By Joel David,
The FilAm
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Source: http://thefilam.net/archives/14902
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Throughout the shifts and changes in our
culture in the past decades, Nora Aunor has managed to produce riveting,
complex performances. Take a look back on this in light of developments
regarding her exclusion in the final list of National Artists
Of whether Nora Cabaltera Villamayor,
legally a senior citizen of the Philippines and permanent resident of the U.S.,
is an accomplished artist there can be no doubt. One might inspect the record
of her multimedia accomplishments – as recording artist, television performer,
stage actress, concert act, and film producer and thespian – and concede that
she may have excelled in many, if not most, of these areas; one might even be a
serious observer of any of these fields of endeavor (as I have been) and assert
that no one else comes close, although many certainly aspire to her level of
achievement.
Not
surprisingly, the rejection by
President Benigno Aquino III of the National Commission for Culture and the
Arts’s endorsement of Aunor has occasioned a number of impassioned and
articulate responses, starting with social networks, by now filtering through
mass media, and inevitably destined to land in scholarly discussions, with the
Philippines’s own major indexed humanities journal, Kritika Kultura of Ateneo
de Manila University, slated to publish a special section early next year
devoted to her. (Personal disclosure: I am in charge of this specific project,
as forum editor.)
The
nature of the reactions should not surprise anyone attuned to Philippine
popular culture: The late-1960s working-class devotees who demanded for, and
got, the teen idols they wanted have since grown along with them, many
gentrifying and positioned in various capacities all over the globe.
It
would have been instructive for the president’s culture team to have looked
into the origin of what National Artist for Literature and Magsaysay Awardee
Nick Joaquin described as a phenomenon, in one of his landmark journalism
articles. For way before the 1986 middle-class people-power revolt that
restored the oligarchy that Aquino effectively represents, an earlier, limited,
though genuinely working-class form of people power, comprising mostly rural
migrants working as factory and domestic labor, discovered the pleasures of
pop-culture consumerism and ignored the dictates of the then-already enfeebled
studio system of the so-called First Golden Age of Philippine cinema.
Rather
than flock to the presentations of the typical European-featured and
bourgeoisified talents then still being insistently launched by the major
studios, the new urbanites, still capable of earning disposable income without
seeking overseas employment, used their peso-votes to signify what types of
idols they preferred.
Today’s
intellectuals replicate an error of historical interpretation when they
position Aunor and her teen-star rival, Vilma Santos, as belonging to the
native-vs.-mestizo division that observers during that time believed was at
play: although Santos first emerged as a child star during the waning years of
the Golden Age, her fairness did not conform to the anti-Asian requisites of
the time; grown-ups with distinctly Oriental features would have been relegated
to serious secondary roles as male villains or femmes fatales or, at best,
comic roles (where, instructively, the biggest star, Dolphy, had to suppress
his Chinese surname).
Hence
the masses’ new choices represented iconographies long withheld by the
elite-controlled studio system, with the two biggest stars no longer male, and
either morena or chinita (as their types used to be termed). By the arrival of
the 1970s, the more Western-looking types accommodated this new demand for
transformative appearances by exploring unusual options, including the
pornography genre now remembered as bomba – also a reference to then-emerging
student and labor unrest.
Since
then this social experiment in discovering new types of media performers for
popular consumption has either ended or changed, depending on what perspective
one opts to adopt. East Asian-type candidates have managed to swing the door
wide open, thanks to the example initiated by Santos and followed through by
the middle-brow Chinoy-ethnocentric efforts of Philippine cinema’s most
successful producer, Lily Yu Monteverde. But proof that this progressive window
has long slammed shut lies in the fact that no other brown-skinned female star
has emerged since Aunor.
To
confound matters for the race- and class-conscious arbiters of social
acceptability, Aunor’s Otherness was too close for comfort to her mass
adulators’ condition – i.e., like them she was born poor and far from the capital
city, enduring the then-standard harsh treatment reserved for those perceived
as unable to call on socially influential contacts for protection, cursed with
disproportionate ambition and fated to rely on wit, talent, and industry to
attain her dreams. Not surprisingly, for the period of what might count as her
on-the-job internship, she displayed an earnest studiousness, carefully
enunciating her song lyrics and delivering over-rehearsed renditions of even
the most casual lines of dialogue and investing whatever spare funds she had in
art or period film projects that baffled her fans and accounted for her
occasional impoverishment (by movie-star standards).
Nevertheless,
when her artistic maturity had peaked, roughly toward the close of the 1970s,
the fruits of such unmatched discipline and struggle went on glorious display
and earned her an entirely new generation of followers, many of them
academically trained in cultural and media appreciation. I remember suspecting
her then of finagling her performance record by paying attention to only her
serious projects (as other serious performers and directors were wont to do),
and watching the several potboilers she appeared in during her many periods of
financial difficulty: to my amazement, each one, without exception, was stamped
with a level of expertise that performing arts majors would have killed for.
This
background also helps explain her disdain for the trappings of social
respectability, having realized (as the most serious artists do) that the
widest range of experiential possibilities can always be harnessed in the
service of interpretive craft. Small wonder that when she had the assurance of
serious coverage during her current career resurgence, she spelled it out for
the world, without apologies: chemical dependencies, multiple (including
same-sex) partners, neuroses and anxieties, an inexplicable wanderlust, regret
in the innocence of the now-lost past and hope in the uncertainties of the
future. It was a source of amusement for me to see her fans scrambling to
rationalize her statements, with a few of them abandoning their devotion to her
because of their fundamentalist religious beliefs.
Less
amusing was the spectacle of a supposedly enlightened presidential
administration decreeing, in effect, that it did not want to be represented by
such a powerfully transgressive figure. Its ignorance of the artistic
temperament gets exposed when we look up the list of names who had already made
it to the ranks of the country’s officially endorsed masters and see that the
best among them had made use of similar methods of exploring truths and
realities. The kind of sensibility that counts a public record like Aunor’s as
contaminated by her less-than-“exemplary” lifestyle encourages medieval
institutions like the Catholic Church to attempt a takeover of official
cultural functions; worse, it plays into the dangerous oligarchic fantasy that
a commodified, infantile, unexceptional mass culture is the perfectly
satisfactory consequence of a wholesome moral existence.
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Joel David is Professor for Cultural
Studies at Inha University in Incheon, Korea. He was founding Director of the
University of the Philippines Film Institute and maintains an archival blog at Amauteurish.com.
