Campos / Ghostly Allegories 611 GHOSTLY ALLEGORIES: HAUNTING AS CONSTITUTION OF PHILIPPINE (TRANS) NATIONAL (CINEMA) HISTORY Patrick Campos University of the Philippines Film Institute [email protected] Abstract By reading through the con–texts of Yam Laranas’s The Echo (2008) and Kelvin Tong’s The Maid (2005), the essay considers three Filipino genres that ironically gathered momentum at the time of the Philippine film industry’s crisis and decline in the 1990s up to the 2000s – the historical drama, the OFW (overseas Filipino worker) film, and horror. In the process, the essay constitutes an alternative map of Philippine cinema premised on inter-national transactions across states and film industries, on the one hand, and on the nodal and spectral bodies of Filipinas that network these states and industries, on the other hand. Dwelling on multiform hauntings, it ultimately focuses on how nations/cinemas – through (de)localized genres – are constituted and called into account by specters of (cinema) histories. Keywords Philippine cinema, Singapore cinema, transnational cinema, Asian horror, OFW film About the Author Patrick Campos is Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines Film Institute. He is currently Director of the Office of Extension and External Relations of the College of Mass Communication, University of the Philippines, Diliman, where he previously served as College Secretary. Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –643 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net> Campos / Ghostly Allegories 612 I came here to see the world. I ended up looking into the saddest and darkest part of the human heart. Here my journey ends. I am finally going back. And so is another girl who has been away from home for a long, long time. -Rosa Dimaano in The Maid The willingness to follow ghosts, neither to memorialize nor to slay, but to follow where they lead, in the present, head turned backwards and forwards at the same time. To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. That is its Utopian grace: to encourage a steely sorrow laced with delight for what we lost that we never had; to long for the insight of that moment in which we recognize, as in Benjamin’s profane illumination, that it could have been and can be otherwise. -Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters Haunting and the Fantastic By reading particular cinematic texts alongside their historical, discursive, and fictive con–texts, the essay aims to bring a polysemic notion of “Philippine cinema” into dialogue with other conceptions of cinematic formation and to map out the multifaceted but interconnected fantasies that their dialectics embody. I reflect upon two films, in particular The Echo (Yam Laranas, USA, 2008) and The Maid (Kelvin Tong, Singapore, 2005), both of which occasion the problematization of the interrelated ideas of the “national” and the “trans-national” as they shed light, or cast their shadows, on Philippine (film) history. By reading “con–texts,” I mean to signify a cleft in the conventional configuration of text/context.1 I read as texts, and not just as backdrops, the critical and popular registers of the perceived place of the films in the national-transnational continuum of cinematic formation. More important, I read as texts intimations of inter-national transactions across states and industries premised, on the one hand, on the globalization of cinema and, on the other hand, on the nodal and spectral bodies of Filipinas that network these cinematic texts and their con–texts. By constituting a Philippine cinema imaginary through films produced outside of the Philippines, I acknowledge the tactical necessity of the shift of focus in film studies from the national to the transnational as a locus for inquiring about cinema. Such a shift in critical paradigm is able to account for the flow of multi- and inter-national capital, the deregulation of markets and creation of “alternative Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –643 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net> Campos / Ghostly Allegories 613 economies,” the interpenetration of communication networks across cultures, and the increased mobility of “ghost labor” and bodies across territories (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff) – all of which have transformed the processes, practices, and perceptions of cinema and nation. But the need to maintain “nation” as a unit of political, economic, and cultural differentiation remains urgent, precisely because it is always caught in conceptual slippages – such as, trans-national, inter-national, sub-national, post-national, multi-national, cosmopolitan, global, world, planetary, scalar, regional, diasporic, ethnic, inter-cultural, multi-cultural, colonial, neo-colonial, and post-colonial – that seek to account for the complex systems that operate historically within, through, between, and above individual nations, ultimately affecting individual national subjects (cf. Hjort and MacKenzie). In both the cultural articulations and the institutional practices that materialize cinema, there remains, therefore, an ironic but pressing need to sustain the phenomenon of nation against global perils that also sustain it (cf. Berry). As I hope to show, the markers of nationality in certain configurations of transnational films alert us to the ambivalent meanings and conflictive uses of nation. My critical project is buttressed by Bliss Cua Lim’s thoroughgoing deployment of “fantastic cinema” as ontological and postcolonial critique of “modern homogeneous time,” which reduces history to the imperial function of “progress” (43-95). I return time and again to her notions of the spectrality of time as crystallized by ghost films (149-89) and the ghostliness of genre as conventionalized by the Hollywood remakes of “Asian” horror films (190-244) in my own analyses of the texts and con– texts of Laranas and Tong. The relationship between the sections that follow below are con–textual and spectral as well, rather than merely linear and sequential; they are unrelated, in one sense, but they occupy the space of comingling ghostly allegories that render Philippine (trans)national cinema perceptible. Drawing upon Lim’s insights, ultimately, I focus on how nations/cinemas can be constituted and called to account by the specters of (cinema) histories. American Fantasies and Philippine Film Culture The 2008 Hollywood release of The Echo by Filipino director, Yam Laranas, clears the locus for us to consider Philippine cinema as “transvergent” (Hunt and Leung 3),2 at the same time as the specter of the Filipina in the film’s fiction allows us to witness “history as haunting” (Lim 170). The Echo, which is a remake of Laranas’s Sigaw [literally “scream”] (2004), is a consummation of the Filipino filmmaker’s fantasy to have the stage and the audience of the American market. Such a fantasy, according to Jose B. Capino, is one of the many permutations of “American fantasies,” or “transcultural imaginings defined by an American presence” (xviii), generated by Philippine cinema – the “dream factory of the former colony.” In what follows, I locate the interior and exterior narratives of The Echo within the spaces of local Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –643 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net> Campos / Ghostly Allegories 614 film culture, in order to constitute Laranas’s and the film’s arrival in Hollywood as a ghostly return of history. In 1997, the Asia-wide economic crisis dealt a deathblow on Philippine cinema, which, earlier in the decade, was already experiencing a pronounced weakening in terms of box-office returns (Tiongson 4). This weakening was, in fact, state-sponsored, when, after decades of uninterested and tractable support on local cinema, the Philippine government endorsed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1993, thereby allowing the unrestricted entry and dominance of Hollywood films in the country. From a leading national film industry in Asia (in terms of quantity, at least) that produced several hundred movies a year, Philippine cinema steadily declined in its annual mainstream output at the turn of the current century, with 103 films produced in 2001; 94 in 2002; 80 in 2003; 55 in 2004; 50 in 2005; and only 48 in 2006.3 The years leading up to, and following, the 1997 crisis concomitantly saw the exodus of more and more Filipinos seeking employment “overseas” (Orbeta and Abrigo). Meanwhile, and ironically enough, three film genres gathered relative momentum in terms of number of either production or popularity during this juncture in (film) history – the historical drama, the “OFW” (overseas Filipino worker) film, and horror. The marked increase of the production of historical dramas beginning in the 1990s celebrated national heroes and commemorated the centennial of the Philippine revolution against Spain in 1896 and the declaration of Philippine independence in 1898. Some of these films include Raymond Red’s Bayani [Hero] (1992), Carlo J. Caparas’s Tirad Pass: The Last Stand of General Gregorio del Pilar (1996), Tikoy Aguiluz’s Rizal sa Dapitan (1997), Jose Mari Avellana and Joey Romero’s Emilio Aguinaldo (1998), Jose Mari Avellana’s Damong Ligaw [Stray Grass] (1998), Mario O’Hara’s Sisa (1998), and Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Jose Rizal (1998) (see Figure 1). These historical films about national triumph and liberty from colonizers are doubtless haunted by the actual turn of events: all the heroes exalted in these films are, of course, tragic figures; there had been no real independence in 1898, since America violently annexed and pacified the islands with the force of an all-out genocidal war. Philippine (film) history has, since then, been indelibly tainted by the physical and epistemological violence of American colonial rule. The early initiation of the Philippines in the project of nation-building and its subsequent “tutelage” under the US find a distinct outworking in the formation of “national” cinema. Among many other consequences, this intersection of the histories of the aborted nation and the new empire – with the Philippines barely out of the throes of the first anti-colonial revolution in Southeast Asia, while America was at the onset of enacting its imperial fantasies – burst open, on the one hand, a dam of American (“junk”) films, flooding local screens even before Hollywood ever achieved worldwide dominance (Deocampo, Film 178-83) and, on the other hand, channels of migration, allowing for increasing waves of Filipino workers to resettle in the US (cf. San Juan, From Exile). A remarkably early figuration of Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –643 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net> Campos / Ghostly Allegories 615 these two consequences of colonial ties (i.e., Hollywood influx and migration to the US) is the activation of the fantasy to adapt Hollywood processes to local film culture and the fantasy of film artists to migrate to Hollywood (Deocampo, Film 413-34), exemplified in the person of the “‘other’ father of Philippine cinema,” Vicente Salumbides (cf. Villasanta).4 Salumbides, considered the progenitive hero of a Hollywoodized Philippine film, directed Miracles of Love (1925), patterned after American romance, employing classical Hollywood film codes, and featuring the “American beauty” of Elizabeth “Dimples” Cooper (Deocampo, Film 476; Pilar 2474; Hawkins 107; cf. Salumbides). Trained in the US, Salumbides initiated and instantiated how American fantasies “are rewritten, indelibly marked, recirculated, or conjured by Filipinos” through “processes of appropriation and cultural translation” (Capino xviii). Such fantasies have surfaced, across the decades, in the fanfares that characterize popular commentaries and journalistic features on the forays of local actors in Hollywood movies, such as Barbara Perez in No Man is an Island (Richard Goldstone and John Monks Jr., USA, 1962) and Cesar Montano in The Great Raid (John Dahl, USA, 2005) (see Fig. 1), or on Hollywood location shooting in the Philippines (e.g., Apocalypse Now [Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1979] and The Bourne Legacy [Tony Gilroy, USA, 2012]). Fig. 1: Cesar Montano, who plays the national hero in Marilou Diaz-Abaya’s Jose Rizal, plays a minor role as guerilla leader, Juan Pajota, in the Hollywood film, The Great Raid, about the liberation of POWs in Japanese-occupied Cabanatuan, Philippines, during World War II. Publicity photo from Cineplex.Com.5 Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –643 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net> Campos / Ghostly Allegories 616 These fantasies, initiated upon Philippine-American colonial contact and amplified by Hollywood’s eventual rise to dominance, are what continue to inform the perceived importance of Laranas’s arrival in Hollywood via The Echo. Over the last fifteen years, according to Toby Miller et al., at exactly the juncture when Philippine cinema spiraled down in productivity, “global Hollywood” has, meanwhile, doubled its share of the international market, demanding between 40 to 90 percent of national box office revenues around the world (Miller et al.). Along with the neoliberal campaign of the US in the GATT and, later, the World Trade Organization, the American film industry has exerted tremendous pressure on international competitors, worked to eliminate the safeguards of other national markets, strengthened its grip on global distribution and exhibition, imported and outsourced talents, appropriated “foreign” genres, and remade box-office hit films from other regions (Hjort and Petrie, “Introduction” 8; cf. Xu; Lo). It is against this Hollywood hegemony that we can, therefore, understand the fantasies that engendered Laranas’s Sigaw and The Echo and the rise of horror film production in the Philippines after the period of the centennials of the Philippine revolution and independence. The Horror Film Cycle The proliferation of horror films in the Philippines at the turn of the century is contemporaneous with what Lim characterizes as the “Asian horror remake frenzy” in Hollywood which began around 2001. In 2003, according to her, “at least 18 remakes of films from South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong were either completed or in the works at various studios,” spearheaded by Dreamworks’ phenomenal, The Ring (Gore Verbinski, USA, 2002), based on Ringu (Hideo Nakata, Japan, 1998). And, by 2004, the year of the local release of Laranas’s Sigaw, “the [horror remake] cycle’s momentum [was] still unchecked” (Lim 194). Meanwhile, from about 26 Filipino horror films produced in the decade of the 1990s, ranking as the least popular film genre of the period according to Nicanor Tiongson, the number rose to nearly 70 in the first decade of the 2000s (“The Best” 22; IMDB.com). Three of Chito S. Roño’s films, produced by the leading mainstream studio in the Philippines, Star Cinema, were record-grossing upon release, Feng Shui (2004), Sukob [The Wedding Curse] (2006), and Tenement 2 (2009). Sukob, featuring local superstars, Kris Aquino and Claudine Barretto, had the distinction of being the highest-grossing Philippine movie at the time, a rare achievement for a horror film which typically attracts select audiences. It also spawned a spoof, Pasukob (2007) by Wenn V. Dermas (see Figs. 2 and 3), signaling a saturation point for the genre. Feng Shui, also starring Kris Aquino, was one of the earlier phenomenal hits that fueled the Philippines’ own horror cycle, and its entry in the user-generated Wikipedia has an ironically painful and perhaps unintentionally humorous line that betrays the fantasy of local film culture; it reads, “The Hollywood version of the Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –643 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net> Campos / Ghostly Allegories 617 movie [Feng Shui] is still frozen and it is unknown if Star Cinema have [sic] decided to have a contract with Hollywood.”6 Fig. 2 & 3 : (Left) Sukob, a Philippine film in the “Asian horror” vein, was the highest- grossing movie in the Philippines in 2006. (Right) Pasukob was a spoof of Sukob, signaling the saturation point of the local market. Publicity photo from KababayanCentral.Com.7 Many of the horror films of the 2000s – especially when compared with horror films prior to the regional-transnational remake cycle, for instance, by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes, in the 1990s – have visibly begun to cannibalize and reanimate with half-lives the conventional iconography of “Asian” (rather than “Philippine”) horror (cf. Lim; Xu). The Philippine horror cycle, therefore, is in large part defined by Hollywood hegemony, and its rise and decline, its genesis and expiration date, are inextricably linked with the Asian horror remake trend. As Lim writes of the horror cycle configured according to the logic of “generic repetition” and Hollywood’s “remake time,” We are faced, on the one hand, with the force of singularity: the singularity of the jolt, of the first time one sees a ghost, or screams at a terrifying turn in a movie. On the other, formulaic repetition: one sees the same ruse again and again. A scream gives way to a chuckle; the horror film fails to horrify, losing the affective charge for which the genre was named. The ghost becomes generic, the very figure of genre. Through singularity and repetition, the ghost figures both the force and depletion of return. (219-20) Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –643 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net> Campos / Ghostly Allegories 618 It is this “remake time” that distinguishes the timeliness of Laranas’s celebrated Sigaw in 2004 and the lateness of The Echo’s (non-)arrival in the American market in 2008. As of June 2007, a year before The Echo’s release, Los Angeles Times already declared that the “chill is gone” (Abramowitz and Crabtree n.p.). Lim, describing the saturation of the market, writes, “Forty-some horror films were released [in America]…, more than doubling the numbers for the year before,” and she notes, too, that fan reviews have begun to “sound an unmistakable note of exasperation – ranging from skepticism to outright resistance – in relation to Hollywood remakes” (Lim 199). This was the context of The Echo’s arrival in America, where it did not get a full theatrical release but, instead, went straight to video. Chronicling the journey of his original Philippine production, Sigaw – through the travails of guerilla marketing via the internet;8 its local patronage by Filipino cineastes during the annual Metro Manila Film Festival; the critical attention it garnered in Screamfest L.A. International Horror Film Festival and CineAsia Film Festival in Cologne; the announcement that Vertigo, the company that began the remake practice of Asian films in Hollywood, was interested in buying it; the drumming up of its coming in special interest user-sites, such as PinoyExchange. com and IMDB.com; the labors of rewriting its script and changing its cast and location; and the obstacles of its principal photography and postproduction – until its arrival in the US as The Echo, the blog of Laranas himself, Yamlaranas. blogspot.com,9 from 2005 to 2008, provides a fascinating peek at the dynamics of fantasy-production.10 In the blog entries and the comments section, Laranas is cast as a heroic underdog by fans and followers (“not bad for a largely unknown filmmaker from the Philippines”), as he narrates himself as the protagonist in an odyssey, responding to a beckoning (“my only objective is…to make all fans of horror movies happy”), weighing decisions (“I was reminded…producers make the final decision…in the remake of my own movie”), overcoming obstacles (“a rough start because of some unexpected delays that’s beyond our control…always pressed for time”), and finally arriving (“It is done. The Echo is now getting ready for the world”) (“Laranas Blogspot”). Some of his admirers exalt his heroic figure by likening him to Hollywood director Martin Scorsese, and by cheering on local celebrities as prospective actors in the remake, especially Richard Gutierrez (imagined as Hollywood actor, Leonardo di Caprio, to Laranas’s Scorsese) and Iza Calzado, both of whom played lead in Sigaw (“Laranas Blogspot”). The heroic configuration of Laranas as film director and as Filipino is ultimately conflated in many of the comments, as when one user (text uncorrected) writes, Sir Yam, I still don’t know you that much. But I can feel how dedicated you are in your craft and how committed you are to make our country very proud in abroad specially in Hollywood. Recently, you are one of the few good news that Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –643 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net> Campos / Ghostly Allegories 619 are happening now in the country. You simply kill those daily political and economic problems, those killings and accidents, those kidnappings and drug syndicates. We hope to hear more of what you’re doing not for yourself and for your family, as well as for our country. […] We are here for you. (“Laranas Blogspot” n.p.) Laranas’s blog also fleshes out the contours of the historical narrative of the Filipino diaspora: Filipinos are now spread all around the world, and yet the fantasy of progress in the US, associated with the grandeur of Hollywood, remains primal and the basis for an ambivalent urgency for unity. “We are here for you,” concludes the above comment, signifying solidarity. “We are proud to be Filipinos” is one of the patriotic refrains throughout the five years’ worth of comments in Laranas’s blog pertaining to Sigaw and The Echo. Indeed, a remarkable feature in the comments section of Laranas’s blog is the motif of the “kababayan” (compatriot), registered as writing from places like Manila, New York, Toronto, Sydney, Madrid, expressing oneness with a fellow Filipino, wherever they may be located (“Laranas Blogspot”). Following Capino’s arguments, the production by a Filipino of a Hollywood genre spectacle is significant since, generally, former colonies of the US “remain practically invisible in Hollywood pictures,” even while “Americans and the states have kept their place as the primary others and elsewheres in Philippine cinema […]not only in the diegesis of the films but also in aspects that are less visible or remain entirely offscreen” (xviii). This “invisibility” from Hollywood screens is doubly significant when one considers a motif in the works of a number of Asian- American critics – that while the migration of Filipinos to the US was initiated by the violence of colonization and has continually been sustained by what Yen Le Espiritu calls “differential inclusion,” Filipino-Americans “are still practically an invisible and silent minority” (San Juan, “Mapping” 117) and remain to be the “forgotten Asian Americans” (cf. Espiritu; Campomanes; San Juan, From Exile; Cordova). Differential inclusion, according to Espiritu, is “the process whereby a group of people is deemed integral to [America’s] economy, culture, identity, and power […] precisely because of their designated subordinate standing,” precisely “because they are not fully present,” i.e., they remain spectral (47; cf. Said). Ghostly Allegory 1 – The Echo This continued violence wrought upon the former colonial, and now neocolonial and also migrant, subject is allegorically played out in the ghost tale that is The Echo. Shedding almost entirely the middle-class issues of Sigaw, The Echo robes itself with the appearance of a racial-historical critique. The story is set in a decrepit and haunted New York apartment, where a recently freed ex-convict, Bobby, gradually discovers the reason for his mother’s mysterious death while he was in prison. Upon his occupation of his mother’s apartment room, Bobby begins to be disturbed by Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –643 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net> Campos / Ghostly Allegories 620 noises. First is the kind of noise that he hears outside, from the adjacent room, every night, where a policeman and his wife and daughter live – loud arguments, screams and pleas, banging and hitting. Second is the strange and unexplainable noise that he hears inside his own room. The constancy of the disturbances begins to agitate him and affect his relationship with his girlfriend, Alyssa. He confesses to Alyssa that he is beginning to understand what happened to his mother, because, like his mother, he has begun to hear noises in his head. This explanation, of course, is not complete, because it does not precisely answer why he hears the noises in his head, or even how. The din just creeps into one’s head, he thinks, as it crept into his mother’s head repeatedly and long enough until it killed her. Meanwhile, it had not occurred to him that the racket made by the family in the other apartment had anything to do with his inner torment, an inner conflict born out of the guilt of a parent. He is unselfconsciously impelled to intervene, whenever he hears the violent beatings followed by cries of pain and terror. Once, he bangs on their door to break up the fight, and the policeman threatens him to “mind your own business.” At another time, he lets their daughter into his room to shield her from the dread. As he begins to meddle in the affairs of his neighbors, he comes upon the dual revelation that the adjacent room has been empty for years and that the “social” and “psychological” noises that continue to torment him are one. The external violence has been interiorized, both literally (with the terror from the other room entering his own) and figuratively. He learns from another tenant in the apartment, who is subsequently killed by the vengeful ghost, that years ago, indeed, there lived a family in the now-empty room, where a policeman beat his wife to death when she tried to escape their abusive relationship. And no one in the apartment building, including Bobby’s mother, risked comfort to help the wife when she wanted out. Here on, the understanding becomes gradually complete, as the terror that he hears in his head is revealed, coded by generic horror, as a call for justice and a clean break. The helpless woman who has been screaming for help, night after night, reveals herself to him in his very own room, face to face, as a bloodied apparition of a Filipina (see Fig. 4). Bobby had seen her before, this Filipina, rapping at his door, begging for help. Fig. 4: The ghost reveals herself to Bobby – as a dream, as a vision, as a reality – in his very own room, face to face, as a bloodied apparition of a Filipina. Publicity photo from Aceshowbiz.Com.11 Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014): –643 © Ateneo de Manila University <http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net>