In the Marcos regime’s political lexicon, love is a euphemism for modes of social control secured in and through cultural policy. It bears noting that cultural policy straddles the intimate and public spheres: insofar as it is primarily concerned with the normalization of tastes and the regimentation of social conduct, cultural policy requires the alignment of the intimate sphere of domesticity with the public culture of the state. The two spheres are assumed to work in tandem, inculcating a drive toward self-improvement in the cultural citizen. And as Jürgen Habermas reminds us, it is in the domestic sphere where citizens are prepared for their critical social function in the public sphere, where the public’s role as critic is guided and made possible by the ideal of collective intimacy.16 Cultural policy indeed turns on what Berlant, after Habermas, calls “the migration of intimacy expectations between the public and the domestic.”17 Simply put, it assumes that the cultivation of good taste in the intimate sphere leads to good citizenship in the public sphere. What is striking about the cultural policy of the Marcos regime is its allegorization of this classic model of the ethico-aesthetic in the person of Imelda Marcos, who, as “mother of the Filipino people,” was the primary civilizing agent of the national family. This book unpacks Imelda’s complex and highly ambivalent role as the melodramatic heroine of the Marcos romance whose desire for the good life encapsulates the melodramatic imaginary of the regime’s cultural policy.
Melodrama is a constitutive feature of the allegorical impulse to narrate “the truth” of a nation. Indeed, the overlap between national allegory and melodrama is of central concern to my project, and a brief explication of their mutually reinforcing dynamic is in order.
As a critical concept, melodrama is a notoriously slippery term. Since the 1960s and 1970s, when melodrama emerged as a major topic in film studies, scholars have tried to pin down its essential qualities. But so many inconsistencies abound in the usage of the term, and so many mutations have surfaced in its cross-media adaptations that no consensus has been reached on whether melodrama constitutes a coherent genre or a more elusive “mode” of expression.18 Recent scholarship has shifted the terms of debate from what melodrama is to what it does.19 Whether scholars approach it as a specific genre, or engage it as a pervasive mode of popular culture narrative, all agree that it is particularly responsive to experiences of dislocation and trauma.20 All agree, furthermore, that its key features—strong pathos, moral legibility, and sensational expressionism—resonate with subaltern audiences, or those among us whose material vulnerability and experiences of social marginalization have been most acute.
Emerging in the wake of the Enlightenment, melodrama, Peter Brooks argues, seeks above all to make moral principles legible in a secular world, where “the traditional patterns of moral order no longer provide the necessary social glue.” It has long been the job of melodrama to serve a compensatory, quasi-religious function, defusing social anxieties with stories enacting the “eventual victory of virtue.”21 But as Linda Williams has more recently argued, the force of melodrama’s ameliorative function rests not so much on a drama of the defeat of evil by good but on the “all important recognition of a good or evil that was previously obscure.” Indeed, what melodrama really does is to allow us to see “a previously unrecognized problem or contradiction within modernity” and to “generate outrage against realities that could and should be changed.”22
These insights allow us to apprehend melodrama as a discursive practice that is also mode of social activism: it is a means of “[making] truth and justice legible by demanding a clear binary between right and wrong.”23 Melodrama does not simply reflect a mode of consciousness in a postsacred world; it acts upon that consciousness by supplying a “dominant language on the modern conduct of public life and politics.”24 This book contends that melodrama fundamentally structures the key operation at the heart of all national allegories: the impetus to reveal the “truth” of the nation in a mode that appeals to the affective reason of the citizen.
Discussions of melodrama’s aesthetic force often turn on the notion of excess. In melodrama, exaggerated emotionality and a predilection for spectacle combine to produce an overwrought drama that “produces and foments psychic energies and emotions.”25 Ultimately, melodramatic excess constitutes a sensational economy that activates a complex process of psychological identification for the viewer.
Central to the discursive practice of melodrama is the presentation of victimization. Almost without exception, moral virtue is signified by pathos and suffering. Melodrama’s sensational economy triggers two interrelated processes: a heightened perception of moral injustice (against an undeserving victim) and the cathartic transformation of raw emotions (of distress and moral outrage). The audience feels strong pathos, “a sort of pain at an evident evil of a destructive or painful kind . . . the evil being one which we imagine to happen to ourselves.”26 The pathos that accompanies melodramatic identification, in short, is a form of self-pity.
The psychoaffective processes of melodrama have a powerful ideological effect. As many critics have noted, melodrama has a conservative social vision: the suffering of the victim must be vindicated through acts of redemptive violence, which then restores a community to its lost “space of innocence.”27 But as Matthew Buckley has recently pointed out, the critical tendency to privilege melodrama’s redemptive social vision obscures the genre’s complicated affective conditioning. Melodrama, he reminds us, initially invites sympathetic attachment to victimized heroes and heroines. However, opposing emotions of hatred and fear ultimately supersede feelings of sympathy, as negative affects are “projected or ‘dumped’ outward . . . upon some clear other, through angry and often violent action.”28 A radical disconnect thus emerges between the consoling vision of melodrama’s moral structure and the violent projections of its affective structure. The latter, to borrow Buckley’s terms, encourages “infantile processes of defensive withdrawal,” substituting “the passive consumption of sensational fantasy for the more complex and demanding performance of collective identification and communal action and identity.”29
A fundamental tension exists, then, between melodrama’s two core operations: the imperative to move audiences to feel moral outrage against social contradictions, and the validation of traditional figures of political authority, who ultimately emerge as the real agents of moral retribution. While the former registers melodrama’s implicit drive toward social activism, the latter speaks to melodrama’s opposing tendency to reduce political action to the spectatorial pleasures of mass entertainment. The push-pull between these two melodramatic operations was amply in evidence in Marcos’s rise to power and in the 1986 popular revolt.
This book unpacks the melodramatic politics inhering in the national allegories created by Marcos and his critics. It locates these allegories in press reports, magazine features, campaign biographies, propaganda films, biopics, and studio films that serve as melodramatic transcripts of the rise and fall of the Marcos regime. These allegories bring to the fore the continuing salience of a fundamental question, first broached by Ana Lopez, that continues to inform studies of melodrama in non-Western contexts: “Is it possible that this form, the product and instrument of the dominant classes and the servant of dominant ideologies, can be utilized and read as a positive force for socio-cultural change in dependent societies?”30
Media scholars and practitioners have routinely attacked melodrama as a retrograde cultural form, “helping to produce the ‘perfect’ subject of political and economic dependence in the Third World.” But as Lopez cogently argues, these naysayers are blindsided by melodrama’s special affinity with the popular classes. Exactly how these melodramas “meet the real desires and needs of real people” is the crux