‘Ang mananayaw’
THE BRICKBATS have come from everywhere, and I doubt I need to add more. Those are the brickbats that have been thrown Willie Revillame’s way as a result of his latest caper, which was to subject a 6-year-old boy named Jan-Jan to jaw-dropping humiliation in his show a few weeks ago.
In case you haven’t heard about it—in which case it’s time you came down from your mountain—Jan-Jan was the kid who was brought to Revillame’s show by his father and tita to do a macho dance. The kid, looking completely innocent and conscripted, did his number while he fought off tears. That vastly amused Revillame, who drew attention to it, saying “pinahanga mo ’ko,” you drew my admiration. Jan-Jan, he said, did what he did through his tears just so he could make some money. He likened the kid’s act to the dancer in the movie “Ang Mananayaw” who had to striptease out of poverty, flaunting her allures through her tears.
Revillame liked the idea so much he made the kid gyrate again and again and again.
Why am I not surprised? Last Christmas, I wrote a column wondering why this first-class pain-in-the-whatever wasn’t just being tolerated by the networks but fought over by them. I found particularly objectionable the way he treated guests, turning them into slobbering recipients of doles. I contrasted that with the way Ellen Degeneres, whose show also gives out generous amounts of cash and kind, treated guests perfectly decently.
A reader took me to task for it, saying my writing that way about someone who only tried to make people laugh merely reflected my pettiness, showing my lack of Christian spirit particularly during Christmas. He said the comparison with Degeneres was neither here nor there because she had a different audience and culture.
I replied that Christmas was especially suited to drawing attention to the true spirit of giving and making people happy. The kind of laughter Revillame knew we saw from his objecting to Cory’s procession being aired on his show because it ruined his show’s kasayahan, or fun and games. We now see that in the kind of laughter Revillame stoked in his audience by the way he treated Jan-Jan.
Just as well, I said, whatever their differences, Revillame and Degeneres’ guests had one thing in common. They were human beings who deserved respect. And whatever their differences, Revillame and Degeneres had one thing in common. They were hosts who needed to respect themselves, who needed to keep reminding themselves what they were.
I can only add to that now that Ryan Agoncillo also has a program, “Talentadong Pinoy,” that has people strutting their stuff and going through hoops for a crack at fame and fortune. He makes his audience laugh with them, not at them.
Beyond all this, what I particularly found insightful were the remarks from some people in the mainstream and social media who said that the first time they saw the Jan-Jan episode, they themselves found little that was wrong with it. Of course they were uncomfortable, but they were not outraged. It was only when they saw it again on YouTube that the atrocity of it registered. Which made them wonder what had happened to them. Had they become so inured to spectacles like this they took them to be par for the course, asking themselves only what else was new? Had they become so desensitized to outrageousness it had become tolerable, if not acceptable?
There’s hope for us yet to go by that introspection, by that self-examination, by that self-realization. Revillame’s reference to “Ang Mananayaw” is particularly rich, even if he supplies the wealth unwittingly. At the very least that is so because, true enough, the boy is like the dancer in “Mananayaw” who has to dance through his tears out of dire straits, out of conscription, out of having to make money for loved ones thoroughly undeserving of his love or money. That is so as well because Revillame, who professes admiration for such self-sacrifice, is in fact the gloating owner of the striptease joint who makes his fabulous living by ruthlessly exploiting the desperate in this way.
But more than that, it is so because, true enough, we as a nation have been reduced to the titillated, voyeuristic audience of this dance. We as a people have been turned into the laughing, howling, mob in a room reeking of gin and cigarette smoke, shouting, “Take it off! Take it off!” That can take an almost literal aspect in Revillame’s show, as witness the crowd that took in Jan-Jan’s tearful exhibitionism in that episode.
But it doesn’t always have to take the literal form of the dance. The striptease has gone on for some time in many forms, not the least of them the way women have agreed to humiliate themselves in noontime shows appearing in skimpy clothing in what passes for beauty contests while the male hosts crack jokes about their physical attributes, to laughter from the gallery. And which the hosts make up for, or think they do, by flinging bills away like drunken sailors, shouting money, money, money, or putting it in the girls’ hands, while the members of the audience applaud and rave and feel as though they themselves were slipping bills in a strip dancer’s garters.
Hard enough as it is to wonder what’s wrong when you’ve gotten used to sights like this, even harder it is to see what’s wrong when you’re part of the panting crowd. Which is why I’m grateful for the self-introspective comments. It’s as though people caught themselves in the middle of the lusty and lustful shouts and wondered what they were doing there, what they were doing to others, what they were doing to themselves.
The other way to think about it is that Revillame has become the mananayaw himself.
That is one striptease that has gone on long enough.
