Sunday, April 16, 2006
Tabada: Enlightenment by DVD
By Mayette Q. Tabada
Matamata
A FEW nights before Holy Thursday, a waxing moon lit diverging roads. To the right was a lonely path leading past homes lit by lamps, where adults talked by open doorways, children played tag near streetlights, and you were greeted by strangers you met on the road.
The left led to the highway, export processing zones, eateries, KTV joints, traffic, dust, balut hawkers, tricycles, and stalls selling pirated DVDs.
We took the left road, of course.
I rehearsed excuses during the forty minutes’ walk to stall no. 3, where Camilo ministers to all visitors (or his wife or his cousin or the 15 other relatives who run the stall 24/7, more dependable than any sanctuary for the sleep-deprived, the marginally illicit, the Hollywood-fixated).
As a Catholic, I know the ritual of Lent: reflection, denial, repentance.
But more lapsed than practicing, I was counting on the long weekend, during which both editors and sources were expected to be out of reach, when you could rely on inviolable deadlines to defer to a two thousand-year-old tradition.
So, in a way, I did reflect on how I would transgress, denying that I was so addicted to work, I could not spare the time to watch DVDs whose pirated quality, if not subtitles, would make me repent for grievously lapsing on some serious soul-fixing.
(I knew, of course, that Camilo always advises if a disc is VCD copy, DVD copy, DVD quality or DVD orig. As they say, there is honor among thieves.)
Just days before Holy Thursday, Camilo had a new stack of China imports but an expected dearth of robe-and-sandals epics. I had once spied a “Ben-hur” copy but the boys were unimpressed when I told them how studio executives did not even censor the sight of Charlton Heston’s skirt flying up, so thrilling was his chariot race against the usurper of his inheritance and his faith.
I had forgotten that, in the boys’ generation, the moral battleground where early Christians were pitted against pagans is not part of the “Age of Empires,” the gaming series that defines for them what history is and isn’t.
Neither did the documentaries on the making of “The Da Vinci Code” and “The Passion of the Christ” make any waves with the hubby. Sitting through a commentary—even though it postulates how Mary Magdalene could have been that beardless fellow turned to the Christ during the Last Supper, or traces where Mel Gibson, who saturated the screen with mind-numbing bloodbaths in “Braveheart,” came up with his vision of a risen Christ marching forth in the movie’s militant Resurrection—must have seemed too much like excoriating penance that it automatically got ruled out for its real threat of boredom.
By Black Saturday, I sat through five “serious” movies, two sci-fi ones, and two thrillers. In “Aeonflux,” Charlize Theron makes the difficult choice to restore the natural processes of death and decomposition. Is it considered evolution if only values erode but bodies don’t in a leotard-friendly world 400 years into the future?
Looking gorgeous even when conscience-stricken, Theron reverses the Catholic myth that guilt turns you ugly.
If movies have one flaw (aside from subtitles that obscure, not clarify, the story), it is this thing about ugliness. No one has blemishes on screen. If it’s not actors looking spectacular while being murderers, adulterers and lawyers for the Other Side, it’s their prosthetics taking your breath away.
Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” is spared of this flaw. Without subtitles, it was hard to follow, let alone cheer for the right side. Was there one? As the Israeli leader killing off, one by one, the Palestinian terrorists that massacred Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics, Eric Bana may look eminently eatable. His cause wasn’t.
The search for the homeland—the righteousness, the justifications, the genocide—turns us all ugly. It is a truth that sears home by way of the excellent reproduction of Camilo’s DVDs.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917-3226131)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (April 16, 2006 issue)
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