De los vehículos

There is no dearth of contemporary writing on melodrama in film, television, and literature in the Anglo-American tradition, which in itself attests to the enduring presence of its elements in cultural texts. Most overviews begin with the seminal study of Peter Brooks (1976), The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess in theatre and literature, which heavily influenced the recuperation of this so-called pejorative genre by contemporary scholars initiated by the likes of Christine Gledhill (1986, 1991, 2002a) and Linda Williams (1998). My understanding of melodrama in this study is guided by these foundational definitions, admittedly derived from Western theorisations, but with the aim of understanding how the mode/genre has been deployed in representative Philippine films configured by the slum chronotope.

As with all the chapters in this study, I begin with these frequently cited definitions for the purpose of launching my own examination of Philippine films, but without the assumption that these are the models to aspire to. While I do engage in some comparisons between Hollywood models and examples from Philippine cinema, this is informed by the undeniable history of cinema as colonial technology, with Philippine cinema reconfiguring European and American genres for its own audience and purposes (Del Mundo Jr. 1998).

Whether melodrama is a genre or a modality is not a debate this study can engage with thoroughly. The way I use melodrama here slides from melodrama as a genre, which is useful for categorical purposes — to melodrama as a mode of expression that manifests itself across various genres. Gledhill (2000) reconciles genre and mode when she argues that melodrama as modality:

“…defines a specific mode of aesthetic articulation adaptable across a range of genres, across decades, across national cultures. It provides the genre with a mechanism of ‘double articulation,’ capable of generating specific and distinctively different generic formulae in particular historical conjectures, while also providing a medium of interchange and overlap between genres.” (Gledhill 2000 p. 229).

In “Melodrama Revised,” Williams (1998) provides re-readings of Brooks’

analysis for film purposes and is an extremely useful springboard for my aims of locating spatial justice in Philippine melodramatic urban films. The most striking principle of melodrama identified by Williams immediately aligns this mode with the aims of locating social justice. Extending Brook’s (1998 pp. 51–52) frequently cited assertions on the “absence of moral and social order linked to the sacred” in the context of modernity, Williams states that a “quest for a hidden moral legibility is crucial to all melodrama” (Williams 1998 p. 52). This quest to surface moral legibility, which Brooks called the “moral occult,” relates to the aims of locating spatial justice if we consider the characters in

melodramatic narratives as moral agents whose actions produce spaces of in/justice.

Of the elements of melodramatic cinema that Williams (1998 p. 42) has identified, it is the “dialectic of pathos and action” combined with the desire to return to a “space of innocence” (1998 p. 42) that reveals the mode’s implicit chronotopic configurations. The pathos-action dialectic, according to Williams (1998 p. 69), is a ‘give and take of ‘too late’ and ‘in the nick of time.’ In the melodramatic narratives enabled by slum chronotopes, it is the time of “too late”

that is more pronounced than “in the nick of time,” while the “space of innocence” is not a return to an idealised space, but rather, a “return to repression” that serves to reveal the heroine-victim’s hopes and desires. Let me qualify this further.

Regarding temporality, the melodramatic narratives enabled by the slum chronotope in Kubrador, Foster Child, and Lola all begin in a space where it is already “too late.” In developmental theory, slum formation is underpinned with the misguided notion that these are urban spaces that are unable to supposedly catch up with the image of the developed modern city. Slums are sometimes regarded as “unintended cities” (Jai Sen cited in Nandy, 1998, p. 2) — they have already developed to the point that there is no ideal time or place to go back to. It is this temporal configuration of the slums being a space beyond the last-minute/nick-of-time rescue that invokes a view of pathos. As such, Gledhill’s (2002b p. 21) identification of a “nostalgic structure” in European nineteenth century family melodramas does not exist in the same manner in the Philippine films in question.

In the melodramatic films set in Manila slums, that or whom must be rescued in the nick of time is already lost; there is really no last-minute rescue to be expected. In Kubrador, the protagonist’s son whose ghost appears at certain

time-spaces within narrative time can no longer be rescued, because after all, he is already dead. In Foster Child, the 24-hour slice-of-life narrative occurs on the day her job ends — the day the foster mother has to hand over the child she reared to his rich adoptive parents. In Lola, the narrative begins when the murder of one grandson by the other has already taken place. This is not to say, however, that all hope is lost in these films. Imaginaries of hope remains, as I will touch upon in my textual analysis, but these can be found not in the

“exhilaration of action”, but in the “paroxysm of pathos,” to borrow Williams’

(1998 p.58) turn of phrase.

This time of “too late” takes place in slum spaces characterised by excess — which is the stage for what I refer to as affective chronotopes. Like the films in the previous chapter, Kubrador and Foster Child are set in sprawling loobans, while Lola is set on and along the esteros (water ways) and shanties comprising a squatter settlement called Sitio Ilog (which literally translates to river site) in Malabon city, a city north of the capital of Manila. In Holywood melodrama, the

“space of innocence” to return to is often thought to be the domestic (private) space of the home, or any space that somehow suggests a restoration of order.

However, in these melodramatic narratives enabled by the slum chronotope, a thin line divides the public and the private spheres. The porous built environment and the density of bodies that inhabit the slum space make it difficult to delineate the private from the public, which in turn makes it difficult to identify spaces of idealised virtue and innocence that belong to the private domestic sphere.

Instead of a return to idealised spaces of innocence, I borrow the idea of the

“return to the repressed“ that Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (2002) used in his famous essay where he relates melodrama to Sigmund Freud’s “conversion hysteria.”

For Nowell-Smith (2002), melodrama is a genre characterised primarily by repressed emotions that the plot struggles to accommodate through action in

the narrative development. Excessive emotions are thus consequently expressed in other filmic devices such as mise en scène and music (Nowell-Smith 2002). Nowell-(Nowell-Smith (2002 p. 73) argues that: “In hysteria…the energy attached to an idea that has been repressed returns converted into bodily symptom. The ‘return of the repressed’ takes place, not in conscious discourse, but displaced on the body of the patient. In melodrama…a conversion can take place into the body of the text.”

Although Nowell-Smith’s essay is brief, this is a crucial premise for my understanding of melodrama’s spatial rendering as configured by the slum chronotope. My argument is that these films’ melodramatic excesses can be read in the ways the slum space dialogues with the female body, which is demonstrated exceptionally in the films I have selected. In these melodramatic films, time moves according to the bodily movements of its female protagonists, particularly through the spatial practice of walking. As with the temporal configuration of excessive urban development expressed in the notion of “too late,” excess is built into the slum’s spatial configuration as containing a surplus of poverty and squalor. The melodramatic element of excess can be found in certain key moments where hysteria is converted into what I designate affective chronotopes.

Before proceeding to my formulation of affective chronotopes and my analysis of how these are used in the films, in the next section, I briefly sketch how melodrama has been used in Philippine cinema. Most Filipino viewers, in my view, would not contest that excess is what characterises traditional Philippine melodrama. As one Filipino scholar has asserted, when compared to those produced by Hollywood, “in the Philippines, the tendency to go overboard seems greater” (Velasco 2004 p. 40).