Mum’s the Word

One artificial couple after another.

In My Life
Director: Olivia Lamasan
Cast: Vilma Santos, Luis Manzano, John Lloyd Cruz
2009

Shirley walks over to a group of four white sculptures. Her son Mark sheepishly stands beside her. “Father and son, mother and daughter,” she says, pointing to the two pairs of figures. She gestures at her and Mark, the third pair: “Mother and son.” Shirley smiles triumphantly at her seemingly clever parallelisms. “Family! Kaya nga gusto ko dito.” Mark’s lover Noel laughs and takes the photo.

The scene is short, almost forgettable, buried somewhere in a touristic sequence where Mark (Luis Manzano), with his boyfriend Noel (John Lloyd Cruz), shows his mother Shirley (Vilma Santos) around New York City. The white sculptures are George Segal’s Gay Liberation, a site-specific installation in Greenwich Village built in 1980 to commemorate the Stonewall riots which catalyzed the gay rights movement in the US. Shirley, however, is unaware of the monument’s nature, recognizing it only as innocent males and females in a “family.”

Love in the Time of Camera

Two seemingly divergent films—the effects-laden extravaganza Cloverfield and the geeky-chic (500) Days of Summer—both end on a May 23^rd. Other than that, they’re as divergent as it gets.

However, both explore interesting angles on the relationship between cinema and life. In Cloverfield, for example, in the midst of crisis, people are looting not grocery stores, but electronics shops, seizing flatscreen TVs and other gadgets. In (500) Days of Summer, the lead character goes into a cinema only to watch his life played out, albeit stylized, on screen. These instances are symptomatic of how closely life and love are linked with the audiovisual form.

Perhaps it is best to begin by saying: Cinema is both a cultural and economic medium. That is, the act of watching a film combines the cultural (the transmission of ideas, formation of consciousness) with the economic (paying for the experience, generation of wealth).

“Imperialism is an economic undertaking,” explains Jonathan Beller, “as well as an ideological and libidinal one.” It is these aspects—the libidinal and ideological—which are so conspicuous in Cloverfield and (500) Days of Summer.