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The Philippine prisoners
performing “Thriller” don’t surprise me. They don’t
fill me with wonder and delight. I find them amusing, perhaps, and vaguely
embarrassing. I consistently vacillate between the imagined positions
of the American viewer and the Philippine prisoner, but I can’t
quite keep each perspective separate. The American laughs but can’t
help knowing that her joy is largely because of misinterpretation. The
Filipino revels in imitation but couldn’t help knowing that Americans
are laughing for the wrong reasons.
Granted, I would have to project myself back to my homeland to figure
out my Filipino reaction. Though there is a handy news report in Filipino,
also available on YouTube, to give me some guidance. The news report highlights
not the innovative techniques of the prison administration, nor the discipline
of the prisoners. Instead, it highlights how amazing it is that these
prisoners are now American stars, how the leads in the “Thriller”
video were entertainers before they went to jail, and that they would
have never dreamed of becoming famous in America until YouTube came along.
At the end of the segment, the prison consultant responsible for the program
looked forward to marketing the dancing prisoners as a tourist attraction.
None of this surprises me. From my position here in the States, I can
imagine Western audiences engaging in an act of teleopoesis, a fancy term
that Jacques Derrida coined to describe the process of cultural copying
and pasting. Western audiences take their existing conceptions of prison,
mimicry, and entertainment and paste them onto the images of these prisoners.
Why can’t American prisons adopt these sorts of programs? They instill
discipline while keeping inmates occupied. The YouTube images function
as fantastic substitutes for the current, broken American prison system,
as placeholders in the Western imagination. Their physical reality renders
them tenable. Even the prison consultant claims that he posted the videos
in order to show other prisons what can be done, even though it would
presumably be bad for the tourist trade if this were actually to take
place.
What makes the videos unsurprising to me is the fact that the Philippines
is a significantly more homogenous culture, united by Catholicism, and
where racial boundaries are much less distinct than in America. Whenever
I talk about growing up in the Philippines, I almost always mention that
I didn’t see or experience any significant bullying at school, which
seems to be a staple of American education. In an environment where everyone
was raised with a significantly overlapping set of cultural assumptions,
it was harder to find things to disagree about. Thus, it becomes much
easier to convince this many prisoners to get along in the Philippines.
Also, given the dominance of Catholicism, the concept of repentance is
much more prevalent, as evidenced by the number of videos containing religious
themes, mostly from Sister Act. The rendition of “I Will Follow
Him” even features female prisoners, which would be unheard of in
an American prison. We’re not talking about Rikers here, and yet
the orange jumpsuits immediately signal such American prison associations,
which then leads to the American fascination with the videos, which also
doesn’t surprise me.
What does surprise me is that I am watching these videos in the first
place, that I am in a position to comment on the goings-on of a country
I left fifteen years ago because of this thing called the Internet, which
turns out to be more amazing than even the most optimistic visionaries
foresaw a decade ago, and which continues to enthrall and surprise me.
Filipinos already have the reputation for being the world’s best
mimics, a claim given institutional credit when the anthropologist Arjun
Appudarai discussed it in his groundbreaking Modernity at Large, which
deals with the effects of cultural globalization. He talks about our precise
mimicry of American songs, even better than Americans themselves, despite
having no access to the lived reality that the songs represent. I wish
to replace “despite” with “because.” Not knowing
the cultural context of these songs, we have little desire to make them
our own. We’re happy to simply copy every move, enjoy each gesture.
It’s a national pastime.
Now, we all find ourselves in a new cultural moment. Taking off my Filipino
hat and putting my American one back on, it amazes me that we have so
much access to the marginal products of American culture, that we can
watch Filipinos mimic our songs from the comfort of our living rooms and
offices. And further, I can watch commentary about these representations
from both American and Filipino news sources. It’s as though a curtain
has been lifted to reveal a mirror behind me when I am already watching
a mirror in front of me, and I get to experience the wonder of an infinite
hall of mirrors.
I can’t wait to see the YouTube video where eleven hundred Americans
in orange jumpsuits mimic the Philippine rendition of “Thriller.”
I’m willing to bet they won’t be real prisoners. Chances are,
it would happen in a music video. If there is a God, the music video would
even bring the corpse that is Michael Jackson’s career back to life.
[B]
MEREDITH TALUSAN
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