I watched a new Thai film, The Unborn Child (Sop Dek 2002)(1) last weekend, knowing nothing more about it than that it was a horror film. Asian cinema abounds in these kinds of films, ever since the surprising worldwide success of the Japanese film The Ring in 1998. Since Asians are mostly non-Christian, their concepts of death, good and evil are refreshingly different. For a Western audience, an audience whose own ideas about those subjects have been shaken up in the last few generations, it seems that the old phrase "better the devil you know than the devil you don't know" has been turned on its head.
The films are all ultimately silly, and many talented Asian filmmakers have turned to them only because they are more likely to have a chance of making them than a film about ordinary people living their ordinary lives. But some of the films are interesting for their imaginative, low-budget solutions to technical problems.
Unborn Child, directed by Poj Arnon, resembles other Asian horror films in its predictably slow pacing and its fetishistic emphasis on specific body parts. The emphasis in Unborn is on vaginas and fetuses. The story is about a young couple whose little daughter befriends an invisible playmate that the father eventually realizes is the ghost of a child he paid to have aborted. Subplots involve young women who become pregnant and seek abortions, which are carried out under the most ludicrous conditions. (The subtitles further complicate matters by referring to "illegal" abortions, which suggests there are also "legal" ones in Thailand. Abortion is illegal in Thailand except in special circumstances.(2)) The woman who carries out the abortions is continually taking drags from a cigarette during the procedure, getting what is presumably placental blood all over her cigarette. The film indulges in this imagery to deliver a political message against abortion. It even tacks on a title at the end that reads (in the English subtitles): "This film is dedicated to all baby souls in the world and hope [sic] there will be no more losses."
The Unborn Child is so disgusting that, even though I watched it in my living room, I wanted to walk out on it. It spends seemingly half of its running time showing us characters who walk around looking for someone who isn't there. But even if it were a masterpiece, the film is a piece of propaganda representing abortion as a terrible, gruesome crime against the fetus. It suggests, with thudding stupidity, that women who have abortions, and men who make them necessary, will be visited by the ghosts of the unborn babies.
The woman abortionist in the film actually presents an argument that is informed by Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation. She says that she is doing a service for unwanted children whose souls will be able to find another life in another body, with parents who genuinely want them. But the action of the film - with the ghosts of the aborted fetuses attacking the abortionist en masse and forcing her to mutilate herself with the same instrument she uses to kill them - shows how little the director takes the Buddhist explanation seriously. The real villain in the film, the one who's responsible for all the trouble, is an incompetent undertaker who, instead of cremating them and releasing their souls, has to stockpile the bodies of aborted fetuses in his (un-refrigerated) morgue. After a few hundred end up being stuffed into the storage locker, the stench alone would've been enough to raise the dead.
(1) The number in the Thai title refers to the number of fetuses discovered buried near a temple crematorium in Bangkok. A trailer for the film can be seen here.
(2) An excellent article on the subject can be found on the Manchester Guardian website.
"I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty."
Imelda Marcos (The number was officially placed at 2,700.)
History is, or used to be, based on something called objective truth - an implicit belief that what is written down is a fairly accurate account of what actually happened. But it's been said that if you tell a lie enough times, it becomes the truth. This would appear to be the case with Imelda Marcos and her children, Ferdinand Jr. (nicknamed "Bongbong") and Imee. The fact that they have been living, despite attempts to divest them of some of their wealth, in palaces for the last forty-odd years may have had the effect of reinforcing their own delusions. Bongbong was elected a senator and Imelda elected a representative to the Philippine Congress. Imee is now governor of Ilocos Norte.
These uncommonly wealthy but quite mediocre people no longer have any reason to lie. Ferdinand's children could have simply said "I am not my father" and let themselves off the hook. Instead they go on repeating the same scabrous song and dance that Imelda has performed for twenty years - that Ferdinand Marcos left the Philippines a safer, richer, and prouder nation than he found it. What they can't seem to grasp is the simple fact that it doesn't even matter if a man acts like a saint 364 days out of a year if he acts like a demon on the last. Ferdinand Marcos didn't have to be a saint or a demon. He simply needed to be a good president.
Current Philippine president Benigno Aquino III was asked in a recent conference with the foreign press if he would consider granting a request from the Marcos family that he be given a state funeral. Aquino, whose father was assassinated either by direct order of Marcos or by Marcos supporters in 1983, and whose mother beat Marcos in a now-famous "snap election" and subsequent People Power Revolution, replied unequivocally "not on my watch".
That means the Marcos family will have to wait until 2016 when Aquino leaves office and another president, perhaps more sympathetic, may give them a hearing. Or they will have to bury the body of their patriarch, dead since 1989 and lying in a state of perfect preservation in a glass case, in his native province of Ilocos Norte.
Henry Sy, the wealthiest man in the Philippines, had a dream when he opened his first shoe mart in 1948, that one day every Filipino would own a pair of shoes. Sixty-three years and 41 SM Malls later, I can say from experience that Mr. Sy's dream hasn't yet been realized. When I got married in Balibago, Pampanga in 1995, I had to buy my bride's father a pair of shoes so he could attend the wedding.
When the Marcos family was whisked away by the U.S. military in February 1986,* when it looked like the presidential Malacañang Palace would be overrun. President Reagan himself offered the Marcoses asylum in the U.S. Witnesses claimed they saw diaper bags filled with gold objects and pallets of freshly printed Philippine Pesos loaded onto the C-141. But most of the money that Marcos stole from the Philippine treasury and in various scams was already safely hidden in overseas banks accounts and in real estate investments. The city of New York seized the Marcos properties. According to one account, Imelda considered buying the Empire State Building, but thought it would be too ostentatious even for her.
When Malacañang was finally searched, the stashes of artworks, nick-nacks and doodads that were found there included 2,700 pairs of shoes belonging to Imelda. A month after the Marcoses fled the Philippines, Lance Morrow wrote an essay, "The Shoes of Imelda Marcos" for Time.
"The parable of Imelda's shoes has something to teach. She could never wear them all. Nor could the Marcos family, one suspects, manage to spend the billions of dollars they plundered from the Philippines. . . . The Marcos plundering seems ultimately a cheerless affair, covert though sometimes ostentatious, avaricious though often prodigal. Christ said, 'If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.' Marcos did not wish to wait. He turned Christianity upside down. He took nourishment from the mouths of the poor and transformed it into his treasure on earth. Such venality is not a matter of either Freud or metaphysics. It is just a brutal habit, the crocodile reflex of a man too long in power. It is a subdivision of the banality of evil."
What makes the image of those 5,400 shoes especially obscene for Filipinos is that owning one pair is a status symbol when so many will either never own them or will never have a life in which shoes would be practical. Instead, the majority of Filipinos wear flip-flops, or "tsinelas" (a word, like so many others in Tagalog, borrowed from the Spanish).
But in a world that rewards excessive greed, that allows a tiny handful of people to own almost everything and that can impoverish everyone else in the world by impetuously trying to increase their wealth, Imelda is perfectly at home. If those shoes could walk, they'd be marching over the bodies of the protesters who are trying to "occupy" Wall Street.
*Ferdinand was carried aboard a C-9 on a stretcher, while his family and their belongings, along with some 49 "supporters" were loaded aboard a C-141.
"For me, never before and never again since has the cinema been so close to its essence and its purpose: to present an image of man in our century, a usable, true, and valid image in which he not only recognizes himself, but from which, above all, he may learn about himself."
Wim Wenders, Tokyo-Ga (1985)
The general admiration of the films of Yasujiro Ozu in the West is a direct refutation of the idea, astonishing to us but common among many Asian scholars and artists, that there is a distinct sensibility that only members of a certain race or culture are able to perceive. The titles of some of his films are certainly addressed to viewers with a distinctive palate, like The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) or The Taste of Mackerel (1962). The latter title was changed to An Autumn Afternoon for Western audiences.
Because of this cultural prejudice, Ozu was probably the most inaccessible genius of international film for more than two decades. Treasured in Japan, for the length of his career and for nearly a decade after his death in 1963, one day before his 60th birthday, Ozu's films were regarded as too idiosyncratically Japanese for Western audiences to fully apprehend. The moment New Yorker Films decided to ignore this prohibition and show a selection of Ozu's films in New York in 1972, the response of audiences and critics was unanimously positive.
Ozu's films lack the exoticism that fans of the Japanese film had come to expect in the 1950s from films like Rashomon, Ugetsu, and Gate of Hell. Like Naruse, whose work had been neglected in the West for much longer, Ozu sought out dramas that took place in ordinary contemporary settings, among people whose ordinariness was irreproachable. Rather than the larger-than-life stories found in the films of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, Ozu's uncommon artistry looked into the commonest of places - a middle class home, an office, a provincial town, a suburban street.
Ozu's most overt statement on his favorite subject - the decline of the family - can be found in what is regarded by many as his greatest film, Tokyo Story (1953). An elderly couple set out on a trip to Tokyo to visit their grown children. They are shocked to find they have become selfish, disrespectful, and greedy. Only the former wife of their dead son, who hasn't remarried, is everything their own children are not: kind, loving, and considerate. Without warning, on the way home, the old woman breaks down and dies. After the funeral, the children leave their widower father alone in his house. Ozu closes the film with the image of the old man (Chishu Ryu, who was 49 when the film was made) smoke from the mosquito coil floating around him like incense, gazing forlornly at the view.
Ozu represented families before and after Tokyo Story, but never so purposefully. In fact, it makes Ozu's message come across much more explicitly and, for me, forcedly. Late Spring and An Autumn Afternoonare far more moving because they don't elicit emotions so easily. Their trajectory is similar to Tokyo Story's but they are more complex because they allow their stories to unfold without Setsuko Hara delivering the line "Isn't life disappointing?"
Occasionally Ozu concentrated on subjects other than the family, most interestingly in one of my favorites of his films, Floating Weeds (1959), which follows a troupe of itinerant actors to a small seaside town. The leader of the troupe, played by the great Ganjiro Nakamura, has a young mistress who is the troupe's leading lady. But the small town is home to another woman, who has borne him a son. The old man thinks about quitting his vagabond life, but he returns to his mistress when he learns that there is really no place for him in his grown son's and former girlfriend's world. (The plot of this film is virtually identical to Ingmar Bergman's masterful film Sawdust and Tinsel [1953].)
And Ozu's camera. It's the most noticeable part of his filmmaking, and it is the most profound element of his art. Antonioni once remarked that camera placement is a moral decision. He meant that where the director places his camera determines how he wants the audience to feel about his subject. By the same token, it tells the audience what the director thinks about himself. While many filmmakers have lately decided to abandon the fixed perspective required by traditional camera placement, if only because cameras have gotten smaller and lighter, Ozu takes advantage of the fact that the viewer has to be seated in order to watch his films by sitting down his camera in the room with his actors, on the floor where, in Japan, they sit, eat, and sleep.
Wim Wenders visited Tokyo wanting to get closer to the places that Ozu depicted in his films. The result was Tokyo-Ga, which is invaluable for its interviews with Chishu Ryu, the actor who played the father in so many of his films, and with Yuharu Atsuta, Ozu's cameraman, who showed Wenders the famous squatting camera position. The rest of the film inadvertently shows the extent to which Ozu's world has disappeared almost completely from 1985 Tokyo. The only surviving setting is the labyrinthine bar district, with innumerable cozy, inviting bars. (In one such bar, called La Jetée, Wenders finds Chris Marker!)
When I recently moved farther from the port town on my island into another house, a feral dog who liked to take shelter on my porch had just had puppies. I didn't see them at first but I could hear them sheltering under my back stoop, whining from the cold when it rained at night. These dogs eat only what they can scrounge from people's trash and the leftovers from their meals. (There is no waste disposal that I know of anywhere in this province.) This diet somehow manages to keep a surprising number of dogs alive, but there is constant fighting among them and they all carry the scars of survival.
The dog that had the puppies started bringing them, one at a time, onto my porch as soon as she and I became friends. Having a dog around your door is always a good idea when you're a stranger and people are convinced that you have stacks of cash inside your house. Given the fact that the dogs' survival depends on whatever they can scavenge, the puppies' survival was especially precarious. In fact, within a week or so, I never saw the puppies again.
Life went on for the mother, and about six wees ago, without my knowing she was carrying one, she had another litter, amounting to four this time. As the weeks have gone by since then, I watched as they survived or, one by one, did not. One of them felt safe enough on my porch to lie down next to one of my tsinelas (flip-flops) and die. Half-starving, it had eaten something it shouldn't have, spent the morning throwing up and only when I began to smell that unmistakable stench waft into my sala sis IO look outside and find it lying there, with flies around its eyes and mouth. I put my hand inside a plastic bag, picked up its cold little body (none of the puppies had noticeably grown for weeks) and pulled the bag inside out around it. My neighbor, a retired cop, buried it somewhere for me.
The one puppy that is left is still nursing - when the mother lets him. When I can, I make sure that she gets the first go at my leftovers, even when the alpha male makes threatening noises as he watches her wolf down the fatback and fish bones. When she looks at me now, I see a calm, contended look in her brown eyes. Just how many more times her well-worn body can stand the strain of a litter I shall have to see. 
One of the most telling details that has emerged from what people are calling the Michael Jackson Death Trial is how many people depended on Jackson as a source of income and to what extent he was an idol as well as a cash cow.
The accused Dr Conrad Murray's witnessed behavior during the moments when he found that Jackson had expired betrayed the near-frantic reactions of a man who was trying to resuscitate a corpse, not because he cared about the vital human being who had given up the ghost quite unexpectedly under his care, but because of what he was figuring that he had to gain by keeping Michael's heart beating and what he stood to lose if he did not. The image of Murray whipping a dead horse sprang to mind as accounts from EMS crews and emergency room doctors were certain that Jackson was clinically dead while Murray was insisting that they keep trying to resuscitate him.
Viewers of the concert movie This Is It (an ironically crass title) were spared, through careful editing, the recorded moments when Jackson betrayed how actually fragile his health was while he put himself through rehearsals for a concert tour he himself announced would be his last.
Another inadvertent revelation of Murray's trial is that his obvious incompetence and unscrupulousness were the conditions of his employment as Michael Jackson's personal physician. A more competent and scrupulous doctor simply wouldn't have prescribed all the drugs that Jackson insisted on having, no matter how much Jackson offered to pay him.
I watched an incredible interview the other day with one of Jackson's business advisers who, while claiming to have been a close friend of his, spoke with unconcealed and unrestrained pride about the dead man's ongoing Net Worth. Despite the expiration of the mortal Michael Jackson, the Estate of Michael Jackson lives on, and even grows, continuing to enrich all the people named in his will but also the many employed in the management of his legacy.
In his final days, Jackson wasn't much different from Elvis - a drug-addicted wreck. At least Jackson wasn't found dead on the toilet. When the Arthur Penn film Bonnie and Clyde became an unexpected hit in 1967, cartoon appeared in a popular magazine that depicted two prison inmates, one of whom says to the other "Bonnie and Clyde! Bonnie and Clyde! All I hear is Bonnie and Clyde. The saying is true, you're never appreciated until after you're dead!" In Jackson's case, he has appreciated in more than one sense.
The news last week that a remake of Sam Peckinpah's powerful film Straw Dogs (1971) was in release infuriated me so much that I decided to revisit the original, if only in memory. "Why not rewrite The Sun Also Rises while you're at it?" I thought. The same people who say they revere certain classic films, while engaged in remaking them, are showing a funny kind of reverence. It shows just how little they take film seriously. Remake a piece of skilled trash like Psycho, as Gus Van Sant did, by all means. Or simply admit that you're only doing it for the money and because you can't come up with an original idea of your own. The truly sad part is that a majority of people aren't likely to seek out the original, simply because the remake just isn't compelling enough. Score one for the philistines.
I noticed from the preview that the remake is set in good old Hicksville, USA rather than the English village in the original. This perhaps gives the story an unfortunate Deliverance-like bias against red state rednecks ("Squeal like a pig!"), small towns and farmers. It would certainly give the new film an unintended political slant. But Peckinpah was trying to tell us what he thought about men and women. He wasn't giving us a travel advisory. I never had the feeling that he was making a general statement about English people, even if the censors may have taken it that way.
In Peckinpah's film, the hero, played by Dustin Hoffman, is a pacifist university mathematician who has come to a small English village (called Wakely, but the film was shot in St Buryan, Cornwall) for some peace and quiet while he works on a new theorem. With him is his newlywed wife (Susan George) who is a native of the village. Hoffman hires some local men to help renovate parts of his old farmhouse. Unbeknownst to Hoffman, his wife and one of the men are former lovers. The film becomes a contest of wills, with Peckinpah imposing a quite primitive view of men and women. (Peckinpah had been reading books by Robert Ardrey on human behavior when he wrote the script.)
The hired hands devise a scheme in which they take Hoffman out hunting while his wife's former boyfriend reclaims her in the film's most objectionable scene. Peckinpah depicts how the wife shows pleasure as she is being raped. The scene caused an uproar precisely because it was presented so powerfully. Pauline Kael called the film a "fascist work of art" - supposedly because it tries to impose its own lurid views of human sexuality on the viewer.
I remember the telling moment when a clash of cultures takes place in a single image: Hoffman kills a bird but comes close to tears when he sees it lying dead before him. The symbolism was made all the more moving by Hoffman's unexpected access of emotion, while cross-cutting shows us his wife being brutalized back at his farm.
The trailer for the remake shows how much of the original was retained: the bear trap, the pots of hot oil, Hoffman beating one of the men with a poker like he's teeing off at St Andrews while mad bagpipe music blares from his stereo.
Dustin Hoffman was excellent as the timid hero, whom Peckinpah helps discover the animal within. Susan George, like many another daughter of Albion, had imperfect teeth that made her seem all the sexier. But one of the best elements of Peckinpah's film was the extraordinary music of Jerry Fielding (he won an Oscar for it - but big deal). He had worked with Peckinpah since his days on the television show The Rifleman and wrote excellent scores for many of his films, including The Wild Bunch, Junior Bonner, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. John Simon noted that his music for Straw Dogs was influenced by Stravinsky's "Dumbarton Oaks Concerto". I found it worthy of Stravinsky himself.
Since the 2000 presidential election, in which Democratic candidate Al Gore won the popular vote, but Republican candidate George W. Bush won the most electoral college votes (and won the election), the fact that there are two Americas has become obvious.
Several issues make the divide between the two Americas seem particularly unbridgeable, and, appropriately I suppose, have to do with matters of life and death. Abortion, with supporters calling themselves "Pro-Choice" and opponents calling themselves "Pro-Life", has inspired its more extreme opponents to murdering abortion doctors and blowing up abortion clinics.
Currently, abortion is legal in every state of the U.S. since the Supreme Court decision of Roe v Wade in 1973. Whatever its legal status, abortion is carried out everywhere and all the time by women who, for whatever reason, do not wish that their lives should be changed permanently by an unplanned pregnancy. I suppose that if it were to be banned in the U.S., its opponents would have the strange satisfaction of knowing that they will have succeeded in making abortion so risky that it could potentially cause the deaths of the mothers as well as the fetuses.
In a bizarre twist, many of the people who are against abortion are also enthusiastically for capital punishment. They continue to believe that it is a deterrent, despite proof to the contrary. People simply don't commit crimes in the belief that they will be caught and punished.
Capital punishment has its supporters in tyrannies like China and North Korea, but also in the United States, which is alone in the Western Hemisphere in its observance of the practice. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment in 1976, but 16 states have abolished the practice.
Last week, it seemed that the whole world was watching as Troy Davis became the latest victim of the moral turpitude of some Americans. Our sudden knowledge of the existence of this man was quickly upset by the state of Georgia's determination to expedite his nonexistence. If the cruelty of the event wasn't already obvious, it was delayed for three hours while a last minute appeal to the Supreme Court was being considered. Since the execution was by lethal injection, Troy Davis likely laid there on the table with the i.v. in his arm the whole time. That's like if he'd been hanged, he'd have had the noose around his neck and been standing on the trap door for 3 hours.
I have made my feelings on this subject abundantly clear before now. People who despair of their countrymen ever coming around to their thinking on the subject have to persevere. I recall when some avowed liberals moved to Canada when George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 because they found the political and moral atmosphere in America to be poisonous. Certainly their departure gratified those on the other side of the divide. But America is my country. And my side is winning.
