Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage

This chapter considers when the masters and servants in two films perform multiple roles, in what the author calls the “embodied montage,” where they establish character among their choices of self, and where roles come together or eclipse each other. In a sense, they perform the very process of identity: losing and finding oneself. These gaps in their performances cause “intimate eruptions” that create small openings in the fabric of mastery and servitude. In these films, mastery demands a certain order that both masters and servants do not always adhere to. Behaviors do not necessarily match the expected roles. As a result, physical and psychic eruptions occur at both expected and unexpected sites: through sensory experiences, the deployment of violence by enemies and allies, and the looming threat of madness and suicide as the only way out of patriarchal sadism. Ultimately, what they learn from intimate eruptions is the possibility of new ethical relations.

Introduction

Different proximities to social life—viability (regard and recognition) and death (disregard and abuse) can measure inequality between intimately enmeshed subjects. In our witnessing of on-screen relations featuring the denigration endured by the abjected, we as the audience are exposed as both conceptualized and located in our difference. In our encounter with films from countries and regions touched by colonial relations, our spectatorship is implicated by the film. From the perches we occupy, we watch these films from positions of distance—whether geographic or social—even as audiences in the West are diasporic subjects from the East. These films may lead us to feelings of empathy or, hopefully, an awareness of our power to name and define whom we see: as subject, other, object or abject—in how we accept the ability of film to show us ourselves and our limits in recognizing and feeling for others.

Epilogue

Proximity in the movies mimic what travel to the past does, which is to come close to loss, and what cannot be remembered, even with close examination. Memories can then act like movies. In recreating memory through writing them as movies, one can bring the past back to life, including who I am and understand myself to be as a writer, a thinker, a filmmaker. By focusing on works that compose our world, I make sense not only of how we relate to each other across our differences but also of what can be possible when we imagine ourselves through representation.

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others

In studying representations of Imelda Marcos, this chapter addresses intimacies that go way beyond the genital sex act to capture relations within production and consumption as well as across the screen and stage to the audience—between spectators and authors. It privileges the perspective of Filipin@x actors, producers, and spectators to answer these questions: Who can represent whom? Why do we tend to judge these works by their adherence to authenticity? And how do we conduct ourselves when we tell stories that represent rarely presented people? What does an ethical act of representing others look like? The critique that says a white man cannot represent these subjects ignores how they actually can and do so rampantly. In calling for broadening who can speak about movies and who can make movies, this chapter homes in on authorship and spectatorship as processes shared between so many but dominated by so few.

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship

Through his filming of bodies in poverty and squalor, Brillante Mendoza prevents the traditional consumption of the third world as enjoyable, entertaining, and educational, and instead enables a multisensorial immersion in a bewildering pandemonium that remains tense and uncomfortable. In this, the filmmaker questions the basis of identification: they suffer like me is replaced by they suffer unlike me. Yet the films demand a feeling, what I call shared spectatorship, for it is a mode of identification predicated not on pleasure but on difference as the necessary condition for us to mark our own positions outside that suffering. We are not inside the shoes or the soul of the other, rather the movie shows us our distance through representations of proximity that emphasize difference. His films butcher the spectator because people are rampantly butchered in the Philippines—as a fact and not a fantasy that his films concoct.

(Rich) White Women, (Poor) Brown Men, and Sexual Settings

This chapter addresses recent representations of Western white women (with money) from the United States, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom and their relationships with African and Asian men (without money) against several backdrops: sex tourism in the Caribbean, the low-wage labor market for undocumented immigrants in the United States, and the US fertility industry. Interrogating the interlocking relationship between political and libidinal economies, the chapter explores how these films frame differing freedoms and choices across gender, race, and class in scenes of sexual intimacy facilitated by a monetary transaction. In the process, it formulates the term “sexual setting” to identify how social, historical, and other contexts never subside but inform the erotics and pleasures of intimate bodily entanglements in the movies. In illustrating how the structural inequality of race, socioeconomics, and globalization infuse sexual scenes, the chapter shows how to assess the ethics of sexual entanglements.