleasure], sex workers, still in revealing night-club attire, prayed
here for more Japanese customers.
10. Northern coastal province named and known for salt as well as seafood
products.
11. Manay is also called Manay Sharon by the other gay characters, plus several
other nicknames (Maria Cristina, Teresa, Beth), possibly in reference to popculture icons of femininity.
12. De La Salle University is a private Catholic school for students from well-off
families; they presumably are ordering uniforms or requesting a donation from
a high-society couturier.
13. Manay uses the term “juwawa,” gay-lingo Frenchification of the Tagalog “asawa”
or spouse; currently shortened to (and mainstreamed as) “jowa.”
14. Evita’s name references the eponymous Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim
Rice musical (then banned in the Philippines) on Eva Perón, Argentina’s
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controversial First Lady, whose life had too many parallels with that of Imelda
Marcos. The character name-drops two prominent Marcos-era ministers, Jose
Aspiras (tourism) and, later, Arturo “Bong” Tangco, Jr. (agriculture). In a later
disco scene (cf. Seq. 17), the dance version of the musical’s most popular hit will
be played.
15. A reference to Alvin Toffler’s then-trendy 1970s bestseller Future Shock, in
which a contemporary sensibility is supposedly susceptible to the overwhelming
effects of increasingly swift changes in society and technology, necessitating
a coping adjustment to be provided in the next wave of social development,
called Consciousness Three.
16. Seven Seas Motel was a popular chain providing two-hour room rentals for
“quickie” sex.
17. Ate and Kuya before people’s names could indicate fictive (sibling) kinships
with older women or men respectively.
18. Film actress Rosa Rosal first became known for her femme fatale roles, then
starred in a number of highly acclaimed prestige projects during the studio
system era of the 1950s. She became known to a new generation of admirers
for her humanitarian work with the Red Cross as well as for hosting her own
TV charity program.
19. National Bureau of Investigation, of the Republic of the Philippines’s
Department of Justice.
20.“Aling” is the equivalent of “Miss” or “Missus,” used with the addressee’s first
name.
21. Short for Mogadon, a hypnotic prescription sedative popular among drug
abusers.
22. Bayside was a popular nightclub along Roxas Boulevard.
23. Bea uses the term “sensation,” one of the euphemisms that emerged for politesociety discussions of sex activities in massage parlors.
24. Baby’s expression “kumakain ng kuhol” literally means “eating [freshwater]
snails,” a local delicacy which requires sucking and use of the tongue to get at
the flesh of the cooked mollusk.
25.“Type” is a double-clipped form of “Type ko” [my type], in turn a clipping of
“Yan ang type ko” [that’s my type]; “bongga” is slang, usually a compliment
meaning stylish, outlandish, extravagant, awesome.
26. Olongapo City is located near Subic municipality, the site of the (sinceterminated) biggest American naval base outside the US . As a result, it had a
thriving night-time entertainment industry for US servicepersons.
27. Manay uses “’day,” a shortening of the regional term “inday” (girl), adopted
initially as gay-lingo and now mainstreamed.
28. The phrase “pang-echeng ng datung” literally means “to mooch [or sponge or
sweet-talk] some dough [from ‘the tong’ or extortion money]” in gay lingo.
29. Manay says “kyeme,” a Spanish-sounding gay-lingo coinage (quieme) that
means “nonsense.”
30. Ilonggo is one of the Visayan-region languages, less familiar to Manila residents
than Cebuano.
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31. Roughly “I already told you, there’s no Adelina Macapinlac here! Yet you keep
saying she’s around! You annoying, totally clueless queer, do you want to start
a quarrel?”
32. Boots Anson-Roa, film and TV actress, was known for playing wholesome
women characters.
33.“Rhapsody” is a twist on “rap-sa,” back-formation of “sarap,” the Tagalog word
for pleasure.
34. Tarlac is a province north of Manila made seemingly more distant by its rusticity.
35. Vanessa uses the term “sward” — not the rarely used English term for grassland,
but a Filipino coinage for “gay male,” free of the pejorative associated with
traditional terms.
36. Joanne Drew Figure Salon (Australia-based, founded by Joan Andrews) was a
popular slimming facility for Manila socialites. Evita would be referring to her
lower waist area, including the crotch.
37. Dated reference, possibly referring to a Muslim-like appearance because of
the turban that the character is wearing (provided by Paul H. Roquia and Ka
Deniz Reyes of the Facebook Pinoy Film Buffs group); also possibly a playful
corruption of “suray,” untidy or disarranged (as suggested by Nestor de Guzman
of the same FB group).
38. Ironic usage, a reference to failure.
39. Some of the most impoverished Philippine provinces are in the Visayas region.
40. Acheng is a regional variation on Ate (elder sister); the seemingly French
resonance has made it a preference for gay (and women) “femme” speakers.
41. Spanish for “bull,” toro suggests studly expertise as well as bullfighting, since
inexpensive live sex is performed in the round (like a bullring), where the central
couple is expected to display a variety of unusual and athletically demanding
positions before the torero climaxes. Cf. the Japanese title of Nagisa Oshima’s
In the Realm of the Senses: Ai no corrida, literally “bullfight of love.”
42. Vito Cruz Street would be toward the end of the former red-light district of
Ermita, which had also catered to American servicepersons during the period
when the US had military bases in the Philippines. Because of its farther
location (closer to the seedier portion of Pasay City), it catered to older and/or
non-Caucasian clientele.
43. The northernmost mainland province in Luzon, to which travel would be
impeded by the presence of a mountain range and inadequate roads.
44. At this point additional footage that anomalously reappeared on a recent digital
copy was inserted in a special release print, intended strictly for then-First Lady
Imelda Marcos’s appeasement — which nevertheless was never granted; using
footage already in previous scenes, it runs through some of the characters and
announces, via male voice-over, how they were either punished or redeemed as
part of the New Society’s moral renewal.
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Kolum Kritika
Editor’s introduction
“Kahulugan, Katotohanan, Katwiran: Pagpapakilala sa Semiotika ni Charles
Sanders Peirce” is a lecture delivered by Epifanio San Juan, Jr. at the Kritika Kultura
Lecture Series last 2 March 2012 at the Ateneo de Manila University. The KK Lecture
Series has been ongoing for many years now, featuring a number of internationally
acclaimed critics, writers, and scholars like Benedict Anderson, David Lloyd, Vicente
Rafael and many others. San Juan’s lecture was meant to illustrate how the work
of Charles Sanders Peirce, an important American philosopher and theoretician,
might be productive of literary and cultural studies in the Philippines today.
The lecture revalued the role of the American pragmatist and philosopher in the
development of the “science of signs,” and attempted to apply his principles to two
Philippine texts, the story “Kristal na Tubig” by Antonio Rosales, and the poem
“Three O’Clock in the Morning” by Cirio H. Panganiban. San Juan supplemented his
discussion with a critique of Virgilio S. Almario’s previous “Marxist” commentary
on the Panganiban poem. The lecture was the very first one on Peirce delivered in
Filipino in recent memory,
Almario circulated on 16 March 2012 a response to San Juan’s lecture. The full text
of his response is also sent to Kritika Kultura and published here alongside San
Juan’s lecture, another response from critic Charlie Samuya Veric, and an English
translation of Veric’s essay by Maximino U. Pulan, Jr.
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Kolum Kritika
Kahulugan, Katotohanan, Katwiran:
Pagpapakilala sa Semiotika ni
Charles Sanders Peirce
E. San Juan, Jr.
Philippine Cultural Studies Center, USA
philcsc@gmail.com
Abstract
This essay elaborates on crucial aspects of the semiotics of American pragmaticist
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and applies them to two Filipino texts: “Three
O’Clock in the Morning” by Cirio H. Panganiban and “Kristal na Tubig” by Antonio
Rosales. Delivered first in 2 March 2012 as part of the Kritika Kultura lecture series at
Ateneo de Manila University, the essay makes a number of distinct yet interrelated claims
before proceeding to an interpretation of the aforementioned texts. First, San Juan
points out the communal (“komunidad”) underpinning of Peirce’s formulations: San
Juan argues that only within a social context — where agreed-upon methods, principles,
and processes operate — can the tripartite division of Peirce’s thought become valid.
The second argument pertains to Peirce’s objective in semiological work: for San Juan,
Peirce’s fundamental aim is to arrive at a sense of belief (“pagtakda ng paniniwala”), however
provisional and subject to correction. Such an understanding is achieved only after a long
process of socially-undergirded inquiry where nothing is taken for granted and deeply-held
assumptions are investigated (“paghahanap ng kasunduan sa pangkat ng mga matiyagang
nagsisiyasat”). According to San Juan, Peirce considers semiotics as an organon of inquiry
that endeavors to articulate effective research principles in any of the (human and social)
sciences (“makapagdudulot ng mabisang prinsipyo sa pananaliksik sa anumang siyensiya”).
San Juan’s third claim argues for, and elaborates on, Peirce’s tripartite scheme: Firstness
(Qualisign), Secondness (Sinsign), and Thirdness (Legisign). The Qualisign refers to signs
of possibility and icons that resemble — but are not — things (“icon na kahawig ng bagay;
tanda ng posibilidad”). The Sinsign — which is equivalent to the index — refers to the realm
of actuality (“larangan ng aktuwalidad”) and the interaction with things and their context:
a sign of the real existence of things in the world. The Legisign refers to overall rules and
regulations (“pangkalahatang regulasyon o panuto”) which link Qualisign and Sinsign:
laws, behaviors, conventions, and regularities (“batas, ugali, nakagawian, regularidad”). For
San Juan, what is crucial is that the numerous semiotic elements which comprise Peirce’s
system are grounded on a specific historical moment (“sitwasyong pangkasaysayan na
nagbubuklod sa senyas, semiotikong bagay, at interpretant”).
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Once Peirce’s interpretive framework is established, San Juan offers readings of “Three
O’Clock in the Morning” and “Kristal na Tubig” as well as an engagement with a number
of previous interpretations of the texts, most notably by Virgilio Almario. For San Juan,
“Three O’Clock in the Morning” — contra what he suggests to be Almario’s moralistically— interrogates the disappointment, paradox, and
inflected and conservative reading disaster caused by succumbing to the attractions posed by Western capital: a romance
without consummation. Moreover, central to “Kristal na Tubig” is the image of the Pieta:
for San Juan, the religious underpinnings of the image, along with its embedment in a
community steeped in Catholicism, accounts for the forcefulness of the story.
Keywords
interpretant, pragmatism, science of signs
About the Author
E. San Juan, Jr. was recently a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.
He is Emeritus Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Ethnic Studies from
various US universities. He served as Fulbright Professor of American Studies at Leuven
University, Belgium; Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of the
Phlippines; and Fellow at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy. Among his recent
books are Balikbayang Sinta: An E San Juan Reader (Ateneo de Manila UP ), Rizal in Our
Time (revised ed., Anvil), and US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave).
Tanyag sa buong mundo si Charles Sanders Peirce, Amerikanong dalubhasa
sa pilosopiya’t agham (1839–1914), bilang imbentor ng “pragmatismo,” isang
metodong sumisiyasat sa proseso ng pagpapakahulugan. Bagamat pantas sa
maraming agham, hindi siya nabigyan ng permanenteng posisyon sa akademya
dahil sa labag-sa-kumbensiyonal na pamumuhay. Liban na sa maliit na pulutong
ng mga kolega tulad nina William James at Josiah Royce, halos walang kumilala
sa kanyang galing at dunong noong siya’y buhay. Ngayon na lamang tanggap na
siya marahil ang pinakaimportanteng pilosopong nabuhay sa Amerika. Malaki
ang impluwensiya niya sa mga modernistang paham tulad nina Bertrand Russell
at Ludwig Wittgenstein, bukod sa makatas na ambag sa malawak na larangan ng
lohika, astrophysics, lingguwistika, at semiotika.
Halos di nababanggit sa talambuhay ang progresibong paninindigang
pampulitika ni Peirce. Kalahok siya sa Anti-Imperialist League nina Mark Twain,
Henry Adams, James, at iba pa na tumutol sa lapastangang paglukob sa Pilipinas
noong Digmaang Filipino-Amerikano (1899–1913). Kakatwa, ang tinuturing na
mga alagad niya ngayon ay siyang masugid na tagapamansag ng imperyalistang
dominasyon ng Amerika sa buong daigdig. Hindi maipagtatanggol ng utak ni
Peirce ang neoliberalismong pagmamalabis ng kapitalismong global.
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Sa pamamagitan ng popularisasyon ni James ng ilang ideyang sinipi kay Peirce,
naging kilala si Peirce sa pagbaluktot sa kanyang hinagap. Ngunit tumutol siya
sa pangitain ni James, tinaguriang “pragmaticism” ang kanyang pananaw upang
hindi ma-hijack. Sa kumbensiyonal na pagkilala, ang pragmatismo ni James
at ni John Dewey ay may individwalistikong kapakinabangan. Nakabase iyon
sa pagpapakatotohanan sa anumang teorya o ideya batay sa kabuluhan nito sa
pagsasakatuparan ng anumang nais makapagpabuti sa iyong personal na sitwasyon.
Sa gayon, ang kriterya ng truth-value o halaga-sa-katotohanan ng iyong haka-haka
ay nasa bunga ng paggamit nito sa pag-unlad ng iyong sariling kabuhayan. Kung
hindi tumutulong iyon sa iyong personal na ambisyon, hangad, pangagailangan,
ibasura iyon sapagkat hindi totoo. Ang “cash-value” ng mga ideya ay maipagtitibay
sa instrumentalismong kapakinabangan sa nagsisikap na indibidwal.
Sa kabilang dako, ang teorya ni Peirce ay nakapokus sa paglilinaw ng ating pagiisip tungkol sa kahulugan/katuturan ng ating mga salita. At hindi lamang para sa
isang tao kundi sa komunidad ng mga nagsusulit o nag-ieksamen ng mga sagot
sa problemang kasangkot sa etika, estetika, at epistemolohiya. Samakatwid, hindi
pormula sa biglang-yaman ang tipo ng pragmatisismo ni Peirce.
Bago tayo dumako sa mga panukala ni Peirce tungkol sa “signs,” signos/senyas
at pag-aaral nito, ang siyensiya ng semiotika — paggamit ng iba’t ibang tanda o
sagisag — linawin natin muna ang pangkalahatang paningin niya sa bawat bagay.
Isang mundong pagkakaiba ang saligang simulain ni Peirce kina James-Dewey at
mga alagad tulad nina Sidney Hook, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, atbp. Gadaigdig
ang pagkakaiba: karamihan sa mga ito, inspirado nina Nietzsche, Heidegger, at
iba pang irasyonalistikong tendensiya, ay nominalistiko sa halip na realistiko sa
pagturing sa realidad. Tulad nina Berkeley, Locke, at mga logical positivists (Bertrand
Russell, Wittgenstein, atbp.), ang nominalismo ay pananaw na walang obhetibong
daigdig o katalagahang namumukod kundi mga indibidwal na pangalan lamang,
nadaramang datos, impresyong pampersonal. Samakatwid, walang “generality”
o pagkakasunod-sunuran na mapagbabatayang pagkakaisa ang ating mga palapalagay, haka-haka, opinyon. Suhetibismo’t ideyalismo ang resulta.
Isa Hinati sa Tatluhan
Sa umpisa, nominalistiko si Peirce ngunit nagbago siya sa tulong ng iskolastikong
paglilimi ni Duns Scotus at mga pilosopong sina Immanuel Kant, Hegel, atbp.
Ipinagtanggol niya ang realistikong pananaw sa dahilang hindi makabubuo ng
siyentipikong hipotesis at masusubukan iyon kung walang kasunuran ang mga
ideya ng maraming imbestigador. Kung walang kaalaman ng pag-uugnay ng
penomena, walang siyensiya na batay sa pasumala, pagbabakasakali, na masusubok
sa publikong paraan. Paano makararating sa kolektibong pagkakaisa kung walang
mapagbabatayang lohika (tulad ng deduksiyon, induksiyon, at abduction, na
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pagbuo ng hipotesis o teoryang bukas sa pagpapabulaan nito sa pamamagitan
ng eksperimentasyong sama-sama)? At kung walang napagkayariang prinsipyo
tungkol sa metodo o pamamaraan ng pagpapatunay ng ating opinyon batay sa
kinalabasan o bunga ng ating pagtimbang, pagtasa, at paghatol sa mga haka-haka
o assumption sa larangan ng panlipunang kabutihan, dakdakang walang saysay ang
resulta.
Magsimula tayo sa mungkahi ng pragmatikong maxim ni Peirce: “the entire
intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of
rational conduct that, conditionally, upon all the possible different circumstances
and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.” Dalawang sangkap ang
importante: rasyonal na kilos o asal, at pag-alang-alang sa konteksto ng kapaligiran
at iba’t ibang lunggati. “Ang buong katuturang intelektwal ng simbolo [ideya] ay
binubuo ng lahat ng uri ng kilos na makatwiran na susunod kung tatanggapin ang
simbolo depende sa kondisyon ng lahat na maaaring kalagayan at kagustuhan na
pumapatnubay.” Ang kabuluhan nito ay panlipunang kaunlaran, hindi personal na
kaginhawahan.
Sa ibang salita, ang kahulugan ng anumang ideya/teorya ay nakasalalay sa bunga
o kinalabasan ng pagsasapraktika noon para sa komunidad ng mga nanunubok
at naghahatol. Ang praktika ng kaisipan, laging konseptwal o pangkahalatan ang
saklaw, ay kaagapay ng proseso ng produksiyon ng signos/senyas at walang patid na
interpretasyon. Ang katuturan ay naroon sa potensyalidad ng pagpapakahulugan
na nakaugat sa basehan ng signos/senyas.
Dapat idiin ito: Nakatuon ang pragmatic maxim ni Peirce sa komunidad ng
mga nag-uusisa’t nananaliksik ng katotohan. Ang komunidad na nagpapalitan
ng kuro-kuro, nag-uusap at nagkakaintindihan, ang siyang susi sa makabuluhang
pilosopiyang siyentipiko at may katuturan sa buhay ng sangkatauhan. Opinyon ng
ilang komentarista ay sosyalistang semiotika, hindi pang-negosyo, ang nabuo ni
Peirce ayon sa kwadrong realistiko, hindi nominalistikong pamantayan (Apel; San
Juan).
Bumaling ngayon tayo sa pinkapuso ng aral ni Peirce, ang tatluhang teorya ng
signos/senyas. Ang signos ay anumang kumakatawan sa isang bagay (pangyayari,
danas, o anuman) para sa kaninuman (interpretant). Kailangan ang tatlong
sangkap o salik sa signos: tanda/signos (representamen), bagay, at nagbibigaykahulugan — nagsisiwalat ng basehan o saligan ng pag-uugnay ng bagay at signos.
Pansinin na lubhang kaiba ito sa malaganap na teorya ni Saussure, ugatparadigm ng istrukturalismo at mga kritiko nito (dekonstruksiyonistang disipulo
nina Derrida, Nietzsche, Heidegger; postmodernistang tulad nina Lyotard, Deleuze,
atbp.). Kay Saussure, dalawang salik lamang ang inaatupag: senyas (signifier) at
ideya o konseptong nasa isip (signified). Ang koneksiyon ng dalawa ay arbitraryo,
kombensiyonal, at sa gayon laging dumudulas, pumapalya, di lapat, walang
katatagan. Ang wika ay sistema ng pagkakaiba-iba/differances (sa terminolohiyang
Franses) na ibinadya sa kamalayan. Nawala ang bagay na tinutukoy, ang obhetibong
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penomena. Nawala ang realidad sa labas ng kung ano ang nasa isip o malay ng
nagpapakahulugan. Kaya nominalistiko, ang realidad ay mga watak-watak na
bagay, isa-sang tinutukoy; hindi nakasalig ang kaalaman sa ibat-ibang uri ng
representasyon. Kaya ang katotohanan ay relatibo, walang katiyakan o katakdaan.
Hikayat sa Paniniwala
Bago tayo sumisid sa malalim at malawak na dagat ng teorya ni Peirce tungkol
sa signos/senyas/tanda o lagda — mga sinonimo o kasingkahulugan ng “signs”
na hindi lamang salita o titik kundi anumang nagpapahiwatig, naghuhudyat,
nagpapaalam — nais kong rebyuhin muna ang layon ng pagtatanong o pag-uusisa
(inquiry) para kay Peirce.
Bakit tayo nagsusuri, nagpapalitang-kuro, nagdidiskusyon tungkol sa paglutas
sa isang problema o pagtugon sa mga tanong ukol sa katotohanan o katunayan?
Bakit tayo nagbibigay ng panahon, pagod, at sakripisyo sa gawaing intelektwal na
pagsisiyasat?
Sagot ni Peirce: upang tiyakin o itakda ang paniniwala (fixation of belief ).
Upang makarating sa isang pansamantala ngunit tauspusong kasunduan
tungkol sa katotohanan na pwedeng mapatunayang mali, huwad, o hindi tama.
Tawag dito’y fallibilism. Sa gayon, patuloy ang paghahanap ng kasunduan sa
pangkat ng mga matiyagang nagsisiyasat, gumagalugad, nananaliksik, dumudukal,
sumusuyod, nagpapaunlad — mga katagang lapat sa ebolusyonaryong pangitain ni
Peirce tungkol sa pagsulong ng sangkatauhang kabihasnan.
May limang paraan o metodo sa pagtatamo ng matinong paniniwala, ang pagaayos ng buto-buto, wika nga: a) ang pagkapit sa nakaugalian, b) pagsunod sa
awtoridad, c) ang metodong apriori, d) ang pagtalima sa pangmadlang opinyon
o haka-hakang pampubliko, e) at ang paraan ng imbestigasyon o masinop na
pag-aaral.
Sulitin natin ang mga ito. Ang paraan ng pagkapit sa gawi o ugali ay simpleng
hangad na maniwala sa anumang tama nang walang imbestigasyon. Ayon sa
kostumbreng nakagawian, napagtibay na ito’y maginhawa, sulit sa pangagailangang
pang-araw-araw sa isang magkakauring komunidad. Pwedeng manatili ito kung
walang hamon ng naiiba o kabaligtarang pananalig; sakaling mabuksan ang
komunidad sa ibang impluwensiya, dahas ang gagamitin upang masugpo ang
pagbabago.
Tiwala at Pag-aalinlangan
Ganito rin ang nangyari sa paraan ng awtoridad. Ang paggalang o pagsunod sa
institusyon (halimbawa) ng simbahan, ng Estado ng naghaharing uri o pangkat, ay
pabor sa may kapangyarihan. Natural na gamitin ang pagkulong ng madla upang
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maiwasan ang impluwensiyang salungat sa orden, kaya mas marahas at barbaridad
ang sistemang ito kaysa una dahil sa una, ang interes ay kaginhawan, seguridad,
at karaniwang kabuhayan; ang huli, sindak ang gamit upang makontrol ang isip/
diwa ng madla at sa gayon mapanatili ang kapangyarihan ng maliit na pangkat sa
lipunan. Diktadurya ng oligarko o mayaman ito, kahit nakabalatkayo sa karatula
ng demokrasya o “free world” o neoliberalismong pamamalakad. Ngunit marupok,
hindi matatag at hindi rin magtatagal. Mapapalitan iyon sa paghihimagsik ng
nakararami, o sa pagbubukas ng kaayusan sa pagbabago, sa mapayapa o magulong
paraan.
Ang pangatlong paraan sa pagkakaroon ng paniwala o kasunduan ay pagsunod
sa opinyon ng madla o publiko. Umiiral ang paniwala hindi sa bisa ng pwersa o
pananakot kundi sa pag-apela o paghahabol sa sariling kapakanan o banta ng takot
at galit ng publiko. Matataya na hindi rin ito matatag sapagkat madaling nagbabago
ang disposisyon at lagay ng kalooban ng madla, sampu ng mga pangyayari’t
sirkunstansiyang nanghihimasok. Mahirap umasa sa pabagu-bagong takbo ng
damdamin, sentimyento, at opinyon na apektado ng di mapipigil na daloy ng
kasaysayan.
Ang pang-apat na paraan upang makamit ang paniniwala ay sa metodong apriori.
Ibig sabihin, ang ugat ng yunibersal na paniniwala ay magbubuhat sa kakayahang
mangatwiran ng bawat tao, ayon sa rasyonalistikong turo ni Descartes at Kant.
Ngunit kung matamang pagwawariin, bagamat malayo ito sa kapritsong hilig at
aksidente, maituturing na kahawig ito ng paraan ng pagsunod sa awtoridad at
gawi. Ito’y “intellectual analogue” ng paniniwalang nakabase sa ugali at awtoridad,
sapagkat hinuhugot ang anumang praktikang pangkultura — tulad ng pagsamba
sa diyos, at iba pang pamahiin — at binibigyan ng kahulugang yunibersal at di
matatanggihan. Samakatwid, bawat kultura ay may kanya-kanyang intwisyong
walang isang batayan, watak-watak. Kaya ang istorya ng metapisika ay mayaman
sa nagkakaibang paniniwala. Kung magkalaban ang dalawang intwisyon, mahirap
magkasundo kung walang isang saligang masusubok at mahihimay.
Ang panglimang paraan ay siyang iminumungkahi ni Peirce: iniimbestiga
pati mga intwisyong pundamental kung saan itinitindig ang mga intwisyon at
simulain ng iba’t ibang sistema ng metapisika. Ang mapanuring lohika ni Pierce
ay nagpapanukala na ang makatotohanang paniwala ay maitatayo sa walang
patid na pagsisiyasat, pinapatnubayan ng paraan ng masusing pangangawtiran:
abduction o pagsusog ng hipotesis/hinuha, deduction at induction. Nagdudulot ito
ng mga praktikal na postulates o presuposisyon na masusubukan at maieksamen
ng lahat. Wala nito ang mga naunang paraan. May posibilidad ng pagtuklas ng
katotohanan, ng pagkakamali, at pagtanaw sa hinaharap na kaunlaran. Nakatindig
ang mga posibilidad na ito sa pagkilala sa realidad (na hindi hinubog ng kalakaran
o kombensyon ngunit apektado ang kaisipan), sa doktrina ng pagkakamali, at
sa prinsipyo ng sinekismo at pagkakabit-kabit at pagpapatuloy ng pag-unlad ng
kaalaman.
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Talakayan sa Kabuuan ng Semiotika
Ngayon, dumako naman tayo sa larangan ng semiotika ni Peirce. Bago sa lahat,
dapat idiin na kay Peirce, namamayani ang intensiyon, layon o tangka ng komunidad
sa anumang pagtatanong o pag-uusap. Anong nais o adhika ang makakamit sa
pagtatanong?
Ang semiotika ay isang pormal at normatibong agham kasangkot sa paghahanap
ng katotohanang maisisiwalat sa pamamagitan ng senyas/tanda/lagda/hudyat.
Hinahanap nito ang mga esensiyal na kondisyon sa paggamit ng senyas. May
tatlong sangay ito: gramatikang semiotika, na sumusuri sa kung paano naituturing
ang anumang bagay bilang senyas; lohikang kritikal, na naglalahad ng pamantayan
kung paano natutuklasan ang katotohanan sa hinuhang bunga ng senyas; at
retorikang yunibersal hinggil sa pagtakda ng kondisyon sa komunikasyon at pagunlad ng senyas.
Normatibong siyensiya ang semiotika dahil sa interesado ito sa truth-value, o
katunayan-halaga. Nakatuon ito hindi lang sa paglalarawan sa katangian ng iba’t
ibang tanda/marka/hudyat, kundi sa wastong paggamit ng senyas sa pagtatanong,
pati na ang mga paraang kailangan upang mahikayat o mahimok ang tao at
makaabot sa pagkakasundo.
Kinakasangkapan ng semiotika ang ordinaryong karanasan, sampu ng mga paraan
ng hinuha, pangangatwiran, argumentong lohikal, na nakasanayan na. Depende
ang semiotika sa mga prinsipyong hango sa matematika at penomenolohiya. Galing
naman sa etika at estetika ang normatibong gabay. Tumutulong ang semiotika sa
pagdalisay sa mga tuklas ng pagsubok at pagtikim sa mga karunungang nabanggit.
Lumilitaw na iba ang semiotika ni Peirce kaysa kay Saussure. Para kay Saussure,
ang semiolohiya ay pag-aaral ng senyas bilang sikolohiyang bagay. Sapagkat ang
pagsudlong ng senyas (signifier) at ideya (signified) ay kombensiyonal na praktika
sa lipunan, nakahilig si Saussure sa sikolohiyang panlipunan, at sosyolohiya, hindi
sa lohika. Kaiba kay Peirce, hindi saklaw ni Saussure ang mga senyas o hudyat na
natural o di likha ng tao. Kay Peirce, ang semiotika ay isang organon o makinarya
ng pagsusuri na mailalapat sa maraming disiplina na makapagdudulot ng mabisang
prinsipyo sa pananaliksik sa anumang siyensiya. Hindi dapat paghaluin ang
pormal o lohikal na semiotika ni Peirce sa empirikal na semiolohiya ni Saussure,
upang makaiwas sa nominalismo at relatibismo na walang kahihitnatnan kundi
mapagsariling pagsasapantaha.
Ang semiotika ay normatibong siyensiya na umuungkat sa relasyong pormal ng
mga kaisipan, walang kinalaman kung saan ito nagmula o paano nayari. Sa ganitong
perspektiba, ang senyas/tanda/hudyat ay hindi lamang penomena sa utak na
itinakda ng lipunan o biolohikong proseso, kundi mga bagay na may obhektibong
batas at istruktura na namamalas sa datos ng maraming disiplinang empirikal,
mula soolohiya hanggang astronomiya. Lahat ng kaisipan natin ay dumaraan sa
hinuha, pagmumuni sa namasid o naranasan, na matitimbang at mapapahalagahan
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ayon sa normatibong semiotika ni Peirce. Sa anu’t anuman, ang umuugit na layon
ay pagkamit ng kasunduan ng mga nagsisiyasat hinggil sa nasubukang paliwanag sa
problema o suliraning sinikap masakyan at malutas ng komunidad.
Kategorya ng Pagdalumat
Bumalik tayo sa semiotika ni Peirce. Ang triyadikong teorya ng senyas/tanda ay
nailunsad upang ipaliwanag kung paano nakalilikha ng kahulugan. Ang susi ay
hindi pag-iral ng mga bagay-bagay kundi ang uri at tungkulin ng representasyon,
laluna ang basehan ng pamamansag. Ang karanasan ng pagkakaroon ng katwiran
o dahilan ang lahat ay hindi nagmumula sa “signified” o ideya-sa-utak, kundi bunga
ng aksiyon o pamamaraan ng pagpapakahulugan. At iyon naman ay hindi bunga
ng senyas/signifier lamang kundi ng buong proseso ng pagpapakahulugan, ng
interpretasyon. Iyon naman ay nilagom sa ugnayan ng senyas (tanda, marka) at
bagay, at ang proposisyong nagbubuklod sa kamalayan at yumayari ng intindihan
o pagkatarok sa realidad.
Lubhang masalimuot ang implikasyon ng triyadikong iskema ni Peirce. Bago
natin imbestigahin ang silbi nito sa pag-susuri at kuro-kurong pampanitikan, dapat
talakayin muna ang tatluhang paghahati ni Peirce sa batayan ng signos ayon sa
kategorya ng Pangunahin/Firstness, Pangalawahin/Secondness, at Pangatluhin/
Thirdness. Iyon ay kailangan upang mawatasan kung paano tayo nagkakaroon ng
kaalaman tungkol sa paligid-ligid, at paano lumalago’t umuunlad ang kabatiran
natin sa katotohanan. Ang pag-unawa ay natatamo sa pagsubaybay sa pagsubok sa
ipotesis sa aspeto ng tatlong kategorya.
Ang Pangunahin ay tumutukoy sa larangan ng mga kalidad, ng posibilidad, ng
nadarama ng sensibilidad. Ang uri ng signos ay Qualisign, mga Icon na kahawig
ng bagay, tanda ng posibilidad/ pagkamaaari (Rheme). Ang Pangalawahin ay
larangan ng aktuwalidad, ng interaksiyon sa kapaligiran o umiiral na bagay sa
mundo kung saan nagkakalaman ang abstraktong kalidad. Ito ang lugar ng mga
datos, pangyayari, anumang nagpipigil sa ating nais o hangad. Ang signos dito ay
tinawag na Sinsign, katumbas ay Index, na may litaw na koneksiyon sa bagay na
kinakatawan nito (usok ® apoy); ito ang tanda ng tunay na eksistensiya ng mga
bagay sa mundo (Dicent). Saksi ito sa realidad. Ang Pangatluhan ay pangkalahatang
huwaran, regulasyon o panuto na siyang nag-uugnay sa dalawang unang kategorya:
damdamin/posibilidad at katalagahang humahadlang o sumasalungat. Tumutukoy
ito sa batas, ugali, nakagawian, regularidad. Katumbas nito ang Legisign, simbolo o
sagisag ng kombensiyonal na kilos. Ang interpretant nito ay tinaguriang Argument.
Lubhang komplikado ang iba pang paghahati ni Peirce. Halimbawa, may
dalawang bagay para sa signos: dinamikong bagay na hindi bunyag, at yaong
kagyat na kamalayan ng mga bagay. Mayroon namang tatlong uri ng interpretant:
dinamiko na iyong epektong talagang nararanasan, hayag na interpretant, at
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pinakahuling lohikal na interpretant. Ang huli ay siyang resulta sa kamalayan ng
signos pagkatapos madulugan ng sapat na pag-iisip. Nalilinang ito at umuunlad
ang laman ng kahulugan.
Sa malas, mula sa 3 kategorya mahuhugot ang 10 klasipikasyon (66 uri, kung
tutuusin) na hanggang ngayon ay mahirap sipatin kung may kapakinabangan sa
pagsulong ng agham at humanistikong pagpupunyagi.
Paglilinaw sa ating diskurso o pananalita ang tangka ni Peirce. Bukod sa
hangaring maiwasan ang ambiguidad o kalabuan sa pangangatwiran, nais ni Peirce
na ilahad kung paano sumusunod ang isip/signos sa kondisyong nagpapatunay
o nagpapabulaan sa anumang proposisyon. Ang interpretant ay gawi o ugali na
gumagabay sa kasalukuyan at hinaharap na aksyon o kaisipan tungkol sa bagay
na ating pinag-aaralan. Kung mali ito, hindi magiging matagumpay ang ating
patakaran, panuntunan, o proyekto. Sapat at mabisang kaalaman ang layon. Sa
gayon, ang triyadikong modelo ng tanda/lagda at mga kategoryang inilatag ni
Peirce, ay gamit upang matuklasan ang mga kailangang kondisyon sa iba’t ibang uri
ng representasyon, na siyang naglilipat ng kahulugan sa mga taong nagsisiyasat. Ito
ay kaugnay ng agham sa pagkilatis at pagtarok sa katotohanan batay sa iba’t ibang
paraan ng pangangatwiran (inferential reasoning).
Tatak ng Likhang-Sining
Pangwakas na obserbasyon bago sa maikling pagsasanay sa panunuring
pampanitikan. Nakasentro ang realistikong semiotika ni Peirce sa pagpapalalim
at pagpapalawak ng ating kabatiran, ng agham sa kaalaman sa realidad. Kailangan
ang basehan o saligan ng relasyon ng signos (signifier) at bagay ng representasyon,
na may penomenang hiwalay sa kamalayan — hindi lamang sa “signified” sa utak.
Matitiyak ang katotohanan/tunay-na-kahulugan ng anuman kung ipapalagay natin
na masusuri ang lahat ng interpretasyon. Makararating tayo sa pansamantalang
konsensus o kasunduan sapagkat maaaring matiyak ng walang patid ang kahulugan
ng tanda/lagda, isip o proposisyon na nakalakip sa walang patlang na pag-iral ng
posibilidad. Ang pasumala (contingency) sa kinabukasang kalakaran ay salik sa
determinasyon ng katotohanan na batay sa pagtuklas ng kamalian, kasinungalingan,
o kawastuhan.
Anumang kalidad o sangkap ay matatarok sapagkat iyon ay matatagpuan
sa anumang pangyayari, kaya maipapaliwanag ang anuman na totoo o huwad.
Sa pananaw na ito, pagpapatuloy o “continuity” ay kailangan upang makabuo
ng masusubukang ipotesis; kaakibat nito, may pagtiyak ng katotohanan dahil
lumalaro din ang lakas ng aksidente o baka-sakaling pagkakataon. Ang kaisipan
ay normatibo, nagbubunsod sa paniniwalang mapagkakasunduan, na may etikal
at estetikang hantungan. Samakatwid, hindi nakabitin ang pagsisiyasat; may
konklusyon o pagtatapos ang pagtatanong sapagkat ang anumang hipotesis ay
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masusubok sa praktika, sa eksperimentong pagsasanay angkin ang responsibilidad
at pananagutan sa madlang nagtataguyod nito.
Sa semiotikang perspektiba ni Peirce, ang sining (halimbawa, panitikang
malikhain) ay sinusuri bilang argumento o habi ng mga signos na nakalakip sa tunay
na kontekstong historikal, di bukod sa praktika at mga bisa nito sa publiko. Binubuo
ito ng mga titik, sintomas o palatandaan ng potensiyalidad. Damdamin ng hayag na
kamalayan ang naghahari, hibo o instinkto ang umuugit sa danas, ipinagdiriwang
ang posibilidad na masasalat sa umiiral. Makapangyarihan ang sakop ng ikon,
persepsiyon, rhematikong aspeto ng salita, pati ang indeksikal na proposisyon; sa
wakas, kapwa nagsasanib iyon sa simbolo, sa argumento ng likhang-sining.
Sa huling pagtutuos, ang argumento ay nagbubuhat sa pasiya o kagustuhan ng
awtor, sa kanyang pananaw-sa-daigdig, na walang lohika kundi ang sitwasyong
pangkasaysayan ng awtor (tinutukoy na “ground” na nagbubuklod sa senyas/marka,
semiotikong bagay, at interpretant) bilang kasapi ng isang takdang lipunan sa isang
takdang panahon at lunan. Ang “ground” o sangkalan ng pagkakaugnay-ugnay ay
relatibo sa sitwasyong naturan.
Sa pagsusuma, batay sa retorikang yunibersal ni Peirce, ang tatlong sangay na
ito ang magagamit sa paglilinaw ng tatlong antas sa masinsing paghimay ng teksto:
1) ang sentido o dama (kaugnay ng kagyat na Interpretant); 2) ang kahulugan
(dinamikong Interpretant, bisa ng marka sa mga ahensiyang nagsasalin; at 3)
katuturan (lohika o ultimong makalayuning Interpretant, ang mahalagang bisa ng
mga signos sa walang hintong proseso ng pagsasalin sa komunidad. Hindi kumpleto
ang analisis kung hindi saklaw sa sistematikong paraan ang tatlong antas na ito, ang
saligan ng triyadikong pagpapakahulugan (San Juan, From Globalization 214–46).
Sintomas sa Modernistang Awit ni Cirio H. Panganiban
Kay Peirce, ang tula ay isang Simbolong Rhematic, isang bungkos ng kalidad
sa Pangunang Kategorya. Ang pananagisag sa damdaming mararanasan ang
posibilidad, ang pagkamaari, ay siyang nangingibabaw sa estetikang karanasan. Sa
tulang “Three O’Clock in the Morning,” litaw na ang damdamin ng pagdaloy ng
panahon. Kasangkot dito ang pagbabago sa larawan ng isang partikular na lugar
at sa takbo ng buhay. Iyon ang pinakabuod ng Interpretant sa pangalawang antas.
Ang indeksikal na ambil ng mga tayutay na tumutukoy sa anyo ng salon, ang mga
nakikita’t naririnig — saksi ito sa realismong tekstura ng tula na may alusyon pa
sa popular na awit sa Ingles noong bago sumiklab ang WW 2. Ang langkapan o
hugnayan ng mga impresyong pandamdamin ay tambad, kontrolado ng istruktura
ng panahon at bugso ng pangyayari — ng indeks, proposisyong nagsusudlong sa
panaguri at suheto, at simbolo.
Ang maladulang balangkas ay batbat ng metonimya, personipikasyon, at iba’t
ibang taktikang retorikal. Ngunit hindi ito dapat makalihis sa pokus ng tula: ang
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pag-iiba o pagbabago ng sitwasyon ng tao, pati ang isinumbat na kahinayangan at
kailangang pagtitika. Iyon ang pangunahing tema. Mahihinuha na ang mga qualisign/
ikon at rheme ay kasangkapan lamang upang maipahatid ang ilang argumentong
nakapaloob sa legisign o simbolong nagpapahayag ng gawi, kombensiyonal na kilos,
batas o ulirang aksiyon. Iyon ang nakabungad sa pangalawang saknong: “Mga puso
yaong / kung di naglalaro’y nagsisinungaling; /gaya ng pabangong sumama sa hangin,
/ ang pag-ibig nila’y di dapat hintayin.” Samyo ng pabangong lumilipas — senyal/
sintomas ng daloy ng panahon, na sa tao ay mapagpasiyang kasaysayan.
Ngunit limitado ba sa personal na suliranin ang isinadula? Ayon kay Virgilio
Almario, bagamat may pagkamoralista at realistikong hilig ang tula, sa makauring
pananaw ng Marxistang kritiko di umano, taglay nito ang “konserbatibong
pananaw-sa-daigdig.” Ayon kay Almario, “Nakabagay [sa makata] sa naturang
layunin ang Kristiyanong aral tungkol sa ‘paglalaro ng apoy’ at ‘bawal na pagibig’
dili kaya’y ang pagtatanghal sa salon bilang representasyon ng biblikong paraiso
na bagama’t masaya ay lunan din ng pagbasak ng tao sa pagkakasala.” Marxista ba
itong pangangaral? Napakababaw naman ng intensiyong ikinabit sa modernistang
makata, na angkop para sa mga balagtasistang tinuligsa ni Almario at didaktikong
Marxista — isang bulgar o reduksyionistang bersiyon — na kanyang binatikos.
Mistipikasyon at romantisasyon, sa akala ni Almario, ang inaayawan ng Marxista
sa tula. Diumano, ang realistikong detalye ay naging “lambong sa pag-uusisa ng
karima-rimarim na kalagayang panlipunan na nagpapaubaya sa salon.” Ngunit
totoo bang romantisasyon ang punto ng sakunang itinanghal? Bukod sa pagpasok
ng talambuhay ni Panganiban, na siya’y propesyonal na tubong uring mayaman,
isinakdal din ang makata na naglingkod sa burges “dahil sa pagdiriwang nito sa
isang layaw na mga masalaping burges lamang ang nakikinabang.” Ang yaman ng
ari-arian ay hindi tanda ng kung saang uri (social class) nakapanig ang isang tao.
Isang ebidensiya ito na malabo’t may malaking kakulangan ang interpretasyong
ito. Malinaw na salungat ito sa konserbatibong moralidad na ipinukol sa makata.
At tiwalag din sa irony o parikalang masinop na dinaliri ni Almario na diumano’y
pormalistikong pag-usisa sa porma, pag-uusisang taglay ang isang malasong
ideolohiyang hango mula kina Kant at kapwa romantikong pantas, sampu ng
pasista’t aristokratang doktrina nina Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, atbp.
Lubhang lihis kundi palpak ang kilates at hatol ng manunuring ito. Bukod sa
maling sapantahang inaayawan ng Marxista ang aral ng Simbahan tungkol sa
kasamaan ng makamundong aliw, hindi naman “biblikong paraiso” ang salong
lunan ng pagtuklas ng dalaga na ang puri niya’y pinagsamantalahan. Sa katunayan,
pinuntirya ng makata ang kasinungalingan at pagkukunwaring naghahari sa
mundo ng kabaret at lugar-aliwan ng di lang mariwasa kundi pulubing sangkot sa
“sex work.”
Opinyon din ni Almario na ang mga Marxistang kanyang nakilala ay sadyang
magagalit kay Panganiban sanhi “sa pagtatanghal sa walang-kabuluhang
pagwawaldas ng oras at salapi ng mariwasang uri.” May iwing kamandag daw ang
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tula at mapanganib ipabasa sa progresibong pangkat ng lipunan — pormalistikong
sipat ang ginamit ni Almario, mapang-uyam na karikatura ng Marxista at
pormalista. Bunyag na iyo’y walang muwang o walang kinalaman sa diyalektikomateryalistikong kritikang kultural nina Lukacs, Gramsci, Brecht, Caudwell, atbp.
Ganyak Tungo Sa Materyalistikong Kritika
Sa semiotika ni Peirce, dapat ipokus ang lente sa lohikal at pinakabuod na
Interpretant. Ano ang matining na hatid ng produksiyong pampanitikang ito na
sa palagay ko’y inilathala pagkawasak ng puwersang Amerikano at ipinaghintay
ang bayan sa pangako ni MacArthur na “Ako’y Babalik”? Di pa natitiyak ang petsa
ng pagkakalathala sa magasin ng tulang ito (kasama ito sa kalipunang Salamisim,
limbag noong 1955). Hinala ni Efren Abueg na 1937; sa ganang akin, ito ay lumabas
noong panahon ng pananakop ng Hapon; tiyak na naisulat ito noong kasukdulang
pagkahumaling ng gitnang-uri sa mga kabaret at musikang jazz na muling sumulpot
noong Liberasyon hanggang dekada 50. Patuloy na imbestigahin ito.
Kung balik-suriin, di ba napakababaw at palasak ang mangaral tungkol sa bisyo
ng kabaret sa mambabasa ng tulang tulad nito? Ang sopistikadong pangkat na
bihasa sa modernistang teknik ni Panganiban ay hindi mag-aaksaya ng panahon
kung iyong mga obserbasyon ni Almario ang mapapala. Sa masinop na paglagom,
ang paggamit ng lagdang hawig-ikon/rheme at indeks/sinsign (dicent) ay nakatuon
sa artikulasyon ng batas/gawi/ugaling mahuhugot sa sintaks ng pangungusap, at
sa retorika’t imaheng tanda ng posibilidad/kalidad. Sa palagay ko, ang aral dito ay
hindi “Huwag mag-aksaya ng panahon sa sayawan sa mga kabaret,” kundi “Huwag
maging biktima ng superpisyal na kabihasnang mapagmataas dahil may elektrisidad,
jazz, ginto, pilak, sapagkat sa huling paghuhukom, di natin mapapagkatiwalaan
ang pangako ng mga iyan, bagkus mapapariwara tayo.” Sa huling taya, mga
ilusyon lamang ang idinulot ng Amerika sa Pilipinas. Samakatwid, “baliw” tayong
maghahanap pang muling angkinin ang “puring nawaglit.”
Ang walang hintong takbo ng panahon tungo sa yugto ng pagmulat at pagtuklas
ng katotohanan ang siyang motibasyon ng istruktura ng tula. Sa pamagat pa lamang
ng tula, idiniin na ang oras sa pagitan ng ilusyon at katunayan, saya at kahabag-habag
na pagsisisi’t lumbay. Sapagkat ang dula’y may mga tauhang pangkalahatan o tipikal,
hindi partikular, ang papel na ginaganap ng mga ito ang importante: ang dalagang
naglilingkod, ang mga may-kayang grupong kaugnay sa jazz, biyolin, bombilyang
may ginto at pilak. Ang urbanidad o kabihasnang kalunsuran na lumaganap sa
pagsakop ng Amerikano ang siyang masaklaw na tagpo sa paghulog ng puri’t
dangal ng mga nasakop. Sa paglipas ng panahon, sa ika-tatlo ng umaga — ang oras
ng pagtutuos — napag-alaman din na hindi makaasa sa lakas o yaman ng Amerika
(kabit sa indeks ng kislap at ingay ng salon) na ipagtanggol ang puri, o isauli ito,
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ng bayang Pilipinas. Ito ang pagbasang maituturing na pinakaultimong lohikal na
Interpretant, na nag-uudyok sa pagbabago ng bulag na pagdakila sa Amerika.
Sa pakiwari ko, ito ang alegoryang nakalakip sa kategoryang Pangalawahin,
binubuo ng indeks ng limitasyon sa kagustuhan o pagnanais ng tao. Malinaw na
ang temang nakasentro ay pagkabigo, kabalintunaan, sakit at sakuna dulot ng
mapanggayumang hibo ng magara’t nakasisilaw na pamilihan/komersyo ng lunsod
dala ng Kanluraning kapital. Naranasan ito sa pangyayaring naganap. Ang bayang
Pilipino ang natukso ng Amerika, ngunit sa pagitan ng gabi ng kahirapan at umaga
ng katubusan, hindi pa rin makaigpaw sa romansang walang kasasapitan. Ang
kaligtasan ay nasa pagmumuni sa takbo ng ating kasaysayan.
Masinsing tunghayan ang ikot ng mga tagpo sa bawat saknong. Sa umpisa,
nakaaaliw iyon (ang mapang-aliw na pangako ng Amerika), nakapupukaw ng
silakbo ng damdamin at ulirat; ngunit bago mag-umaga (sa yugto ng pagliliwanag,
at pagkapawi sa tulog o himbing ng malay), “sa dilim ng gabing mapanglaw,” ang mga
nasawi ay mukhang “baliw” na umasa pa sa Kanluraning modo ng pamumuhay. Ang
ugali at tatak ng kabuhayang iyon — hindi ang pagkakasala sa doktrinang relihiyoso,
o burgesyang pang-aabuso — ang sinikap ipadalumat ng makata sa huli’t lohikang
interpretant batay sa istorikal na konteksto ng tula at ng buhay pampanitikan ng
makata bilang kasapi ng modernistang manunulat, at kasapi ng bayang nasadlak
sa kahirapan noong panahon ng pananakop, una, ng Amerika, at sumunod, ng
imperyong Hapon. Ito ang masaklaw at mapanlikhang “ground” ng pagkakaugnay
ng teksto (senyas) at bagay (ang mundong tinutukoy) sa mapanuring dalumat na
nailahad dito.
Sa konklusyon, ang kahulugan at katuturan ng likhang-sining ay nagmumula
sa dinamikong interaksiyon ng tatlong sangkap sa pag-unawa: signos, bagay
o pangyayaring tinutukoy niyon, at ang saligan ng pag-uugnay ng dalawa sa
Interpretant o pagpapakahulugan. Bunga iyon ng aplikasyon ng semiotika ni Peirce.
Salamin o Salamangka sa “Kristal na Tubig”
Bukod sa ulat na ipinarangalan si Antonio Rosales bilang mahusay na kwentista
ng taong 1937, wala akong alam na nailathalang puna o pagsusuri sa akdang ito.
Panahon ng Komonwelt iyon, ilang taon pagkaraan ng insureksiyon ng mga
Sakdalista sa pamumuno ng makatang Benigno Ramos at ilang taon pa bago
sumabog ang WW II sa Europa. Samantala, ang pinagkaabalahan noon ng mga
progresibong intelektwal sa atin ay ang paglago at paglaganap ng pasismo sa mundo,
partikular ang Falangistang kampon ni Generalissmo Francisco Franco sa Espanya
na maraming taga-suporta sa Pilipinas, una na ang mga oligarkong kapitalistang
lahing Kastila. Masusubaybayan ito sa mga tala ng Philippine Writers League nina
Federico Mangahas, Salvador Lopez, at Teodoro Agoncillo.
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Sa malas, walang pahiwatig na progresibo o reaksiyonaryo si Rosales. Tulad ng
maraming kamanunulat, kumikiling siya sa romantikong pananaw sa kalikasan at di
umano’y payak na buhay ng mga magsasaka, mangingisda, at mga taga-lalawigang
may sariling kabuhayan. Ang “Kristal na Tubig” ay halimbawa ng produksiyong
pampanitikang tumutumbok sa buhay rural, ang kanayunang ginagabayan ng mga
ugaling tradisyonal, at paghihikahos ng magbubukid at mangingisdang pamilya at
iba pang mga anak-dalita. Ipinipinta nito ang kahinaan at kagalingan ng mga taong
laki sa kabihasnang pumapanaw, iginugupo ng industriyalisadong kalunsuran. Ano
ang kinabukasan ng kalikasan sa harap ng pangungulila ng inbididwal sa gitna ng
sitwasyong kolonyal noong Komonwelt?
Ang multo ni Ninay, na binubuhay sa pagmumuni ng talisuyong kasintahan, ang
himatong na malulutas ang dilema sa tagumpay ng saloobing manatiling buhay.
Ito ang mahihinuhang tema ng akda. Tampok sa salaysaying ito ang suliranin
ng dukhang amang nag-aaruga sa isang batang ulila sa ina, anak ng babaeng
lumabag sa batas ng relihiyon, kostumbre ng pamilya at ng kanayunan. Sa kabila
ng suliraning kasalatan at kawalan ng tiwala sa sinumang makapagkakandili sa
iiwanang anak, gumitaw ang lakas ng kalikasan sa mga Qualisigns, pandamdaming
senyal, na sinasakop ng mga indeks ng pangyayari. Iyon naman ay nilalagom sa
huli ng argumentong nakabuod sa usal ng pagbabakasakali (na may himig dasal)
ni Tasio, ang sentral na tauhan: “Kung buhay si Ninay ay ganito rin ang kanyang
gagawin.” Semiotikong pagsasanay ito, di ba?
Ibig sabihin: Kahit patay na si Ninay (ang babaeng bumalikwas sa tradisyon
at awtoridad ng kinaugalian), bubuhayin ko sa isip, gunita, guni-guni, pagninilay,
kamalayan, budhi, ulirat ang dakilang diwa/antig ng damdamin, puso, kaluluwa.
Multo o Kaluluwang Nagbanyuhay?
Sa kagyat (immediate) na Interpretant, ang kuwento ni Rosales ay napakamaram­
daming paglalarawan ng isang karakter, ang pagkatao ni Tasio. Inilahad muna sa
anim na bahagi o eksena ang mga detalye tungkol sa tungkulin ni Tasio bilang
pinagtambal na ama at ina ni Nene, ang anak ni Ninay sa asawang kanyang sadyang
tinakasan upang makapiling ang tunay niyang mahal, si Tasio. Ang maginhawa’t
mahinahong tagpo ng kalikasan, ang malinaw na kristal na tubig ang nakatatawagpansin bilang “salamin” ng “kaayaayang larawan ng kamusmusan,” ang dominanteng
imahen na nag-uugnay sa diyalogo ni Tasio at bunsong si Nene.
Mabilis ang daloy ng ulat at tala tungkol sa araw-araw na gawain, walang
bagabag o ligalig hanggang sa kalagitnaan, sa eksena VII . Umigting ang balisa ng
protagonist. Naisingit doon ang problemang bumabagabag: sino ang mag-aalaga
kay Nene pagkamatay ng tanging ama/ina niya, si Tasio? Iyon ba’y pagkabasag
lamang ng basong kristal at hindi ng kristal na tubig ng kamusmusan at kalikasan?
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Ang dinamikong Interpretant ay reaksiyon sa panganib na umigpaw sa ating
loob pagkabatid na sadyang nabalisa si Tasio. Sumunod dito ang kanyang litong
pag-iisip kung sino ang nararapat umampon at kumalinga kay Nene na tutupad
sa pagkatao ni Ninay. Sa eksena XI hanggang XIII , sumalisi ang enerhetikong
Interpretant na napukaw sa pangambang may gipit at desperadong tangka si Tasio
na lunurin ang walang muwang na bata. Tumatalunton sa isang payak at palasak
na balangkas ang maikling kathang ito, mula exposisyon hanggang hidwaan ng
mga lakas hanggang kasukdulang pagkaunawa ni Tasio tungkol sa puna ni Nene
sa “kristal na tubig.” Ang anak mismo ang sumagot sa kanyang balisang budhi
bago pumanaw ang eksena: “Bakit niya katatakutang maiwan sa isang mapanlibak
at di nakawawatas na daigdig ang isang walang malay na si Nene kung ang puri’t
dangal nito’y kristal na tubig?” Bakit pa ilulubog sa kristal na tubig si Nene kung
siya mismo’y bahagi nito, pinagtambal na ikon at indeks, rheme at legisign, ng puri,
dangal, kabanalan?
Tumatambad dito ang proseso ng paghihinuha, ng paghuhulo, na maselang
bahagi ng lohika. Sa semiotika ni Peirce, ang pangatlong dibisyon ay Speculative
Rhetoric, o retorikang mapagnilay. Ang paksa roon ay kung anong kinakailangang
kondisyon sa pagsasalin at paghahatid ng kahulugan sa komunidad ng mga
mananaliksik. May kinalaman na ito sa sikolohiya at sosyolohiya, agham na ipinasok
natin sa pagtiyak sa panghuli’t lohikal na Interpretant sa tula ni Panganiban. Ngunit
sa pag-analisa sa signos ng likhang-sining, ayaw ni Peirce na isangkot ang sikolohiya
tulad ng semiolohiya ni Saussure. Ang dapat sangguniin muna upang maunawaan
ang katotohanan ng mga proposisyon ay alintuntunin sa lohika, sa paghihinuha
(inference) at paghuhulo, na may takdang regulasyon o tuntuning maiimbestiga at
mapapabulaanan (fallibilism).
Ano ang maikikintal sa ating unawa kung maiging iintidinhin ang palagay na
ang “puri’t dangal” ng batang si Nene ay katulad ng kalikasan? Ibig bang sabihi’y
hindi na magpapalit o mag-iiba ang gulang, ang kabataan ni Nene? Mahihinuha na
sa pagpalagay ni Tasio na nahuli o nagaya niya ang kaisipan ni Ninay, nakahulagpos
na siya sa kapalaran ni Tasio? Tatak konserbatibo ang kiling ng akdang ito bagamat
litaw ang kontradiksiyon ng hangad sa pagbabago kaalinsabay ng pangarap na
mananatili ang kawagasan ng pag-ibig at kawalang-malay ng anak?
Ano ang Dapat Gawin?
Pamukaw-habag ang tagpong ito. Nakapangingibabaw ang rhematiko’t ikonikong
katangian ng senyas (bilang Qualisign) sa nadaramang ingay at nakikitang anyo.
Lubog ang indeksikal na uri, pati ang proposisyong “Natagpuan ko rin ang
kaligtasan!” Ipinabulaanan ito ng iginuhit na impresyong may pahiwatig na di
maglalaho sa ulirat ang magkatalik na hugis ng bunso at ina. Tumingkad ang haraya
ng magkapiling na nilalang:
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Siya namang paghihip ng hanging may inihahatid na isang awit, ang awit ng
isang inang may ipinagheheleng sanggol. Napatitig siyang muli sa kristal na
tubig. Nasinag niya ang isang matamis ngunit malungkot na gunita: si Ninay.
Ang lagaslas ng tubig, ang awit ng mga ibon, ang sutsot ng hangin ay naitaboy sa
kaniyang pandinig ng awit ng inang may ipinagheheleng sanggol.
Ngayon lamang naitampok ang imaheng Pieta sa buong kuwento. Bagamat
alam nating lumabag sa batas si Ninay, walang puwang na ginamit upang idiin ang
magkalapit na katawan ng ina at anak. Sa gayo’y sumingit ang kapangyarihan ng
tradisyon, na di alintana ni Tasio. Alipin pa rin siya ng makalumang ugali.
Malakas ang bigat ng gunita, ng nakalipas. Binanggit lamang na laging
hinahalikan ni Tasio ang “mukhang pinaghuwaran” ng kaaya-ayang larawan ni
Nene. Sumungaw na lamang ang mukhang iyon sa pintuan ng dampa ni Tasio. Mula
noon, “Si Ninay ay di na umalis pa sa dukhang tahanan ng maralita niyang talisuyo.
Naisumpa na niyang matapos niyang isanla sa iba ang kaniyang katawan, ang
puso niya ay siya naman niyang tatalimahin.” Mapaghuhulo natin na ang paglitaw
ng imaheng Pieta/Madonna ay bunga ng malaking impluwensiya ng tradisyong
Katoliko, na may sinkretistang paglagom sa katutubong praktika ng mga babaylan
at katambal na pananampalataya sa mga diyosa at ispiritu ng kababaihan. Ito ang
bukal ng pinakahuling lohikal na Interpretant.
Maimumungkahi na ang ulit-ulit na pagdakila ni Tasio kay Ninay, sa kanyang
mga kaugalian, ay pahiwatig ng akda na ang indibidwalistikong pagrebelde ni Ninay
at matinding pagpapahalaga sa puso/damdamin, ay siyang malalim na kalatas
ng kuwento. Nakapangibabaw ang romantikong sensibilidad. Tantiya kong may
malasakit ang komunidad ng manunuri at mag-aaral sa mensaheng ito, laluna kung
aalagatain ang masidhing tulak-kabig ng romantikong pangitain sa mga kabataang
manunulat — kundi pa nabulusok sa sinisismo. Maimpluensiya pa rin ang relihiyon,
laluna ang tendensiyang ebanghelikal sa lumulutang na intelihensiya ngayon. Di
kasangkot dito ang organikong intelektwal ng uring gumagawa. Maitatakda ang
ganitong pagpapakahulugan dito sa tulong ng makalipuna’t rasyonalistikong
semiotika ni Peirce na may dalumat ng materyalismong diyalektikal at istorikal.
Sa ibang okasyon, pwede nating kasangkapanin ang semiotika ni Peirce upang
linawin ang nakatagong isyu ng kontradiksiyong umiiral: sa isang banda, ang
ritwalistikong palabas ng Corona Impeachment trial, at sa kabila, ang nakasisindak
na lindol at maraming biktimang napabayaan, nalunod, o natabunan. Maraming
signos, senyal, tanda, marka, sintomas na dapat buuin at pagkabitin. Nakatutok ang
atensiyon ng bayan sa intra-alitan ng naghaharing oligarko, samantalang patuloy
ang paghihikahos, sakit, kawalan ng pag-asa, korupsiyon, karaniwang krimen at
pandarambong ng burokrata-kapitalista, may-lupa, at dayuhang korporasyon,
sampu ng mga pulis, militar, at para-militari gangster. Ano ang kahulugan nito
upang tayo’y makapagpasiya’t kumilos upang mabago ang kabuhayan?
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Hanapin Upang Maisakatuparan
Isang pansamantalang parabula sa panayam na ito ang ibubuntot ko rito. Sa lektura
ni Peirce noong 16 Abril 1903 sa Harvard University, may pahatid siya tungkol sa
rebolusyonaryong pangarap ng mga Filipino. Nangyari ito sa gitna ng pagkawasak
ng Republika ni Aguinaldo at pagsugpo sa mga hukbo ni Heneral Lukban sa Samar
na siyang responsable sa masaker ng mga dayuhang manlulupig sa Balangiga, Samar,
noong 1901. Maigting ang paniwala ni Peirce na lumilikha ng di-matingkalang bisa
ang wika, nagsasakatuparan ng mga mithiin ang naipahayag na kaisipan/dunong/
talino.
Ang pakikiramay ni Peirce sa ating pakikibaka tungo sa kasarinlan at demokrasya
ay masisinag sa higing/hagod ng kanyang talakay hinggil sa kapangyarihan ng
salitang nagpapahayag ng isang konstelasyon ng motibasyon sa praktika ng buhay.
Maingat na timbangin ang pakikipagkapwa ni Peirce sa ating pakikibaka:
Nobody can deny that words do produce such effects. Take for example, that
sentence of Patrick Henry which, at the time of our revolution, was repeated by
every man to his neighbor: “Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of
Liberty, and in such a country as we possess, are invincible against any force that
the enemy can bring against us.”
Those words present this character of the general law of nature, that they
might have produced effects indefinitely transcending any that circumstances
allowed them to produce. It might, for example, have happened that some
American schoolboy, sailing as a passenger in the Pacific Ocean, should have
idly written down those words on a slip of paper. The paper might have been
tossed overboard and might have been picked up by some Tagala on a beach of
the island of Luzon; and if he had them translated to him they might easily have
passed from mouth to mouth there as they did in this country, and with similar
effect.
Words then do produce physical effects. It is madness to deny it. The very
denial of it involves a belief in it; and nobody can consistently fail to acknowledge
it until he sinks to a complete mental paresis. (The Essential Peirce 184)
Hindi alam ni Peirce na taglay ng ating kasaysayan at diwang kolektibo ang
isang mayaman, matibay, at malikhaing tradisyong rebolusyonaryo. Isang kronika
ng pakikibaka na nakaugat sa di-mabilang na insureksiyong antikolonyal (mula
pa kina Humabon at Soliman), batbat ng ulirang sakripisyo ng mga bayaning
sina Gabriela Silang, Balagtas, Del Pilar, Rizal, Sakay, Teresa Magbanua, Salud
Algabre, Cherith Dayrit, Maria Lorena Barros, Kemberley Luna, at maraming
pang nag-alay ng buhay para sa ikatatagumpay ng pambansang demokrasya. Hindi
na natin kailangang basahin si Patrick Henry. Gayunpaman, dapat pahalagahan
ang alyansiyang inihandog ni Peirce at iba pang aktibistang intelektuwal ng ibang
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bansa. Kailangan ito sa pagsasakatuparan ng simulain ng Nagkakaisang Hanay.
Bukas-makalawa — sundan natin ang alegorya ni Peirce — mahahagilap din natin
itong Tagalang ito sa madlang gumagala sa ating dalampasigan, naglalakbay sa
iba’t ibang lupalop ng daigdig, kabilang sa mahigit na 10 milyong Pinay/Pinoy
na gumagala sa buong planeta, pinagsalikop sa mapagkandiling abot-tanaw ng
kaisipan ni Charles Sanders Peirce. Matatagpuan natin sila, makikipagtulungan at
patuloy na makikipagtalikan.Mabuhay itong natatanging balikatang mapagpalaya’t
makatarungan!
Sanggunian
Almario, Virgilio. Pag-unawa sa Ating Pagtula. Manila: Anvil, 2007. Print.
Apel, Karl-Otto. Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism. Amherst: U of
Massachussetts P, 1981. Print.
Fisch, Max. “Peirce’s General Theory of Signs.” Peirce, Semiotic and Pragmatism. Ed.
Kenneth Ketner and Christian Kloessel. Bloomingon, IN : Indiana UP , 1986. Print.
Liszka, James Jakob. A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Pierce.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP , 1996. Print.
Merrell, Floyd. Change Through Signs of Body, Mind, and Language. Prospect Heights,
Ill.: Waveland, 2000. Print.
Panganiban, Cirio. “Three O’Clock in the Morning.” Salamisim. Manila: Teo Gener,
1955. Print.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Peirce on Signs. Ed. James Hoopes. Chapel Hill, NC : U of North
Carolina P, 1991. Print.
——— . The Essential Peirce. Bloomington, IN : Indiana UP , 1998. Print.
Rosales, Antonio B. “Kristal na Tubig.” Web. 6 Jan. 2012. <http://www.seasite.niu.edu/
Tagalog/kristal_na_tubigni_antonio_b.htm>.
San Juan, E. Critical Interventions: From James Joyce and Henrik Ibsen to Charles
Sanders Peirce and Maxine Hong Kingston. Saarbrucken, Germany: Lambert, 2010.
Print.
——— . From Globalization to National Liberation: Essays of Three Decades. Quezon
City: U of the Philippines P, 2008. Print.
Sheriff, John K. The Fate of Meaning: Charles Peirce, Structuralism, and Literature.
Princeton: Princeton UP , 1989. Print.
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 274–291
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Kolum Kritika
Si E. San Juan
Bilang “Interpretant”
Virgilio S. Almario
University of the Philippines, Diliman
egnarvaez@yahoo.com
Abstract
In this rejoinder to E. San Juan’s lecture “Kahulugan, Katotohan, Katwiran: Pagpapakilala sa
Semiotika ni Charles Sanders Peirce,” Almario addresses San Juan’s critique of his reading
of Cirio H. Panganiban’s poem in his essay “Pormalismo at Marxismo sa Pagbasa ng ‘Three
O’ Clock in the Morning.’” Almario’s essay was delivered in 1992 in a seminar at Ateneo
de Manila University and published in 2006 in his book Pag-unawa sa Ating Pagtula.
Although Almario lauds San Juan’s critical interventions on C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, which
updates Saussurian linguistics with the role of the “Interpretant,” he nevertheless deplores
San Juan’s shortsightedness when the latter fails to evaluate the former’s essay in its entire
argument. San Juan overlooks Almario’s analysis of modernization and Americanization,
subtexts that, for San Juan, represent the “real meaning” of the poem but were missing in
Almario’s reading. Moreover, San Juan dismisses Almario’s elaboration of the Christian/
moralist strain in the poem as vulgar and reductive whereas this textual consideration,
Almario argues, although deemed outdated compared to current Marxist hermeneutics,
was relevant to materialist reading practices at that time. Thus, Almario attributes what
San Juan observes as his lack of theoretical complexity to the historical moment. Lastly,
Almario decries the absolutist stance of San Juan’s criticism which forecloses other possible
mediations between text and history. This, he cautions, contradicts the sense of dynamic
and ongoing interrogation that C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic method of inquiry requires.
Keywords
formalism, marxism, Philippine literary criticism, Philippine literature, pragmatism
About the Author
Virgilio S. Almario, whose nome de plume is Rio Alma in Filipino poetry, is Professor
Emeritus at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. A critic, literary historian, and
cultural manager, his latest works include Muling Pagkatha sa Ating Bansa; Rizal: Makata
(a book on the poetic genius of Jose Rizal); Jacintina (a revaluation of the lifework of the
young revolutionary Emilio Jacinto); and Pitong Bundok ng Haraya (a discussion of literary
and creative values inherent in the Filipino tradition). The latter was translated into English
as Seven Mountains of the Imagination by poet Marne Kilates, making it Almario’s first
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critical book in English. In 2003, he received the Order of National Artist for Literature
from the Philippine Government, honoring his contributions to Philippine Literature. His
seminal work, Balagtasismo versus Modernismo, traced the history of the development of
poetry in Filipino in the 20th century.
May bagong tuklas na naman si E. San Juan, Jr. para sa ating mga tagahanga
ng Karunungang Kanluranin. Si Charles Sanders Peirce. Sa kaniyang lekturang
“Kahulugan, Katotohanan, Katwiran: Pagpapakilala sa Semiotika ni Charles Sanders
Peirce,” na balita ko’y binigkas ni San Juan sa Ateneo (at sa UP at DLSU daw?) nitóng
Marso 2012 at ikinalat ngayon sa internet, kahanga-hangang nilagom niya ang
mga dakilang kaisipan ni Peirce bilang semyologo na ikinaiba niya kay Saussure,
at nakalulungkot na hindi natin natutuklas sa kabilâ ng mataos na pagkahumaling
natin sa mga kritikong Amerikano. O marahil sadyang iniligaw din táyo ng ating
edukasyong Amerikanisado? Higit na ipinamalay sa atin ang halaga ng mga
kapanahong sina William James at John Dewey kayâ nalingid sa atin si Peirce? Ako
mismo’y nakapansin lamang kay Pierce sa isang libro hinggil sa semyolohiya dahil sa
sanaysay doon ni Umberto Eco tungkol sa kaniya. Sinikap kong bumili ng isang aklat
ni Peirce ngunit hindi sapat ang aking natutuhan upang magamit siyá. Mabuti’t may
tulad ni San Juan na kailangang dalawin táyo sa pana-panahon at buksan ang ating
mga matá sa mga bago’t magandang balita mula sa Estados Unidos.
Nais ko ring purihin ang pagsisikap niyang gamitin ang kaisipan ni Peirce sa
dalawang akdang Filipino. Sa isang tula at sa isang maikling kuwento. Makabuluhan
ang gayong praktika upang higit pang luminaw ang paksa na kung tutuusin ay sinikap
likumin sa isang mabigat na lektura at lubhang nangangailangan ng isang higit na
mahabàng talakay at talakayan upang totoong maging bahagi ng karunungan ng
mga nakinig. (Natatákot akong marami sa kanila ang nakatulad lámang ng mga
taga-San Diego na sapilitang nakinig kay Padre Damaso. Nangingisda ng kahulugan,
sabi nga ni Vince Rafael, sa wikang hindi nilá nauunawaan.) Gayunman, labis kong
ikinabigla (at siyempre, ikinalungkot) ang pagpasok ng aking pangalan sa kaniyang
pagbása sa tulang “Three O’Clock in the Morning” ni Cirio H. Panganiban.
Ikinabigla ko ang paratang ni San Juan na “Napakababaw naman ang intensiyong
ikinabit” ko sa tula ni Panganiban. Pagkatapos, binira pang “Lubhang lihis kundi
palpak ang (aking) kilates at hatol.” Ang una kong naisip ay sisihin ang aking sarili:
dahil hindi ko pa nababása noon si Peirce. Nakapagpapalalim at nakapagtutuwid
palá ang pagbása kay Peirce, tulad ng ehemplo ni San Juan. Nalulungkot man, dalìdalì kong binalikan ang sinulat kong “Pormalismo at Marxismo sa Pagbása ng ‘Three
o’Clock in the Morning’ ni Cirio H. Panganiban” para sa isang seminar sa Ateneo
de Manila University noong 11 Hunyo 1992 at naging bahagi ng aking librong Pagunawa sa Ating Pagtula (2006).
Nahaluan ng pagtataká ang aking kalungkutan.
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Bakit daw “napakababaw” ng aking pagbása sa intensiyon ng tula? Dahil
sinabi ko raw na may taglay na “Kristiyanong aral” ang tula at papansinin iyon ng
Marxistang pagbása. Bulgar daw iyon at reduksiyonista. Maaari. Idadagdag ko pang
repleksiyonista. Bagaman sinabi ko lamang na maaaring mapansin ng “Marxista”
noon ang ganitong aral. At ang totoo, hindi ko mismo sinabing masamâ ang tula
na may “Kristiyanong aral.” Ang aking sinabi tungkol sa “moralistang” hibo ng tula
ay bahagi ng aking susunod pang paliwanag hinggil sa mga bagay na maaaring
pansinin ng “Marxistang” kritiko noon sa tula ni Panganiban. Para sa akin ngayon,
isang antas iyon ng pagiging “Marxista” alinsunod sa ipinahihintulot ng sanggunian
noon, at maaaring hindi kasinlalim ng paraan ng pagbása ngayon ngunit isang
makabuluhang antas ng progresyon sa kasaysayan ng kritisismo sa Filipinas.
Ilang paglilinaw ang kailangan ko pang gawin hinggil sa aking talakay noong 1992.
Una, isang napakaikling panayam iyon upang bigyan ng introduksiyon ang mga
estudyante at guro hinggil sa kasalukuyan noong praktika sa paggamit ng Pormalista
at Marxistang pagbása. Nilinaw ko rin sa loob ng panayam ang ordinaryong
background ng tinatawag kong “Marxista” at siyempre, hindi nilá nababása si
Peirce. (At hindi kasáma sa kanila si San Juan dahil may higit siyáng mataas na
karunungang Marxista noon pa.) Ang aking mga punto, sa gayon, ay isang paraan
ng pagpatnubay hinggil sa karaniwang tinatalakay ng isang Filipinong “Marxista”
noon alinsunod sa kanilang nabásang mga sangguniang Marxista sa Kanluran. Ang
mga posibleng bása, gaya rin ng inihanay kong mga posibleng básang pormalista,
na maidudulot ng mga sangguniang Kanluranin noon. Na hindi ko rin sinasabing
masamâ. At ni hindi ko rin sinasabing dapat iwasan. Sa buod, pagsusuri iyon sa
posibleng konteksto ng tula — gaya ng sitwasyon sa kasaysayan, ng posibleng taglay
na kamalayan, ng posibleng buhay at paniwala ng sumulat.
Ngunit “napakababaw” daw at “lubhang lihis.” Bakit kayâ? Dahil hindi ko
nabanggit ang higit na makabuluhang saysay ng tula, alinsunod sa pagbása ni San
Juan.
Ano iyon? Sa buod, ang “maituturing na pinakaultimong lohikal na Interpretant,”
ani San Juan, ay inilalantad ng tula ang katotohanang “ilusyon lamang ang idinulot
ng Amerika sa Pilipinas.” Wala akong tutol. Ang babae sa kabaret ay isang biktima
diumano ng “bulag na pagdakila sa Amerika.” Sa isang salitâ, produkto ang babae ng
Amerikanisasyon at ng mapanlinlang na “bighani” ng pananakop ng Estados Unidos.
Ngunit ang ikinalungkot kong lalo ay sinabi ko rin iyon sa unahang bahagi ng
maaaring ipaliwanag ng mga “Marxista” noon. Wika ko, “Sa pagsusuring Marxista
naman, unang dapat pagpakuan ang tipo ng buhay na isinasadula sa tula. Isa itong
dekadenteng búhay na dulot ng modernisasyon at Amerikanisasyon. (Minarkahan
ko pang bold ang dalawang naturang salitâ.) Ang salon mismo ay mikrokosmo
ng masamâng búhay lungsod, isang aliwang pangmayaman, at isang lusak na
kinasasadlakan ng mga babaeng anak-mahirap. Isang uri din ito ng aliwang panggabi
na sumigabo sa panahon ng Amerikano at tanghalan ng dekadenteng kulturang
Amerikano. Malinaw ang impluwensiyang Amerikano sa titulong mula sa popular
noong kantang Amerikano at sa banggit sa jazz.”
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O hindi iyon ninais basáhin ni San Juan dahil mas nais niyang basáhin ang iba
kong inihanay na posibleng ungkatin ng mga “Marxista” noon at ayaw niya? Sa
kasamaang-palad, natatalakay ang mga puntong iyon sa mga nabása kong “Marxista”
bago mag-1992. Sa akin ding palagay, bagaman itinuturing na “napakababaw”
ngayon ni San Juan, ang mga puntong ito ay hindi “lubhang lihis” at sa halip ay mga
lehitimong pag-uusisa na maaaring idulot ng tula at ng kasaysayan.
O dahil may ibang haka si San Juan? A, bakâ ito ang gusto niyang igiit. Halimbawa,
ang haka niya na sinulat ni Panganiban ang tula pagkatapos ng Ikalawang Digmaang
Pandaigdig? Kasi daw lumabas ang libro ni Panganiban noong 1955. (Ngunit dapat
banggitin agad na postumo ang koleksiyon.) Kailangan niya ito upang ipasok din
halimbawa ang “pangako” ni MacArthur. Ngunit ano ang masamâ kung ipilit kong
sinulat ito noong panahon ng Amerikano? Lumalim ba ang kaniyang bása dahil
lámang sa isang hakang halos walang batayan? Ang “salon,” ang “jazz”? Ipagpatawad,
ngunit bakâ hindi makáya ng mga senyas sa tula ang nais niyang ikargang kislapdiwa. Iminumungkahi ko pang titigan ang Bulaklak ng Kabaret ni Ruperto Cristobal
bilang isang kapanahong proyekto ng tula ni Panganiban.
Nakatatákot isipin na maaaring nais pairalin ni San Juan ang isang uri ng
monopolyo sa karunungan. Iyong uri ng tindig na may nag-iisa’t laging wastong uri
ng Kritisismo. Binanggit ko doon din sa bungad ng aking pagbása kay Panganiban
ang panganib ng gayong Awtoridad sa kritisismo — ang malimit ko nang sinasabing
patibong para sa kritiko: nagiging mainipin, arbitraryo. Mahihiwatigan ang
gayong prebilehiyadong pagturing-sa-sarili ni San Juan sa nais niyang isurot na
“pormalista” kong oryentasyon (at kayâ “napakababaw” ko!) at pagiging tunay na
Marxista niya. Natatákot din akong lumilihis siyá mismo sa paraan ng paglitis ni
Peirce sa bagay-bagay. Si Peirce din ang nagsabi, alinsunod sa talakay ni San Juan,
na ang karunungan at katwiran ay natatamo ng kritiko sa patuloy na imbestigasyon,
sa walang tugot na interogasyon, lalo na upang magtamo ng pagsang-ayon at
malawakang pagkakasundo sa paghatol ng sining; hindi sa pamamagitan ng walangpakundangang pangmamaliit sa iba’t nakaraan dahil hindi katulad ng kasalukuyang
paniwala ng kritiko. Ang modelo mismo ng paglitis ni Peirce sa senyas, alinsunod sa talakay ni San
Juan, ay dapat litisin. Totoo, isang dagdag na sangkap ang interpretant sa signifier/
signified ni Saussure. Ngunit hindi nangahulugang nawalan ng silbi si Saussure
dahil sa idinagdag ni Peirce. Patuloy na nakikinabang ang sosyolingguwistika
sa pinasimulang imbestigasyon sa senyas ni Saussure. Samantala, hindi naman
nangangahulugang naghinto na ang semyolohiya sa interpretant ni Peirce. Kapag
binása, halimbawa, ang sistemang sosyal ni M. Halliday (1978) ay makikita ang higit na
komplikadong sitwasyon ng bawat komunikasyong pangwika. Higit na komplikado
kaysa ipinaliwanag ni San Juan na natanto ni Peirce. Higit na komplikado. Dapat
isaalang-alang mabuti, sabi ni Halliday, ang tinatawag niyang salimuot ng field, tenor,
at mode (gaya ng ninais kong ilarawan sa libro ko noong 2006). Ang haka ko pa, at
batay sa disenyo ni Halliday, ang ingat sa pagtuklas sa potensiyal ng akda alinsunod
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sa metodo ni Peirce ay kailangang isakatuparan din sa kritisismo ng kritisismo
at, lalo na, bago tahasang isakdal na “napakababaw” ang isang pagbása. Kung
sinulyapan ni San Juan ang aking pahabol sa aking libro noong 2006 ay maaaring
maapuhap niya ang motibo ng pagsasáma ko sa panayam ng 1992 sa loob ng aking
nagbagong balangkas sa pagbása ng kasaysayan ng ating pambansang panitikan.
Hindi ko nais ipagtanggol ang aking pinagmulan, hindi ko nais burahin o itatwa
ang aking mga limitasyong pinagdaanan, ngunit ang kritisismo ay isang dinamikong
proseso. Kailangan kong harapin ang aral na maaari kong pakinabangan ngayon kay
San Juan. Kailangan iyon sa patuloy kong pagsisikap upang humanap ng bagong
pagtingin sa panitikan at upang makaigpaw kahit sa kasalukuyan kong katayuan.
Nais ko ngang imungkahi kay San Juan na higit sanang kapaki-pakinabang kung
ginamit niya ang imbestigasyon sa senyas ni Peirce sa Noli ni Rizal. Hahabà ang
lektura. Ngunit higit na lilitaw ang halimbawa’y aplikasyon ng “limang paraan ng
pagtatamo ng matinong paniniwala” ni Peirce — ang pagsulong mula sa nakaugalian,
awtoridad, a priori, pangmadlang opinyon, hanggang masinop na pag-aaral. Kayâ
lang bakâ lumitaw na ginamit na palá ni Rizal ang ihahaka pa lámang nitóng ika-20
siglo ni Peirce. Ngunit sino ba ang nagsabing laging nagsisimula ang karunungan sa
Kanluran?
Ano’t anuman, sa wika ng mga abogado sa telenobelang pambansa ngayon, ang
“Dakilang Paglilitis kay CJ ,” I submit your honor. Dapat ko ngang ikatuwa na sa
pamamagitan ko’y napag-uusapan ang totoo namang napakahalagang tula ni Cirio
H. Panganiban. Nakatutuwang nadagdagan ang literatura ng pagpapakahulugan
dahil sa kaniyang tula. Kahit nakatatákot isipin ang kakamtin kong bagong epiteto
o lapida kapag may nagtangka ng gay reading o ng post-marxist reading (may ganito
na ba?) sa kaniya. Para akong nag-aabang ng kidlat ni Zeus mulang Olimpo (ang
ating Pambansang Dambana). Pero kailangang umikot ang mundo.
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Kolum Kritika
Ang Dapat Mabatid ng
Planetaryong Filipino:
San Juan Versus Almario
Charlie Samuya Veric
De La Salle University–Manila
csveric@yahoo.com
Abstract
An assessment of the debate between E. San Juan Jr. and Virgilio S. Almario, the essay
inquires into what it calls the planetary unconscious of Filipino literary production. The
essay is divided into two parts. The first part explains the historical context that informs
the San Juan-Almario debate. The second part focuses on the planetary implications of
their exchange. The essay argues that Filipino literature should be viewed from a more
planetary perspective. Moreover, it suggests that the example of Filipino literature has
much to contribute to the reinvention of world literature as a practice and concept, one
that provides a counterpoint to the field’s Goethean origins.
Keywords
Filipino diaspora, planetarity, world literature
About the Author
Charlie Samuya Veric holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University where he was
a former member of the Working Group on Globalization and Culture, the Initiative on
Race, Gender, and Globalization, and the Photographic Memory Workshop. He currently
sits on the Technical Panel on Literature at the Commission on Higher Education of the
Republic of the Philippines. Also a poet and translator, his current research experiments
with world systems theory and close cultural analysis.
Alam kong kabaliwan ang pumagitna sa umpugan nina E. San Juan, Jr. at
Virgilio Almario, dalawang higante sa kritisismo at panulaang Filipino. Pero wala
akong ilusyong maging bagong Bernardo, o dili kaya’y Bernarda, Carpio. Kung
pumapagitna man ako, hindi ito pakikisawsaw sa alitan ng iba, kundi pakikisangkot.
Dahil lahat tayo, mga Filipino sa buong planeta, ay may nakataya sa palitan ng
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dalawang kritiko. Nais ko, kung gayon, na mabigyang pansin ang mga bagay na
pakiwari ko’y tinatanghal ng kanilang palitan: mga alegorya at apostasiya, mga
signos sa kasalukuyan at hinaharap ng kritisismong Filipino.
Bago ko dalumatin ang kanilang debate, hayaan muna ninyo akong mailahad
ang pagkukrus ng aming landas, isang pagsalikop ng mga karanasan sa iba’t ibang
pook mula Diliman patungong New Haven, at mula sa huli, pabalik ng Maynila.
Ang historikal na pagsalikop na ito ang siyang nagtakda upang aking mabusisi, dito
at ngayon, ang kahulugan ng mga ideya ng dalawa sa pinakamahalagang nabubuhay
na intelektuwal na ipinanganak sa Pilipinas. Ano ang kwento ng mga pagtatagpong
ito?
Uunahin ko ang pagtatagpo namin ni Almario na siyang naglathala ng dalawa
kong artikulo sa Bulawan na kanyang dating pinamatnugutan.1 Samantala,
nadaluhan ko rin bilang estudyante ng komparatibong panitikan sa UP Diliman
noong huling bahagi ng dekada 90 ang kanyang panayam sa Balay Kalinaw kung
saan tinalakay niya ang Bagong Pormalismong Filipino.2 Isa ako sa mga nagtanong
sa kanya. Ani ko, parang magkatunog lamang ang Bagong Lipunan, Bagong
Kritisismo, at Bagong Pormalismong Filipino. Ano ngayon ang bago, dagdag ko?
Kinabukasan, nakasalubong ko si Lilia Quindoza-Santiago na dati kong guro sa
isang kurso sa Araling Pilipino. May nakapagsabi raw sa kanya na may “bomba”
akong pinasabog sa Balay Kalinaw. Ganito ako noon, noong bata pa si Sabel, wika
nga, laging nagpapasabog ng mga bagay.
Nang muli kong makita si Almario makalipas ang ilang taon para kunin ang
honorarium para sa artikulo ko tungkol kay Jose Garcia Villa, mabuti ang kanyang
turing sa akin. Mabilis ang usapan namin sa kanyang opisina sa ikalawang palapag
ng Faculty Center, sapat na panahon marahil iyon upang maikabit niya ang aking
mukha sa aking pangalan. Isa na siyang Pambansang Artista at Dekano ng Kolehiyo
ng Arte at Literatura noon, habang ako nama’y naghahandang umalis ng bansa
para sa araling doktorado.
Samantala, kasama sina San Juan at Delia Aguilar sa mga unang kumupkop
sa akin pagdating ko sa Amerika. Nakatira sila sa Storrs na halos dalawang oras
ang biyahe mula sa New Haven kung saan ako pansamantalang nanirahan habang
nagpapakadalubhasa sa Araling Amerikano sa Yale. Malimit kaming magkita.
At kapag napapadaan sila sa akin, pumupunta kami sa mga restawrang Intsik o
Indian na paborito ni San Juan. Sa huling bahagi ng aking pananahanan sa New
Haven, dinaluhan namin ang konsyerto ng Madrigal Singers na nagtanghal isang
araw sa taglagas sa Marquand Chapel ng Divinity School. Nakaupo kami sa harap,
at habang pinagliliyab ng tinig ng mga kayumangging anghel ang puting kapilya,
bumaling ako sa mag-asawa at pabirong nagsabing, “It’s the day the singers came.”
Samakatwid, makahulugan ang samahan namin nina San Juan at Aguilar, pinanday
sa magkabilang panig ng Pasipiko at higit na pinatatag ng mga kolaborasyong
intelektuwal, kundi man ng natatanging pangarap para sa lahat ng kababayan natin
na nasadlak sa apat na sulok ng mundo.
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Nagsimula ang lahat ng ito sa UP Diliman kung saan inorganisa ko bilang magaaral ang sub/berso, isang serye ng mga panayam na tinampukan ng mga kritiko
at artista sa kampus tulad nina Luisa Mallari-Hall bago siya sumakabilang buhay,
Edel Garcellano, Gelacio Guillermo, Bienvenido Lumbera, Neferti Tadiar, Caroline
Hau, Jason Banal, Neil Doloricon, at iba pa. Naimbitahan ko minsan si San Juan
na magsalita sa sub/berso. Hindi nagtagal at naging rebyuwer ako ng ilan niyang
mga akda. Sa New Haven, naisalin ko sa Ingles ang kanyang mga tula sa Filipino
na tinipon sa Mahal Magpakailanman. Pagbalik ko sa Maynila matapos ang aking
doktorado noong nakalipas na taon, nagturo ako sa De La Salle kung saan isa ako
sa mga nagtaguyod upang makapagbigay siya ng panayam na kanya ring binasa sa
Ateneo. Tinalakay niya rito ang semiolohiya ni Charles Sanders Peirce kasama ang
tula ni Cirio H. Panganiban na siyang pinag-ugatan ng palitan nila ni Almario.3
Mahalagang banggitin na makailang ulit nang natalakay ni San Juan ang mga
masalimuot na ideya ni Peirce, isa rito ay nangyari sa pahina mismo ng Kritika
Kultura.4 Dito binuno nina San Juan at Ubaldo Steconni ang puno’t dulo ng kaisipan
niPeirce. Sa kanyang sanaysay, pinagtagni-tagni ni San Juan ang semiolohiya
ni Peirce, ang kampanyang global laban sa terorismo, at ang nobela ni Michael
Ondaatjee para mabuo ang tinatawag niyang siyensa ng pragmatikong esteteka,
isang pamamaraan ng pagbasa na obhetibo at diyalektiko. Pagbasa ito ng materialista
na pumapanig sa ideyang kasaysayan ang ugat ng lahat ng pagsisiyasat. Binanatan
ni Steconni ang naturang pamamaraan. Aniya, pwersahang ginamit ni San Juan
ang kaisipan ni Peirce para maisulong ang kanyang layuning politikal. Dagdag pa ni
Steconni, hindi naipaliwanag ni San Juan ang palaisipan ng pagtalikod ni Peirce sa
ordinaryong kalakaran upang masuri nito ang mga dakilang katanungan.
Inilathalang muli ni San Juan ang kanyang sanaysay kasama ang naging tugon
niya kay Steconni sa From Globalization to National Liberation bilang “Knowledge,
Representation, Truth: Lessons from Charles Sanders Peirce.”5 Sa librong ito,
itinampok din ni San Juan ang maikli kong sanaysay tungkol sa Balikbayang
Mahal, koleksiyon ng kanyang mga tula at salin, kung saan binusisi ko ang
poetika ng paglalakbay at ang konsepto ng planeta bilang Inangbayan.6 Batay sa
panukala ni W. E. B. Du Bois, iminungkahi ko ang kahalagahan ng dalawahang
kamalayan o diasporikong sensibilidad sa panulaan ni San Juan na nagpapamalas
ng pagkakahambing ng karanasang Filipino at ng pagdanas ng mga Afrikano
Amerikano. Para sa dalawang komunidad, mahihinuhang ang batayang karanasan
ay kumakawala sa bansa at umuugnay sa maraming kasaysayan.
Ano ngayon ang saysay nitong pagbabalik-tanaw? Maaaring pagbubuhat ito ng
bangko para sa iba, subalit mahalagang mailarawan ko kung paano pumaloob ang
agos ng buhay ko sa buhay nina San Juan at Almario. Sa madaling sabi, naging
saksi ako sa mga kasaysayang tinahak nila — isang tagamasid sa ilan sa kanilang
mga mahahalagang panukala. Ito na rin marahil ang sanhi kung bakit ako nasali sa
usapang ito. Samakatwid, nililinaw nitong pagbabalik-tanaw na sadyang malawak
ang larangan ng kasaysayan.Na bago pa man ang panayam ni San Juan tungkol kay
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Peirce sa De La Salle, may malalim na ng alala na nag-uugnay sa iba’t ibang panahon
at tauhan. Na malayo man ang Storrs sa Maynila, malapit din. Na magkaiba man
ang karanasan, magkadikit din.Na ang personal ay kritikal. Na binubuo ng nakalipas
ang politika ng kasalukuyan. Kung gayon, ang paglagom sa palitan nina San Juan at
Almario ay pagtawid sa mga sangandaang planetaryo ang saklaw.
Hindi ko na babalikan pa ang mga detalye ng pagsasangandaan nina San Juan
at Peirce. Sapat nang sabihin na makabuluhan ang pag-unawa ng una sa pilosopiya
ng huli bilang sosyalistang semiotika na taliwas sa personal na pragmatisismo na
ang layon ay makasariling pagpapayaman lamang. Isantabi natin pansamantala
ang semiolohiya ni Peirce at tutukan nang mabuti ang mga di-tuluyang nasasabi
subalit tuwirang inilalahad ng palitan nina San Juan at Almario. Ano, halimbawa,
ang kasaysayang nakapaloob sa palitan ng dalawa at paano nito tinatanghal ang
mga posibilidad ng panitikan at kritisismong Filipino? Sa mga susunod na bahagi
ng sanaysay na ito, tatangkain kong unawain ang mga signos, at pag-uugnayin sila,
upang tuluyang mawari ang kinakaharap ng panitikan at kritisismong Filipino.
Pansinin ang simula ng tugon ni Almario na kumalat sa internet matapos ang
panayam ni San Juan: “May bagong tuklas na naman si E. San Juan, Jr. para sa
ating mga tagahanga ng Karunungang Kanluranin. Si Charles Sanders Peirce.”
“[A]t nakalulungkot,” aniya, “na hindi natin natutuklas sa kabila ng mataos na
pagkahumaling natin sa mga kritikong Amerikano.” “Mabuti’t may tulad ni San Juan,”
dagdag ni Almario, “na kailangang dalawin tayo sa pana-panahon at buksan ang
ating mga mata sa mga bago’t magandang balita mula sa Estados Unidos.” Mapanguyam ang tono ni Almario: mapagbiro, makamandag. Tinig ito ng subersibong
payaso, tinig na hindi na rin bago sapagkat matagal nang armas ng poskolonyal na
utak ang parikala. Ang kakaiba rito, ang kabalintunaan mismo, hindi nagsayang ng
oras si Almario at ipinambala ang parikala laban kay San Juan na isang poskolonyal
at materyalistang kritiko.
Sa unang tingin, masasabing paglulon ng sariling salita ang banat ni Almario.
Maaalala, halimbawa, na tinuligsa ng una ang “ugaling pangginggera” sa panitikan
noong dekada sisenta kung saan walang nangyayari, ayon na rin sa kanya, kundi
“pataasan ng ihi ng magkaibang kapisanan” (18).7 Kung hindi man pataasang ihi ang
ginawi ni Almario, malinaw na personal ang atake niya kay San Juan. Sa email na
ipinasa sa akin, inilahad mismo ng huli ang kanyang pagkagitla sa inasal ng una.8
Kung gayon, madaling isipin na sadyang magkaiba ang kapisanan ng dalawang
kritiko, at may materyal na basehan ang posisyong ito, subalit malaking kamalian
na magtapos tayo sa hakang ganito. Sa ibang salita, madaling isipin na magkaibang
ilog ang pinamamangkaan nina San Juan at Almario, na hindi na magtatagpo pa
ang kanilang mga bangka. Subalit malawak ang dagat ng kasaysayan kung saan
dumadaloy ang lahat. Nais kong mangisda, kung mararapatin, sa nasabing dagat.
Ibig sabihin, nais kong balikan ang kasaysayan upang maisapook ang palitan ng
dalawang kritiko. Gagawin ko ito sa pamamagitan ng paghimay sa panimula ng
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tugon ni Almario, panimulang marami ang tinutukoy. Tututukan ko ang tatlo rito:
ang personal, ang historikal, at ang metakritikal.
Una, ang personal sa biradang may bagong tuklas na naman si San Juan. Kung
babalikan ang kasaysayan ng dalawa, mahihinuhang lumang hibik na ito ni Almario.
Sa unang kalipunan niya ng pampanitikang kritisismo, napuna na niya ang pagsusuri
ni San Juan na “waring pagpapakita na lamang ng erudisyon ng sumusuri at di ng
birtud ng makatang sinusuri” (Ang Makata 92). Nagmula ang obserbasyong ito sa
pagtataya ni San Juan sa obra ni Alejandro G. Abadilla. Sa ganang akin, mababakas
sa tinuran ni Almario ang suhestiyon na abanse talaga mag-isip si San Juan noon
pa man, laging may bagong tuklas at pinapamansag. Malinaw ito, para kay Almario,
sa mga tula ni San Juan na “may likas na kalabuan” (Ang Makata 172). Sa katunayan,
parang pagbasa raw sa dyaryong Intsik ang pagbasa sa kanyang gawa. Tula ang
tinutukoy rito, subalit maaring sabihing tumpak na paglalarawan ito sa kritisismo
ni San Juan. Anupat nasabi ni Almario na sadyang walang “kahandaan ang lipunan
sa isang tulad ni San Juan” (Ang Makata 172). Makalipas ang apatnapung taon,
tumining ang kahulugan ng inusal ni Almario. Hindi pa rin handa ang lipunan ng
mga Almario sa mga tulad ni San Juan.
Subalit katampalasan kung hindi ko babanggiting malalim ang respeto ni Almario
sa kakayahan ni San Juan.9 Ayon nga kay Almario, “[n]asa kanyang mga obra ang
pag-uugnay ng mga kalinangang Kanluranin at Silanganin, ang pagtitimbang
ng diwa’t damdamin, ang pagdukal sa naaangkop na tradisyon at pagsasagap
ng mga makabagong inobasyon” (Ang Makata 173). Ganito din naman, sa totoo
lamang, ang tingin ni San Juan sa panulaan ni Almario.10 Maliban dito, malalim
din ang kanilang ugnayan sa paglinang sa panulatang Filipino sa pangkalahatan.
Matatandaang naging kontribyutor si San Juan noong dekada sisenta sa Dawn, ang
pahayagang pangkampus ng University of the East na naging sentro ng kilusang
modernista na kinabibilangan nina Almario, Rogelio Mangahas, at Lamberto
Antonio. Mula sa Harvard kung saan tinatapos niya noon ang kanyang doktorado
sa panitikang Ingles, masugid na nagpapadala si San Juan ng kanyang mga ambag
sa pahayagang pangkampus.11
Malinaw, kung gayon, ang mahabang ugnayan sa pagitan ng dalawa, ugnayang
pinagyaman ng kanilang simulaing humawan ng bagong larangan para sa pagsusulat
sa Filipino. At minsan, na siya rin namang nararapat, nagkakaroon ng hindi
pagkakaunawaan. Sa isang banda, ang hidwaang namagitan sa dalawa, noon man
at nito lamang, ay hidwaang nakabatay sa respeto ng isa sa isa. Sa madaling sabi,
maaaring atakeng personal ang tugon ni Almario kay San Juan, pero napapanahong
pagpapaalala rin ito sa iisang kasaysayan ng dalawang manunulat na madaling
makalimutan kung magpapatangay tayo sa silakbo ng tugon ni Almario. Pero sa
kabilang banda, walang pasubaling pinapakita ng palitan kung paano tuluyang nagiba ang mga landasin nila. Sa ganitong pananaw, ang kanilang palitan ay tanda ng
pag-iibang isip, kundi man ng pag-iibang kulay, na siyang ugat ng kanilang debate.
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Dito ngayon papasok ang pangalawang bagay na pinapangalanan ng tugon ni
Almario, ang usaping historikal na sa kahuli-huliha’y hindi maihihiwalay sa kanilang
desisyong personal. Muli nating balikan ang panimula ng tugon ni Almario. Aniya,
mabuti na lamang at may tulad ni San Juan na dumadalaw sa atin sa pana-panahon
at nagdadala ng mga magagandang balita mula sa Estados Unidos. Mababatid sa
banat ni Almario ang pag-uugnay sa dalawang bahagi ng ating kasaysayan, ang
epoka ng kolonyalismo at neokolonyalismo. Makabuluhan ang pagbanggit niya
sa pagdalaw ni San Juan sapagkat nagpapaalala ito sa historikal na relasyon sa
pagitan ng Estados Unidos at Pilipinas. Ang kakaiba sa pagpapaalalang ito, tulad
ng kaibahan ng parikalang ipinambala ni Almario laban kay San Juan, ay ang
nakakamanghang pagtatalaga ng una sa huli bilang kinatawan ng neokolonyalismo.
Kung gayon, binubuhay ni Almario ang multo ng neokolonyalismo sa persona ng
poskolonyal at materyalistang kritiko. Tila baga bagong pensionado si San Juan
sa mata ni Almario, sugo ng neokolonyalistang Estados Unidos para dalawin tayo
at biyayaan ng pinakabagong tuklas mula sa imperyo. Ito ang multong historikal
sa tugon ni Almario at inilalarawan nito ang malalim na bitak sa hanay ng mga
intelektuwal, Filipino at Filipino Amerikano, sa magkabilang bahagi ng Pasipiko.
Para sa mga tulad ni Almario, hiwalay ang kasaysayang kinakaharap ng mga tulad
ni San Juan sa kasaysayang kinakaharap ng mga naririto. Ito, sa madaling sabi, ang
lamat sa pagitan ng posisyong katutubo (pantayo) at diasporiko (panlabas). Mula
Makata sa Panahon ng Makina hanggang Pag-unawa sa Ating Pagtula, halimbawa,
kakikitaan ng pagkiling sa katutubo si Almario. Sa huling libro, iginiit niya na ang
“panitikang likha ng manunulat na Filipino [ay] para sa mambabasang Filipino” (18).
Ano ngayon ang kahihinatnan ng panitikang Filipino Amerikano? At paano na
ang likha ng mga Filipino Koreano, Filipino Mehikano, at iba pang diasporikong
identidad? Aling mambabasa ang tatangkilik sa kanila? Kung gagamitin ang lente
ni Almario, magkasalungat ang mga karanasang diasporiko at katutubo. At para sa
kanya, umiba ng landas si San Juan nang tumulak ito pakanluran at doon manirahan
bilang naturalisadong mamamayan ng Estados Unidos.12
Samantala, si Almario ang siyang nawalay sa tingin naman ni San Juan. At
makikita ito sa pagbira ng huli sa pagbasa ng una sa tula ni Panganiban, pagbasang
binansagang Marxista ni Almario. Pero kay San Juan, “[l]ubhang lihis kundi palpak
ang kilates at hatol” ni Almario. Dagdag pa niya, “pormalistikong sipat ang ginamit
ni Almario, mapang-uyam na karikatura ng Marxista at pormalista. Bunyag
na iyo’y walang muwang o walang kinalaman sa diyalektiko-materyalistikong
kritikang kultural.” Mabagsik ang hatol ni San Juan at may ipinamumukha ang
banat nito. Matatandaang naging bahagi si Almario ng Panulat Para sa Kaunlaran
ng Sambayanan (PAKSA ) na itinatag noong 1971, isang grupo ng mga aktibistang
manunulat na kinabibilangan nina Lumbera, Virgilio Vitug, at iba pa. Matapos
maideklara ang Martial Law noong 1972, pumailalim ang organisasyon sa kilusang
lihim. Noong dekada 80, nagdesisyong kumawala si Almario at sinuportahan
ang diktadoryang Marcos. Sa ganang akin, pinapaalala ng lihis na Marxistang
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pagbasa ni Almario ang kanyang pagbaligtad noong Batas Militar at pagtalikod sa
kilusan. Kung susuriin, ang paglihis ay walang iba kundi sintoma ng pagbaligtad. Sa
madaling sabi, inilalabas ng lihis na pagbasang Marxista ni Almario ang katunayan
ng kanyang pagbaligtad.Tila baga pinapalabas na walang kredibilidad na maging
Marxista, kahit sa lebel lamang ng pagbasa, ang mga nagkanulo sa kilusan.
Pagmasdan ngayon ang naratibo ng pagkawalay sa birada ng bawat isa. Kung
nawalay si San Juan sa bansa dahil nangibang bayan, ayon sa pahiwatig ni Almario,
nawalay naman si Almario sa kasaysayan dahil nagtaksil sa kilusan, ayon sa pahiwatig
ni San Juan. Bakit matingkad ang naratibo ng paglihis at pagkawalay sa kanilang
palitan? Paglalahad ito, para sa akin, ng pangkalahatang kondisyon ng buhay sa dulo
ng modernidad kung saan namamayani ang pagkakawatak-watak. Sa pangkalahatan,
mawawari ang kondisyon ng pagkakawatak-watak sa mga komunidad na lumilitaw
sa laylayan ng mga lungsod sa buong mundo, mga etnikong pamayanan na binubuo
ng mga nawalay sa tinubuang lupa: migrante, manggagawa, destyero, at biktima
ng gera o persekusyong politikal. Sa lebel na mas molekular, mararamdaman ang
pagkakawatak-watak bilang paghahanap sa nawaglit na kabuoan ng sarili, bayan,
at kalinangan. Sa aking tingin, ang buhay ni San Juan ay alegorya nito, alegoryang
pinakawalan sa baul ng apostasiya ni Almario. At dahil sa kanilang palitan, hindi
na tayo maaaring magbulag-bulagan sa mga bagong katanungan ng ating panahon.
Ano ang kahulugan ng bansa sa harap ng patuloy na paglitaw ng mga diasporikong
komunidad sa apat na sulok ng planeta? Ano ang nag-uugnay sa mga naglalakbay
na bahagi ng bayan? Ano ang kasaysayan na hindi nakatali sa heograpiya? Ano
ang taong walang bayan? Sa aking pakiwari, tinatanghal ng alegorya ni San Juan
ang krisis sa puso ng katutubong pananaw na kinakatawan ni Almario. Pinapakita
ng una na hindi na sapat ang dikotonomiyang pantayo at panlabas, na bangkarote
na ang kaisipang nagwawalang bahala sa mga karanasan na lampas sa makitid na
hurisdiksiyon ng bayan, na nangangailangan tayo ng lenteng mas sinteteko ang
layon, mas malawak ang pananaw, mas malalim ang pagsusuri, mas bukas at handa
sa mga karanasang umuusbong sa hindi inaasahang pook, sa hindi pangkaraniwang
kalagayan, sa hindi pa nasusulyapang panahon.
Ano ang ibig sabihin nito para sa panulatang Filipino? Isa lamang: dumating
na ang panahong dapat suriin ang karanasang Filipino at ang panitikang kaakibat
nito na planetaryo. Kung lumalawak ang karanasan, naglalakbay sa iba’t ibang
pook, nararapat lamang na maging kasing lawak ang ating pag-unawa. Ibig sabihin,
kailangang harapin natin ang mga nagbabagong kalagayan ng kulturang Filipino,
lalo na ang panitikan nito. Mula lenteng pambansa, kailangang balangkasin natin
ang mga bagong lapit na lalagom sa karanasang planetaryo. Mayabong na ang
kritisismong tumatalakay sa ating panitikan gamit ang pambansang pananaw,
salamat sa mga tulad ni Almario, ngunit bihira ang sistematikong pagtatangka na
usisain ang mga ekspresyong kutural na hindi natatali sa heograpiya ng bansa. May
aral para sa atin ang halimbawa ni San Juan na patuloy na tumutula sa Filipino sa
Estados Unidos.13 Sino ang aangkin sa kanyang gawa? Hindi Amerika o Pilipinas
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lamang, dahil kolektibong awit ito ng planetaryong karanasan ng mga kababayan
natin sa London, Paris, Tokyo, Dubai, Madrid, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Milan,
at Singapore. At dahil marami ang paraluman ni San Juan, planetaryong layon
lamang ang makakasagot sa kanyang kalatas. Samaktwid, nasa atin ngayon ang
pambihirang pagkakataon upang bakasin ang planetaryong di-malay ng ating
panitikan napinapanday sa mga kabisera ng daigdig, binubuo sa pamamaraang
hindi pa natin tuluyang magagap.Ito ang hamon ngayon ng planetaryong panitikang
Filipino at ng kritisismo nito — ang maunawaan ang karanasang lampas sa abottanaw ng pambansang pananaw.
Hindi matatawaran ang kahalagahan ng hamong ito dahil kasangkot dito hindi
lamang ang katangian ng panitikang Filipino kundi ang konsepto ng panitikang
pandaigdig mismo. Nakasanayan nang tingnan ang panitikang Filipino bilang
isang pambansang kalinangan na nakakabit sa partikular na heograpiya at wika.
Ngunit kung iisipin, nasa puso ng panitikang Filipino ang lohika at dinamismo ng
panitikang pandaigdig. Sa madaling sabi, planetaryo ang tunay na kalagayan ng
panitikang Filipino at kinakatawan nito ang mga posibilidad at suliraning saklaw ng
panitikang pandaigdig. Ano ang saysay ng wika sa konteksto ng multilingualismo?
Ano ang ugnayan ng sentro at laylayan? Ano ang kahalagahan ng katutubo at lokal
sa harap ng pamamayani ng kanluraning monokulturalismo? Paano lalagumin ang
sanga-sangang tradisyon? Ito ang mga tanong na kinakaharap ng panitikang Filipino,
mga tanong na nasa puso rin ng panitikang pandaigdig. Sa ganang akin, malaki
ang maiaambag ng panitikang Filipino sa teorya at praktika ng mga prosesong
planetaryo, ambag na kakaiba sa namamayaning pag-unawa sa panitikang
pandaigdig na unang pinangalanan ni Johann Wolfgang von Goethe noong 1827
kung saan tinukoy niya ang pag-angat ng panitikang lumalampas sa bansa. Nitong
huling dekada, naging saksi tayo sa muling pagbuhay sa konsepto ni Goethe sa
konteksto ng ekonomikong globalisasyon at pampanitikang transnasyunalismo.
Ayon kay John Pizer, modelo ang konsepto ni Goethe para sa kontemporaryong
produksiyon sa panitikan.14
Mangangahas akong sabihing hindi si Goethe, o ang kaso ng bansang Aleman
noong ika-19 na siglo, ang modelo para maunawaan ang planetaryong daloy ng
kultura sa ating panahon. Matagal nang nakatanghod ang mga kritiko pakanluran
upang mailatag ang mga batayan para sa panitikang pandaigdig. Kung nais natin
ng mas napapanahon at makabuluhang halimbawa, kung nais nating maimbentong
muli ang konsepto ng panitikang pandaigdig, maaaring magsimula tayo sa
panitikang Filipino. Samakatwid, natatangi ang kalagayan ng panitikang ito. Bilang
isang tradisyon, kakambal nito ang mahabang kasaysayan ng modernidad. Isipin
ito: kung masasabing nagmula ang modernidad sa kaisipang bilog ang mundo,
nagsimula lahat ito sa paglayag ni Ferdinand Magellan at sa kanyang “pagtuklas” sa
kapuluang kinalauna’y tinawag na Pilipinas. Mula noon, naging kolonya ang bansa
ng tatlong imperyo — Espanyol, Amerikano, Hapones — na nagdulot ng kontramodernong experimentasyon at inobasyon sa pangkabihasnang kaisipan.
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Sa ganitong pananaw, buhay na kwadro ang kalinangang Filipino ng mga
engkwentrong kultural na planetaryo ang saklaw. Masdan ang ating panitikan.
May tradisyon sa Espanyol at mabulas na produksiyon sa Ingles, mayroon tayong
hindi magkulang sa pitong wikang rehiyunal, maliban pa sa pambansang wika, na
may malakas na tradisyon sa panitikan: Ilokano, Kapampangan, Bikolano, Waray,
Ilonggo, Kinaray-a, at Cebuano. Sa kasalukuyan, may mga manunulat tayong
nakabase hindi lamang sa Estados Unidos, kundi sa Australia, Canada, at Inglatera.
Hindi magtatagal at yayabong ang panulat na magmumula sa mga diasporikong
komunidad: mga panitikang Filipino Arabo, Filipino Italyano, Filipino Hapones,
Filipino Aleman, at iba pa. Kung gayon, hindi kalabisang sabihing bagong kapital
o ang bagong Babel ng panitikang pandaigdig ang Pilipinas. At ang palitan nina
San Juan at Almario ay isa lamang sa maraming tanda nitong bagong kulturang
Filipino na malawak ang saklaw. Higit pa rito, mahalaga ang kanilang palitan dahil
pinapakita nito ang kontekstong anti-kolonyal kung saan sinasagisag ng pagtalunton
sa panitikang Filipino ang paghahanap sa kaayusang mas mapagpalaya. Kaya ang
aral ng planetaryong panitikang Filipino ay aral ng planetarismo mula sa ibaba. Ito
ang planeta mula sa mga komunidad na minsan ay itinuring na walang kasaysayan,
walang kalinangan, walang hinaharap. At sa hanay nitong mga komunidad
magmumula ang mga bagong gawang muling bibinyag sa konsepto ng panitikang
pandaigdig sa mga darating na panahon. Saan tayo magsisimula para matugunan
itong bagong kondisyon?
Ang sagot dito ay nakakabit sa pangatlong bagay na tinatampok ng tugon ni
Almario, ang metakritikal na aspekto. Balikan natin sa huling pagkakataon ang
kanyang panimula. Ang sabi niya, mataos ang ating pagkahumaling sa mga kritikong
Amerikano, kasama na si San Juan dito. Sa kilatis ni Almario, laging nakasandal si San
Juan sa mga kanluraning ideya at ang kanyang diskusyon sa semiolohiya ni Peirce
ay ebidensiya nito. Pero sa katunayan, at ito ang kritisismo sa kanilang kritisismo,
magkatulad ang kanilang pagbasa. Mapapansin ito sa kanilang pagtalakay sa tula
ni Panganiban. Sa kanyang Pag-unawa sa Ating Pagtula, halimbawa, sinasabi ni
Almario na itinatampok ng tula ang magkakambal na demonyo ng modernisasyon
at Amerikanisasyon: “Ang salon mismo ay mikrokosmo ng masamang buhaylungsod, isang aliwang pangmayaman, at isang lusak na kinasasadlakan ng mga
babaeng anak-mahirap. Isang uri din ito ng aliwang panggabi na sumisigabo na
panahon ng Amerikano at tanghalan ng dekadenteng kulturang Amerikano” (283).
“Malinaw,” dagdag pa niya, “ang impluwensiyang Amerikano sa titulong mula
sa popular noong kantang Amerikano at sa banggit sa Jazz” (283).15 Ganito rin
naman ang buod ng pagbasa ni San Juan sa tula ni Panganiban, pagkakahambing
na hindi niya binanggit sa kanyang panayam. Tingnan ang interpretasyon ni
San Juan. “Sa palagay ko,” aniya, “ang aral dito ay hindi ‘Huwag mag-aksaya ng
panahon sa sayawan sa mga kabaret,’ kundi ‘Huwag maging biktima ng superpisyal
na kabihasnang mapagmataas dahil may elektrisidad, jazz, ginto, pilak, sapagkat
sa huling paghuhukom, di natin mapapagkatiwalaan ang pangako ng mga iyan,
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bagkus mapapariwara tayo.’ Sa huling taya, mga ilusyon lamang ang idinulot ng
Amerika sa Pilipinas.” Mapapansing parehong nakatuon sina Almario at San Juan
sa imahe ng salon at jazz upang maisulong ang kanilang pagbasa tungkol sa epekto
ng Amerikanisasyon sa Pilipinas. Sa madaling sabi, ang salon at jazz ang batayan ng
kanilang pagbasa ukol sa masamang dulot ng kulturang Amerikano.
Makabuluhan ang ganitong pagbasa, ngunit may pundamental na limitasyon.
Una, aling Amerikano ang tinutukoy dito at kaninong kultura? Kulturang puti o
dominante lamang ba ito? Nakatali ba ang kulturang ito sa bansa? Kung uusisain
ang kasaysayan ng jazz bilang musika, malalamang mas malawak ang sinasaklaw
nito, kasaysayang di maipapaloob sa iisang bansa o layon. Hindi patay ang estetiko
at pandamdam ng jazz, subalit buhay na alaala ng mga aliping inangkat mula sa
Kanlurang Africa, kung saan nagmula ang karamihan sa kanila, patungong Bagong
Mundo. Ayon nga kay Nathan Huggins, mahalagang batis ng kasaysayan ng mga
Afrikano Amerikano ang jazz na may bahid din ng kulturang Europeo.16 Batay dito,
kasaysayan ng tatlong kontinente — Amerika, Europa, Afrika — at ng karagatang
Atlantiko ang taglay ng jazz. At kung isasali natin ang halimbawa ni Panganiban,
mauungkat ang kasaysayan ng kontinenteng Asya at ng karagatang Pasipiko.
Ang mas mahalaga, mapapansing hindi nakapako ang jazz sa monolitikong
pagbasa kapag sinuri ang tula ni Panganiban. Sa isang banda, senyas ito ng kultural
na impluwensiya ng Amerika sa Pilipinas — isang kanluraning modernisasyon para
kay Almario at ilusyong imperyalista naman para kay San Juan. May batayang
historikal ang ganitong pagbasa dahil nailathala ang tula noong 1955 kung kailan
namayagpag ang jazz dahil sa mga sundalong Amerikano na nakabase sa bansa
matapos ang Ikalawang Digmaang Pandaigdig. Matatandaang dinadayo pa ng
mga musikerong Filipino ang mga base militar noon para magbigay aliw sa mga
nakadestinong GI . At hindi lamang sa Pilipinas namayani ang ganitong kondisyon
dahil may kuwento na nailabas noon ding 1955 si Yukio Mishima kung saan
kinahuhumalingan ng mga Hapones ang jazz. Batay dito, masasabing malawakan
ang pagtukoy sa musika bilang instrumento ng Amerikanisasyon sa Asya.17 Pero
sa kabilang banda, higit na komplikado ang jazz bilang senyas. Balikan natin ang
tula ni Panganiban kung saan orkestrang jazz ang tumutugtog sa salon na lunan ng
Amerikanisasyon. Dahil sinasalamin ng jazz ang masamang epekto ng dominanteng
kultura, masasabing kritikal na komento rin ang musika sa proseso ng kultural
na imperyalismo. Multidimensiyonal, kung gayon, ang jazz. Sa katunayan, may
radikal na ginampanan ang musika sa anti-kolonyalismo dahil mga sundalong
Afrikano Amerikano ang unang nagpatikim ng jazz sa mga Filipino. Mga sundalo
itong sumapi sa rebolusyonaryong hukbo ni Emilio Aguinaldo bunga na rin ng
rasismo sa hanay ng mga tropang puti sa kasagsagan ng Gerang Filipino Amerikano
(Quirino).18
Hayaang arukin ng imahinasyon, kung kakayanin, ang nasasakupan ng musikang
ito. Kaya masasabing akostikong salon ang jazz ng maraming kasaysayan at kultura,
nagsisilbing mikrokosmo ng makrokosmo. Sa ibang salita, isa itong pampublikong
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 297–312
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tagpuan ng maigting na pagtatagisan ng magkaiba, magkasalungat, subalit
magkasalikop na kasaysayan, estetika, at tradisyon ng buong planeta. Kaninong
armas, kung gayon, ang jazz? Armas ba ito ng kulturang dominante o ng kulturang
galing sa ibaba? Ang tumpak na sagot sa nasabing katanungan ay nangangailangan
ng mas malawak na perspektibo na bumabalikwas sa anumang simplipikasyon.
Samaktwid, ito ang aral ng kaisipang planetaryo: walang madali, walang simple,
dahil lahat ay magkaugnay. Ang kalahatan ng planeta, kung hahalawin ang imahe
ni Panganiban, ay isang salon. Gayundin ang palitan nina San Juan at Almario na
nagtatanghal sa bagong karanasang planetaryo ng mga Filipino ngayon, salon itong
malaki at maluwang na lunan ng iba pang palitan na nagtakda sa mga bagong yugto
ng ating kasaysayan: Lopez versus Villa, Sison versus Lava, at marami pang iba.
Kung nais nating matugunan ang bagong hamon ng planetaryong Filipino,
kakailanganin natin ng kasinglawak na pananaw na hahango sa katutubo at diasporiko
upang masinop na madalumatang mga karanasan ng ating panahon. Kakailanganin
din natin ang tulong ng mga tulad ni Peirce sa ating patuloy na paghahanap, wika
nga ni San Juan, “ng kasunduan sa pangkat ng mga matiyagang nagsisiyasat,
gumagalugad, nananaliksik, dumudukal, sumusuyod, nagpapaunlad — mga
katagang lapat sa ebolusyonaryong pangitain ni Peirce tungkol sa pagsulong ng
sangkatauhang kabihasnan.” Dahil ang nais para sa buhay na malaya ay layuning
walang bansa, walang dayuhan o katutubo sa sangkatauhang kabihasnan na
nagnanais ng kalayaan para sa lahat. May pook dito ang mga San Juan, Peirce, at
Almario na ating gabay sa pagbalangkas ng bagong humanistang planetarismo na
mag-uugnay sa lahat ng mga komunidad, kaisipan, at gawaing mapagpalaya. Sa
ibang salita, ang pagdalumat sa karanasang planetaryo ay kinakailangang bukas at
demokratiko, mapagtanggap at mapagpalawak. Pagpapaalala ito sa ating lahat na
ang tagisang kultural ay hindi lamang proseso ng oposisyon, kundi ng sirkulasyon;
hindi lamang ng pakikipag-buno, kundi ng pakikipag-alyansa; hindi lamang ng
pagsuway, kundi ng pag-unawa. Ito ang diwang makikita sa pagtalakay ni San Juan
sa Tagala sa obra ni Peirce. Ibig kong magtapos sa imahe ng Tagalang ito at hayaang
manatiling bukas ang aking pagwakas.
Isipin, sabi ni Peirce, ang isang Amerikanong estudyante na naglalakbay sa
karagatang Pasipiko. Habang nasa laot, sinulat niya sa kapirasong papel ang
mga salita ni Patrick Henry noong panahon ng Rebolusyong Amerikano — ang
tatlong milyong mamamayan na tumitindig para sa kalayaan ay hindi palulupig sa
anumang lakas na dadaluyong sa kanila. Liliparin itong papel at matatagpuan ng
Tagalang walang pangalan sa baybayin ng Luzon. Ayon kay Peirce, magkakaroon
ng parehong epekto ang mga salita sa kinapadparan nito sapagkat ang anumang
layuning mapagpalaya na napapangalanan sa isang pook ay maisasakatuparan
din sa iba. Ani San Juan, kaila kay Peirce ang tradisyong rebolusyonaryo ng
ating kasaysayan mula kay Raja Soliman hanggang kay Cherith Dayrit, ngunit
makabuluhang makipagbalikatan tayo sa Amerikanong pilosopo. Narito ang sabi
ni San Juan. Narito rin ang kamalayang planetaryo mula sa ibaba:
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Hindi na natin kailangang basahin si Patrick Henry. Gayunpaman, dapat
pahalagahan ang alyansiyang inihandog ni Peirce at iba pang aktibistang
intelektuwal ng ibang bansa. Kailangan ito sa pagsasakatuparan ng simulain
ng Nagkakaisang Hanay. Bukas-makalawa — sundan natin ang alegorya ni
Peirce — mahahagilap din natin itong Tagalang ito sa madlang gumagala sa ating
dalampasigan, naglalakbay sa iba’t ibang lupalop ng daigdig, kabilang sa mahigit
na 10 milyong Pinay/Pinoy na gumagala sa buong planeta, pinagsalikop sa
mapagkandiling abot-tanaw ng kaisipan ni Charles Sanders Peirce. Matatagpuan
natin sila, makikipagtulungan at patuloy na makikipagtalikan. Mabuhay itong
natatanging balikatang mapagpalaya’t makatarungan!
Mabuhay itong natatanging balikatang mapagpalaya’t makatarungan! Mabuhay
itong natatanging balikatang mapagpalaya’t makatarungan!
Notes
1. Tingnan si Veric, “The Disentangling” at “Jose Garcia Villa.”
2. Tingnan ang pagtalakay ni Almario sa Bagong Pormalismong Filipino sa Pagunawa sa Ating Pagtula.
3. Tingnan sina San Juan, “Kahulugan, Katwiran, Katotohanan”; at Almario, “Si
San Juan Bilang Interpretant.”
4. Tingnan si San Juan, “Signs, Meaning, Interpretation”; at Steconni.
5. Tingnan din si San Juan, Critical Interventions.
6. Veric, “The Planet as Homeland.” Nailathala rin ang rebyung ito sa ilang dyornal
sa Pilipinas at Estados Unidos. Tingnan din si San Juan, Balikbayang Mahal.
7. Tingnan si Almario, “Ang Filipino sa Kritisismong Filipino.” Nararapat
banggitin na naisama sa antolohiyang ito ang sanaysay ni Almario tungkol kay
Panganiban at may sanaysay din si San Juan sa nasabing libro.
8. Personal na email ni E. San Juan, Jr. 16 Apr. 2012.
9. Pansinin, halimbawa, ang papuri ni Almario sa mga gawa ni San Juan noong
dekada sisenta: “At kaipala, ang inihahandog niya ay manigong landas upang
idugtong sa gasgas na’t putol na tradisyon nina Balagtas at Batute. Taglay
ang ganitong kadalubhasaan at intensiyon, na kay San Juan na rin ang lahat
ng pagkakataon upang binyagan ng bagong pangalan ang Panulaang Pilipino”
(Ang Makata 186).
10. Nabanggit ni Almario sa Balagtasismo Versus Modernismo ang pahayag ni San
Juan tungkol sa antas ng intelektuwalisasyon sa kanyang tula. Nailathala ang akda
ni San Juan sa Dawn mismo (tingnan ang “Sining at Rebolusyon”). Narito ang
diskusyon ni Almario: “Ang wika at pamamaraang Modernista ay anino lamang
o pang-ibabaw na antas ng higit na malalim na hidwang pagtanaw sa daigdig
sa panig ng mga Balagtasista. Ito ang ang panukalang katwiran ni San Juan sa
pagtatanggol na tumpak ang salitang ‘makinasyon’ sa halip na ‘mekanisasyon’
Kritika Kultura 19 (2012): 297–312
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sa tula ni Alma. Ang antas ng intelektuwalisasyon sa tula ni Alma — na wika
nga ni San Juan ay ‘malinaw na katibayan na ang kamalayang rasyunal na tao ay
siyang mabisang lakas sa pagpapahalaga at pagpapakahulugan sa lahat ng bagay
sa daigdig” (Balagtasismo 249).
11. Bilang editor, isinama ni Almario ang mga tula ni San Juan sa Walong Dekada
ng Makabagong Tulang Pilipino na naglalaman ng mga obra mula kay Julian
Cruz Balmaceda hanggang Jesus Manuel Santiago.
12. Natukoy ni San Juan ang sentimyentong ito sa tulang “Biyernes ng Hapon sa
Oktubre” kung saan binabalikan ng persona ang kutob at kilabot na kanyang
naramdaman bago ito “naglakbay patungong Amerika” (9). Nagbabalik-tanaw
ang persona at ang kutob at kilabot na kanyang naramdaman noon ay naging
realidad sa kasalukuyan kung saan namamayani ang terorismo ng imperyo.
Napagtanto ng persona na nasa tiyan siya mismo ng hayop ng imperyalismo.
Tingnan ang tula ni San Juan sa Mahal Magpakailanman: Poems in Filipino
and English.
13. Ukol dito, tingnan si Veric, “What, and Where, is Philippine Studies?”
14. Tingnan din sina Damrosch; at Casanova.
15. Pahabol pa ni Almario: “nagtataglay din [ang tula ni Panganiban] ng mga
binhi ng wika’t buhay na dulot ng Amerikanisasyon — bagaman naiiralan pa
rin ng pamumunang Balagtasista — at maaaring ituring na palatandaan ng dimaiiwasang pagkiling ng mga edukadong makata sa modernong kultura ng
bagong mananakop” (Pang-unawa 285).
16. Maliban kay Huggins, tingnan din si Panish.
17. Tingnan ang kuwentong akda ni Mishima, “Swaddling Clothes.”
18. Mahalaga ring banggitin na isa sa mga una at pinakamahalagang komposisyong
jazz sa Pilipinas ay tumatampok sa katutubong kultura, ang “Igorot Rhapsody”
ni Angel Peña.
Sanggunian
Almario, Virgilio S. Balagtasismo Versus Modernismo: Panulaang Tagalog sa Ika-20
Siglo. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila UP , 1984. Print.
——— . “Ang Filipino sa Kritisismong Filipino.” Kilates: Panunuring Pampanitikan ng
Pilipinas. Ed. Rosario Torres Yu. Quezon City: U of the Philippines P, 2006. Print.
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Literary Section
Excerpts from
Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog
Edgar Calabia Samar
Ateneo de Manila University
ecsamar@gmail.com
English Translation by
Sasha Martinez and Mikael de Lara Co
About the Novel
Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog (trans. Eight Muses of the Fall) is on the one hand a young
man’s frustrated attempt to write the great Filipino novel, and on the other, his coming to
terms with the futility of his search for his lost mother. Along the way, he is guided and
misdirected by some muses and demons to reimagine his personal past without the burden
of national history. He will be forced to accept that truth can somehow be in the deceptive,
inchoate recreation of memories, without which, the fall seems inevitable.
The following chapter is part of the second half of the novel, when the protagonist
Daniel tries to revise his personal history, with the help of his dreams, and his attempts at
analyses of his chance encounters. In this chapter, he first meets Teresa, the prostitute who
can read other people’s minds, but only after dark.
About the Author
Edgar Calabia Samar is a multi-awarded poet, children’s story writer, essayist, and novelist.
He is the author of Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog (trans. Eight Muses of the Fall) (Anvil,
2009), winner of 2005 NCCA Writer’s Prize, and longlisted in the Man Asia Literary Prize
in 2009. In 2010, he attended the 43rd International Writing Program of the University of
Iowa as a writer-in-residence. He is also a professor of literature and creative writing at
the Ateneo de Manila University. Recently, his second novel in Filipino, Sa Kasunod ng 909
(trans. One After 909) was published by UST Publishing House.
About the Translators
Sasha Martinez was born in 1989. She studied Creative Writing and Literature in Ateneo
de Manila University, and now works as a consultant for the Presidential Communications
Development and Strategic Planning Office. Her fiction has received the Loyola Schools
Award for the Arts, the Nick Joaquin Literary Award (Philippine Graphic), and the
Philippines Free Press Literary Award. She lives in Quezon City.
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Mikael de Lara Co graduated with a BS in Environmental Science from Ateneo de Manila
University and was a fellow of the Ateneo, University of Santo Tomas, Iyas, and Dumaguete
National Writers Workshops. He has received the Don Carlos Memorial Award—considered
as one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the Philippines—and has been published
in the Philippines Free Press, Sunday Inquirer Magazine, and Aklat Likhaan. At present,
he works at the Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office.
16. Karl Kabute
SA PANAGINIP KO , ako si Karl, iyung una kong pangalan, hindi si Daniel gaya ng
tawag sa akin ng halos lahat ng tao, o hindi si Ayel, na tawag sa akin ni Tito Tony
noong bata pa ako, at kahit noong malaki na ako pero gusto niyang ipaalala sa akin
na ako pa rin ang batang kinakandong niya noon habang tinuturuan ng kung anoanong bagay, o ginugulo ang buhok kapag may activities sa school at si Papa dapat
ang naroon, pero wala nga, at nahuhuli niya akong tumitingin sa mga kaklase ko
na akay ng kani-kanilang tatay. Hindi ko siyempre naririnig na tinatawag akong
Karl, lahat naman kasi, nakikita ko lang sa panaginip. Kaya ganun, sa panaginip ko,
nakikita kong tinatawag akong Karl. O baka nasa isip ko lang iyon, na idinidikta ko
sa iba. Basta’t tuwing maaalala ko ang laman ng panaginip ko, ako si Karl at walang
alaala ang ako na si Karl na ako rin si Daniel o si Ayel kapag gising ako.
Laging mukhang uulan, o katatapos lang ng ulan, sa panaginip ko. Kahit minsan,
hindi pa umulan sa panaginip ko. At lagi, para akong may hinahanap na kung
ano. Mag-iikot ako sa buong kuwarto na inuupahan ko sa Marikina. Paglabas
ko, ang bakuran sa lumang bahay ni Lola Bining ang babati sa akin. Madilim ang
langit. Hindi ko makilala kung katatapos lang ba ng ulan o paparating pa lang
ito. Pumunta ako sa likod-bahay, habang naglalakad, saka ko maaalala na kabuti,
naghahanap ako ng kabuti. Kung gayon, nakadaan na ang ulan. Nakaramdam ako
ng magkasabay na katiyakan at panghihinayang. Dumaan na ang ulan at hindi ko
na naman inabot. Halos kasabay nito ang pagkatagpo ko sa mga kabuti sa ibabaw ng
lupang tumatabon sa poso negro namin. Pagkakitang-pagkakita ko sa kanila, saka
ko mararamdaman na hindi sila ang hinahanap ko. Pero bubunutin ko pa rin sila,
ibabalumbon ang dulo ng suot kong t-shirt upang sahurin doon ang mga kabuti,
dahil hindi ko rin naman maisip kung ano ba talaga ang hinahanap ko. Pagtayo
ko kapag naubos ko na ang kabuti na maaaring ilaga at iulam, saka ko makikita na
bata pa pala ako at mga bulaklak at dahon ng gumamela na ang sahod-sahod ko
sa damit. Tatawagin ako ng isang kalaro, hindi ko siya makita pero nararamdaman
kong kalaro ko siya, at alam ko nang bitbit niya ang sabon na ihahalo namin kapag
nadikdik na ang mga dahon at bulaklak ng gumamela. Nakakuha ka na ng tangkay
ng papaya, naisip kong isinigaw ko sa kanya at hindi ko narinig ang sagot niya
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pero naramdaman kong iwinawagayway na niya ito sa hangin. Napangiti ako at
pagtingin ko sa direksyon niya’y nakita kong nasa loob ako ng isang pagkalakilaking bula. Maya-maya’y nakita kong palapit na ang kalaro ko, nasa loob din ng
malaking bula na lumulutang sa hangin. Mukhang si Erik. Natawa raw siya sa akin
dahil hindi ko raw siya nakilala agad e wala naman akong ibang kalapit na kalaro.
Tawa rin ako nang tawa. Oo nga, oo nga. Saka ko naalala na nasa loob kami ng bula.
Naisip kong sinigawan ko siya dahil mukhang hindi niya alam na nasa bula kami
pareho at magkakabunggo na ang mga bula na kinapapalooban namin. Pero huli na
ang naisip kong pagsigaw sa kaniya dahil magkasabay na pumutok ang bula namin
at nahulog ako sa hangin at bumagsak ako sa aking kama.
Noon ako nagigising.
Matagal ko na itong napapanaginipan pero hindi ko ikinukuwento kahit kanino.
Hindi ko naman makita ang dahilan kung bakit kailangan pang ikuwento ang
panaginip sa iba. Kahit kay Tito Tony. Lalo na kay Tito Tony, dahil tiyak na aasarin
lang naman ako noon. Noon. Hanggang sa makilala ko si Teresa.
NASA MARIKINA NA ako, sa isa sa mga nakasiksik na paupahan sa hindi pantay
na lupa ng Barangka. Kapag hapon, bago kumagat ang dilim, lumalabas ako ng
apartment, naglalakad-lakad pababa sa subdivision malapit sa Riverbanks. Hindi
ko alam kung bakit walang pangalan ang subdivision namin. Mukha kasing hindi
ito kasama sa plano. Mukhang nagsobra lang ang semento sa katabing subdivision
kaya’t dinagdagan sa gilid ng tatlo pang kalye na halos korteng Y. Nasa dulong itaas
ng kanang kalye ang tinuluyan kong apartment. Ilang minuto lang ng lakad bago
makababa sa Riverbanks.
Kapag Sabado ng hapon, madalas na may nagko-concert sa Station Grill.
Maaaring makita kahit hindi ka pumasok sa loob. Kahit minsan, hindi ako pumasok
sa loob noon. Hindi sikat na banda. O mga banda na hindi ko alam kung sisikat pa
ba sa gitna ng maya’t mayang paglitaw ng mga bagong grupo. Hindi ko na nga
kilala ang iba. Natapos na ang pakikinig ko sa mga banda sa Carbon Stereoxide
ng Eraserheads. Nalulungkot ako kapag naiisip ko na hindi ko na kilala ang
naririnig na mga bagong banda. Ito siguro ang unang tanda ng pagtanda, hindi na
updated sa mga bagong kanta. Pakonsuwelo ko sa sarili, alingawngaw na naman ng
Eheads. O, nakanta na ng Eraserheads ‘yan. O, mas maganda ang kanta ng Eheads
tungkol d’yan. Wala pa akong inabutang banda na tumutugtog sa Station Grill na
nakahikayat sa aking pumasok sa loob. O kahit tumigil man lamang nang matagaltagal para makinig.
Madalas na bumababa ako ng hagdan sa gilid ng Station Grill upang bumaba
malapit sa ilog kung nasaan ang malaking sapatos na pink. Maglalakad-lakad ako
nang kaunti, hanggang sa pagpasyahang tumawid sa kabila ng ilog upang doon
maghapunan sa naghilerang ihawan ng mga sariwang isda, pusit at iba lamang-tubig
na siguradong hindi naman nagmula sa ilog ng Marikina. Mura ang pagkain, sulit
na sulit. Madalas pang nag-uuwi ako ng hindi ko naubos para kainin sa hatinggabi
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kapag nagutom akong muli sa gitna ng mga kailangang tapusin. Nakakasawa na rin
ang pagkain sa caf ng iskul, o ang manok ng McDo o Jollibee o Max’s o Chicken
Bacolod o KFC na naghilera sa Katipunan. Kung minsan, pumapasok pa lang ako,
pakiramdam ko’y pumuputak na nang pumuputak ang mga lahat ng kumakain
sa loob ng alinman sa mga iyon. Mabuti kung tutubuan nga ako ng pakpak para
makalipad palayo.
ISANG HAPON NGA , nakilala ko si Teresa, nakasalampak sa pinakaibabang baitang
ng hagdan pababa sa gilid ng ilog. Iyon lamang. Nagkita kami, at tamang-tama,
lumubog na ang araw, agaw-dilim, at nagsisimula nang buksan ang ilaw sa iba’t
ibang poste, sunod-sunod, gayon din ang ilaw ng mga nakahilerang tindahan at
bar, at maya-maya’y hawak na niya ang kamay ko papunta sa madilim na bahagi
ng mga damuhang nakaharap sa ilog. O nakatalikod, depende sa gusto mong
pagtingin. Martes siguro noon, o Miyerkules, kaya’t hindi gaanong marami ang tao.
O masyado pa lang maaga.
“Huwag kang matakot.” Parang nababasa niya ang isip ko.
“Nababasa ko nga ang isip mo.” Napangiti ako. Pero hindi ako nakatingin sa mukha
niya. Natakot akong makita sa mata niya na nagsasabi siya ng totoo. “Nagagawa ko
lang ito kapag gabi.” Nakaramdam ako ng magkasabay na kilabot at pagdududa:
Ayos a, mind reading kapag gabi. ESP ? Sino ba ang babaeng ito?
“Teresa.” Noon ako napatingin sa kaniya at bago ko naiwasan, nagtama ang mga
mata namin. “Teresa ang pangalan ko.” At mukhang nagsasabi nga siya ng totoo.
Bago pa ako nakapagsalita, hinahalikan na niya ako sa bibig at gumagapang na
ang kamay niya sa hita ko. “Ikaw, ano’ng pangalan mo?” sabi niya nang bahagyang
humihingal. Mabango ang hininga niya, parang kaiinom lang niya ng mountain
tea sa Sagada. O kahit anong tea na may lemongrass. O baka nag-Halls lang siya.
Magkahalong kaba at pananabik ang naramdaman ko. Hindi pa ako naging ganoon
kapangahas sa isang pampublikong lugar. Dinaan ko sa pagpikit. Pinapapaniwala
ang sarili na walang nakakakita sa amin dahil wala rin akong nakikita.
“Karl.” Ibig ko sanang magsinungaling, pero bigla’y parang nablangko ang isip
ko’t wala akong maisip na ibang pangalan, iyong hindi akin. Mabuti’t hindi ko na
isinunod ang Daniel kung saan ako mas kilala ng mga tao. Nakaupo na ako noon
sa damuhan, nakababa nang bahagya ang shorts at brief ko nang sumalampak siya
nang upo sa harapan ko.
Bago ko pa man maisip noon ang posibilidad na makakuha ako ng sakit sa
ginagawa namin, bumulong na agad siya, “Wala akong sakit, wag kang mag-alala,”
bago niya dinilaan ang tenga ko. Nakaramdam ako ng koryenteng dumaloy mula
sa puno ng tenga ko, hanggang sa mga tuhod ko, hanggang sa sakong. Naninigas
ang dulo ng mga hinlalaki ko sa paa. Nakasubsob ang mukha ko sa dibdib ni Teresa.
Ilang giling lang ng balakang niya at mabilis akong nilabasan. Iniangat ni Teresa ang
mukha ko at hinalikan niya ako sa bibig. Sinipsip niya ang dila ko. Ang lemongrass
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tea sa Sagada. Hinawi niya ang mahaba niyang buhok papunta sa kaniyang batok,
bago siya bumulong, “magkikita pa tayo.”
Umalis siya mula sa pagkakaupo sa harapan ko. Mahina ang paghingal ko habang
dahan-dahan kong iniaangat ang brief at shorts ko. Hindi ko alam kung ano’ng
kailangan kong gawin. Nakaupo sa tabi ko si Teresa, nakatitig sa mga ilaw ng mga
ihawan sa kabila ng ilog. Kailangan ko bang magbayad? Paano kung magalit siya?
O mainsulto. Ano ba talaga ang babaeng ito?
“Kahit 200,” mahina niyang sabi. Nakatitig pa rin sa mga ilaw sa kabila ng ilog.
Sigurado akong hindi siya sa ilog nakatingin kahit hindi ako tumitingin sa kaniya.
Nagmamadali ko namang binunot ang wallet ko sa likod na bulsa ng shorts.
Mabuti’t may barya akong tatlong daan. Iniabot ko lahat sa kaniya. Pagkakuha ng
pera, tumayo siya nang madahan at madahan ding naglakad palayo nang hindi man
lang tumitingin sa akin. Hindi naman ako nakagalaw sa inuupuan ko hanggang sa
mawala na siya sa tanaw ko.
Kagaya ng sinabi niya, nagkita pa kami nang madalas simula noon. Subalit
tuwing magtatagpo sa pinakahuling baitang ng hagdan pababa sa ilog, pumupunta
na kami sa isang kuwarto ng maliit na motel sa bayan mismo ng Marikina. Hindi
talaga motel iyon, parang bahay lang, lumang bahay na may maliit na sign: 24 hrs.
Sumasakay kami ng dyip o fx na biyaheng San Mateo o SSS , hindi nag-uusap sa
halos wala pang limang minutong biyahe, at bumababa sa may 7-11 pagkalampas ng
tulay. Wala akong alam tungkol sa kaniya noon maliban sa ginagawa niya ito para
kumita ng pera. At hindi nga siya mahilig magsalita. At nakababasa siya ng iniisip
ng tao. Kapag gabi. Kapag gabi lang.
Kay Teresa ko lamang naikuwento ang tungkol sa panaginip ko. Nang makilala
ko si Teresa, bigla’y parang gusto kong sabihin ang lahat sa kanya. Walang
pagdadalawang-isip. Kahit pakiramdam ko’y alam na niya ang lahat bago ko pa
man sabihin. O dahil nga siguro sa pakiramdam na alam na niya ang lahat bago ko
pa man sabihin, kaya pinili kong sabihin na rin ang lahat. Sa hindi ko maipaliwanag
na dahilan, dito, malayo sa Atisan, at dahil kay Teresa, kaya ako binabalikan ng
mga bagay at katiyakan na naging bata nga talaga ako. Ang ilog ng Marikina, ang
Sapang Ligaw. Ano nga ba ang mga pinag-uusapan namin? Hindi ukol sa kung saan
patungo ang ilog. Hindi siya ganoon mag-isip. O hindi ko lang talaga alam, hindi ko
talaga nalaman, kung paano siya mag-isip. Bakit tinatawag natin itong ilog? Akala
ko’y itinanong ko iyon sa kaniya pero maaaring nakatingin lang ako sa kaniya at
binigkas ko lang iyon sa isip ko. O maaaring naisip ko lang iyon sa panahon kung
kailan tinitingnan ko ang ilog ng Marikina at hindi ko na siya kasama.
MALIIT ANG TENGA ko: parang tenga ng daga, parang kabuteng tengang daga. Ang
sabi ng matatanda, mahaba ang buhay ng isang tao kapag malaki ang tenga niya.
Gayon ang madalas kong marinig kay Lola Bining noon sa tuwing makikita si Erik
noong bata-bata pa kami. Pero walang sinoman na nagbukas ng usapin ukol sa haba
o ikli ng magiging buhay ng isang tao kapag nakikita nila ang ang tenga ko. Maliban
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kay Teresa. Si Teresa lang ang nangahas na magsabi sa akin: “Mamamatay ka nang
maaga.” Naramdaman ko ang kilabot na gumapang sa buo kong katawan. Pero
sinabi rin niya na huwag akong mag-alala dahil iba ang kamatayan na mangyayari
sa akin kaysa sa mga naisip ko na noon, o kumpara sa kahit na anong inaasahan ko.
Dinaan ko na lang sa biro ang nararamdaman kong takot: “Paano, mapapatakan
ako ng eroplano?” Pero hindi ngumiti si Teresa. Lalo naman siyang napalapit sa
loob ko noon.
Kapag may bago akong ideya para sa nobela na hindi ko maupu-upuan,
pumupunta agad ako sa lugar kung saan kami unang nagkita, at laging nandoon
siya, kahit wala akong pasabi, upang ibahagi sa kanya at mas upang marinig kung
ano ang masasabi niya. Kaya’t ang Karl, kalauna’y naging Karl Kabute. “Dahil basta
ka na lang sumusulpot,” sabi pa ni Teresa, kahit alam ko na iyon naman talaga ang
dahilan. Hindi niya alam, at hindi ko na inungkat noon, kung nang tinawag ba niya
akong Karl Kabute’y naaalala niya ang panaginip kong sa kanya ko lang ibinahagi.
Ang panaginip ko kung saan akala ko’y naghahanap ako ng kabuti.
Nagbiro na lang ako, “mabuti’t hindi Karl Bula!” upang mahagingan kung
naaalala nga ba niya ang panaginip ko.
“Puwede rin,” sabi naman niya, at muli, hindi man lang ako nagkaideya kung
naalala ba niya ang panaginip ko lalo pa’t ihinabol niya nang tumatawa, “basta ka
rin nawawala e, kasimbilis ng paglitaw mo.” Nakitawa na rin ako kahit may kumurot
sa loob ko noon na maaaring hindi man lang pala minahalaga ni Teresa na siya lang
ang nakaalam sa isa kong panaginip na hindi ko sinasabi kahit kanino. Natukso
akong sabihin kay Teresa na siya lang ang may alam ng panaginip kong iyon, pero
nag-alangan ako dahil wala naman sa pinag-uusapan namin noon ang panaginip,
mahirap ipasok at ipilit sa pag-uusap. At maaaring nabasa na rin niya ang nasa isip
kong iyon nang sandaling iyon.
WALANG KASAYSAYAN ANG mga kabute, sabi pa rin sa nobelang dahilan kung
bakit ko napagpasyahan na magsusulat din ako ng nobela noon. Nakaramdam ako
ng lungkot nang maalala ko iyon habang nakahiga sa tabi ni Teresa. Si Teresa na
inakala kong maghuhugas sa akin sa maraming bagay, gaya ng ulan na nagsusupling
ng mga kabute sa lupang matagal na hindi nadilig. Nakatitig ako kay Teresa, walang
kamalay-malay noon na itong babaeng ito na hindi ko alam ang kasaysayan, na
basta sumulpot sa buhay ko, ang siya ring bula na basta-basta maglalaho.
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16. Mushroom Karl
IN MY DREAM, I was Karl, I went by my first name, not Daniel by which almost
everyone called me, and not Ayel, by which Uncle Tony called me when I was
young, or whenever he felt the need to remind me that I was the same child that
he sat on his lap or whose hair he ruffled during school activities where he’d catch
me staring at a classmate’s father, school activities where my father should’ve
been, but wasn’t. Of course no one ever called me Karl in that dream, because
of course in dreams I saw things from the third person, so what I really saw was
myself answering to someone who called me Karl. Whenever I remembered what
happened in my dream, I would be Karl, and not Daniel or Ayel, names by which I
was called in my waking life.
In my dreams it always seemed as if it was about to rain, or as if it had just
rained. It’s never rained in the world of my dreams. And always, I was looking for
something. I would be going around the room I was renting in Marikina. I would
step out of the room, into the yard, into Grandma Bining’s old yard in San Pablo.
The skies would be dark. Had it just rained? Or was it about to rain? I would go
behind the house, and I would remember, while walking, what I was looking for.
Mushrooms, I was looking for mushrooms. It had just rained, after all. I was sure
about it, and at the same time I felt a sense of loss. The rain had passed and I wasn’t
there. Immediately after this thought I would find mushrooms, growing near a
mound, a patch of soil near the old pump-well. As soon as I see the mushrooms,
I would feel, with certainty, that they weren’t at all what I was looking for. But I
would pick the mushrooms, I would roll my shirt up and put them there, because
as yet I couldn’t remember what I was really looking for. Only after picking all the
mushrooms I could broil and eat would I notice that I was still a child, and that
I had picked not mushrooms but flowers, gumamelas, leaves and flowers of the
gumamelas. Do you have the papaya stalk with you, I would think of shouting to
him and I wouldn’t hear his answer but I would feel him waving the stalk in the
air. I would smile and look at his direction and as I do this I would realize that I
was inside a large bubble. After a moment I would see that he was approaching
me, inside his own gigantic bubble, floating in the wind. He looked like Erik. He
laughed at me, because why didn’t I recognize him right away when no one but
him was there. I would laugh, laugh aloud. Of course, of course. And then I would
remember that we were inside our bubbles. I think I shouted at him, screamed.
He didn’t seem to realize that we were inside our bubbles, and we were about to
collide. But I would be too late. Our bubbles would collide, explode, and I would
fall, through the air, unto my bed.
I would wake then.
I’ve been having these dreams for a long time, but I haven’t yet told anyone. I
didn’t see the point in narrating my dreams to anyone. Not even to Uncle Tony.
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Least of all to Uncle Tony, because of course he would just tease me about it. Back
then. Until I met Teresa.
I WAS ALREADY in Marikina, in one of those apartments cramped in the uneven
terrain of Barangka. Afternoons, before darkness arrived, I would take a stroll
through the village by the Riverbanks. I didn’t know why our village, our subdivision,
didn’t go by any name. It looked like one of those villages that wasn’t planned out. It
looked as if the neighboring subdivision just had some leftover cement, and so they
put in three more streets, shaped almost like a Y. My apartment was at the far end
of the street on the right-hand side. I was a few minutes away from the Riverbanks.
Concerts would usually be held Saturday afternoons at the Station Grill. I
could see it even if I didn’t go inside the bar. Bands that hadn’t yet gotten a break.
Would any of those bands ever get a break, when the next big band came a week
after the other? I had no idea who they were. I stopped listening to rock bands
after the Eraserheads released Carbon Stereoxide. It made me sad, thinking about
how little I knew of the band scene now. This could be the first sign of aging—not
knowing which songs were popular. I tell myself, well, they’re just pale echoes of
the Eraserheads. Or, well, the Eraserheads sang about that in one of their songs. Or,
the Eraserheads had a song just like that, and it was way better. I never felt the urge
to go inside the Station Grill just to listen to the band that was playing. Or even to
stop for awhile outside.
I often went down the stairs by the side of Station Grill to get to the river, to
the part of its banks with that well-known landmark, that statue of a gigantic pink
shoe. I would walk awhile, until I decide to cross to the other side, to have dinner
at the row of food stalls, grilled fish, squid, other creatures of the sea that of course
couldn’t have come from the Marikina river. It was cheap fare, but good. Often I
would take my leftovers home in a plastic bag and finish it off in the middle of the
night, whenever I would get hungry in the middle of doing the things that needed
to be done. The school’s cafeteria food can get tiring, and so can the chicken I could
buy from any of the fast-food chains in front of the University. The endless chatter
of people who ate in those restaurants unnerved me; the noise would hit me like a
wave as soon as I stepped into those glass doors. And I didn’t have the wings to fly
away from those places once I got in.
I MET TERESA one afternoon. She was sitting on the lowest step of the stairs that
led to the river. That was that. We saw each other, and the timing was just right:
the sun was setting, it was dusk, and the streetlamps were coming to life, one after
the other, as were the patio lights of the rows of bars and stalls, and a few moments
later she was holding my hand, leading me towards the darkness, to the patches of
grass facing the river. Or with its back to the river, depending on how you look at
it. It was maybe a Tuesday then, or a Wednesday, there was no weekend crowd. Or
maybe it was just too early for a crowd?
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“Don’t be afraid.” It was as if she could read my mind.
“I can read your mind.” I couldn’t help but smile at that. But I wasn’t looking at
her face. I was afraid to see in her eyes that she was really telling the truth. “I can
only do this at night.” I felt a fear and doubt, both at the same time: Wow, that’s nice,
a mind-reader at night. ESP ? Who the hell was this girl?
“Teresa.” It was then that I looked at her face, and we met each other’s gaze even
before I could look away. “My name is Teresa.” And it looked as if she were telling
the truth. Even before I could speak, her mouth was on mine and her hand was
crawling over my thigh. “You? What’s your name?” she asked in a breathy voice.
Her breath smelled nice, smelled as if she had just drunk mountain tea from the
northern highlands of Sagada. Or whatever tea that had a tinge of lemongrass. Or
she might have just taken one of those cheap lemon-flavored mints. I felt nervous,
and at the same time I was excited. I had never been that bold in a public place. I
closed my eyes. I tried to convince myself that, if I couldn’t see anyone, then no one
could see us.
“Karl.” I wanted to lie, but it was as if my mind went blank and I couldn’t think
of any other name, a name that wasn’t mine. It was a good thing that I didn’t add
Daniel, by which many people knew me. I was sitting on the grass then, with my
shorts and my underwear pulled down, when she sat on me.
Even before I could think that I might contract something from what we were
doing, she spoke. “I don’t have anything. Don’t worry,” and then she ran her tongue
over my neck. I felt a current run from the base of my ear, to my knees, to my heels.
My toes tensed. My face was on her breasts. Just a few moments of grinding and I
came. He held up my face and kissed me in the mouth. She sucked on my tongue.
Lemongrass tea in Sagada. She pulled her long hair to her nape, and whispered,
“We’ll meet again.”
She got up. I was panting softly as I pulled up my shorts and my briefs. I didn’t
know what I was expected to do. Teresa was sitting beside me, staring off into the
row of lights across the river. Did I have to pay her? What if she got insulted? Who
the hell was this girl?
“200 will do,” she said softly. Her eyes were still on the lights across the river. I
was sure she wasn’t staring at the river itself, even though I couldn’t fully see her
face. I scrambled to get my wallet from my back pocket. Good thing I had 300 in
change. I gave it all to her. When she got the money, she stood up slowly, walked
slowly away without even looking back. I sat there, unmoving, as I watched her
fade into the distance, into the crowd.
As she had told me, we met many more times after that initial encounter. But
after we would meet on that last step on the stone stairway that led to the river, we
would rent a small room in a motel in downtown Marikina. Well, it wasn’t really
a motel; it was a house, an old house with a small sign that said: 24 hrs. We would
ride a jeepney that travelled the route to San Mateo or SSS village, keep silent
throughout the ride that took less than five minutes, and get off at the 7-Eleven
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right after the bridge. I didn’t know anything about her then, except for the fact that
she did these things to earn money. And that she didn’t speak a lot. And that she
could read people’s minds. At night. Only at night.
I never told my dream to anyone except Teresa. When I met her it was as if I
wanted to tell her everything. Without any hesitation. Even if I felt that she knew
everything about me even before I spoke. Or maybe it was because of this, because
I felt that she knew everything about me even before I spoke, that I chose to tell her
everything anyway. For some reason that I can’t fully grasp, it was here, so far from
Atisan, because of Teresa, that I began to remember with absolute certainty that,
yes, I did go through my youth, I was a child once. The river of Marikina. Sapang
Ligaw. What did we talk about, really? We didn’t talk about where the river led.
She didn’t think that way. Or maybe I just don’t know, I never got to know, how
she really thought. Why do we call a river a river? I might have said that aloud, or I
might have just thought it, said it in my mind. Or I might have thought about that
question during the time I was staring at the Marikina river, alone.
I HAVE SMALL ears, like a rat’s, like that mushroom called rat’s ear. The old folks
would say that large ears signified a long life. I would hear Grandma Bining say
that whenever she saw Erik, when we were younger. But no one ever talked about
how long or short a life could be whenever they saw how my ears were. Except for
Teresa. Only Teresa had the guts to tell it to me straight: “You’re going to die early.”
I felt the dread creep through my whole body. But she did say that I would die a
different death, a death unlike the one I was thinking then, or unlike anything I’d
expect.
I tried to lighten the mood, more for my own sake: “What, will a plane crash on
me?” But Teresa didn’t smile. I felt closer to her then.
Whenever I have a new idea for a novel and I couldn’t find a way to work on it or
to make it work, I would go to the place where we first met, and always, always I’d
find her there, even without any previous agreement to meet, and she’d listen to me
as I told her. That’s why, later on, “Karl” evolved into “Karl Kabute,” mushroom Karl.
“Because you just appear out of nowhere,” she said, and of course I knew that was
what she meant even before she said so. I didn’t know, and didn’t ask, if she called
me that because she remembered the dream I once told her about. That dream
when I thought I was looking for mushrooms.
I tried to lighten the mood, as I always do. “Good thing it’s not Bubble Karl!” I
said, perhaps to find out too if she remembered the dream.
“Yeah, that could work too,” and again I had no idea whether she did remember
the dream, especially after she followed it up: “because you just vanish into thin
air, as quickly as you appear.” I laughed along, not minding the ache inside of me,
which stemmed from the fear that maybe she didn’t at all remember that dream,
the dream that I had told no one about, no one else but her. I was tempted to tell
her that no one else knew about the dream, but I hesitated because it was off the
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topic, because it would’ve been difficult to try to force the conversation. And after
all, she might’ve been reading my mind, anyway.
MUSHROOMS HAVE NO history, as that novel said, the novel that made me decide
that one day I’m going to write a novel too. I felt a certain sadness remembering
that sentence as Teresa lay beside me. Teresa whom I thought could cleanse me of
many things, like the rain that would birth mushrooms on earth that had not tasted
water for a long time. I was staring at her then, and I had no idea that this woman
whose history I did not know, who appeared out of nowhere, into my life, would,
just like a bubble, vanish into thin air.
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Literary Section
From “The Difference Between
Abundance and Grace”
Christine V. Lao
University of the Philippines, Diliman
christinevlao@gmail.com
About the Author
Christine V. Lao was a fellow at the Silliman National Writers Workshop. Her poems
have appeared in Under the Storm: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Poetry and
the special literary issue of Kritika Kultura. Her stories have been featured in Philippine
Speculative Fiction; Philippine Genre Stories; the Philippines Free Press; and the Philippines
Graphic. She is pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines.
Author’s Note
“Josephine’s Last Farewell” is first published in the Philippines Graphic, 19 Mar. 2012. “How
We Met” is first published in the Philippine Collegian, 14 Feb. 2012.
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Josephine’s Last Farewell
They are burning your books, Pepe.
It is a mistake. A great wind is coming
to feed the fire. The forests are already
aflame with your words.
Your words, the chatter of morning birds
but deeper. In your sleep you named
all the extinct animals of the world
and they came alive.
How long until the city burns, the country
reduced to ash? It is not as you intended.
It is as you intended. There is no comfort
in these thoughts. Nor in the starless horizon
beyond this burning. No comfort
in the shadow that mimics
your overcoat, the crevice where the fatal
bullet is lodged.
This darkness is a straightjacket
A bullet’s trajectory, widow’s weeds
The costume one chooses to wear
When falling off the map.
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How We Met
Tied to my wrist at a party:
A lighthearted airhead
High on helium
I jerked it around
It followed me home
Squeaking gleefully
Overhead
Not yet
This glowering god,
This sullen moon
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Gretel
so I strayed
from the aisle
where you’d left me
but left a trail
so if you looked
you would know
I had meant
you to follow
so I crumbled
our cookies
& they dropped
from my pocket
though this
was the grocery
not a forest of crows
still I went hungry
& still I grew cold
as I made my way out
& into the mall
& its stalls oh its stalls
all so brightly lit
& towards the
stall with
the toy cars you loved
to look at, you said,
before they turned
into pumpkins
but it was too late
& I ran
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out of crumbs
& by the bakery too
so I took off a shoe
laid it softly aground
pointing toward the house
of gingerbread & sweets
that looked good enough
to eat though it
was only gumpaste
on cardboard & I
was nibbling the roof
when you finally
found me
you & that salesgirl that
damsel in distress was it
she who had called you
back to claim me? But dear silly
Hansel, why are you dressed
like mall security?
Why the rough hands
pushing me out the door?
Now your exit’s behind me
now the lock has been turned
now before me the twilight
& its stinking pelt
& beyond the unfathomable
dark.
Why, I say to it,
What big teeth you have.
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Swatches
After Shane Carreon, “Deciding on Another Memory”
Choosing the paint to dress our home,
We spin the color wheel. Blue, bottle Green — I think, Ocean! You say, Sky! — Red bleeds into orange — Sunset! we agree,
And so it appears between your roller,
My brush. The color of a memory:
A hammock by the beach
Holding our bodies
The way you now hold my hand.
This, I choose to remember.
Not the weight of his head on my
Unmoored shoulder, some other night,
Some other beach;
Or the self as mere body
Without conscience or remembrance.
Once there was a skiff that crossed the skyline
And vanished. Somewhere it is crossing the horizon
Still.
Now I’ve lost my way
With the brush, haven’t I?
Yet hereWe are here
You are with me
Still
On the shore where the tides have carried me back
Where you hold me and all the world’s colors turn
Hard and brilliant, jewels in our paint-stained hands.
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New Scholars Forum
Discursive Formations and the
Ambivalent Nation in Gina Apostol’s
The Revolution According to
Raymundo Mata
Jillian Joyce Ong Tan
Columbia University, New York
Abstract
Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata brings to the fore a multicontested textual space that not only politicizes the act of reading, but more importantly,
engages in a form of nation-building or imagining. The paper will demonstrate through
a two-prong analysis of form and content that this novel utilizes postmodern modes of
articulation such as parody, intertextuality, and a non-sequential temporal narrative in order
to examine knowledge-productions, politics of representation, agency, and nationhood
that have become immanent and critical in the emerging and rapidly-developing field
of theoretical discourse that seeks to illuminate Philippine postcoloniality. It will also be
argued that postmodern forms, which are premised upon diffusion, multiplicity, and the
ambivalence of meaning render the notion of the Philippines to be equally ambivalent and
diffused. Whether such re-imagining or re-configuring of the nation is advantageous or
not is left for the reader to decide. The critical works of Linda Hutcheon, Homi Bhabha,
and Benita Parry will serve as departure points for the analysis.
Keywords
historiographic metafiction, narrative, paratexts, parody, performative, Rizal
About the Author
Jillian Joyce Ong Tan is currently pursuing an MA in English and Comparative Literature
at Columbia University, New York. She graduated last 2012 from the Ateneo de Manila
University with a double-degree in Management and English Literature.
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(Re)placing History and the Forging of Identities
The study of Philippine historiography is a particularly thorny endeavor,
polarizing and mired with conflicting purposes. History is, after all, written with an
ideological standpoint in mind. Central, however, to all the variegating discourses
on Philippine historiography is José Rizal whose life and works have become the
foundation through which this country’s nation-space has been imagined and
configured. His two novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, have been
universally acknowledged as portents and catalysts of the Philippine Revolution.
Such identity-formations and knowledge-productions arguably represent a desire
to create an indissoluble bond among Filipinos, united by their admiration for Rizal
and engendered by his imagination. Benedict Anderson, who calls Rizal “the father
of Filipino Nationalism,” suggests that the opening scene in Noli Me Tangere, which
depicts a group of people from different socio-economic backgrounds discussing
a party to be held that evening along Anloague Street “immediately conjures up
[an] imagined community” (26–27). In spite of Rizal’s undeniable influence, there
is a looming inadequacy and lacunae that plague Philippine historiography, which
stems from the little importance given to marginalized and ex-centric figures who
have contributed as well as impeded the development of the Philippines as a nation.
Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata attempts to address
this gap through a facetious treatment of historiography and the scholarship behind
it. Apostol begins the novel by writing, “I knew no scholar, no text, not even a
comic book that spoke of the Philippine War of Independence without disturbing
solipsism or deeply-divided angst” (The Revolution 1). Through the novel’s
protagonist, Raymundo Mata, it attempts to search for an alternative configuration
of both the past and a re-imagining or inscribing of the nation. In his seminal book
Orientalism, Edward Said contends that “narrative is the specific form taken by
written history to counter the permanence of vision” (240). Apostol has taken this
statement to its extreme by choosing a narrator (Mata) who is night-blind, so what
the novel, in fact, offers is an account of one of the most momentous occasions
in Philippine History from a blind man’s perspective. In so doing, The Revolution
confronts historiography by placing at the forefront what has often been slipped
under the rugs and sometimes deliberately ignored such as the testimonies of the
marginalized sector of the community and, more importantly, the heroes’ sheer
humanity and its antecedent doubts and fears.
The novel unfolds through a series of collated diary entries arranged
chronologically from when Mata was in primary school up to the start of the
Philippine Revolution. The entries are divided into five parts: (1) A Childhood
in Kawit; (2) Provinciano in the City; (3) Blind Man’s Bluff; (4) The General in
the Revolution; and (5) Aftermass. The diary ends abruptly because Mata was
imprisoned for pilfering during the American occupation and subjected to
regular bouts of torture. It can be assumed that it is in between those bouts of
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torture that Mata compiled and emended his entries. He died in jail and what
remained was a medical bag filled with papers and other medical paraphernalia.
Three women footnote the diary: Estrella Espejo, Dr. Diwata Drake, and Mimi C.
Magsalin. Each, based on her specific subject-position, will compete with others
in claiming to understand Mata and what his cryptic notes meant. Espejo suffers
from an acute case of nostalgia, extreme patriotism, and panic attacks brought
about by encounters with western products such as hamburgers. Characteristics
of Espejo’s hermeneutics include her unwavering loyalty to the pristine memory of
Rizal, her predilection to see anything vaguely cryptic as an example of Katipunan
Code (even though some of the entries are dated years before the founding of
the secret organization), and her propensity to include personal anecdotes in her
footnotes. She ends her preface with a remark that is not only paradoxical, but also
highly uncharacteristic of a historian, “My surprise was great as I read on. That
the storyteller is, I must admit, flawed, maybe mad, does not diminish my faith in
his story. In fact, his madness amplifies its truth” (Apostol, The Revolution 2). Dr.
Drake, a psychoanalyst from the “Mürkian School of Psychoanalysis,” continues
the editing of the papers when Espejo is confined in the hospital after a particularly
life-threatening nervous breakdown. Considering herself a Midwestern mongrel
who is “half-Filipino from my maternal grandmother’s side,” Dr. Drake regards the
entries as the perfect supplement to her unfinished book tentatively entitled You
Lovely Symptoms: The Structure of the Filipino Unconscious, Not Really a Langue or
a Parole. She writes in her addendum:
Here was a document worth my while: filled with misconstructions of the ego
and the malapropisms of time, affections unnarcoticized (banyan trees get more
time than the Cry of Balintawak – genius!), autistic lists, moving digressions,
classic psychopathologies of the tongue (typical of the Filipino, who has an
irritating penchant for puns). (Apostol, The Revolution 10)
Among the three, Magsalin, the translator, is perhaps the most ambivalent and selfreflexive. She poses a question in Entry #21 when the derogatory word “indio” was
used by Mata, “So what then should a translator do? Take on the Spanish prejudice
by using the denotative term ‘indio’? Or translate it inaccurately as ‘Filipino’? A
tragic agon of colonial pain lies dramatized in quotation marks. I took the path of
least resistance and just footnoted” (Apostol, The Revolution 98). Magsalin is also
the last person to see the Mata Papers in its original form. The entries are now
suspected to be lost and possibly irrecoverable due to a typhoon that struck the
Philippines.
Such a hypertextual version of History is enabled by Apostol’s appropriation
of the postmodern form called “historiographic metafiction.” Postmodern critic
Linda Hutcheon characterizes historiographic metafiction “as a kind of fiction
that is at once metafictional and historical in its echoes of the texts and contexts
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of the past” (Historiographic 3). It attempts to show History as an ideological
construct that often materializes through a violent restructuring or as a result of a
deliberate emplotment. Furthermore, it enables the reader to recognize “not only
the inevitable textuality of our knowledge of the past, but also both the value and
limitation of that inescapably discursive form of knowledge” (Historiographic 8).
Summarily, this form makes use of the strategic advantages of both historiography
and fiction, hence, allowing the text to straddle worldliness and literariness
respectively. It therefore eludes any notion of totality and undermines the
singularity of History as one knows it.
Historiographic metafiction is a popular choice among Filipino authors and
three of the four winners of the much-publicized Philippine literary contest
sponsored by the Estrada government during the centennial anniversary of the
nation’s independence from Spain employed it as their literary form of choice.
Such patriotic tendencies and artistic vision are, however, not always unequivocally
celebrated. R. Kwan Laurel observes that Eric Gamalinda’s My Sad Republic,
Charlson Ong’s An Embarrassment of Riches, and Alfred Yuson’s Voyeurs and
Savages “have only cut and pasted certain historical moments together, and have
ignored history altogether” (600). Whether it is justified or not, Laurel has read
these novels as manifestations of the many problems that plague any engagement
with History regardless of the liberty provided by historiographic metafiction. The
question that begs to be asked is: Had The Revolution been published during the
time of the Centennial awards, would Laurel have accused it of ignoring History
altogether like Ong or trivializing it like Gamalinda? (Laurel 600)
The answer to the question posed above is not as resolute or as definitive as the
one provided by Laurel. Apostol’s numerous characters from different subjectpositions enable her to avoid reductive or homogenizing tendencies. Furthermore,
Apostol also places the act of translation and interpretation at the heart of the
novel. In an interview conducted by Daryll Delgado for Kritika Kultura, Apostol
locates the burden of the Philippine postcolonial condition at the citizens’
existence as “translated beings, footnotes within footnotes, grasped only by a series
of mediations, braid upon braid of voices with relentless multiplicity” (Apostol,
Interview 293). Perhaps, it is the acknowledgement of postcolonial Philippines’s
tenuous and often contradictory position that can deter Laurel from equating
Apostol with her literary predecessors. To read The Revolution is therefore to
encounter the nation “as it is written” at its moment of production, as it were,
and to see it, as Bhabha writes in his introduction to Nation and Narration, “as a
form of cultural elaboration (in the Gramscian sense)” and the locus of an “agency
of ambivalent narration that holds culture at its most productive position, as
force for ‘subordination, fracturing, diffusing, reproducing, as much as producing,
creating, forcing, guiding’” (3–4). Noticeably, the stance of Bhabha as well as the
technique of Apostol show a denial of coherence and unification. The desire for
an infinite space of production and meaning making is made manifest in the many
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loops within The Revolution and, to a certain extent, removes it from any material
reality. At this point, it is important to note that one cannot conclude that The
Revolution is plagued with the same problem as the Centennial winners, but the
novel does raise several questions about the widening gap between the space of
the literary production and its socio-historical basis.
Such questions necessitate an examination of both form (historiographic
metafiction and its consequent formal manifestations) and content (the ambivalent
imagination of a nation-space and the historical underpinnings or lack thereof in
the novel). Before such an examination, it is important to note that The Revolution
unfolds dialectically through the spatial analysis of the nation as recreated in the
imagination of its characters and the temporal continuity or discontinuity that
they have with the past. This dialectic gives rise to three critical questions: (1) In
foregrounding the lives of ex-centric and their eccentricities as well as its farcical
treatment of the Philippine revolution, what forms and structures of knowledge
are impinged upon and consequently destroyed? (2) What kind of Philippine
nation emerges from such an ambivalent narrative? (3) What is the politics behind
a displaced historical account that only finds legitimacy and agency in a textual/
discursive space?
Historiographic Metafiction and
the De-Doxification of History
In Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism, she discusses some key postmodern
literary devices that Apostol would use in the novel such as (1) paratextuality and
parody; (2) intertextuality; and (3) the decentering of western metaphysical constants
such as the “I” and the linear progression of time. These three techniques and
motifs allow any postmodernist text to become self-conscious, self-contradictory,
and self-undermining (Politics 1).
Paratextuality is a postmodern technique that functions through simultaneously
effacing and asserting its own authority. Hutcheon classifies paratexts “as footnotes
and the textual incorporation of written documents that simultaneously signals
an authoritative referent while disrupting one’s reading “of a coherent, totalizing
fictive narrative” (Politics 81). Paratexts also produce the effect of doubling, a
doubled narrative of the past in the present as it were (Politics 80). Furthermore,
the insertion of historical documents can also be related to Brecht’s alienation
effect where “like the songs in his plays, the historical documents dropped into the
fictions have the potential effect of interrupting any illusion, of making the reader
into an aware collaborator, not a passive consumer” (Politics 84–85). In the case
of The Revolution, we have at least three levels of readings: (1) The editors reading
Mata’s Entries; (2) The reader reading Mata’s entries; and (3) The reader reading
the editors’ reading of Mata. Here, what occurs is the conveying of agency not to
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the author/creator but to the reader, thus allowing the “free-play” of reading and
interpretation.
Before presenting Mata’s entries, Dr. Drake poses a caveat, “Filipino scholarship
has an endemic originality: it is stained by passion. You will note a chronological
set of querulous attachments … Thus, enclosed herewith are the underbeams of
the text’s construction — a rumbling exegesis by email, anathema, and dyspeptic
scrawl” (Apostol, The Revolution 31). With this begins the novel that attempts to
rewrite History while simultaneously showing how the writing is being done. Let
us look at the second entry in the novel, which is dated January 20, 1872 (the day
of the Cavite Mutiny). Mata writes, “I followed shit. I mean suit30 31 32 33 34” (Apostol,
The Revolution 39). The following are excerpts of the footnotes that followed after
this line:
30 The pun on shit and suit is mine, but it matches the vulgarity of the original.
Kitchen Spanish as Rizal called it… (Trans. Note)
31 …it’s sad to note that despite their heartrending bond, the friends [Blumentritt
and Rizal] spent only around forty-eight hours, max, in each other’s company –
and so we have perhaps a fine inspired hypochondria to thank for the copious,
homoerotic correspondence that survives. In one of those endless letters, Rizal
made a matter-of-fact list of Filipino languages to satisfy Blumentritt’s scholarly
questions; next to Cavite, Rizal simply noted: español de cocina (Trans. Note)
32 Homoerotic? Shame on you, Mimi C.! Just because you have the power of the
pen in the modern age does not mean every word is a phallic orgy…May Rizal’s
heterosexual hex vex you from Banahaw! (Estrella Espejo)
33 Mimi C. did not say Rizal was gay; she said the letters were homoerotic. (Dr.
Diwata Drake)
(Apostol, The Revolution 39)
34 Same difference. (Estrella Espejo) In a span of five footnotes and a single line from a diary entry, Apostol unsettles
the traditional perception of Rizal as a polyglot scholar (showing that the hero
himself has certain biases), illustrates Espejo’s myopic view of the national hero, and
questions the reliability of the translator. This is the kind of scholarly engagement
that often occurs behind closed doors, and by showing it to the readers, Apostol
ruptures the validity of historical narratives and the authority of footnotes. In doing
so, she not only transfers agency to the reader, but more importantly, unsettles
the hegemonic and authoritative nature of academic scholarship. The participative
nature of the text also implies that the reader is integral in completing the work’s
meaning, and he or she must simultaneously interpret both footnotes and the
entries. One can see that the questioning of the archival documents, which is one
of the functions of a paratext, is not simply a matter of invalidating the past, but of
reminding us that in reading History, one must not be a passive but a self-reflexive
reader.
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Paratexts are therefore used in the novel as a democratization of the text and as
a limning of history-as-construct. As mentioned earlier, Philippine historiography
has been beset by polarizing scholarship, and an important example of this is
whether a scholar was for the revolutionary majority in the tradition of Reynaldo
Ileto and his Pasyon and Revolution, or for Nick Joaquin and his Hispanized
Filipino elite as illustrated in The Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (Hau 101).
Through the paratexts in The Revolution, one sees a negotiation of both ends of
the spectrum. Raymundo Mata is educated in Ateneo Municipal, the same school
that Rizal attended. This university has historically been perceived as the school
for the elite with the presence of the learned and liberal Jesuit priests who taught
there. Dr. Diwata Drake and Mimi Magsalin are US -based intellectuals. In contrast
to these figures is Estrella Espejo, a graduate of the University of the Philippines,
an institution well-known for supporting student activism and land reform. The
clashing of Marxist ideologies in the figure of Espejo (note her previously mentioned
battle with a hamburger) and Lacanian psychoanalysis in the figure of the hybrid
Dr. Drake shows the kind of battleground that the Philippines continuously finds
itself in. Ironically, it is often Espejo who castigates Mata for his actions such as
stealing Rizal’s draft of Makamisa when she should feel more sympathetic to his
reactive and reactionary nature. After all, the purloining of Rizal’s Makamisa
suggests a kind of revisionist writing, a writing that came from the margins as it
were. On the other hand, Dr. Drake and Magsalin who represent the institutions
of the United States are always sympathetic to Mata when his presence threatens
the heroic, almost mythicized nature of José Rizal. One must remember that the
Americans promoted Rizal over Andres Bonifacio because they found a convenient
legitimization of their colonial policy “in Rizal’s philosophy of education of the
masses first before independence” (Agoncillo 160). Bonifacio’s advocacy for armed
resistance discomfited the Americans who harbored plans of assimilating the
Philippine islands; thus, Rizal’s pacifist stance led to his induction as national hero.
The favorable reaction of Dr. Drake and Magsalin will be further explored in the
latter part of this study.
Aside from paratexts, Apostol also employs parody. According to Hutcheon,
parody works through “a double process of installing and ironizing, [it] signals how
present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences
derive from both continuity and difference” (Politics 88). Essentially, the presence
of parody through its ironic overtones and undertones allows one to both subvert
and preserve History. Hutcheon further adds, “the politics of representation and
the representation of politics frequently go hand in hand in parodic postmodern
historiographic metafiction” (Politics 99).
Take, for example, Entry #30 when Mata adds his own emendations to the multiple
versions of Dr. Pio Valenzuela’s account of their trip to Dapitan. Espejo notes, “Pio
Valenzuela’s alternate versions of this trip are available in at least three forms, each
version providing a perplexing pall upon the next” (Apostol, The Revolution 172). In
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this entry, Mata criticizes Valenzuela for being a pretentious and boring wanna-be
revolutionary who exaggerates Mata’s eye disease to entertain ladies. He also
informs the reader that the doctor is in fact a book-peddler who is perhaps more
inclined to literary embellishments than facts. Mata bitterly comments:
I bet a hundred pesos the doctor barely mentioned my name in his odious
confessions to the Spaniards, the scoundrel, and instead of being a major actor
in a historic drama, I’m instead a minor detail in a hysteric’s act, doomed to
molder in history books as some obscure blind man with a useless passion in the
company of that lying doctor Don Pio Valenzuela, betrayer of the revolution.381
Whereas, in truth, what could history have become, if only someone had asked
me? (Apostol, The Revolution 177)
Indeed, what could History have become, if only someone had asked Mata? The
accounts of Dr. Valenzuela have been used by the Spanish prosecutors to indict
Rizal for treason and, had more investigations been conducted, they will realize
that Mata has a very different portrayal of the events in Dapitan. This particular
entry sets up the eventual meeting between Mata and Rizal where the latter is
as far from a revolutionary as anyone can be. The testimonies of Dr. Valenzuela
seem to suggest a desire to project onto Rizal his own authorial tendencies as well
as to make a name for himself as the man who convinced the hero to support the
impending revolution.
In addition, the propensity of Dr. Valenzuela to politicize, going as far as
making up a story that Mata was struck as a child by a wayward friar, suggests
the inextricably political nature of any representation. He takes it upon himself to
speak for the subaltern Mata who “lisped and preened and curtsied and worst of
all, accepted all of Dr. Pio’s lies” (Apostol, The Revolution 176). It is very clear in this
part that, to a certain extent, the ilustrado class as represented by Dr. Valenzuela
also contributes to the marginalization of people who belong to a lower socioeconomic class such as Mata. In contrast to this is the politics of emancipation in
Mata’s “counter-memoir,” and although it is rather belated, Mata is at least able to
speak for himself. His narrative which provokes its own version of pathos opens
up the space for an alternative reading of History, one that not only came from the
margins but destabilizes the primacy of what has been considered a factual account
of the past.
The last discursive technique that Apostol uses is intertextuality. Roland
Barthes and Micahel Rifaterre believe that intertextuality “replaces the challenged
author-text relationship with one between reader and text, one that situates the
locus of textual meaning within the history of discourse itself ” (qtd. in Hutcheon,
Historiographic 7). Hutcheon adds, “[intertextuality] demands of the reader not
only the recognition of textualized traces of the past, but also an awareness of
what has been done-through-irony to those traces” (Historiographic 8). Apostol
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achieves this by integrating The Revolution with Makamisa. It was only recently, in
fact, that the Rizal historian Ambeth Ocampo discovered a draft of Makamisa. For
several decades, the twenty-page text was mistakenly labeled as a draft of the Noli
Me Tangere since some names of the characters were the same (Ocampo 19–20).
As mentioned in the summary given earlier, the last chapter of The Revolution
is “Aftermass,” which is the English translation of “makamisa.” When Mata visits
Rizal in Dapitan, he was disappointed with the kind of life the hero was living
over there. Considering his meeting with Rizal as the highlight of his otherwise
uninspired career as a revolutionary, his entries revealed a dismayed Mata. He asks
the hero about the rumored third novel only to be rebuffed with a vague answer.
Depressed over the lack of revolutionary/authorial commitment in Rizal as well as
the doctor’s unfavorable diagnosis of his eye disease, he takes a walk and stumbles
upon a hut. To his delight, he sees a sheaf of paper that appears to be the draft
of Rizal’s sequel to the El Filibusterismo; he then proceeds to steal the draft and
brings it back with him to Manila. In “Aftermass,” each paragraph of Makamisa as
compiled by Ocampo is juxtaposed with a narrative written by Mata, either typed
in the backside or in an altogether new sheet of paper. Rizal’s text is in regular
typeface while Mata’s emendations are italicized. One example of the latter’s
addition is to include “typist” as the profession of Ysagani, which is unsurprisingly
also Mata’s job. What becomes very interesting is when the first diary entry of
Mata corresponds with the final regular typeface paragraph in this part; thus, the
novel follows a circular structure ending where it began. The ending also raises
doubts on both Makamisa as well as the character of Raymundo Mata. Readers will
notice that the italicized parts are indistinguishable from the original transcript of
Makamisa, the savant/plagiarizing Mata can copy Rizal’s literary style with perfect
precision, which is why Magsalin had to emphasize the part by italicizing it. Could
it be possible that what we consider as Rizal’s third novel was actually written by a
forgotten and blind member of the Katipunan? How would that change our reading
of Makamisa or even Rizal’s two prior novels?
By forcibly implicating himself in Makamisa, Mata shows that the peripheral
and the central can coexist without negating each other. In the more recent
past, because of Rizal’s stature as a national hero, his novels have become almost
untouchable. Local readers have a tendency to accept traditional criticism of his
work as manifestations of nationalist sentiments, and to a large extent, that is really
one of the novels’ overarching projects. However, there is much more to Rizal and
his works than anti-friar sentiments. Apostol believes that this specific chapter
does not only benefit her own novel, “And of course I cheated since Rizal had
already given me words, but you have to understand Rizal must also gain from this
juxtaposition. That’s why multiplicity is good” (“Interview” 296). What, then, does
Rizal gain from this unseemly interruption of his unfinished novel? My own sense
is that Rizal’s text gains by a widening of his works’ hermeneutic field as well as a
more enlightened view of Rizal as both national hero and author. Intertextuality
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functions as a way to signal the ineluctable influence of the past and pays homage
to it by removing it from the archives of historical contingencies and repositioning
it at the forefront of contemporary discourse. Discourse is also enabled by the
presence and influence of deconstruction as a philosophical method.
In the event that Derrida calls a “rupture … when the structurality of structures”
were examined and investigated, a realization occurs, which is the absence of the
center, resulting in the conclusion that “everything [becomes] discourse … the
original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system
of differences (353–54). By questioning and proving invalid the center that had
historically taken on various forms such as Truth, telos, time, and even the West or
the Occident, counter-discourse can finally emerge. What has traditionally been
marginalized or defined as (ex)centric can now question the very existence and
legitimacy of the binaries that have subjugated them.
The Revolution also problematizes time especially as an intersection of memory.
Although the diaries are arranged chronologically, the reader is often unsettled
by certain entries leaping into the future. Mata’s concept of his age also varies,
depending on the entry one is reading. An example of a flash-forward occurs in
Entry #24 dated 1892, almost a decade before the American occupation and Mata’s
imprisonment at Bilibid. In this entry he writes, “even laid out wounded and naked
in the dungeons of Bilibid, he turned to me with the same,” suggesting either that
he foresaw his own imprisonment or that he was writing in retrospect. The Bilibid
entry along with Mata’s mutable notion of his age situating the years of his birth
between 1862–1872 makes locating the period in which he wrote his entries difficult.
One possibility is that Mata kept a notebook growing up and heavily edited these
entries while he was already in prison to suit the kind of project he had in mind.
Although it does make the narrator unreliable and puts the veracity of the entries
in doubt, the retrospective editing of Mata seems to be the most probable option.
The lack of dates on the entries with two exceptions (one dated on the day of the
Cavite Mutiny and the other during the year Rizal began writing Noli Me Tangere)
is further proof that the completed entries were written in retrospect, with Mata
remembering only the more significant dates.
The novel’s amorphous notion of time as existing both within and outside the
actual narrative undermines the facticity and legitimacy of History. Temporal
constraints, that is, time as a ruling or guiding principle, is often used by History to
validate its claims, but this text refuses to be contained into one specific temporal
period. The novel traverses the past through Mata’s recollections, portends the
future of the Philippine revolution through Mata’s childhood caricatures of the
various people who will dictate its course, and deals with the present through the
three editors. The Revolution is a novel that is defined by its excess and slippages
while continuously deconstructing itself along the way. By pointing towards its own
constructed/fictive nature, the novel pushes the reader to question historiography
whose basis is largely dependent upon first-hand narratives such as diaries.
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The unsettling of the past and the questioning of History, however, cannot be
completed without providing a restructuring. The next question and perhaps
the most important one is: what kind of nation emerges from the past that is
deconstructed and reconstructed by Apostol? It seems that such a nation will be
defined by ambivalence because it is still founded upon a text and another author’s
imagination. The succeeding part will attempt to provide an answer, however
provisional, to this question. Also, a survey of Apostol’s politics (or lack thereof )
will be examined.
The Ambivalent Nation and After Apostol
The space that is opened by Derrida’s rupture has been appropriated by various
critics of minority discourse such as the pre-eminent postcolonial theorist, Homi
Bhabha, who visualizes this decentering gesture as “a space of translation: a place
of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that
is new, neither one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and
changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics”
(Location 37). Derrida’s deconstruction of the center becomes a space-clearing
gesture, allowing for what Bhabha calls the “third space.” This space is imperative
in any postcolonial or minority discourse because “through unrepresentable in
itself, [it] constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that
the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even
the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew”
(Location 55).
Based on an examination of the literary techniques employed in The Revolution,
one can see a clear trope of ambiguity emerge. The multiple perspectives and the
plethora of voices impede any cohesive reading of the text. The critical advantage
of The Revolution’s ambiguity can be more clearly seen through the application of
Bhabha’s notion of the “the third space of enunciation.” Apostol, in fact, conceives
the novel in a very similar way to Bhabha: “[The Revolution] was planned as a puzzle:
traps for the reader, dead-end jokes, textual games and unexplained sleights of
tongue” (The Revolution 290). This ambivalence is clearly something that Apostol
celebrates or at least remains faithful to throughout the entire novel.
Finding the loci of the novel in a hybrid site changes the epistemological
relationship in the novel from one with a clear object of inquiry to a field where
signifying systems are repeatedly diffused. Dr. Drake articulates this liminality in
her epitaph:
So the document seems not one but two — or who knows three: one a
waspish intertext of witches, another a disarmed combatants’ confession of
misadventure, and yet another (the most revolutionary of them all, perhaps) the
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abominable pulsing void in which the intramural wrangling and all that awful
mess, the pasticciaccio brutto of voices, intersect and must converge (Apostol, The
Revolution 273, emphasis mine).
This “abominable pulsing void,” Bhabha believes, “is not self-contradictory but
significantly performs, in the process of its discussion, the problems of judgment
and identification” (Location 43). An example of this is how each of the three
editors and other scholars interpret the ending of Mata’s entries which mysteriously
correspond to Rizal’s third unfinished novel. Espejo believes that Makamisa and
the entries of Mata are one and the same (Apostol, The Revolution 274). Others
also believe that everything was simply the result of Mata’s over-imagination
while some believe that “Mata’s memoir is a text within Rizal’s recently discovered
novel Makamisa” (Apostol, The Revolution 274–275). Dr. Drake, on the other
hand, believes that such dexterity with literary and mimetic techniques could only
be done by a “translator”; she then challenges Magsalin to produce the original
text (Apostol, The Revolution 277). The Revolution ends with Magsalin’s postcard
written in code, “Mi noamla: ra puada vimgoes am at,” which can be translated
as “No miente: se peude confiar en el” or in English “It’s not a lie: You can trust it”
(Apostol, The Revolution 279). Indeed, the discovery of the Mata papers questions
the very nature of Makamisa as well as Rizal’s literary and nationalist aspirations.
Everything hinges upon a text whether it is Rizal’s, Mata’s, or even, Magsalin’s.
One can never be certain of who is telling the “truth” and such an open-ended
ending, ironically, leaves very little room for negotiation. Where does one stand in
this void? Perhaps, the next part, which will discuss nationhood-as-discourse, can
prove to be more enlightening.
In the chapter “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern
Nation,” Bhabha elaborates on his notions of doubling in relation to a nation’s
people. This doubling occurs in between what Bhabha calls “the pedagogical” and
“the performative.” The former functions largely in the past through objective
cultural significations while the latter deals with the present in the constant act of
demonstrating its identity as a nation people (Location 208). Bhabha explains the
process:
The scraps, patches, and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs
of a coherent national culture, while the very act of the narrative performance
interpellates a growing circle of national subjects. In the production of the nation
as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of
the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It
is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern
society becomes the site of writing the nation (209).
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The Revolution splits the performative from the pedagogical in several ways. First,
is the notion of the novel as in itself, performative. Prior to reading Rizal’s Noli
Me Tangere, Mata writes, “I will write a book into which my countrymen would
see themselves as if in a mirror, or at least like the reflection of a drunk in a wasted
glass” (Apostol, The Revolution 120). However, soon after this, Mata reads the Noli
and reacts, “I cursed [Rizal] … for doing what I hadn’t done, for putting my world
into words before I even had the sense to know what the world was … I already felt
the bitter envy, the acid retch of a latecomer artist … a borrower never lender be”
(Apostol, The Revolution 121). In this part, one is able to understand why the novel
must necessarily be performative. For Mata, the presence of Rizal and his novel
precedes reality and the hero’s words shape the world for him. As such, he must
constantly perform as the double of the hero who has already interpellated him.
How could he be anything but the negative of Rizal? Dr. Drake observes the same
thing, “Could it be said as well that from the Cavite Mutiny Jose Rizal begat novels,
while Raymundo Mata begat shit?” (Apostol, The Revolution 44). The Revolution,
therefore, performs as the mirror of Rizal’s text, similar to the way Mata is Rizal’s
comic double.
However, Apostol is not content with merely the creation of a double, but makes
the climax of The Revolution the long-awaited meeting between Mata and his idol,
Rizal. In Entry #33, the binary of the pedagogical and the performative collapses
and what arises is a slippage in identity. Mata writes, “On Dapitan, if I were not
careful, oblivion would swallow me up. Zamboanga was the end of the world:
and there was nothing with all the pig-herding, coffee-planting, fishnet-hauling …
there was nothing to live for under its stricken stars” (Apostol, The Revolution 201).
The first part ending at the colon echoes the well-known sentiments of Rizal as an
exile, which explains why he applied to be an army medic in the Cuban War as part
of the Spanish Army. On the other hand, the latter part seems to be the scathing
and bitter remark of Mata over Rizal’s lack of heroic display. In this conflated entry,
the pedagogical Rizal seeks agency while the performative Mata struggles in the
search for a transcendental historical signifier. Historically, this was provided by
the mythic scholarship surrounding Rizal, which were premised upon larger-thanlife descriptions and anecdotes of his Messianic ability to heal people. Rufino, one
of the men who accompanied Mata to Dapitan, is also extremely excited to meet
Rizal and says to Mata, “He can walk on water, you know” (Apostol, The Revolution
179). It is only when Mata encounters Rizal in Dapitan that he realizes that the myth
surrounding this hero is not only exaggerated but worse, not enough to satiate his
longing for an identity. The first words he says to Rizal upon seeing him are, “Jesus
Christ, you’re short! Jesusmariosep, Jesusmaryjoseph. I was taller than Jose Rizal”
(Apostol, The Revolution 190). Clearly, Rizal cannot live up to the expectations of
grandeur, which Mata reserved for him.
Postcolonial theory often focuses on the colonial encounter alone, that is, the
dynamics between the colonizer and colonized. However, one should also pay
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attention to the heterogeneous quality of the various subjugated identities who
are often at odds with each other. A nation constantly undergoes the process
of “dissemination” because of the conflict between the pedagogical and the
performative (Bhabha, Location 212). This liminal existence of the nation-people
becomes necessary in emancipating themselves from hegemonic ideologies such
as those of bourgeois nationalism. Paradoxically, “the unity of a nation consists in
the continual displacement of the anxiety of its irredeemably plural modern space”
(Bhabha, Location 213) Simply put, the nation, like Lacan’s concept of desire as
continuously moving through an endless chain of signifiers, must perpetually look
for a signifier that will reflect its identity as a nation.
Dr. Drake characterizes “nationhood” as a “jerky motion — more akin to awkward
crablike lunges perhaps, sometimes backwards or sideways, at times forward”
(Apostol, The Revolution 99). It is one that runs against homogenous space-time
and in the same fashion as Jorge Luis Borges’s “Garden of the Forking Paths” where
there is the possibility of a series of time converging and diverging. The concept of
a nation is problematized by Mata, himself: “To retrieve the illusion of wholeness
for this random and sinking archipelago, this patchwork of bamboo-and-coconut
planets speaking idly and in many tongues … From this vantage, the notion of
Filipinas was at best a fluke, or worse someone else’s error” (Apostol, The Revolution
201–02). There is an entropic quality to the language of Mata in this section of the
novel. This part comes right after the conflation of Mata and Rizal and seems to
show that even the national hero had doubts over the country that he was going
to die for. Such an ending seems to posit that the discourse of nationhood in this
novel is actually ambivalent. What can possibly arise from an ambivalent text but
an ambivalent nation? The last part of the analysis will examine the politics behind
The Revolution. Is the concept of Filipinas, and consequently Filipinos, just a fluke?
Delgado makes an astute observation, “[Mata] is set up for tragedy. Given so
much but so little, while inside the ideal world of the academe, he becomes too
smart for his own circumstances; he is forever misplaced” (Apostol, Interview 294).
The ending of The Revolution presents the reader with certain problems especially
in terms of Raymundo Mata as a figure of historical agency. Mata, as character,
belies the problems of a theoretical discourse or a literary text that only finds
legitimacy in a discursive space. If Raymundo Mata cannot find agency outside
textuality, does this imply that The Revolution fails in its project of reimagining or
reinscribing nationhood? Is there no way out of the text that finds itself in a loop
with the same beginnings and no ends? (Apostol, The Revolution 270)
In the “Translator’s Notes” section, Magsalin describes Mata: “The man you will
find in the manuscript has no approximate precursor in the annals of the revolution,
perhaps even of humankind” (Apostol, The Revolution 6). This description leads
one to question the viability of Mata in representing any form of subjugated
identity. Espejo notes, “Raymundo, as a petty-bourgeois Basque-Filipino-(ghostChinese) quadroonish type, from landowning, military lamp-oil-selling castes, is,
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I’m sorry to say, destined to mess up” (Apostol, The Revolution 109). The plurality
of his existence leads one to assume that he exists everywhere and, therefore, also
nowhere. His diffused identity misplaces him and relegates him to the margin and
not because this is the strategic position to be in, but because there is no other
place where he can belong.
Dr. Drake also comments on Mata’s ancestry, “isn’t it both a generic and
symbolic marvel that Mata contains within himself the Enemy, his ancestor Matta,
so that the Self ‘like a vertiginous Russian doll concatenates into a delirium of
recuperated animosities, a precious history of revulsion’ out of which truth erupts?”
(Apostol, The Revolution 24) What Dr. Drake implies is that for Rizal to remain
untainted, there must necessarily exist an Other to whom all things punny and
funny about Rizal can be attributed to; thus, Mata becomes an overdetermined
subject where everything negative is placed. This becomes less a critique of Mata
than an upholding of the irreproachable status of Rizal. Benita Parry writes that
Bhabha, in “representing the productive tensions of its own situation as normative
and desirable, the privileged postcolonial is prone to denigrate affiliations to class
ethnicity” (71). Indeed, the heterogeneous socio-economic class of Mata becomes
a disadvantage; hybridity is not always to be desired.
In addition to Mata’s diverse social class, his function as reader is also problematic.
Mata is the ideal reader, one with a photographic memory as well as an ability
to make connections between what he reads and the prevailing circumstances of
his time. In Entry #40, Magsalin footnotes an exchange between Fr. Gaspar and
Mata where the former says, “Nothing exists without an observer” (Apostol, The
Revolution 237). Indeed, Mata is the ideal observer, keen and sensitive but never
antagonistic, only agonized by his inability to be recognized as a writer. However,
by choosing to elevate Mata to an ideal reader, Apostol removes him from any
subject-position. For Mata to exist in the level of the real or to gain materiality,
he must exist beyond words, but he can’t, “I don’t know what it is about me that I
contain nothing but semen and words” (Apostol, The Revolution 239).
Not only does Mata have a difficulty existing beyond words, but his love
for reading also, ironically, proves to be a deterrent in his accidental role as a
revolutionary. He writes in one of his final entries, “I’d rather fuck a leper than go
to war. That’s just common sense. I know, I know — the Spaniards were our enemies.
But the thing is, I’m just not a killer … Really, I’m just a reader” (Apostol, The
Revolution 244). The anti-confrontational stance of Mata shows his inability to
exist in a space that is material. With the imminent attack of Spanish civil guards at
the Katipunan’s camp, Mata buries himself under a banyan tree and imagines the
tree telling him “Because encryption is a way of burying” (Apostol, The Revolution
256). Apostol, thereby, encrypts or en-crypt Mata and buries him in a textual field
with no hope of escaping.
What perhaps becomes the most difficult part to comprehend in The Revolution
is the mystery surrounding the Mata Papers. Dr. Drake ends her epigraph with a
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petition, “And so I demand in the name of Raymundo Mata: habeas corpus. Give
us the body” (Apostol, The Revolution 277). Towards the end, even the historical
or physical existence of Mata is questioned. Dr. Drake continues, “Or is it possible
that the Translator, the pseudonymous Mimic, has had us in the trap of her infernal
arts all along, and history is only the blind alley of her imagination?” (Apostol,
The Revolution 278) What is implied with the realization that everything was a
creation of the translator? It seems to show that History was still written from the
perspective of the elite and educated class from where Magsalin hails. The fact
that Magsalin sends a postcard stating that everything is true does not guarantee
that it actually is. Does one take the translator for her word? Another critique of
Bhabha by Parry is in the former’s reliance on linguistic difference. She writes, “For
rather than positing the capacity of theories to constitute multiple understandings
of reality, and which in turn inform diverse plans for human action, Bhabha’s
methodology renders this reality dependent on the knowledge produced by critical
discourse.” She continues, “what [Bhabha] offers us is The World according to
the Word” (59). This is precisely what occurs in The Revolution where the world
of Mata becomes dependent and contingent on the word of what could possibly
be an intellectually complicit translator, putting us back right where we started
which is the conundrum of Philippine postcoloniality: the misrepresentation and
underrepresentation of marginalized figures.
Aside from the possibility that Mata was, in fact, the result of an over-active
imagination of a translator, there is also the problem of how The Revolution can
be accessed by readers who do not have a background in literary criticism. The
textual acrobatics of the novel and consequently its deconstructive tendency can
only be fully appreciated by someone who has a profound knowledge of theory and
world literature. Citing Voltaire and Eugene Sué further distances Mata from his
contemporaries. The de-doxifying tendencies of the text will only be effective if one
is able to understand how psychoanalysis and structuralism have been traditionally
conceived. Even Hutcheon recognizes such intellectually complicitous critique
when she says “that here exists a real threat of elitism or lack of access in the use of
parody in any art” (Politics 101). At the end of the day, one can say that though there
is a revisionist tendency in The Revolution, its very methods of doing so not only
remains at the textual level, but also within the narrow confines of the academe.
Even the interpretation and footnotes of Dr. Drake and Magsalin, which supposedly
enlighten the reader, further complicates the text and are sometimes much harder
to understand than the cryptic and “punny” notes of Mata. An example of this
is already present in Entry #1 where Dr. Drake explains Mata’s abecedary game
through psychoanalysis: “globular shapes are classic imago of the pre-mirror
stage … the reference to the father is an obvious (and, to be honest, banal) allusion
to The Father” (Apostol, The Revolution 36). The obvious allusion to “The Father”
is not as common as the psychoanalyst conceives. Here we also see that to a
certain extent there is a specific audience that Apostol has in mind, one that can
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understand the banality or absurd nature of such an allusion. Towards the end of
Entry #2, Magsalin footnotes a juvenile poem in the Balagtas style that Mata wrote,
“I was ashamed to translate his imbecility. However, Raymundo accomplishes what
he sets out to do — illustrate in sweating, panting rhyme the sweating, panting
act — and while the onomatopoeia is barbarous, the achievement is clear” (Apostol,
The Revolution 45). Magsalin’s embarrassment illustrates the distance between the
figure she wishes to represent (or at least make accessible to others) and her own
intellectual background. Here we see that Magsalin and Dr. Drake’s attempt at
allowing Mata to speak (even going to the extreme of saying “shh!” to Espejo) is
merely an act of tokenization, an empty often politically correct gesture, as it were.
Dr. Drake, in particular, gains psychoanalytical legitimacy in Mata; she is the least
critical of Mata. However, her reading of Mata is always reduced to the level of self,
determined by his search for his father.
The project of The Revolution is to poke fun at History and thereby make
room for histories, yet no histories really emerge. The book is a series of deadends, malapropisms of the tongue, jokes upon jokes that destroy/annihilate, but
do not create or recoup. Kumkum Sangari writes, “The writing that emerges
from this [ambivalent] position, however critical it may be of colonial discourses,
gloomily disempowers the ‘nation’ as an enabling idea and relocates the impulses
for change as everywhere and nowhere” (183). Indeed, what Apostol has shown
in The Revolution is the ease by which one can imagine an alternative nation and
how easily one can fall into the trap of a continuous inscribing of a nation. How
this nation can emerge from textuality remains unanswered. Like the specter of
Philippines in Rizal’s two novels, the Filipinas of Apostol remains a far-flung albeit
extremely attractive ideal.
Conclusion
Gina Apostol’s The Revolution makes a compelling case for the contingency of
historiography. As a postcolonial text, it imagines a nation built upon the reemergence of marginalized voices and a revisioning of History. The novel, in
itself, performs the nation at the moment of its production through the critics’
interpretation of Mata as well as their reading of each other. Present in all her
characters especially Father Gaspar, Tio U., and Matandang Leon are the symptoms
of historical silencing. However, by making these figures peripheral to Mata,
Apostol is unable to explore the possibility of such figures as agents for revisioning
History. Furthermore, the dialogic nature of the text simultaneously asserts and
effaces Filipino identity. If Rizal creates Mata in order to write Makamisa, who is
actually the comic character? Is the joke aimed at Rizal or at Mata?
Such conundrums and contradictions are never resolved in the novel precisely
because Apostol’s method is primarily deconstructivist. In the face of Bhabha’s
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formation of postcolonial theory, Apostol’s “playful” approach finds legitimacy.
On the level of the theoretical and the ideal, The Revolution does as expected of
it. There are space-clearing gestures, an inter-mingling of voices, and the shift
from the pedagogical to the performative. However, in applying Parry’s materialist
critique, one realizes that it is not enough to remain in the realm of textuality and
discursivity. Mata as a character is problematic not because he fails to represent
subjugated identities, but because one cannot conceive of a Mata outside the
novel. The Revolution is symptomatic of the innate problems that plague Philippine
postcoloniality. The distance between the deconstructivist approach of Bhabha
and the material inclinations of Parry seem to suggest the impossibility of a
reconciliation. In light of this, how should postcolonialisim in the Philippines be
studied and written?
The Revolution shows the necessity of a mediated and a critically-anxious
position in the discourse of postcoloniality. It is not enough that free-play occurs
within the text, but at the same time, to focus solely on material conditions of
production will result in problems of economic determinism. Postcolonial studies
in the Philippines should not be relegated to an either/or position of material or
discursive scholarship. Philippine postcolonial discourse must straddle the lines of
the conditions of productions and discursive formations. Such an endeavor does
not have a fixed methodology, but the questions that The Revolution raise is a firm
starting point.
It should be concluded that Apostol’s The Revolution has cleared the way towards
a more refined understanding of historiography, and from there we must pursue
a new kind of investigative practice. The difficulties inherent in reading about the
past and writing about it should not be a detriment towards a search for an escape
from a debilitating colonialist system of knowledge. Not only should we look at
History from a new perspective, but see theory in all its (im)possibilities.
Works Cited
Agoncillo, Teodoro. History of the Filipino People. 8th ed. Quezon City: Garotech, 1990.
Print.
Anderson, Benedict. “Cultural Roots.” Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. London: Verso, 2006. Print.
Apostol, Gina. The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. Pasig City: Anvil, 2009.
Print.
——— . “Interview with Gina Apostol.” Interview by Daryll Delgado. Kritika Kultura 15
(2010): 284–96. Web. 5 July 2011.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Oxon: Routledge, 1994. Print.
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——— . Introduction. Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London: Routledge,
1990. 1–7. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”
Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Oxon: Routledge, 2001. 351–70. Print.
Hau, Caroline S. “Literature and History.” Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and
the Nation, 1946–1980. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila UP , 2000. 94–132. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
——— . “Historiograhic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertexts of History.”
Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Eds. P. O’Donnell and Robert
Con Davis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP , 1989. 3–32. Print.
Laurel, R. Kwan. “A Hundred Years after the Noli: The Three Centennial Novels in
English.” Philippine Studies 51 (2003): 599–643. Print.
Ocampo, Ambeth. The Search for Rizal’s Third Novel Makamisa. Quezon City: Anvil,
1992. Print.
Parry, Benita. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. Oxon: Routledge, 2004.
Print.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print.
Sangari, Kumkum. “The Politics of the Possible.” Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 157–86.
JSTOR . Web. 3 Feb. 2012.
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New Scholars Forum
Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera
John Barth’s Death-Defying
Art of Writing
Farideh Pourgiv
Shiraz University, Iran
fpourgiv@rose.shirazu.ac.ir
Mahsa Hashemi
Shiraz University, Iran
sharian21@yahoo.ca
Abstract
This study seeks to demonstrate the trend and development of Barth’s concept of writing and
authorial presence, and the emphasis that Barth puts on the very act of narration/writing,
as a means of deferring death and entitling writing as the art that defeats death. As the
ultimate storyteller of the postmodern dispensation, John Barth has achieved prominence
in his treatment of the contemporary man’s eternal engagement with their intuition of a
hovering ultimacy and death, and the strategies of survival that his characters adopt in
order to defy the diminishing of the self. He creates characters who are either literally
writers or by the very nature of their existence are expected to write the story of their
lives. These characters need to narrate themselves in order to avoid their disappearance
into nothingness. Those who succeed in narrating themselves manage to achieve, not
immortality, but existence, even if it is on the pages of books; those who fail to do so would
eventually fall off the edges of the narrative into the void surrounding the fictional level of
reality. The entire world, in Barth’s rendering, is reduced to an act of narration. Narrative
functions as a means of survival.
Keywords
author, metafiction, narration
About the Authors
Farideh Pourgiv is Professor of English Literature in the Faculty of Literature and
Humanities, Shiraz University, Iran. Her areas of interest and research are women’s studies,
children’s literature, and comparative literature.
Mahsahashemi is an English literature PhD candidate at the Department of Foreign
Languages and Linguistics, Shiraz University, Iran..
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“Telling stories for a living is surely one of the strangest of all jobs. It is a process
of controlled madness.” (Broderick 101)
In this paper , John Barth’s concept of writing and authorial presence, and the
emphasis that he puts on the very act of narration/writing as a means of deferring
death, and entitling writing as the art that defeats death, is discussed with emphasis
on Barth’s first novel The Floating Opera (1956). It is argued that the autotelic act
of writing/narrating refutes the decentered status of the author; in his fiction
Barth emphasizes the act of narrating and equates it with existence. Thus narrative
becomes a means of survival.
The sixties and later decades in America were “transforming” periods in
American art and literature: “techniques grew random, styles mixed and merged,
[and] methods became increasingly provisional” (Bradbury 65). Postmodernism,
as the dominant mode of production and interpretation, designates a rather allinclusive stance in arts and letters concentrating primarily on the sense of loss,
alienation, confusion, and ultimacy in the face of a chaotic universe. Susan Strehle
touches upon the fact that Newtonian physics perpetuates “an inertial frame of
reference, a nonearthly locus where its laws were fully valid” (128), and that in his
Principles Newton rather defines the primary concepts of time, space, and motion
as follows:
Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from itself, and from its
own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external. Absolute space,
in its own nature, without relation to anything external remains always similar
and immovable. Absolute motion is the translation of a body from one absolute
space into another. (qtd. in Strehle 128–29)
Yet, the absolutes are undermined and unreliable, challenging any form
of certainty concerning the foundations of the universe. It is no longer the age
of unchangeable backgrounds and a cosmos “ticked out by the measure of one
universal clock” (Strehle 129). It is the new era of Einstein’s theory of Relativity and
Heisenberg’s theory of Uncertainty where the prevalent and reassuring beliefs in
the reliability of grand narratives and the major frames of reference have gradually
diminished. The implication of this, with regard to postmodernist fiction, is that the
relativity of all frames of reference irrecoverably results in a sense of ultimacy and
the disappearance of authorial omniscience, individuality, and any inherent sense
of closure. In such an irresolute cosmos, Lacan’s “notion of the loss of the subject
and all the alienations of self-consciousness” (Bowen 70) imply the diminishing of
the individual’s sense of selfhood and, at the most basic level, of the finitude of their
existence in a world in which the dominant (postmodern) discourse “speaks man
rather than the reverse” (70). What prevails in such an atmosphere is a deep sense
of “existential despair, a sense of man at road’s end, with nowhere to go. Morally
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paralyzed, on the verge of suicide,” the individuals have “to either put themselves in
motion or to force death to give way to life” (Lehan 172).
Social incongruities and dissonances, as well as the prevalent epistemological
and ontological uncertainties, stimulate the sense of finality, futility, pointlessness,
and disjunction. The postmodern condition gives birth and feeds off such nihilistic
existentialism. The individual’s awareness of death can set them to think about
“mortality and devising strategies for coping with their consciousness” (Leclair
6). Such concept of death and doom implicates “a contractive end, or a final and
ultimate denial of the future rather than a way to some futurity or immortality” (7).
As a premier medium of postmodern representation, fictional narratives
dubbed as postmodern in their status, frame of reference, epistemology, and
ontology portray an engaging and intriguing play of death, and the awareness of
the characters of their impending doom inform the inclusive thematic structures of
these narratives. In fact, it is in their characters’ involvement with their inescapable
and preordained death that such fiction prospers.
Marjorie Worthington believes that “in the face of postmodern indeterminacy,
interpretive authority no longer resides with authors, and singularity of meaning
no longer exists” (1). In such fiction, as Gordon Slethaug puts it, the equation that
relates time and space parameters constructs a space resembling the space defined
by a Môbius strip, “a nonlocus, a hole, a loss, the absence of a center or subject, a
labyrinth, a universe of discourse when an infinite number of sign substitutions
come into play, where nothing contains everything, and when a gap constitutes
the subject” (138). Reality and the search for identity can be as illusive, misguiding
and chimerical as the art of narration itself. As “the premier storyteller of the
postmodern dispensation” (Broderick 101), John Barth stands out among such great
names as Pynchon, Barthelme, Vonnegut, Nabokov, and Calvino in his treatment
of the contemporary man’s eternal engagement with their intuition of a hovering
ultimacy and death, and the maneuvers and strategies of survival that his fictional
characters adopt in order to defy the diminishing of the self. It is the very essential
fact of survival and sustainability that they aim at.
Nearly six decades ago, John Barth published his first novel, The Floating Opera
(1956), and thus began the weaving of the narrative spell that has enchanted readers
ever since in works like The End of the Road (1958), The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles
Goat-Boy (1966), Lost in the Funhouse (1968), Chimera (1972), Sabbatical (1982),
The Tidewater Tales (1987), Where Three Roads Meet (2005), The Development
(2008), and Every Third Thought (2011). John Barth’s fiction and character are as
controversial as the kind of criticism that has been written on him. He has been
diversely described as a nihilist, a black humorist, a fabulist, and since the mid1950s, a postmodernist throughout his long and proliferating career as a fiction
writer and literary theorist. His works, as various and colorful as they are, have
earned him a distinguished status as a professional and highly influential writer
and literary theoretician in the way they consciously and intentionally break the
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familiar grounds of narrative tradition and fiction writing while rooting themselves
in the literature of the past. What distinguishes Barth from his fellow writers is
the fact that in the fantasy land of his fiction, he is concerned not only with what
ultimately befalls his characters, but also with the fate of Barth the author. Thus, in
confronting the Barthesian death-of-the-author epidemic, he struggles to maintain
the primacy of authorial selfhood and prominence, and “instead of challenging the
primacy of authorship,” his “metafictional experiments serve to cement the author
into a position of authority over the text” (Worthington 1). Living in the postmodern
era and being determinedly productive narrative-wise, Barth addresses, in his
fictions and non-fictions, the contemporary concern with the hovering sense of
end and death; this vision of the end is extremely functional in his rendering of the
narratives of characters trapped in a void:
In this post-modern, post-historic wilderness of minds, tethers and ends … the
end isn’t near, it’s already upon us; or worse, may long ago have pulverized us
to powder and flakes without our knowledge. Like the English Puritan Thomas
Beverly, who, having set the date of the Apocalypse for 1697, published a book
in 1698 saying that the world had ended on schedule but no one had noticed it.
(Rother 23)
Critics of Barth primarily focus on his works as belonging to the trend of
postmodernism and thus contemplate upon the manner through which he employs
his metafictional, self-reflexive techniques, his metafictional and intertextual
strategies of narration, or the existentialism prevalent in his early fiction. The
road not taken in the study of John Barth’s oeuvre is divining the way he devises
a contradictory process of apotheosis and kenosis in the body of his works
through metafictionality and intertextuality in order to make one single point: that
narration (as an all-inclusive act encompassing writing in its most basic form) per
se, par excellence, is the one and only means of survival in an age of uncertainties,
disjunctions, and in the face of the ubiquitous sense of ultimacy and doom. He is
the writer of the age which Ronald Sukenick labels as post-realistic, where all the
former grand narratives are discredited, where
[a]ll of these absolutes have become absolutely problematic. The contemporary
writer — the writer who is acutely in touch with the life of which he is a part — is
forced to start from the scratch: Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist,
personality doesn’t exist. God was the omniscient author, but he died; now, no
one knows the plot and since our reality lacks the sanction of a creator, there’s
no guarantee as to the authenticity of the received version. (qtd. in Klinkowitz
xvi–xvii)
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On the fictional level, Barth creates characters who are either literally writers/
artists or by the very nature of their existence are expected to write out the story of
their lives. From the early novel of 1956, The Floating Opera, his fictional characters
need to assert themselves, to give voice to their existence, to narrate themselves in
order to avoid or at least defer their disappearance into nothingness, death. Those
who succeed in narrating themselves manage to achieve, not immortality, but
existence, even if it is on the pages of books; those who fail to do so or fail to do so
properly would eventually and in due course fall off the edges of the narrative into
the void which surrounds the fictional level of reality.
What is more, Barth, who is by temperament a narrative addict, seeks to
fictionalize his own character in order to immortalize himself in the written
word. In almost all of his narratives, there is a version of Barth moving in and out,
socializing with his fictive characters since “a text that thematizes a self-conscious
awareness of the processes of its own construction unavoidably thematizes the
importance of its constructor” (Worthington 1). Apart from the fact that in so
doing, he constantly reminds the readers, his characters, and himself that he exists,
and thus the author is not dead after all, he paradoxically questions his authority as
the author. On the level of fiction, he assigns himself a god-like status and against
all the Barthesian claims of the death of the author we observe the apotheosis of
Barth the author. However, on a metafictional level, he dramatizes himself as a
character similar to others; we observe the kenosis of the author. The presence of
multiple narrative voices and the inherent Bakhtinian dialogism of Barth’s works
defy the role of an all-omniscient author minimizing the role of the writer in the
process of the book to a similar and equal entity as that of the other narrators in the
novel. The dichotomy, nevertheless, is never resolved, and the interface where both
stances reside is in fact the narrative of the author. He is simultaneously the puppet
and the puppeteer, as the dichotomy is deconstructed and overthrown. Neither has
primacy and authority over the other. As such, he is the postmodern puppet master
pulling the strings of his characters as his own strings are being pulled by unknown
hands. The entire world, in Barth’s rendering, is reduced to a narrative, an act of
narration; it can be fabricated as it is desired by any narrator who wishes so.
Narrative and writing, therefore, function as means of survival. In Barth’s fiction,
characters who are authors of their lives and have the ability to narrate themselves
(i.e., capable of putting themselves in words) have the chance of survival even if it
is on a purely fictional and narrative level. Unlike Pirandello’s characters who seek
to have a life on the ontological level of reality, these characters are in search of
life on the ontology of words and narratives. They postpone the hovering sense of
ultimacy through their narration as Barth’s all-time muse, Scheherazade, manages
to postpone death through her nightly storytelling. According to Marzolph, based
on folklore theory, the tales, “whether written down or orally performed — gain
their meaning in the individual performance” (47), and this is what Barth aims
at achieving: to give each character a chance of ascribing meaning to their lives
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through narrating the self. Postmodern fiction entails a sense of loss, it is all about
the loss of whatever is valuable and dear, and “the ultimate loss, the loss of self ”
(Barth, qtd. in Reilly 1). Thus, one can be all lost in eternity of words in a universe
which is brimming over its edges. Barth uses his narratives and the very act of
writing as a guarantee of his existence in the postmodern era of disappearances.
Stories are narrated in order to re-construct and restore a sense of self that has been
questioned, undermined, and nearly wiped away. He manages to draw attention to
“the act of the designer in the very ingenuity of the fabulation” (Scholes 10). And it is
writing which, for Barth and in his fiction, is “promoted to the rank of art to defeat
death” (Couturier 5).
In The Friday Book, Barth calls The Floating Opera “a nihilist comedy” (134).
The novel is, indeed, a narrative about death and how death impinges upon
the consciousness of the narrator/protagonist of the story, Todd Andrews, an
alienated figure, as he keeps an account of his life in what the reader will ultimately
understand to be a letter to his dead father and not so much to the reader after
all. As the story starts, one cannot but notice the resemblance that it carries
with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway in the way they all
picture narrators who set their minds to share with their readers a significant and
life-changing day in their lives, and the way their accounts of that single day are
interrupted by flashbacks and foreshadowing as the protagonists attempt to reach
an understanding of their provisional existence. Yet, Todd manipulates his readers.
As the progenitor of Barth’s author/characters, Todd Andrews, the successful lawyer
from Cambridge, Maryland, practices what would later be preached by Barth in his
(in-)famous essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967); Todd Andrews makes his
own sense of ultimacy the proper subject matter for his narrative.
More than any other of Barth’s protagonists, Todd Andrews deals with the
concept of death. Death is a central, or rather the central, focus in this novel, and its
centrality shapes the protagonist/narrator’s character, the “strategies of selfhood”
(Leclair 5) that he adopts (self-expression through the very act of writing) and the
technique that he applies in narrating his story. From the very beginning of his
narrative, Todd Andrews associates his own existence and identity with death as
he confides in the reader that:
So. Todd Andrews is my name. You can spell it with one or two d’s; … I almost
warned you against the single-d spelling, for fear you’d say, “Tod is German
for death; perhaps the name is symbolic.” I myself use two d’s, partly in order to
avoid that symbolism. But you see, I ended by not warning you at all, and that’s
because it just occurred to me that the double-d Todd is symbolic, too, and
accurately so. Tod is death, and this book hasn’t much to do with death; Todd
is almost Tod — that is, almost death–and this book, if it gets written, has very
much to do with almost-death. (The Floating Opera 3)
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Death forces itself upon him in various guises: Todd’s killing in cold blood
and out of fear of the German soldier in the Argonne Forest while he fought in
World War I, his father’s suicide after he goes bankrupt in the Market Crash of
1929, Harrison Mack’s father’s death, Harrison’s thought of committing suicide, his
elderly fellow boarders at the hotel where he resides embodying gradual death, and
above all his own fatal heart condition which might stop at any given moment, “this
fact — that having begun this sentence, I may not live to write its end … that having
slumbered, I may never wake, or having waked, may never living sleep — this for
thirty-five years has been the condition of my existence, the great fact of my life”
(The Floating Opera 49). The thought of death “as a possibility” (Leclair 6), the great
fact of his life, makes him think about his mortality and as it is often the case in
nihilistic fictions, it does not motivate him to live a life of virtuosity in the hope of
a promised salvation in the other world.
He devises strategies, instead, to cope with this awareness about his own
impending death, a result of his faulty heart: “I used to have (probably still have)
a kind of subacute bacteriological carditis, with a special complication … what
that means that any day I may fall quickly dead, without warning — perhaps before
I complete this sentence, perhaps twenty years from now” (The Floating Opera
5). He writes and writes and keeps baskets full of his notes in the (unconscious)
hope that one day they will lead him to some answers regarding his father’s suicide
or his own hanging and uncertain situation. He resorts to narration in order to
make sense of the incomprehensible and chaotic world within and outside him,
attempting to bestow order upon it through the power of his words as he assumes
authority through narration. He constructs himself and the world around him
through his fiction. As Barth believes, “art is long, in its aggregate anyhow, and
life short” (Further Fridays 75). With death a breath away, Todd finds a refuge
in the art of storytelling since it restores a sense of purpose and control. He can
assume, within the premise of his created universe, a god-like status. He starts his
narrative in medias res, thus manipulating his readers’ direction through his nonlinear fiction, speaking as one who has the knowledge of the past and future of his
narrative, sparing it upon his readers as he desires, self-consciously highlighting
his own digressive patterns. He forewarns his readers, “where were we? I was going
to comment on the significance of the viz. I used earlier, was I? Or explain my
‘piano-tuning’ metaphor? Or my weak heart? God heavens, how does one write a
novel!” (TheFloating Opera 2)
Death is a perpetual process to Todd Andrews; it is “the ultimate denial” (Leclair
7) of his future. It is the prominent element in his provisional existence. And it is this
bleak perspective of his existence that determines the shrewd manner by which he
avoids responsibility or commitment regarding having what could be called a family
life or normal romantic relationship, and also eschewing integrity portrayed in the
way he pays for his hotel room every day and tries to stay emotionally detached
from those around him like Jane and Harrison Mack and even Jeanine who might
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be his daughter after all. It is this attitude that leads him to treat life as fiction. He
creates fictional masks of a rake, a saint, a cynic. Thus, death is not the end for
Todd; it is rather the cause, the motivational factor that pushes him forward toward
the fictional end now that all values are gone: “To hell with the brotherhood of
man!” Social justice is “impossible to achieve, irrelevant if achieved” (The Floating
Opera 23). The face behind all these masks is that of a storyteller.
That is why Todd sets out to create a fictional universe in which he creates
layers upon layers of narrative, moving back and forth in time and avoiding any
conventional order of linearity. Away with the “gesture of eternity,” it is all a
“gesture of temporality” (The Floating Opera 51). Todd the narrator’s addressing of
his readers in a rather humorous way might be interpreted as Todd the existential,
solitary being, reaching his hand to find a companion. Yet, more truly, it could be
a strategy for the manipulation of readers, to involve them as much as possible
within the labyrinth that he calls his life story. It is best seen in the chapter “Calliope
Music” in which he presents the reader with two versions for the beginning of
his chapter, “in two voices” (TheFloating Opera 172), thus creating alternative
possibilities, alternative worlds of words simultaneously running parallel, leaving
the reader more befuddled as which direction to take. As the author-surrogate,
Todd tells his story since “of what one can’t make sense, one may make art” (Further
Fridays 109).
Barth’s parodying the process of writing proper, the genre, as well as other literary
techniques is indicative of his belief in the need for making the ultimacies of time
the proper subject of his art. In his metafictional novel, The Floating Opera, he deals
with the exhaustion so native to his time both in the way he toys with the process
of writing in which he makes Todd Andrews the narrator a parody of authorship
by pretending to be a novice, amateur writer (Barth the novice writer penning his
first novel?), and thus criticizing and undermining the cliché techniques when he
rambles on and on about his reason for writing and continuous digressions. Also,
by centralizing death and making it the premier motive and raison d’être, or rather,
raison de coeur of his central character, he pictures the contemporary sense of loss
and demise. In a Poe-like, tell-tale heart fashion, Todd indulges in his confessional
tale of how he decides to commit (mass) suicide, blowing up the showboat with
all those on board and how, godlike and indifferent, he lets go of his plan. It is as if
he is throwing off dices deciding for the life of his fellow passengers as well as his
readers.
What characterizes Barth’s trend of fiction writing, or better to say, what makes
fiction and the very act of writing so singular and distinctive for him, is the inherent
and crucial emphasis that Barth puts on the art of narration/writing as a means
of deferring death and demise, and entitling writing as the art that defeats death
and disappearance, the very predicament that the individual deals with in the
framework of the postmodern condition. For Todd, incapable of logically justifying
his father’s suicide, and in the face of his imminent death, the only means left which
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can help him possess a sense of self is through narration. Writing and narration
possess a therapeutic essence and function since they represent the organized
process of creating a Welt where the storyteller restores his control and is the one
who determines which approach should be taken by the audience/reader. Joseph
Francese believes that in fictional narratives, “unable to know the world, the author
forfeits the right to impose meaning on the text” (49). Critics such as Federman
and Francese argue that since the author has forfeited his right to manipulate the
organization and execution of order in the text, “the center of gravity supposedly
shifts from the producer to the consumer of the text” (49).
Not that any of the readings of the text would be privileged over another, but
the opposite is true in the case of John Barth and his fiction, as in his narratives
the author/writer still occupies the position of omniscience that authors have long
held. In fact, the author is after a reaffirmation of his selfhood and authority within
the constructed zone of his fiction and through the art of narrative proper; this is as
much ontological certainty as possible that he can hope to attain. The autotelic act of
writing and narrating (encompassing heterotelic functions) refutes the decentered
status of the author. This is best seen in the central metaphor of the novel that is the
image of the floating opera. Todd explains early in his narrative that he had always
had the idea of building a showboat on board of which a play could be performed;
the audience would be sitting along the banks of the river as the boat constantly
moves back and forth. What the audience would grasp would be glimpses of the
play; “to fill in the gaps they’d have to use their imaginations, or ask more attentive
neighbors or hear the word passed along from upriver or downriver” (The Floating
Opera 7). Here, Todd (the author-surrogate) takes control of his own metaphor,
playing the role of his readers’ imagination, indirectly and tacitly telling them what
to expect. And he states that he does not care about anything but his own pleasure
of telling the story: “perhaps I would expire before ending it [the story]; perhaps the
task was endless, like its fellows. No matter. Even if I died before ending my cigar, I
had all the time there was” (The Floating Opera 252). As such, the fiction holds up
the mirror not to reality but to the reality as Todd/Barth constructs and envisions.
This is how Barth manages to undermine his own status through overthrowing
the hierarchical dyad of the death/life of the author, though he still manages to
ascribe primacy to the narrating figure, be it a character or the author, and leaves
the consumer, the reader, on a lower rung of the ladder. Thus, one can follow the
paradoxical process of simultaneous apotheosis and kenosis that Barth takes
upon himself to portray and display in his fiction through his solid and constant
emphasis on the act of narrating and equating of narrating with existence. Although
attributing human characteristics to Todd (such as his heart condition, occasional
and developmental impotence, clubbed fingers, and his description of his five
emotional encounters in life) lowers the status of the author figure, assigning
a rank as that of other fictional characters, he nevertheless occupies the divine
position of a creator much higher than that of the reader which is a fabrication
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of the author. In Damien Broderick’s words, “telling stories for a living is surely
one of the strangest of all jobs. It is a process of controlled madness” (101), and
John Barth risks this madness in search of a restored sense of self through this
strangest of all jobs in order to avoid “cosmopsis,” defined by himself as the time
“when an individual becomes overwhelmed with the macrocosm of the world and
thus realizes the insignificance and futility of one’s own life” (qtd. in Martin 34).
In such a situation, in Barth’s own words, narration and storytelling are equatable
with “being humanely alive” (112).
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