The lines dividing the arts and the virus

IT has been a month and a few days since I left Manila to escape the lockdown. No one had an idea what it meant to close a city. Like a monumental production pushed by a deranged auteur, the entire behemoth of an island called Luzon was ordered to be shut down. Again, no one knew the implication of that move. It was a film with a badly written script with no research at all, bereft of wisdom and certainly devoid of any inspiration that may guide the law to the side of the population.

In a week, we saw what a lockdown or a quarantine meant: No film, no theater, no TV. No artistic presentation that needed an audience.

The noontime shows continued but they were not the same. The viewers were removed. Were there canned applause? We would not be bothered. After the food ran out, we realized we were not allowed to leave our homes and spend our sweet time in groceries, supermarkets and malls. Survival and the way to it became real.

There was nothing maudlin anymore when we declared to others—usually by way of SMS or through the Internet—that we want to live.

The filmmakers did not stop. They continued not with filming but with talking to each other. Ranting became cinematically engaging: you sensed you were there in the created spaces of varied persuasions and conflicting perspectives. In my own online territory (to imagine how physical such territory can be), I saw that filmmakers had gone out of their quiet selves as they fleshed out their views about the flaws and the failings of this government.

The brave filmmaker was born in the Age of Covid. But they were not with the silver screen but with the realities they poked each day.

This activism, though, is a bit problematic. No filmmaker can be political by merely talking and refining proposals. For filmmakers—from directors to sound engineers—the political product is found in the film they would collectively produce at the end of three or six months or a year, sometimes even longer.

What films will be made when all this is over? When the quarantining has shifted from special, meaning strict, to regular, meaning lax and lawless, will filmmakers go back to filmmaking? And then, what kind of films will they make?

We cannot rely on the facile one-to-one correspondence between society and artistic product. That is gross and truly exploitative. Remember the massacre films? They were not political responses to the killings that were happening around us. They were simply works taking advantage of a topic that were blatantly displayed over and over via tabloids and the programs of the characteristically loud, arrogant news readers and commentators with simplistic analysis of events. What is that word— organic? Yes, we want to find films in 2021, or perhaps in December of this year, that are about isolation of a world that has been stopped. Or, about the demise of certain artistic forms.

Dear Sylvia/mayuga/morningstar would have a word for it—synchronicity. With all the time in the world now available, I found in one of the boxes old copies of Vanity Fair. This was the magazine that, in the late 1990s and 2000s were so thick not with articles but with ads. This was one of those issues. A Hollywood Issue. But that is not the point of interest in the magazine, but rather about the two articles, the titles of which were bandied on the cover. The two essays focused on the making of two films: Rebel Without a Cause and Midnight Cowboy. These films were directed, respectively, by Nicholas Ray and John Schlesinger. As claimed by the authors of the essays and as accepted by many, both directors remain underrated.

Rebel and Midnight were considered game changers. James Dean has always been considered the single major contribution to cinema and to juvenile social studies. Sam Kashner, in an essay titled “Dangerous Talents,” perhaps summed up the charm of James Dean in an era of safe, good-looking gentlemen leading men from Tab Hunter to Troy Donahue. There was something magically off and edgy about James.

Dying before the film Rebel hit theaters, James must be the actor who became a legend literally overnight. Ray quotes the maverick filmmaker Terrence Malick, who said: “There were only two people in the 1950s: Elvis Presley who changed music, and James Dean who changed our lives.” If this testimonial was not enough, Ray recalled in the essay how Elvis was obsessed with the movie Rebel Without a Cause, and how the singer “worshipped James Dean.”

As for the film, Sam Kashner stated: “The impact of the movie was immediate, unleashing knife fights and ‘chickie run’ enactments around the world among teenagers, who felt that Rebel spoke to them. The film was censored in London. It had to be smuggled into Spain and shown in private screenings, and wasn’t formally released in that country until 1964...”

Rebel was way ahead of its time that a Production Code officer sent a memo to producer Jack L. Warner, which contained the following statement: “It is of course vital that there be no inference of a questionable or homosexual relationship between Plato [Sal Mineo] and Jim [James Dean].” And yet, Kashner would write: “Sal Mineo—so affecting as the essentially fatherless outcast Plato—later commented that he had portrayed the first gay teenager in film” (italics mine).

Peter Biskind, in his article “Midnight Revolution”, put it succinctly in his opening sentence: “From where we stand now, 35 years after the 42nd Academy Awards, it is impossible to imagine an X-rated film winning best picture.”

Continuing in his essay, Biskind articulated the impact of a film on a society on the verge of social breakdown: “This was a dramatic moment pregnant with historical significance, marking as it did the symbolic transfer of power from Old Hollywood to New.”

Rebel Without a Cause had the youth at the cusp of finding their voices and places in the world of adult locked in a civilization that they created for themselves who were on their way out, and not for a new population about to grapple with changes and the freedom to cause more changes. Midnight Cowboy, which was, according to the article, “etched in acid,” was confronting not only social shifts but the subversions of what polite society was still holding on as signs of humanity.

Those films were of the 1950s and the 1970s. What are the films that would be wrapped in a virus when we start leaving our caves?

No one has any idea about the future of Philippine cinema. This much I can say: when we (and this includes my own group, the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino) start handing out awards and prizes in June or July—or, God forbid, next year—the titles of films that will be mentioned will have nothing to do with the new order, the novel danger, and anything at all about our society. By then, we will be constructing varied norms—for the normal will never be back— and untested behavior—with our persons fitted with unrecognizable materiality.

Will our films make us sick with gluttonous exercises about dystopia? Or, will dystopia be outmoded as we face a nervous new world? ■