By: Iris P. Concepcion
The ongoing film series, subject of my review in this corn's previous entry, yielded a lot of reactions both from the celluloid cloth (they get talked back a lot but the visual language always wins as I had observed) and the armchaired audience.
In one movie, I saw my teacher changing seats, training her eyes to a, well, maybe a member of a flock that had gone awry. Lo and behold, she sat beside an equally elegant lady who had likewise been frequenting (is this a word?) the theater all by her lonesome. I wondered what kind of conversation they had exchanged while the reel was flowing like waves in the ocean. I just heard one, loud, offbeat word and was awed by its echoing reverberations inside the cinema.
As I said, in my interaction, I have learned about passion, about soul-searching, about institutional systems and about men in general in less than one hundred words. If you were anywhere near this visual stadium, consider it a privilege if you had been a.) dressed down tactfully b.) given advice randomly c.) reviewed hourly and was chosen as seatmate in that group of 500 million friends (who are nonetheless bound to have enemies, as is expected, as one poster had placed it). I am familiar with this environment. I grew up with a father who was demanding that kind of authority even since I was weaned out from my mother's womb.
I have seen many eyes turn weepy, perhaps, as the medium excised some truths about ourselves in a salacious manner. Believe me, I was not spared from this if some nitpick about this august chance of mingling with your somewhat ordinary but brilliant people. This teacher even pointed out a scene of one semi-erogenous angle and commented on it casually as : "Oh, that's you."
Of course, I bit my lips because I wanted so much to let out a guffaw in my bellyaching manner of chortling. Like, who would have thought.
Often, we find it boggling why we are drawn to earthlings so different from ourselves. Then the reality strikes: we are all united in our own humanity. They never change nor vary: compassion, laughter, madness, happiness. We speak of families, of the food we eat, on how we cope with various instances of living progressions and we strike a chord of familiarity, upfront, without even trying too hard.
I now have an answer why I am comfortable this way. Without any pretense, these people say it as is i.e. "You need not worry about what clothes you wear, just be discerning of what is decent and what is not under the given circumstances"; or "You look like you are going to an Oscar awards, what gives?".
Compare this with the decent members of the reformed class: "(Expletive), I am the one earning, sampalin kaya kita sa kayabangan mo" and you already know how William Golding's Lord Of The Flies got its bearing from this aggressive behavior. You just need to deal with them on equal terms, on the same mold.
There are those types who got mad easily over nonsense stuff like the size of extremities. I have experienced one almost pushing me out from a vehicle because of the music I was listening to. Everyone can be emotional if a competition has, say, 10 inches shoe size. I mean, it is already terrible to be listening to all that shallow skirmish but you get the drift: those who are tight-lipped almost always wins the battle ahead. By the way, the losing guy here elbowed me, shoved my hand and God knows what hideous physical beatings women near him might have experienced owing to this misplaced gratitude. It is senseless, pointless, stupid.
In case you wonder why my title is eerily crafted that way, blame it on one film. The Swedish President took pity on the crying tot so he held her on his arms.
Louise got inside the castle not because of the wail but because of her motivational innocence this time.
Yeah. It is soooooo Laban.
And now, a quote from Jessica Zafra:
"Like, totally, whatever, Filipinos in general seem to have the ability to absorb the speeach of other nationalities and recite it back to them. I suspect it is an adaptive survival mechanism, the result of having to deal with a succession of colonizers. As my friend put it: "Nausukan lang ng tambucho ng British Airways, nagka British accent na."