Proximity of Other Skins: Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinema 0190865865, 9780190865863

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations in Those Long Haired Nights (2017) and Call Her Ganda (2018)
2. (Rich) White Women, (Poor) Brown Men, and Sexual Settings: Political and Libidinal Economies in Heading South (2005) and Never Forever (2007)
3. The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship: Annihilation and Affliction in Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador (2007), Serbis (2007), and Ma’ Rosa (2016)
4. Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage: Performing Roles and Breaking Rules between Masters and Servants in The Housemaid (2011) and The Handmaiden (2016)
5. The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others: Ramona Diaz’s Imelda (2005) and David Byrne’s Here Lies Love (2010–17)
6. Epilogue: Memory and Death (2013–Present)
References
Index

Citation preview

The Proximity of Other Skins

The Proximity of Other Skins Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinema C E L I N E PA R R E ÑA S SH I M I Z U

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2020 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​086586–​3  (pbk.) ISBN 978–​0–​19–​086585–​6  (hbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by Marquis, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

With so much love for Bayan Parreñas Shimizu who enlightens my work and illuminates my life

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

ix

1. Introduction: Subject/​Abject Relations in Those Long Haired Nights (2017) and Call Her Ganda (2018)

1

2. (Rich) White Women, (Poor) Brown Men, and Sexual Settings: Political and Libidinal Economies in Heading South (2005) and Never Forever (2007)

42

3. The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship: Annihilation and Affliction in Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador (2007), Serbis (2007), and Ma’ Rosa (2016)

87

4. Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage: Performing Roles and Breaking Rules between Masters and Servants in The Housemaid (2011) and The Handmaiden (2016)

137

5. The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others: Ramona Diaz’s Imelda (2005) and David Byrne’s Here Lies Love (2010–​17)

183

6. Epilogue: Memory and Death (2013–​Present)

219

References Index

225 233

Acknowledgments I write this book in the aftermath of my son Lakas’s sudden and unexpected death, within 24 hours from a common virus that attacked his heart. I could not read anything much less write. Even movies could not touch me. I am thankful for my community of colleagues, friends, and family. This book is possible with you. First and foremost I thank J. Reid Miller for encouraging bigger thinking and deeper digging throughout my reading, writing, and living. To be born in this time so we can do great things together makes me so happy. I am thankful for his bottomless knowledge that makes me work harder to get here. I am intensely grateful to Bakirathi Mani, who read every chapter as she wrote her own forthcoming book. Her bright and brilliant responses ignited me and pushed me from start to finish. We did it! Historians are needed in one’s life and work, and I am fortunate for Shelley Lee in mine. Jennifer Brody gave immensely insightful feedback in developing specific chapters. I am grateful to Jane Park and Helen Lee for replying to an earlier draft of Chapter 4. I interviewed the filmmaker Ramona Diaz and the actors Jaygee Macapugay, Melody Bitiu, and Belinda Allyn. Their work makes this book richer. I thank them for sharing their time, insights, and talent with me. The filmmaker Brillante Mendoza graciously agreed to share his beautiful work for the cover of this book. The scholar Linh Nguyen joined me at Here Lies Love in critical absorption of the experience. Theo Gonzalves encouraged me to write about Here Lies Love, and for this I send thanks. Brian Hu from the San Diego Asian Film Festival embodies generosity as a scholar and curator, and really helped me as I pursued the leads to make this book better. Masashi Niwano of the San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival responded to my questions attentively. With her characteristic spirit of making things happen, Melissa Michelson connected me to the editors at Oxford University Press. James and Lien Percy talked with me about the mechanics of the body in various poses, which assisted me in writing. Pauline Masterson supported me throughout the writing of this book with her technical expertise.

x Acknowledgments I am thankful for the invitations to present at various institutions and for the scholars and students who engaged this work there, including: Jennifer Brody, Yvonne Yarbro Bejarano, Jeff Chang, Michele Elam, and Harry Elam at Stanford University; Shelley Lee and Rick Baldoz at Oberlin College; Bakirathi Mani at Swarthmore College, J. Reid Miller at Haverford College, and Hoang Nguyen at Bryn Mawr College; Rachael Joo at Middlebury College; Pawan Dhingra and Karen Sanchez Eppler at Amherst College; Ju Yon Kim, Gabriela Soto-​Laveaga, and Genevieve Clutario at Harvard University; Manduhai Buyandelger at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Corrie Martin, Flavia Vidal, Emma Staffaroni, Lilia Cai-​Hurteau, and Susan N.  Lee at Phillips Academy Andover; Kimberly Hoang at the University of Chicago; Qiu M.  Fogarty, Paul D.  Young, Mary Desjardins, Mark Williams, Eng Beng Lim, Benny Adapon, and Jennifer R.  Zhong at Dartmouth College; Martha Kenney, Russell Jeung, Isabelle Pelaud, Valerie Soe, Allyson Tintiangco-​Cubales, and Grace Yoo at San Francisco State University; and Yiman Wang at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Attendees at American Studies Association and Society for Cinema and Media Studies including Gilberto Blasini, Peter X. Feng, Yessica Hernandez, and Mila Zuo engaged this work energetically. My work with students fuels these pages. Students in my Theories of Sexuality and Cultural Studies graduate seminars at San Francisco State University (SFSU) School of Cinema in 2015–​2019 rigorously invested in the ideas and texts directly related to this book. This generation of graduate students includes Kiera Abdur-​Rahman, Anaiis Kudeja Cisco, Cady Conaway, Sam Davis-​Boyd, Q Flux, Haley Gilchrist, James Andrew Huffman, Kylie Harris, David Mai, Roe McDermott, Alicia Jimenez McPherson, Katherine Morrison, Chase Menaker, Pablo Riquelme-​Cuartero, Anthonia Onyejekwe, Mychal Reiff-​ Shanks, Karly Stark, Sarah Taborga, Joshua Thomas, Priya Vashist, Xiuhe Zhang, and so many more. My thousand plus undergraduate students at the SFSU School of Cinema and Sexuality Studies Program compel the best in me and I hope they enjoy this book which I wrote alongside their own midterms and finals. Our shared passion—​for the medium of film and the lens of analysis that is sexuality—​is inspiring. I began writing this book at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney when I was on fellowship during the summer immediately after the death of my son Lakas. They provided a space and community that warmly welcomed me and my family so I was able to launch back into my work with full force and from a more transnational lens in looking at the

Acknowledgments  xi United States. I am grateful to Katherine Delaney, Meaghan Morris, Brendon O’Connor, Jane Park, Craig Purcell, Rebecca Sheehan, and Rodney Taveira. This book would not exist without your support. The SFSU School of Cinema is where I  finished this book among my colleagues Daniel Bernardi, Scott Boswell, Steve Choe, Larry Clark, Cheryl Dunye, Laura Green, Martha Gorzycki, the late Jennifer Hammett, Julian Hoxter, Pat Jackson, Jason Jakaitis, Steve Kovacs, Jenny Lau, Aaron Michael Kerner, Joe McBride, Katie Morrissey, Alex Nevill, Rosa Sungjoo Park, Elizabeth Ramirez-​Soto, Ben Ridgway, R.  L. Rutsky, Britta Sjogren, Greta Snider, Bethany Sparks, Johnny Symons, and Weimin Zhang. The Program in Sexuality Studies is my second home at SFSU, and my colleagues there model a wonderful collaborative spirit. My research assistant Jon Alonso provided important support. For the support they provide my research at SFSU Cinema and Sexuality, thanks to Nalini Libby, Connie Carranza, Artie Farkas, Michael Cortina, Jiri Veskrna, Milton Gouveia, Florence Hou, Rozan Soleimani, and Thao Pham. I am grateful to former Dean Daniel Bernardi, Dean Andy Harris, former Provost Sue Rosser, Provost Jennifer Summit, and former President Leslie Wong and President Lynn Mahoney for their support of my research. My faculty cohort, the 55, provides reprieve and camaraderie that lifts my spirits. Anitra Grisales touched every chapter of this book, which helped me to get it out of my mind and into the world in its best form. I thank her so much for her talent and encouragement that strengthened the work. The anonymous readers provided strong, detailed, and extensive feedback and asked generative questions. I feel so intimately connected with them and thank them for inspiring me throughout my writing and helping me improve the book significantly. From the book proposal stage to the rounds of reviews, my Oxford University Press editor, Norman Hirschy, shepherded the book with grace and care. Lauralee Yeary and Asish Krishna assisted the book’s coming to life at Oxford so well. My sisters, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Juno Salazar Parreñas, keep me in close company in our work as scholars and professors. The Salazar Parreñas/​ Palma/​Piamonte/​Tamarkin/​McNeill and Shimizu/​Risk/​McCobb families bring me solace and cheer. This book is wholeheartedly fueled by my beloved husband, Dan Parreñas Shimizu, and our cherished sons, Bayan Parreñas Shimizu and Lakas Parreñas Shimizu. Dan fires me up my world so thoroughly and his ardent

xii Acknowledgments warmth gives me the strength to aspire, desire, crave, and hope. Bayan’s genius lights up my life. Our conversations clarify my thinking and his perspectives concretely help me access what language can do so uniquely and powerfully. I am forever grateful to Lakas, who hugged me, looked me in the eye to do right, and made every day sweet. The best way to honor Lakas’s life is to nurture his vital and vivid legacy—​of loving each other hard and fully living in sadness and joy, disappointment and abundance, courageously suffering and thriving together.

1  Introduction Subject/​Abject Relations in Those Long Haired Nights (2017) and Call Her Ganda (2018)

The Proximity of Other Skins examines transnational films that represent intimacy and abjection—​of gaining closeness to difference previously inexpressible—​that encountering it causes a disruption of one’s ego that can threaten the social order itself. It argues for the importance of representing intimate abjection—​the bores of romance, neglectful care, mundane sex, and pared down love between self-​centered subjects and those for whom object status is not achieved—​as sites for ethical choices not only for what occurs inside the movie but also for us as spectators watching, usually, from far away. In looking at films that represent transnational intimacies across radical inequality, I attend to relationships with people who exceed their classification as the unrepresentable abject. That is, for the denigrated—​transwomen sex workers, poor black and undocumented brown men desiring and desired by white women, the denigrated and disposable in the third world, housemaid and handmaiden—​fear and hatred for them combines with desire and fetishism. Their experiences and encounters can even look and feel like love but ultimately is the aggravation of inequality from where fantasies arise. When privileged subjects who encounter the alienated unequal within the global movement of people and goods in geopolitical, historical, and cultural contexts in and out of the United States—​the meeting becomes one where we see the re-​enactment of abjection socially, or the inability and confusion to conceptualize the other as a subject. The other registers as a non-​being, one that does not go beyond the ego’s self in occupying a not-​subject, or object status. I am concerned with giving more precision to relations of inequality within globalization where the other is abjected. At the same time, the question must also be asked about the wider range and scope of relations that can spring from what looks entirely like domination. We cannot anoint agency, it is always already there, yet we must always ask why it must be emphasized and sought, especially for those merely trying to stay alive.

2  The Proximity of Other Skins We need to recognize and name what I am calling “subject/​abject relations” that occur in the realm of the real and the reel. The inequality between intimately enmeshed subjects can be measured by their different proximities to social life—​viability (regard and recognition) and death (disregard and abuse). Denigration and repudiation shape the quality of the abjected and in our witnessing of these on-​screen relations, we as the audience are exposed as both conceptualized and located in our own place, our own history, and our difference. We in the West are not innocent in the other’s invisibility. In our encounter with films from South Korea and the Philippines and other transnational films from countries and regions touched by colonial relations, our spectatorship is implicated by the film for our distinction from it. From the perches we occupy, we watch these films from positions of distance—​ whether geographic or social—​even as audiences in the West are diasporic subjects from the East. These films may lead us to feelings of empathy or, hopefully, an awareness of our power to name and define whom we see: as subject, other, object, or abject—​in how we accept the ability of film to show us ourselves and our limits in recognizing and feeling for others. The result of engaging stories we don’t want to watch and don’t want to feel is the displacement of the universal spectator, in a redefinition of the power of cinema for today’s global audiences. These celebrated transnational films that move across continents give us (as spectators) the opportunity to theorize how people now live together in many spheres of contemporary life. We can then better understand and appreciate the function and impact of what it means to witness and consume intimacy across different locations and relations. The subjects in and out of these films have the opportunity to measure whether life becomes more livable in their encounter with the abject. In their scenes of intimacy, the privileged subject not only has the ability to affirm and express love and emotion across inequality but also simultaneously to act untouched and remain unmoved. They are abetted by powerful social forces that alienate and oppress, revealing the loneliness, pain, disenfranchisement, and suffering within transnational, national, and personal relations of power and hierarchy of which cinema is but a part. The abject is not entirely powerless, but certainly acts within more constraints. Their life is near death and their encounters can severely aggravate their situations. This is what cinema can show us—​the dynamics of power and desire to transform and more deeply entrench—​and its success in transforming the world depends on how we respond to our experience of these relations on-​screen. And too many times, the words and

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  3 interpretative tools we have are also authored by limited voices, as the films themselves are, so that they actually do not expand our understanding of others but narrow them. I examine this phenomenon of relationality through the movies, in terms of what we already know, now, through this form. David Bordwell asserts that classical Hollywood cinema is the American tradition of filmmaking by which all others are judged. He claims its privileged place among other cinemas as that which is emulated:  “The classical tradition has become a default framework for international cinematic expression, a point of departure for nearly every filmmaker.”1 He argues that the ways films are told were established early in Hollywood and filmmakers from all other parts of the world spring from this tradition—​while classifying them as belonging to particular areas. Indeed, we have a tradition of looking at movies—​third cinema, national cinemas—​yet films that emerge from other places resist this notion that they are simply mimicking or organizing their film language against ours. The ways films are made and distributed are complicated. Many may not even be seen in the places from where they emerge. My theory is that the movies I study—​from the Philippines, South Korea, and other places—​may or may not be made for us, and they may not make use of our traditions. Rather, they exist to express their own concerns, not only in the abjection of their characters and their subjects in film studies and within their worlds but also in demanding space for the knowledge they produce beyond our existing frames. These films require us to go beyond passive consumption, or even introspection of ourselves as spectators to define otherness and self, for the abjection they describe produces new knowledge we cannot unsee, unhear, or unfeel. I coin the term “ethical intimacy” to move away from the arrogance of Hollywood self-​centrality in order to capture the new ontological awareness these films demand in our encounters with them. Seeing, hearing, and feeling these films outside the cinematic experience, toward a new prioritization of different senses and voices, can hopefully lead to a transformation of how we experience intimacy on-​screen in a new global world. I begin with an internationally award-​winning film from the Philippines to illustrate how spectators and other texts are hailed to recognize the abject—​those below object status in our established relations on-​and off-​ screen—​so that we may dislodge ourselves from our own self-​centering view. For Kinatay, a 2009 film about a prostitute butchered by a reluctantly corrupt cop, Brillante Mendoza is the first Filipino to win Best Director at the

4  The Proximity of Other Skins prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Coming from the Global South, his victory hints at the displacement of Hollywood and Western filmmaking’s dominance on the global stage. This is important to note, considering the colonial domination of the Philippines—​first by Spain for hundreds of years, then another 50 years by the United States—​solidifying the soft power of Hollywood infusing the country’s identity and self-​recognition. For the colonial subject to come into speech through filmmaking is a kind of retribution which has a long history in the late 20th century, but Mendoza and others are working with the fall of the American empire in sight. A decentering of the master narrative of filmmaking away from the classical Hollywood cinema is afoot when they assert that these films are not entirely made for the West, and when they are, they defy and give what the West really does not want. The ones made abject in and by Western cinema and cinemas of the Global North that put in the periphery the non-​Western Global South come to light. And their films formulate a voice that refuses their marginalization or their ghettoization into niche films—​they make films that demand watching in new ways. Mendoza’s films dramatize grim and brutal scenarios in the Global South that at first seem to affirm their denigrated status from the perspective of imperial eyes à la President McKinley’s dream, in 1898, of little brown brothers unable to govern themselves as primitive, savage, perverse, and perpetually underdeveloped colonial subjects.2 Both perspectives indeed are at work: the subaltern amplifies their abject situation in their own voices and in doing so, chooses to depict third-​world squalor. As such, Filipin@x3 filmmakers like Mendoza are not simply making exploitation films but also illuminating the limits of other perspectives on their abjection as well as their filmmaking. Displacing the dominant voice of Hollywood provides an opportunity for thinking about the persistent presence of the West in the lives of those they’ve abjected. Making the West’s culpability in the lives of others apparent demands a new ethical conduct regarding our own viewing and filmmaking of the Global South. I explore the significance of the implications of screening these films about difference and defilement in terms of displacing dominant voices and listening to what these other films and filmmakers demand. In attending to these emergent voices, what I am eager to explore is the focus on intimacy at the site of inequality that these films depict:  bodies within their poverty and abjection interacting with other bodies whose wealth and subject status differ significantly. Films about the Global South by filmmakers I study investigate their relation to others in the Global North and beyond and their histories of colonialism not only nationally but also

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  5 cinematically, especially in how they interact within sites of intimacy in sex and care work. I consider their focus on sex and care as representing acts of interpenetration whether bodily, spatially, or psychically. Achieved by such a focus is the constant threat of contamination by the filthy other as worthy of both the taboo pleasure and the enjoyment of power such contact enables. Sex becomes an exploration of social death—​both figurative and literal—​that such entanglements compel. And in viewing these films’ engagements with intimacy across inequality, the titillation that indeed occurs for the spectator must be redirected to another kind of feeling that goes beyond spectatorial rapture of consuming the other to one of other possibilities such as the rupture that arises from witnessing pain and suffering. My feeling is that self-​displacement is what these films ultimately compel and demand in Western spectators —ethical intimacy is a call for us to assess the value we give to our actions in relation to cinema. That is, Mendoza’s films are primarily screened outside the Philippines (the films don’t pass muster with the local censors). Spectators in the West are hopefully made aware of their traditional viewing as occupant of the colonizing eye. In recognizing one’s established position as the centered audience, the targeted viewer, the typically marginalized then say no, yours is an arrogance that needs to stop when given films that are hard to watch. When the filmmakers then clearly speak from and about different contexts of sexuality, care, and romance, they expand our perspectives about others and ourselves. I ask how these two displacements—​both of the filmmaking voices rising up from the Global South and of a dominant Western perspective on intimacy and care—​recast the significance of filmmaking’s power to create not only empathy and awareness but also compassion toward others and action on oneself.

Displacing Hollywood and Its Notions of Romance, Sex, and Care: A Cinema of Abjection In Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador (Slingshot) (2007), drug addicts, prostitutes, boosters, thieves, jammers, and other dejected or destitute members of society attempt to survive while on the verge of social and actual death during national government elections. In one scene, a desperate, toothless drug addict steals a laptop, gets caught, and then loudly and tearfully wails for forgiveness. In the act of watching this scene, we are aware of the spectacle this poor young woman creates within the public spaces represented

6  The Proximity of Other Skins in the film. The embarrassing scene of her wailing while she is berated by the shopkeepers roots us in her desperate poverty. Seconds later, she shamefully slithers out of the electronics shop, using the pageant of wiping away her tears to steal another laptop as she merges into the crowded streets. It is a brazen act that exposes her deceitful performance of absolute despair and makes mockery of the forgiving proprietor’s mercy. The drug addict’s tears of misery give way to joyful cackling. The despondency leading to the theft is soon revealed. The theft will fund fake teeth, enabling inclusion in society as more possible for an otherwise normatively beautiful drug addict who presumably loses all her teeth from using methamphetamines. The scene is powerful for representing everyday denigration within the coexistence of anguish and satisfaction in the act of stealing, where a frantic need is fulfilled while a triumphant bravado is performed. The scene makes clear that drug addicts deserve teeth so as to gain social redemption. Yet, soon after the beautiful toothless drug addict’s triumphant return home, she loses the postizo teeth when they fall off her makeshift sink, past the other ramshackle levels of her tenement, into a trench of dirty water, sewage and garbage flowing underneath her entire neighborhood. Her most prized body part leaves her to become one with the filth of the ground beneath her. She loses acceptability again. The film, which won the Caligari Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2008, indeed presents a striking overall look at a largely unexpressed world the West is not encouraged to visit—​in its locations, spaces, and objects and the blocking of the actors within all of it. Our awareness of the tenements as built over sewage is ceaseless so as to create an undeniable location clearly so far away from the luxury seats occupied by festival goers at Berlin and other venues. The smells in this film are not ours. The strength of the film’s looks secures this olfactory difference. Through the rich and unrelenting details of the production design and the movement inside the movie through its energetic cinematography, we notice our different location in an unforgettable way, gnawing at us with its horrific details. Through these devices, I argue, the film recasts identification—​to stand in the shoes of the other—​as one replaced by the need for accepting what may not be understood precisely because it is so different. And, as such, a new ethical relation is formed. The film is not for the Western spectator but for itself. The film was shot by hand in the slums of Manila, and the filmmaking itself signals the arrival of an insider perspective that locates itself within

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  7 global cinema as one grounded in third-​world abjection: characters teeter on the edges of non-being and humanity resorts to animality. To shoot by hand is also a form of intimacy—​that recasts the cinematic production as primitive art unlike Steadicam technology. The movement of the camera as such demonstrates a masterful representation of abjection, one that rouses in the viewer a visceral disgust. Mendoza deploys the camera eye in a dark, dank, and dirty scenario that we feel, smell, and fear as the camera moves in like a flashlight in the darkness, revealing wet trash, feral kids, in dark corners public sex both heterosexual and homosexual, blatant corruption of campaign officials paying off voters, casual stealing, and open-​air drug use. Moreover, the movie is shot on film but made to look like video in a play with optical mastery and haptic mutuality. That is, we see totally and well and then partially and poorly, challenging our senses and making precarious our feeling of control. The subaltern makes itself known—​through the mise-en-scene and cinematography of poverty as an uninviting place:  the slums where houses are makeshift—​built around stairwells, showers are a pail and a tub in the streets, and people approach the camera with trepidation and courage both. We see something intimately in the interior view of persistently near-​death deprivation and in a cautionary way, too, through the palpable force of the lively and forceful camera, the energies of the unhealthy and scrawny kids and the disheveled and smudged faces of the adults who wander, scavenge, and prey on each other in the film. The foreign world of the Philippines as gutter and ghetto is represented as multi-sensorial, overwhelming, and a real trip to the faraway while sitting in the theater (usually at a festival) or watching at home (DVD) or viewing online on small screens. These films travel and speak in a filmic language that undeniably generates an experience of filth and the endurance of defilement. The implications of local filmmakers making films that seem to validate their abjection is not only then a demand to say we are so not you but also an invitation to explore what can be beyond identification. Empathy and compassion, as the tenets of ethical intimacy, may be blocked by an identification that insists on understanding difference and emphasizing sameness. Ethical intimacy says there is a distinction here that should not lead to discrimination alone but, rather, to connection of another kind. I am particularly interested in these archives of films from the 1970s to the present, for it reflects what Hamid Naficy describes in his book

8  The Proximity of Other Skins An Accented Cinema (2001), wherein the rise of films outside the West coincides with the diaspora of its peoples, creating new cosmopolitan audiences as well. This book explores the exchange of culture and context that is now undeniably part of the moviegoing experience today, where the films cross continents as do their audiences. So the spectator I cited earlier is differentiated too, much like the filmmaker. I am calling for more political approaches to ethics in cultural production, which to me is not only a widening of voices and the diversification of subjects we see on-​screen but also the recognition of the subject/​abject relation that ultimately exposes the power dynamics of eroticism informing racial pleasure from sexual representations and how power so intimately shapes our lives. I  look to global cinema for the worldviews films offer as a speaking back to the metropole with different values, conduct, and ethics. Hollywood’s exclusion of voices—​in the limited demographic of who gets to author films—​prevents us from more expansive views of race and sexuality and desire. Let’s see what we can learn about the subject/​abject and ethical intimacy from these other films and filmmakers. Travel away from home and the familiar is represented in the films I study: vacations in Haiti for rich white women frolicking with poor black men in Heading South (2005) and another rich white woman paying a brown man for sex in Never Forever (2007). Women both fight and escape from gendered violence and sexual abuse in Korean-​made films The Housemaid (2010) and The Handmaiden (2016). Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador (2007), Serbis (2008), and Kinatay (2009) are located in places spectators wish not to go or should not go to—​so that his films offer distance through cinematic proximity. Similarly, the musical Here Lies Love (2010–​17) and the documentary Imelda (2005) about Imelda Marcos present proximity differently—​ wherein the musical offers a physical immersion lacking historical depth while the documentary presents intimacy as incomplete without historical interruption. What artists I study in The Proximity of Other Skins render in their works is indeed the proximity that enables and upturns. The scenarios and realms they choose to zoom in on and land on are sites of intimacy that are not just sex but also relations that are never transcendent of inequality. They not only show us glimpses but also go deep inside of difference. The specific difference is the cultures of sexuality and care that we now see on screens point outside the West. The central illustration that occurs in these scenes is the alteration and commentary of the subject/​abject relationship between people who are usually distant and different from each other.

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  9

Subjects and Abjects in Fiction and Nonfiction Filmmaking Cinema scholars such as Donald Bogle, Sylvia Chong, Allyson Nadia Field, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Peter X. Feng, Ed Guerrero, Kara Keeling, Glen Mimura, Hamid Naficy, Chon Noriega, Jun Okada, Jane Chi-​hyun Park, Ellen C. Scott, Jacqueline Stewart, and Michele Wallace, among others, including myself, have long established the production of racial and ethnic otherness and exclusions from filmmaking in the history of dominant film industries and canons. My concerns now, however, delve into the question of the differently racialized, gendered, classed, and sexed who constitute the abject in transnational filmmaking and film representations consumed by spectators who regard themselves as subjects. In her work on abjection, Julia Kristeva identifies Georges Bataille as “the first to have specified that the plane of abjection is that of the subject/​object relationship (and not subject/​other subject) as an ‘archaism.’ ”4 Extending this framework to the site of representation across radical inequality is helpful toward identifying the power of eroticism, sex, care, and romance as both fearful and desirable among its actors. According to Kristeva, a logic of exclusion causes the abject to exist, wherein hierarchies of otherness are based on who is clean and who is dirty, both as individuals and as groups; thus “asserted to be a non-​object of desire, abominated as abject, as abjection, filth becomes defilement and bounds on the henceforth released side of the ‘self and clean’ the order that is thus only (and therefore always, already) sacred.”5 If the other is dirty and the self is clean, the desire to make contact with the other exposes how the social informs the sexual. Considering the existence of multiple sexualities placed within a hierarchy of value as argued by Gayle Rubin in her classic essay “Thinking Sex,” then what happens inside the representation of the sexual scene can and should be visible in its work.6 Moreover, the care work across inequality can both transform and further solidify the established meanings of social identities in the world outside. To illustrate this phenomenon, I discuss two films—​one fiction and one nonfiction—​about trans Filipin@x sex workers in the Philippines today. In the filmmaking crafted by Filipin@x filmmakers in the diaspora regarding the formation of trans Filipin@x women, a new language attentive to abjection forms. Unlike representations of queer and trans bodies who frequently endure death in Western cinemas, the narrative film Mga Gabing Kasinghaba Ng Hair Ko (Those Long Haired Nights) (2017) by the queer

10  The Proximity of Other Skins Filipino filmmaker Gerardo Calagui withholds the death of its subjects from its spectators while crafting a world that presents trans Filipin@x women as confronting relentless perils. As C.  Riley Snorton argues in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017), “the numerous structural factors and institutional practices of radicalized gender that delimit black and brown women’s life chances expresses territories of violence, sites of vulnerability and precarity, and scenes of slow death.”7 Violence, thus, is never far away, for they perpetually suffer it as they seek recognition of their struggles as transwomen, especially in a Catholic country. The film language attends not just to physical but also to structural, psychic, and social violence in the ongoing humiliation, perpetual fear, and continual lack of recognition of their womanhood by their family (private) and in their profession (public). The film presents three vignettes; each story focuses on one Filipin@x transwoman in situations where violence would normally be the guaranteed result of the representation, especially in US films, where queer people are killed so frequently, echoing the rising violence in everyday reality. The new anthology Trap Door (2018) identifies how representation is lauded as the path transwomen should take toward a livable life, yet the rise in visibility coincides with the rise in the death toll, especially for transwomen of color.8 The film by Gerardo Calagui seems to answer this problem directly by presenting a film lauded for its empathetic treatment of transwomen. There are limits to the representation however. Strangely, the film casts cisgendered heterosexual male actors in ways that limit what trans visibility looks like and contributes to its celebrated status, while the subjectivity of transwomen is made distant precisely by the cisgendered heterosexual well-​known actors who play them. In Those Long Haired Nights, we witness interactions at sites in and out of sexual intimacy for transwomen. In the first vignette, a wealthy, cisgendered white-​presenting heterosexual male global tourist and professional athlete from Sri Lanka relates to a genderqueer brown transwoman local sex worker named Tuesday (Matt Daclan). In the second vignette, Tuesday’s friend Amanda (Anthony Falcon) visits her home in the provinces while her parents, former friends, and family refuse to accept her identity as a woman and simultaneously take money from her to build their house or make a spectacle of her transitioned life. In the third vignette, Barbie (Rocky Salumbides) insists on involvement with the local Filipin@x and Korean emigré drug underworld to fund her sex-​change operation.

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  11 The film opens to establish a pimp named Kuya Roger (Mon Confiado) marketing the transwomen masseuses whom he calls “girls.” These women live under the specter of violence, and this is clear in the instructions provided by the senior women who train the newbies and by the pimp himself, who lovingly and firmly watches out for them. One of the film’s central characters, Amanda, not only instructs the new sex workers on massage techniques but also shares advice on what amount to charge and how to assert their worth in the negotiations with clients. She advises them to anticipate decisions within working conditions where drugs proliferate and as they interact with clients in the confines of private hotel rooms. After Amanda instructs the new sex workers, she and her friend, fellow transwoman sex worker Tuesday, confer with their protector/​pimp, whom they refer to intimately as older brother, as their night begins. Kuya Roger emphasizes the use of their phones in case he needs to rescue them and sternly cautions them all about Trixie, who is recently disappeared and possibly murdered. We continually hear about her throughout the movie as she haunts the nightly forays of women who approach death, in order to make their life (where death follows them around) more livable. Gerardo Calagui rewrites the narrative of denigration for Filipin@x transwomen in his film by not killing them on-​screen, indeed, but does so prominently by instead amplifying the ceaseless violence structuring their lives. This occurs relentlessly, inside and outside their bodies at the sites of sex, family, and work. In the first vignette, Tuesday meets the handsome, fit, white-​privileged cisgendered male who presents as white and heterosexual—​ he is a professional, internationally competitive rugby player from Sri Lanka or who plays for Sri Lanka. They meet on the street, and a flirtation ensues that leads to checking into a nearby hotel. As they walk to their room in the narrow hallway, they encounter cisgendered women who evaluate Tuesday from head to toe with their discerning eyes. Uncomfortable with their measurement of her presentation, she looks down self-​consciously. This is a very different interaction from the flirtation in the elevator, an isolated space away from others, where she is fabulous, confident, and playful—​and twirls her long hair as she looks at the john. From the mirror behind her, we see him staring at her with desire, intently and happily. In the hallway, she breaks out of that private space in order to see herself in the eyes of these women. The john does not notice the other women, for his desire for her is keen and focused.

12  The Proximity of Other Skins

Figure 1.1  In Gerardo Calagui’s Those Long Haired Nights, Tuesday (Matt Daclan) flirts in the elevator with the john who desires her.

When they enter the hotel suite she secures for them, he aggressively turns the massage she performs into a much more sexual interaction when he directly says, “I want to fuck you.” In order to get out of the quickly escalated sexual scene, she retreats to the bathroom and calls her security for a possible “rescue.” When she returns to the bedroom, with the excuse of her period and the proof of blood (lipstick smeared on toilet paper), the john won’t stop expressing his wishes, saying “I don’t care” and stating his intention again, “I want to fuck you.” This statement scares Tuesday, who frantically acts to prevent his discovery of her male genitalia by running away from the bed into the bathroom again. She’s crying as he’s breaking down the door. This scene of Tuesday fleeing from her john to the bathroom, where she is on the floor near the toilet when he bursts in, directly alludes to the 2014 death of the Filipin@x trans sex worker Jennifer Laude, who was drowned in a toilet bowl. What is different, however, is the life-​affirming fiction of the Calagui film. When he slams inside the bathroom, the Sri Lankan john instead cradles Tuesday’s face. Though she is shaking in fear, he declares his desire for her, saying “I like ladyboys,” as he tenderly approaches her face for a kiss, waiting for her consent. This film, by a gay filmmaker, recasts the trajectory of death to one of unexpected life-​in-​struggle. In its focus on the sex scene between Tuesday and the john, the film addresses what happens in the sexual transaction between unequals: a very real desire and pleasure that is

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  13 grounded in difference. Yet, the pursuit of pleasure and financial compensation both costs the transwoman a great deal. Calagui recasts denigration within new relations representable through a focus on intimacy as a site of violence and pleasure both. In fleeing the john’s desires, Tuesday goes from feelings of absolute fear to an unexpected surrender to pleasure when the john offers his desirous recognition of her. He bows down and leans into her crotch to give her a blowjob while she’s seated on the bathroom floor. In this scene, her feeling pleasure is seen on her face with her eyes closing in surrender, her shoulders and legs easing into vulnerable relaxation, and the complete release of her bodily tension. Desire at the site of inequality not only arises but also exposes its undeniable presence in these relations. Her change from terror to rapture shows the stability of the ego of the john, who is there to extract pleasure in a calm manner. He does not seem alarmed at all by the intensity of her fear or how she anxiously interprets the bold declaration of his desire. This shows how Tuesday lives in a different place even in the shared space: nearness to her own death. She struggles to judge her own worth within her proximity to danger. In the struggle to decipher the hatred that could emerge in the site of lovemaking, and the knowledge of whether she will fight is not entirely known to her. She must go toward death just in case on the other side she finds payment, regard, or pleasure. Her fabulous appearance speaks of a certain worth that Madison Moore describes in his work Fabulous (2017)—​which chronicles the style forged by queer people in the face of risk and danger to their lives when they live loudly in public space through adornments on their bodies.9 In the face of death’s nearness, however, Tuesday, who presents beautiful care for her body and thoughtfully regards her presence in the world, still struggles with displeasing the one who so closely threatens her life. Most fascinating and relevant about the psychoanalytic philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theorization of abjection that rises up here is the insecurity of the subject with power, when faced with how sexual desires for their object choice is related to the formulation of their ego. “For the subject will always be marked by the uncertainty of his borders . . . like a fear of being rotten, drained or blocked.”10 Here, in Calagui’s film however, the john definitely takes pleasure in his power over this fearful fabulous woman. He is so self-​centered in his pursuit of pleasure through her that he does not note her feelings nor their surroundings. He is unaware of the judgment of her self-​ presentation in the hallway by the cisgendered women they pass as an experience of aggression for her. In their private encounter, his desire creates fear

14  The Proximity of Other Skins and dread, but he interprets it differently—​as part of the erotic exchange. The fear threatens to crack at her facade of fabulosity while he remains steadfast in expressing his desire. In this way, he finds erotic and pleasurable her fear as part of his enthusiastic sexual relation with a “ladyboy.” When the cisgendered heterosexual actor who plays Tuesday, Matt Declan, talks with the actor Mon Confiado, who plays Kuya Roger the pimp and protector of the transwomen characters, in an interview available on YouTube,11 they discuss the transgender subject as hardly represented in films from the Philippines. Their film also represents rare sites such as the red light district of Burgos in Manila, where they shot among “actual” sex workers there who are varied—​straight, gay, and trans (1:26). They also discuss putting on a mask of gender, gesturing to putting on a wig, where they render identity as external rather than the emergence of the internal. The latter seems closer to the characters’ inner lives. They acknowledge, however, that in the collective putting on of masks, each has their own lives and struggles. Tuesday is affected by abjection, which Kristeva describes as something that “threatens the ego” when confronted with dread, hatred, and disregard for the other in the moment of desire.12 Tuesday does seem to desire the Sri Lankan rugby player in the fiction film: his cisgendered macho appearance and his tenderness and delight in her are pleasing. She measures whether or not he sees her (trans visibility) in his attraction to her (trans subjectivity). The visibility of her trans identity is something she is definitely aware of. We see this in her encounter with the cisgendered women who clearly render her as visibly different. Returning to the hallway scene en route to their hotel room, the two cisgendered women actually eye her man first and in assessing his desirability, turn to evaluate her. It is unclear whether they see her as a transwoman or assess her competitively as just another cisgendered straight woman who exceeds them in normative standards of beauty—​taller, statuesque, and stylish. What is clear, however, is her discomfort in their gaze and even in the way he only has eyes for her. In this way, she is bound by her construction as abject in ways he interprets differently. His inability to see her trans subjectivity as one that entails feelings of fear at that moment, or to make a show of her as one that lives near death yet the one he desires—​ for the benefit of these women who judge her—​contrasts with her constant awareness of him, others, and their surroundings. Her sexuality is anxious. His sexuality is presented as flexible—​anything goes—​he does not care that she has her period if she is a girl and he actually likes her as a ladyboy. His

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  15 flexibility makes visible his self-​certainty as a privilege and the rigidity caging her gender crossing is her non-being, in recognition of her own abjection. The story of Amanda, Tuesday’s friend and co-worker, composes the second vignette in Those Long Haired Nights. She heads home to the provinces to visit her family on the occasion of her high school ex-​girlfriend’s new child and the baptism, for which Amanda takes on the role of godmother. The trip causes trepidation, and she shops for a new dress in a form of self-​ fortification. She chooses a very feminine and flowing dress that strongly presents her identity as female. Clad in it, she travels by bus and is picked up by her younger brother, who calls her Kuya—​usually a respectful and affectionate reference for older brother. It is odd to hear the reference for a visibly female sibling. So the reference, intended to confer respect, actually relays disrespect. It is a misrecognition even if the little brother behaves lovingly and attentively toward her as she rides closely behind with arms draped around him on his motorcycle. He is equally comfortable with her physically and her physicality as visibly female. The use of the term “Kuya” is thoughtless and ritualistic in its affection, indicative of the entrenchment of language that must and should change. This is merely the beginning, as she endures misnaming by her own mother, who shows off the results of Amanda’s monetary remittances in the construction and renovation of various parts of the house. When her mother calls her Armando, the misnaming is doubly painful for the tour of the renovations is both an expression of gratitude and the request for more money. The least that can be done is to call Amanda by her proper name. The father comes home and brags to the guests he’s brought about his child’s work at a bank. It is unclear if they know the work of the bank is a ruse—​for their daughter is a masseuse and a sex worker—​in her limited options as a transwoman in society. The lack of recognition—​both deliberate and unconscious by her family—​inflicts a horrible psychic violence, for its delivery is coated in nicety accompanied by smirks. Her high school ex-​girlfriend bursts into the home wanting to drag Amanda off to her own neighboring house. It feels like a reprieve—​the girlfriend compliments Amanda’s beauty and calls her by her chosen name. Yet, the visit to her ex-​girlfriend’s own home entails more violence when Amanda is treated like a freak show performer with whom various cisgendered straight women take pictures. The cisgendered straight men, including her ex-​girlfriend’s husband, tease her and loudly refer to memories of her prior manhood for all the other guests to hear. They coax Amanda and her

16  The Proximity of Other Skins ex-​girlfriend to slow dance while they all watch and comment. It is humiliating as Amanda continues to bear a pleasant smile while forced into a male comportment in the dance. She wriggles in her dress as a sign of discomfort. When Amanda retreats inside, the husband follows her and attempts to kiss her. Amanda is saved when someone else walks into the scene. The night concludes with Amanda collapsing outside her home from the exhaustion of enduring the varied aggressive hailings: freak on display, misnamed, observed, disciplined into rituals of heterosexuality in the dance, forced back into time in the rehearsal of her prior identity, photographed and then coercively touched, assaulted by her intimate’s intimate. The routinization of psychic violence inflicted on her articulates the insidious wish of death for her subjectivity as a transwoman, even within the sanctuary of her home and especially in relations of kin. The last narrative carries this withholding of physical death for the trans subject with Barbie. Watching the film is tense because of the nearness to death that shadows these women’s lives but it is especially true for Barbie, who travels in circles of illicit drug dealing. Established in the earlier narratives is the closeness to death that sex and romance bring for transwomen sex workers, at the site of work and the wish for their annihilation in the aggressions they face from kin. Barbie’s pursuit of money to fund her sex change shows her working long hours that bring her into contact with danger progressively as she gets more exhausted and less guarded. Barbie exists in the arena of crime in order to make even more money, which her body’s transformation requires. Earlier in the film, she has to be rescued from a hotel garage from her Korean client, who is on a rampage. Despite his instability, she accepts this same client’s call later, at the end of her long night, when he asks her to get drugs from a dealer in the slums. The transaction with the drug dealer inside his cramped quarters involves his direct reference to Trixie, the transwoman who disappeared, whose fate is made near to Barbie as a warning. When the drug dealer stuffs the drugs into Jollibee kids’ lunch packs, much like McDonald’s Happy Meals, he casually mentions Trixie’s name again, making clear he is responsible for her death. Barbie may have already known this, for she does not visibly react and instead goes on with her task, carrying the bags of food into the hotel where her Korean client waits. The food is examined by a guard at the lobby, heightening our sense of the risk she takes. She enters the elevator, and the doors close at the film’s end. We are not sure of her fate—​except that the film ultimately withholds from us what is most likely her death. It

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  17 is inevitable, whether now or soon, as she risks working with the volatile killers of Trixie in the violent drug trade. The award-winning documentary Call Her Ganda (2018) by the queer Filipino@ American director P.  J. Raval confronts the undeniably brutal murder of trans Filipin@x sex worker Jennifer Laude at the hands of a white GI, who very different from the Sri Lankan john in Calagui’s film. Indicted for killing Laude by asphyxiation when drowning her in a toilet bowl, the soldier reduces Jennifer Laude to filth. The films by Calagui and Raval are both inspired by this story of Jennifer Laude, whose death was the first in history to be attributed successfully to the white American military man who perpetrated the murder. Though the GI was found guilty of killing the Filipin@x woman, in the context of the long relationship between the United States and the Philippines, the US government continues to intervene so that he is not punished. Raval’s documentary presents not only the rallying cry of a nation that protests her abjection but also how this movement is grounded in the unconditional love of her family and community. Jennifer is rendered as a loving person within a community that returned her love. Jennifer Laude’s mom explains how she calls her daughter Ganda, which means “beautiful.” In this naming, she shows us her acceptance of Jennifer while also sharing her daughter’s generosity in supporting her family and friends. Jennifer’s German fiancé explains his devotion to her too, while demonstrating awareness and acceptance of her as a sex worker. Her friends then share Jennifer’s leadership and kindness among their group. She was one they highly regarded. And all of her community members rally for justice in the aftermath of her death. Interviews conducted by Raval emphasize their dignity as they share their love, recognition, and regard for Jennifer. The filmmaker’s framing of Jennifer’s mother looking directly into the camera with Jennifer’s photo shows her unflagging devotion to her daughter. This image supports others, as her mother stands solidly and irrefutably devoted to her daughter outside the courthouse even as she is beleaguered by the many bureaucratic obstacles of the murder trial. Both Calagui and Raval capture a dynamic of subject/​ abject relations in contemporary Filipin@x—​American relations, and forge filmmaking practices that expose discrimination and difference that extend beyond the site of sex to kin and to the larger community of the nation. The undeniably brutal murder of Jennifer Laude at the hands of a white GI, as chronicled in the documentary Call Her Ganda, provides evidence for the basis of fear in the lives of Filipin@x transwomen. The solider claims that he

18  The Proximity of Other Skins

Figure 1.2  Julita Cabillan holds up her daughter Jennifer Laude’s picture in P. J. Raval’s Call Her Ganda.

killed Jennifer Laude after realizing “it was a man” performing a sexual act on him—​and here is the abject in his speech. Essentially, the murderer used his bigotry to defend himself. The brutal killing, described as drowning in a toilet bowl, expressed the soldier’s horrific disregard for the human subjectivity of Jennifer Laude. When the murderer feared the significance of the contact with whom he regarded as abject, as contaminating or corrupting, he reduces her to filth. In doing so, he exposes the social significance informing the relations between the subjectivities involved in the sex act turned murderous. Julia Kristeva describes how “the danger of filth represents for the subject the risk to which the very symbolic order is permanently exposed, to the extent that it is a device of discriminations, of differences.”13 The social meaning of sex between radically unequal people manifests in the way the powerful regard others. The killer treated her like a non-​subject, an object of denigration, whose sexual encounter with his body dirties him enough as to convince himself as justifying his violent response. Yes, making her literally abject, at one with fecal matter. The subject/​abject relation, however, is about experiencing desire unbounded by social categories—​and then when giving language to that desire—​for a transwoman by a cisgendered man, a visceral disgust results. To be clear, in Jennifer Laude’s case, the soldier experiences desire uncondoned in society: he did not know “it was a man.” Desire when named by social

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  19 identity—​queer sex—​becomes an experience of horrific meaning for the abjected in that they are considered deserving of dying a vicious and undeserved death by the soldier-​subject who insists on retaining his cisgendered heteronormative white male ego. The solider represses and refuses his desire for pleasure, and, in participating in sex with her, threatens his fragile identity. He kills Jennifer Laude, demonstrating his inability to conceptualize desire outside of social categories. He enacts abjection, her reduction to filth, when she is found in the toilet with a broken neck. He expulses her from his body and identity in order to maintain a social order, where the meaning of his identity remains whole. He must maintain a clean body, to which hers represents a source of defilement. In his mind, he must contain desires that she represents, so he annihilates her. In this way, we can see how acts are tied to sexual identities unnecessarily. What if we succumb to our bodies’ desires and pleasures without the condemnation of identities instead? Therefore, the intimate relations occurring within scenes of radical inequality are not intersubjective but rather are sites where one subject reduces the other to the worst object. The nonsubject, the filthy, is the abject, seen as difference compelling desire that must either be killed or released. It is identified as an injustice deserving of action in Raval’s film. And in Calagui’s film abjection is enjoyed—​fetishized by the rugby player in the case of Tuesday, rendered as entertainment by Amanda’s family at her expense, and assigned as deserving of death in the case of Barbie in her interactions with the drug dealers. Either way, abjection exposes both the erotic and annihilating dimensions of power that operate in relations of inequality, including the erotic, the familial, and places of work. Through my discussion of these films by two queer filmmakers, Calagui and Raval, we can see how abjection operates in the relegation of worst object status for Filipin@x transwomen. In crafting a language that highlights the psychic and structural violence permeating their lives in Calagui’s film, and in the death that illustrates abjection’s typical result, we see the power of film in capturing the struggle for regard in the lives of the transwomen sex workers and, in Raval’s film, in amplifying the national outcry to secure justice for Jennifer Laude. Kristeva helps me to identify the abject—​trans local women—​in relation to the subject—​cisgendered men, normative kin, and drug dealers—​and the need to read their sexual, familial, and working relations to reveal the power dynamics inherent in their attraction or bond and in their unraveling. The pimp Kuya Roger in Those Long Haired Nights finally catches up with Tuesday, days later, still raving about her handsome Sri

20  The Proximity of Other Skins Lankan lover. The lines of subjection and abjection surround the reaction of intimacy that is always informed by power. It is the acts comprising intimacy like sexual relations, kin gatherings, and illegal transactions, that need to be interrogated. In asserting an unflinching look at the site of sexual acts and relations, I must go to the debate between Leo Bersani and Michel Foucault regarding the site on which homophobia and heterosexism is inescapably based. In a famous interview titled “The Gay Science,” Michel Foucault theorizes that it is not the sex act that compels hatred of gay sexual identity but the joyful formulation of new relations outside of normative heterosexuality. More precisely, he says homophobic “people can tolerate the pleasure not the happiness.” He argues that it is the expansion of the “economy of pleasure”14 that threatens the hierarchies of sexualities that organize the social order. Responding to Foucault, the theorist Leo Bersani argues that queer sex acts never go away from the forming of new relations of intimacy. In his essay on Freud and Foucault, Bersani identifies how for Foucault: “it is the political anxiety about the subversive, possibly revolutionary social rearrangement that gays may be trying out”15 that threatens those who condemn gay sexuality. Apparent for Bersani is how the actual role of inequality and power are present in sexual relations so that the new ways and new formations that enable new sexual acts and practices become the social threat. For him, it is not just the formulation of new relations but also the new sex acts and sexual conduct themselves that construct the threat. Sex never goes away as the basis of fear. Gender and sex normativities explode “to reveal the unshakeable foundation in which power is built.”16 That is, if people are flexible in their sexual practices so that we see empowered and not denigrated bottoms, what gets cathartically exposed is the play with expressions of power so they are ultimately denaturalized. For Bersani, it is S&M that is most fascinating, for it allows him to lean into what is considered most revolting and difficult about it: pleasure as pain or pleasure in pain.17 Similarly, I am interested in racial pleasure—​how, in seeking out sex in scenes of radical inequality, what gets exposed is the way the inequality of power informs desire across difference just like in the scenes of intimacy in Those Long Haired Nights. For me, it is the focus on intimacy within an identifiable and relentless context in cinema. It is the mise en scene of what frames sex and what sex looks like on-​ screen. Pleasure is extracted from arenas outside the sexual too, informing it through and through, thus, casting anew both practices and relations

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  21 intrinsically tied to them. In Call Her Ganda, it is intimacy with her as a daughter, a fiancée, a girlfriend, and a community leader that helps to bring her case to justice. The struggle for justice is fueled by love that cannot be extricated from her subjectivity as a Filipin@x transwoman sex worker who built alliances precisely because of her struggles. Thus, in these two films, I am interested in what happens when sex never transcends inequality (as always!). Its history and its undeniable conditions never cease within the films I study. This is an essential part of the film language that makes ethical these representations—the importance of setting to illustrate social value. In all of the scenes attended to in this book, the context never goes away so that we see how desire for the other creates pleasure and provides a specific enjoyment because of the subject/​abject formation. Beyond the films inspired by Jennifer Laude, which show her relegation to the abject and her estimation as a subject, I interrogate gendered power over men of color by white women in Heading South and Never Forever as well as the hierarchized relation between masters and servants and husbands and wives in The Housemaid and Handmaiden. The abjected similarly ask us to consider how they live differently from how we understand sex, power, and pleasure. It is the scene of inequality that will expose these new theories of relationality that I call ethical intimacy emerging from the subject/​abject dynamic the films I study take on.

Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinema: A Method Ethical intimacy is about the refusal of transcendence by filmmakers who are fueled by a desire to keep us in these scenes of filth—​abjection, inequality, and intimacy—​that we want to get out of but cannot. We cannot create relationality that resolves radical differences and ways of life. In Serbis we experience ethical intimacy, which Brillante Mendoza captures in his shooting the subjects of death, criminality, and sex. Through his shooting of sex within a very clear context of squalor and poverty, we see the formulation of a sexual ethics in cinema that accounts for power in understanding what options are available for various people when engaging intimately across inequality. Serbis, a film about multiple generations of one family living in a ramshackle movie theater, shows a struggle with female power and sexuality. In the film, a brown-​skinned young man’s bare butt with a wound oozes puss while he engages in sexual intercourse with a thin young woman who sweats out heated expressions of pleasure with her open mouth. Her face, without

22  The Proximity of Other Skins makeup, visibly glistens with perspiration so that we can strongly feel the heat of the cramped room and the body heat transferring between them. They orgasm. Though we do not quite see the organ, his penis evacuates the cavern of her thighs as we see strings of semen stretch in the space between them. To go into this moment so closely means we see the evidence of the culmination of their physical entanglement. Mendoza’s technique of placing his camera just outside the genital sex act, thus avoiding the label of pornography, works in the cinematic style of the Philippine “bold” or “bomba” film. In the West, this kind of film would be considered erotica of the R-​rated and even NC-​17-​rated sort. But here is a scene traveling to us from a different geographic and historical context. We must see this moment for its psychic and cultural significance. The man’s body is disintegrating—​wound oozing puss—​much like the physical space that is controlled by women who represent his mother—​the matriarch grandma who raised him and the biological mother who abhors what he represents—​the curtailment of her youth and freedom. Sex occurs between two particular young brown subjects mired in poverty evident on their bodies: a thin woman and wounded man whose sex acts present as acts of pleasure, which binds them and us together. But this is not the goal. Within this scene, pleasure indeed transpires, yet so does inequality, not only because of the third-​world context but also because of the gender and sexuality in this cultural situation. The string of semen is indeed proof of pleasure, the proof of inequality is in its interpretation. Presumably, with the illegality and lack of available contraception in the Philippines during this time, the semen and the method of pulling out are the culprits for the pregnancy they produce. And this is what I emphasize in interpreting Mendoza’s representation: the context matters in the language of the film’s intimate scenes. The illegality of abortion too frames the sex act and understanding the significance of the sex scene to their future. What is apparent is the defilement and filth we see is related not only to abjection but also to an abhorrence toward the woman by the man who has sex with her gently then throws her away roughly, within mere moments. When the context of inequality that never leaves the scene of intimacy between unequal others, an ethical filmmaking is achieved, for it is committed to never relinquishing the context in which the sex takes place and, in this case, makes a critique of gender along the way. I  recognize the physical movements as sex but I also identify the simultaneously important story of the context. My own work about race and sexuality in my two previous books advances in these

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  23 scenes to identify then tackle the subject/​abject dynamic most apparent in transnational cinema. In this film there is no transcendence of circumstance, nation, or identity for the sake of universal pleasure. Indeed, these characters sexually engage and find fulfillment or not, just like us, one can say. Indeed, we all have sex differently. Rather, what is more promising to explore is how both like and unlike us they are, not because of sex as transcendent, but because of the radically differing historical and cultural contexts that intimacy exposes beyond the sex act. What I refer to as going beyond the sex act is how the cultural definitions shaping the sex act and its results cannot be denied in studying the film. At the time of the film’s release, abortion is illegal in the Philippines and so is contraception, which is a rapidly proliferating condition in different parts of the world today, so that the young woman’s lack of “choice,” as it were, the thing that makes her other, is also what emplots her situation there. What makes her radically other is her poverty precisely in this sex act. For her to be pregnant (and we discover that she is) means they have to marry. Otherwise, she falls out of society. Because he hesitates and escapes, she becomes a fallen woman. The women in the film act as if this fate is the end of the world, for it also means the confirmation of the moral decay of their family that is already framed as such by their surroundings. What kind of family lives in a dilapidated porn theater? So the point of the film’s sex scene is not simply to advertise the sexual availability of these brown bodies, according to accusations and assessments of poverty porn that frame films that come from the Philippines since Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988), which would dismiss the power of filmmakers like Mendoza today. His film exposes different cultural pressures regarding sexuality in different national and historical contexts. What makes this scene worth bringing up now is the assertion of plurality in these sexual scenes, which are ultimately presented as ethical events. Not only is there no such thing as a universal sexuality, but the representations of sex capture how ethical intimacy is significant on-​screen for the story and off-​screen because it tells of the lives of others we usually do not meet (or fantasize about) because of separation not only by time and space but also by power and resources. I must really also out myself as a Filipin@ American diasporic spectator who rails against the presumed universality of the white cis male heterosexual privileged spectator. Yet, I am also coming from the West where the other—​ the Filipin@x abject—​is also other to me due to my location, despite my ties to the Philippines as having been born and raised there until my early teens.

24  The Proximity of Other Skins Ethical intimacy describes the moments in films, the building blocks filmmakers create wherein characters face a choice that builds their character and shapes their surroundings and their futures. The factors involved in making these choices are their past, their backgrounds, and their present relations as well as the structures that limit and enable their mobility and movement. This interrogation when performed by the spectator on their viewing experience can also be transformative. Whether in sites of sex, death, or criminality, these actions, as they are represented, also comment on and illuminate their context. Ethics, according to the philosopher J. Reid Miller in his book Stain Removal (2016), allows us to evaluate an event and our actions as both inherited and situated within a context of equity and opportunity, or lack thereof.18 What is crucial here is that we are also not locked into what is already known about people within these structures. Ethics is about conduct and values, which are both socially determined and inherited so that our actions occur within a genealogy. To engage in sex on-​screen as an ethical event is to identify how choices awaken one’s potential according to critical limits in which subjects act—​both on-​and off-​screen. Therefore, engaging in sex as an ethical event moves us forward beyond introspection to instead acknowledge our distance and difference from the abjected on-​ screen. Engaging in sexual representation as ethical intimacy helps us to understand the abjection of others and our role in aggravating it (insisting on our centrality) or alleviating it (in decentering ourselves).

Ethical Intimacy and the Site of Sexuality On-​Screen Focusing largely on distance and otherness, rather than proximity and intimacy, Hollywood film won’t go closely into the sex scene. In her essay, “Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies” (2006), the film scholar Linda Williams describes this as the “ellipse” we see in screening sex in Hollywood, wherein the buildup of sex is presumably going to teach us lessons about how to do it, but then pans away.19 As in the case of Serbis, Brillante Mendoza’s films do the opposite. Rather than pan away from scenes of sex, he goes more deeply in to them. There is no dissolve, no fade to black but just going deeper inside. Going inside, where the camera usually flees, makes the sexual scene just another elevated moment in life where people, situated in their circumstances that we can see and absorb, can discover who they are at that moment in terms of what they like and whom they

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  25 desire. What is mesmerizing is the commitment to intimacy as an experience of relationality that should be captured, for it is where bodies, psyches, emotions, and imaginations come into heightened awareness of the self and the other in the disclosing of their dependence. Sex is essentially a story, composed of a physical language, grammar, and vocabulary, that is worth telling and studying in detail in order to share what is unspoken verbally but spoken physically and beyond. Whether in private or in public, these relations deserve unflinching study. Striking in Mendoza’s filmmaking is how he goes into these scenes of the sex act with a similar language that he uses to tell the story of the criminal act of stealing in Tirador, or the brutality of killing in Kinatay, so as to explain the limited choices his characters face. The laws prohibiting contraception and abortion determine the significance of the sex act for the man and woman differently. Like the scene of the drug-​addicted thief who lacks teeth, compelling the theft of a laptop, Mendoza focuses on scenes considered shameful and usually hidden—​the abject—​and makes us privy to it, in a use of cinema as a technology of intimacy and ethics. Mendoza goes there because his characters conduct themselves in a manner where they either launch down a bad path or perhaps find a glimmer of a way out before resorting to resignation. So we must see these explicit scenes as worth viewing and worth studying as ethical events. They need to be represented in order to understand how choices by the characters can embed them in their existing world or widen it. And when we go into the scene, we see they are situated in the coexistence of seemingly contradictory feelings such as regret and confusion, purpose and clarity. The fullness of their character comes to light in the gentleness of the man who really does not reciprocate the love of the woman with whom he has sex, a perception that she does not share. Yet, in that single act of sex, we glimpse how he attends to and cares for her so that we ultimately see how she feels for him too. It is a fuller understanding of the extent of their feelings: physical, emotional, psychic, and socially situated. The proof of bodily entanglement provides stark detail in capturing the simultaneity of destitution and agency as well as morality and immorality for these subjects who wrestle with poverty and destitution as well as varying inequality in relation to each other. This captures how ethical intimacy engages with various forms of power dynamics. There is a dynamic of power relations in sites deemed simple and uncomplicated in the powerlessness of abject people we usually do not see as spectators in the West. That is, the man

26  The Proximity of Other Skins wields power in abandoning the woman. For Mendoza, the sex act is a scene where ethical choices are made within an undeniable social context. The woman represents for the man the abject from which he wishes to flee in order to pursue freedom. Choices, no matter how limited, occur throughout the lives represented in the film. These ethical moments of sex should thus be seen and mined; they deserve the focus of time and space in cinema for they function as crucial moments in the lives of the people represented. The sex scene between the couple in Serbis is a turning point—​a moment of intimacy wherein an ethical choice must be made, pushing the possibilities of the character and the entire film in a particular way.

Postcolonial and Global Cinema: Film Studies and Ethics In relation to postcolonial and global cinema, film studies and ethics both position the spectator and the Western subject as observers of “other” people. Ethics is constructed in film as far away from people who are other—​the darker, the destitute, and the disenfranchised. We are constructed to look from the West at the plight of suffering others, and to feel bad in a form of sympathy, and become aware of it in a kind of mind-​expanding education that does not necessarily require action. They are not us, they are far away from us. But what needs to be clarified is that the other abjected are near us. We know of this complicity from liberal feminist scholarship, but I am positing another way out for us by emphasizing how we must acknowledge our implication in the struggles and marginality of the abject. By attending to the mise-en-scene in our attunement to context—​the location of the place and space on-​screen as not here, but there—​then, we can see them as invitations to care about others by examining our own limited perspectives and even our roles in their suffering. To ask oneself: How do these conditions lead to an awareness of my place in and away from this? And why don’t I want to go there, this place of desperation? Location makes us realize our difference. The experience of seeing these particular kinds of films from the East and the Global South should be transformative beyond introspection. If we are implicated in the world of the film, and thus change our behavior whether it is in a different investment in film viewing or in actually demanding films tell more diverse stories from someone else’s perspective, is for us to evaluate the self in relation to the other. Too frequently, spectators in the West see their viewing as a

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  27 temporary respite, an escape, or an introspection of one’s identity, rather than an ethical examination of one’s role in affecting others in society. In ethical intimacy, I argue that spectatorship that attends to location actualizes our difference so that they bring us into an interrogation of self because our physical distances are not truly bridged and are seemingly too far apart to be the same. Thus, there is an intimacy that cinema enables through mise-enscene, one that emphasizes contexts as essential to the film’s ethics. Rather than a touristic experience, it is a more embedded experience that is narrated, more determined by the filmmaker and the film that enables your entire entry into the different world they present. The spectator must surrender to the fact that film both narrows one’s perspective and expands it, therefore this truth requires a self-​displacement and distrust not only of authorship but also of spectatorship, as unequal terrains of interaction and encounter with the other. Thus, there is an intimacy in the sex act that is also in the relationship between the filmmaker and the spectator. In the sex act between the wounded man and the thin woman in Serbis, for example, we do not yet know how these two, who share physical pleasure, invest in each other after the sex act. That is, we know they go into this sex act with desire. She pursues him, seeks this intertwining, one in which he participates wholeheartedly as gentle and caring. But what transpires after, in terms of other emotions within the context of their larger relations in the world, matter for the rest of the film. Who are they to each other and how are others involved explore the instability of their relationship due to gender inequality? In confronting this inequity in their gendered positionalities, the film represents how those who seem so far away from the West, in the cavernous dilapidated theater, can touch us. In her essay “Who’s Your Daddy: Queer Diasporic Framings of the Region” in the book The Sun Never Sets (2018), Gayatri Gopinath discusses touching across intimacy and difference, linking the intimacy I speak of as grounded in queer studies. She uses the “spatial to map sexual topographies in the transnational moment.”20 Similarly, in Serbis, the film captures the vast distances between different regions as well as the space of us and them in our screening encounter. Mendoza uses sex in order for audiences to appreciate and understand other contexts, especially when he is aligned with the subjectivities of his stories that are unlike those of his spectators. These critical moments occur in sites of intimacy, wherein something private is disclosed or laid bare—​as in the intimacies of sex scenes. These are called “love scenes” in Hollywood movies, but they refer to the moment

28  The Proximity of Other Skins when characters achieve a physical closeness that establishes intimacy. They are not sex scenes per se, because we usually pan away or fade to black to imply sexual relations. I argue, however, that these scenes should come closer to showing sex, for these unseen scenes purport to tell sexual stories that serve as shorthand for intimacy. Scenes of physical entanglement engender a kind of knowledge that changes the relationship between people who do not know each other, both as individuals and as representatives of groups. The knowledge to which I refer can be about learning sexual preferences or tastes and experiences that can lead to orgasm, then maybe attachment and investment or revulsion and flight. In studying representation as sites of ethical intimacy in the movie and beyond it, however, I challenge us to exceed the genital sex act as our definition of intimacy, even as I call for more representations of sex especially by people for whom sex is overrepresented by others than themselves! This may seem contradictory at first. That is, if we see the genital sex act, we can see more about the conduct people undertake within their circumstances. We can then see how larger social forces show up and can possibly be rewritten at these sites. Our condemnation of seeing sex acts obscures what these scenes can teach us. And if we do not see it, we cannot study it. And when we finally do see it, we can realize how much a part of a larger constellation of intimacies genital sex acts are. Continuing from my previous work focused on sex acts across various genres, sites, and eras, there is so much more about sex that we need to study. So I look at how this mapping of desires, feelings, and acts can be done without fetishizing sex as a big event—​it is merely another turning point in life—​especially across differences, through the meanings assigned to sex and other intimacies in other contexts. This book identifies how our inability to film and view sex requires us to expand our vocabulary of moving images and their role in redefining the care work and affective relations between people across difference and inequality. In this way, I explore the empathetic power and compassionate potential of film—​as occurring at the site of sex and other intimacies. Film has the power to teach us empathy and compassion if we are ready to approach it via a displacement of the self. We must be there to feel, in order to learn how to act. This book teaches the reader to refuse the terms of universality and to instead appreciate the limited view one may have about very specific experiences. We are not all the same, and not all who experience inequality overcome it. The specificity of the film experience of different places and how they organize people’s lives should hopefully deploy compassion

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  29 toward others. I hope our discomfort with inequality helps us to then understand ourselves in relation to how we oppress others. Through seeing sex scenes in other contexts, can we see the limits of our own perceptions. Through the recognition of sensing impecunity and inability, may we feel our own pockets and capabilities, may we empathize, or come into cognitive awareness of the existence of others, and particularly the conditions that lead to their experiences that likely involve our very freedom. If intimacies between anxious masters and hungry slaves, desperate drug addicts and corrupt police, and forlorn mothers and promising children on-​ screen create empathy, the ability to feel for others, then compassion, or the want to ease the suffering of others off-​screen, should not be far away. I evaluate ethical intimacy in order to assess how films encourage us to develop compassion, wherein we do not merely become aware of suffering but also do something about it in terms of questioning our assumptions and most importantly, decentering our own perspectives. The question is what kinds of concrete changes can happen through the ability of practicing ethical intimacy in our cinema experience. My book’s intervention is to show how different cultural, sexual, class, and racial contexts of sex matter in the movies because they illuminate black holes in our imagination. Whether it’s imaging sex between others who meet across difference or who encounter each other inside and outside the United States, we are able to see the limits of our own vocabularies and literacies regarding sexuality, especially as they occur across difference. There is no universal sexuality, especially since subjects bring different and particular cultural meanings to every entanglement. Moreover, what becomes clear is this fact: sex is a privileged form of relationality that can identify power dynamics and when we screen such scenes we are implicated. We are put in a position where we can learn something new, understand better a situation and possibly care about a problem of social injustice that sex scenes and other cinematic intimacies capture unlike any other. What happens in this instance is the power of cinema itself is arrested as a tool of empathy and compassion, for it allows a privileged form of knowing what is private through its work as a public art. To be clear, this is a two-​point moment:  first, that sex is a form of relationality that identifies power dynamics (that is, the film as text). Then, we are implicated when we screen these scenes (our implication in the film as viewers). I am interested in both the text and the viewer as they are involved in this witnessing. Films are seen in both public theaters and private

30  The Proximity of Other Skins sites such as the home and/​or individual methods including smaller devices of the cellphone or personal tablet. The cinema enables viewers to see across distances of difference in such proximity. As a technology of ethics, the cinema possesses the capacity to show how love and desire occur, develop, and work for subjects across radical inequalities but what the new cinemas from the Global South show us is not universalities of these feelings and relations but rather the importance of their contexts and specificities. We in the West can learn our limits from watching these cinemas as Third Cinema scholar Teshome Gabriel argues in “A Cinema of Wax and Gold.”21 But the films are not necessarily made for us, so the importance of their context and specificity is important for the “others” we see on-​screen. For example, Heading South was made for a European audience, so there is a non-​US context of the viewer too. And Brillante Mendoza’s films are not necessarily seen in the Philippines, yet they are not necessarily more “for us” in the West but perhaps for a future Filipin@x audience to be reclaimed from a colonizing Hollywood hold. We need to account for these differences in the films’ cultural contexts while making sure to empower self-​awareness rather than self-​ centeredness as viewers from the outside. This film may not be for me, yet I shall experience it so as to learn—​should be the approach, rather than let this film serve me as I am. In defining love and desire, the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant goes beyond the mere terms of individual identity and practice. She argues in her book Desire/​Love (2012) for the role and function of fantasy as an attempt to “anchor” identity in the face of the “anarchy” of desire and love.22 In this way, the practice of heterosexuality as the dominant form of connectivity between people is tyrannical. She argues for the infinity of relations that are more pliable and adaptable to different forms. Yet, she worries too about an open-​ended definition today in terms of what marginalized people face when attempting to secure rights such as gay marriage. Jasbir Puar calls this homonationalism, the uplifting of the “queer liberal subject as bearer of privacy rights and economic freedom (that) sanctions a regime of racialized surveillance, detention, and deportation.”23 I am fascinated by the infinity of intimate relations Berlant identifies. It is one I have explored in the work of Emanuel Levinas’s conceptions of totality and infinity.24 Identities are indeed full of possibility because of the deep interiorities of subjects themselves, especially as they relate to others or move from different contexts. What one wants and practices depends too on where and with whom, in a more unlimited formulation. When we place relations of

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  31 love and desire within a context, however, we then see how there are limits to these encounters. To shoot the complexity of love and hate within relations of racial and other inequalities is to illuminate the lack of choices facing particular subjects we do not see often on cinema screens. We need to behold the power, or agency, that the marginalized possess, what the late anthropologist Saba Mahmood defines, in The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005), as the ability to act within constraints, including those of our own making.25 Mahmood insists that female agency must be understood in situated terms, as having a historical and cultural specificity as it occurs. What it looks like cannot be assumed but is determined within the conditions surrounding it. In revealing these dynamics, film can show us that we all have power, albeit incredibly variant, from miniscule in the case of those abjected in the Global South to abundant in the case of the privileged West. I need to interrogate this bifurcation between Global South and Global North as a construction presented in the films. I do not mean to imply a homogeneity in the West rather than the criss-​crossings of relationality across class and nationhood between the United States and for example, the Philippines, as I show in my chapter on Mendoza’s film in terms of the diaspora. Yet, there are gradations wherein wealthy brown people in the third world can have more choices than poor whites in the developed nations. Although structural differences also mean that poor whites in the West have legibility in ways that poor browns in the South cannot access in civilization—​beyond the classification of savage brutes who cannot govern themselves. Cinema is a technology that can show gradations of power because it must tell a situated story, where everything we see in the mise-​en-​scene is deliberately decided as needed there. Cinema is an art form that evaluates the world and sets up a story where conditions determine action. Because conditions shape cinematic language (cinematography, location, production design, and costumes), we can see the situation that determines the conduct of others. Thus, cinema enables us to better understand each other and ourselves not just to be enlightened but also to possess an awareness of our differences. The key moment however, is how this awareness becomes a recognition of complicity and an implication of the viewer within systems of inequality. That is, I have what I have because others do not have it. Therefore, what am I doing to correct it? Do I simply enjoy what I have, my enlightenment, and then do something that eases my guilt or do I take away my own privileges or limit my pleasures in order to change the situation of inequality

32  The Proximity of Other Skins of which I am part? How much more pleasure can the privileged take? I’m curious about what the specific changes we make are if we approach these films from this position of self-​displacement. To see the film is to note not only how we are making sense of it psychically but also how intensely bodily the experience of watching can be. My hope is that this bodily intensity can transform the physical conditions of our relations. An example is in Serbis, where the movie theater is falling apart. The camera moves into it, then through it. We see the transgender and cisgendered male sex workers and johns (the best ones, in the sense of desirably lucrative transactions, are older, richer, and flamboyantly gay or powerful, mysterious men who are either gangsters or military men) engaging in sex for sale along the back wall of the darkened theater. We see the legs in the air as sex transpires on the movie theater seats, from the perspective of a child who lives in the theater with his family. He accidentally catches a sight of the sexual engagements when his tricycle takes a turn into the cinema. Bathroom plumbing breaks down and feces and urine flood the entire floor, which the young male worker with the puss oozing out of the wound on his butt must clean. His open wound in the squalid festering swamp makes me cringe. Fulfilling the haptic turn in cinema, which attends to embodied spectatorships, I get up, when I first view the film, shaking my hands in disgust. He must walk through the flood, undulating between clear and brown, only in flip-​flop slippers. His skin is uncovered, naked, and raw in its exposure to the filthy and foul stench. If he has an open wound on his butt, his feet and legs may also have sores. The risk of infection is on my mind. The body in the space of poverty is convincingly told because it does not notice the smell, nor the flood of filth. Intimate literacy is required to communicate the work this scene does: it achieves a kind of proximity for the viewer, who assumes Manila is wretched, miserable, sorry, and slummy. The design of the space is purposeful in bringing us close through our senses beyond just sight. We hear the dirty water pushed into waves. The filthy, mucky smell cannot be denied. I focus on the filmic form using a method of bodily attunement to my own situated bodily responses in relation to the abjected represented on-​screen, and for the specific proximity it allows. While literary narratives from postcolonial contexts have indeed represented the sensorium of such encounters, film offers a unique venue because it not only captures abstractions (in the sense of a generalized scene of a broad universality) but also limits the imagination that literature—​or written text—​requires. Film requires concrete materials such as actors, production design, and lighting that establish a

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  33 particular experience for its audiences. The filmic form prioritizes not only the visual but also other senses such as sound and smell, which I explore in various chapters. It also puts audiences into physical viewing spaces that provide them ways to achieve intimacy with each other in a way that is different from the written text—through the concrete placement of objects and the bodies in relation to them.

Ethics, Empathy, and Compassion: Shared Spectatorships A note on method when entering the terrain of inequality that is representation at the sites of spectatorship, authorship, and, less well-​known, the arena of criticism. In 2018, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative reported that 79 percent of film critics are predominantly straight white able-​bodied men and “women of color are written off as film critics.”26 Considering the lack of diversity on-​screen from the endemic invisibility (limited speaking parts and lack of leadership and above-​the-​line creative roles) of women and people of color, my method challenges the viewer to expand their perspective by taking on my particular experience of the movies—​racialized, gendered, and sexualized—​that occurs within this inequality. The method I present in this book is in my description of the world of the film, specifically in how it frames intimacy from the perspective of a cisgendered heterosexual woman of color. Identifying the discomfort for the viewer and the reader in always retaining the scene of inequality is one emphasis in my intervention. I do not want you to forget the inequality within the scenes of intimacy so that we may learn how to decenter ourselves in better seeing, hearing, and feeling the film from other positions. A question to ask in order to achieve ethical intimacy would be: what are the limits of my comprehension as situated in my structural identity? Self-​ displacement enables an understanding of presence, voice, and actions that lead not to transcendence but to historical, political, economic, and other real contexts when coming close to the other across distances of difference, felt in the nearness to death and far from social recognition. My hunger for and prioritization of these silenced voices and experiences on-​and off-​screen provides an antidote of conscious attunement to the stories and perspectives of women, people of color, and the sexually marginalized. My method of thick description springs from anthropology, particularly the

34  The Proximity of Other Skins work of Clifford Geertz in his Interpretation of Cultures (1973).27 The ethnography of film that I produce not only observes what transpires with attention to the subjectivities of those rendered unimportant but also accounts for the sociohistorical context and the meanings provided by the actors themselves. I describe the scenes of the films knowing that I am requiring and demanding the reader to see and experience the film from what I prioritize as important from my specific viewing position. This strategy is part of my critique of the white cis straight able-bodied male domination of film criticism and production that provides us limited interpretive tools in studying these films that are already made from such limited perspectives. We need to eliminate the idea of a universal spectator, which usually refers to a white male perspective, to move instead toward a shared spectatorship. Thus, I  mediate your interpretation of these films in this book deliberately, spotlighting the role of the critic/​theorist/​reviewer much as Trinh T. Minh-​ha does when emphasizing how the translator in her film Shoot for the Contents (1991) mediates our access to information.28 She shoots the three-​shot with an emphasis on framing the translator as central, lighting only this figure between the speaker and the listener. Unlike this three-​shot of interviewer, translator, and interviewee, however, the scene of inequality I chart regarding film criticism and authorship highlights the lack of plural voices in analyzing and interpreting narrowly authored films. That almost 80 percent of film critics are uniformly of a particular demographic is an injustice, to keep the analysis and interpretation of this medium in the hands of so few! Film criticism can narrow our view. Moreover, since white men author 96  percent of films that are widely seen, according to the same study that identifies a mere 4 percent of popular films as directed by women, we clearly know nothing about romance, marriage, love, partnership, courtship, and everything that film teaches us about life and the world. It is the narrowing of our minds that occurs through this limited authorship of films as well that informs the descriptive method that lands me between you and the movies I study. In her essay on the race films of Oscar Micheaux, the film scholar Jane Gaines asks questions about the location of critics and viewers who are either prevented by “unconscious racism” or more simply, their “clear inability to follow the film” when their limited position prevents a more compassionate viewing of marginalized subjects.29 I enter this field of inequality she well describes to center my own viewing and interpretation as one my readers can occupy in order to account for the impossibility of a universal spectatorship. It centers a perspective that

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  35 insists on uneasiness and discomfort as important positions from which to learn about others. Shared spectatorship, rather than a universal spectatorship, decenters the self into a position of abjection or allows one to find the abject in oneself. It is an attunement to how cinema acts as part of other structures of inequality that assigns otherness. This awareness of the limits to authorship and spectatorship is powerful considering how desire, sex, love, and romance in the movies can capture experience between people on-​screen in ways that shape relations off-​ screen. Crossing the distance of otherness before us when facing another being is intimacy—​and this works in the film as well as at the site of spectatorship. The scene of intimacy enables a form of proximity wherein the self transforms when articulated to the other. The other can also be a measure by which self-​understanding forms in a way that we can see in the movies, but not necessarily in how the movies work on ourselves as spectators. In the film before us, we can see that when the self articulates desire for the other, it is an event that can change one’s entire self-​perception. How can we tell that something new, when released to the world, changes how we perceive and conduct ourselves? The one-​on-​one encounter of intimacy—​exemplified in touch—​its function on-​screen can show how one can unravel or form anew from contact with the other, how one can move the other to pain, to pleasure, and to recognize one’s power as well as responsibility to the other in relation to oneself. This is precisely why I formulate the subject/​abject form of relationality that these films tackle. I formulate this method of shared spectatorship so that we don’t return to a solipsistic narcissism after our viewing of the films. Through sexual and other intimacy in the movies, we can see how one can be ugly, can be beautiful, can be free, and can be imprisoned. That is, love can also cause pain and suffering. And as Lauren Berlant argues, the notion of heterosexual romantic love as a goal can also constrict imagination. Moving on to the spectator who is similarly touched by the movie in order to become aware of one’s own limits and one’s own context for viewing: for example, seeing sex scenes between gay and lesbian couples and pairings can lead to discomfort or arousal in ways that need to be theorized for heterosexual people. While gay and lesbian spectators become aware of their exclusions from sexual representations in Hollywood quite early, heterosexual viewers tend not to know this hunger and deprivation at all. Thus, sexual representations across a larger spectrum of desire and pleasure require the development of an ethical intimacy too. The film posits the spectator as the master who can see, in a kind of transcendental gaze or optical control,

36  The Proximity of Other Skins but we must identify how this works when we account for haptic cinema that engages more mutually and more mysteriously. What does this mean for sexual looking relations? Is there mere pleasure in looking? Is there a sexualization of looking and in not being seen while looking? Or is there a disavowal that renders the spectator so powerfully? We must ask these questions when it comes to representing the other so as to identify our own desires as they are anticipated in the movie, and in how those desires and love/​sex scenes really work in our resistance to as well as capitulation to the film, the camera, the characters, and other elements of the film’s power. In this way, it is not enough to resort to film theory alone to make sense of films about erotica, intimacies, love, and desire across inequality. An interdisciplinary approach is required in studying how sexual representations must come into conversation with social theories of power and the ethics of inequality, especially in terms of understanding race, gender, class, transnational differences, and contested entities of history and nations. Ridding ourselves of this assumption of universality in both spectatorship and authorship enables better learning of the specific forces that contextualize the meaning and significance of multiple representations of sex on-​screen. Studying it enables us to understand how it works in the film and beyond it, in shaping social and sexual culture and power. My hope in establishing this practice of shared spectatorship and attunement to difference and distance is to explode the idea of a universal spectator that still is touted today by white male critics who need to be conscious of their limits in viewing when deciding for others what authorship is worth watching and what spectatorship is worth experiencing.

The Book’s Unfolding The book comprises five chapters that focus entirely on global cinemas that directly address the United States in its dreams, reflections, and fantasies. In each, an unfolding of an idea of proximity and ethical intimacy, the relation of self-​other as subject/​abject, and the West–​Global South appear. After the introductory chapter, I begin with a focus on contemporary films, which allows me to address the relationships between Western white women (with money) from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom and their relationships with African and Asian men (without money) in the sites of sex tourism in the Caribbean and the low-​wage labor markets of the West. In this chapter situated in the dynamics of racism and colonialism, I explore the

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  37 way in which power informs racial pleasure or how race informs the sexual desires between rich white women and poor men of color who are steeped in impecunity. The subject/​abject dynamic leads to real catastrophes in one and a romantic fantasy in the other. Interrogating the interlocking relationship between political and libidinal economies in Heading South and Never Forever, I explore how the filmmakers frame differing freedoms and choices across gender, race, age, and class. How do these subjects’ desire for each other reach across the different hierarchies of power and privilege that they occupy? It is in this chapter that I coin the concept of sexual settings—​which describe the spatial and temporal context that never subsides in intimate encounters so we are not be deceived by the smiles and the sun of exploitative sexual liaisons. The next chapter evaluates international politics and the film-​festival market in the celebration of so-​called poverty porn, the erroneous and simplistic classification of films by the celebrated Filipin@ director Brillante Mendoza, who spotlights drug addicts, prostitutes, and the dredges of society in the slums of Manila in Tirador, Kinatay, and Serbis. In focusing on the carnality of otherness through brown-​skinned bodies and abhorrent spaces such as the brothel or the shantytown, Mendoza redefines the abject as a critique of his dismissal as pandering to the West. He formulates an ethical intimacy in the form of shared spectatorship—​a compassionate and empathic filmmaking that moves us away from condescension and pity toward an awareness of the ugly inequalities that force people to pay great costs living as others in the Global South. A major task this chapter accomplishes is to make room for the voice of Brillante Mendoza in the context of his dismissal by critics who operate under the notion of a universal spectator. I then study internationally celebrated films about domestic workers and their masters in contemporary Korea in The Housemaid and in Japanese colonial-​era Korea in The Handmaiden. Here, I show the minutiae of nurturing, emotions, and other feelings that develop between the family and the worker through the proximity required in domestic work. Yet, the intimacy achieved is used to devalue the lives of abjected others when their needs are not only negated but exploited to harm them. In this chapter, I also dig into the eroticism of abjection that leads to yet another fantasy and another horrendous and horrific demise. Why do the dynamics of power between employer and employee manifest so acutely at the site of erotica and the wielding of abuse through sexuality? The theoretical contribution formulated in this chapter is the “embodied montage,” which shows details of film language that illustrate the lives of those in the margins in relation to those with power

38  The Proximity of Other Skins over them. In reading how the servant classes battle with their masters in inventive and imaginative ways, I show an intervention to the class struggles represented in these films, one I call “intimate eruption.” The last chapter examines the representation of an icon:  the former Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos and the fantasies of self that two works present. I close my book with the musical Here Lies Love (2010–​17) and the documentary Imelda (2005) because Imelda Marcos’s reign demonstrates flagrant abuse of power that dismantles the binaries between North and South and, furthermore, her representations across different positions enact the dynamics of inequality within the terrains of authorship and spectatorship. Through my reading the work of her unofficial biographers Carmen Navarro Pedrosa and Katherine Ellison, I compare what the rock musical presents—​ the mining of the ridiculous in the life of Imelda Marcos—​against the proximity that the documentary filmmaker Ramona Diaz presents, which is intimacy with the megalomania that informed Imelda Marcos’s rule.30 I formulate a definition of intimacy that moves beyond the focus of the genital sex act in the closing of my book, and instead focus on the choices filmmakers and theater makers make regarding the representation of a woman’s psychic life and the role of the historical in their presentation, especially when the ramifications on an entire nation are at stake. What comes tumbling down in my question about the ethics of representing self and others is the criterion of authenticity. We need to go from asking the question of who makes films about others to asking the hard question of how. In the epilogue, I meditate on memory and death in a movie in my mind about my own life. There is much we can do in the face of abjection in this world where we live, and I  demonstrate what that conduct is. I  conclude with how subject formations on-​screen call up histories of (hetero) sexuality, racialization, colonialism, and structures of power and privilege. I argue that, indeed, the globalization of culture in cinema allows for us to make sense of the limits of representing intimacy in the United States and beyond. In addressing the diverse ways that films represent social contexts and social forces that compel the actions, conditions, and choices of others like/​unlike us, we learn that there is no universal sexuality, love, or intimacy and that we need to see all of it, in a more shared spectatorship, in order to make sense of the power of cinema, to theorize it, and to mobilize in order to help us achieve a more complex understanding and a more developed vocabulary of power and desire within it. The possibilities of developing compassion for others and to interrogate the self are more tenable in the movies, I expect, if we see how representations of intimacy give us the opportunity to recognize

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  39 others’ suffering away from abjection, and in doing so, come to see how we need films to develop care for others like and unlike us in ways that decenter Western voices. The dream is that they demand not only introspection and expansion of who we include in our humanity but also action from Western spectators to turn themselves in so as to enable space for others. And to see films made by others and about others! I hope the book reveals films as transformative of who we are as subjects in relation to whom we desire and perform sex acts with, and with whom we are kin, so that we can explore what that looks and feels like in ways that do not solidify narcissism and instead expand our ideas about intersubjectivity and value. I hope that these lessons matter not just to us in the Global North but also to filmmakers, audiences, and actors in the Global South, or, I should say, the other way around, really. To acquire ethical intimacy is to learn from others’ voices and to recognize not just sexuality but also pleasure from inequality or fear of the other as that which may bind us together. It is the very thing we need to undo so as to enable changes, however they may be embodied, as soon as we approach the cinema with self-​displacement rather than self-​centering. To embrace the confusion films bring should change the world beyond the expansion of ideas and perception. I look forward to an audience that acknowledges complicity in relation to the actors/​actions of these films. What I imagine the future for the reader of the book is to recognize the persistence of inequality that sex and intimacy on-​screen may help us to understand. To learn about how subjects who objectify others make them abject, worse than a thing. A person becomes thing. When we become intimate with another, an ethical commitment to recognizing each other inside and outside the film is what I  want. I also want more sex in the movies so that we may exploit what cinema can do best: bring us intimacy and an approach for interpreting what happens there as powerful enough to change what we do here in our world beyond the movies. And that change can be a more humble position for those who deem themselves as central subjects in a world of others’ abjection.

Notes 1. David Bordwell, “Introduction:  Beyond the Blockbuster” in The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 13. 2. See the epigraph in the novelist Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), as well as Enrique De La Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, Abe Ignacio, and Helen Toribio, eds., The Forbidden Book: The Philippine American War in Political Cartoons (Berkeley: EastWind Books,

40  The Proximity of Other Skins 2014), which details the use of the paternalistic term “little brown brothers” in reference to Filipinos by Americans during colonial rule from the 1890s on. 3. The cultural critic Richard T.  Rodriguez troubles the move from “Latina/​o” to “Latinx” in terms of who gets eclipsed in this move toward inclusion. I follow his lead to assert “Filipin@x” as encompassing both the hierarchies of gender and exclusions of sexual identities. Richard T. Rodriguez, “X Marks the Spot,” published on October 4, 2017 (https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​0921374017727880), accessed on March 25, 2019. 4. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror:  An Essay on Abjection (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 64. 5. Ibid., p. 65. 6. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” in Carole Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger (New York: Routledge & Kegan, Paul, 1984). 7. C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides:  A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 8. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, Trap Door:  Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 9. Madison Moore, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). 10. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 62. 11. Bedalyn’s Beat, published on September 29, 2017 (https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=M0QM-​rvER84), accessed on March 30, 2019. 12. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 62. 13. Ibid.,  p. 69. 14. Michel Foucault, Nicolae Morar, and Daniel W. Smith, “The Gay Science,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2011), pp. 385–​403, quotations at p. 392. 15. Leo Bersani, “Foucault, Freud, Fantasy and Power,” GLQ, Vol. 2 (1995), pp. 11–​33, quotation at p. 11. 16. Ibid.,  p. 17. 17. Ibid.,  p. 20. 18. J. Reid Miller, Stain Removal:  Ethics and Race (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2016). 19. Linda Williams, “Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Winter 2006), pp. 288–​340. 20. Gayatri Gopinath, “Who’s Your Daddy” in Vivek Bald et  al., eds., The Sun Never Sets: Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (New York: NYU Press, 2018), p. 274. 21. Teshome Gabriel, “A Cinema of Wax and Gold,” Jump Cut, No. 27 (July 1982), pp.  31–​33. 22. Lauren Berlant, Desire/​Love (New York: Punctum Books, 2012). 23. Jasbir Puar, “Rethinking Homonationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 45 (2013), pp. 336. 24. Emanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity:  An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 25. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and The Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

Introduction: Subject/Abject Relations  41 26. Marc Choueiti, Dr. Stacy L. Sith, and Dr. Katherine Pieper, “Critic’s Choice? Gender and Race/​Ethnicity of Film Reviewers across 100 Top Films of 2017” (http://​assets. uscannenberg.org/​docs/​cricits-​choice-​2018.pdf), accessed on March 31, 2019. 27. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 28. Trinh T. Minh-​ha, Shoot for the Contents (New York: Women Make Movies, 1991). 29. Jane Gaines, “Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama and Oscar Micheaux” in Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 161–​184, quotation on p. 168. 30. Carmen Navarro Pedrosa, The Rise and Fall of Imelda Marcos (Manila: Bookmark, 1987), and Katherine Ellison, Imelda, Steel Butterfly of the Philippines (New York: McGraw Hill, 1988).

2 (Rich) White Women, (Poor) Brown Men, and Sexual Settings Political and Libidinal Economies in Heading South (2005) and Never Forever (2007)

What kinds of intimacy are possible in scenes of radical inequality? The films Heading South (2005) and Never Forever (2007) show rich white women who experience disenfranchisement then subjugate others in the name of their own empowerment. In Heading South, white women sex tourists in Haiti discuss why they don’t find black men in their US, Canadian, British, and French homelands attractive as they choose among various black men on the beach in the Caribbean. One of the possible reasons they consider is that they are closer to nature in the tropics. Never Forever similarly explores intimate encounters between a rich white American woman and a poor Korean immigrant man in another site of inequality, the fertility industry and underground economy of New York City. The woman propositions the man, who looks like her Korean American husband, to impregnate her for a large sum of money. An undocumented immigrant and low-​wage worker with several jobs in and out of the formal economy, he agrees. As he penetrates her for the first time, he says out loud, “such fucking blue eyes.” In both films, the white women and men of color touch each other intimately and across steep inequality, while recognizing the cultural and racial difference between them. The racial and the economic significance of their difference informs and infuses the erotics of their relationships. What other relations are possible between unequal subjects that exceed the frame of domination? And what are the ethical ramifications of such a question? This chapter addresses recent representations of Western white women (with money) from the United States, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom and their relationships with African and Asian men (without money) against several backdrops: sex tourism in the Caribbean, the low-​ wage labor market for undocumented immigrants in the United States, and

Political and Libidinal Economies  43 the US fertility industry. Interrogating the interlocking relationship between political and libidinal economies in Heading South and Never Forever, I explore how these films frame differing freedoms and choices across gender, race, and class in scenes of sexual intimacy that are facilitated by a monetary transaction. In the process, I formulate a term, “sexual setting,” to identify how social, historical, and other contexts never subside but inform the erotics and pleasures of intimate bodily entanglements in the movies. In illustrating how the structural inequality of race, socioeconomics, and globalization infuses sexual scenes, I  show how to assess the ethics of sexual entanglements—wherein differing social values of their subjectivities emerge and interact within intimacy. I identify how white women with money use their racial, national, and economic power—​including hegemonic power—​to serve their own gendered needs in the sites of colonial sexuality and intimacy with men of color without money. Because there is so much sex in the films, these encounters can be read as mutually about making love (ignoring the radical inequality between the partners). But my reading shows how the white women prioritize the fulfillment of their own needs without interrogating the costs for the people who suffer along the way, so that their pleasures occur at another’s expense. Using a haptic and sensory approach to the language of sex and intimacy, I deconstruct how desire occurs across racial, class, and gender difference even if it looks like sex transforming into love or vice versa. I offer urgent thinking about white womanhood that is made accountable to racial privilege in colonial contexts. At the same time, the films offer masculinities that are deemed too romantic in terms of male power,1 yet it is a characterization I find illuminating in identifying the power white women can hold over men of color in these scenes. Both directors, Gina Kim and Laurent Cantet, focus on sex, so much sex in the case of Never Forever and so many women in the hunt for sex and intimacy through money in the case of Heading South. The intervention in their use of sexual settings is key: to represent sex is to reveal the intimate intricacies of power in the case of Never Forever. And to represent sex in Heading South we can see the undeniable presence of the public in what is considered so private. Psychologist Eric Erikson helps me to define intimacy, and Viviana Zelizer and other feminist sociologists help me to formulate my term “sexual settings,” or the spatial and temporal context that never subsides in such encounters. These are two important ways of approaching the cinema through sexual settings: do not be deceived by the smiles and the sun. And never forget the structures that organize how people occupy their spaces.

44  The Proximity of Other Skins Thus, an epidermal and haptic approach to cinema is a method that can produce specific breakdowns of how structures and relations are present in these individual relations. Experimental ethnographer Laura Marks, in her book The Skin of the Film (1999) identifies how film touches us and brings us to an awareness of our place and our bodies through an embodied understanding of the cinema. She coins the term “haptic visuality” so as to capture how the experience of visuality mimics touch and the screen of the film, our own skin.2 I build from her understanding of how cinema captures these cultures in order to conceptualize the idea of “sexual settings,” which I define as the way cinema can be deployed so as to never let go of the social, political, economic, and cultural context particularly when representing sex acts. Whether through the use of bodies or sets, filmic representations of sex scenes require contexts that shape how we see intimacy working differently according to the players and locations of their engagement. Skin and touch animate my study centrally. “Skin” refers not only to that remarkably porous border that signifies an ostensibly fixed racial identity or national physiognomy. Skin, the border of the self that is engaged and breached in acts of intimacy, is also a metonym for one’s erotic being. Following Marks, skin is, moreover, a metaphor for the cinematic genres that give form and eligibilities to idiosyncratic and collective fantasies about the other, whether that other is a proximate sexual partner or the citizen of a faraway country with whom we feel intimate because of cinema’s machine of desire. Skin is the emblem of visibility or exposure and, at the same time, the covering of what is vulnerable and obscene. The unpredictable and transformative events made possible by the touching of skins are sexual encounters, the play of genres, and cross-​cultural cinematic exchanges. The other keyword—​“touch”—​also has multiple connotations. Touch is, alternately, the event of making contact, a provocation, an affective charge, the haptic quality of media, a sexual act, a temporary interface between self and other, and an opening or closing toward transnational empathy and eroticism.

Intimacy at the Site of Inequality Before tackling the relations in Never Forever and Heading South, I need to provide the theoretical scaffolding for how to measure intimacy and how it forms between subjects located in structural and social positions of radical difference from each other. In “Intimacy:  From Transformation to

Political and Libidinal Economies  45 Transmutation,” Gabriel Bianchi (2010) establishes how intimacy matters to one’s survival in a hostile world. Closeness and proximity to others provide a haven to individuals who must engage a world of competition.3 The value of intimacy occurs in sites where one discloses one’s true self in a private enclave so that the disclosures there act as a buffer from stress, illness, and distress. Therefore, in this chapter, one way intimacy is presented and structured is as a life necessity wherein one connects with others to receive comfort and strength in order to face the world. In Bianchi’s approach, intimacy is a scene of safety where people risk themselves to be vulnerable in the face of another and then reap its rewards henceforth. In 1968, the developmental psychologist Erik Erikson established seven levels of intimacy when describing how people establish connectivity with others.4 The first is “cliché” wherein contact is established between people but does not open up the self. This can further develop to the second, which is a “factual” basis of relating to others. The factual relation is where communication occurs at the level of the weather, sports, and schedules but does not approach the hidden subtext. The third stage, the “relationship” signifies the exchange of views and arguments—​where ideas can start to shape the other’s worldview. “Common future,” the fourth stage, describes how the participants each open up their hopes and dreams to achieve commonality with each other. As the fifth stage, “recognition” is composed of two who give, share, and accept as other the one with whom they are now entangled. A deeper stage, the sixth, is “forgiveness” where faults, fears, and failures are not only recognized but accepted. Finally, “legitimate needs” describes the achievement of co-​existence and collaboration in leading their lives together. In each of these stages, I am concerned about how intimacy occurs wherein two come together from contexts that signify not only economic inequality but also racial and cultural difference. Stories of intimacy across a divide have fascinated viewers since the beginning of cinema, as I have explored in my previous books, such as in the films featuring Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong as well as James Shigeta and Nancy Kwan. Yet understanding the dynamics of desire should not be analyzed as limited to one or another category of difference. Nor should we understand social categories to be impermeable as they are experienced. Historian Mary Lui’s The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-​ of-​the-​Century New York City (2005) provides an example of long-​running American fascination with interracial desire as illicit.5 The murder of Elsie Sigel purportedly by her lover, Leon Ling, revealed how anti-​miscegenation

46  The Proximity of Other Skins laws were crossed. The controversy over her death, accompanied by a vehement manhunt for the disappeared lover, spoke of the protection for white women in national culture. In Never Forever and Heading South, I refer to economic inequality that signifies financial power and cultural capital such as in the ability to navigate the social world with one’s resources as well as one’s charm, humor, or knowledge regarding how one should look in order to be appealing or appear to belong in one’s environment. In Never Forever, we see scenes of the white woman Sophie and her husband as they navigate a social world of luxury and beauty as part of the charmed circle of rich married heterosexual cosmopolitan elites in the New York. They are the only interracial couple in this mix, yet they far exceed hegemonic standards of beauty in their fine clothes and tall, fit statures. In Heading South, the college professor Ellen embraces her sex tourist role without discomfort. The position does not overdetermine her identity, and she freely wields her economic power with enjoyment and ease. These dynamics occur within the realm of structural differences, such as in the interactions of different subjects whose values are determined within colonial hierarchies and legacies. In the worlds represented in both these films, whiteness means mobility and possessing the luxury of wealth and time. And to associate with white people is to produce the possibility of changing one’s lot. When people enter into an intimate sexual relationship bearing different values in society, intimacy is thus a site where hierarchies can transform or reify. And at work in these relationships are both individual personas and group identities that have different values in society and that shape the interpretation of various deeds and acts that transpire therein. Intimacy can then function as a source of individual identity in society where the self and other find meaning in closeness and proximity, such as in the cache of a family reputation or the enclave of a powerful group’s protection. Intimacy at the site of sex exceeds cliché and factual information. There may or may not be an exchange of names or a discussion of the circumstances or factors that lead to the private sexual moment. It is about establishing a relationship wherein the self transforms through the touch of the other. Not only in terms of the pleasure that touch generates in the self, but for the perception of the other as manifested in that physical relation. When black men in Heading South are seen as the source of phenomenal orgasms previously unavailable to white women in their usual settings, or when desire for the undocumented brown man in Never Forever leads the wealthy white woman to imagine new worlds, we see both the limits imposed on men of color and the

Political and Libidinal Economies  47 horizons opened for white women. Either way, sexual pleasure can change real circumstances. Sexual touch does not necessarily result in investment in others so deeply that lasting relations form. It can also result in the relegation of subjects into disparaged and undervalued places such as in shameful entanglements hidden from society. The particular realm of the sexual in the work of intimacy is of interest to me, for it is a private site that is ultimately intensely public and at the same time, a scene that is hardly represented in cinema. External relations inform how people behave in these scenes so that we should see it. And what results from inside these relations shapes the outside world now and in the future, so indeed we must interpret and engage them. This chapter specifically focuses on the sexual intimacies that occur between terribly unequal subjects within the US fertility industry and what a rich white woman does in order to get pregnant and what several white women do in order to achieve orgasms while on holiday in the Caribbean. So I am concerned with the dynamic of money and how that makes possible intimate relations between people across radical difference in both these films. In her book The Purchase of Intimacy (2007), the economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer confronts the coexistence of money and intimacy as certainly a concern but one that is currently very poorly framed in moralistic terms within popular culture and society.6 She focuses on the coming together of intimacy and money and traces the problematic way of analyzing it in discourse. Viviana Zelizer describes an “accusation” when intimacy is associated with payment. When the transactions of financial payment actually transpire, they are seen as “corrupting” and “degrading” (818). She describes three established social science approaches used to analyze money and intimacy in relation to this claim. The first is the “hostile worlds” theory, which defines intimacy and money as “inherently incompatible and places rigid moral boundaries between market and intimate domains . . . it condemns any intersection of money and intimacy as . . . dangerously corrupting” (823). The second is the “nothing but” way of thinking about money and intimacy where it is rationally conducted, reflects culture, and is simply coerced. There is no ambiguity in this approach in that women, for example, only go into prostitution because they are entirely forced to do it. It is not possible in this way of thinking that women choose to perform sex work. Lastly, “differentiated ties” involve various social relations that reflect distinct pay. The key concept in this approach is the incommensurability of money and intimacy.

48  The Proximity of Other Skins That is, there are as many ways to transfer money in the world as there are different forms of intimate relations. Money participates as a prop in these films in ways that reflect Zelizer’s analysis. White women hand over money to the men but never literally hand-​to-​hand. There’s a discomfort with the exchange. We see the money on the night stand in Never Forever or in the expensive clothes bought for and worn by the black men in Heading South. In one scene, the white woman slips a roll of cash in pants draped on a chair. It is an act that avoids a direct handing over of money yet she makes sure her black male lover notices it as he prepares to leave. In Zelizer’s argument for the third method of differentiated ties, she situates the debates about money and intimacy within the routine ways people create and define social relations as depending on money systems. There are rituals and cultures created around certain social relations such as dating and marriage in who pays, for example. Legal conflicts regarding intimacy such as divorce cases involve the allocation of money and the distribution of resources with decisions evaluated relationally. Popular culture also determines the value of particular roles and relationships in the law. Therefore, as Zelizer argues, “the exchange of money for intimacy shows a lot about the meanings of relationships, the deep social character of how these relationships are manifested in money” (820). Thus, it is not only the law, popular culture, or rituals that determine and define relationships but also what occurs inside those relations.7 So intimacy is thought of as being above money, but is actually permeated by it across society. Because of this belief, I am attuned to how the transactions of money retire a performance of disbelief or fantasy. Rather than condemn the coming together of money and intimacy, Zelizer argues that we need to shift our concern from moralistic judgment to improving regulations that concretely affect people’s lives (835). She argues that there are a wide variety of connections between payment and intimacy (839) and that “hard bargains between socially unequal players” and “bad bargains—​where unequal power borders on coercion” (840) do occur. In the case of the films I study, we will see how white women with money shift their voice and power through it. In the case of Heading South, we see how the white women’s old age and gender limit their power in their home country (in that white men relegate them to the realm of undesirability)—​and how this changes in relation to poor and young men of color without money to a position where the women wield power in defining desirability. In Never Forever, a rich white woman leaves the stifling enclave of her wealthy home

Political and Libidinal Economies  49 and cold rapacious husband to a different relationship with a poor and passionate man. Love and partnership transform in this new context wherein the payment of money for sex produces so much more beyond proximity and temporality. In Heading South, they produce closeness indeed, yet also an investment for the white women in the future of the black men as well as an interest in long-​term companionship elsewhere in the world—​beyond the fantasy space of Haiti into the woman’s home country. What we see is how individual and seemingly private and personal emotions and eroticism are not exempt from larger social world power dynamics (839–​840). In these ways, I find Zelizer’s definitions to be very useful in studying the sexual relationships in representations between unequal subjects who relate intimately through paid sex. Her work is a reminder of the situatedness of the sexual encounter within social and structural relations—​in how these experiences show that sex acts are always grounded in the sexual settings of power relations. I argue through sexual settings employed by the filmmakers that these social circumstances never subside, as evidenced in the individual and intimate lives of the characters in Never Forever and Heading South. Only when we identify sexual settings can we assess the significance of intimacy between unequal subjects. Like the previous chapter that compared the fiction film Those Long Haired Nights and the nonfiction film Call Her Ganda, this chapter uses the method of juxtaposition in order to illuminate each film. The first film, Never Forever, seems more ambivalent or perhaps more open-​ended in its representation of exploitation. The second film also seems more clearly straightforward in its exploitative relationship between white women and men of color. The juxtaposition of the films allows for recontextualization that reveals the fantasies that rich white women tell themselves in their relations with the other, that is, in their fetishization of poor men of color. Both films riff on the trope of the Magical Negro in the way white women approach men of color. The Magical Negro is a trope in Hollywood for representing black people who appear in service of white people’s self-​actualization, as argued by Matthew Hughey (2009).8 In the case of Never Forever, the illegal immigrant and low-​ wage worker Ji Ha Kim is initially and merely someone who is supposed to impregnate Sophie Lee. Then, unlocked through intimacy is a relationship that ultimately releases her from an unhappy marriage. The youthful bodies of black men in Heading South are used by older white women in order to find themselves. Despite this use, critics tend to read a feminist journey as the central matter in these films, ignoring how poor men of color are exploited

50  The Proximity of Other Skins by their class and racial subjection in globalization, which reads to me as an unethical reading in its eclipsing of the men. Intimacy is the salient lens I use in order to make sense of these relations involving inequality, money, and sex. Intimacy is risky in that it can pollute straightforward monetary transactions. I am going beyond Zelizer’s point here—​she identifies the standard view that money and intimacy are mutually exclusive and my work indeed shows this is not the case. What’s new is that intimacy is not the thing that is polluted by monetary transactions but the business transaction as the basis for what composes the encounter. That is, intimacy happens despite money. Money cannot lower or detract from the purity of intimacy, which can produce solidarity, closeness, and connection even when people are trying to keep their relations simply financial. In this way, intimacy is guilty of polluting money. If we think of money as a danger to intimacy, the situation can be reversed. Intimacy is indeed risky, in that something more can and will come out of money. Intimacy can produce an investment in the other and a transformation of the self, as I will show in my readings of these two seemingly very different films about rich white women who pay men of color for sex.

Never Forever (2007) Gina Kim’s Never Forever is a narrative feature set in New York City about a wealthy white American woman, Sophie Lee (played by Vera Farmiga), who seeks the sexual services of a Korean undocumented immigrant and low-​wage worker Ji Ha Kim (played by Ha Jung-​woo), so as to bear a child. Married to a Korean American man named Andrew Lee (David Lee McInnis), who is shot to look similar to Kim, she intends to get pregnant in order to pass off the mixed-​race baby as her husband’s biological child. After futile years of attempting to get pregnant, the discovery of her husband’s sterility makes her hope that the baby she makes with Ji Ha Kim can save her marriage. Within the narrative, her crazy pursuit is justified by her plan to restore hope to her grieving husband who mourns the recent death of his father. In the ritualized act of sex between the lovers, however, love and attachment unexpectedly develop between Sophie and Ji Ha. It not only threatens Sophie’s marriage but also introduces the power of intimate transcultural encounters that unexpectedly entangle two radically unequal subjects.

Political and Libidinal Economies  51 Its form of sexual setting is apparent in how wealth and poverty organizes the world of the film. Because intimacy always has a context, the filmmaking process must account for where the sex transpires so that everything we see is deliberately placed there. In Never Forever, the lead character dresses in very expensive designer clothing that is also very prudish, always hires a car or taxi to take herself to the city, employs a maid, and lives in a large, pristine, and luxurious home that requires staff and money to maintain. Within the clichéd space of extravagance contrasts the lives of the unhappy couple. While she does not do housework, or expend her body in housekeeping, she behaves as an anxious insomniac. The film opens at a funeral, and the first scene we see involving the couple is a tense sexual encounter when they get home. The sexual act between husband and wife is rapacious, where penetration occurs within a disconnected relationship resulting from the husband’s grief. While it occurs on the dining room table, in the husband’s fit of grasping and desperate aggression, Sophie experiences it in a dispassionate manner. Immediately, the failure of their attempts to produce a child is a palpable issue that casts a shadow on their coitus and also informs the following scenes of her long and, clearly, frequent visits to the infertility doctor. She frantically despairs there when she discovers that once again, she is not pregnant. And immediately asks if there is other sperm she can use in order to get pregnant, even if it is not her husband’s. The doctor’s response indicates this is a recurring question and patiently reminds her that this approach is unethical and any such action requires her husband’s knowledge and consent. In this film, the economic context is twofold. It is about the “legitimate” market of paying for infertility treatments wherein IVF (in vitro fertilization) and IUI (intra uterine insemination) are extremely expensive processes. It is considered worthwhile to try to have a baby by using the unregulated fertility industry, where so much money is paid for the promise of something that is never guaranteed. The second market is the “illegal” industry of private payments for sex or prostitution. The overlapping of these two markets creates confusion in terms of ethical action. Returning to Zelizer is helpful in order to show how we need to understand the rampant intermingling of money and intimacy. Sophie and Andrew are essentially paying a great deal of money to try to have a baby. It is at this location that the second market, of illegal immigrant brown bodies as available for private negotiations of paid sex for reproductive purposes, comes to view. The transaction between Sophie and Ji Ha, at first, seems much more clear, though dirtier, illicit, and, at first glance, unethical.

52  The Proximity of Other Skins At the clinic, Sophie catches sight of another frantic and struggling figure, Ji Ha. At first, Ji Ha’s profile and his build register similarly to her husband, himself a strikingly beautiful man. Upon closer looking however, Ji Ha differs in his ruggedness, casualness, openness—​his emotions are available, and his bodily movement less controlled and poised than her husband, who is extremely controlled and stoic. It is this physical similarity and opposite affect that Sophie finds intriguing as told in the frantic use of the camera and her own movements in the clinic when she follows him before he enters a private consulting room. She eavesdrops on his private conversation with a doctor. His poverty and foreignness becomes apparent. In accented English, he expresses his desire to sell his sperm for money. He is disappointed when his illegal status prevents him from qualifying for the sperm donor payments. There are questions about whether sexual labor constitutes a job and if it is one that requires national belonging in order to qualify for this work. The doctor treats him like a pariah, a dirty body confirmed by his status as an illegalized subject. Sophie immediately recognizes his vulnerability and demonstrates awareness of her inappropriate behavior as she attempts to conceal herself when Ji Ha emerges. Later, when she proposes to Ji Ha, he too responds to the illegitimacy as if participating crosses an ethical line that he does not consider when donating his sperm to the fertility clinic. The overlapping of these two markets—​fertility and undocumented immigrant labor—​introduces us to the confusing dilemma around money and intimacy that Zelizer confronts. For Zelizer, “sex has (both) market and non-​market aspects that come with human relations” (836). Ji Ha’s similar appearance, precarious status, and economic vulnerability make him prey to Sophie’s designs for his sperm. Her proposal, and Ji Ha’s ultimate agreement to it, illustrates what Zelizer argues: that people’s “choices are part of their social roles and contexts” (836). It is helpful to recall this part of Zelizer’s argument. People are always limited and bounded by their structural locations so that when we look at the sexual exchange of money, it is not inherently degrading but produces the value of labor within a specific context. This context thus shapes the choices people make. Sophie’s desperation for a child as a salve for her vulnerable marriage, and Ji Ha’s illegal status and desperation for economic opportunity lead them to this intimate encounter. What binds these two characters together is this frantic desperation, an affective condition that shapes their coming together in this film and the characters in the next film I study too. Yet, we cannot forget the inequality that these two figures represent. For her, frantic desperation is contained by

Political and Libidinal Economies  53 economic privilege and the power of possessing hegemonic beauty—​as a wealthy, tall, thin, blonde, blue-​eyed, and wrapped-​in-​expensively-​proper-​ clothing of a prudish-​looking white woman. Her status as a white and wealthy subject hides her crazed decisions and normalizes her stalking of a poor man to prey on his poverty for her own selfish needs. She essentially stalks him and is never treated as suspect even when she interacts with his boss at the dry cleaners or eavesdrops outside the doctor’s closed door. And his economic futility is in the language of the film, to prove their inequality, as she follows him to his small apartment without any other demand on her time while he moves from job to job in one day. We see that Sophie experiences time as her limitless own. She follows him around New York City while he himself is chasing time in the various ways he looks for jobs and any opportunity. He picks up garbage on the street, in the form of a dilapidated chair in order to rescue it for a new purpose. She follows him in order to discover more about his economic vulnerability—​he works at a dry cleaner, he peddles black market goods—​and later we see he also works as a meatpacking laborer on the graveyard shift. In recognizing his economic vulnerability, she knows her advantages when she approaches him after waiting for him at his apartment door stoop all day. She matter-​of-​ factly offers him $300 each time, and $30,000 if she gets pregnant. Her quietly stated proposition is a light of hope for him and she knows it. Rather than pay for sperm without necessitating a sex act between them, she demands his sexual labor on, to, and with her body. When he agrees, she takes claim of his space (no rental fee), removes her clothes without hesitation, and lays down to await his bodily service. He is shocked at her cool demeanor as if her behavior is a bewilderment to his understanding of the world order—​and indeed it is, he agreed to payment for bodily service and she takes over his space in the process. His first words in the position of penetrating her, “such fucking blue eyes,” he speaks as he avoids an intimate face-​to-​face encounter. In saying this during the sex act, he articulates her whiteness, and in a way this racial difference overwhelms her other identities in this transaction. She won’t look at him intently, yet her eyes pierce him when she does take a glance, demonstrating how he does not just breach her physical boundaries but also her consciousness in this act. His racial observation of her whiteness is one that we find out later indicates his recognition of her as the “perfect American wife” who exemplifies an American dream for her Korean American husband and a success story incomprehensible for him as an undocumented immigrant and

54  The Proximity of Other Skins low-​wage worker. In this sense, Ji Ha Kim’s apartment—​in its warm makeshift quality and comforting ramshackle, is a transnational space that tells his story, such as his perspective in engaging in sex with this unexpected partner who does not belong in his social world. There is a photo of his girlfriend, whose pending presence gives him hope for changing his loneliness. Isolation, sadness, and solitude compose his stressful state of being as an illegal immigrant, yet his lack of emotional companionship also leads him to sink into a specific ennui. His mental health is present in his physical resignation—​the way he accepts his lot as one who is paid for sex by a white woman who follows him to his home. On one side of the bed, he slouches as he and Sophie begin a ritual of taking off their clothes before sex. She is meticulous—​placing her expensive lingerie and demure high-​end couture in a Ziploc plastic bag as if protecting herself from fleas, even as she opens her body to him in his sparse room. The social situation of his apartment sets their sexual encounter within their radical economic inequality and racial difference as imbricated factors. Fantasies of racial beauty, which they both possess, and a shared mental state of stressful alienation they somehow experience within their different worlds—​a compatibility like the one Betty Ting Pei describes in her purported affair with Bruce Lee I’ve explored in the past—​are intertwined with their desires.9 Yet, this intimacy of cliché is what the racial and economic establishes. Their intimacy is deepened by the reconstitution of gender roles in the act of sex. Sex is when and where Ji Ha and Sophie renegotiate power—​moving from sex worker and female john to gracious male lover with a woman he attempts to please—​without letting go of their social status. As he penetrates her, missionary-​style, he asks if “it hurts” and tries to kiss her. She refuses, and simply instructs him to “just keep going” with the genital sex act for reproduction. The film tells a story about what his labor includes: his emotional ties to her as well as that which she determines as the one who pays. This dynamic changes the more they have sex. One day, when she falls asleep after sex, she stays long enough to intrude on his time and to reveal more of herself beyond the sex act. Naked, she lays in a fetal position, looking vulnerable and unguarded as he watches her. When she wakes up, he tells her he has to eat, and asks for permission, revealing the continuation of their power dynamic as employer and employee. But he breaks this boundary when commenting personally on her life: how she must be tired. She admits that she is “unable to sleep well.” This conversation opens the door to a deeper intimacy: curiosity on his part, open vulnerability in hers. They find out more

Political and Libidinal Economies  55 about each other through communication about factual matters that organize their lives: his hunger, her lack of sleep. This exchange of information occurs already within a relationship of sex for pay which is limited in terms of duration of time and containment of space. Yet, the information previews their exceeding of these boundaries. It is sex that moves them from the cliché of their structural locations into a relationship that Erik Erikson describes within a range of common future, recognition, forgiveness, then legitimate needs. That is, they forge a shared legacy through heterosexual reproduction. At this juncture, I must argue that moments of intimacy do not presume equality among participants. That is, intimacy can and does happen between people who are socially unequal, but the crucial matter to keep clear is that intimacy does not transcend their actual conditions. Hunger and lack of sleep awaken the two out of their business transaction into more personally revealing relations. Yet, hunger and lack of sleep are not universal needs that transcend racial, national, or gendered matters. Ji Ha’s hunger comes from his status as a low-​wage worker in multiple job sites that do not pay him enough money. He works at several undesirable jobs for low pay due to his illegal status. His hunger is clearly situated in his class and undocumented status. Sophie’s lack of sleep is situated in her life as an anxious rich white woman who worries constantly: too much time, too much money? She finds it exhausting to meet her husband’s singular criteria of good wifehood: to not think of herself, to think of others instead. Sophie and Ji Ha are not merely hungry and sleepless beings who are decontextualized. Her sleeplessness results from the demands placed on her by constricted gender and class roles. She uses her abundance of space and time to host her anxiety as a very real and concerning mental health problem. Intimacy goes through contextual social relations rather than despite them. Intimacy is made possible by their contexts of hunger and lack of sleep as part of a complicated intimacy unfree of implications and consequences. Intimacy is not an escape from world obligations or responsibilities. They do not have these moments where they lose themselves in the other. They find closeness due to the truth of their situated experiences. Their intimacy really acknowledges their racialized, gendered, and classed situations as leading them to each other. Their sexual encounters are not a sanctuary from these social categories that organize their experiences. The site of their sexual encounters in private becomes a lair for how they individually manifest their difference from and sameness with each other.

56  The Proximity of Other Skins It is the sex act that enables the lovers to arrive at the next levels of Erikson’s intimacy, that of common future. Common future is when the two open up their hopes and dreams in order to achieve commonality with the other. In this case, commonality is established through their shared unhappiness and failures. Her loneliness is not just about her husband’s sterility, which would be just as intractable as Ji Ha’s poverty, but also about his lack of connection to her wants and needs. Indeed, her disconnection leads her to Ji Ha, whose economic powerlessness guides him to accept her proposition. And it is her unhappiness that opens up his own expression. Her emotional condition stems from her husband, Andrew Lee, with whom she is disconnected though they share a home and a life. In their shared space, he is alien to her. In Ji Ha’s space, she and Ji Ha find in each other a new home. That is, intimacy can bloom in the most arid fields. Their emotions blossom even in the concretely ramshackle apartment especially compared to the cool, pristine, and luxurious home she shares with her even colder husband. Sophie’s husband, Andrew, is so deeply sad despite his appearance as a hegemonic man:  wealthy, handsome, and strong. Unable to sleep, Sophie rises from their marital bed to seek him out. Downstairs, he plays the piano and he remains inside himself and unaware of her despite her proximate presence. What is so striking is how he remains so totally unaware of her as she is completely attuned to him. Playing piano in one instance, he then goes underwater in the bathtub having downed a bottle of pills in order to commit suicide. The space of the marital couple’s home is one where they are apart. Ji Ha is lonely too—​physically apart from his girlfriend, with his other interactions hostile. Prospective business relations fall apart when they discover he is undocumented. He lacks money to the point of desperation that consumes his time and limits his relations to employer-​employee or other pursuits of money. In this way, Sophie and Ji Ha share a state of loneliness across their differing economic positions. It is also a symptom of a larger problem of the lack of belonging. Sophie Lee and Ji Ha Kim’s mutual lack of belonging ultimately gives way to recognizing each other. Sophie and Ji Ha’s relationship indeed resets after she wakes up and he eats, when their physical needs, her lack of sleep and his hunger, are addressed, so that they can move toward acquiring knowledge about each other. He finally asks her name, which he does not know even after several times having sex. The philosopher Michel Foucault says that the illicit stature of gay sex lends urgency to the act, and the courtship, which usually occurs before sex for heterosexuals, must happen only after. He gives the example of gay men

Political and Libidinal Economies  57 finding out each other’s names only after sex (399).10 Similarly, the illicit sex between the white woman who pays and the poor brown man who provides sex for money, disallows any such courtship. Anonymity is required for the intimacy to transpire because of the social context shaping their encounter. The goal of this relation between Sophie and Ji Ha is procreation for pay, and the connection between the couple thus bypasses personal knowledge in this relation. They find out each other’s names. Sophie Lee. Ji Ha Kim, which she already knows, she reminds him, from when she stalked him at the clinic. He tries to find out how long she has lived in New York City, and she does not respond and instead insists on his buying a new blanket, because his is “starting to pill.” She educates him on the preferred quality of sheets and recommends that he “should buy cotton.” And he replies, do “you have pattern? A certain kind you like?” Their interaction returns to a business transaction, but deeper too, in his making sure to customize her preferences in the accommodation and service he provides. Money muddles their intimacy as they shift between personal and business relations. When Sophie proposes to exchange sex for money, she first makes clear what she is supposed to get and what he is supposed to give: sex for procreation. They each give and receive so much more than what is arranged in the intimate knowledge of the other’s body. Their relationship shifts from the personal but returns to professional interactions then away from it again. She finds out more about him personally by interrogating him about the space and the artwork he chooses for his home. She looks at a poster he’s put up on the wall, of a beach. “Is that some place you’ve been?” To which he replies it’s “in Korea.” He sees that she has some kind of affinity for it and asks her, “have you been to Korea?” Her reply, “Somebody I know is from there,” indicates how she is not yet willing to disclose more to him about her closeness to Korea and Koreans vis-​à-​vis her husband. Yet she asks him if he misses Korea. His response exactly describes a form of displacement she understands. He says, “I am not sure I belonged enough to miss it.” And this displacement there and lack of belonging here will be remedied for him through his relationship with a woman. “It will all be different when my girlfriend comes.” She points to the girlfriend’s picture—​which in itself also looks like a cliché of a Korean girl who performs cuteness in her pose for the camera. While this conversation identifies both of their shared lack of belonging and their distance from their lovers, it is significant for it traverses to the level of recognition of the other, as different from the transaction of sex for pay.

58  The Proximity of Other Skins She actually forgets to pay him at first, and he stares at the money as if it transgresses their intimate knowledge now gained of each other. This transmission of intimate knowledge occurs outside of yet transforms the sex act. There is a discomfort that comes from the intermingling of sex and money when the paid sex act produces more than what was bought. Through the excess of time, information, and interaction, they go beyond what was paid for to reach a new level of intimacy that involves emotional knowledge and investment in the other, and a persistent erotics of their racialization and sexualization continues as well. The lovers actually move to a place of forgiveness in their next interaction, when their worlds collide upon Ji Ha’s sighting of Sophie’s husband, Andrew Lee. Before we see this encounter, a montage of Ji Ha as a low-​wage worker with a variety of jobs is established from backroom assistant at the dry cleaners to the graveyard shift at a meatpacking factory. In this sequence, it is indeed striking how similar he looks to Andrew in terms of the length of their hair, their height, and countenance beyond their shared ethnicity and phenotype as Korean men with high cheekbones and chiseled jawlines. Their worlds soon collide when Andrew enters the dry cleaners to pick up his jacket. The owner makes a fuss at noticing Andrew, clearly a wealthy customer who is also Korean. He mentions to Andrew that he offers discounts especially for Koreans. Sophie fears the encounter from the car where she sits. And Ji Ha witnesses that moment of her sitting in the fancy car, and senses her discomfort. He understands her state when he recognizes Andrew. He sees her husband first in the store then looks back to her in the car. He makes sense of Andrew’s identity and this knowledge shapes his next interaction with Sophie. Ji Ha demands they go out to eat first before the ritualized sex for pay. He undoes their ritual as his angry jealousy rises up. He brings their situation out of the sanctuary of his room to become unconfined in the world. Sophie, in her prim buttoned-​up Victorian blouse, resentfully agrees to eat at a Chinese restaurant, where Ji Ha orders the most expensive drink and challenges her to stop him, agitates her when he says, “the alcohol will help me perform.” When he opens his fortune cookie’s message, “When winter comes showered with good fortune” he says, “it has something to do with you.” She becomes frustrated. He reveals that he’s seen her husband, who “looks a lot like me.” He is upset and accuses her of being in a “sexy dress” as the “perfect couple, perfect clothes and perfect American wife!” She says he has no right to be angry. “This is business.” He accuses her of “enjoy(ing) her

Political and Libidinal Economies  59 sacrifice” of having sex with him. It is a gendered accusation in asserting her pleasure in an act she is supposed not to enjoy as a proper woman, and white and wealthy at that. It is an identity that is not usually called on and remains unspoken. When he speaks of the difference, they fight. He belittles her by saying, “is this the first time you’ve paid for it?” and she equalizes them with her disparagement, “is this the first time you’ve been paid?” Here, they confront not only the gendered reversal of their arrangement, they also point to the intimacy they feel with each other in the context of paid sex. They accuse each other of a kind of betrayal that then takes them to new roles in their relationship. Their emotions and feelings for each other are revealed beyond the financial transaction. Sophie flees the restaurant into the streets of Chinatown itself—​and he chases her. He yells at her, accusing her of racial fetishism. Why does she pursue him as a Korean, why not his other Asian friends who can also serve her needs? She turns toward him and reminds him that they met at the fertility clinic, where they did not even want him. “All you are good for is your dick, and that isn’t even good enough!” Here, Sophie Lee and Ji Ha Kim’s fight finally pushes directly against the borders of their relationship as a paid exchange. They point to the parameters of paid sex and how it does not quite fit their blossoming feelings. They articulate how their feelings exist in a contradictory way from the business arrangement that organizes their relation. Yet, to follow Zelizer’s thinking, this is precisely intimacy that is not disabled by its purchase. It goes to show how monetary transactions permeate relations and do not prevent or preclude intimacy! At the same time, the film differs from Zelizer in that Sophie is not paying for emotional intimacy but for physical intimacy toward reproductive ends. Their intimacy deepens through their linguistic articulation of hurtful truths to each other. When he finally reaches her on the street, she is crying in a doorway and he takes her face in his hands. They get so close, they breathe into each other’s faces and look at each other eye-​to-​eye. They breathe into each other and the smelling that occurs between them in this intensely emotional scene is where a haptic and sensory reading comes in. The olfactory is used in the cinematic language to tell the lovers’ attachment and enjoyment of each other physically. They possess a very real connection across their fight. Clearly, they achieve a more intense connection as they stand outside in public view. The haptic and the sensory appear here in full force wherein the framing of hands on faces isolates the emotion for us as viewers.

60  The Proximity of Other Skins

Figure 2.1  In Gina Kim’s Never Forever, Ji Ha (Ha Jung-​woo) and Sophie (Vera Farmiga) invest in each other through sex.

Ji Ha’s touch makes more visible Sophie’s feelings and vice versa. Hands on each other’s faces, they not only kiss each other but also smell each other, and wrap their arms around each other in a homecoming found in each other’s bodies. The haptic and the sensory here provides an opportunity to return to my definition earlier in the chapter where their acts make us aware of our own experiences of kissing and touching as well as the significance of these acts within the film. They previously avoided kissing each other, and keenly maintained their distance even as they had penetrative sex. We see this new intimacy in the changed language of the sex act focused on the touching of their faces and hands. Through the haptic and the sensory of sight, touch, and the olfactory, the shot emphasizes what they achieve from the bedroom to outside on the street and back in the bedroom. A public performance of their transformation through intimacy validates its coming to be when it returns to the bed. It concretely shapes what transpires physically which we will see more clearly in the sex scene. Inside Ji Ha’s apartment, she sits on him now as they have sex face-​to-​face, looking into each other’s eyes deeply, and crying. There is so much sex in this movie in order to show how what we consider the private sex act between two people is so intensely shaped by their external life. Not only does sex

Political and Libidinal Economies  61 illustrate a physical, even chemical relationship of attraction and passion, but also the scenes contextualizing this moment embody what Erikson describes as forgiveness, the next level of intimacy that goes beyond recognition. It is the stage of intimacy wherein faults, fears, and failures are not only recognized but also forgiven. Lovers now, they experience their sexual encounter differently through the knowledge that informs their practice of sex as acts of love that taint the business transaction. Through the ritual repetition of sex, they recognize each other’s common displacement, loneliness, and unhappiness. Intimacy transforms. What becomes clearer then, is the lack of intimacy in Sophie’s marriage to Andrew as the force that shapes her actions with Ji Ha—​that unleashes not only desire but love. Her motivation for sex with Ji Ha, however, is to fulfill her role as a wife by becoming a mother and providing a child for her sterile husband. Her pregnancy means, “We will never see each other again,” as she hands Ji Ha an envelope with the cash she promised. At this moment, she chooses Andrew and curtails the budding of emotions between her and Ji Ha. Her reunion with Andrew reinstates her to a venerated position as his wife and as a new mother-​to-​be. He discloses to her why he loves her: “You always care about other people’s feelings before yours. You are the most amazing caring generous person I’ve ever met.” Her response to this is a confused disappointment she keeps silent about for she does not quite understand the impact of his valuing her selflessness on herself. Meanwhile, Andrew’s private acknowledgment of her as a mother is publicly validated. No longer standing as an outsider, Sophie settles into the center of the backyard family gathering, where she is no longer the only white person. Family friends, primarily white, join the usually Korean composition of her community. Children are present among the adults who instill her pregnancy into a heteronormative narrative of her role as a celebrated and stabilized figure in her home. She is no longer a failure, and no longer isolated. She regains her role through her function as a mother central to the family and community. A party is thrown for the religious celebration to welcome the new baby and to celebrate the couple’s reproductive success. This scene is interrupted by her own fantasies of Ji Ha’s passionate lovemaking and she expresses her pleasure of this dream by closing her eyes and literally having an orgasm that makes her fall off her seat during the family event. At the same time, Ji Ha’s actual appearance at this gathering indicates the already fragile semblance of the heteronormative monogamous family. Sophie’s sexual desire is met by a mutual regard for her by Ji Ha, whom

62  The Proximity of Other Skins Andrew and a young boy find in the driveway. Face to face with Andrew, Ji Ha claims to have “the wrong address” while then sneaking to the other side of the house to catch a glimpse of Sophie. He remains outside her family, and outside society as he resumes his work as an illegal immigrant whose body endures harsh physical conditions in various employment such as moving boxes in the rain. He senses her physically too. She takes a taxi to the city to stand underneath his window. High up, from his walk-​up apartment, he senses her outside and runs to see her. Upon seeing him, she runs but turns around to hug him when he catches her. They are back in his room having sex and since she is already pregnant, this occurs outside the bounds of their arrangement. We can see this in the physical choreography of the sex act that Gina Kim directs. The lovers stand in his small hallway just inside the door. Sophie props her expensive shoe against the wall as he thrusts into her. Then, they are on the bed completely naked again. After the bodily speech of sex, they address their fear of separation by way of acknowledging their fear of spoken speech. She asks him what he wanted to say when she left him with the money. He says he wanted to thank her, but didn’t, because in saying it, “I thought it would separate us forever.” What is striking about this scene is that the cause of their separation is not the exchange of money but his acknowledgment of participation in that monetary relationship. The financial transaction around their sex acts must be fleshed out in terms of their ethical implications. Sex scenes, and the persistence of their sexual settings such as in the narrative of this film, enable the visualization of power between individuals who are never let go of their social context. This outright declaration of the existence of emotion in their relationship, occurs after the sex act—​where he penetrates her and she rides him again, facing the same direction with her breasts out and away from him. Essentially, sex opens the space for their emotions to be named as unequal subjects. New terms of their relationship are introduced. He gives her keys, saying “It’s getting cold outside. If I am late, I don’t want you to wait outside. And even when I’m not here, you are welcome to come.” He opens his space to her—​he now gives it to her completely and it is not just something she takes. The space comes to stand in for the existence of their relationship that he says he now consents to within his context. She responds affirmatively by kissing him, yet she must also state her conflict of loving her husband, whom she can “never live without . . . this

Political and Libidinal Economies  63 baby is his. Please tell me this baby is his.” She hugs her belly to herself. This scene shows his demonstration of agency—​an expression of his consent, his desire and his willingness for a future life with her. Yet, she refuses, remaining confused about her marital bond. And the next scene must then confront her own choice: Andrew or Ji Ha. When she arrives home to see Andrew, she is clearly halfway out of their relationship. While she kisses her husband in bed, he pretends to be asleep. He notices her absence at home, and even departures from him when they are outside. When they go to church, and she is the only white woman in the Korean congregation, her distinction is marked. And she hurries to leave again, in a clear wanting to be elsewhere. Her explanations that she has “an errand to run” clearly resonate as false, for her head and heart are focused elsewhere. The space that belongs to Ji Ha now acts as a sanctuary of belonging for her that she flees toward. She notices the new sheets she asks him to buy. She falls asleep again, posing in that vulnerable fetal position and as a pregnant woman herself, heightens that feeling of surrender to the place and to him. When Ji Ha arrives, he tells her he loves her as she sleeps. A different relationship is created after the commingling of sex and a verbal declaration that names their mutuality. Her return makes clear to him her choice to stay. When she wakes up, she tells her that “sometimes you have to throw away everything and start out from nothing” as a way to convince her to pursue the unknown future with him. This turning point moment for the couple is interrupted by a new development in the sexual setting, when the external world barges in, via the state’s intervention, which includes the police and her husband, who operates from the socially sanctioned institution of marriage and citizenship. Ji Ha’s illegal alien status catches up with him and he is arrested. Sophie returns to Andrew and speaks to him from a position of power when she makes clear the ownership not only of her own body but also of a separate future from him. She says, “This child is mine. Not yours. Mine. I am sorry.” This assertion is met with Andrew’s violent response. He demands she “abort the child. Say you love me” instead. And when she does not, he tries to intercept and take possession of her body by forcing her to go with him. She fights back, screams, and cries. And Andrew lets her go. She won’t coexist with him. She won’t collaborate. Instead, she will coexist and collaborate on a shared life with Ji Ha, who is at the police station being interrogated. Ji Ha hopes she returns to the apartment, their space where their relationship exists. Somehow, she is

64  The Proximity of Other Skins there and answers the phone from the police station. The film concludes with Sophie, pregnant again and caring for her biracial toddler on the beach in what is presumably years later and in Korea. Her occupation of it makes the print on Ji Ha’s wall come alive. In the dreamlike scene, she explains to their mixed race child about fish finding their way home. The film’s conclusion is located in a fantastic place that houses the intimacy that blossomed between them. It found a way to live. To conclude on the sands of the beach, with a child and while pregnant too, is to establish the choice she makes, to define her freedom by making family with one disallowed to be in the United States so that they need to establish home elsewhere, with each other. A reproductively viable future is what she chooses and has the ability to choose. It is a fantastic vision of whiteness in her skin and in the clothing and on the white sand, and their mixed race children in a transnational world of mobility. Even as I open out the complex entangling between Sophie and Ji Ha, the film’s resolution prioritizes white mobility. It is rather puzzling what Sophie is doing on that Korean beach in prioritizing her subjectivity—​she is free to flee her situation, yet Ji Ha is returned to Korea, where he may not have belonged, enough for him to flee. He is unable to explore his freedom as she is. And whatever happiness he may find is now located in her. The complex entangling between Sophie and Ji Ha at the end of the film thus reveals a white feminist fantasy too. A  white woman finds belonging by leaving home, where her role is confined and stifling. The state prevents recognition of Ji Ha so that the Korean beach is a fantasy of the belonging they can achieve as a couple that is unavailable in the United States. As an American citizen, is she unable to bring him in? Why don’t we see Ji Ha? Is he at work? Is he crossing other borders? This fantasy ultimately belongs to her: the fruition of her children ensuring her victory as a mother who does not seem to work or one who definitely has time and resources for leisure on the beach. Perhaps Ji Ha is reinstating himself in the dream of the hegemonic father and husband role or he is again bound to work, which makes him unable to be there. The film is ultimately counter-hegemonic nonetheless, not only in its direction by an Asian American woman but also in introducing possibilities of dreams, even if differing for both protagonists. Moreover, what Never Forever achieves is marriage, or a togetherness that secures privileges presumed in a shared family partnership that does not exist in the scene of sex tourism in Heading South.

Political and Libidinal Economies  65

Heading South (2005) Both these films are made in the early 21st century. It is notable that Gina Kim is that rare woman of color filmmaker in Hollywood whose transnationally co-​produced works focus on women and Asian stars—​with keen attention to their physical and psychological states in feature films such as Invisible Light (2003) and Final Recipe (2013). And French filmmaker Laurent Cantet’s own career is composed of making films that make room for difficult encounters across difference such as in his Palme D’Or winning The Class (2008) and his newest film The Workshop (2017). These films craft a cinematic language that engages globalization and the mobility of people who now relate to each other intimately in small rooms across large divides and distances of ethnic, racial, linguistic, and class differences. Heading South and Never Forever may be called feminist, woman-​centered films, about women whose self-​ actualizations are achieved at the expense of poor men of color. These two films confront these dynamics in both critique and celebration. They embark on journeys that do indeed occur but go deeper in the characters of men of color and travel to places of poverty so they are not merely mute shadows in the background. Intimacy is the lens I use to understand the different ways the films confront difference and inequality especially in an era when, like the protagonist in the novel (2007) and the film Eat, Pray, Love (2010), white women attempt to complete themselves through encounters with people of color at home and around the world. Set at the beach in Haiti, Laurent Cantet’s Heading South takes up where Never Forever ends at the beach in Korea. Both of these locations outside of their homes in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are fantasies that belong to rich white women engaging in paid sexual relations with poor men of color. These sites are deliberate commentary on the structural displacement white women feel for expressing and pursuing their desires. Like Never Forever, Heading South privileges white women’s perspective while also placing strong responsibility in their hands for the demise of poor men of color they derive benefit from, damage, and/or destroy along the way. So Heading South is even more similar to Never Forever in its narrative representation of privileged white women from the West who engage men of color from the East and South in a matter-​of-​fact manner:  they will give them money in exchange for sexual intimacy. Yet the money is exceeded by whatever they discover through sex. As in Never Forever, the sexual setting that shapes these women’s choices never eases up. It is a space that is experienced

66  The Proximity of Other Skins differently however, as the white women exist in the tourist bubble of dictator Baby Doc Duvalier’s Haiti in the 1970s, a place of violence and poverty for its local people and a place of erotic leisure for its tourists. Through this film, I focus on the way in which internal and external life need to be accounted for in our understanding of the representations of sex between unequal subjects. Following the lead of feminist social scientists like Denise Brennan, Leiba Faeir, and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, I argue for the necessity of looking at the private to understand the public and vice versa. In doing so, I privilege the subject position of the men of color sex workers in order to focus on their perspectives and experiences, ones that are usually ignored in the exploration of white women’s subjectivity and journeys of self-​ discovery. I propose to do so by conducting a kind of ethnography of the film that a haptic approach to cinema performs. It is an account of what the sex workers say, and how they are represented as a group through a sensory representation of their relations. I intend to focus on the ground of their stories in order for a different account of sex tourism in the movies to emerge. Not only are these young black men aware of what their jobs entail in the sex industry, they are equally aware of their unimportant dreams and desires in the face of what white women want from them, which can include their disposal and their demise. Heading South’s opening scene at the airport establishes this context of intimate encounters within relations of inequality. We see Albert, played by Lys Ambroise, the older Haitian butler who works at the resort hotel that white women frequent. While he waits for the next cadre of female sex tourists, an older black woman approaches to offer him her daughter. Only 15 and already too beautiful, states her mother. Therefore, the girl must be protected from a future that befalls her in Haiti of the time. She eyes a man like him, who looks decent, says the concerned mother. Immediately, in director Laurent Cantet’s choosing the airport as a location and this striking scene of a mother wishing to surrender her girl child to a stranger, the film establishes the lack of power, control, and resources that people in Haiti feel as white tourists seek leisure and pleasure from their bodies. A local trade in bodies threatens the local people’s livelihood and overdetermines their future viabilities into a narrow path of sexual service. The scene cuts to the American sex tourist Brenda’s (Karen Young) arrival at the hotel’s beach. Already, she is hunting. Focused on her search for the young boy Legba (Menthony Cesar), who is now a man, she finds him lying down on the beach, alone, and attired in his short swim trunks. She

Political and Libidinal Economies  67

Figure 2.2  Upon her return to Haiti, Brenda (Karen Young) immediately hunts for Legba (Menthony Cesar), who lays on the beach in Heading South.

approaches him, revealing her thin and fit body, and innocent and open face as she looks at him with hope, longing, and hunger. The director emphasizes her race and gender as a hegemonically attractive woman with long blonde hair and blue eyes, a healthy and youthful appearance as a middle-​aged woman, and clearly wealthy in her gold cover-​up and safari-​print swimsuit as well as her trim, toned, and groomed body. She gazes down on him while standing. Her shadow leads him to look up. Legba reclines and props himself up on his elbows and gazes up at her to smile. They confirm their knowing each other. He is unavailable to her now however, which leads us to follow her as she surveys the scene of other female sex tourists who also desire Legba and with whom she now competes. Legba fulfills an arrangement with another white woman sex tourist, a handsome and patrician Wellesley College professor named Ellen (played by Charlotte Rampling) who asks Brenda if she comes to Haiti alone. Upon hearing that yes, indeed she is alone, Ellen welcomes Brenda with a greeting of “Welcome to paradise. You are going to have a ball.” In her straightforward descriptions, Ellen tells us how white women come to be in Haiti on such trips alone. It is “paradise” because of their economic power. They spend the day on the beach catered to and served by a variety of black men. The men even jockey for time with Ellen and all the other white women. Ellen enjoys assigning them turns to help her get off her horse or walking her to their tented spot on the beach.

68  The Proximity of Other Skins At the beach, the white women converge with horses, food, drink, marijuana, and men, all for the purposes of leisure and pleasure. Brenda arrives, gets off her horse, and surreptitiously watches the other white women relate to the black men who serve them. She sees Ellen gallop in and organize the two young men fighting for her attention. One young man insists on helping her down from her horse. She deflects his attention and says it’s Jeremie, the other man’s turn to be with her. She tells the other man to take care of the horse so she could go with Jeremie instead. Soon arriving at the beach is the other white woman, Sue (Louise Portal). Heavy-​set and accustomed to carrying things for herself, she does not meet white hegemonic standards of beauty nor does she behave in a demanding manner as Ellen and Brenda do. Yet, she herself fends off the attention of multiple men. One young man asks to carry her things and take care of her so she can enjoy her friends. She brushes him off and authoritatively states she knows this beach and what she is doing. Brenda watches their interactions to learn not only how relations are mapped between white women and the local men who fawn for them but also how to behave herself. At the beginning of this scene, she does not demand help when getting off her horse or demonstrate the enjoyment that Ellen experiences with every interaction. She looks on these models of behavior as she crafts an understanding of the extent of her power and place in Haiti. Feminist geographer Leiba Faeir’s book Intimate Encounters (2009) studies the “zones of encounter” between Japanese men who marry Filipina women they meet at hostess bars in Japan. Faeir’s ethnographic study identifies desire in the Foucauldian sense as constructed within historical and social contexts. That is, their desires take “shape through discrepant, but not unconnected, sets of social and political economic relations . . . that shape dreams and life-​ worlds into recognizable beckoning shapes” (37). She calls these dreams “figures of desire” (38) that guide their choices and significantly, these differ according to gender.11 She interviews Filipina women who see travel to Japan as an opportunity to craft beautiful and independent selves. They see beauty as a form of freedom to explore the self or even experience life as a movie star or model (54) enjoying “an elite, cosmopolitan and bourgeois world” (64), and the chance to work as a way to forge economic power to support their families (65). Japanese men see Filipina women not necessarily as beautiful but as both sexy and poor and in need of help (77). They also find them to fulfill traditional definitions of good womanhood in terms of obedience, submissiveness, and deference (76) to their husbands. In each circumstance,

Political and Libidinal Economies  69 Japanese men and Filipina women see intimate relations as sites for “crafting the self ” (37). In this case, we learn too of the differing self-​perceptions each brings to their encounter where the women deem themselves “beautiful,” while the men don’t, relegating them to a different realm of “sexy.” This competing perception is important in identifying how they perceive the other as reflective of their cultural and historical context such as ethnic hierarchy among Asians. An important way in which the women ensure and manipulate gain from these men is through a physical relationship that feminist sociologist Rhacel Parreñas calls the performance of sexual titillation through flirtation, rather than sexual fulfillment. In her ethnographic study of Filipina hostess bars in Tokyo, the women were not forced into prostitution as widely perceived but instead served drinks, sang karaoke, performed dances, and deferred affection to their customers strategically while occupying a vulnerable position in their labor.12 Similarly, in Faeir’s description, Filipina hostesses demonstrate affection through touching such as “squeezing his face” (60) and sitting with him closely while chatting. The women perform accepted forms of relating to men, which also indicates what never leaves this situation: the “deep political-​economic inequalities between them and their Japanese customers . . . placed them in many vulnerable and undesirable positions” (66). To extend these nuanced descriptions of sexual labor, the sensory vocabulary of touch in the interactions between white women and brown men in the films I study require a haptic reading; for it is through a keen observation of sensory language that we can see how these subjects relate to each other across their difference and inequality that never subsides in their relationality. They learn about each other within their social, political, economic, and historical contexts, which render “unequal yet productive” (79) relations in globalization today. The argument Leiba Faeir makes is essentially to remember that ours are not inherent desires. They are produced in a field of practices informed by larger forces. Yet, these desires feel so private. Thus, their exploration is essential to reveal how the public shapes what we consider our innermost wishes. In Heading South, three middle-​aged white women are among many others from the United States, Canada, and Europe who travel to Haiti in search of sexual relations with poor and young Haitian men. As sex tourists, these women prioritize their pleasure in their rampant sexual relations, access to tenderness and regard within their everyday intimacies and their plentiful orgasms, as that which they cannot get at home. We see

70  The Proximity of Other Skins this in particular through Brenda, the svelte and typically attractive white woman with long blonde hair as recently divorced and who returns to Haiti in search of Legba. Why this young boy? He was the young 15-​year old boy who enabled her first orgasm three years ago while she was still married. When critics recall her backstory and this specific scene that launches her search for Legba, they simply say she found him attractive and acted on her desire. When describing the act as making love, they neglect to describe how he was a poor and hungry 15-​year-​old boy, who saw her as his much older mother. The sex act was certainly not what he wanted. Her desire for pleasure occurs at his expense. What he wanted did not matter. She fed him, then had sex with him in ways he did not expect then came to accept as part of his lot in life—​preyed on as young, hungry, and poor. We do not see her husband nor the dynamics of her marriage. What is important to the film is her search for the boy whose pleasure-​giving she has not forgotten. She shamelessly confesses to him, “I missed you so much, it was like an addiction,” as she dances with him, eyes closed and holding on to his body tightly. The film begins from this premise. For critics to render their relationship as merely sex or making love, they eclipse the fact of the rape of a young boy by a woman thirty years his senior. He knows her and relates to her as a maternal figure who fed him and took care of him, for which she demanded and took sexual advantage. This is a powerful and knotty site of intervention in the film. I point out how mainstream reviewers eclipse the fact of rape so as to point to how, within a context of ethical intimacy, this is indeed a violation. For the maternally perceived woman on whom the vulnerable boy relies, she acts in a predatory manner. To follow Erikson’s stages of intimacy, we see a direct contrast between Heading South and Never Forever. The sexual intimacy between the young boy and older woman deepens his victimization and what is reconstituted is white mastery over black colonial servitude. We see in older white women’s desires for young black men their exploitative use. Brenda returns to Haiti to find Legba, now 18, working actively in the sex trade as a young man for hire by older white women. And he is more attractive than ever, not only to Brenda but also to Ellen. My task in this chapter’s engagement of this film is to confront the rape as the starting point for the film’s engagement with ethical intimacy at this site. In establishing the practice of sexual settings, I argue that the unequal roles in society to do not find transcendence in the sex act but instead use these dynamics relentlessly as part of its erotics and pleasures. It is the structure of mastery and servitude that provides pleasure as well as the racist and colonial power

Political and Libidinal Economies  71 one has over the other. From here, the burden is to forge ethical intimacy in how we account for and regard power dynamics in the sex act. I track the women’s relationships with the black men and boys as they offer different recommendations for engaging their power and the ramifications of their exercise of feminist freedom on the lives of colonial subjects. Frustrated with the lack of viable sexual partners in the West—​whether it is the United States, Canada, France, or the United Kingdom—​for older women like herself, the white middle-​aged professor Ellen has spent her entire summers in Haiti for the past six years. She devotes this time to enjoying her economic power, which enables access to beautiful young men like Legba, with whom she has sex and intimacy. In a gathering of other women at the hotel, Ellen offers a critique of white women’s plight in the dating scene in the United States. “If you are a woman over 40 and not dumb as a super model, the only guys available to you are natural born losers or whose wives are cheating on them.” Thus, the opportunity to enjoy relationships with men who are pliant to her physical, aesthetic, and other desires is not available. While Brenda calls Ellen beautiful, even their friend Sue says they need to be realistic about the bounty they are able to secure here in Haiti in terms of sex and intimacy, precisely because of their age and their gendered failure to meet what men in the West need from them: compliance, submission, and not to demand orgasms. Debates about the Western feminist demand for orgasm has risen up again in recent years. In 2015, the rapper Nicki Minaj made globally popular a discussion of the demand for equity in female orgasm when she said to Cosmopolitan Magazine:  “I demand an orgasm every time.”13 Jessica Valenti, the feminist columnist of the UK publication The Guardian, refers us to The Kinsey Institute research on the inequity of orgasm achievement between men and women: 75%–​85% of men regularly achieve orgasm while 59% of women do. Lesbian women “had a nearly 75% orgasm rate.”14 This is the discursive context for the practice of sex tourism by white women in the Caribbean that feminist scholars also problematize as inherently unequal. Feminist anthropologist Denise Brennan’s book What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (2004) defines the Dominican Republic beach town of Sosua as a “sexscape,” where the space is organized by the economic relations of sexual exchange.15 That is, sex-​for-​sale is a key feature of political, historical, economic, and social life for Sosuans, and the leisure of tourists necessitates the work and labor of the locals. Sex tourists cross continents propelled by fantasies of sex they

72  The Proximity of Other Skins can have for prices they can afford. Sosuans rarely leave their town yet possess transnational dreams. The occurrence then of transnational sex tourism is supported by the psychic life of its participants, who imagine in each other a diversity of fantasies they seek to fulfill. These sites of encounter witness what Brennan calls the “performance of love” and how it reveals the sex workers’ lack of control of their circumstances. That is, despite any creativity of the local sex worker to fashion a good time for the sex tourists, their plans can be easily thwarted by circumstances such as poverty or dictatorships where violence is sanctioned especially towards the vulnerable. It is a local experience tourists hardly see. Thus, it is also a transnational space that aggravates the lack of freedom for the locals where the possibility of mobility through the tourists can be a truly transformative experience. Sex workers exploit the terms and conditions of transnational desire when they are aware of their objectification and use it for material gain. Yet their precarious subject position as easily exploited remains. There exist dangers and pleasures in the performance of love through emotional and economic precarities entailed in sex work for the Sosuans more than the foreigners. The women in Heading South seek sexual and emotional gratification in the name of self-​actualization they cannot find at home. They do so through intimate relations with poor black men in this contained time and space. In Never Forever, the rich white woman seeks self-​actualization at the expense of a poor man of color as well. At first, she seeks to complete her marriage by getting pregnant, but it is through sex that she realizes herself as an unhappy woman. She finds fulfillment through achieving intimacy with the poor illegal immigrant man. They meet at the site of difference and then build up fantasies about each other and a more intimate relation through their sexual encounters, which results in her uprooting to an entirely new home. The locals and the tourists in Heading South frequently engage disconnections between myth and experience in their encounters with each other. Ellen is clearly aware of Legba’s beauty and youth as well as his financial need that leads him to her bed. In African mythology, Legba represents a go-​between among spirits and humans. Legba is a “translation of the Yoruba trickster-​god Esu-​elegbara into the terms of African Diasporic peoples,” such as in Zora Neale Hurston’s representation of Legba in Tell My Horse (1938) as “ ‘god of the gate’ who holds ‘the way to all things . . . in his hands’ ” and in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) as the “hoodoo trickster.”16 Similarly, in Laurent Cantet’s film, Legba is a kind of leader among the men working

Political and Libidinal Economies  73 in the sex trade. He organizes events for the white female tourists and black male sex workers to share time and space. He also occupies the position of the most desired in terms of his charisma and beauty. Ellen knows and relishes that she is the author of her own sexual story with Legba as a player serving her needs. While in her room with Legba, she takes a movie camera to photograph him as he lies face down, naked and uncovered on her bed. His body is entirely available to her, yet he poses in a straight rod. It is a fascinating pose because he is completely revealed yet clearly in an alert state. Through the viewfinder, we see him from her desirous perspective: an object of beauty who is a lithe, dark, fit, and youthful figure luxuriating on her white sheets. He is there for her gaze, her consumption, and her pleasure. Moments where he exercises his agency do arise in their relationship, but she refuses to allow it. When having sex, he asks if she knows his preferred body weight for sexual partners. She refuses to hear about his desires so as to maintain her own fantasy that she simply embodies his ideal woman. The moments in the film where Legba asserts his agency are met not with acquiescence but with refusal, indicating the unequal position he occupies in his relations with white women. My readings that emphasize his complicated position is not simply to recover his perspective but also to point to white women’s aggressive participation in his colonial subjection. What we learn about is agency not as something to recuperate but to understand within its limits. The financial transaction between the rich white women and poor black men makes their relationships clear but at the same time rather blurry as well. Although the financial transaction is not direct, she is clear about fulfilling her role as the one who pays for the sexual transaction with her money, authority, and resources. For example, the first time we see Ellen with Legba is the opening of the film, when he leaves Brenda on the beach to get lunch with her. Ellen makes a show of ordering whatever Legba wants from the menu, including food for the young boy Eddie, who seems to be his ward. The financial payment by Ellen is mediated by the server who takes their order, although Legba certainly reciprocates her show of ordering in such a blasé manner with an indulgent demonstration of savoring his food with every bite. As he bites into his food and looks into her eyes, a promise of sex is made through his performance of eating. A scene such as this makes the reciprocity between two unequal subjects clear: she pays for him to eat and he provides a sexual service in return. In flirtatiously eroticizing eating, he links the act to sex as the thing for which she pays. While this occurs on the

74  The Proximity of Other Skins beach while they are dressed in swimsuits, it is a site of work for him and one of play for her. His work, however, looks like but is definitely not simply play. The sexual setting never ceases. There are times that Ellen is truly confounded by their relationship in terms of what she is able to purchase with her money. It is not just the sex act but the fulfilling pleasure of his gaze, his attention, his presence, and the actions of his body. Ellen is bewildered by Legba’s sexual attention as she receives it, overwhelmed by her fortune. Her face expresses puzzlement as he caresses her cheeks while gazing into her eyes. To her, his performance is masterfully mesmerizing. And what she gets for her money exceeds its value. She purchases a sexual relationship from which she gains so much more: a deeply nourishing pleasure from closeness and companionship. The transaction of money as indirect fits this procurement of intimacy. When we witness the financial transaction itself, it is not direct. After sex, Legba grooms himself in the mirror and sees beyond his reflection, Ellen placing money in the pocket of his jeans that are hanging on the back of a chair behind him. He watches her do it even if he does it as a private act that does not require his visual confirmation of its occurrence. We do not see Brenda pay him, but along with the presumed payment she also buys him flashy clothes. The visible evidence of this purchase signals to Ellen her competition for Legba’s attention. We learn how her attachment to him is made more clear when another white woman’s competing desire for him is made apparent. It is this range of differing behaviors by white women that make clear the choices we have for forging an ethical intimacy between radically unequal and different subjects. Laurent Cantet’s film maps the diversity of how white women occupy and wield their power. The film tells this story by showing us Legba’s world: one where he and his childhood sweetheart, a young woman kept by a powerful man, possess choices that are inevitably poor. Their short reunion in her car driven by the powerful military or government man’s chauffeur leads Legba to be a target of violence. As he is being hunted down at the whim of those with power, we learn what are ultimately the various white women’s desires for him. Ellen’s larger desire is to bring Legba home and to create a family relationship with him, not with children but with sexual intimacy, friendship, and companionship. She offers him a home with her in the United States while chastising Brenda for seeking him out and buying ostentatious clothes. Sue is also presented by the filmmaker as one who is in a bind as well. She loves her boyfriend Neptune but recognizes that their relationship cannot

Political and Libidinal Economies  75 exist beyond Haiti. Sue is rather matter-​of-​fact about its impossibility in the West, yet clearly feels pain and suffering for the loss of a life with him. Unlike Ellen, who desires Legba so as to fulfill the loneliness and lack of recognition for the sexuality of older white women in the West, Brenda wishes for any poor, young man of color to use for sex in a white woman’s rampant sex tourism. Ellen recognizes this. Through their money, the white Western women are able to alleviate their own gendered suffering through racial and economic domination of others. When they meet for the last time, Ellen chastises Brenda for creating a narrative of love that counters how they are “here to have a good time . . . that’s all, we do not kid ourselves . . . we don’t cheat” by bringing up romance. As Sue points out that Ellen also is “madly in love” with Legba, Ellen says hers is different, for she “respected” him. Brenda not only exploits Legba’s poverty and youth in the name of love, but brazenly, wildly and fully enjoys his lack of options. She admits it herself when she acknowledges Ellen may be right: “I may not have loved Legba . . . I sure loved the way he looked at me.” Scholars like Inderpal Grewal in Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (1996) have for decades called our attention to white women’s complicity in expanding colonial structures.17 Yet, these white women in Heading South do not see that they are such small parts of their lovers’ lives. And perhaps, most viewers too. The film by Cantet makes this argument about the larger forces that shape the locals’ differing agendas and agencies. At the beachfront gathering, Brenda observes the scene of white women and black men with laser focus on Legba, who stands out not only for his beauty, which differs according to taste, but also for his expert ways of loving and attending to the women’s needs. A  surveillance-​like focus on Legba occurs not only visually but also in terms of the vocabulary of touch composing his relations with the women. Not only do the women exchange looks in how they observe each other’s physical relationship to Legba, this optical focus is accompanied by attention to the epidermal as well. Attraction to Legba includes not only caressing him or being touched by him but also noticing the difference of skin, age, and role in the work he performs in service of female pleasure. Indeed, loneliness defines the Western white women in both the films. In nothing but very brief shorts, Legba now serves Ellen, who lays on his lap as he kisses her and runs his fingers through her hair. In the role of guide to the festivities, fulfilling the gateway mythology of his name, Legba offers the women various pleasures, including marijuana, which he himself smokes now.

76  The Proximity of Other Skins He tells Brenda, “this will make you feel good” as he extends the joint to her. Brenda refuses, worried it will make her sick. When Ellen partakes, Brenda suddenly and very impatiently does too. When she performs a coughing fit, they laugh at her before turning back to their intimacies of caressing each other. Brenda takes note, and registers resentment at their ignoring her. The camera pans to another joint being passed around among several white women, including Sue, who massages her lover. Another older white woman refuses to give Eddie, the very young boy, perhaps 14 or 15, who also seems to be Legba’s ward, the joint, saying “you’re much too young.” The bare-​chested boy Eddie gets up to turn on the music to dance in front of the crowd, with the white sand and blue beach as his background. Brenda looks toward Ellen and Legba and then the boy, and decides to dance seductively toward him. She sexualizes the moment and revises what was originally the boy’s simply immersing himself in the music. The boy Eddie gestures toward her and extends his hand. She takes it and gets closer. Cut to another man, who whistles and cajoles, and a white woman, who shakes her head disapprovingly. Sue and her lover laugh as Brenda begins to massage Eddie’s back and neck—​in a sexualized gesture too. A sudden cut to Legba and Ellen shows their different reactions to the dancing: his steady stare, pursed lips, concerned eyes, and angry face and her amused smile, closing eyes, and sideways glance. He is intensely alert and she is lazily relaxed. Legba intently focuses on the scene, directly revealing the trauma of his own childhood with this particular woman too. He witnesses his own sexualization by Brenda while Ellen barely cares, as she enjoys her physical closeness to him now. She does not feel his stiffening alarm. Brenda places her head on the young boy’s forehead, then more deeply burrows her body into his chest. For a moment, Legba tries to smile and looks around as the whistles and catcalls increase. Brenda then sways her hips more vigorously as the boy embraces her and nestles his head in her neck. She steals a glimpse of Legba and turns away to focus on the child. Increasingly concerned, Legba abruptly gets up, shoving Ellen away. Only now does she feel his state of urgency. “Stop,” he directs the young boy, “you look dumb.” He attempts to talk to Eddie who says that Legba is not his dad, and has no right to speak to him as such. Brenda intervenes too, but Legba ignores her and instead focuses on the boy, returning him to youthful innocence by running after him and playing with him in the waves. To release the boy from the corrupting clutch of Brenda is his priority. In this scene, we isolate how Legba relates directly to Eddie—​he reaches out to him separately from their relations with these women. Indeed, it is a fatherly concern, much like the mother at the airport who seeks to protect

Political and Libidinal Economies  77 her daughter, who is of the age Legba was when raped by Brenda and, presumably, Eddie’s age now. This is what Eddie refuses—​you are not my father—​when clearly, Legba is attempting to protect him. I return to the scene when Brenda first arrives, to note how Ellen introduces her to Legba, who displays discomfort in her presence. Unable to look at her, he is simply silent in her presence, like he is reverting back to himself as a little boy. It is then revealed in the on-​camera interview with Brenda that intersperses the film: her rape of Legba. Brenda delivers a monologue providing a context for meeting Legba when he was actually a destitute child. Legba had not eaten for two days, and was loitering in the hotel. To Albert the butler’s disapproval, her then husband “took pity” on the “boy (who) did not look a day over 15.” The couple ate with him “day after day,” showing concern for him and his welfare. They essentially “adopted him and he seemed to have taken that for granted too.” The dynamics between them were very much of benevolent parents to a needy child. He is neglected, untended, and foraging for food, attention, and care, despite his caring yet poor mother. A young child, he found food and resources among these tourists before his body and psyche come to be the payment for the nourishment and sustenance provided him. She essentially grooms him so as to prey on him. Cinematically, the monologue confesses the rape of a child and chooses not to show any part of the scene, allowing the white female character’s perspective. It is a stunning choice—​for what we see is the available narrative for white women as victims and not predators. So while she speaks of raping him, she establishes an incompatibility between her phenotype of whiteness and the actions of rape she admits to. This is striking in terms of her delivery that demonstrates an innocent self-​understanding that emphasizes how we typically perceive white womanhood as victimized versus predatory. She really does not see her actions as rape, even as her own descriptions establish how the child relates to her as a protector, a provider, and a mother. This is the context for when she assaults him and changes their relationship by initiating sex with him as an improper partner who does not consent. In my reading, I will treat the verbal description in a haptic manner by studying her descriptions of the touching that composes the rape. My study of this scene contrasts to the other scene of touching in Never Forever, where the two lovers acknowledge their differences before they pursue a change in their relationship, suggesting an intimate connection rather than intimate disconnection. In this way, I use the haptic attention to the body to show two different manifestations of ethical intimacy.

78  The Proximity of Other Skins BRENDA:

One day, I suggested he come swimming with me. He . . . he took me to a secluded beach. We were both lying in our bathing suits on a big rock, basking in the sun. His body fascinated me. Long, lithe, muscular, his skin glistening. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. The later it got, the more I was losing my mind. He was lying there beside me. His eyes were shut. I remember every move I made as if it was yesterday. I edged my hand over and placed it on his chest. Legba opened his eyes and immediately closed them again. That encouraged me. I moved my hand down his body. Such soft young skin. He was motionless. And I slid two fingers into his bathing suit and touched his cock. Almost immediately, it started getting hard growing into the palm of my hand until it just popped out. His arms were beside his body. He breathed faintly but very regularly. I looked around to see no one was coming and I threw myself on him. I literally threw myself on him. It was so violent I could not help but scream, I think I never stopped screaming. It was my first orgasm. I  was forty-​five. (Crying.) He opened his eyes. He was exhausted too. Shy and frightened. I kissed him all over. I was crying. The interview ends as she covers her crying face with her palm. This act of self-​pity reveals her disregard of Legba and his experience, even as her words demonstrate an awareness of his youth and the impropriety of her actions toward someone over whom she holds power. The 45-​year-​old sexually dissatisfied woman privileges her victimization—​through the deprivation of sexual pleasure—​and justifies her becoming the rapist of a poor and hungry boy whom she describes as actional in his own rape: he took her to an isolated place. She looks at him in a sexual way that drove her crazy increasingly with desire as the day went on, is what she says. She notices their epidermal difference: his muscular and soft youthfulness and his skin in relation to the sun. And acts on her desires on a child who is separate from his parents and who regards her as an adoptive parent. In her own words, she initiates the sex act actively while making sure no one was looking. It is a crossing of roles that confuses the boy who expects not to be initiated into sex, essentially assaulted by a maternal figure. And her crossing from mother role to a sexual one, she describes as an act of “losing my mind” due to the heat of the baking sun. She describes his passivity as consent. If Legba’s perspective is prioritized, the language of his body discloses the lack of consent. He closes his eyes to accept passively and quietly his attack

Political and Libidinal Economies  79 and she takes this gesture as “encouragement” of her initiation of him into sexual life. She says he remains motionless in a reaction of fear versus reciprocity. His erection occurs as a wayward response to the purposeful stimulation of her fingers. The entirety of his body is otherwise unmoving. His arms lay at his sides. His breathing is “faint” but “regular.” Is he alive? This is a question I ask. He steels himself for the assault. As a boy, Legba endures in the hands of this predatory maternal figure an attack. It is an initiation into sexual life by one he considers a parental figure who fed him and helped him. The film is clear that she ignores his perspective as she savors his beauty and the pleasure she derives from him. Before she straddles him, an act she calls “so violent,” she makes sure “no one is coming” so that she is unseen in what she does to the child. The use of the word “violent,” too, captures what must be an intense physical experience on both their parts. The overwhelming desire she feels and uses to act inappropriately. It is violent for him too, in that the orgasm she indeed experiences, manifests as screaming that “never stops.” Her orgasm, described in this way, must be so frightening to the child. I must connect the haptic quality of this touching by Brenda of Legba, which is rape, with the hands-​on-​face touching in Never Forever, which suggests an intimate connection across their different inequality—​ particularly age. Through the haptic, we can see two different manifestations of ethical intimacy where one is unethical rape and the other is ethical recognition across difference. In describing her rape of Legba, she tells the story not as a rape but as the fulfillment of needs she had as a 45-​year-​old woman who never experienced orgasm—​and that this is a kind of crime that then justifies her rape of a young poor 15-​year-​old boy who regarded her as an adoptive mother. She deserves her orgasm, she argues, as a feminist project without acknowledging what it cost others. Her money, her nurturing, and her feeding him, are all presented in her story as an absolution of her rape of the boy. Her own deprivation of sexual fulfillment is told as an injustice, from a romantic and self-​pitying perspective when addressed through the rape of a boy. She is filled with breathless tears that efface his own pain and suffering in her hands. In the aftermath of sex, the boy is “shy” and “frightened” as well as “exhausted.” From his perspective, the victim of an attack by a trusted and familiar maternal figure, these words easily translate to shame, horror, and defeat. To bring into manifestation this scene as a rape corrects the mainstream representation of the film as simply making love or for it to be described as her first orgasm effaces the horrible nightmare of his experience of rape. The

80  The Proximity of Other Skins rape of Legba is eclipsed because rendering this desire as mutual is not to see this as a ruptured form of ethical intimacy. I want not only to correct this representation but also to restate that white women need to be held accountable for the violence they commit in the name of establishing a self, finding a voice, or achieving orgasm. Analyses of the film in mainstream media such as the New York Times, Salon, and The Guardian describe the mutuality in the relationships between the white women and the young Haitian men in the movie. In Stephen Holden’s New York Times review, he celebrates the film as “one of the most truthful examinations ever filmed of desire, age and youth, and how easy it is to confuse erotic rapture with love.” He refers to how the white women imagine their role in Legba’s life as larger than it is, when what we see of his past and his situation as a local in Duvalier’s Haiti presents a different picture. The review nonetheless lauds the film’s characters as “fully realized” and how it does not simply “demonize” the women.18 However, the film is ultimately about the women, and it indeed includes the varying ways they approach their relationships with Haitian men. Ellen hides her loneliness with what seems a brutally honest assessment of her paying for sex and intimacy. Sue recognizes that her loving relationship won’t survive at home in Canada. And Brenda is a predator who comes to acknowledge the riches of her freedom as a white woman in a country of poor black men. In his review of the film in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw refers to the rape of Legba by Brenda simply as sex. And he describes the “exquisite bodies of young black men—​which can be bought for sums trifling to the affluent” outside of their consciousness as laboring people with minds, intentions, and particular subjectivities. He inserts what he describes as a more realistic violent and vengeful quality to white women and black men’s relationships in sex tourism and rejects the “sweetness and gallantry” of the Haitian men in the movie as a too much of a fantasy.19 Stephanie Zachareck’s review in Salon describes how “Legba remembers Brenda, and seems fond of her” and characterizes the rape of Legba by Brenda as “(making) love with Legba for the first time: she had her first orgasm at age 45.”20 In all, these critics easily negate the subjectivities of the young men in favor of the white women, saying the film does not fall victim to moralizing in any form such as in the gender reversal of how we usually see representations of sex tourism. I must note the dearth of film critics of color means that frequently subjects of color receive short shrift in their consideration. My task is to explore what is too

Political and Libidinal Economies  81 easily negated:  the perspective of people of color in these encounters on screen. Indeed, there is an inequality here that the critics do not acknowledge, that white women are discovering not simply “what money cannot buy” according to Zachareck, but also the recognition of their power, which is what Laurent Cantet is ultimately exposing: that white women, who experience disenfranchisement, can also subjugate others, especially in the name of their own empowerment. The concluding scenes featuring Brenda searching for Legba and instead discovering the limitless availability of young and beautiful black men to choose from in Haiti and other neighboring islands identify (in reference to scenes) a monstrous predator who recognizes and unleashes her economic power. She no longer wants to go home, finds no belonging there without house or husband. Instead, she reverses exploitation by gender and continues the racial power of colonialism in dominating and subjugating native people in tropical islands of leisure. “I will visit islands in the Caribbean:  Cuba, Guadalupe, Barbados, Martinique, Trinidad, the Bahamas . . . they have such lovely names. . . . I want to know them all.” This voiceover is spoken over a close-​up of her face as she travels by boat. The wind blows through her hair and she faces the sun. The horror film masquerades as a tourist film in this moment, with a predator who looks innocent and sweet. The critic Stephanie Zachareck from Salon identifies Brenda at the end as discovering that “love and fulfillment are not the same” as a lesson she learns from Legba’s death, but her grief for Legba is extremely short-​lived. It is a blip or a moment until it makes room for her own needs. She quietly demands to open the ambulance and enter it, unveils his face and kisses Legba on the mouth when he is found dead on the beach near the resort, along with his childhood friend, the female prostitute who was kept by the powerful man. Instead, Brenda continues on the hunt, refusing awareness of her role and complicity to the cheapness of life that her own purchase of black male bodies enables. Similar to Sophie and Ji Ha, the characters Ellen, Brenda, and Legba exchange more than what they bargained for. Yet, what is different in terms of ethical intimacy is in gaining both the body and consciousness of another human being, you can do right by that person. Brenda sees the dead body, and just walks away to find others. The critics perform a structural violence, too, in the eclipsing of the rape of Legba. I am concerned about what kind of intimacy these reviewers desire. When we see the other undergo violence, we must call it out and intervene as a form of our own ethical intimacy as viewers.

82  The Proximity of Other Skins I began this chapter by defining intimacy as a “life necessity” wherein one connects with others. In Never Forever, Sophie changes her life for the necessity of being with Ji Ha and fulfilling her goals as a mother. But here, Brenda disposes of life for the necessity of her sexual pleasure. Even in Never Forever, where the white woman seems to conduct herself in a more ethical manner, she remains privileged. The relationship between ethics and privilege is key to my thinking in this work: white women need to acknowledge their privilege of benefiting from those without it. In these scenes, the white women wield more power in a demonstration of their lack of power elsewhere. Here, their lives have more value, even in this society outside their homelands. I see that in Never Forever, where Sophie changes her life for the necessity for being with Ji Ha (however problematic that is). But here, Brenda disregards a life: the necessity of her sexual pleasure in some sense seems disjunct from the life of Legba, even though it was Legba who gave her life through orgasmic pleasure. The film Never Forever privileges white woman’s perspective too. Sophie is entangled with Ji Ha, whom we never see at the end of the film: does she use him to have a baby in order to fulfill her wishes to become a mother? Is he needed past this? All these are possible, since he is not seen at the film’s conclusion, which focuses on her as a mother. Since the setting is the picture in Ji Ha’s apartment coming alive, presumably, they are a family unit. For Brenda however, Legba is dead. He is simply a means to an end for Brenda. Whereas Sophie initially views Ji Ha similarly, but through the process of sex is transformed and is forced to acknowledge his agency. This is why his disappearance at the end of the film seems to indicate that heteropatriarchy is restored in their marriage. She remains a stay-​at-​home mom, a non-​worker. He is reinstated into patriarchy beyond the domestic. For Brenda, however, Legba is fodder, an expendable person or abject thing, on her way to self-​fulfillment that is defined by pleasure. We see this in the club she wanders into while searching for Legba late at night. While many men watch her and comment on her arrival, she does not notice at first. She orders a drink as she asks various men Legba’s whereabouts. After consuming the drink and perhaps another, she is head down asleep, then wakes up more clear-​eyed as she finally observes various men who look at her. She gives one a smile and authorizes his approach. He takes her hands and leads her to dance. She leans into this young man just as the film intercuts this scene between Legba’s weeping face and the disposal of his dead body on to the beach late into the dark night.

Political and Libidinal Economies  83 The film recognizes Legba’s complexity as it ultimately kills him. He is someone who was raped as a child, and then became inducted into the economy of sex for money between black boys and men and white women. He initiates and organizes events that ensure women’s pleasure. He attempts to insert his subjectivity in intimate relations even if they are not there to listen. He cares for his childhood sweetheart, visits his mother, and monitors the induction of other young men in sex tourism. He attempts to find meaning in his existence and forge a masculinity that is viable not only within sex tourism but also within a country with a colonized history now under the rule of a dictator while also a ground for white women in order to find themselves at the expense of his body and even his life.

In Closing In coining the term of “sexual setting,” I show that there is never a moment between these subjects where race, class, and the globalization of capital are suspended. Every interaction involved goes beyond each of their individual lives to the social scene contextualizing the acts we experience on screen. Femininities and masculinities are shaped not just by individual personalities such as Ellen’s commanding presence or Legba’s charisma or Sue’s sweetness to her boyfriend Neptune or Brenda’s psychology as a victim even as she preys on others. Using Leiba Faeir’s approach, the dynamics between internal life and external life are at work in these films. Critics need to recognize that desires demonstrated by characters occur within a context of structural inequality where recognition, control, and independence are not equally accessible to all. Different discourses of desire are at work in intimate transnational encounters between unequal bodies and subjectivities. In this chapter, I have isolated specific scenes such as the bewilderment Ellen feels as the object of Legba’s erotic affection. Or Ji Ha’s gentle reception of Sophie’s exploitation. There is never a moment where their structural locations suspend their hold. Every interpersonal encounter in the film involves history and social and political processes beyond individual life that set each scene. The dynamic of gender complicates the story because white women use the regulation of their sexual lives to justify how they exploit black boys and men in sex tourism. Never Forever shows the market of fertility and low-​wage labor, and Heading South shows the market of global sex tourism. To focus on the sexual intimacies between these subjects is to show how the most private

84  The Proximity of Other Skins moments are shaped by public life. Never Forever shows the overwhelming power of sex between two who choose to recognize, forgive, and invest in each other, even if whiteness and wealth haunt their new family formation in another country. Heading South does not show but speaks of the rape, while also demonstrating the haptic in various scenes of intimacy between diverse white women and black boys and men. The white women in these films are set up as heteronormative and upper-​middle-​class characters whose lives unwind in ways that provide ethical opportunities and ethical breaches. Through the diversity of their subjectivities, we see the distinct and disparate behaviors at the site of sex and intimacy within scenes of inequality. What we learn about the characters through their sexual setting is agency—​in terms of how larger forces of gender, history, politics, and economies but also everyday social dynamics shape and limit their choices and actions. The white women use their agency in order to find pleasure regardless of the cost to others. “Agency” is a keyword that I hope this chapter opens up for Ji Ha and for Legba—​not simply to claim it as power but to map inequality. It provides a very important connection to my prior work as well in terms of attending to effaced subjects in scenes of sex at the site of inequality. A question I ask in my work that I hope readers take up is: how do films serve the perspective of those usually marginalized in the scene? What happens when we account for their view and their location in sexual settings? My readings of Never Forever and Heading South unravel the conundrum of ethical intimacy: white women must acknowledge and account for their exploitation of others in the name of their own empowerment. This chapter thus argues that structural locations never suspend their hold, and agency is forged from within the context of people’s subjection. The ethical act is to account for how we affect others as we attend to our own wants. The characters we meet do what they can within the fantasies about their subjectivities and their conditions. Intimacy should not confuse us: people can look like they care, especially when the scenes constituting their relations occur on the beach, in the bedroom, in restaurants, and in other places of leisure. When we look at these deceivingly dazzling scenes, people do not occupy the same terrain. The black men are there as authorized by the desire of white women. The white woman’s presence enables Ji Ha to order the most expensive item on the menu. The men of color are more vulnerable in the worlds of these films. They do not own their space nor their time there. The first question I posed in this chapter is “what kinds of intimacy are possible in scenes of inequality?” It remains a central concern to the book

Political and Libidinal Economies  85 as a whole. My work thus far has approached this question in a number of different cinema contexts, across different ranges of inequality, and never in the search of a happy ending but always to press, to finger, and to touch the thing that ties us across difference together. Only by acknowledging our differences, that we do not share things universally, can we relate to each other ethically. In the next chapter, I will take up this question of identification with the other through a presumed universal sexuality. And I do so via the work of celebrated Filipino director Brillante Mendoza, whose films represent squalor, dirt, wounds, missing teeth, and various human fluids in what has been critiqued as “poverty porn.”

Notes 1. Peter Bradshaw, “Heading South,” The Guardian, July 6, 2006 (https://​www. theguardian.com/​film/​2006/​jul/​07/​drama.worldcinema), accessed on March 30, 2019. 2. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 3. Gabriel Bianchi, “Intimacy: From Transformation to Transmutation,” Human Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 1 (March 2010), pp. 1–​8. 4. Erik Erikson, Identity, Youth and Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968). 5. Mary Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery:  Murder, Miscegenation and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-​of-​the-​Century New York City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 6. Viviana Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2005). 7. So many examples can be provided, such as in http://​www.salon.com/​2015/​08/​28/​ attention_​straight_​men_​dating_​women_​heres_​why_​they_​still_​yes_​still_​expect_​ you_​to_​pick_​up_​the_​check/​; http://​www.dailymail.co.uk/​news/​article-​3205657/​ Wife-​starts-​Ashley-​ Madison-​divorce-​proceedings-​husband-​outed-​member-​ infidelity-​website.html; and Teemu Ruskola, “Gay Rights versus Queer Theory: What Is Left of Sodomy after Lawrence versus Texas,” Social Text, Vol. 23, Nos. 3–​4 (Fall–​ Winter 2005), pp. 84–​85. 8. Matthew Hughey, “Cinematic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in ‘Magical Negro’ Films,” Social Problems, Vol. 25, No. 3 (August 2009), pp. 543–​577. 9. Celine Parreñas Shimizu, “Claiming Bruce Lee’s Sex,” Frontiers, Vol. 38, No. 3 (2017), pp. 92–​120. 10. Michel Foucault, Nicolae Morar, and Daniel W. Smith, “The Gay Science,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2011), pp. 385–​403. 11. Leiba Faeir, Intimate Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 12. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Illicit Flirtations (Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 2011).

86  The Proximity of Other Skins 13. Laurie Sandell, “Nicki Minaj Wants All Women to Demand More Orgasms,” Cosmopolitan, May 29, 2015 (http://​www.cosmopolitan.com/​entertainment/​a41113/​ nicki-​minaj-​july-​2015/​), accessed on March 30, 2019. 14. Jessica Valenti, “Women Deserve Orgasm Equality,” The Guardian, June 5, 2015 (https:// ​ w ww.theguardian.com/​ c ommentisfree/ ​ 2 015/ ​ jun/ ​ 0 5/ ​ women- ​ d eserve-​ orgasm-​equality), accessed on March 30, 2019. 15. Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 16. See Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008); Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (New  York:  Doubleday, 1972); and Darryl Dickson-​Carr, The Columbia Guide to African American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 17. Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). 18. Stephen Holden, “Laurent Cantet’s ‘Heading South’ Shows the Ache of Blinding Lust in a Sexual Paradise Lost,” New York Times, July 7, 2006 (http://​www.nytimes.com/​ 2006/​07/​07/​movies/​07sout.html). 19. Bradshaw, “Heading South.” 20. Stephanie Zacharek, “Heading South,” Salon, July 7, 2006 (http://​www.salon.com/​ 2006/​07/​07/​heading_​south/​)

3 The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship Annihilation and Affliction in Brillante Mendoza’s Tirador (2007), Serbis (2007), and Ma’ Rosa (2016)

Serving as a juror at the 2008 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, one of the best-​known festivals in the city, and one of the most highly regarded festivals in the world for its curatorial approach—​screening the best Asian cinema alongside films by Asian American filmmakers—​I meet the filmmaker Brillante Mendoza. We greet each other warmly in the green room of the Japantown hotel where we are staying as festival guests. We recognize each other as diasporic Filipin@x, though we do not know each other. This happens even before I see his films Foster Child (2007) and Tirador (2007) the next day at the San Francisco Kabuki Cinema, where I am among hundreds of viewers, including diverse film festival devotees who watch everything; filmmakers from Asia and the United States; activists, curators, and scholars in the national Asian American community; general Asian American audiences; and a large representation of Filipin@x and Filipin@x American viewers who attend specifically to see classic and new Philippine cinema. I begin now at this moment of recognition among kababayan—​fellow Filipin@x who work in film to make a point about our voices and our presence so as not to be made peripheral. Through the power of critical description, as part of what I call “shared spectatorship,” I frame this as an intimate encounter between the spectator, the critic, and the film/​ maker, specifically to arrest the affective responses we bring from our critical locations and positioning when we experience these films. Celebrated Filipin@x director Brillante Mendoza’s films have been simplistically classified as “poverty pornography” that panders to “the Western fascination with the poor, filthy, ‘exotic’ Third World.”1 I argue that the classification is erroneous and simplistic in dismissing Brillante Mendoza’s ethical choices in spotlighting drug addicts, prostitutes, and the dredges of society in the slums of Manila as in his films Tirador (2007), Serbis (2007), Kinatay (2009), and Ma’ Rosa (2016). “Poverty pornography” quells the rebellion

88  The Proximity of Other Skins Mendoza and his team muster against the usual pleasures the West extracts from or allocates in their experiences of “another cinema.” Western critics accuse the third-​world filmmaker of exploiting his own people and benefiting from the poverty represented. And since the films are primarily seen outside the Philippines, the accusation may ring true. To accuse his films of making pornography out of poverty suggests that pleasure is the primary way of experiencing the movie’s exploitation. Upon closer reading, however, the accusation of exploitation stems from an overload of pain in order to create the deprivation of pleasure. While I do not deny that some people could derive a degree of pleasure from films about poverty, which is presumably what initiates this critique of poverty pornography in the first place, I am interested in the vehement response that denies the conscious and creative decision the filmmaker makes to deprive us of pleasure and to inflict us with pain. Obviously, by failing to provide pleasure as its primary experience, the film fails the classification of poverty pornography. And the experience of violence in spectatorship remains untapped in how it also captures myopia in Western spectatorship. That is, engagement of representations of poverty does not just mean exploitation and reification but can also be exploration and fictionalization of a lived reality. I argue that the filmmaker’s emphasis on abjection, misclassified as poverty porn, makes the spectator undergo a special kind of self-​transformative violence in questioning one’s desires for exploitation. In focusing on the carnality of otherness through brown-​skinned and wounded bodies doing bad things to each other while living in abhorrent spaces of third-​world shantytowns, Mendoza sets out to redefine the power and language of cinema itself especially in terms of spectatorship. He does so by recasting the proximity cinema enables, and redefining the empathetic power of film. Through distancing the cinematic subject from the spectator, he moves us toward an awareness of the ugly inequalities that face people living in the Global South. Mendoza forces us to recognize how theirs are not necessarily universal struggles. They remain “disposable,” to use Neferti Tadiar’s term, in how they live outside formal employment and other social structures.2 They do not face common struggles but different, particularly situated ones with contexts and specificities that matter. Western spectators are already entangled with these worlds not only as spectators but also as beneficiaries of these historical and globally imbricated inequalities that limit people’s lives. The encounter with films such as Mendoza’s must be seen in this larger historical context. Mendoza presents

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  89 Filipin@x whose experiences are situated in a world that requires a new conception of cinema that differs from Hollywood and its resolution of superheroes like Iron Man flying in fast to drop down with a hard landing of his fist on the ground in order to save the day via deus ex machina, or calling up an innate individual power that overcomes structural adversity, or learning about oneself as a liberating goal for the character or the viewer. And since his films do not really screen in the Philippines, his voice questions the positioning of Hollywood in local cinema. He expands the definition of cinema available to local viewers in the Philippines in order to create a new cinematic order. To make classical Hollywood cinema fall off the shelf of how Philippine cinema is measured, includes annihilating the Western viewer’s usual position as the one to be addressed. A violent self-​transformation must then come with seeing the world differently. Here I am referring to a soul-​ crushing response of alienation that Mendoza’s films can compel. His films are not about a touristic time travel of seeing different worlds or offering the third world as a place to visit for their servile catering bodies. More fundamentally, Mendoza wants us to see the world differently for both Filipin@x and non-​Filipin@x when experiencing his Philippine cinema: to give ourselves up, and this can only result from a new attention, one that requires a different listening, and a real seeing and feeling that his style demands. His work calls on the forging of a shared spectatorship for the people whom he makes films about. A major difference in telling these stories is the focus on people caught in structures of inequality that won’t let them go or simply won’t let them live. What they know more about themselves by the end of the film is how much more stuck they are, and all they can do is find sustenance to keep going:  whether sex, food, or even a new location to live their affliction. Crucial to this process is how Mendoza undoes the mastery of the camera to instead encourage mutuality between his global spectators and his local actors and filmmakers. He creates a necessary distance that protects his subjects from the consumption and cannibalism of the Western gaze in a new viewing position that manifests his hopes and aspirations for a different expression of Filipin@x—​one that requires the Western viewer’s decentering so as to occupy a place of compassion that is a crucial part of sharing spectatorship. In her online essay in lolajournal.com on cinematic compassion, film scholar Amelie Hastie asks us to move away from “control over our agitation” in experiencing films and encourages us to “recognise and enact a spectatorship based instead on a model of compassion . . . not just for the

90  The Proximity of Other Skins characters . . . but also simply for being in the world.”3 Similarly, I am asking spectators to share their contextual and structural location when examining not only their relationship to films but also how we frame, interpret, analyze, and translate films for ourselves and others. To arrive there requires closely attended readings composed of both a phenomenological and historically contextualized approach that recognizes yours is neither the only nor the central perspective by which all others should be measured.

Serbis (2007) In Serbis, the multigenerational and extended (aunts and cousins and not just the immediate family) Pineda family lives and works in a dilapidated movie theater that shows pornography on-​screen and the painted murals on its walls while sex workers “service” their johns on the theater seats and in the halls. The light-​skinned, mixed-​race Filipin@x family is essentially considered beautiful in the context of the Spanish colonial cultural legacy in the Philippines. Yet, their entrenchment in the ugliness of poverty and unsavory pornography lead them to become off-​putting and odious themselves in the process of their downfall. Nayda, the middle-​aged junior matriarch portrayed by Mendoza regular Jaclyn Jose, who looks mestiza—​light-​skinned and Spanish-​Filipino, sports caked-​on makeup, as if to hide the grime of grease and paint that layers the walls of the theater and ultimately her face too. Her husband Nando must have been dashing, handsome, and gallant in his youth, yet now looks disheveled, appears incompetent, and acts deeply confused by the most mundane things such as giving change or packing his son’s lunch. The family used to own several other theaters, and now only the one called “Family” remains. The actors look like fallen Spaniards abandoned in the wild demise of the Philippines. And what a downfall they experience to land in a dirty hole of a place: a dilapidated movie theater where their entire clan loves, lives, and works. From the matriarch Flor (who sues her husband for adulterous abandonment), young daughter Jewel (who blossoms into womanhood under the tutelage of gay men and transgender women), and grandsons Alan and Roland (who fight each other while they work to maintain the theater), all the way to her young kindergarten-​aged grandson Jonas (who is exposed to public sex and prostitution in the theater). Because the separation between public and private feels barely there, the family’s private moments occur in public when passers-​by witness the fallout

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  91 of an unwanted pregnancy or the financial woes that beset the family. The camera takes its time behind Nayda, as she endlessly waddles through the labyrinthine hallways looking for family members to mobilize into various jobs or policing the customers while her son Jonas makes sense of the sex acts occurring in the dark on-​and off-​screen. The co-existence of both prostitution and pornography permeates the lives of its proprietors, especially the generations of women in the family. Flor, the matriarch and mother of Nayda, bathes with a bucket and a pail in what was formerly a public bathroom stall, and her youngest daughter Jewel learns to walk in a feminine style from a black Filipin@x transgendered woman on the grand stairs. On the screen and on the walls, vividly painted large-​scale posters of women in various states of sexual arousal hang with titillating titles emblazoned on their naked bodies. There are signs undoubtedly written by Nayda: “Bawal Mag Sex Dito,” or “Having Sex Is Prohibited Here.” Because the social structural forces put pressure on their private lives (as matriarch of a disintegrating family or as a young girl coming into womanhood), the matriarchs Nayda and Flor must police the moral bounds of the family itself. The film’s opening establishes the lack of privacy as Jewel stands in her room, her hair wet following a shower. She dries off with an old towel that only partially covers her body. She gazes upon her image in the cracked mirror and repeatedly declares, “I love you” in a smoldering and seductive way. Her

Figure 3.1  Jewel (Roxanna Jordan) plays with her image in the opening shot of Serbis by Brillante Mendoza.

92  The Proximity of Other Skins youth is striking in terms of the film’s giving us access to her nudity—​she seems to be in her late teens. The towel comes off as she continues to speak to the mirror. We see her crevices: the depths of her armpits, the valley between her small breasts, the large nipples on screen, her belly, and mound of pubic hair. She may gaze at her image in a declaration of self-​love or she may be performing for the gaze of a potential lover or she may be performing a sexual role like the women on the walls of her home. To open the film in this way is a revelation, for it immediately problematizes what it means to see the body of a young woman from the third world in her makeshift room, with the overwhelming noises of the street, and the cracked mirror upon which she looks at her own image. The camera shoots her youthful body in close-​up even as it focuses on her crotch and concentrates on her nipples. The film suddenly cuts away to show us that a young boy actually watches this scene and when we see him, our watching becomes illicit too. It is Jonas, her kindergarten-​aged nephew, who yells to his mom that his aunt is naked. Here, his judgment implicates our own perception as a perverse viewing. In beginning the film in this way, Mendoza puts us in the position of witnessing ourselves watching scenes that confront our intersubjective relationship. The film attends to bodies and places to make us aware of our own bodies and places. This composes a haptic viewing for it involves our multisensorial viewing experience so as to make sense of what we are seeing. It makes erotic the mysterious and fragmented way the body is treated—​pulling our own bodies in to make sense of the screen body—​ aspiring not just to an aesthetic representation but also to an ethical relation. The film deploys not just the brown body but also its wounds, its third-​ world locale, and its dirty bottles populating the public and private spaces, to tell a story of a different situation of sights, smells, and a general blanket of dirtiness that stems from impoverishment. It attends to bodies and places in order to make us aware of our own bodies, which may be healthy and not susceptible to poor care, or housed in perhaps less dire or even similar circumstances. This composes a haptic viewing between films from the Global South and its global audiences, including the West and its showering of both condemnation and accolades. Mendoza accomplishes this haptic viewing in the form of three relations of intimacy, sexual and otherwise, that I study in this chapter. In them, we see this demand for ethical relations that ultimately distance the Western viewer from the abjection that Mendoza so intimately represents. Mendoza secures this distance with the unabashed and unforgiving observation of the lives of

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  93 this family that is detailed in the production design, specifically (1) the object of the boil in the space of the bedroom and bathroom, (2) the role of bottles in various scenes, and (3) a goat in the theater where sex transpires, bringing the space of the rural to the urban and light into the dark in a collision of haptic and optical visuality that makes us conscious of our spectatorship as an erotics involving vulnerability as full of potentiality.

Brillante Mendoza and the Rise of a New Filipin@x Cinema When Brillante Mendoza won Best Director at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival for Kinatay (2009), which means “butchered,” esteemed American critic Roger Ebert called the film the worst to screen at that festival ever. The story follows Peping (played by Mendoza’s frequent star Coco Martin), a wholesome young husband and father who needs to support his new young family. He joins a crew of criminals—​part of a syndicate—​who seek to punish Madonna (Maria Isabel Lopez), a female prostitute-​drug addict-​bar hostess for her debts to a powerful man, the head of the syndicate of which she is part. Peping does not know that she will be beaten, raped, stabbed, killed, then cut up into pieces, with her head severed, wrapped up in plastic and gradually thrown out of the van on the long ride back to Manila. Ebert accuses Mendoza of punishing his spectators, rendering the film’s following the van as it disposes of the hacked-​up plastic-​wrapped body as using shock on his viewers, as a kind of conceited and cheap hack job by the filmmaker himself, who cuts us up and tortures us too essentially. Ebert accuses the film of possessing “no drama . . . no story purpose” as it captures in detail not only the murder but also the rape and mutilation of the woman by men who ravage her verbally as well, in a film with very little dialogue. The low-​lighting within—​established through a light on top of the van, the incessant noises of the street, the perspective of the young man in the labyrinth of a dirty and loud Manila all make for an “alienating . . . unpleasant and painful . . . recoiling” experience for the viewer, who can barely watch the film, just like me, who spent most of the time hiding behind my own hands and stopping the film for months before resuming and failing again to watch. Ebert’s vivid description of his own physical and affective responses is revealing and deserves further address. His response captures the Western spectator’s refusal to engage the racialized and gendered affliction represented on-​screen

94  The Proximity of Other Skins and his rejection of the Filipino filmmaker’s demands to be considered and this Filipin@ American spectator’s difficulty in getting through the whole thing. Mendoza makes a film that is different from the tradition of the West’s watching our suffering—​to one that decenters the Western spectator’s expectations and pleasures—​by making a film that no one may want to or should see—​the worst possible one to make—​as a creative and political decision. Within this context, Roger Ebert anticipates my counter-​ reading of Mendoza—​rather than appreciate others’ spectatorships and criticisms—​he warns his readers to watch out for anyone who may come up, “defend(ing) this unbearable experience” of watching the film.4 Here I  am indeed, offering a different spectatorship and perspective from his. I argue that it is precisely the unbearability that must be borne, for the West consumes the Third World as objects and events to be enjoyed in aesthetic terms, in enjoying difference, suffering, and people doing bad things to each other. Mendoza rejects tears and indignation as indications not necessarily of compassion but of consumption. And if consumption is the way that films from the Global South are received, it must then be perverted through deprivation of it as palatable—​it must be not only unacceptable, unsatisfactory, and unpleasant but even repulsive, revolting, and horrific. Roger Ebert watches the film and feels disgusted, telling others that this is not worth watching. I watch the film and am drawn in, thrown back, again drawn in, thrown back; and from my struggle, I emerge to say there is something to be watched and it is about who we are in the face of abjection. My close readings of the film and my formulation of a shared spectatorship amplify the theoretical concepts of “attention” as defined by French philosopher Simone Weil and “compassion” as described by American civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr., while using a phenomenology of film approach to my close readings that interrogate the bodily materiality of our emotive and affective responses. Ebert and I recommend two different viewing methods in the face of Mendoza’s demand for a new kind of watching: one that makes the viewer in the West attend to difference, inequality, and distance through intimate and real-​time representations of poverty and violence. The film enables a cinematic proximity that both repels Ebert and fascinates me. That is, the cinema of Brillante Mendoza brings near and close subjects who are distant and far, in a creation that is also fictional, imaginative, and interventionist. He frames his characters within gritty squalor, showing how the place, its history and culture, informs their lives and their lack of better choices—​Peping attempts to leave then realizes

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  95 he cannot—​and never lets go. As a production-​designer-​turned-​director, Mendoza’s use of place and the time spent there notably does more work than dialogue in organizing our spectatorship. In Mendoza’s Kinatay, Tirador, Serbis, and Ma’ Rosa, we are immersed in cramped locations, invading the spaces alongside a frenetic camera, with its hyperreal aesthetic of squalor (we see how dirty are the streets) and its brown subjects who won’t stop trying to survive even as they face forces that maim and butcher. I  am concerned with formulating an ethical response to the cinematic encounters between such images from the Global South screening in and against the West. Doing so forces the questioning of the basis of our identification in establishing relationships with images that won’t let us simply watch with pleasure but show us realities that exist for others and that are unlike our own. This is a deliberate refusal to give pleasure to the viewer by Brillante Mendoza, who is committed to telling stories that really happened—​the butchering of the poor by the poor, who are just like us but are in these very different circumstances that must be accounted for.5 Instead, the viewer must undergo annihilation, self-​destruction, and self-​ trauma in a new form of watching and listening, which is to accept the trap the filmmaker puts you in. Becoming trapped is an opportunity to listen and to attend to your surroundings, precisely because the filmmaker captures us as his protagonists—​disabled from escaping—​positions that really happen for people in his world. This is a deliberate construction of the cinema, for which the Philippines has a history of colonial relationality with the United States. Since its inception, US cinema has dictated how films are supposed to function in the world in ways that Philippine independent filmmakers have critiqued in recent years. With the emergence of an independent film culture in 2005, by the time of Mendoza’s emergence as a director, Joselito Acosta asserts “the term (New Philippine Cinema) has become a popular byword” recognizable in the works of Lav Diaz, Auraeus Solito, Raya Martin, and Brillante Mendoza himself. Lav Diaz—​known for his multiple-​hours-​long “slow cinema,” which like Mendoza’s work is largely not seen though it is well awarded by the most prestigious film awards in the Philippines (Gawad-​Urian and Carlos Palanca)—​ describes his new way of filmmaking as part of developing a local cinematic language that is specifically for Filipinos, even if they do not yet access his films. He says, “Maybe it will take 50 years for them (the Filipino audience) to see that all the crazy things we are doing are not really madness, but it is for them, for the culture.”6 So while the films are not known to circulate

96  The Proximity of Other Skins in the Philippines, the artist defines himself as working for the local people and the culture that is distinct from Hollywood and worth developing in its own terms. He further tells the University of the Philippines Film Institute Professor Tilman Baumgartel, “we are not rushing. It will happen. Culture is growing. So if you make good cinema, you help culture to grow. If you make bad cinema, you demolish culture.”7 This awareness of developing an independent film culture, cognizant of a unique voice and simultaneously aware of cultivating local culture, is part of a larger critique of how Hollywood has determined not only what films look like but also how they are received and regarded in society. Tikoy Aguiluz, founder of the Independent Cinema Association of the Philippines and festival director of the premiere Philippine festival Cinemanila, describes independent cinema as a “Western concept” that they are appropriating so as to achieve a higher goal. He says, “More importantly, the (independent) movement was against the monolithic power of the Hollywood Studio System.” Mendoza and his cohort of independent Philippine filmmakers declare themselves as developing their own film language and consciously positioning the spectators differently as well from the dictates of Hollywood. Nonetheless, the films by Mendoza are in conversation with the haptic turn in cinema studies. The philosopher Simone Weil says, “To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself.”8 While I do not agree with the actuality of standing inside the other’s position much less taking on the soul of another, I find recognition of another’s affliction can be well performed by a phenomenological attunement to the cinema and one’s bodily distance and difference from other locations and bodies. Mendoza shoots his films with so much movement and, in doing so, places us in the space frenetically, which at the same time prioritizes difference and distance for the Western spectator. He rewrites how spectatorship is structured along the processes of their desire. He is not trying to create a relationship of identification dependent on pleasure and desire for it. Instead, the spectator experiences a refusal of pleasure (poverty as palatable) and even a desire to be far away from this place and these people (abjection). Through his shooting of space and place, Mendoza prevents the traditional consumption of the third world as enjoyable, entertaining, and educational, and instead enables a multi-​sensorial immersion in a bewildering pandemonium that remains tense and uncomfortable. In this, the filmmaker questions

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  97 the basis of identification: they suffer like me is replaced by they suffer unlike me because I am not in this situation. Yet the films demand a feeling, which I call shared spectatorship, for it is a mode of identification predicated not on pleasure but on difference as the necessary condition for us to mark our own positions outside that suffering. We are not inside the shoes or the soul of the other, rather the movie shows us our distance through representations of proximity that emphasize difference. The film butchers the spectator because people are rampantly butchered in the Philippines—​a fact not a fantasy, argues both Mendoza and the film critic Tikoy Aguiluz during a panel at Cannes with the film’s screening.9 Mendoza says, “We have seen this story a lot especially in the Philippines . . . there (have) been lots of stories of people being butchered and stories about massacre and a lot of this violence.” He wants to offer the spectator the dimensional experience of “being with the character, rather than watching the film, just to scare you. . . . This really exists, it is not just entertainment.10 He shares that while they were shooting there was another butchering in the newspapers. Tikoy Aguiluz, from the audience of critics, confirms Mendoza’s assertion: “The subject—​is not a figment of imagination—​you read this in the tabloids almost every week.”11 When a critic from Brazil asks Mendoza if he is satisfied with this film to be regarded as horror from the third world, he says: it is up to the audience, but “the fact is it is a real experience that is really happening.” The film is thus not only horror but a “real psychological thriller or drama. . . . It is as truthful and honest as it can be.”12 The filmmaker speaks with urgency about his authorial standpoint. Why do the critics ignore the filmmaker’s description of his goals? The critical response by critics and audiences at Cannes indeed scorned Kinatay for how it positioned the audience. The Hollywood Reporter’s Maggie Lee describes the “nauseating cruelty . . . that make(s) the audiences feel like they are watching a snuff film . . . of forced voyeurism.”13 and contrasts it against Mendoza’s previous films for their “warmth or exotic social phenomena.” Here, Kinatay clearly achieves the critique of the Western spectator who would seek cinematic tourism and is instead confronted with the nightmarish cold and brutally horrific. Jay Weissberg from Variety lauds Mendoza’s descriptive abilities in “capturing the chaos of life in the teeming slums and streets of Manila.” However, like other critics, he finds the Kinatay viewer as “unlikely to feel anything other than anger at being subjected.”14 A critical turn comes to view—​from Western subject to being subjected—​ through the feeling of disgust at being made abject (in relation to the film).

98  The Proximity of Other Skins Identification then is not based on sameness but on difference. In order to have a different response from rejection, anger, and irritation, such as empathy, sympathy, or even compassion and love, we do not need to overcome difference, but to recognize it. I isolate the specific discomfort the viewers and critics abhor as precisely the spectatorship that Mendoza upends. It is politically important in making way for the perspective of the Filipino filmmaker in global cinema. Jessica Zafra in Newsweek says Kinatay “is so grim and gruesome that it didn’t even divide audiences and critics . . . it united them in hatred and disgust.”15 Zafra contextualizes her critique within a Filipino audience response to the film. Filipinos “felt deeply conflicted . . . the prize (of Best Director) represented an honor . . . yet it was for a film that showed the Philippines in the worst possible light.”16 Moreover, “Mendoza’s own compatriots . . . criticized him as an unworthy successor to Lino Brocka.” Mendoza refuses the critique and describes how he aimed to “trap” the audience and to take away their “choice.” He says that he deliberately confronts audiences by telling them, “Look at this (poverty). If you can’t take it, don’t look. But it’s not going away.” Kinatay is not an aestheticized poverty but an aggressive exploration of a world where the poor face horrible choices in hyperreal squalor. The character Peping’s lack of resources leads him to dire circumstances as a bewildered participant in a shakedown that entail a brutal rape and murder. The perpetrators of the crime in this corrupt country are themselves police and military men. The film is set, then, within a mayhem that is particular to a place where there is no way out. The spectator from the West is thus placed in a special role in viewing such a closed and constrained space. Philippine critic Lito Zuleta, in Zafra’s article, defends Mendoza against the critique of poverty porn” or “cinema of squalor.” He says, “Philippine social reality is so glaring that only the most dense Filipino filmmaker could ignore it . . . if Mendoza’s cinema is very trenchant, it’s because things have gotten worse.” So, to watch these films should not be comfortable, for the affliction represented demands a new shared spectatorship that won’t silence the maker’s positionality or stated platform, as Mendoza relentlessly foregrounds the reality on which the film is based. I formulate the theory and practice of a shared spectatorship, for cinema has the capacity to enable compassionate feeling for others beyond oneself, and in this situation, they are others to the West, whose brutal conditions embody Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life.”17 The representation of these lives should provoke a reaction that includes consideration—​that is, reflection on

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  99 the circumstances of others and the distinction of one’s own subject position. If cinema can indeed present well the situation where others despair, feelings of warmth and enjoyment cannot be the appropriate response to such representations. Shock and horror is not enough either. It should lead to a piercing and soul-​crushing recognition that an affliction is taking hold. A  shared spectatorship can then be born, because films should generate and empower love for those whose lives teeter on the edge of life and death. Others’ experience should not be cannibalized and the filmmaker’s political perspective consumed simply. It is complicated beyond sameness as the basis for universality. Mendoza goes beyond presuming you can step in to the sameness of the other. What prohibits compassion is the insistence of sameness as the basis for universality! A shared spectatorship asks the viewer to expand our worldview to account for others including expanding one’s imagination to awaken an emotional engagement with the feeling of difference, to embrace alienation in disallowing our proximity and in particular, disavowing our mastery of the image. To call on the universal in scenes of difference is to deter compassion that shared spectatorship demands. There is no hope in these scenes, and Mendoza makes sure we know it as particular to them and not the case for us as Western spectators. There are no characters that give us a way out of the affliction. They are hustling always and relentlessly so as to live even if there is no hope and even if they are, as Mendoza asserts, “forever trapped.” The spectator who sees these films and does not recognize the difference of that life is of no help. Unlike films that invited the Western tourist to partake in the pleasures of brown bodies such as in Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988) and even Richard Quine’s The World of Suzie Wong (1961), these films consciously repel when indexing the violence imperialism causes, including the tourism of cinema itself.18

Shared Spectatorship and the Other: Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion Brillante Mendoza’s films ultimately distance the spectator from the intense proximity of poverty and squalor in his films. It is a contradictory feat to create the feeling of distance in a film that offers an intensified closeness, especially to abject subjects frequently unseen on-​screen, including their boils and their cut up body parts. He formulates this new language of cinematic

100  The Proximity of Other Skins proximity, composed in his films of an entrapping mise-​en-​scene, which is the visual entirety of the film as it is represented beyond editing and certain camera tricks, including the blocking of actors in their performance, cinematography, lighting, art direction, costume, set design, and props. That is, his films are so acutely realistic about poverty not only through design but also through its camera movement pushing into the slums, following bodies convincingly harried and flustered, or covered in grime, wounded, and toothless. By injecting the spectator into a frenetic setting and infusing the senses with the looks, sounds, feelings, smells, and touches of the largely underrepresented Filipin@x poor, Mendoza demands a more mutual engagement rather than a masterful spectatorship over the representation. He does so in order to discontinue an experience where the spectator remains intact. That is, as Laura Marks argues, in haptic visuality, the viewer is unable to see the entire subject, and reviewing the close-​up (341) or other filmic representation calls on senses of touch, such as representations of the fragmented body and space.19 The kinesthetic experience can then render the viewer more vulnerable to the image and empathetic to the subject represented. Optical visuality is thus characterized by a viewer fully seeing and comprehending what they see, enabling mastery over the moving image (341), while haptic visuality enables the viewer to sacrifice their mastery, and lose themselves in a form of disorientation with the image and, thus, the space they themselves occupy. They lose their ability to separate themselves from the object of their perception in a form of annihilation. The object then touches the viewer as the viewer touches the screen intersubjectively. They are under the spellbinding and mesmerizing power of the image in its ability to move the body, to remember and awaken the body and its role in understanding the film. Haptic visuality thus encourages a dynamic bodily relationship of mutuality between viewer and viewed with the potential for overwhelming the spectator. This potential fracturing of the spectator occurs, rather than just the fractured representation of third-​world subjects on screen. Yet, a first-​world spectator like Ebert refuses to accept the role of learning from the Third World filmmaker’s creative and political choice to position the viewer in this disoriented and out-​of-​control way. So much of Kinatay we cannot see. There are minutes of black where all we hear is the sounds of voices. Mendoza says it is especially true for this movie that “other than images, the sound and music plays a vital role. Even if you don’t see any images you can almost feel what is going on in the film by hearing sound and the voices of characters.”20

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  101 Completely deflating our sight—​through the use of the dark—​and using the power of sound to heighten a fuller sensorial experience is disconcerting. Indeed, the film won Best Sound Design at the 33rd Gawad-​Urian awards ceremony. What Mendoza does here is participate in the phenomenological turn in cinema that emphasizes the materiality of the film and the embodied experience of the spectator. Through disorienting the viewer by preventing access to the image, Mendoza relinquishes their mastery over the image as a whole in optic visuality and emphasizes the amputated experience of haptic visuality. In denying the visual and emphasizing the aural, the ocular-​centric approach to film is lambasted while heightening our other senses usually made secondary in interpreting and understanding the cinema experience. What Mendoza makes clear in relinquishing the spectator’s control and access to his films is this: we in the West are made witness to affliction we cannot control, mimicking the subjects’ inability as well. Simone Weil defines affliction as that which “compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.”21 It is an undeniably discombobulating experience to witness the levels of indignity that compose their humanity. To experience the vividly portrayed poverty should not only expand our world and our imagination but also require us to analyze our new understanding as not a purely rhetorical experience. The ethical challenge the movies present is whether it provides a strong enough experience to awaken our capacity to feel for others on screen and to see ourselves anew in the process. “Cinematic ethics” is a term coined by Robert Sinnerbrink to describe “film as a medium that can express and evoke ethical experience  .  .  . through the aesthetic experience, emotional engagement and cognitive understanding that cinema so richly provides.”22 Like Sinnerbrink, I am concerned with the cinematic encounter in the “relationship between the film, spectator and context” (10), especially at the sight of the spectator’s action. Films do help us share a vocabulary and engage in measuring the value of behavior. However, we must account for the vast cultural differences that span the audiences as well as the historical context of American domination in the cinema industry, its history, and distribution. This inequality that undergirds our study of cinema also shapes our spectatorial experience including forging an ethical experience of cinema that accounts for the structural inequality between spectators in the West who constitute Mendoza’s audiences and the people represented in his films. My understanding of the transformation that occurs in cinema is not rhetorical, not simply a change in thinking or an experience, but an action conducted on

102  The Proximity of Other Skins the self by and of the Western spectator who must be decentered in their viewing. There are limits to Sinnerbrink’s cinematic empathy in my project, for it does not anticipate the claims of universal experience that Western viewers impose on films from the Global South. Thus, this decentering is really part of a decolonial process: to center the subject of the Global South and to decenter the viewer from the Global North. Beyond whether empathy and sympathy occurs, my concerns focus on the imposition of universal experience in naming, defining, and condemning films whose worlds we may not truly know, as if spectatorship is not shared and simply hierarchical. Indeed there are worlds in today’s digital and special effects that we do not and cannot know. Mars and Jurassic Park are the representations of imagined and fabricated worlds. The worlds represented in Mendoza’s films are those he urgently needs us to know, yet his films are unconcerned with developing empathy or sympathy alone. For these feelings are ultimately consumptive; it is a cannibalistic experience to say I saw something that made me feel for and with others. The spectator may feel for or feel with the subjects, but the place and the direction always keeps distance that separates the film from the spectator. This is a distinct place where people are suffering in specific ways. So the spectator who wishes to share their viewing position as not singularly occupied must do more—​such as implicating oneself as different and not the same as the subject on screen in that their very lives make the others’ less livable. And their perspective may need to account for the filmmaker’s and other spectators’ views. The extent of their suffering presents a different point of view that requires self-​examination in their relation to the existence and persistence of others’ worlds. What method do we need to employ to achieve a different form of engaging these movies about distant others? French philosopher and activist Simone Weil focused her work on labor and inequality in Europe during the period before World War II. She identified how the class of people most suffering in this world are the only ones telling the truth, and in their presence we must pay attention for we are unable to hear them within structures of hegemony. She calls this state one of affliction, which she defines as more grave than suffering, for it “pulverizes the soul.”23 A hierarchy exists in how people experience their constraints. In her essay “Human Personality,” Simone Weil distinguishes between suffering and affliction in ways that illuminate what Brillante Mendoza is showing, which is already deemed an unacceptable representation. She writes:

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  103 When affliction is seen vaguely from a distance, ether physical or mental, so that it can be confused with simple suffering, it inspires in generous souls a tender feeling of pity. But if by chance it is suddenly revealed to them in all its nakedness as a corrosive force, a mutilation or leprosy of the soul, then people shiver and recoil.24

To describe the base experience of the afflicted as a contagious disease such as “leprosy of the soul” or a severe degradation that must be visible as “corrosive . . . mutilation” echoes the dismissal of film critics who accuse Mendoza of going too far in the violence of Kinatay. Ebert, Lee, and other critics find the utter reality of the degradation repulsive. It is as if Mendoza crosses a line of acceptability. It is precisely the representation of depravity that they critique, for their descriptions reveal a spectatorial preference for simply consuming the image, rather than sharing the affliction, which is about becoming sick through contagion. The Western viewer wishes to not be made vulnerable. Ebert claims the position of not only the offended but also the universal spectator. He will not listen, ensuring further inequality, since the Filipin@x subject represented remains unheard in his dismissal. The injustice here, too, is the disservice of the Western spectator, who does not awaken to compassion in engaging the film. And this is exactly the distinction that can frame well the Western critical response to Kinatay. A compassionate, and not just a feeling with or for, but an actional, self-​ transforming and life-​changing response is required to awaken the spectator to a shared space that is the audience, and should be of criticism as well. The spectator and critic who share are those who undergo a transformation that destroys established worldviews when confronted with scenes of an afflicted world beyond theirs, so they need to ask for tools beyond their own to achieve understanding of their experience. This is a different response that a cinema of affliction demands: a compassion that is attendant to difference and inequality. That is, there are constraints to what we can understand from our limited point of view. The feeling of difference should surpass the seeking of sameness. Holding on to the basis for identification of these subjects, their humanity (like me, like mine) is their different experience of inhumanity. And such an inhumanity is not simply deserved and not entirely the purview of the poor. It is not a form of indifference to say there are human experiences to which I am not privy. It is a real temptation and risk, the creation of mandates, in what should be a proper response to films by Mendoza. The compassion I advocate for

104  The Proximity of Other Skins in shared spectatorship is political and not prescriptive. It is not a matter of what one should do upon leaving the film festival or looking up when the film finishes on your personal screen. Compassion does not immediately translate to action but is an understanding of the need to transform one’s perceptions, including one’s self-​understanding and world-​making in relation to another. To achieve self-​deprecation at the receiving end of Mendoza’s films is an altered engagement, a formulation of a new shared spectatorship that awakens the self into a new way of being and a rethinking of cinema’s role in our world as plurally occupied. To bear witness to the lives of people whose conditions make one alert to difference varies from simply acknowledging that these are dehumanized people who must be humanized. The ethical move is not to humanize but to recognize their different conditions that organize their humanity and inhumanity. To pay attention may be the most ethical response. Attention is the most compassionate response to an awareness of affliction. Simone Weil says, “There is a point in affliction where we are no longer able to bear either that it should go on or that we should be delivered from it.”25 In Gravity and Grace, Weil defines attention as the “rarest and purest form of generosity” that one can practice upon our relations with each other. In its “highest degree, is prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”26 Similarly, the American civil rights movement leader, Martin Luther King Jr. deploys the word “compassion” as a form not only of attention but also of love. Compassion, in my theory, is an attentive love that is demanded by a shared spectatorship. In his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” delivered in 1967 in New  York City, King shares how his “conscience leaves (him) no other choice  .  .  . but to speak” (1) against the Vietnam War.27 There is a two-​part approach to this that inspires my own method. He tries to speak from a place of “compassion” when convening with the young black and white men drafted into the war (2) and the people of Vietnam, whose struggles for independence and freedom are thwarted by the United States and its “deadly Western arrogance” (3). Here, King identifies the specific location occupied by the young soldiers who must go to war as different from his own. Theirs are the lives on the front lines of danger. He also acknowledges the context of the people of Vietnam and their own desires and investments in his envisioning of the war. This acknowledgment of the other is part of my formulation of shared spectatorship. Further, it is not simply focused on the people involved but also on the structures that frame their choices. King states, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice, which

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  105 produces beggars needs restructuring” (7). Attunement to structures that organize our experience must organize our understanding of the people’s involvements. And this must inform our reading of cinematic language, in building a method from Weil’s attention, to include the structures of cinema itself. For King, “the true meaning and value of compassion . . . when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view . . . for from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition . . . and learn and grow . . . from (their) wisdom” (4). I extend this definition to the site of the film encounter in the following three ways. First, Mendoza is not simply one voice but one of a larger constellation of voices that includes an ancestry of Filipin@ filmmakers as well as his collaborators and contemporaries who craft new languages of cinema. Second, they are not simply fitting into the existing language of cinema but crafting it anew so as to register different subjectivities. Third, King is careful not to say you can stand in your enemy’s shoes but instead simply attempt to see the context that situates their perspective, as the springboard for the revelation of one’s different situation. The Western spectator can witness the poverty Mendoza shows as not only distinct to place but also entrenched in a particular history and culture. As such, the representation of what composes inequality should require the spectator to recognize their difference in space and context, questioning the assumption of a universal spectator by shared spectatorship. If one transports oneself to another place and other conditions, the viewer should then return to their own differently situated and maintained body with a new understanding. It is a subject position that must be interrogated for experiencing viewing pleasure from the suffering of others. I consider this part of what King indicts as part of the “Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them (as) not just” (6). Shared spectatorship requires an annihilation of that “Western arrogance” in order to occupy a position of attention, or compassionate attunement in listening and learning from the other who speaks to and from the experience and truth of affliction.

Philippine Cinema and Poverty Pornography Philippine Cinema industry production designer Brillante Mendoza began directing at age 45 with Masahista (The Masseuse) (2005), a film about gay Filipino masseurs. Since his debut, Mendoza has prolifically produced films

106  The Proximity of Other Skins that gained significant international recognition, including the first Filipino to win Best Director at the invitation-​only Cannes Film Festival in 2009. For his first film to focus on gay masseuses evokes Lino Brocka, the political activist director who led the previous generation of Filipino filmmakers to international attention in the 1970s and 1980s. Twenty years prior to Mendoza’s entry into the scene of global cinema, Brocka’s film Macho Dancer was widely screened, launching the transnational popularity of a gay male movie genre from the Philippines. Like Mendoza’s films, Brocka’s film was accused of exploiting third-​world conditions in a kind of pornography of soap bubbles on gyrating brown nubile male bodies. As film scholar J. B. Capino argues in his book, Dream Factories of a Former Colony (2010), Brocka was accused of catering to Western colonial eyes that extracted pleasure from lustfully exotifying third-​world bodies.28 To regard films by Mendoza and Brocka as feeding into a colonial gaze raises the important question of what kind of spectatorship emerges from engaging films from the Global South, especially in terms of the new popularity of films that show in such detail beautiful brown bodies steeped in poverty, though now mired in dirt and filth rather than cleansing bubbles. Are these exploitative extensions of the colonial gaze a rendering of the power of film as creating a masterful relationship between viewer and viewed? Or do they create a new cinematic language that demands a new form of spectatorship where the Third World shows itself in its own terms to the West? I argue for the latter. In the case of Mendoza, a tradition of filmmaking precedes him at the international level. Lino Brocka was the first Filipino filmmaker to screen at Cannes with Insiang (1976), a newly restored version of which just screened as a Classics selection at Cannes in 2015. The film stars Hilda Koronel as Insiang, who is a young woman raped by her mother’s lover. Betrayed not only by her mother but also by her own boyfriend, Insiang enacts revenge against all of them in the context of a life already in despair. Lino Brocka describes his intentions as a director in The Philippine Star: “I wanted to show the violence of the overcrowded neighborhoods; the loss of human dignity caused by the social environment and the ensuing need for change.”29 Made in the context of martial law and the Marcos dictatorship, Brocka’s film spotlights social injustice through the dramatization of a young girl’s life in the slums.30 Mendoza’s films such as Ma’ Rosa (2016) are contextualized within even more severe conditions of poverty in the Philippines today, where President Duterte says “I will kill you” to drug dealers and “(t) here is nothing wrong with a President saying that.”31 And to drug addicts,

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  107 he proudly and matter-​of-​factly declares: “Hitler massacred 3 million Jews. Now, there is (sic) 3 million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them.” Promising the military men and the police that he will protect them from killing drug dealers and addicts, a rampant vigilantism now approaches a kind of genocide of the poor today.32 Thus, more than simply spotlighting injustice, Mendoza intends to further immerse the Western spectator in the cinema in order to show it as radically different and requiring of your compassion, and not just your empathy or sympathy.33 The accusation of poverty porn is similar to the disapproval Brocka’s now classic film Macho Dancer also received. Brocka supposedly pandered to the Western view of the third world’s squalor and poverty as a form of exoticism and eroticism that leads Western tourists to partake in the prostitution and consumption of brown male bodies. The idea is that the film served as a kind of advertisement for sex tourism. It is not a simple matter of filmmakers from the Philippines simply confronting what poverty does and how it composes people’s lives, especially in a country where there is rampant poverty unlike that seen in the first world. To build from J. B. Capino, who argues that Macho Dancer’s pornography is its politics, I argue that Mendoza’s representation of poverty is his aesthetic, political, and ethical intervention in order to undo the idea of poverty as warmly endured by a noble people. Mendoza’s films engage poor people who fight to live at all costs, and this includes desperately doing ugly and immoral things. The films do not romanticize the Philippines as a place to go for enjoyment. Following this logic, local film critic Zafra does capture a Director’s Guild of the Philippines official’s response to Kinatay. Mark Meily says, “It is not the duty of filmmakers to be the country’s publicist for tourism.” The separation between tourism and cinema is a crucial one today for developing a different form of spectatorship between the Global South and the West/​Global North. My formulation of shared spectatorship captures the experience of films that demands recognition of difference and distance in order to make unbearable a previously enjoyable consumption, frequently of brown bodies in squalor. It is multisensory for it requires a bodily or motor response and not just a visual or psychological one. Kinatay makes us quiver and shrivel in our seats, or run away from the theater or complain endlessly and even adamantly about how trapped and brutalized we feel, or watch the entire film with hands over face and hiding behind furniture or a door. It is precisely the multi-sensorial representation, including the smells, sounds, and touches and not just sights of the place. In this way, it also produces a

108  The Proximity of Other Skins different aesthetic experience—​it creates a distance from the viewer unaccustomed to experiencing such places so closely and such lived experience so starkly with a camera that won’t linger but maybe even cause distress to the viewer in pulling them in more deeply. The camera does not settle in order to comfort or orient, but to make clear the anguish, desperation, and small pleasures within the endless hustle of life in Manila’s slums. Mendoza’s images that focus on intimacy—​such as sex acts and private moments alone—​are persistently accompanied by the brutality of the state, even the hypocrisy of the church, and the limitations of poverty. The mise-​ en-​scene of the social, cultural, and historical context never let up, as I argue in my notion of sexual setting in the previous chapter. Sex scenes are shot with unexpected details: the poverty frames the intimacy, and inside it, we see shut eyes driving home the point of closeness and the impact that another person impresses on a subject (beyond their weight, this includes the sight, sound, smell, look, touch, and multi-sensorial feeling of the person). Solitary scenes of looking in the mirror reveal the unspoken dreams of the characters already dashed by their circumstances. We cannot escape their situation when we hear the noises of the streets spilling into the scenes of their privacy. The films and their attention to the specific place also affect the spectator in a cognitive manner—​for the spectator has to think about the different circumstances and histories that prevent mobility and freedom such as repressive state laws that completely organize and limit people’s lives. In collecting a multi-​sensorial experience that is physical, aesthetic, emotional, and cognitive, we develop the possibility for recognizing our difference from these subjects whom we access only through the intervention and authorship of the filmmaker. This may be a distinctive voice in films from the Global South, where the state’s impact on mobility and freedom is never visualized as constant, unless explicitly foregrounded in the cinematic narrative or language. In third cinema, however, the brutality of the state is constantly made visible even in scenes of everyday living. Upon engaging the suffering subjects on-​screen in this multi-sensorial and spatially located manner, spectators recognize their distance from that body, for it feels like a hostile experience to endure the indignities that others accept every day. It is not a fantasy scene but a nightmare event. It may be a place that they do not want to be or see, so that spectators cannot but ultimately account for their difference. At least, that is the hope of films that won’t simply invite but rather trap tourists. However, the way the spectator’s body is moved, the way their aesthetic experience is overloaded, their cognitive

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  109 processes, and their emotional responses shape their desire to know more about people whom they now see, who live in such different circumstances. Thus coexist the fascinating and the repulsive that the accusation of poverty pornography also captures. Mendoza’s characters complicatedly fend off death, rather than simply pursue life. The conditions they face, of vulnerability in the face of the sovereign’s suspension of the law and disregard of their life, follow Giorgio Agamben’s theorization in Homo Sacer (1998).34 This is a condition Mendoza presents as specific to the Philippines and the cinema he makes for the West—​for the films tend not to pass muster with local censors yet are programmed widely in international film festivals. The irony is not lost to him. Zafra confirms indeed that “mainstream Philippine audiences may never get to see the film. The country’s Movie and Television Review and Classification Board forbids excessive onscreen sex and violence, meaning Kinatay will likely be rated X and banned from commercial exhibition.” Mendoza refuses to “allow a ‘sanitized’ version and plans to take it straight to university campuses. . . . None of Mendoza’s films has performed well at the local box office,” proving he is aware of his impact on the larger stage of Western spectatorship and the secondary status of Philippine audiences for whom the films are most important.35 He nonetheless addresses the Philippine spectator even when reaching the West, which decries or celebrates the film in ways that reach home.

Film Phenomenology and Haptic Visuality The phenomenology of film that I describe in the introduction attends to the lived bodily experience of viewing and shows how the cinema of Brillante Mendoza brings to proximity the lives of others who exist distances away in order to make their distinction specific. I use Sara Ahmed’s definition of proximity to assess whether or not we “completely grasp” an object or as one that “does not hold things in place, thereby creating a feeling of distance.” 36 Ahmed’s description of queer phenomenology’s concern with orientation and how we relate in a “straight” or “oblique” way to objects around us so as to help us feel like we belong or make sense in the world helps me to say more about the unknowable in Mendoza’s representation of the poor. Ahmed specifically points out how subjects who “live on parallel lines, as points that should not meet” (169) actually do meet in order to mark difference! I reflect

110  The Proximity of Other Skins on this obliqueness in my studying and seeking new Filipin@x cinema as a Filipina American immigrant. Coming to the United States from the Philippines as a teenager, I feel a distance from the work of Mendoza, which is counterintuitively revealed to me by the “proximity” it presents. Seeking closeness to this film, which is what I do as a spectator beyond my work as a scholar, is thus ultimately futile. The feeling of distance is meaningful not only for the Western spectator but also for me as a diasporic spectator. In going near the object, it indeed becomes a marker of how I’ve traveled away from the time and place when and where these films are made. I desire to be close to them not only for my own heritage, but to make sure my children also recognize home in the Philippines even if only through Philippine cinema (rather than visits made years ago now). There is a limit to this search for home. Haptic visuality helps to examine the significance of this distance in order to better understand the limited intimacy that nonetheless affirms whatever limited closeness I find in the work. Laura Marks theorizes what she calls haptic visuality or embodied touch in her understanding of the film experience, which Mendoza uses both to demand recognition of suffering and to create distance from the spectator through a language of a physically and psychically impoverished life rooted in the Philippines. Haptic perception describes how people experience touch through a visual mechanism. That is, haptic visuality requires the use of the viewer’s bodily senses where “it encourages a bodily relationship between the viewer and the video image.”37 The key idea in haptic visuality is the “dynamic subjectivity” that the body enters in relation to the film when our partial and fragmented views demand our other senses come to the fore in experiencing the film. For film theorist Laura Marks, haptic visuality possesses an erotic potential in its maintenance of its “alterity . . . maintaining its unknowability, delighting in playing at the boundary of knowability. Visual erotics allows the object of vision to remain inscrutable . . . where the looker is also implicated.”38 The distance identifies the gap between the spectator and screen to be much wider and thus a separating force that nonetheless affects the viewer in a penetrative and intimate way. In the recognition of difference and distance, what is displaced is the mastery of the viewer over the film object. Instead, an intersubjective relationship emerges wherein we recognize not only our distance but also how our proximity further estranges us from the subjects on screen whom we barely see. Through the use of haptic visuality, Mendoza creates a distance between those who consume his subjects, and in effect, uses the language of cinematic proximity to defy any claim of mastery.

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  111 Instead, he encourages mutuality in what we can learn not only about others but also about ourselves in watching his movies. Haptic visuality helps me to show the counterintuitive function of Mendoza’s intentional use of proximity to create further distance and discomfort for the audience. He does this through what Laura Marks theorizes as a mode of representation in intercultural cinema that rewrites the media’s colonial mastery, aspiring instead to mutuality between spectator and image that haptic visuality describes. This is an important framework to use in order to make clear why Mendoza’s work goes beyond poverty porn as exploitative and simplifying of an abject condition. He sets the ground for a compassionate spectatorship that annihilates the viewer through representations of affliction that deserve this kind of affecting response. Through his deployment of haptic cinema, by shooting film to look like video or combining film and video to look cheap and makeshift,39 he makes sure we achieve a kind of proximity that protects his subjects, representing a particular ethical commitment to them. It limits the ways in which the people he represents in his films are consumed, for they are less accessible when only partially seen or seen in extreme close-​up. He creates not a relation of mastery between spectator and image, but a mutuality that generates compassion for the subject represented. It brings people and the conditions in which they live close but not enough to say they are entirely known. We are made to feel our distance in a redefinition of the work of cinema as that which brings other worlds to us intimately, so we may recognize our difference instead of our universal sameness, which is what an optical visuality achieves when we see the whole object.40 For Marks, however, optical visuality requires distance so we can more wholly see the object or subject of the film and identify with them. And haptic visuality eliminates the distance to achieve closeness in the partial and the proximate. I revise this to say that the close-​up and the proximity achieved makes us realize our distance actually, in the vast space between the different skins we see and experience on-​screen. This is all rather deliberately crafted film language—​this play with distance and proximity—​that critiques the tradition of colonialism in cinema: where the West won’t dare acknowledge learning from the Global South. We learn from the skin we touch on-​screen! Mendoza’s screenwriter for Serbis, Armando Lao, declares conscious awareness of their cinema’s different goals as non-​Western filmmakers. They point out, “the Hollywood screenwriting code—​the Syd Field manual—​cannot accommodate the Filipino experience.” Therefore, they attempt a “new code” by telling stories from the “vast

112  The Proximity of Other Skins majority (who) will not transcend social class and economic reality. Few will realize the promises of democracy and the free market. The individual is helpless against the power of his environment.”41 Clearly, in their filmmaking, they confront poverty and remain there as inescapable fact. There is no escape. No Western-​style hero swoops in to save the day, and no cathartic recognition takes place. The protagonists have to do everything to survive their plight. And it takes everything from them. Plots may indeed be for dead people, rather than heroes who live on and get better.

Close Readings of Serbis (Service) Structurally, I start my close readings of the film with the role of the boil in the relationship between Alan and Merle in the bedroom, then moving to the role of the bathroom in establishing the family’s entrenchment in filth. I then examine the role of three bottles in containing not only urine, pus, and blood but also water for a flower that represents incestuous sexual desire. I then move from the family sexual relations to the customers’ sexual activities and the role of a goat in commenting on the pandemonium of the theater and the film itself as the annihilation of the universal spectator. Alan, played by Coco Martin, is the oldest son of Nayda and Nando. Because they had him at a young age, he is the root of their unhappy marriage and do not relate to him as parents, but more like an aunt and uncle existing in the periphery of his life. The authority in Alan’s life is the matriarch, his grandmother Flor. The family relations are rather hard to decipher, actually. Only after several viewings did I realize Alan is not their nephew but their son, attesting to how the family itself is a theater, living in a theater called Family. His grandmother Flor seems to be his mother and certainly the matriarch to whom he must confess the transgression of impregnating his young girlfriend Merle. Flor expresses her rage at the news as tied to the inheritance Merle may be trying to access from her relationship with Alan and the birth of their child. Merle is poor and young; she recently quit her job and follows Alan around like a lost and aimless child. Seeming like a loitering youth, she seeks him out just as the day starts. Nayda disapproves of her choice in relinquishing work in a society plagued by lack of opportunity. As one whose own early pregnancy limited her life, she is frustrated with Merle’s “stupidity” in “allowing Alan to get her pregnant.”

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  113 Distinct about Alan is his limp, which stems from a boil on his buttocks. He is in charge of painting the raunchy posters on the walls of the theater, and of picking up and delivering the film reels from other theaters in town, and we see how the boil creates discomfort for him. He looks at it while painting, and it impacts the way he moves, in and out of the theater. We see it most significantly during the sex scene explicitly represented between him and Merle. Here, Mendoza does not pan away from sex but instead goes more deeply inside. And I go there too, because we are often excluded from the scene of sex, as one of the most illuminating and telling moments of life’s encounters—​in cinema these are moments when the camera pans away or fades to black rather than explore how communication transpires with the acts on and by the body. I argue that it is not only valuable but also necessary to look unflinchingly at the unguarded performances of sex that Mendoza shoots. Merle straddles Alan with her eyes closed. “My boil,” he says possessively while she mounts him during sex, “it hurts.” Our attention drawn to the boil as painful, we’re made aware of our bond to the scene and the people. His infection affects and impresses on us our proximity and distance to the wound itself as representing different social worlds and local discourses of dirt and lack of medicine perhaps. The boil is like Elizabeth Povinelli’s sore in “Rotten Worlds,” the chapter in Empire of Love (2006) that describes how the anthropologist is bound to her field site and the people she studies. She is in a sense infected, affected, and impressed upon by her proximity to different social worlds. Povinelli details the care she receives in the West and the stories that emanate from the prying into her wound. She states, “Sores acquired from one social world entered into another, and as they did so, they were refigured by local discourses.” 42 She uses the sore to talk about how she is touched by her site of study and the people there through their shared wounds, yet she is adamant about stating that despite what the sore says about vulnerability she shares with her subjects, that they are “not equally so.”43 Similarly, the boil in Serbis functions as a marker of our unequal differences as spectating subjects. The boil in Serbis distances the viewer from the subject. This man is so entangled in the place that its griminess shows up on his skin, as if he is a wall of this world. His body is diseased and it emanates from this different world. For us, his skin takes over the screen when the boil is in close-​up. Gargantuan, dollar-​coin-​sized, and dark, the wound is particular to that place where our bodies are not, despite our aversion to the sight of the wound or our projections onto our own bodies. Wounds, whether in horror or war movies,

114  The Proximity of Other Skins indicate time (an era) and place (war) or situation (zombies on attack). Here the cinematic language of the wound—​shows all of these factors—​yet here, what is different is how the wound signifies inequality of the cinematic subject from the spectator. It represents a pathology of poverty linked to the place and the people. Moreover, it performs this function within a sex scene. Inequality is established through the sex scene’s production design of space, time, and its signification as an object representing a people’s difference. To argue this point, I show how the boil even participates in the sex scene between Alan and his girlfriend Merle. The scene is extraordinary in how it focuses on her pleasure while telling the story about his pain. He shifts her below him and penetrates her missionary style. The focus on her pleasure is notable in the shooting of the sex scene. She keeps her eyes closed as she perspires; sweat glistening on her brow and forehead. He caresses her as she makes faces, narrating how “it feels good.” And we see both their hips moving toward each other. He gyrates energetically as the boil hones our sight on his buttocks. There is semen on her knee as he leaves her, showing the cavernous space between their thighs with the creamy white ejaculation stretching like a spider’s cobweb binding them still. The tenderness for her that he displays in the postcoital moments is quiet and caring. The postcoital bond continues, although Alan expresses some tension that expresses itself much more fully later on, “My boil hurts. Don’t touch me.” His boil changes their dynamic in a reminder of how poverty—​with its bodies that lack proper medical care or are so enmeshed in the dirt—​shapes one’s larger life and enters all of its aspects. He remains tender toward her for now, as she looks completely exhausted from their sexual intimacy. “Are you okay? Are you tired?” he asks, as she lands inside the embrace of his arms and rests her head on his chest. Merle surrenders to him and the pleasure of sex. It is a powerful image that is used as the cover of the DVD for Serbis. Soon though, he is dismissing her and berating her for crying. We learn she is pregnant. Minutes later, Alan treats the pregnant Merle with contempt. When she follows him around for the rest of the day, he must constantly tell her to leave him so he may work. A notable scene is when he is called on to clean up the feces and urine plugging up the entirety of the men’s restroom so the floor is flooded up to one’s ankles. Alan walks in to it without fanfare, without much response. She follows him in, pregnant woman with bare feet steeped in the dirty water, without comment but simply resignation at her bond, of following Alan around. Only when a third person comes in to say, “it stinks” do we become fully aware of the stench that must surround the couple. The

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  115 place is so impoverished, and her presence steeps him further in the stench. We notice his bare feet in nothing but flip flop slippers as if being chased by her leads him here. Her pregnancy thus presents a crossroads for him: to remain in the family or to flee from it and her. Alan’s grandmother Flor and mother Nayda confront him, demanding that he marry Merle, as abortion is illegal in this predominantly Catholic country. The confrontation compels him to escape toward freedom. While no one mentions this, the fact motivates his action, which is to flee the family and the theater. He must kill his boil first. He already has taken fire and flames to it. He now takes a bottle and puts its open mouth on top of the boil. By then pounding the butt of the bottle on to his own bottom, the boil explodes into it. We see the spray of the bloody puss splatter inside. He then limps toward the city, away from the place where he works and lives, in order to chart his own path away from the family and its theater. This could have been the cover of the DVD too, of a limping Alan feeling the theater and its marquee with its lit up name of “Family” towering behind him. As Elizabeth Povinelli points out, the struggle is about how to “produce a viable subject within these carnal worlds and mitigate the social numbing they inspire in others.”44 Using this framework, Alan refuses the death-​in-​life he may be destined toward when he is subjected to Merle’s pregnancy. Refusing the role of husband and father that will further bind him to the family theater, he escapes. The bottle is an object that releases him from the boil, and allows him to pursue a new life. We discover how the grandmother also battles a law that prevents her freedom. The film never explains the illegality of divorce, as it never comments on the illegality of abortion, yet this is the context that limits their options and drives their behavior. Separated from her husband, who starts a new family with a much younger wife, Flor sues him in order to acknowledge his deceit. In this way, we piece together how the law also prevents divorce and allows for wives to sue their husbands for abandonment. A corrupt legal system organizes their lives, from her attorney who won’t pay for his meals at their restaurant in the pavilion of the theater, to the corrupt judge paid off by the husband, to Flor’s children, who testify against her so as not to lose their status and inheritance as their father’s legitimate children. The grandmother Flor bathes in the nude in a formerly public restroom. She uses a small pail to bathe herself as she sits on a stool. The sight provided is rare in the cinema, a naked older woman caring for herself. The scene assesses the entirety of her life in the naked abandonment she feels. She cleans herself solemnly, angered at the law’s refusal to acknowledge her husband’s betrayal.

116  The Proximity of Other Skins The waters in the public-​bathroom-​turned-​private-​sanctuary is tainted by the other bathrooms represented in the film. We see it in the fight between Alan and Roland, who wash their shirts in the public bathroom. They fight for a clean shirt that is stained by and from a dirty space. Nando, too, washes his family’s clothes in the public bathroom. Their collective aspirational cleanliness fails, and their clothes and skin remain dirty. Even Nayda and Nando’s obsession with cleaning their son Jonas is futile, for he must bathe in the same dirty public rooms. They are entrenched in abjection through the confinement of their space. The body remains a tool to deliver the numbing that poverty and alienation produce. Alan’s cousin Roland, played by Kristopher King (a frequent Mendoza collaborator who died in February 2019), works as the projectionist. His body is represented in the film for its wants and needs. Nayda bursts into the projection room to find Roland urinating in this bottle. “This is why it stinks here,” she says. This second bottle represents the young man’s confinement in the space of the theater. Whether it is laziness or the constriction of his work as a projectionist who must stay close to the film winding its images to view, he is stuck in the booth and urinates in this bottle. Nayda catches him and complains about its stench within the smallness of the space. Hidden in the most elevated part of the theater and distanced by even more stairs, the projection room is the site of other bodily exchange. We see the work Roland does: threading the film requires his entire body performing a dance with the contraption of the rewinder or the projector itself. Like Simone Weil’s theorization of the human body as wretched and poor becoming part of the work and the machine, he distinguishes his human body from the projector by caressing the film’s materiality, its body, as he traces its path in the machine. He uses his arms and chest as well as his core and legs to rewind the film between reels as if trying to find his body’s distinction from the metal contraptions surrounding his small space. And later, we see the transgender black woman giving him oral sex in the same exact space. Roland holds on to her head as she concentrates on the task. He shifts her body so she is stuck between his crotch and the rewinding table. Her head and her mouth become extensions of the table, or at least an appendage. The unnamed black trans woman becomes part of his work machines and a source of his pleasure in connecting his body anew to his place of and the mechanisms of his work. Though he violently releases her, as he is about to ejaculate, kicking her out of the room. She protests, “You left me hanging” when he does not ejaculate in her mouth. She wishes to swallow his semen in

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  117 no uncertain terms. The act of fellatio gives her no shame, her desire for it is unabashedly and unflinchingly real. A third bottle comes into play from this scene. The trans woman buys a flower for Roland, despite her disappointment in his not coming in her mouth. The flower makes its way to Nayda’s room, where with a sparkle in her eye, she looks at it stemming from another bottle or perhaps it is the same bottle that contained the urine, the pus, and now water for the flower. She gazes on the flower, then her eyes look up to her face in the mirror, then scan photos of her wedding day to Nando and her diploma, which flank the sides of it. Both documents mock her happiness at that moment and the joy evaporates from her eyes. The bottle in this last scene is a reminder not only of her disappointed hopes and confinement but also of her perverse engagement in incestuous sex or at least mutual desire with her nephew Roland. Incestuous, adulterous, and premarital heterosexual sex occurs in the context of equally varied and rampant gay sex in the theater. In the cultural context of the Philippines, sex is an affliction inside and outside the film. In Arniel C. Serato’s article in the online celebrity magazine www.pep.ph, rumors contextualize this sex scene. Through an interview, I discover that the actor Kristopher King holds a reputation as a gay hustler in a Catholic country. He simply admits that his mother’s illness made it necessary for him to have sex with older gay men.45 For him, as Roland, to not fully participate, by relinquishing or withholding his sexual pleasure in the film works to remove him from moving-​image evidence of any homosexuality. That is, he can remain untouched by the incendiary gossip if there is no evidence of ejaculation in the form of what would be the money shot. He does not ejaculate in the film, while the other actor, Coco Martin, who plays a gay masseur in Mendoza’s first film, does ejaculate in the heterosexual sex scene with Mercedes Cabral in this film. As King says in the interview, he worked so hard not to have anything “bad” emerge from the experience of hustling with gay men. Similarly, or in parallel, Coco Martin plays gay characters in films like Mendoza’s El Masseur. For him to participate in heterosexual sex that is not simulated but made real by the evidence of semen on a female body then “proves” his heterosexuality or offers alternate images to his other movies. In both of these sex scenes with the young men of the film, intimacy is established within situations of a country steeped in Catholicism and its cultural control, which is fueled by the power of gossip and innuendo intended to shame the actors. We may not so easily appropriate these scenes outside of

118  The Proximity of Other Skins their deep rooting in cultural particularity that includes homophobia in the interpretation of sex scenes involving these young men. While we see the evidence of sexual acts, their meanings are shaped by external discourses. We may interpret these sex scenes within our contexts, but do not master them—​in a form of haptic viewing—​because we are missing or do not easily access the different cultural meanings contextualizing these scenes of explicit sexuality. Indeed, Mendoza establishes haptic visuality not just within the narrative of the film but also in how he shoots sex scenes. Like the opening scene with Jewel’s body, we see the sex scenes between the young prostitutes and the older clients in a mediated and fragmented way that makes our access as spectators questionable. When the young boy Jonas witnesses the transaction between an older trans woman and a young male sex worker, he listens attentively to how they talk about when to exchange money for the sex act and how much each particular sex act costs. Through the course of the film, we find out that a day’s pay of 70 pesos working a non-​sex-​worker job in the public market does not compare to 200–​400 pesos for various individual sex acts. The child Jonas, however, cannot make out the particularity of the identities as the men are shot in shadow in showing how haptic and optic visuality operate in the film in terms of questioning our mastery as viewers and inviting us instead toward mutuality in our engagement as discombobulated spectators. In the latter part of the movie, we cannot quite discern what is going on as the screen represents auditory sounds of sex and we see in the blackness, fragmented parts of bodies engaged in sex. This is a similar device to Kinatay, where we barely see through blackness yet hear the sounds of the characters’ physical experiences. We see glimpses of bodies in the dark. Young men on their knees may provide oral sexual service for older men. A young man possibly penetrates someone between his hips whose legs are apart and in the air. It is unsure and uncertain viewing. We see this view from another seat so that what transpires in the theater during a movie becomes the primary action of our movie. Suddenly, the sound of a goat is heard. The goat is actually on the stage in front of the screen as the woman in the movie within the movie expresses orgasmic pleasure by way of her sounds. The goat enters the theater while the sexual scene plays on the screen and with corresponding live sex acts in the theater as a reminder of the economic transactions of sex that permeate our film’s setting. The goat represents the rural agrarian economy penetrating the urban sexual economy. The house lights abruptly come on to

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  119 reveal the participants in the sex acts. The participants pull up their pants and begin to chase the animal so that the lights coming on confirm the sex we may have witnessed to the certainty of its transpiring. The goat is significant in the cinema for, like babies, they represent a production that goes out of control. An ideal production should not involve babies or goats, so for Mendoza to include the goat is to say something about the chaos of third-​world filmmaking or Philippine cinema. More importantly, however, the goat functions as segue into the marked difference between mastery and mutuality. At this moment, of going from dark to light and rural to urban, we see haptic visuality transform to optic visuality. Previously, we could not tell who was doing what to whom in the darkness, making our body undergo an investment in the mystery of bodily entanglements supported by the sound design of moans and grunts. When the light comes on with the goat’s entry, we regain our mastery of the scene, though in a manner limited by the goat. This is crucial. The goat shows us that our access to these subjects is mediated through the filmmaker, who limits then expands then limits our view again. The sex scenes occur in the dark. And now we see it completely and starkly when the lights come on. Yet the goat, representing reality somehow, or a bridge between the dark and the light, interrupts the scene to allow for a return to our precarious mastery as viewers. We can now decipher the bodies previously in the dark, but the goat’s presence is a reminder of our lack of mastery over the scene at the same time. We do not have it completely. Brillante Mendoza retains control. In these scenes, Mendoza uses space, context, and the materiality of film to prevent our mastery of sex scenes even with the lights on. Moreover, he uses 35mm film and audaciously makes it look like video so as to create a different relationship between viewer and viewed, especially in cinema about others primarily viewed in the West and from the Global South. Because we experience touch as something that occurs inside our bodies and not just the surface of the skin as Laura Marks argues,46 we need to account for this way of experiencing visuality. When the viewer can see the entire object on screen, their distance enables projection upon the representation.47 The viewing experience involves the entirety of the viewer’s body inside and out, physically and psychologically. This is very different from the system of optic visuality, which renders the viewer master over the scene through the achievement of distance and identification. What is fascinating about this argument is the way it can extend to identify how Mendoza achieves an erotics through visuality. Through his film, we can see that there

120  The Proximity of Other Skins are erotic capacities to a haptic cinema as argued by Marks. As I have shown throughout this chapter, the film approaches the viewer not through their eyes alone but also through their skin. In this way, the cinema touches the skin, and stimulates the viewer. It has a multi-sensory effect. So if touch is located on the surface of the body, the cinema needs to consider the body as a whole because of its ability to create proximity that is physical, feels physical. That is, in opening the door to empathetic potential—​not just a window but a door, to walk right into a vastly different and distant experience. The potential eroticism of haptic cinema can be found in this mutual experience of touching, creating a certain intimacy and proximity, suggesting a deeper interaction with the image beyond character identification.48 There is a being in their presence that is achieved so that the visual is erotic not just through sight but also through the entire body.49 The film demands to be recognized in one’s body and skin, showing how a sensuous knowledge is developed that simply cannot be attributed to or described as visual. Because the entire body is called on by the tactility of bottles, the goat, the boil, and more, the distinction between the spectator and the viewed subject is supposedly less apparent. Yet the sexual setting of difference remains, and the proximity that haptic visuality enables actually magnifies our distance! In forging a different relationship with the viewer, the bodily relation is heightened through the materiality of the film as a confirmation of the viewer’s intersubjective being.50 In recognizing the separation of the subject on screen, one actually stands outside and does not fully immerse in the world of the film. The haptic is not passive but active: the viewer is called on to work harder to understand the image as a bodily engagement with another. And if the film is an other, then the spectator is separate. That is, the body as the basis of the film’s relationality helps to redefine the identification of a universal spectator, lambasting the idea of the same view or exploding the same viewing experience. We can look slightly askew or obliquely at the suffering before us. The viewer thus “thinks with one’s skin”51 and knows the separation of the skins represented in the film as well. And thus, the spectator is simultaneously more engaged and less distant from the object, opening questions about how one should regard otherness in the representation as a platform to see others and to see oneself anew in relation to another. An earlier scene is linked to the pandemonium of the goat when another subject in the spectrum of livability enters the scene. When the cousins Roland and Alan fight, an impoverished and very thin thief suddenly bursts into the building chased by a policeman. The entire theater is revealed by

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  121 the chase as the thief runs through the halls while desperately holding on to a woman’s shoulder bag and the voice of its owner is heard shrieking for its return. We start at the orchestra and move up to the balcony. Light from outside begins to seep in. The lobby downstairs and upstairs is seen too. And the chase brings together the family whose private fights are not separated by public troubles and even the state presence of the police. Povinelli’s framework of autological subjects (individually defined desires) and genealogical society (structurally organized forces of desire) is well illustrated here in its spatial representation as unbound by the divisions of public and private in the case of the goat and the thief. In her book Empire of Love, anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli works toward a “robust” definition of sexuality that goes beyond the “cultural politics of recognition.”52 Her project is based on bringing together two “incommensurate” sites—​of an indigenous community in Australia and her own urban queer community in the United States. The main concepts she identifies are the “autological subject,” which refers to “self-​making, self-​sovereignty and the value of individual freedom” (4), and “genealogical society,” which refers to the various structural forces and “social constraints” contextualizing and acting on that subject. She is especially concerned about the “intimate event” that brings these two together in an “intersection—​and crisis” (4). Like Povinelli, who follows Michel Foucault, I am concerned about sexuality not as identity that can bind together diasporic Filipin@x viewers and filmmakers, but as part of a larger “investigat(ion) of power and the discursive matrixes that underpin it” (10). That is, what are bodies doing not only to survive but to get pleasure? Chasing the thief creates unity and pleasure for the previously fighting family and amusement for the perennially present customers. The thief though, despairs for his life as he is caught, when his torn shirt is stuck on the balcony railing and he hangs for a moment then falls to the ground floor. This is certainly relevant in the conditions of poverty that ensnare these subjects even as they experience individual pleasure, desire, and enjoyment alongside their struggle, deprivations, and conflicts. The work of Foucault, Marks, and Povinelli together demonstrates the mutuality encouraged by the film versus a mastery over its images. The film also shows us that there is no universal sexuality, for the film’s sex scenes are situated within the specific cultural context of the Philippines, which never subsides in the production design and the narrative. The smoke from the pavilion’s open-​air cooking permeates the air. The sounds of the street are unmuted because no doors separate the theater from the street.

122  The Proximity of Other Skins The goat represents the lack of a division between the rural and the urban, representing the hoards of youth from the provinces who come to the city to find their fortunes in films such as Macho Dancer that precede Serbis and its representation of youth seeking opportunity, including gay sex. The very last scene of the film, which occurs very briefly, introduces a brand new character, a young teen-​aged boy conversing with an old man on the sidewalk in front of the theater. The older man asks about the boy’s penis in relation to his brother—​evoking the exploitation of youth for sex by the market creating poverty. In terms of the narrative, the condition of abject poverty and the state illegality of abortion and divorce shapes the not only the sexual culture but also the lives, relationships, and possibilities of the characters. The co-​existence of a popular tolerance and Catholic intolerance of homosexuality53 also leads to a particular gay cultural life in the Philippines, where sex taking place in public spaces such as this theater is not surprising. Various types of gay men enter the scene: a big and burly bald man looks intimidating but speaks in an effeminate manner. A large van, full of wealthier, older gay men who vary in their degrees of flamboyance frequent the theater and trade in various boys. An older transgender woman attempts to get a discount for different sex acts. Young men who present as straight loiter about, negotiating sexual transactions with eager older men while pursuing better tricks. One excuses himself from an older john to run out of the theater to join the “Captain” with a gun on display, who picks the boy up in his jeep. Other boys are envious, asking if the Captain needs an orgy. Through the specificity of his characters, Mendoza shows the diversity of the gay community and the space they need to exist, express desire, and practice sex for pleasure and pay. While these characters indeed mingle with each other and seek out sexual company or sex work for pay, poverty’s stranglehold comes in like an unwanted or wanted visitor. The boy on the street is not perturbed by his conversation with the older man. Sex for pay is an option thrust on young boys throughout the film. As Nayda warmly welcomes the van-​load of older gay patrons, one using a walker, a mother with a small child attempts to find her other presumably young son, who she knows is inside. This may be a flashpoint, the mother who wants to protect her child from sex transactions or to access his money from it, finds no loyalty but only betrayal from one mother to the next. Nayda discourages her when she outright lies that they do not let minors in the theater. In these scenes, both the establishment of poverty in the production design and the narrative of child sexual trafficking creates a distance between

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  123 viewer and viewed, even if the spectator witnesses such close proximity to squalor and despair. Returning to the closing shot: as the older man asks to see the young boy’s penis, the film begins to burn on screen. The projectionist must have left the film unattended, so it dissipates before us, commenting beyond the film’s narrative to the annihilation of the film’s materiality. When it comes to cinema from the Global South, like the films of Brillante Mendoza, issues of ethics arise from this intimate viewing. While Laura Marks focuses on intercultural cinema—​and short experimental videos—​ it is a useful framework to understand the work of Brillante Mendoza, who transforms his films so as to achieve a visible tactility like it is shot on video. He creates scratches on the film’s opening titles and eventually burns the film during its closing credits as a comment on the materiality of cinema. In this way, the tactility of the film—​especially as it is secured in production design—​presents an erotic encounter between viewer and viewed that is also inside the film itself. He solidifies Marks’s emphasis on the cinema and its contact with the skin, toward thinking of the film’s very skin through its scratches and its burnt demise. Similarly, Roland the projectionist almost dances with the projector as he threads the film through its various crevices. Alan with the boil on his butt has to limp through the streets of Manila with heavy movie reel cans on his back. Similarly, we are made to notice the materiality of the film itself as a mediator of the representation of the poor in richly shown squalor. It is a mediated image from which we are made distant and thus not the master of the image. We can barely see the movies the characters watch, just as we can barely see the sex acts they mimic and conduct in front of their own movie screen. If film is an intersubjective experience, we must account for the distance created when we realize we are watching film viewers we cannot see. We cannot see them in total, and we are teased by glimpses and samples of their movie inside our movie. We can see our lack access most in Mendoza’s use of other senses such as smell. Through his representation of how the poor must endure and live in bad smells, he shows the bondage people feel to the place where they live as well as work, such as in the case of Serbis, where people cannot leave where they work. The main characters live where they work in a place that seems perpetually open and thoroughly available to customers. There is thus never any privacy. They experience a bondage to their work and their home. And when Mendoza shows how smelly and dirty this place is, we experience what is a kind of grounding in the local. We are not there to experience smell “as an impoverished state of difference” as Marks claims. We don’t get just

124  The Proximity of Other Skins knowledge from this place but also pleasure and pain. This is exactly what film language accomplishes—​the creation of distance even as it proffers proximity. You may be getting close to these subjects, but only in the terms the filmmaker allows.

Queer Sex and Phenomenology In the case of the film’s representation of queer sex, it is a disorienting space where one attempts to find one’s way in the darkness as a participant in gay sex at the movie theater. Recall the little boy Jonas on his bike attempts to make sense of the bodily entanglements in the darkness, we see how the blurring of public and private space disorients him. The camera trucks alongside the line of men leaning against the back wall of the theater offering “service” to the viewer who stands in the place of the john propositioned. Like us, Jonas has to stop to make sense of his disorientation. He sees numerous male figures serving each other sexually in various upright positions along the back of the theater before he is called on, once again, to get clean. The concern his parents have for his cleanliness delineates him as one they attempt to separate from the space of sex, albeit unsuccessfully. For them to insist on his cleanliness is to envelop him in a straight world, and away from the ubiquity of queer life at home. Queer phenomenology is precisely the concern with one’s sense of direction and how it shapes one’s orientation, especially in a straight world. For queer people to identify what Sara Ahmed calls their obliqueness and their oblique perspective is the way they must navigate the world toward safety. Jonas’s parents attempt to straighten his world through the opposition of queer as dirty to straight as clean. The queer people gather together in sanctioned spaces so as to achieve a feeling of belonging, a place to express and to act on sexual desire, to act in an “oblique” way so as to make sense in the world. And Jonas’s parents attempt to make a straight enclave in the queer space. It may be too late, as Jonas emerges on his bike with red lipstick smeared on his face. Straight and queer cultures meet in the space of the Family Theater with its pornography and prostitution. Essentially, his oblique space queers everyone inside. Yet this does not mean that the forces of normative heterosexuality do not try to take hold in this alternative space. The space changes however, as different players enter and exit. If Alan leaves, does Merle move in anyway, to give birth to his unwanted child, who

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  125 is nonetheless a descendant of the family and a rightful inheritor, if Flor loses her case. Time changes space too, as Neferti Tadiar observes in her essay on Mendoza’s Serbis and Tirador. It is taking me a long time to get close to Mendoza’s films too. It takes great effort to find them when they screen at festivals, to view them with a theatrical audience and to find them on DVD. Trying to get close to these films to write about their proximity is a struggle. I am also a Filipin@ American immigrant who knows the language, can understand it and also measure the time and distance that separate me from the films. There is something unknowable about them even as I possess a semblance of being an insider to these films. In seeing his films, I am aware of that distance in time and space, which includes not only a physical and historical distance but a cognitive one as well. To account for the social and political contexts does not necessarily guarantee understanding of what may be a close subject. My closeness proves my distance, which a phenomenological viewing of film allows. So much remains unknowable in the film and its representation of the poor. The proximity of the film guarantees a feeling of distance even for viewers who have even a small claim to heritage in these films.

Tirador (Slingshot) (2007) In closing up this chapter, I  briefly meditate on two more films so as to prove further the affliction that grounds the films of Brillante Mendoza. In an emblematic move, Mendoza’s camera follows his subjects through the dank hallways of the Family Theater in Serbis, much more aggressively in the squatter neighborhood of Tirador, and even more stealthily in the dark alleyways of Ma’ Rosa. Tirador is a cinema verité film that follows the endless trials and challenges the slum-​dwelling poor face in urban Manila. Their only reprieve from lives of endless hustling and stealing is the state election candidates’ bribes, where they give out money or arrest people in order to bail them out and create debt, or the church’s religious ceremonies, which hundreds of people attend. Masses are the time when no stealing can occur. Otherwise, all other times and places are fair game, even election night debates. The film follows junkies, jammers, hustlers, and gamblers—​among other groups of the urban poor—​as they barely stay alive in the slums of Manila. The moving camera provides a privileged view and dramatizes frenzied access to slums usually unseen by tourists when visiting Manila. Tirador

126  The Proximity of Other Skins precedes Serbis but employs the same immersion in the slums and the lack of privacy for people who must live among each other as a condition of their poverty. The film follows several characters as the elections for councilman intervene in their everyday lives through the sudden appearance of the police, emphasizing the force of state and capitalist authority that create obstacles in their lives. The narrative arc that the film follows is the affliction people face, which immerses their bodies and psyches totally. Tess is a junkie with no front teeth, whom we first meet as she has sex with her boyfriend, one she shares with another woman whom she fights. Kaloy steals jewelry from women on the street and brazenly throws a gold necklace back to a victim when he realizes it’s fake, accusing her of “wasting his time.” Rex is a pedicab driver who has not paid for its rental in months, risking its confiscation. There is no central protagonist to follow. We are simply dropped into this world as the people struggle to survive. If the film were not to stop, there would be no shortage of characters acting in desperation for us to witness. The camera runs hurriedly across and around the slums, giving glimpse to private scenes where couples have sex in makeshift hovels and babies cry in cramped spaces as their parents consume drugs. It is as if we are being chased in and out of the neighborhood’s makeshift holes where numerous poor people live. The doors barely work, attesting to the proximity of people’s involvement in each other’s lives. In another use of haptic visuality, we remain so close to the subjects on screen as if shooting them walking around crouched in circles. The lighting mimics a flashlight and a flash that creates snapshots of depraved scenes in the slums and tenements. We follow the camera’s navigation into dark passages where people somehow and unexpectedly live. Cleaning supplies flank the outdoor cement sinks that are open to the elements, including passers-​by. Kids walk unsupervised. We are barely oriented. A disembodied voice warns the kids that cops are going to raid and they should go home. The genders of people are hard to make out. In the dark, a group of men appear like old ladies. They stoop to conduct a drug exchange of sorts. Various people in different grades of destitution are introduced such as old drunk men, young aimless children, and junkies and break dancers trying to clear out of the police’s path. The voice-​over yells out, “Drunk again?” without showing us who is speaking. In this rendering of familiarity with the people we see, we are privy to an intimate perspective. In realizing this privileged positioning, we are clearly outsiders to this world even as we are steeped in its dark and dank details.

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  127 When the police arrive, announced by screams of “Raid!,” we now see from their perspective the numerous configurations of disenfranchisement and illegality in the dank labyrinthine living spaces forged in the makeshift structures and the streets. The police threaten to shoot people as suspect people throw out drugs. Tensions are heightened and the camera moves like a blur to stop at two men having sex in a dark corner. They are called disparaging names. A young man fans his sick and disabled father who is sprawled on the bed without a shirt. They complain about his ailments. The police ransack their home and leave. Suddenly, the sick father and doting son get up to uncover the stolen loot they were covering with their scene. A young couple fights ferociously—​one of them is Tess, a frail yet ferocious young woman who is both a beautiful and a toothless hag, fighting for her man. Someone says she is not his legal wife even as she calls him her husband. The chaos is contained when the police call for all the men to gather in the center of the plaza. The raid is actually a political maneuver during election time—​the people are paid off to vote for a particular councilman. If they vote for him, the police say there will be “no more trouble next time.” In this first scene, what is established is the “pandemonium” of poverty. There are ceaseless numbers of people hustling or fighting against the “trouble” of poverty and police-​sanctioned state bullying during fraudulent government elections. A young kid passes by a fight and falls down with a bloody face. The troubles continue and do not end even as scenes escalate. Something else escalates. The bloodied boy later shows up in the film serving food to the man who hit him. Scenes of stealing reveal the desperation of the people and their quality of life. Tess, the young and beautiful toothless hag, presumably a methamphetamine drug addict who has lost her teeth, now walks along the markets selling electronic goods. She casually steals a laptop and slips it in her bag. Caught by the proprietor, she is humiliated and weeps. It is an embarrassing scene to watch. She is crying uncontrollably, and her toothless mouth on a youthful face is jarring to watch. Her frail smallness makes her look vulnerable in the face of angry shopowners. She is in a fearsome situation and while crumbling to the ground she frequently calls up the image of her sick 2-​year-​old baby (who does not exist). Fortunately, the owners let her go and instruct her never to return. Before she leaves, the young woman resteals the laptop without remorse and without hesitation. Stealing reveals the continuous desperation of the poor who must steal. Stealing enables the young and beautiful toothless hag to regain her teeth in

128  The Proximity of Other Skins the form of dentures. On the open air tricycle ride, she smiles while people on the street compliment her beauty or call her a junkie. She is ecstatic, no longer a hag, yelling to the community, “I just paid for my dentures!”—​ presumably from the stolen laptop, explaining her brazen act of stealing immediately after getting caught. The missing teeth certainly aged her and revealed her addiction as one who belongs in the margins of society. Her new smile indicates her pleasure in returning to society. The poverty prevails. When she is washing the dentures, they fall into a drain pipe that lead directly to the dirty water canals under the slums. She once again weeps. It is no longer a performance to get out of trouble. Yet it looks the same: desperate in the sense of life-​or-​death. Rex carries his infant through the dirty alley and is called on by a group of young men who invite him to smoke crack inside a dingy hole. His daughter, in a romper and a long, highly-​perched ponytail, wails and wails as he passes her off to another man. After he takes a hit of the drug, he leaves with his crying daughter. Soon, drug-​induced, we see him obsessively focused on fixing a fan while his baby eats her own feces. When the mom comes home, she fights him over who is responsible for the baby’s hunger. He is so drugged he cannot participate in the fight and simply ignores her. The baby is left to roll all over her own mess—​of vomit and poop. Rex flees and receives an offer to enter his downstairs neighbor’s house for a romp in bed with her. Reminiscent of the feces in Serbis, the baby wallows in the poverty of her surroundings and her father is responsible for ignoring her while her mother is unable to defend her. Another stealing scene reveals further desperation even among those who live in the nicest part of the slums. A teenaged boy is caught in the mall stealing things from the backpack of another boy. His companions abandon him, and the police catch him and beat him up. Bleeding and crying under the desk of the station, reaching a point of desperation similar to Tess, he is released in exchange for revealing the other young thieves or “jammers” with whom he was stealing. To fear for his fate is easy: he looks like an innocent child. When he gives up the stolen things to the policemen, who release him as they count the loot, we realize he is also being preyed upon by the state. He is aware of this as well. It is revealed that there is another backpack full of other loot he has stolen: cell phones and the like. He walks away limping and clearly ready to continue his life of stealing. The film ends with these scenes of stealing that occur at the level of the state. Masses of people on the street listen to the speeches of councilman candidates. They speak of the “hope of the people” or “pagasa ng masa!” The closing scene is an indictment of stealing elections that govern state practice.

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  129 The structures of corruption at the higher level of government occurs in the everyday lives of the masses who are without hope yet are constantly fighting to survive even in these conditions of poverty with no way out. The film’s focus on following the story of affliction as it embraces numerous characters is the main arc of the narrative about a poverty that won’t subside until one dies. I recall the scene with Kaloy, who not only throws back to the young woman her fake necklace but also tries to sell another gold necklace to a dealer. Explaining how his child needs to be fed, he tries to convince the buyer of its worth. At the end, Kaloy forgets about the child when he chooses payment in the form of crystal meth. Stealing is an act performed by the poor in order to survive or to afford pleasure. The representation of stealing does not merely enable us to experience an ethical dilemma or to see the representation of an ethical experience as in cinempathy theorized by Robert Sinnerbrink. Tirador does not focus on one protagonist but instead organizes its narrative on the unified action of the urban poor in order to survive. Rather than character identification or a narrative story, the film illustrates what people do within constraints that shape their lives and limit their choices. There are too many people who live like this and the film can continue without running out of subjects. The film positions spectators as witnesses not only to these subjects who occupy a distant world but also to one’s own transformation in the face of affliction. They must annihilate the universal spectator. In recognizing the bonds that others face—​that there are no ways out of debt, that the state itself is so corrupt, and the church does not help, only the spectator is left to listen to the filmmaker tell this version of the world. It is not for the spectator to identify but for the spectator to experience the trauma and to transform one’s assumptions and expectations of viewing.

Ma’ Rosa (2016) The cinematic theme of no way out, or the lack of a hero who swoops in to save the day, continues in Mendoza’s latest award-​winning film, Ma’ Rosa, starring Jaclyn Jose and Julio Diaz as the couple who run a small neighborhood sari-​sari (variety) store in the slums of Manila. They buy in bulk at a faraway big box store then restock the items at their storefront directly out of their home. The opening scene of Rosa and her son paying for the groceries with every single cent registers poverty as the main drive of the narrative centered on the store called Rosa. It acts as the “front” of the couple’s drug dealing operation, primarily crystal meth. The neighborhood not only counts on the

130  The Proximity of Other Skins store to provide everyday supplies for sale, like toilet paper and soft drinks, but everyone in the neighborhood also seems to depend on them for access to drugs. When Rosa buys dinner from a neighbor who sells home-​cooked fish and rice, she promises to pay him with credit for drugs at her store. At home, her drug supplier is welcomed warmly. They hide the drugs in a small cigar box in an easily accessible and visible shelf at the back wall display of the storefront for it is frequently used in their transactions at the store. Rosa’s three children mill about the neighborhood:  a tall, good-​looking young man who wears an athletic jersey, a light-​skinned young woman wearing nursing student scrubs, and a shorter and skinnier younger brother wearing shorts in the heat of the urban night. A friend of the kids enters the house desperate for drugs. And Rosa instead offers him food. When he begs, she relents. Soon after this transaction, the police raid the family. The timing of their arrest, as signaled by a gesture from the young boy, reveals his betrayal of the family. He gives up the family so the police may release his own brother. When the drugs at Rosa Sari-​Sari (Variety) Store are discovered, the couple is taken to the police station, in an open-​air vehicle that announces their arrest to the neighbors. When they arrive, they are guided to the back and are not booked, for corrupt policemen seek bribes. They ask for them to reveal their drug dealer so that he can help to raise the exorbitant amount as well. In this scene, a young and effeminate gay boy is the corrupt policemen’s servant, facilitating the hostage situation by running errands like picking up chicken or beer. His presence is stressful, for he is small and vulnerable and likely the victim of violence. They call him names. To watch this scene is to remain alert to violence especially towards one who seems most vulnerable for defying both heterosexist machismo and for being so diminutive in size. Yet we discover that the young gay boy brazenly steals from the hostages. Without fear, he is secure in his status as protected by the police. The two youngest children demonstrate their own immersion in affliction for their willingness to betray the family who cares for their well-​being or for boldly stealing among corrupt policemen who already disparage them. The arrest of the parents leads the children to find the money to release them. They ultimately do, but Rosa has to find the miniscule remainder of the money, arranging for her own individual release from the depraved policemen as her family waits for her in the makeshift jail in the basement of the real jail. She secures an unfair deal with the Sikh moneylender (member of another diaspora) who speaks Tagalog. The interest is so severe that it will surely bog the family down without the chance of freedom from debt. The film ends with

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  131 Rosa in close-​up, after she buys a skewer of fish balls from a vendor. As she takes a bite, she looks upon a family—​a man and woman with two small children packing up their mobile store. They look innocent in the sense that they are outside the economy of drugs and the life of affliction. She looks on them without longing, but rather recollecting of a former life without the endless burdens of debt that will never stop. Jaclyn Jose’s performance during this short closing scene alone warrants her Best Actress win at Cannes in 2016. She chews the fishballs bitten off the skewer, trying to fend off her exhaustion and hunger in order to return to her family. Fortifying herself, she must find strength to plow on and continue a cycle of poverty that won’t subside until death claims her and her family. In this latest film and its last scene, Mendoza’s scream for recognition of his people’s affliction continues. Through his films, and the use of production design, he annihilates the universal spectator and universal sexuality through the placement of all in a particular and distinct cultural context and content. The traditional Western viewer, the master of the film, must be annihilated, in order to listen to others.

In Closing In these internationally celebrated films, Brillante Mendoza rewrites the narrative of rescue and shoots the mise-​en-​scene as thoroughly enmeshed in poverty. We are made aware of our expectations of rescue that his filmmaking deliberately will not meet. Hollywood pleasure is refused. The affliction of poverty thoroughly constructs the narrative of the films. It is his politics to demand through his aesthetics of squalor our attention to transform in the face of what his subjects experience. The detailed rendering of the specific impoverishment demands we pay attention in a new way beyond empathy’s feeling with and sympathy’s feeling for. We may identify with this scene as unlike us and this is the basis for our care. One’s very access to the watching of this movie means you are different from it and far away from it because this film did not necessarily reach the people it depicts. We in the West get to see it. Indeed, the Filipino elites may roll their eyes at it and say “Oh God,” while Mendoza himself says “poverty is what he notices everyday.”54 Shared spectatorship means annihilating the self as a demand the committed filmmaker of the poor makes of the Western spectator. Mendoza won’t give them to us entirely though. Ever apparent, his cinematic mediation reminds us of his style and presence, which protects his

132  The Proximity of Other Skins subjects from our consumption and identification despite the details achieved through proximity in his shooting style. We do use our senses and imagine a seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, and smelling of the grime, the filth, and the dirt. Through a multisensorial understanding, we feel the desperation and the hunger. We smell the feces, the urine, the semen and the sweat. We cringe at the baby rolling around in her own excrement on the cold bare ground. We feel the sadness of the gorgeous toothless hag losing her new dentures as they fall into the trench of dirty water passing through the slums. She watches them fall into the overwhelmingly fast water from her second-​floor slum dwelling. The dentures, bought from stealing and the hard work performance and feeling of desperation, are lost so fast. They are so hard-​won, yet now, too enmeshed in the affliction. They cannot be recovered. They cannot be found in the pandemonium of poverty and its boils, bathrooms, and bottles. What can be found in the representation of poverty as political? I have personal history that links me to the country of these films. And my heritage makes the representations not closer, but more clearly distant. These are not the Philippines of my background or my memory. They are the Philippines of a present day, a transformed space and place—​and a different class. Despite my various entries through familiarity and language, it is a place much farther apart from my understanding and from me. Nonetheless, my closeness informs my hunger to see these films. These films are part of the Filipino diaspora, so I am introduced to them in the context of Asian/​American film festivals in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. My encounter with these films at these sites is not outside power and exploitation, which includes the hierarchy of film critics and the lack of diversity among them. The spectators, like me and Roger Ebert, are always racialized and located. Why does Ebert get to be the one who says there is a universal spectator and it is him? And he cannot recognize what can be learned from someone like me, like Mendoza, and other Filipinos who say it’s worth sitting through the film. It is important for Filipin@ American spectators, immigrant, refugee, and U.S. born, to acknowledge the differences between us too, especially in terms of the conditions that are laid bare as distinct and particular to there, the Philippines, where the value of life is different precisely because of the structures that shape the lives, the bodies, and futures of the subjects on screen. This difference is not one that is based on creating a divide between Self and Other, but a matter of acknowledging inequality and differential knowledge between metropole and colony despite what is shared.

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  133 As a Filipin@ American diasporic subject, I  interrogate my own desire for proximity in seeking out these films. I  am not alone in this, as Philippine cinema plays in my local mall and at the three film festivals in San Francisco going on for the past 24  years with FACine by the curator Mauro Tumbucon, almost 10 years at the Yerba Buena Center (2010–​2017) and the past 2  years with the new festival called Cinematografo by The Filipino Channel. Different registers of spectatorship resonate according to our structural locations and our conceptual maps of history and cinema itself. Compassionate spectatorship develops from the knowledge about one’s power to recognize both sameness and difference in one’s identification with a film and its characters. Brillante Mendoza’s films present scenes of intimacy—​whether in sex, stealing, or other relational acts beyond these moments. And through them—​the bottle, the reels, the projector, the walls of the theater, the woman’s purse, and the goat—​shows how our individual desires and dreams are shaped by the strength of the circumstances that hold us down or enable us to rise. Shared spectatorship is what Mendoza attempts to foment in his filmmaking. He prevents spectators from achieving full mastery of his characters and instead always reminds us of his mediation as a filmmaker presenting and protecting his subjects from our consumption and cannibalism. The lives his subjects lead are always teetering on the edge of demise as they are burdened with the heavy weight of institutions bearing down on their survival. He does not merely humanize his subjects as he shows their dehumanization in the affliction that drowns them every day. He expands our idea of what we can survive when witnessing through his films what people endure. In this process, our own constraints and lack thereof are more obvious to us as the suffering of others, perhaps. This is my hope, which is why the experience of these films is worthwhile even as we acknowledge the limits of what we can truly learn from them. The filmmaker certainly comes into view. From the experience of a more shared and humble rather than universal and self-​centered spectatorship, a kind of ethical intimacy emerges that is about the refusal of transcendence. Power is mapped out between Western critics who claim universal spectatorship that dismisses the urgent voice of affliction the Filipino filmmaker brings to the global scene of cinema. Power is mapped out between diasporic Filipin@x audiences too and what we are trying to get close to in these films. History? Memory? Nostalgia? Diasporic spectators need to rethink our desire for proximity to representations of “homeland” and racialized subjects who look like us. To do so produces a theory of shared spectatorship

134  The Proximity of Other Skins that takes at its heart the idea that acknowledging distance and difference in the act of viewing is both ethical and necessary when filmmakers from the Global South speak directly to the West about what they want you to learn not about them but about yourself. What we learn will matter to them. In the next chapter, I evaluate the films The Housemaid (2010) and The Handmaiden (2016) to discuss intimate scenes in terms of romantic and other forms of sex, love, and care across difference and inequality as well as sameness and alliance. Why does the power differential get exercised through sex in relations between masters and servants? In studying internationally celebrated films about domestic workers in Korea then and now, I focus on both sexual intimacy and the emotional intimacy that arises from the everyday care work by domestic workers and their sexualization by their masters. I show the minutiae of nurturing, emotions, and other feelings that develop between the family and the worker through the proximity of intimate care work between radically unequal subjects in the proximity of domesticity. Yet, the intimacy achieved is used to devalue the lives of others when their needs are not only negated but exploited so as to harm them or in some cases, lead to fantasy-​wish-​dream lives in a true deployment of the power of cinema to explain some of the complexities of love, sex, and desire across difference and inequality.

Notes 1. See Jessica Zafra, “The Things We Don’t Want to See,” PhilStar, June 12, 2009 (www. philstar.com/​young-​star/​476341/​things-​we-​don’t-​want-​see), accessed September 24, 2017. 2. Neferti X. Tadiar, “Life-​Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism,” Social Text, Vol. 31, No. 2 (115) (Summer 2013), pp. 19–​48. 3. Amelie Hastie, “Cinema of Compassion,” Lola Journal, No. 4:  Walks, August 2013 (http://​www.lolajournal.com/​4/​compassion.html), accessed on February 1, 2019. 4. “There will be critics who fancy themselves theoreticians, who will defend this unbearable experience, and lecture those plebians like me who missed the whole Idea.” Roger Ebert, “Cannes #4: What Were They Thinking Of?,” published on May 16, 2009 (http://​www.rogerebert.com/​rogers-​journal/​cannes-​4-​what-​were-​they-​thinking-​of), accessed on September 28, 2017. 5. Brillante Mendoza in the Press Conference for Kinatay at Cannes Film Festival (https://​www.festival-​cannes.com/​en/​films/​kinatay), accessed on October 29, 2018. 6. Joselito Acosta, “Honor Roll,” p. 2 (https://​annaisabelle.wordpress.com/​2008/​06/​20/​ honor-​roll/​), last accessed on March 30, 2019.

The Compassion of Shared Spectatorship  135 7. Acosta, “Honor Roll,” p. 2. 8. Simone Weil, “Human Personality” in Selected Essays, 1934–​1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2015), p. 28. 9. Brillante Mendoza, in conversation with the Filipino newspaper at the Press Conference for Kinatay at Cannes Film Festival (https://​www.festival-​cannes.com/​ en/​films/​kinatay). 10. Ibid.,  5:45. 11. Ibid.,  9:01. 12. Ibid.  20:27. 13. Maggie Lee, “Empty,” published on May 18, 2009 (http://​www.hollywoodreporter. com/​news/​film-​review-​kinatay-​84186), accessed September 28, 2017. 14. Jay Weissberg, “Kinatay: An Unpleasant Journey into a Brutal Heart of Darkness,” Variety, May 17, 2009 (http://​variety.com/​2009/​film/​markets-​festivals/​kinatay-​ 1117940277/​), accessed September 28, 2017. 15. Jessica Zafra, “A Filipino Director Dares Viewers Not to Look Away,” Newsweek, June 11, 2009 (http://​www.newsweek.com/​filipino-​director-​dares-​viewers-​not-​look-​ away-​80465), accessed on September 28, 2017. 16. Interestingly, the film also won Best Film and Best Director at the prestigious Philippine Gawad-​Urian Awards that same year. 17. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 18. Macho Dancer, directed by Lino Brocka, performance by Daniel Fernando (Philippines:  Award Film, Special People Productions and Viva Films, 1988); and The World of Suzie Wong, directed by Richard Quine, performance by Nancy Kwan (United Kingdom and United States: World Enterprises, World Film and Paramount British Productions, 1961). 19. Laura Marks, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” Screen, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Winter 1998), at p. 341. 20. Mendoza, Press Conference for Kinatay, 11:20. 21. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: Rutledge Classics, 2002), p. 81. 22. Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics:  Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 9. 23. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 70. 24. Weil, “Human Personality,” p. 28. 25. Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 82. 26. Ibid., p. 212. 27. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” A speech delivered on April 4, 1967 in New York, NY (https://​kinginstitute.stanford.edu/​king-​papers/​documents/​beyond-​ vietnam), accessed on March 30, 2019. 28. J. B. Capino, Dream Factories of a Former Colony (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota, 2010). 29. Mayenne Carmona, “‘Insiang’ Revisited,” Published on August 18, 2007 (http://​ beta.philstar.com/​lifestyle/​modern-​living/​2007/​08/​18/​13638/​lsquoinsiangrsquo-​ revisited), accessed on September 28, 2017.

136  The Proximity of Other Skins 30. Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, The Philippines Reader:  A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987). 31. Raissa Robles, Marcos Martial Law: Never Again (Philippines: Filipinos for a Better Philippines, 2016). 32. Andrew Glazer, “Duterte’s War on Drugs through a Local Photographer’s Eyes,” New  York Times, March 27, 2017 (https://​lens.blogs.nytimes.com/​2017/​03/​27/​ dutertes-​war-​on-​drugs-​through-​a-​local-​photographers-​eyes/​), accessed on October 4, 2017. 33. Brillante Mendoza shot the inauguration of President Rodrigo Duterte. 34. Agamben, Homo Sacer. 35. See Zafra, “A Filipino Director Dares Viewers Not to Look Away.” 36. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 166. 37. Laura Marks, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” Screen, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Winter 1998). In this essay, Marks describes how “the eyes themselves function like organs of touch,” p. 332. 38. Ibid., p. 345. 39. Elena Oumano, Cinema Today: A Conversation with Thirty-​Nine Filmmakers from Around the World (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), p. 19. 40. Marks, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” p. 341. 41. See Zafra, “The Things We Don’t Want to See.”. 42. Elizabeth Povinelli, Empire of Love (Durham, Duke University Press, 2006), p. 59. 43. Ibid.,  p. 73. 44. Ibid., p 88. 45. Arniel Serato, “Kristoffer King on What He’s Willing to Do for Fame and Money,” published on August 5, 2012 (http://​www.pep.ph/​news/​35184/​kristoffer-​king-​on-​ what-​he39s-​willing-​to-​do-​for-​fame-​and-​money-​sa-​ngayon-​siguro-​kahit-​patulayin-​ ako-​), accessed on September 28, 2017. 46. Marks, “Video Haptics and Erotics,” p. 332. 47. Ibid., pp. 335–​336. 48. Ibid., p. 332. 49. Ibid., p. 333. 50. Ibid., p. 338. 51. Ibid., p. 344. 52. Povinelli, Empire of Love, p. 13. 53. “‘Just Let Us Be’: Discrimination against LGBT Students in the Philippines,” Human Rights Watch, June 21, 2017 (https://​www.hrw.org/​report/​2017/​06/​21/​just-​let-​us-​be/​ discrimination-​against-​lgbt-​students-​philippines), accessed on September 28, 2017. 54. See Zafra, “The Things We Don’t Want to See.”

4 Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage Performing Roles and Breaking Rules between Masters and Servants in The Housemaid (2011) and The Handmaiden (2016)

Unlike the slum-​ dwelling subjects alienated within Filipino society in Brillante Mendoza’s films of the previous chapter, in the two Korean films I  study here, women experience relations of inequality within fantasy domains of extreme wealth and luxury. This is no longer the kind of inequality that occurs between distant subjects in completely different geographic areas impacted by global capitalism. In the context of these films, the lives of impoverished subjects play out in private plentiful spaces shaped by contemporary neoliberalism or historic colonialism. In these representations of the socially and economically powerful interacting with the servile class, the rich demonstrate their power through psychic and physical relationships. While in Mendoza’s films the poor are disposable, in the two films I analyze here they are interchangeable in the eyes and hands of the wealthy. Even so, these relations are ultimately upended or laid bare by intimate eruptions between unlikely subjects. Both films use as their inspiration cultural texts from other times and places. In The Housemaid (2011), Im Sang-​soo remakes Kim Ki-​ yung’s film from 1960, but sets it within the phenomenal wealth resulting from neoliberal capital accumulation in Korea today. And The Handmaiden (2016), Park Chan-​wook’s interpretation of the Victorian novel Fingersmith (2002), by Sarah Waters, is set in historical Korea during Japanese colonial occupation in the early part of the 20th century. The films each focus on sexual and intimate relations—​between a master and servant in The Housemaid, and a mistress and her maid in The Handmaiden—​not only revealing the precarity of the characters’ divided roles but also providing an opportunity to interrupt, pause, and recast those roles. While one film ends

138  The Proximity of Other Skins with death as the only way out of suffering, the other ends with the hope and possibility of a world that can change when subjects take on new identities. When the masters and servants in both films perform multiple roles, in what I call the “embodied montage,” they attempt to undo the rigid strictures of mastery and servitude. In a sense, they perform the very process of identity: losing and finding oneself. These gaps in their performances cause “intimate eruptions,” the creation of small openings in the fabric of mastery and servitude where they establish character among their choices of self, and where roles come together or eclipse each other. In these films, mastery demands a certain order that both masters and servants do not always adhere to. Behaviors do not necessarily match the expected roles. As a result, physical and psychic eruptions occur at both expected and unexpected sites: through sensory experiences, the deployment of violence by enemies and allies, and the looming threat of madness and suicide as the only way out of patriarchal sadism. Ultimately, what they learn from intimate eruptions is the identity they wish to pursue. I refer to the relationships represented in both of these films as one between masters and servants because they explicitly exceed the employer and employee arrangement. Due to the intimate setting of the labor transpiring in the home of the masters, the hours the servants are bonded to seem ceaseless, especially since they live at their place of work and their own homes are located so far away. Set in the master’s house, these films attend to the permeable borders of being on and off work as being on and off stage for masters and servants both, albeit unequally, wherein the masters’ surveillance of the servant is a wielding of power. I also consider these relationships of mastery and servitude given the films’ representation of the brutal control of the global rich over the impoverished that seems not only over the top but also antiquated. The servants live in their homes, so the masters’ demonstration of power over them seems redundant, unnecessary, and excessive in its form of ongoing brutality. Precisely because of the films’ approaches to representing labor performatively, I turn to sociologist Erving Goffman and his framework of staging the body at work. In his classic book The Presentation of the Self (1961), Goffman studies the face-​to-​face encounter across various social scenarios. Using the framework of performance, he discusses how someone prepares for an interaction by conducting research on the person with whom one is interacting to inform their own self-​presentation. A person uses that “initial information” to define the “situation and [start] to build up lines of responsive action.”1 Once the

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  139 relationship is defined in the case of masters and servants who cross borders through sex and intimacy, the relationship becomes “untenable, and the participants find themselves lodged in an interaction for which the situation has been wrongly defined and is now no longer defined . . . the face-​to-​face interaction breaks down.”2 This is what I identify as an “eruption” in master–​ servant relations where the established distance between employer and employee (when the subjects cross into intimacy that produces confusing feelings) interrupts the established boundaries of their work contract. As in the previous chapter, however, the context never ceases, so the inequality in their relations feeds the eroticism in these scenes. According to Goffman, social roles are “enactments of rights and duties attached to a given status.”3 When it comes to masters and servants, the power dynamic depends on whether those serving have the “moral right to expect that others will value and treat [them] in an appropriate way.”4 This is precisely the issue that guides my study of these films: how should the poor expect to be treated, especially by masters who consider it a moral imperative to prioritize their own needs and perspectives over those of their servants? In this chapter, my concern regards the moment when relationships between masters and servants erupt so as to answer this question. I will explore how disruptions to socially established and acceptable roles redefine in order to form the opportunity for ethical relations in the face of intimate inequality. And since the subjections disrupted are determined not only by class but also by gender and ethnicity at the site of the sex act, the feminist intervention there is especially of concern. When we approach the other and consider what we want from them, we are considering how to perform and what roles to take on. This is unavoidable to consider: if I am the one to speak a complaint in Western places of work, my speech occurs within the context of a world wherein women of color are angry. Even if I choose to speak without looking at everyone, while choosing to look down, and speak quietly, the reception of my voice may still be considered antagonistic for it is an available identity circulating rampantly in society. So I could deploy an ally to speak the complaint in ways that are listened to with patience. In this way, the performances of roles teach us about ourselves: our place in society and how to maintain or change our place. It is how we come to know ourselves, what we want and what we can have, as these films dramatize. Goffman defines performance as “all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on

140  The Proximity of Other Skins the observers.”5 Consciousness about how to impress the other, or how to express one’s regard for the other, enters the relation. He asks us to pay attention to how verbal language may not necessarily agree with one’s bodily expression. I build from his work to say: if they even agree—​quiet speech, bowing gesticulations—​it won’t matter if the perception of anger prevents their being seen as anything but. Your interlocutor may say you speak too loudly even if you are whispering. Or that the food you made is delicious but barely eat any of it. An observer may see verbal self-​presentation as intentional, while other bodily expressions are less governable and can then be used to “check the validity” of the more governable expression. Indeed, Goffman identifies how a “fundamental asymmetry is demonstrated in the communication process.”6 Moreover, I extend his argument to note how the context and archive matter in terms of perception and how the experience of the event is eventually narrated. If the predominantly available narrative allows for easy acceptance of limited versions of the subject—​angry woman of color—​the asymmetry has severe implications. In this, the observer functions like the theorist/​critic of a film—​as viewers we can observe interactions and even see through the camera, from a perspective outside the film. My revision of Goffman then is in the signification of the body as determined by archives and contexts. What this makes clear, in terms of the significance of my revision of Goffman’s work, is that the body is governable too, like speech. People can outright lie, and so can bodies. The way one walks or stands is also disciplined and created, as is the process of choosing what to say in the context of the scene. This means that the bodily voice is not an authentic one that always defies the spoken voice. Thus, I am interested in the eruption that occurs when roles and characters are overtaken by another role or character within the same person in the film, and with different goals and ideas—​what I call an embodied montage—​wherein we see different dimensions found within the same character cutting into each other. When they do so, we see their coexistence in the scene. These identities may coexist or compete, making evident how characters in these films are performing multiple roles, and within these roles there are very real desires that occur across different interests that are determined by social inequalities. What becomes apparent is how multiple desires exist in one character. And our presence further complicates the movie, given that we as viewers see the characters from our perspective and how they think and behave away from others. In this chapter, I wrestle with embodied montage in how I evaluate two films made by Korean filmmakers. These films circulate transnationally and

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  141 are well known for the sex acts they represent between people who occupy the roles of master and slave. Goffman’s framework helps illustrate just how rigidly the master and servant are portrayed and performed in both these films. Adhering to their assigned characters and roles is tricky and challenging, however. And when they fail, they enable eruptions that threaten the systems of mastery and servitude. Thus, when incoherencies and inconsistencies in character question the expectations placed on women in servitude, these eruptions offer the possibility of new ethical relations. In my formulation of the concept of intimate eruptions, I offer a reading that thinks about what happens when those who are subjected to power experience proximity to their masters. The films’ eruptions occur precisely because of tensions that arise when people who are separated by the physical and psychic borders of inequality exist in such close proximity that they permeate or cross those boundaries.

The Housemaid As a feminist intervention that calls for a sharing of spectatorship, I interrupt your viewing of this film to prioritize the unexpected centrality of sex, smelling, slapping, and suicide as what will reveal violence against women and provide both a critique and a way out of class and gendered sadism represented in this film. This version of events, my reading of this film, is an interruption of the limited views that dominate film criticism. Once again, my spectatorship as a woman of color contrasts rather pointedly with predominantly male critics who review the film. Their readings must not be universalized in a world where white Western male views dominate the framing of films. These critics don’t quite get the allegiances between women in the films as the way out of their subjection. They see the competition between women in relation to men, as is the case in Roger Ebert and A. O. Scott’s review of The Housemaid.7 They recognize the master’s seduction as rape, yet render women’s relations as entirely competitive. These unexpected alliances between women constitute an ethical intervention in these films, both from Korea and both made by men. In my viewing, I insist on privileging the perspective of women so that we may learn and listen from across the distance. Im Sang-​soo’s The Housemaid remakes the 1960 film of the same name by Kim Ki-​young. Unlike the original film’s focus on the middle class, the new film is set in the realm of stratospheric wealth inhabited by a self-​anointed

142  The Proximity of Other Skins superior breed of people who treat their household help sadistically. They take pleasure in commanding them to serve all their needs in a mansion located in a snowy, forested region of Korea occupied by modernist architectural structures. In this film, I evaluate the ways in which performances of mastery and servitude occur through the multiple roles revealed in the embodied montage, the use of smell and taste, the bodily choreography and the production design—​or the settings and properties of the film’s language. I attend to these cinematic vocabularies so as to make sense of how intimate eruptions present challenges to masters and servants who transgress the borders of their relationships. It helps me to make sense of how the servant upends the system of mastery in place. In Im’s The Housemaid, a young woman from the urban working poor named Lee Eun-​yi enters the theater of the Goh family as a new nanny for yet unborn twins and a kindergarten-​aged girl named Nami. Both the master and mistress regard themselves as kind. The older maid, Mrs. Cho, contradicts this version of the masters’ narrative. With her eye-​rolling, she warns us as viewers and Eun-​yi, who does not seem to notice. Meanwhile, Eun-​yi establishes a bond with Nami by playing with her sweetly. As the housemaid learns the household and her role in it, the master seduces and impregnates her. I use the word “seduce” to describe a more challenging situation of rape: he leads her astray from their separate paths of mastery and servitude and crosses over to a new realm within their shared space. He is there to play and experience bodily pleasure from a subordinate who must serve him sexually. While he is particularly clear about his intent, he is also nonchalant, in stark contrast to the confusion she experiences in his pursuit of pleasure with and through her. Her hesitation and trepidation transforms as she literally plunges her face into his crotch, murmuring love for his smell. Their class difference fuels their sexual encounter on screen in his casual taking of pleasure and her palpable fear. The class crossing is significant in the world of the film, for Mrs. Cho betrays Eun-​yi to the mistress and her mother, who then attempt to kill her so as to terminate her pregnancy. Such is the lack of value of her life. The housemaid fails to nourish her pregnancy in the face of her mistress’s wrath. That is, she miscarries due to the physical and psychic violence she endures from the mistress and her mother. Her pregnancy fails when she is given a daily drink that expunges the fetus rather than nurtures it. When the master discovers this eruption of social roles in his house (where the employers torment and torture rather than sponsor and support employees) he attempts to discipline the women. The housemaid

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  143 goes mad, and with her besieged body attempts to interrupt the legacy of entitlement the master’s family holds most dear.

Staging and Sensing Hierarchies: The Smell of Mise-​en-​Scene In the established world of The Housemaid, masters are anxious about maintaining their power in the Hegelian sense of insecurely needing validation from those they subjugate. When the housemaid Eun-​yi first arrives at the Goh home, the wife and mistress Hae-​ra is introduced as a cherubic young mother who takes care of her youthful body by practicing yoga privately with an instructor at home. She prepares for a natural childbirth for her twins and finds her role of mother validating and deserving of every indulgence. When her husband Hoon reminds her that the doctors will do whatever he asks, he expresses concern for her readiness. She wields her role as a mother to answer him. “Of course, I am the mother.” She speaks in the same entitled manner about her identity as the mistress throughout the film. But it is an unstable identity that she constantly protects by verbally articulating it and claiming it. Even in sex, she is anxious about meeting her husband’s needs. She nervously protects her autonomy from her mother, who attempts to control her life, including her servants. Since Hae-​ra has known her head housemaid, Mrs. Cho, since girlhood, she worries that the servant regards her not as a woman but a girl. Despite her excessive wealth and power, the mistress acts as if her position is precarious and must be asserted diligently, lest all forget who she is (including herself). She is insecure in her mastery. Servants too, in a revision of the Hegelian dialectic, are anxious about their roles in an isolating world of wealth that exhaustively determines their lives. The head maid Mrs. Cho stands by Hae-​ra with a tray as she expresses her appreciation for Eun-​yi’s coming to be her twins’ nanny. Mrs. Cho has neglected to tell Eun-​yi that there is more than one baby. Cho apologizes to Hae-​ra and promises to renegotiate the terms of Eun-​yi’s employment. In these two examples, we see that Eun-​yi has the ability to renegotiate her compensation and responsibilities at her new job. But we soon see that her value as a worker is based on her becoming a masochist to her mistress’s sadism. Hae-​ra airily commands her to go to the laundry and find her underwear to hand wash. As Eun-​yi sifts through the laundry basket in a wide two-​ shot, we see a close-​up of Hae-​ra’s face enjoying how Eun-​yi must touch her

144  The Proximity of Other Skins urine-​soaked underwear. She relegates Eun-​yi to the realm of putrid smell while distinguishing herself from it. Eun-​yi’s resignation means Hae-​ra’s pleasure is not derived from the servant’s reaction; Eun-​yi’s occupation of the role provides it. Regarding the commodification of sense experience, Laura Marks argues that the poor, such as the people who live and work in the movie theater in Serbis in the previous chapter, often have to endure the proximal sense of smell. Marks points to how the “very rich and the very poor” experience “an inequity of sense experience.”8 Smell, in particular, is an “impoverished experience [as] poor people are more likely to live with odors that index real events.”9 This is the case for Eun-​yi, who must touch the urine of her pregnant mistress among other contact with the masters’ bodily grime such as fully crouching inside the bathtub to wipe off the scum. In contrast, Hae-​ra enjoys pleasant smells, such as that of the lavender in her breakfast tray or the flowers in her sitting room, that the servants provide for her. She consumes the fragrantly pleasing smells of her class and distances herself from the unrefined and offensive smells her servants are subjected to, even if they are her own. Staining Eun-​yi with the smell of her bodily waste brings Hae-​ra sadistic pleasure. The glimpse into Hae-​ra’s pointed treatment of Eun-​yi allows us to understand the way the powerful masters control sensory experience for their servants. Cinema often conveys observable human dynamics through sight, touch, or sound. The haptic turn that a phenomenological approach to understanding the way cinema affects its audiences helps us to attend to the senses of smell and taste as well. Less obvious, smell is usually relegated to the animal as a form of sense perception. In this film, however, smell is a metaphor for intimacy between unequal subjects, and it presents the distinction of smell between masters and servants with an exaggerated theatricality that dramatizes well their power dynamics. Hoon lives an indulgent life exemplified in his nightly consumption of fine wine. A connoisseur, he examines the bottle approvingly, sensuously smells its distinct quality, and makes shameless slurping noises as he savors the taste. This ritual is both a performance and a celebration of his individuality as an extremely wealthy person and his power to not only buy such indulgences but also enjoy them. It is a luxury he shares with his wife, telling her to try it, and if she wants more they can get some from his father’s house, indicating his privileged upbringing and continued support from his wealthy family. Hae-​ra spends her days receiving yoga instruction from teachers who visit her at home or indulgently peruses large art books while lounging on a sofa. Notably, it is a

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  145 Henri Matisse painting of Icarus that she looks at while instructing Eun-​yi to wash her underwear. As the myth of Icarus goes, he flew too close to the sun, which led to his downfall, despite his wings. It is a comment on her sadism here as a force that will lead to her own demise, just as Mr. Goh’s arrogance will lead to his. When Mr. Goh first meets Eun-​yi in his living room, his self-​presentation embodies an elegant propriety. He calls her Ms. Lee and politely asks her to sit down on one of his many luxurious chairs. He spreads his body languorously in front of her, looking very relaxed in his suit as he drapes his lean and long body across the expensive sofa. He then embarks on what feels like an important ritual. He is rather smug when he says what seems rather polite: “I have nothing to say in particular. But you’ll be raising my kids and cooking the food I’ll eat. You are an important person and I should greet you properly.” I describe his bodily choreography alongside this self-​ congratulatory declaration of his propriety, to emphasize how he uses wine and the luxurious furniture to emphasize his status, a bodily speech of arrogance and superiority that counteracts his verbal narration of kindness. Mrs. Cho rolls her eyes at this ceremony, subverting his feigned show of respect for the worker who recently joins his house. The older maid’s performance reveals he is not to be trusted, even as he calls Mrs. Cho “Madam” when instructing her to bring him wine, at which point she rolls her eyes again. In the kitchen, Eun-​yi expresses surprise that Mr. Goh refers to her with such reverence,” Mrs. Cho clarifies that he does so, only “when he feels like it.” In this comment, she relays to Eun-​yi that this is simply a performance of respect performed at whim. It has nothing to do with what the servants do or if they warrant consideration as employees; the master simply decides how he wants to treat them depending on his mood. It is a warning that his is a performance aimed at the situation of the present. It is unreliable and should be suspected. Indeed, Hoon and Hae-​ra’s daughter, Nami, affirms this power dynamic between masters and servants. When Eun-​yi compliments her nice and polite manners, Nami says that her own expression of respect is actually motivated by “putting herself first.” It is a strategy her father teaches her, she says. Eun-​yi further compliments Nami by saying, “You are lucky to have a father teach you such things.” This is a revelatory statement. Eun-​yi clearly did not have a father teach her from the perspective of an arrogant rich man. She also does not teach Nami that her self-​serving politeness is actually cruel to people like her, those who do not have such class privilege and who must serve the rich. Eun-​yi adheres to the order Mr. Goh establishes himself when

146  The Proximity of Other Skins serving his daughter. That is, she does not criticize the version of the world that he presents, even if it is deceptive toward people like her. She accepts the terms in which he presents the world to Nami, without inserting her own perspective. This power dynamic is crucial to establish; privilege and entitlement are taught, and a compliant servile class ensures them. Both are required for mastery and servitude to continue. The order of things is apparent when we first see Nami descend from her chauffeur-​driven shiny black car in a Burberry-​style black trench coat that is belted and buttoned up, an unusually adult look for a child. Unsmiling, she proceeds up the grand staircase to her room. She seems to mimic her father in her purposeful walk that seems accustomed to or ready to lead an entourage. She is immediately attended to by Eun-​yi, who cheerfully and playfully follows her upstairs and along the long hallway, making funny faces. Nami remains unmoved by Eun-​yi’s friendly and fan-​like overtures. When asked if she likes the new nanny, Nami responds to her mom by saying: “She likes me a lot . . . I can tell from her face.” This is an interesting understanding regarding Eun-​yi’s juvenile performance as emotional expression of affection, and perhaps Nami’s inability to know her privileged place in the world (that requires servants to expend emotion for money) even as she knows how to occupy it. Or this is how Nami observes and expresses her knowledge of the hierarchy of the household, including her place in it as the one who is served and that of the others who cater to her. When her mother instructs Mrs. Cho to prepare breakfast, Nami instructs Eun-​yi to do the same. While theirs is a playful and laughter-​filled interaction, we see that the role of servant and master is a generational order learned early on in life. We later learn that the driving force of the female adults in the master’s family is ensuring the mastery of the next generation. Their similar bodily comportment indicates that Hoon is indeed teaching his daughter how to perform mastery. It is an embodied performance. She walks purposefully toward her room, with a plan to go there first, to wash up, before dinner. Her father walks similarly. He knows where he is going and won’t be interrupted. Her carriage is self-​possessed, as is his. She sits properly in the sitting room like a princess, while her father reclines like a king. In each of their postures and gaits, wealth is an embodied performance that one learns from their parents. They make other people do things with their posture of expectation. So far, I have spoken of the ethical order of things as it is established by different sensory experiences and the bodily choreography performed by

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  147 masters and slaves in relation to each other. One expects to be served by others and one expects to serve others. A third component is the production design or the locations, properties, and objects that establish the space on screen, and in this world, it is powerful in eroticizing service to the rich. They live in extravagant settings, typified by the palatial home that resembles a museum where a multitude of people can gather but only a very small family lives. This is in direct contrast to the capsules where Eun-​yi previously lived in the city, where too many people occupy so little space. From the outside, the Goh home is an edifice that feels important once you arrive there. The grounds are manicured and well lit, as if the people who live there walk on high-​fashion runways or are on display in an empty and expansive gallery. It also looks secure and impenetrable, intimidating just to look at. Is this a museum? Is this a hotel? The riches entail a smell to it: this pristine and empty place must be pleasantly fragrant versus the stink of the crowded and dirty city. It is also located at a distance so that strangers are clearly out of place. Later we see it is hard to leave this place and hard to enter, too. I describe the details of this place in order to establish my own spectatorship so that readers cannot but see and experience the film as I do, which is that it is an elaborate stage for performance. Inside it is all stark luxury. The place is so large that a camera can be placed on a crane, with expansive room to move above. We see the maid Eun-​yi hopping across large expanses of white floor in her black shiny uniform made of expensive fabric. There are rooms set up like a stage: where the master looks majestic playing Beethoven on a blue elevated platform. He is harmoniously framed in a symmetrical composition where two identical lamps flank his grand piano while the maid serves tea and acts as his audience. A large sitting room adjoins the master bedroom where the couple gathers. They lean their hegemonically beautiful bodies on to each other, with his head on her lap as and their daughter sits separately on a chest. They look like a European painting of a wealthy family in their living room. The bathroom is a large stage for the white tub on a bed of black rocks that absorbs the overflow of water. The kitchen is enormous with a large island to set up breakfast trays full of food. Mrs. Cho puts a cup of berries next to a cup of root-​vegetable salad and a plate of fish. The tea finds its designated spot. Two shakes of black pepper. Even if the masters are not there to witness the servant’s painstakingly meticulous labor, their expectations demand it. The space instructs the servants to perform their roles. The camera captures the wealthy family’s wielding of their power while the lavish display presents a critique of the

148  The Proximity of Other Skins ostentatious capital accumulation, where the food and the people making it are objectified. The Goh family home looks like a stage for the rich to watch the poor serve them, or for the poor to play the audience fawning over their masters’ superiority. The maids cannot be seen in anything other than their uniforms. The rich always look spectacular, even at home, just as they do outside in furs and other expensive material. The housemaids, too, look like they belong on a haute-​couture runway. Their uniforms make them part of the setting for the masters, similar to the other expensive objects in their lavish mansion. One uniform is a white oxford shirt that has a large belt or corset-​like bandage of the same fabric stretched across the waist. This is worn over a tight, black pencil skirt. Another uniform is a black dress made out of a shiny, coated fabric. The effect of all these uniforms is the same—​haute couture for cleaning grime. Moreover, these costumes function in a space that is theatrical in terms of being removed from the everyday world. Eun-​yi’s uniforms contrast with the everyday clothing she wore in the city streets before she came to work for the Goh family. In one scene she wears jeans while sporting a teddy-​bear-​style poofy youthful jacket whose blue and beige colors of sky and earth refer to a larger world. Eun-​yi revels in the outdoor peace of the city as she stands on her rooftop rails looking at the view. In contrast, in the Goh home, we do not know where we are. The snowy, manicured surroundings are exclusive and located far away from the knowable city. This isolated place clearly has its own rules, which are determined by the rich who control Eun-​yi’s life within a severe and evident setting of mastery and servitude. This starkness makes the intimate eruptions, or gaps in mastery and servitude, more revealing. Taste is at work in this as well, particularly in the consumption of expensive food that the masters don’t finish eating. The food is relegated to waste and excess. It is not valuable for the masters, who do not consume a lot of it. They relegate it as scraps that the servants recognize as special extravagance. When the servants partake in their leftovers, their wish to luxuriate comes into view, especially when it is consumed with wine in a way that mimics how the masters highly regard it. One night, when the family does not finish their food, the servants sit around the kitchen island eating the leftover oysters. Mrs. Cho actually says it is better to eat, since the food gets thrown away as she takes a beautiful glass and fills it with wine for herself, after pouring most of it in a decanter for Mr. Goh. She impatiently instructs Eun-​yi to take up the tray of the

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  149 wine and a beautiful arrangement of small bites to the couple upstairs. As Eun-​yi departs, the shot widens to frame Mrs. Cho, the movement emphasizing the stage-​like setting as she remains seated on the kitchen island, like a queen, cross-​legged and drinking the expensive wine. As she holds up the glass in her hand, it is clear she is no longer working, but enjoying the luxury her job affords her. This is an eruption of the black-​and-​white world of mastery and slavery—​she refutes servile behavior while in the domestic sphere of the master. And appreciates and consumes the wine like her master. Wine represents class distinction between masters and servants, so when Mrs. Cho drinks it while perched on the kitchen counter like a throne, its consumption represents a class-​crossing enabled by their shared space and the privacy of the kitchen for the servants to express their wishes for enjoyment. When Mrs. Cho orders Eun-​ yi out of the kitchen, which she has transformed from a place of labor to one of leisure, we see that the private interactions among the servants are also hierarchical. That is, the relationship between the masters is also hierarchical between the man and woman in ways that extend more aggressively to the help. Upstairs, the family sits together while discussing the household help. Hae-​ra tells Hoon that their new nanny has a “major in Early Childhood Education.” His reply speaks volumes about this Master of the Universe’s regard for Eun-​yi. He says, “What does that have to do with raising kids?” Her childlike nature is what is “good, she will get along with the kids.” He values her as a child-​like innocent versus her training and education. It is as if she is actually a child herself versus a professional employee, so he is essentially dividing the world into “us versus most of the world that serves me.” It is a very black-​and-​white distinction between the classes of masters and servants, rather than simply a contractual employer/​employee relation that is less commandeering of servants’ entire lives. While smell and taste establish the proximity of masters to servants and reveal the hierarchies that organize their existence as threatening, the bodily choreography and spatial occupation of the masters also help to establish and maintain their mastery. And the production design reminds us of the stage where performances of mastery are made and unmade. So far, the eruptions I have identified are minor yet necessary to the major eruption of sex and violence that transpires later in the film. While they live together, the nearness portends their coming together across the large gap their roles represent. A pregnancy then leads to violence and sex that make their bodies collide into an eruption that upends the whole world of the film.

150  The Proximity of Other Skins

Sex: Bodily Eruptions Sex brings bodies together in ways that wreak havoc on privately and publicly defined roles. While away on vacation with the family and the nanny, a spa day for the family concludes with Hae-​ra straddling Hoon in their bedroom. She faces away from his chest, toward his feet. She says, “Not so deep. I think we should stop.” His face expresses disappointment, but as he taps her behind and moves her off him it changes to an expression of patience. She says she will use her mouth. The shot changes and is now taken from directly above, as she fellates him. The shot reveals his fit body in a particular pose that he takes on when experiencing pleasure, with his arms flexing on each side as if performing a shoulder press, showing his front double biceps and six-​pack abs with her hair and body covering his crotch. His pose defines sexuality as gendered power by men over women that is made especially apparent when the master approaches the maid for more service, in the form of penetrative genital sex his wife was just now unable to provide him. After this somewhat failed sex scene between the married couple transpires, we see Eun-​yi downstairs in the servants’ quarters, which are open from above via stairs. Her room is not enclosed and does not afford privacy. She is unclothed and reading on her tablet. When she hears a noise, she yells for Nami to come down. Her space is unlocked so that her ward can find her. Looking back, she sees it is her master, Mr. Goh, wearing black pajama bottoms and no shirt, descending the stairs behind her. She nervously puts on her white camisole shirt with a distressed expression on her face. Still partially unclothed and in bed, she attempts to say something to him, which he cuts off when he says, “shhhhh” with a bemused look on his face—​an acknowledgment of the transgression he is initiating. Her downcast eyes do not look at him, revealing her different response to the unexpected encounter. His smirk is light-​hearted, indicating that he is simply playing, as he pushes the boundaries of his entitlement. In other words, he exercises his power and makes clear that she lacks it. What is occurring is a violation of power and an abuse of the master’s role as employer. Downstairs in what is not a room, he can simply walk in while she has nowhere to go as he transgresses the bounds of their relation in sexualizing it. I understand sinking her gaze lower as a performance that can only make sense in the context of rape where she must measure her ability to flee—​which is very limited—​they are in an isolated place, where the only ones around are his wife/​her mistress and her ward, a young child of her masters. Within the context of their master-​servant

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  151 dynamic, it is a rape despite her participation in the sexual act. My readings are attuned to their distinct performances—​his ease and her difficulty as she constantly and continuously assesses the possibilities available for her to leave this scene. The wine Hoon holds in his hand further shapes the encounter as an invitation to his life, not only its power but also to partake in the luxuries characterizing his mastery. Hoon offers her his glass of red wine while holding the bottle in his other hand. She stiffens and drinks, all the while unable to look up at him. Her stiffness contrasts with his ease in holding a bottle and his own glass. The scene, with its contrasting bodily comportments, is tense to watch. We do not know if the bottle will become a tool of violence against her if she refuses. Not only is he the master, but he wields an instrument that can be used for a direct application of bloody violence. She grips the glass as he commands her to let him see what is underneath the blanket. She lifts it off her body while looking petrified or perhaps intrigued by the sexualized commands. Increasingly afraid or confounded, she locks her legs together. Her fear is well established, as is his amusement. He eroticizes her fear. My reading holds on to the dynamic of mastery and slavery that does not subside even when she measures her next move differently. The scene changes when Hoon sits next to her and begins to touch her thighs, which open for him to access. She quickly touches him, pulls his pants down, and plunges her face toward his crotch and declares, “God, I love this smell.” This is the moment when an embodied montage begins for she retains her role as maid and dives into her new role as sexual flame. The sensory experience of smell continues here, but it is distinct from the urine she must clean. Eun-​yi’s mention of smell and her desire for it indicates a turn in her behavior. She now seems to be willing rather than afraid in a co-​existence of these two very different emotions as they are tied to her particular roles. Yet, the very deployment of smell indicates how this relation cannot let go of the inequality that frames it. The maid and the paramour exist in the same body, performing sexual acts as both. For example, to say she loves the smell of his crotch distances her from the displeasure of cleaning the mistress’s bodily fluids and brings her closer to enjoying the master’s body. She attempts to undo her suffering and transform it to enjoyment. But Eun-​yi’s expression of sexual desire for smell confirms the master’s regard for her as depraved. He remains the master and the sexual act confirms it. He takes her pain and her pleasure for himself. She smells the master’s crotch as a source of pleasure for her. Her service to him now goes beyond work to seek her own pleasure

152  The Proximity of Other Skins

Figure 4.1  The servant Eun-​yi (Jeon Do-​yeon) has nowhere to go as her master Hoon (Lee Jung-​jae) holds a bottle of wine over her.

in the same act. Even so, in this relation, the housemaid has limited choices when she complies with his desires, exceeds the boundaries of her servitude, and somehow makes her desire a confirmation of her inferiority to him. Hoon is fully smiling now as Eun-​yi fellates him while he stands, lifting his arms once again to show off his front double biceps as if he is crucified, or a superhero, or the lead in the slasher film American Psycho (2000), when Christian Bale flexes his arms in the mirror while having sex with a sex worker in his Manhattan apartment. This act by Hoon, of posing with his front double biceps exposed, recalls the previous sex scene with his wife. However, in this scene, he is standing and the pose is more prominent. It is one of the most memorable images in the film for what it says about his sense of self as tied to masculine sexual mastery. In this initial scene of sexual intimacy between Hoon and Eun-​yi, the black-​and-​white mastery and servitude is clearer, for the relationship between entitled master and frightened servant is a rape, even in the private scenes where these roles blur. The action he performs of flexing his arms visually conflates and also blurs the women’s roles, asserting a gender difference between men and women in terms of power. The mistress definitively holds power over the housemaid, yet this scene points to their shared lot in relating to the master. Sex is where public

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  153 and private come together to blur the bounds that separate the poor from the rich. Power is nonetheless entirely and continuously at play. We see this extend to the world beyond the sex scene wherein her embodied montage is most visible in the world outside the sex scene. In the car on the way home from the vacation where the transgressive sex transpires, we see the mistress is upset and wearing large dark glasses that dominate her face. Behind her is Eun-​yi looking out the window as Nami looks at her puzzled. A change in the dynamic of the family in relation to their servant is detectable even to the child. Eun-​yi steels herself in the back seat in a position of withholding herself from participation—​knowing there are two ways of relating to her masters: where servility now includes sexuality for the master and hiding that experience of pleasure and desire from the mistress. When they reach home, we immediately see Hae-​ra reading Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book The Second Sex. She seeks to understand her own subjectivity as secondary to her husband’s, yet the subjectivity of the maid is not considered. The book aligns Hae-​ra with white women and Western feminism, and further distances Eun-​yi from this feminist subjectivity. Yet, when Hae-​ra looks up to see Eun-​yi, she thanks her for waiting on her. The smile the maid exudes quickly extinguishes when she turns away. Instead, she looks toward us with a frown. The maid is not entirely available to the mistress, this shot reveals. She must use the acceptable face of servility—​the willingness to serve other’s pleasures—​and hide the other face of serving her own. Her expression belies her distance from the mistress’s hailing. After returning home from the vacation where he established sexual access to the housemaid, Hoon walks around the house like a lion stalking and sniffing the prey he will finally claim. He surveys his daughter’s well-​ lit room from Eun-​yi’s connecting room. The camera focuses on her many stuffed animals as a way to emphasize her role as nanny and his role as lord over this scene. In another room that is near but separate from Nami’s, he lifts the blanket over Eun-​yi to reveal her completely naked body and the deep brown burns around her upper thigh and the side of her pelvis. While the film does not provide answers about her body, the marks reveal a history of pain and suffering. Unlike the pampered body of the mistress, Eun-​yi’s body is traumatized and marked. He ignores the obvious scars that speak of horrors, which his behavior similarly inflict, but under the guise of sexual pleasure. He acknowledges her work situation when he states, “You must be tired.” To which she responds, “I am fine, sir.” Her reply, in calling him sir and not his first name, also acknowledges his status and power over her that does

154  The Proximity of Other Skins not subside. Their limited conversation indicates how their unequal roles indeed inform their sexual relations. This scene is intercut with Mrs. Cho, who senses something amiss and walks up to Eun-​yi’s room to find it empty. The intercutting between the private sex scene and the public eye of Cho effectively demonstrates the dangerously risky ramifications the sex act will have for the outside world. The scene intercuts with moving close-​up shots of Hoon’s body gripping Eun-​yi’s in a gyrating up and down motion. He is whispering, “I’m going to come. Can I do it inside you?” She is breathless when she murmurs, “Please don’t.” Hoon’s question is itself a performance that harkens back to the lavish display of respect when he first meets her. He actually does not care what she says. As Mrs. Cho at the time interjects: he will do what he wants, as he always does. In this case, he comes inside her despite her refusal. Thus, this second sex scene, though seemingly consensual, is still a rape. Mrs. Cho’s response is the same in both scenes, as their sex scene is now intercut with Mrs. Cho’s eye rolling outside the room. The master clearly ejaculates inside Eun-​ yi as we intercut with Cho. The master’s question was entirely empty because he directed it to a person who is not an actual subject for him. As one who is subject to his grime, she is abjected. While she predicted that he does what he wants, Mrs. Cho’s tortured face reveals concern. We hear Eun-​yi as she panics and says, “I’m terrified. I’m scared.” Thus, this eye-​rolling by Cho is actually a complaint, in the terms outlined by Sara Ahmed, as feminist practice. It is aligned with concern for the fate of her fellow maid Eun-​yi that results from the unprotected sex with their master. He does not understand why his pleasure is met with her fear, a testimony to the inequality continually infusing the intimacy. Her answer has no weight and neither does her fear. He refuses to acknowledge it which is proof of his regard for her as abject. Her refusal is part of his pleasure as evidenced in his orgasm that ignores her refusal. And to know that this is the only time they have sexual intercourse, it is the time he impregnates her. She says, “Please don’t.” He ignores her pleas. She must live with the consequences of his choice. The intercutting with Mrs Cho show the implications of the intimacy for transforming public and private relations. The sex act results in a major eruption, an intervening moment that will change the world of the film, for the boundaries between masters and servants are literally penetrated, resulting in a pregnancy as proof positive of the transgression. We see the transformation quite immediately; Eun-​yi now wears lipstick and walks with a more confident gait in a scene that repeats one earlier in the film of the bringing of

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  155 breakfast to a piano-​playing Hoon. This time, he calls her over and her face is full of hope. But he pays her instead with a check, and she realizes the sexual relationship is over and returns to the realm of the black-​and-​white, private-​ public divide of mastery and servitude. In this scene, Hoon intends to resume the order of the master-​and-​servant relationship. He wants to pay her off, like a transaction with a sex worker that is now done. She wants to continue. She wears lipstick in the house, blurring her role in the form of an embodied montage where we see her assertion of self as a centralized subject to be looked at versus a secondary subject not to be noticed. The complexity that the eruption of sex unleashes is what he wants to control. He may have competing desires for a sexual experience with her, but that is now put back in its place. What may have erupted are their other identities within their roles as master and servant: she may have been available and close when he was not properly satiated with his wife. Or part of his attraction to her is her eroticized servility. When she occupied her servility he detected it as erotic. Unable to leave, she responded by saying she loved his smell. As the maid, did she love his clean smell? As a lonely woman isolated from her home, did she love his smell as a man? The man and the wealth cannot be untangled, and neither can the woman from her lack of power. Hers and his are performances constrained by their roles as master and servant wherein such feelings have no room. The eruption occurs with the emergence of feelings incongruent with their roles. His suppression of what is unleashed meets her unwillingness to terminate the pregnancy resulting from the transgression.

Slapping Down Eruptions to Mastery and Servitude: The Embodied Montage Eruptions in the performance of public and private roles quickly get shut down in The Housemaid, especially through the violent act of slapping and its attendant machinations by the wealthy who refuse to relinquish the borders of their mastery. The notion of the embodied montage comes to play here when the role of the lover comes to the fore while the role of the servant recedes—​and vice versa. So, the embodied montage of subjectivities is made clearly apparent by the act of the mistress when slapping the maid. Slapping explodes the barriers that divide the characters by offering a glimpse into the possibility of changed roles. The empowered lover appears from under the

156  The Proximity of Other Skins facade of the maid. Private acts of violence reveal the unstable identity of the wealthy women. The wealthy women—​the wife and her mother—​together discover the housemaid’s pregnancy by the master before she even realizes it herself. That is, the older maid Mrs. Cho detects it and reveals it to the mistress before the younger maid even recognizes the symptoms. Hae-​ra, her mother Min-​ hee, and her daughter Nami descend the staircase of their enormous foyer overlooking the living room. At the middle of the staircase, on a landing, Eun-​yi stands on an A-​frame ladder cleaning the chandelier hanging over the grand room. Within the three-​shot of the generations of wealthy women, we see how Min-​hee notices a Roomba-​like automatic vacuum cleaner nearby and kicks it toward the feet of the ladder. It topples and sends Eun-​yi flying and hanging on precariously to the frail chandelier that clearly cannot hold even her diminutive frame for long. As Eun-​yi hangs, Hae-​ra and Nami both recognize the deliberate act of murderous violence by Min-​hee and express their shock with wide eyes and mouths. “Oh my god, Mom,” shrieks Hae-​ra, without trying to stop her or save Eun-​yi, in an absolute lack of compassion. The flailing Eun-​yi yells for them to “grab her leg” to help restore her position on the staircase. Min-​hee blocks Hae-​ra and Nami against the wall and after desperately hanging for a while, Eun-​yi decides to jump down before her certain downfall. Since the baby did not die from the fall, the wealthy women confront Eun-​yi. Her mistress Hae-​ra slaps her not once but repeatedly. Eun-​yi is aghast. It is at this moment that the slaps on Eun-​yi’s face arrest the performance of mastery and the performance of servitude, but only for a moment. In a different voice than she usually deploys, Eun-​yi demands an explanation, “What are you doing?” She questions how her mistress violates the law of employment established in the house when harming her so brazenly. The question is posed as if to remind her of the civility by which the mistress previously conducted herself. Hae-​ra won’t allow that eruption of roles however, and slaps her again to shut down the insolence. She wishes to stifle Eun-​yi’s empowered identity emerging in front of her and threatening her as mistress. She disciplines Eun-​yi, who then accepts the slaps as punishment as she retreats into her role as a servant. In silencing herself and her complaint, Eun-​yi accepts the newly restored world of master–​servant relations she now occupies to include brazen deployments of violence. Eun-​yi surrenders to the narration of the masters. She accepts Hae-​ra’s narrative of betrayal of the mistress by the maid versus rape by the master of the maid.

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  157 When Hae-​ra says, “I treated you humanely and nicely,” the mistress centers herself. It is as if Eun-​yi does not deserve decent treatment that should come with fair employment. Quickly, Eun-​yi is put in her place within a larger system of mastery and servitude when the wealthy woman’s version of events will stand. From the perspective of the mistress, Eun-​yi wanted the master and forced him to take her due to her depravity as unrapeable or essentially, should be blamed for being raped by him. In this act of Hae-​ra’s slapping Eun-​yi and in tolerating her mother Minhee’s plan to hurt the maid as well, the mistress protects the wealth of her family. Minhee advises that Hae-​ra must learn to tolerate her husband’s indiscretions because he grew up accustomed to “everything he wants,” especially if it means Hae-​ra lives like a queen throughout life. She points particularly to Hae-​ra’s children as entitled to getting everything they want, just like their father. Continued wealth justifies murderous violence if it ensures their superior stature in life. The child of another woman threatens their claim to money and status as entirely theirs. Thus, it is worth hurting the maid and her pregnancy to keep the wealth in the family. This narrative of wealth and entitlement organizes the family’s actions, including preventing Eun-​yi’s departure from the home. When the wealthy women offer her a check for 100,000 dollars they tell her to think about it, though she will “not get what [she] wants.” They essentially tell her she has no choice but to follow their orders to abort the pregnancy. The slapping of Eun-​yi performs this work of reining her back in to the world of patriarchy that ensures the wealth of these women. Physical violence also transpires between the maids—​in an eruption—​for they finally form an alliance against their masters. The slapping that occurs between them is an awakening wherein the embodied montage finds the liberated subject attempts to triumph over the enslaved. So Eun-​yi secures revenge against the masters through the help of Mrs. Cho. Theirs is an intimacy between intergenerational peers that does not occur smoothly at first. And their story is one that The Housemaid is concerned with, in a refocus of the first film. I read this remake as a feminist intervention in its retelling of an alliance between women that also diagnoses the contemporary audience’s concern about women’s relationships as alliance. The Housemaid from 1960 depicts a hostile relationship between the housemaid and her friend—​the woman who brokers the housemaid position for the middle-​class family. That film ends with the housemaid stabbing her friend. In this new version, the film traces the development of a different relation between the women who serve the rich family.

158  The Proximity of Other Skins Because Eun-​yi Lee and Mrs. Cho share a bathroom in Goh’s house, they brush their teeth together, bathe, and use the toilet in each other’s presence. Yet they do not share equal concern for each other’s well-​being at first, to use the terms of Erik Erikson’s different stages of intimacy. They live in intimate proximity, with knowledge of each other’s bodily habits, and certainly each other’s smells in the bathroom where they bathe and use the toilet. The toilet and the bath are indeed sites where they are familiar with each other’s nudities. Theirs is a relationship of anomie—​where they are isolated from each other despite their intimacy. Part of their disconnection results from their different moral standards, as Mrs. Cho aligns herself with the master class. It is Mrs. Cho who betrays Eun-​yi to the women in the family out of loyalty for their support of her son, who is now in the prestigious post of a prosecutor. No doubt due to the influence of Hoon, who shares the news of her son’s appointment with Mrs. Cho himself. Mrs. Cho constantly interrogates Eun-​yi on whether she has a boyfriend to assess other possible culprits in her pregnancy. Cho also expresses her disdain for Eun-​yi’s inappropriate behavior as a maid. She glares at Eun-​yi disapprovingly when she expresses excitement over the unborn children of the masters. Her emotional enthusiasm crosses the black-​and-​white master–​ servant relation that Mrs. Cho also upholds. However, as Mrs. Cho begins to see the inevitable demise of her colleague’s pregnancy at the hands of the powerful employers, she changes her allegiance—​a concern that we glimpse when she hears Eun-​yi raped in Hoon’s ignoring her refusal that he come inside her. When sharing her strategies on how to cope with their servitude, Cho admits waking up to dread the abuses she will experience that day. She makes herself turn into a “cold stone,” which she says prevented her from being kind to Eun-​yi at first. As she witnesses Eun-​yi’s injuries, Cho becomes more sympathetic. Moving toward an alliance with Eun-​yi and away from Hae-​ra’s mom, Minhee, Mrs. Cho confesses to Eun-​yi that she betrayed her and told the masters about the pregnancy. Eun-​yi slaps Mrs. Cho, shocking her awake. This is a different slap than the one Hae-​ra uses against her maid. The slap between housemaids is a form of intimacy, albeit violent, between them. It is a call to pay attention, to pull it together, to be more cognizant and to come back to a grounded reality of recognition. It is a demand for attention, sisterhood, and alliance across class. The slap realigns their relationship and dislodges the mask of allegiance to the master. Mrs. Cho accepts the punishment, and this is finally when she comes into full alignment with Eun-​yi. It is

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  159 at this moment that the embodied montage fizzles so she chooses an alliance to the servant versus the masters. Upon receiving her slap as rightly deserved from Eun-​yi, Mrs. Cho apologizes for not being nicer. Here a promising eruption develops, not between master and servant in sex but between servants. “I’m sorry. I’m ashamed. A woman like me is built this way. It’s in my bones.” She advises Eun-​yi to accept the family’s payoff. The wisdom she shares is that the checks are a “convenient way for them, and not bad for us either.” The advice shows concern for Eun-​yi’s well-​being, unlike Hae-​ra’s slap, which is meant to put the maid in her place. Their coming together as allies is secured when Mrs. Cho witnesses the final trauma Eun-​yi endures. Later in the film, Hoon opens the bathroom door to find Eun-​Yi immersed in the masters’ tub. Her head emerges from deep in the water and she looks at him directly with a smile. She mimics his “ooops!” from their first sexual foray, in an acknowledgment of the role-​ crossing that is now taking place from her actions instead. “What’s wrong with you?” he asks, acknowledging her luxuriating in the tub as a crossing of the mastery and servitude divide that he wishes to keep erect. She tells him about her pregnancy and how the women “really smacked me around.” The key line she says however is this, “I know you don’t even think of me as human, but this baby is yours.” As she says this, the first time acknowledgment of her pregnancy, her body immediately quakes and blood discharges slowly from her vagina until the tub of water completely reddens. Crazed, she screams in recognition of the unwanted miscarriage transpiring. Hoon’s incredulity at the news of pregnancy too easily and quickly transforms to amusement. His face of concern becomes a smirk as he coolly says, “Calm down, Ms. Lee, let’s have the baby,” confirming that he does regard her and the baby as less than human. Not only does he lack sympathy for her physical suffering and mental confusion, but clearly enjoys watching it happen. His cruelty here is extremely brutal. He calms down as her body essentially breaks up, without regard for the danger to her life as she bleeds in front of him, writhes in pain and loses her mind. When Eun-​yi leaves the house on a hospital gurney, completely devastated and out of sorts, the doctor judges “the men in this family are really something.” Her comment indicates this behavior of impregnating a maid may not be an isolated occurrence. As Eun-​yi undergoes the final procedure to terminate her pregnancy, tears fall down the side of her face. Through the glass, Mrs. Cho watches the procedure while weeping herself. The nurse asks

160  The Proximity of Other Skins the doctor, a friend of the Goh family, about Mrs. Cho’s identity. The doctor responds plainly, “that’s nobody.” The doctor’s statement captures the abjection of the human being who is the servant. The alliance of unimportant subjectivities binds the two housemaids together in this final act of violence on Eun-​yi.

Suicide as Punishment of Self and Others After her miscarriage and her hospital procedure to clean out the miscarriage, Eun-​yi returns to the family after she is expelled from it. She stands over the cribs of her masters’ new twin babies, wakes one from sleep and breastfeeds him. Hoon catches her and appears genuinely afraid of her madness. She gives him one baby and grabs the other. She is the one laughing now. This scene inverts their sexual dynamic when he was amused and she was terrified. She could drop the baby, which could mean his destruction. Her own baby died, and it destroyed her. She gives him the other baby so he is holding both, unable to chase her as she runs away laughing like a crazy woman terrorizing the house. It is a gesture toward the future haunting she intends to ensure for the family. She does not want to disappear into a life where she constantly mourns her loss and thinks of them. Instead, she wants them to mourn her loss and to think of herself in a way that will transform their family. Afraid of her as she roams unseen like a ghost in their home, the family gathers in the living room with Hoon and Hae-​ra each carrying a baby now while Minhee holds on to Nami. Mrs. Cho refuses Hae-​ra’s commands that she defend the family from Eun-​yi. Mrs. Cho finally speaks frankly to her now, in an authoritative and commanding voice: “You never shut up, do you? From now on, if you want something done, do it yourself.” The face of the maid dissipates to make room for freedom from servitude. Hoon speaks frankly to his wife while in public now, too. This frankness is a shedding of his mask, too; he is no longer polite (in that mask of self-​centered nicety) to the servants. He simply articulates what he always tells his wife in private, that the servants are lesser beings. “This is what these people are like,” he says, confirming that he regards the servants as inferior to him in his self-​and institutionally anointed superiority. Nami asks Eun-​yi directly about her baby when her former nanny appears on the balcony overlooking the living room. The baby died, Eun-​yi shares. She then apologizes to Nami

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  161 and her twin baby brothers and begins to explain why she is about to ruin their lives by killing herself in their presence: “I can’t get out of my head what happened, I can’t take it.” Hoon interrupts, offering to pay her again. “Don’t forget me,” she tells Nami as she jumps off the balcony with a noose around her neck. She swings above them and then bursts into flames. Her act of self-​immolation propels the family up from their sofa to run for their own lives as Hoon curses in English for the first time in the movie: “Oh my fucking God,” over and over. The film offers the representations of Eun-​yi’s self-​immolation and suicide as an ethical intervention by the poor whose lives are relegated to the inhuman. She consciously pursues the impact of hanging and simultaneously burning herself—​the softly spoken “don’t forget me” is a curse of intergenerational traumatic caliber. And in my reading, a feminist intervention in diagnosing the life-​in-​death condition assigned to her by the family. This form of protest has a history as feminist intervention by the subaltern. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, in Real and Imagined Women (1993), explores representations of sati and rape in Indian cinema and popular culture. She describes the death of three sisters who tie themselves up from a ceiling fan.10 The photo and the news reports describe their necks as broken petals of a flower. Unlike these women, Eun-​yi’s burning body swings wildly in a spectacular conflagration when she returns her pain and grief to the family. Why describe a woman’s participation in her own death as a feminist act—​ an ethical act? In the face of her suffering, she could not see a future. An intimate eruption occurs that transformed her life—​it reminded her of her status as an object of and to the wealthy. The wealthy women’s violent subjugation tortured her body and her sense of self. Their violence turned into an ethical reckoning. In the aftermath of sex between master and servant, the master’s family is transformed forever by Eun-​yi’s self-​sacrifice. Here, death makes visible the power dynamics that cannot be reconciled. In making the children, especially the girl child, witness her death and burning, Eun-​yi tries to interrupt Hoon’s lessons for embodying entitlement and wealth. She introduces a potential new path for the girl and her family: madness. Nami may never be able to unsee the vivid suicide by hanging and the visual of the burning body. Eun-​yi cannot get the death of her unborn child out of her mind and inflicts her own death as something that Nami will be unable to flee. She is cursing Nami to punish her family. Unlike Hoon’s previous dismissal, Eun-​yi’s degree in childhood education, arguably, comes in usefully, though pervertedly and madly.

162  The Proximity of Other Skins The film ends with a new scene of the family outdoors, presumably much later, in a new compound, of even more modern architecture. Several maids, dressed in the same uniforms, now flank them. One older maid, a version of Mrs. Cho, somberly sits on a red love seat while carrying one twin in each arm. Two younger maids, interchangeable with Eun-​yi in age, hold up a painting. They all wear the same couture uniforms donned by Eun-​yi and Mrs. Cho. The family replaces the maids essentially in order to recuperate normalcy that is impossible to restore. Hae-​ra sits on a red throne of sorts as Hoon sits across from her in a matching throne. She gets up and begins to sing “Happy birthday” to Nami on a microphone that broadcasts her voice in an eerie manner over the otherwise quiet outdoor snow scene. The young maids smile, their faces of servitude in place. Hoon and Hae-​ra both seem lethargically happy, together in the scene among the maids and their children, yet distinctly apart from each other. Their marriage has changed too. While Nami listens to her mother, she settles into a look that is disturbing, her eyes moving side to side, as if looking for something or somebody. She is in this world among her family, yet also outside it in her searching eyes. Through Nami’s troubled face we can see Eun-​yi’s legacy in the next generation of the Goh family: perhaps the coming of madness. Eun-​yi has prevented the family from achieving their major goal: the entitlement of the next generation and the black-​and-​white narrative of the public and private divide of mastery and servitude. Instead, the next generation is unsettled and the narrative that separates the rich as worthwhile and the poor as unimportant is rendered unjust. Thus, the legacy of the servant’s death is madness in the master’s family, which is intended to impede the next generation from accumulating or “getting whatever they want.” What unsettles the divide in this final scene between master and servant is the eruption of the masters’ narrative. The masters indeed continue to be masters and the servants continue to be servants. However, madness enters the line of mastery. A better and more ethical relation should emerge without the rampage of abandonment, suicide, and immolation of people who are already human, beyond their servitude. This is the final conclusion of the film, that it does not show ethical relations between masters and servants. The film by Im Sang-​ soo prioritizes the predicament of the housemaids versus their masters, who control the world with patriarchal values. Masters and servants both perform for each other: the masters exploit the maids to extract pleasure from their bodies and their labor. The maids attempt to defend themselves from

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  163 these unrelenting forces or measure their losses in the face of their masters’ ceaseless demands. By exposing the inhumanity required of mastery, Mrs. Cho releases her bondage. In Eun-​yi’s claiming the inhuman assignation, by claiming her depravity as the form of her protest, she makes her grievance visible through her death. The audience for this eruption is the child of the master’s family, who looks around her world to find a gap that Mrs. Cho and Eun-​yi occupied. When they left, a gap opens up in her world. It is an eerie end that emphasizes the possibilities of a new ethical relation instantiated by the child. I now pair The Housemaid with another Korean film about master–​ servant relations, this time in the form of a mistress–​handmaiden coupling, in lives haunted by the specter of female madness as a result of patriarchy. Unlike The Housemaid, this film about same-​sex love and passion shows the eruption successfully undoing inequality as the dominant force in intimate relations.

The Handmaiden Set in Victorian England, the novel Fingersmith tells the story of a woman who is enlisted to help a gentleman seduce a rich woman. Celebrated filmmaker Park Chan-​wook’s The Handmaiden adapts the novel and resets it in Japanese-​occupied colonial Korea. Feminist film theorist Patricia White describes how “Park’s cult reputation for excess invites a pulpish prurience from his Western fans.” Indeed, a central response to the film is whether the plentiful and deeply shown representations of lesbian sex by a male director are exploitative or liberatory. White says it’s both, that the films go beyond prurience. Indeed, I argue that the appropriately excessive focus on sexuality tells a story about forging the self through sex with another—​a same-​ sex other.11 Thus, I argue that the explicit sex scenes between mistress and servant here work to undo inequality which is unlike The Housemaid—​while also eroticizing difference, which is like The Housemaid. Told in three parts, the film adaptation first focuses on the perspective of Sookee, the Korean handmaiden, as she arrives to work in the palatial home of an extremely wealthy man Uncle Kouzouki and his even wealthier niece, Hideko Izumi, whom their numerous servants refer to as the Lady. A thief and a crook, the handmaiden Sookee is there to help another swindler, Count Fujiwara, who intends to seduce the niece Hideko in order to take all her money. Sookee falls in love with her instead.

164  The Proximity of Other Skins The second part of the film attends to Hideko Izumi’s point of view. Hideko’s wealth will allow the Uncle to maintain his greed for building a library of erotic books—​a phantasmagoria of explicit sexual imagery and tales he makes come alive with Hideko’s staged performance of the text for the consumption of other wealthy men. These rich men clad in Western suits consume her elegant reading of the erotic material and sometimes her physical enactment of the scenes. One features her hanging by a rope conjoined with a mannequin in a sexual pose or the actual flogging of her naked rump, resulting in multiple threads of thin red whip marks. Men look upon Hideko’s bruised body as a form of erotic visual pleasure. Their witnessing leads to fantasy visualizations of men taking her place in the position of receiving the flogging themselves. Who views the images of men being flogged is not quite known. This representation is unclear in terms of its actual occurrence or if it is simply the men’s imagining themselves as occupants of the same position. Is it the Uncle who visualizes the men? Is it Hideko? Is it the Count who visualizes himself as flogged? The perversion of a public reading of erotica is a collective experience of sexuality for Hideko, her Uncle, the Count, and the men. The Uncle began training her to read erotica and perform these sexual acts at a very young age, inflicting continuous, intense physical violence on her body by beating her hands and smashing her face with his leather-​clad glove for the slightest infractions. Now, he merely needs to threaten her verbally with further torture when he utters the words: “the basement,” a place whose evocation as a “nice place” invokes in her the greatest fear. In contrast to the master’s wife in The Housemaid, the patriarch of her home, Uncle, is physically abusing Hideko explicitly. Thus, the Lady of the house does not necessarily have the “pleasure” of accumulation and reproduction as Hae-​ra does. She is herself a servant to her Uncle’s sexual whims. And yet, she also exercises her power whenever she can over the housemaids when she slaps them or terrorizes them with threats. The third part of the film represents how the two women come together sexually and emotionally in the face of sadistic patriarchal subjugation coming from both Uncle and the Count. Unlike the book, in the film the women do not betray each other, and instead of going mad, they leave us with an image of two deranged men. Aptly capturing this scene as the ongoing lack of awareness by men, film theorist Patricia White in her publicbooks.org review of the film states, “Books and worldly experience have taught them nothing about female desire, and their ignorance is killing them.”12 In the

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  165 women’s pursuit of togetherness in freedom away from the hold of the Count and the Uncle, the men fight each other toward their own deadly ends. The Handmaiden uses production design and voiceover narrative to depict a highly produced theater of multiple characters and multiple relations that are even more performative than in The Housemaid. In my analysis of this film, I evaluate the schisms in the performances of the characters—​the embodied montage—​through a close reading of what I call “semi-diegetic voice” in order to show the eruptions that ultimately interrupt social and structural roles. These eruptions enable the maternal melodrama that leads to queer kinship, resulting in the undoing of inequality so that it does not dominate their intimacy. I then show how they integrate phallic sexuality in their excoriation—​the stripping off the skin—​of their female subjection. These eruptions as excoriations establish more options than death for women to register their bondage. In contrast to The Housemaid, this film closes with female pleasure that undoes patriarchal sadism, and it is the men who die from the violence they inflict on each other.

The Production of Performance The production design—​the art direction of the spaces, the objects on the property, and the costume design—​functions to tell the story of characters who perform various roles—​at times in the same room, with each individual present serving as distinct audiences to the story. That is, the characters perform multiple roles for multiple audiences simultaneously in what I call an embodied montage, where there is in one body the filmic staging of multiple performances of roles and identities. The objects, settings, and costumes construct their characters into masters and servants. The maids are in plain, dark, sack-​like unstructured uniforms while the Lady Hideko is dressed in elaborately decorated, vibrantly colorful, and highly structured dresses when she performs—​an emerald green kimono for example—​or Victorian gowns with intricate embroidery. Her costumes signal her singular uniqueness and status compared to all other characters. Throughout the film, the books of erotica and their illustrations, as well as sex toys such as steel balls hanging from yarn, ropes, mannequins, and whips represent an imposition of sexuality on women by men. Jewelry represents the adornment of women by men, yet it also represents wealth that can lead to freedom for a thief like the handmaiden Sookee. When the Count teaches private lessons to Hideko, the tools

166  The Proximity of Other Skins of painting—​brushes and the like, which enable their touch—​enable access to intimate relations across gender. Antique dolls in the house show a Lady and her maid, establishing this relationship as generations-​old. The Uncle wears black gloves and his tongue is black from ink. A hairclip becomes a key that opens a safe, or unlocks chains that hold Sookee down in the insane asylum. Props offer access to freedom and wealth or demonstrate the gendered constraints imposed by men on women’s lives. The performances of the master and servant roles occur in a much more expansive manner in this film. Sookee is not merely a servant but also a con artist, a thief, and a swindler. From the perspective of the Count, she is his collaborator, for she is supposed to help him seduce Hideko. From the perspective of Hideko, she is a housemaid and a lover. Hideko is not only a Lady but also a sexual slave to her Uncle. She is a Lady to Sookee and a collaborator to the Count. The Count is a counterfeit artist for the Uncle and a gallant, dashing, and handsome gentleman to the servants; a suitor and collaborator to Hideko; and a collaborator with and trickster to Sookee. In these multiple roles, in the form of my concept of the embodied montage, the characters juggle not only the different and contradictory character traits they must assume but also what to say as informed by different backstories and aspirations. They frequently repeat lines across different scenes, exposing the active process of both the scripting and making sense of their roles. They speak their lines, while also thinking about whether what they are saying is appropriate for their characters. Is this the right choice to say in order to convince the other of my proper character? Through the semidiegetic voice, the characters are in the process of making themselves. The diegesis represents the world of the film—​where diegetic sound emerges from what we see or nondiegetic sound comes from outside the world of the film. The semidiegetic refers to sounds that come from the diegetic world but do not make sense—​such as the voiceover meant never to be heard by others in the world of the film but nonetheless deployed. In terms of the embodied montage that the semi-diegetic voice exposes, I discuss two scenes where the repetition of lines exposes the vulnerability of the characters performing multiple roles within their various ruses. When the fake Count meets with Sookee’s family in order to share his plans, it is clear what roles are assigned to her. “Sookee will be my mouse, work as her maid, and eavesdrop . . . stay by her side and gently encourage her to talk about love.” In describing their victim, he discusses how “every night, I think of her assets in bed” in reference to her financial wealth: cash, jewelry, and dresses.

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  167 He also asks her to practice lines such as, “Beautiful! I am flummoxed by your presence!” He says to perform it “with a stutter,” which exudes affect that will make “those uppity bitches feel superior and open up to you.” Sookee follows his instructions as best she can to carry out the plan. When Sookee actually does her job as a handmaiden, she repeats the lines the Count used. Upon seeing her mistress’ face for the first time, she says to herself, “Bloody hell! He should’ve told me she was so pretty. I’m completely flummoxed.” These lines are spoken in a semidiegetic manner. The semidiegetic voice, where the audience hears the character’s thoughts as they actively make sense of the encounters within their scenes, may provide some answers. When we hear characters speak in the gaps of their multiple roles, holes in the narrative of mastery and servitude form and are available for us to see. It is the voice in her head that the other characters do not hear, but we do as their audience. These lines reveal the authenticity of her character within her performance of a role. They include her crass sensibility as a common thief using a curse yet end rather elegantly, in copying the words of the Count, who doles out such dramatic compliments to manipulate others. The word “flummoxed” is one she learns from him, which she incorporates to make sense of her new surroundings and her new feelings. Through these crucial semidiegetic lines, she also “comes out” to her audience as desiring the Lady sexually. The combination of different languages of class and colonialism indicates the thief ’s active construction of identity as she performs the handmaiden’s role. The form of a semi-diegetic voiceover expresses her inner thoughts, showing how her integration of multiple identities in making sense of her work as a thief includes juggling her performance as a handmaiden. In the same scene, she also repeats his line when trying to coax Hideko to think of the Count romantically. “Every night in bed, he thinks of your assets . . . your face,” a repetition of lines she produces in a muddled and confused manner. She stumbles over the word “assets,” for example, and hesitates before saying “your face.” This scene in Part 1 of the film, which focuses on Sookee’s perspective, is one where the mistress and handmaiden measure each other while performing multiple roles. What we know is that Sookee as the handmaiden perceives the mistress as innocent, for Hideko asks her why the Count thinks of her “in bed.” Sookee absorbs this as a lack of understanding of sexual fantasy and takes note of this as surprising, for she considers it a measure of the mistress’ isolation. Later on, she shares this assessment with the Count when she says, “She’s so naïve, even if he pulls on her nipples, she

168  The Proximity of Other Skins won’t know what she wants.” The handmaiden performs her role and absorbs the mistress not only as someone she serves but also as a player on stage with whom she acts. The performance is not always seamless, however, as we see when the thief ’s characteristics limit her abilities as a handmaiden. This is where eruptions can occur to which we, the audience, are privy. When the Count prepares Sookee to memorize the letter of introduction he writes to the Lady Hideko from a fake Lady Minami, Sookee’s fictional former employer, Sookee cannot remember all the lines. When Lady Hideko asks Sookee to read the letter, she falters. Clearly, different stages of performance are taking place in one scene. Sookee performs for the mistress, but her own body and knowledge, which is limited by her structural and social situation as a poor thief, prevent her from posing completely as a handmaiden who can read and thus thoroughly assist her mistress. Sookee then has to make it up when her memory betrays her, as her inability to read does, too. In these purportedly unscripted moments, new directions emerge. The mistress says “reading can be learned,” unlike other traits like lying, which presumably cannot be unlearned. In her performance as handmaiden, the thief ’s subjectivity enters, creating an expected hole in which an unanticipated relationship can blossom and where the subjects can organize their relationship with new rules: teaching Sookee how to read and privileging the importance of truth to a maid who is actually a thief. Possibilities open for rewriting their roles against the ones written for them by men. For example, we later learn that the letter is actually a betrayal of Sookee by the Count. Rather than Hideko choosing to follow the Count however, she sees more of an alliance with Sookee, who she imagines will learn to read so as not to be deceived. The performances of mastery and servitude are thus not total, and in the intersections of these performances are openings so momentary that eruptions occur, where truthfulness can emerge. The primary relation between Sookee and Hideko is composed of the work of building intimacy, hard-​won as the women travel through the maze of multiple performances by many players:  the Uncle is not Japanese but a Korean passing as one. While pretending to be, the Count is not Japanese either. Hideko may not be Japanese either. She came to the palace from Korea at age five. Sookee is a handmaiden who intends to trick the Lady to marry the Count so he can commit her to the insane asylum and steal her money. The Count actually cheats Sookee because he intends instead to commit her to the insane asylum

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  169 in place of the Lady. In appropriating the wealth of Hideko, she cannot be detected by her Uncle. But it is sex, physical proximity, companionship, and touching (like Sophie and Ji Ha in Never Forever) that lead Sookee and Hideko to break out of their roles and their plans away from the men who bind them into servitude. They achieve a trusting connection with each other instead—​through an intimate attachment that is romantic, passionate, and loving—​as an escape from patriarchy. Both women create and experience these eruptions through the device of semi-diegetic voiceovers. In the film, these voiceovers show their true feelings, which are different from the performances of their roles. Rather, they are commentary on or contradictions of them. They are also honest assessments of their interactions with each other that defy their performances. Through these interruptions in their roles of Lady and servant, an intimate relationship is formed. In these exchanges they try to make sense of their feelings for each other within suspended moments that transpire while performing their roles. Intimacy is built in the occurrence of these eruptions, enlarging the world they know now. When the Count arrives at the palace, the servants are all extremely thrilled. They run to the front of the house to form two lines at the entryway. He descends from the car and walks toward the house, as if on a runway flanked by the uniformed and uniform maids who ogle him. As he walks closer to us and the door, the two lines of black-​and-​white uniforms frame varied and colorful expressions of sexually charged excitement. Their bodies move out of their lines and they lean in behind him, some partially, some fully, and all take in his presence. They open their mouths in admiration or open their eyes wide—​all in a silent shrieking. In this shot, we see the performance of roles in front of the master and behind the master: first, the maids create formal rows of anonymity that serve quietly. Then when the Count passes them, they transform into individually distinct, fawning women who express various stages of joy at the sight of this handsome and rich man. Inside, the relationship between Sookee and Hideko finds their characters further intersecting within the eruptions caused by their encounters. The Count gives the Lady Hideko a gift of blue sapphires. The Lady exclaims her pleasure. The handmaiden is unimpressed and disagrees, correcting her. They are not sapphires, but blue spinels. It becomes the mistress’ turn to take note of her handmaiden’s knowledge. Unexpected knowledge recasts the handmaiden in the eyes of the mistress. And the emergence of the thief from inside the handmaiden—​the embodied montage—​stems from desire

170  The Proximity of Other Skins and jealousy, compelling a purposeful rebellion against her assigned role. The schism opens to reveal how the handmaiden regards the mistress as one to possess: “Of all the things I’ve washed and dressed, has anything been this pretty. I’d like to show her to the people at home.” Her own desires to take possession, to partake as an independent woman—​a thief, rather than a maid—​emerge in direct conflict to the project she shares with the Count regarding the Lady. The desire becomes mutual rather quickly. When they play dress-​up, the maid now wears the Lady’s lingerie, corset, gown, and jewelry. In this enactment of switching identities, the mistress is the one who repeats the Count’s line. “I think I know what the Count meant . . . your face . . . each night in bed I think of your face.” The handmaiden is taken aback. She cuts off its further development into a new path in their relationship by saying, “Don’t be silly, Miss.” Yet, she sits in the reverie of possibility for a moment. These very small moments in time change the space of their relationship gradually. Such eruptions or gaps in their roles allow for their true desires to come out and create intimacy in the sense of closeness and connectedness beyond their prescribed roles. The creation of closeness that is based on sexual tension occurs in what may be the largest eruption in the film. It goes beyond sex toward the larger realm of intimacy. The handmaiden and the mistress walk in the pretty tree-​lined grounds of the palace. Suddenly, the mistress asks the handmaiden about their common lot as orphans. “How did your mum die?” “When I was a baby, at the madhouse, she was hanged.” In both instances, madness as a woman’s destiny unless an eruption occurs is central not only to The Handmaiden but also The Housemaid. “She hanged herself, like my Aunt,” says the mistress. The Aunt was an adult who protected the mistress as a child. She went mad from the violence of reading erotica forcibly and suffering the intense physical punishments of the uncle, her brother-​in-​law. The mistress recounts her history that leads to the current situation, “[Mum] died giving birth to me. It is as if I  strangled her myself. I  wish I’d never been born.” This statement awakens the thief to break out of the handmaiden role, to stand ground in the eruption of their relationship. She turns toward the mistress, and grabs her face, asserting:  “No baby is ever born guilty. She was so lucky to have you. She had no regrets before dying.” The scene uses a flashback to emphasize how the disclosure by the mistress calls up in Sookee her primal scene of subject formation. She is braiding the hair of the woman who raised her and who trained her to steal. “Did my

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  171 mum cry before they hanged her?” The woman responds in the strongest fashion: “Your mother stole a thousand times, was caught just once, and died once. She said she was lucky to have you before dying. She had no regrets.” And the image concludes of young Sookee laughing. She uses this joyful energy from her memory to convey an orphan’s strength to Hideko. It is a gripping scene, acted with urgency. The eruption closes up quickly, however, for Sookee must now follow the Count’s plan. She leaves, giving Hideko this gift of strength. Hideko must now be prey to the Count who comes up the path, as Sookee leaves, shaken by the eruption. The handmaiden’s performance has glitches. From those cracks emerges a different and possible relationship with Hideko. This is made clear in the next scene where Sookee spies on the Count, who reveals his lustful desire for Hideko. As Sookee places her face against the window, she looks into the Lady’s quarters as the Count touches the seated Lady. Hideko is unwilling and slaps him away as he touches her arm then her hip. Sookee’s voiceover delivers a raging description of the scene: “The Lady sits shy and trembling. The Gentleman is persistent. The perceptive maid has stepped out for a moment. All is well, Sookee. Everyone’s performing their damned roles so well. I see I should not have come here. It was wrong to come.” Here, the device of the semi-diegetic voiceover reveals her individual struggle with the performance of her role. She narrates her role and expresses her doubtful investment in how she is supposed to play it. The voiceover continues when she is alone in bed. “I need to become rich and sail off to a distant harbor. Buy my fill of glittering baubles. Eat food I scarcely recognize. Not think of Hideko. Never think of Hideko.” Here, we hear her frustrations with the performance required of her role as a handmaiden, as well as the constraints of her place within the structures of society. She needs wealth to get out of the role. It is her poverty that forces her into it. The relationship between the women primarily occurs as one between a mistress and handmaiden, an intimate relationship that hinges on wealth inequality. The love that develops between them in the scene of violent and duplicitous men demands the undoing of the structures and identities that tie them to unequal roles in society. Their unequal positioning through class must transform within their relationship. The eruption—​the gap where their identities converge and interrupt their performances—​sets the scene for the sex act that occurs after their connection as girls whose mothers died. The maternal plays a role in the eruption, which informs the sex scenes between them.

172  The Proximity of Other Skins

From the Power of Intimate Kinship: New Roles The role of mother and child is enacted as a sexual scene for the orphaned women. Hideko is in the bath and Sookee tells her, “You are my baby, Miss.” She tells Hideko that her Aunt taught her how “bath time is sweet.” Hideko sucks on a lollipop, affirming the sweetness of the scene. In a childlike manner, Hideko grimaces in pain and captures the nurturing attention of Sookee, who asks what’s wrong. Hideko tells her that her tooth is hurting, describing it as “sharp—​it keeps cutting me.” Sookee finds a thimble and puts it on her finger, leans over, and penetrates Hideko’s open mouth with the silver-​capped digit. As she rubs into her mouth with an in-​and-​out motion simulating oral sex or intercourse, Sookee’s voiceover relays her awareness of Hideko’s body’s smell. The sight of Hideko’s face while her finger penetrates her mouth and the recognition of the smell lead to Sookee’s own louder intake of breath. She releases her breath slowly and audibly, creating a strong feeling of eroticism. Hideko looks up at Sookee who looks down on her in a symmetrical fit. They see each other eye-​to-​eye, face-​to-​face, as is simulated by the frame so we may understand this as a moment of recognition important to Sookee via her audible voice. From there, Sookee looks even lower to focus on Hideko’s naked torso in the flower-​laden water. Sookee’s stare lingers on Hideko’s breasts and both her nipples. We hear more loud breathing as the two look up at each other

Figure 4.2  Lady Hideko (Kim Min-​hee) looks at Sookee, who penetrates her mouth with a thimbled finger in The Handmaiden.

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  173 and the film cuts to a close-​up of Hideko’s eyes. The shot becomes very wide. We see the whole room and their place in it before taking on Hideko’s view. We see Sookee lick her mouth, Hideko’s hand holding a lollipop, and Sookee’s elbow at the same time. The scene ends with an extreme close-​up of Sookee’s eye staring into Hideko deeply, penetratingly like her finger. Moments later, Sookee is in the Count’s room discussing her work on convincing Hideko to fall in love with him. The intimate eruption was a moment that truly interrupted this scene of the thief ’s work with her conspirator. She places her thimbled finger inside her apron, indicating that the memory of penetrating Hideko leads to a desire to touch herself. She closes her eyes. Sex in The Handmaiden, unlike The Housemaid, takes the form of female mutuality rather than male mastery over women. The mutuality emerges from their shared subjugation by men as that which trumps their financial and class inequality. Through sex, they come to share fate that is released from male subjection. In the first full-​blown culmination of their sexual relationship, Hideko rings the bell to summon Sookee; she anticipates a nightmare and orders the handmaiden to sleep next to her. They face each other as Hideko expresses fear about the Count, who recently proposed marriage to her. The fear is based on a man’s sexual expectations of a woman. Sookee does not know what Hideko does for her uncle or for other men. Convinced of Hideko’s ignorance of sexual matters, and of the illegibility of same-​sex desire in this context, she agrees to show the Lady what she expresses curiosity about: “What is it that men want? I mean after getting married? How would I know? I am practically a child.” The role of mother-​and-​child re-​emerges as a way to hide the intimacy as sexual because their relationship occurs within the context of same-​sex desire in a world of sex organized by and privileging men. “What the hell—​I’ll show her one thing then put her to bed. Poor thing, alone in a strange country, reading those useless books without learning a single useful skill.” In this statement by Sookee, sex transpires in the form of educational instruction by a handmaiden to the Lady who must prepare for male desire. She takes a lollipop in her own mouth to collect sweetness on her tongue, which she uses to penetrate Hideko’s mouth. Sookee is stunned by the taste: “Why does the candy taste different? The butter turns sour. The sour turned sweet. Sweet turned savory.” The eruption is a moment in time and space revealed by the semi-diegetic voiceover. This is Sookee talking to herself to reconcile her actions within her job as a handmaiden and to register the

174  The Proximity of Other Skins jolt of sensation—​compatibility and attraction—​she did not expect when teaching her ward. The intimacy becomes full-​blown sex that creates pleasure between women representing what Luce Irigaray famously calls “two lips touching” rather than a phallic penetrative sex.13 In Subjection and Subjectivity: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy (2014), the philosopher Diana T.  Meyers theorizes how “Irigaray invokes the image of two lips touching to exorcise the demon of the master-​slave dialectic and to vitalize the mother-​daughter relationship.”14 These two dynamics of the master–​slave dialectic and the maternal kinship bond actually inform the relationship between the Lady and the handmaiden. Building on Meyers, I  argue that the eruption—​the self in competition with the other self that arises in a temporal crevice—​fights to achieve a “coherent subjectivity”15 in what Irigaray herself (in Meyers) describes as the elimination of the hostility between the self and other (1986, 30–​31; and also 1991, 50). Sex becomes the site where the “desire to subjugate the other” dissipates. This is what occurs when Hideko is ignited and grabs Sookee, kissing her aggressively as their tongues visibly meet. Their sexual entanglement is narrated with the presence of the man; that is, Hideko is supposed to be imagining the Count and what he would do to her sexually. The sexual acts underneath the narration, however, are girlish—​ the nipple is “so cute.” And Sookee sucks on it tenderly, an act that Hideko genders as female. As Sookee gobbles up her nipple, the Lady asks, “Will he really be as tender as this?” And her soft actions are narrated with an evocation of his actions. “He will touch you like this and like this,” she says, as she reaches into Hideko’s genitals. “Keep doing it like the Count would” Sookee commands, including the Count though he is really not there physically. They use him as a ruse to come together sexually. Sookee uses the words the Count taught her: “This is what he would say: so soft, so warm, so wet, so spell-​blindingly beautiful,” as the shot shows an extreme close-​up of Sookee’s face framed by Hideko’s thighs, her tongue slowly moving toward Hideko’s vagina. Here, the sex between women is mediated by the evocation of a man, making prominent the authorship of this scene by a male director. In terms of the tradition of male representations of female sexuality, I question how this sex scene between women is imagined for men.16 The ramifications of the sexual relationship between Sookee and Hideko—​ which represents an eruption—​intervene in the Count’s plans nonetheless. Both Hideko and Sookee express their desire to impede the Count’s plans to marry Hideko, and they do so immediately after their sexual coming

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  175 together. While he does not yet know that they want to derail his plans, the Count still subjects her to sexual denigration. He grabs Sookee’s hand and forcibly places it on his crotch; he threatens her and warns her to remember her family at home and what it means to “go home empty-​handed.” She hears the part about her family and changes her mind, instead telling him to not push Hideko too hard. Here, the intimate eruption is shut down when the Count calls on family loyalty, illustrating the persistent gender dynamics organizing the world of the film. Nonetheless, she still insults him and defends herself by pushing up against him and threatening him, “Don’t ever again put my hand on your tiny joke of a cock.” Retaining her spirit, she reminds us of the struggle with patriarchy that befall these women’s everyday and the ongoing terrain of their choosing how to pursue a way out of it. When Sookee returns to Hideko, she hears the Lady confess: “I could be content here if you were with me.” The option of staying as a handmaiden, without benefiting her family, is not enough for Sookee, who keeps to the Count’s seduction scheme. Unbeknownst to Sookee, Hideko is outraged when Sookee essentially goes along with the Count. While Sookee does not admit it, Hideko knows the larger machinations of the Count’s plans. Sookee is choosing to put Hideko in the madhouse! Reminiscent of the slapping between Eun-​yi and Cho, Hideko slaps Sookee thrice as if to awaken her and to knock off the mask of the thief. Hideko wants her lover back and she is outraged that Sookee has betrayed the eruption they occupied during sex so powerfully that Hideko imagines her ability to remain in her gilded prison if Sookee was imprisoned with her. This life-​giving pleasure is so strong for her that the future with her sadistic Uncle is a bondage she could endure, even with contentment. And even if it meant they would be even more subjugated. She is willing to choose bondage to patriarchy, colonialism, and empire with her lover as a small salve to an otherwise largely horrendous life. She can imagine that kinship—​essentially, sex and love with a handmaiden—​ could make that bondage bearable, despite the rest of her torturous existence. Sookee essentially chooses kinship, too. To come home empty-​handed to her clan makes the happiest of smells and the sweetest of pleasures with Hideko absolutely insufficient. When the film soon moves to Part 2, or Hideko’s perspective of the previous scenes, what is illuminated is that sex and intimacy—​in their specific relationship, both maternal and sexual—​lead to the achievement of a shared goal. The maternal means something. We learn that Hideko’s aunt killed herself when she realized she could not save her niece from a life of sexual service

176  The Proximity of Other Skins to her uncle and other rich men. She herself tutors the child Hideko to read pornographic stories and be unaffected by its perversity. But when Hideko laughs, Uncle takes his black-​gloved hand and smashes their faces together while shaking their heads violently. When he threatens to put Hideko in an insane asylum, her aunt goes insane and runs ferociously, only to be trapped in the library of erotica by a statue of a snake guarding the door. She then hangs herself from the cherry tree outside, crazed by the prison of her gendered role in sexual service. She cannot see a future because she cannot stop Uncle from subjecting Hideko to the performance of erotic readings. Not only could she not stop it, she did not want to see it. Like The Housemaid, death makes visible the power dynamics that can subject women so deeply that they can no longer see a way out. Hideko’s version of events in Part 2 of the film reveals a melodramatic film structure wherein the central female characters attempt a rise to power that ultimately plunges them back to their patriarchal lot. The film returns to the genre of the women’s film, and more specifically the maternal melodrama, which Marina Heung defines as a “mode of cinema focused on the emotional, and against the inherently patriarchal outlook of the typical Hollywood product.”17 It is relevant to identify how this film, in the current context of globalization, redefines these genres. In The Handmaiden, Sookee strives for wealth in order to achieve freedom for lesbian desire and to help her family as an independent woman who lives by her own means. Hideko seeks freedom from the sexual predation of her family that prevents her from claiming power, including her own wealth and property. Her sexual desires are reserved for women. And her future is limited by men: the Uncle who tortures her and the Count who desires her and her money. She desires neither. So she also seeks the freedom to be with Sookee sexually. The Count regards her as a challenge and tells the Uncle as he advises him on having sex with Hideko: “Her eyes have no desire, this means she is dead inside. Go easy on her training unless you enjoy making love to a corpse.” In this, we learn that the Count is aware of Hideko’s preference for sexual relations with women. The Count approaches Hideko by letting her know he is aware of her lesbian sexuality. She agrees to the proposition to marry when he points out that suicide is not an option, arguing that her wealth would just go to the Uncle who would then “buy little girls to read books.” He also gives her poison so she will never fear going into the basement “alive.” The options he gives her are based on fear, not courage, which would entail stepping

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  177 forward to claim what is hers. Instead, she needs him in order to flee the man who oppresses her. In Part 2, we see this patriarchal offer of unfreedom and we also see what Sookee introduces to her, true freedom and the opportunity to claim her own property. When Sookee asserts that Hideko’s mother was lucky to have her before dying and that she surely had no regrets, Hideko recognizes the freedom Sookee offers. In her semi-diegetic voice, we hear her asking, “Is this the companionship they write about in books?” She sees a future unbound to men and instead bound to love, with a woman. The sex scene is also told differently. While the sex scene repeats, Hideko further layers it with solicitations of faith and loyalty when they rub their vaginas together while facing each other and holding hands: “Can you promise you won’t betray me?” Along with this declaration, which Sookee answers with affirmative passion, Hideko’s version of the sex scene also includes the handmaiden’s offers of maternal nurturing when she screams: “I wish I had breast milk so I could feed you.” In the coexistence of family loyalty, maternal nurturing, and same-​sex sexual pleasure, we see how Hideko and Sookee bring together kin, sex, and commitment in a shared future that is an emblem of intimacy. It lights their way to freedom and a life in the eruption only possible in a new world that can eclipse the patriarchal world. The slapping scene between Hideko and Sookee extends here to reveal how Hideko attempts to hang herself from the same cherry tree as her aunt. This is after Sookee chooses her own kin and demands Hideko fall in love with the Count. Hideko decides on death even if it means the Uncle gains her wealth, showing how her relation to her capital assets here is quite distinct from Hae-​ra and Minhee’s in The Housemaid. She has reached the place of her Aunt’s madness: to take her own life and for the bondage of little girls to continue. Sookee does not want Hideko to die. She cries and screams. Sookee confesses the plot of the Count while holding on to Hideko’s feet, preventing her from dying by hanging. Hideko confesses how she was also in cahoots with the Count. Here, unlike the previous film, death compels a new bond away from madness toward freedom. In joining together, in refusing death together, they continue the ruse of the proposal and the ensuing marriage. They escape to meet the Count, who marries Hideko. They even go all the way through so that they commit Sookee into an insane asylum. However, the presumed treachery is abetted by Sookee’s family who rescues her from her certain death there. She is able to lure their loyalty away from the Count because she promises them a bigger cut in the money. In saving each other

178  The Proximity of Other Skins from the limited options offered by the Count and the Uncle, the combination of sexual and maternal intimacy triumphs in queer kinship for Hideko and Sookee. Queer family-​making happens in the sense that nurture and sacrifice for the other composes the kind of love that should yet cannot exist in this world of patriarchy. We learn that Hideko has now taught Sookee how to write. After saving herself from a rapacious Count, who tells her of his love and how he has much to teach her, including a truth he subscribes to, that “women feel the greatest pleasure when taken by force,” Hideko then sacrifices the Count to the Uncle. She is somehow able to disclose his location and in capturing him, the Uncle tortures the Count in the basement. She writes the Count and tells both of them that women never want to be forced. The Count sets a fire that kills both men, just in time to avoid being castrated by the Uncle. The wreckage of male violence makes clear that the film ultimately imagines queer kinship as the future to aspire to, as it punishes patriarchy and the men who torture and devalue women. The film shows how intimate eruption enables a way out of patriarchy. And most importantly, the eruption also undoes the hierarchy between the women as mistress and handmaiden when they have to depart in gender and class drag, with Hideko dressed as a man and Sookee fashioned as a Lady. When the couple flees the country, as a man and woman in order to escape the Uncle’s goons, who are looking for two women traveling together, they reappear on a ship departing to a far-​away place. Europe? The Americas? Beyond? Inside a luxurious cabin with an open suitcase flanking the table, they touch and kiss each other, breast-​to-​breast and chest-​to-​chest. Their class privilege saves them as women without men. And in this sex scene, they seek pleasure in each other’s faces. They then each raise two circular steel balls connected by a rope. This is the same device that Uncle uses to punish Hideko as a little girl, putting one steel ball in her mouth while he took another rope of steel balls and whipped her hand with it. The Uncle instructs her to remember the taste of the steel so as to remember the pain of his punishment. The two women now wet the steel balls by taking them into their mouths before inserting them into each other. They recast the steel balls to constitute a different identity and a divergent future from Hideko’s brutal past. They create a different taste from the steel and craft pleasures from the balls that are visible as surprise on their faces. Through sex that includes new sensations forged from their subjugated histories, they give birth to themselves.

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  179 In this way, I read this film, like The Housemaid, as a feminist intervention. I focus on the women’s attempts to come together in a queer loving alliance within the context of a violent patriarchal narrative imposed by the Uncle and the Count. This is also very different from the novel, which ultimately shows a mother figure betraying the two female protagonists. The film instead prioritizes the women’s perspectives through the special use of semi-diegetic voiceover in the repetition of lines, voiceover, and flashback to compose the eruption as an interruption of performance or the normativity of women’s subjugation by men. Nonetheless, the film ends in a voyeuristic sex scene that recasts the tools of her subjugation into ones of pleasure. It is rare to see lesbian sex in mainstream film, much less two femme Asian women. They are also making love on a dinner table or a game table, on a moving ship. They are to be eaten or consumed by spectators. It is a carnivalesque site. We don’t know where they are. The music of bells also seem to place the scene in an unknown temporal space. They are finally in the eruption that has extended to occupy the world through their togetherness, as women whose time together will no longer elapse. They no longer live under the shadow of men and their patriarchal narratives of women. The relationship between Sookee and Hideko expands sexuality beyond bodily pleasures and companionship in order to illuminate a different economy of gender in terms of love and money. The multiple performances that characters embody structure the film and provide the ground for various eruptions. The women’s sexual practice broadens toward a larger intimacy of passion, romance, and lust, occurring along with the representations of violence itself, which are actually indictments of male power over women. The narrative traces glitches in their performances of imposed roles, launching the identities they hold and aspire to. The eruptions they make in the patriarchal narrative define the nature of their intimacy as undoing the power of men, especially in my close readings of their romance and their sex scenes. Through the enactment of phallic sexuality by referencing the Count during the sex act and the use of devices previously used by men to torture women—​ the practice of sexuality for women becomes an excoriation of male subjection. Eruptions within the film show us how women make space and time no matter how small in ways that can completely reorder one’s life. They do so by veering away from the plan established by the man whose ideas are premised on his own primacy and their secondary status. He was going to rape Hideko and kill Sookee! They flee this condemnation toward an open-​ended future.

180  The Proximity of Other Skins

The Housemaid and The Handmaiden In conclusion, these two films from Korea offer a different rendering of sexuality for women in the scenes of master and servant relations. Through the construction of characters in The Housemaid who are caught within the severity of black/​white, public/​private definitions of mastery and slavery, eruptions open in the eventual alliance between housemaids. They both register their grievance not so much to the masters as to their future generations, using the proximity of their bodies to catapult them to another time and place—​for Eun-​yi it is death, and for Mrs. Cho it is a mystery. One departs and makes a ruckus, telling the masters off with the courage. One leads to death, however, in the form of suicide and self-​immolation. This is not a desirable feminist future, but the only one she saw in the face of her grief. The Handmaiden, in contrast, offers the eruption as a way out of sadistic patriarchy. The two women not only achieve equality and cooperation across class disparity but also punish the men by leading them into their own deaths. The women also secure wealth and freedom as well as pleasure. They eclipse the world surrounding them and essentially create their own. A promising end where they perform roles they’ve given themselves even if it is a heterosexual masquerade in public and queer kinship and sex in private, as enabled by wealth, allowing us to imagine them with viable and thriving lives. In this chapter, Korean cinema about intimacy across ethnic, class, and gender inequality entices the spectator with voyeuristic sexual pleasures that are shiny and glamorous. Both films feature production design that seduces and plays with what the audience can see and hear. With its contemporary fashions, modern architectural pornography and kitchen devices, and K-​pop aesthetics in the bodies and faces of the actors, The Housemaid presents a tempting world of the future where the poor cohabitate with the wealthy in their intimate spaces. They can shape the legacy of their children with the little power they have. The Handmaiden also features ridiculously beautiful people—​with different kinds of bodies. The Count is distinguished and cisgendered, heteronormative in his beauty, which can expand beauty standards in the global arena. The femme sexuality of Asian women is a unique vision, too. It can be easily appropriated as simply fetishistic and adhering to extremely limited standards of beauty. Paired together, however, they rewrite a phallic and penetrative economy of sex. In needing to cross-​ dress as a man and a woman in order to travel within their time, however, the future they present still has its limits. Even so, the eruption in this film

Intimate Eruptions and the Embodied Montage  181 is a joyful illustration of how, in between the roles one must perform in the embodied montage, even in sadistic dungeons that seem impossible to escape, there is always the potential to emerge with one’s full self and the power to meet and express all one’s desires. They birth themselves through sex. In this chapter, I discuss films that are famously known for their explicit sex within unequal power relations to show how a wide expanse of relationships is possible from there. They can aggravate inequality or offer ways out. The solutions are never released from the bondage of inequality. For us to succeed in forging ethical relations, we cannot let go of the contexts that shape our bodies, desires, and identities. We can only engage in the lot we’ve inherited in order to undo them. Meanwhile, we must analyze the struggle in forging our selves through our bonds.

Notes 1. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New  York:  Anchor Books, 1959), p. 10. 2. Ibid., p. 12. 3. Ibid., p. 16. 4. Ibid., p. 12. 5. Ibid., p. 22. 6. Ibid., p. 7. 7. Roger Ebert, “The Housemaid,” published on February 2, 2011 (https://​www. rogerebert.com/​reviews/​the-​housemaid-​2011); and A. O. Scott, “Taking Up with a Maid Might Upset the Family,” New York Times, January 2, 2011 (https://​www.nytimes. com/​2011/​01/​21/​movies/​21house.html), last accessed on November 10, 2018. 8. Laura Marks, “Thinking Multisensory Culture,” Paragraph, Vol. 31, No. 2: “Cinema and the Senses” (July 2008), pp. 123–​137, quotation at p. 130. 9. Ibid., p. 7. 10. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women (New York: Routledge, 1993). 11. Patricia White, “A Handmaiden’s Tale,” published on November 11, 2016 (http://​ www.publicbooks.org/​a-​handmaidens-​tale/​), accessed on January 10, 2018. 12. Ibid. 13. Luce Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” Signs, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1980). 14. Diana T. Meyers, Subjection and Subjectivity:  Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 89. 15. Ibid. 16. In recent years, controversies have emerged regarding male representations of female sexuality such as in Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013) by Abdellatif Kechiche, where the actors Lea Seydooux and Adele Exarchopoulos complained about the shooting conditions they identified to be exploitative. Kareem Aftab, “Blue Is the Warmest

182  The Proximity of Other Skins Colour Actresses on Their Lesbian Sex Scenes:  ‘We Felt Like Prostitutes,’” The Independent, October 4, 2013 (https://​www.independent.co.uk/​arts-​entertainment/​ films/​features/​blue-​is-​the-​warmest-​colour-​actresses-​on-​their-​lesbian-​sex-​scenes-​ we-​felt-​like-​prostitutes-​8856909.html), accessed on March 31, 2019. 17. Marina Heung, “What’s the Matter with Sara-​Jane? Daughters and Mothers in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Spring 1987).

5 The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others Ramona Diaz’s Imelda (2005) and David Byrne’s Here Lies Love (2010–​17)

The Proximity of Other Skins is concerned with the role of representation in a world of suffering. The white women in Never Forever and Heading South, marginalized in the West, subjugate men of color whom they desire. The films depict through bodily choreography and unflinching gazes the ethics entailed in participating in sex that cannot be removed from the sexual settings of colonial history, racial inequality, class dynamics and the gendered politics of age. The films of Brillante Mendoza help me to identify an unique and urgent voice emerging from the Global South that is both belittled by and celebrated in the West, in light of the straight, white men who dominate the industry of film criticism. I uplift Mendoza’s use of cinema to offer ways of prioritizing and empathizing with the denigrated in our globalized world. My focus on maids in the previous chapter isolates the sexual warfare that occurs on a class terrain in films recently produced in South Korea. Performances I capture in the term “embodied montage” show how characters establish their choices of self, and where roles come together or eclipse each other. In so doing, I show how intimacy and proximity can erupt in entrenched class relations and even catapult the subjugated into another time and place so as to interrupt the hold of patriarchy. In this chapter, I hone in on suffering that can be inflicted by an individual on an entire nation and how representations can aggravate or alleviate the problems generated by such corruption. If we are to account for the limited voices that assert universal spectatorship, I demand sharing of that space, including expanding opportunities for who can author representations, especially for stories we don’t usually hear and the people already voicing them. How can representation do justice not only to suffering but also to precarity that produces not only inequity but also desire? How can representation

184  The Proximity of Other Skins capture our formation of selves that includes old places, which no longer exist except in memory, and the new places we consider home, to which we’ve been catapulted? In The Proximity of Other Skins, which focuses on intimacy across radical inequality, I am interested in how the self is made up of our dreams that exceed the authenticity of our experiences. That is, who we imagine to be and how we narrate our hopes can help us endure. I remember departing my village in the Philippines as a teenager and memorizing the details of the streets. Thirty years later, with my husband and two children, I return able to make my way, driving the same route, glimpses of the familiar helping me among the radically changed. As a child in this neighborhood, I do not yet know my husband, Dan, and I sure dream of him and the children who would rise from our future togetherness. As a girl, I dream of a self I do not know. When I receive the big brown envelope accepting the teenaged me to university, I know it means my freedom as a young woman away from the shackles of my patriarchal family. I think about the future self that will be unleashed by the university to which I will flee. Similarly, in cultural productions that represent her story, former First Lady of the Philippines (1965–​1986) Imelda Marcos dreams of the somebody she will be but does not yet know. Given her circumstances in the provinces, she knows her beauty entitles her to meet someone or allow her to travel far from her poor circumstances. It is a dream to move away from her small town. So, what does it mean for others to create representations about her? We cannot simply judge these works by the criterion of authenticity when she worked hard to erase her circumstances. Is Imelda delusional for saying she is not from poverty—​the place where she grew up? In refusing the truth of her self, is she living inauthentically? The past, including her own poverty and her own hatred of the poor that must have existed for her to steal from them and further entrench them in suffering, is something continually produced and reproduced. Not only was she poor, she must hate poverty so much that she came to hate anyone immersed in it. Her relationship to the past is tainted by what she did between then and now, including her hard work of dreaming to deny her past. So, I close my book by discussing how the past not only is not here but also is not a place of truth from whence to understand our present and our future. I do not need to take my sons and my husband to the Philippines to say being here in the place where I was born means we now know the truth of our family. This is somewhat of a lie. Our truth is more than the cold facts of where we come from. Representation is not just about authenticity and its achievement. My kids cannot go back and say, “Now, I realize where

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  185 I am from.” They can actually now more factually say, “I realize I am really not from there.” And to do so is not to deny their truth. This book is about representations across difference and inequality at the site of intimacy—​one that exceeds sexuality—​including how they shape the experience of time and space for spectators. That is, spectators experience complexities and intimacies with images, too, as we have with our past, and this is why I study recent works about Imelda Marcos. In studying representations of Imelda Marcos, I  am interested in intimacies that go way beyond the genital sex act to capture relations within production and consumption as well as across the screen and stage to the audience—​between spectators and authors. I  privilege the perspective of Filipin@x actors, producers, and spectators to answer the question:  who represents whom and how? And it is the representation of Imelda Marcos that helps to parse this question in an era of #oscarssowhite, #metoo, and #timesup—​movements that identify problems with authorship and, indeed, spectatorship and criticism, too. As we live in a country that is increasingly populated by a majority of people of color,1 I am compelled to ask what our films look like—​and who creates them and interprets them in our classrooms and beyond. In creating representations about Imelda Marcos’s story, whether it is in authorized or unauthorized biographies, or the hit musical Here Lies Love (2010–​17) and the award-​winning documentary Imelda (2005)—​works by whites and Filipin@x alike, I ask not only who can—​but also how we can—​represent ourselves and others. Why do we tend to judge these works by their adherence to authenticity? And how do we conduct ourselves when we tell stories that represent rarely presented people? What does an ethical act of representing others look like considering unequal access to authoring representation and criticism? The critique that says a white man can’t represent these subjects ignores how they actually can and do so rampantly. In calling for broadening who can speak about movies and who can make movies, I center, ground, and home in on authorship and spectatorship as processes shared between so many but dominated by so few. The musical by David Byrne casts Filipin@x actors who relate to Imelda as the most famous Filipin@x in history and memory the world over. The musical essentially ends where Ramona Diaz’s documentary film Imelda begins—​as the filmmaker explores the aftermath of People Power in the life of the former dictator’s wife. Filipin@ filmmaker Ramona Diaz catapulted her own career with this documentary, and she is now the premiere Filipin@ American filmmaker working in the world today. In these two works, I explore

186  The Proximity of Other Skins the ethics of representing oneself and others while accounting for spectators who wrestle with the politics of representation in light of inequalities among authors and audiences. In Diaz’s Imelda, the filmmaker achieves an intimacy in representing others that we can learn from, while in Here Lies Love, Byrne shows that one does not have to be Filipino@x to represent Filipin@x. Yet his musical is not removed from power relations and the terrain of representations that privilege cisgendered straight white male able-​bodied authors and critics. Furthermore, in analyzing the musical and the documentary, I want to emphasize how intimacy and proximity are not limited to sex acts, and how they can manifest in other ways through performance and film representations. While I situate the idea of proximity and ethical intimacy in filmic sex acts I study in this book, I also want to identify how it works within a larger context. Moreover, these distinct genres—​musical and a documentary—​two very different sets of texts, reveal how intimacy and proximity occur in expanded contexts of production and spectatorship. Thus, I am opening up the book in its final chapter to broaden its implications. David Byrne and Romana Diaz are not alone in their engagement of Imelda’s life. Imelda Marcos is the subject of numerous articles and books by Westerners and Filipin@x alike, including Katherine Ellison’s Pulitzer Prize–​ winning reporting that “documented massive transfers of wealth abroad by President Marcos and his associates  .  .  .  ”2 and her book Imelda:  Steel Butterfly of the Philippines (1988) and Carmen Navarro Pedrosa’s unauthorized biography The Rise and Fall of Imelda Marcos (1987). According to these biographers, Imelda Marcos, former First Lady of the Philippines, is known for her rampant abuse of power and corruption in accumulating wealth, such as prominent buildings in New York City, an estate in Long Island, a penthouse in London, and some of the most expensive jewelry in existence—​ such as the “Idol’s Eye,” the “biggest diamond in the world, (for which she) paid a cool $5.5 million dollars . . . and is rumored to own it still,”3 and her rollicking love for disco dancing and traveling with entourages of over 60 people, requiring 4 Philippine Airlines planes, as they shopped in New York, Europe, and the Middle East. She was notoriously extravagant in the lavish ways she hosted heads of state and in how she expected to be treated by them. In her self-​representation, she seemed entitled to enjoy the stolen wealth because she embodied her people. How does one approach representing this fascinating person? How does one form an ethical representation that eclipses those she tortured along the way to her rise? That is, how can a work that obscures the people she

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  187 tortured claim to be an ethical representation? Can a representation be ethical if it doesn’t focus on the people she harmed? In studying the work of Ramona Diaz and David Byrne—​a Filipin@ American immigrant and a white American man—​both artists, I hope to identify how one goes about forging an ethical intimacy to one’s subject and one’s production.

A Musical across Difference The white American musician and icon David Byrne became fascinated by Imelda Marcos and the megalomania that fueled her rags-​to-​riches/​head-​of-​ state/​power story. His musical Here Lies Love begins with Imelda’s humble childhood in Leyte along with her friend and caregiver Estrella. She dates the young opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, who aspires to serve the people justice. His hopes are the opposite of Imelda’s aspirations for personal upward mobility. When Ninoy Aquino breaks up with her for reasons that include her being “too tall,” she meets the ambitious senator Ferdinand Marcos and marries him within days. She rises to power by his side and comes to enjoy the fruits of corruption; these include not only the wealth that she accumulates as her people suffer but also the idea that her personal achievement of happiness as First Lady brings joy to the poor masses she represents. Imelda’s refusal to accept her background of poverty distorts to another wish: to refuse to see poverty and to choose to cultivate wealth by stealing from the poor. As a child, Imelda’s mother was forced to live in the garage by her husband’s first children. Her mother’s death when Imelda was nine led to childhood feelings of abandonment and want, which she translates to a global stage where she imagines the Philippines becoming the center of attention and abundance—​via trade, culture, and the global economy. As her husband’s health declines, she rises to power and eclipses him. More importantly, she loses her devotion to him when he scandalously cheats on her with a largely unknown American actress, Dovey Beams. Presumably acting on her own, Imelda Marcos enables former paramour Ninoy Aquino, who was imprisoned under martial law, to flee to the United States for health reasons. When Aquino returns to the Philippines from exile in the United States, he is gunned down. Slowly begins the rise of the people who no longer contain their anger at the Marcoses’ corruption. The musical then ends with a song about the People Power Revolution.

188  The Proximity of Other Skins Despite this ultimate alignment with the plight of the people Imelda and her husband preyed on, the musical has been accused of having a romantic fascination with Imelda’s corruption. In the 2012 New York Times article “The Steel Butterfly Still Soars,” Katherine Ellison recalls of Imelda Marcos, “She fascinated American officials, diplomats and journalists with her striking beauty and lavish hospitality . . . and helped convince Americans that the Marcoses alone stood between order and Communist chaos—​while distracting them from accumulating evidence of torture, executions and disappearances.”4 The Pulitzer Prize–​winning writer penned this recollection within the context of her review of David Byrne’s “surprisingly sympathetic new musical Here Lies Love.” She describes Imelda’s lasting power as like a “cockroach after a nuclear bomb” and quotes Byrne saying, “he wants his audience to ‘reluctantly empathize’ with Imelda.”5 Ellison asserts that this “pop-​iconization of Imelda and the success of Here Lies Love is an affront to the Marcoses’ surviving victims” before pointedly recalling the plight of Hilda Narciso, “repeatedly gang-​raped by soldiers” or Mariano Pimentel, who was tortured and “left for dead.” I want to confront this question about the storytelling in terms of how we assess the white, male authorship of Imelda by centering the perspective of the Filipin@x actors and their take on the musical, how it was written/​produced, and how they are represented by and represent the work; and I also center the spectatorial experience too as bound by power and marginality both, in this case my own, as one who is simultaneously watching and being represented as a member of the Filipin@x diaspora. This book is about how structural location and approach matter so centrally because the cultural production of theater and movies do transform and teach us. For this reason, I am fascinated with the question of how white American celebrity musicians with no expertise in Filipin@x history or politics legitimately represent the story of Imelda Marcos. What language exists to make that assessment? Do David Byrne and Imelda Marcos complicate the issue of authentic representation in analogous ways, wherein he complicates representation of the other and she complicates self-​representation? From the standpoint of the spectator, I loved the musical because it brought me back to my past in all of its incongruity and it gave my older son a sense of Filipin@x postcolonial history in ways he now emotionally and musically knows. He also learned names important to Filipin@x national identity:  Marcos, Aquino, and Romualdez. Yet, I  need to interrogate the complications of Byrne as author/​authority, and how he does it in light of the real need to have more Filipin@x voices out there.

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  189 Measuring representation through authenticity, however, does not capture what cultural productions like Here Lies Love ignite: imagination, creativity, or dreaming of a possible future away from reality. The latter is what the former First Lady Imelda Romualdez Marcos’s life exemplifies. She treats her past as a thing to be erased and then rewritten in an act of impressive creativity that does not have good ends. David Byrne focuses on this act of creativity on Imelda Marcos’s part, and perhaps this is how his work is an ethical intervention in her way of life that affected an entire people. Yet, the role of history is muted when focusing so deeply in the psyche of a woman who stole from her people and her country in ways that still have ramifications today. In reporting on her 90th birthday celebration and the hospitalization of 260 attendees due to food poisoning, The New York Times restates her criminal past when she and her husband “were believed to have plundered the government treasury of up to $10 billion, and thousands of activists who opposed his rule were either killed or went missing.” The newspaper also reported that “only a small fraction of that wealth was recovered” because of cronyism in subsequent governments. A mere two years ago, current President Rodrigo Duterte said “that the Marcos family had approached him and said they were willing to return some of the money without admitting that they were guilty of any crimes.” Even more recently, on November 2018, a “Philippine court sentenced her to more than 40 years in prison for creating private foundations to hide her wealth.” However, “she remains free despite the court warrant for her arrest.”6

Imelda Marcos and the Will to Dream According to biographers Katherine Ellison and Carmen Navarro Pedrosa, and what I learned as a child growing up in Manila, Imelda was born to a poor branch of the powerful Romualdez family. As she rose from poverty to wealth, an opportunity was perhaps missed. Rather than use her emergent power to alleviate suffering in the lives of the poor, she enriched her own personal wealth by deepening their suffering. In her mind, she must really have been a rich person stuck in a poor family or body. She destroyed the hut she lived in as a child and replaced it with a mansion that equated her life with the child Jesus through her own stations of the cross. She transformed herself into a rich queen who owned the world’s best diamonds, but was from a poor country and used the poor’s money without their consent.

190  The Proximity of Other Skins Imelda understood representation’s power to fabricate their compliance to her anointed status. In her fake ancestral home, she created dioramas to tell a different story that authenticated her wealth and erased her poverty. This is but part of a narrative that Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos created, which lasted and overpowered the evidence of corruption—​the stealing of Philippine wealth to build their own personal coffer with ridiculous acquisitions of real estate, jewelry, clothing, and friends from the circles of global celebrity. The images of elegance overrode the lack of images of robbery. Through her glamorous self-​presentation and her embezzling of money, Imelda Marcos catapulted the Philippines onto the global stage during her tenure as the wife of Ferdinand Marcos, president and dictator for 21 years. Imelda expanded the historical imagination and gendered roles available at the time of her rule as a formidable female leader who wielded power and influence in global politics, negotiating not only with Presidents Johnson and Reagan but also with Fidel Castro and Muammar el Qaddafi. In The Guardian’s 2016 article “The 10 Billion Dollar Question:  What Happened to the Marcos Millions?,” Ferdinand Marcos is referred to as “the world’s greatest thief,” who received a $13,500 annual salary but accumulated $10 billion in stolen wealth which he shipped out of the Philippines after a 21-​year reign of looting from the people as its top politician, using cronies to funnel funds in bank accounts and properties. After he was ousted in 1986, the new government tried to retrieve the money and assets, but the Marcoses eluded them by hiding over 26 world-​renowned paintings and jewels and even keeping properties out of reach in a global chase. As the Marcos cronies came back into power, and even their investigators who participated in more corruption during the investigation, the power of the committee charged with the recovery slowly dissipated and remained threatened. The Marcos clan’s rise to power and thus the memory of their corruption is gradually erased.7 This is perhaps why many Filipinos do not remember or do not believe the corruption transpired, so that the Marcoses remain not only beloved but in power and wealth today. The money was never fully recovered. Here Lies Love and the documentary Imelda both highlight the radical inequality separating her from the Filipin@x people. And Imelda Marcos’s representations aptly illustrate the different authorial positions of Byrne and Diaz that enact the dynamics of authorship and spectatorship across inequalities and differences. First I analyze what the rock musical by David Byrne presents—​the spectator’s physical proximity to, immersion in, and

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  191 implication in the life and work of this woman, both the ridiculous and the atrocious—​and later in the chapter, compare that to the proximity that the filmmaker Ramona Diaz presents, which is closeness and intimacy within the megalomania that informed Imelda Marcos’s rule. In the process, I ask us to look beyond authenticity in assessing the representational ethics that both these works present. And in closing the book, account for how the historical context never subsides or is de-​emphasized—​so as to measure its intervention. The deployment of historical context in representation has been an emblem of ethical intimacy in this book. What is fascinating in the musical however, is an immersion in physical proximity and a lack of depth in historical context. Proximity is crucial to the language of David Byrne’s Here Lies Love at the site of the spectator who must move around and even dance among the actors when in the orchestra, along with the construction of the play’s storytelling through the intimacy of song and music. This proximity to the historical events portrayed in the musical however, lacks a substantial libretto and involves the foregoing of a book. In a 2014 article in The Guardian referring to the British production, Michael Billington notes the “lack of ” the musical’s book so that “songs alone are left to tell the story.”8 And when we are encouraged to sing along and even to dance, where the immersive space means “standing spectators become eager participants” then we do not quite know how this party or election we participate in fits into history. Moreover, it may also lead to empathy for the villain, resulting from the lack of information. Billington says, what we get is a “clear outline” that prevents him from learning while there “about the U.S.’s dubious role in supporting Marcos during his 20 years in power.” This is a precise observation in how the play is physically immersive for the spectators present yet does not provide historical depth during its performance that directly implicates the demographic comprising its audience: those of us in the West and Global North. The key idea I appreciate from Billington’s problematization of what I call the musical’s contradictory immersion is this: “I know a musical is not a history lesson, but the lack of a libretto means we never fully understand how the Marcos regime survived as long as it did.” In my book, how history never subsides in representation is a key aspect of ethical representation of intimacy across inequality in order to implicate the viewer in distance that undeniably exists in the film encounter, which purports to bring proximity and intimacy uniquely through the close-​up and other transformative techniques. So when Billington refers to the strong support of the United States that kept

192  The Proximity of Other Skins the Marcoses in power due to fears of communism, a distancing counter to accountability to the story represented transpires instead. That is, even as one purportedly stands in the place of Filipinos becoming mesmerized by the couple’s charm so as to elect them into office, we are not informed about the American role in this charade of corruption. We are now simply observers rather than guilty benefactors or even propagators of injustice. Our role is thus eclipsed by the glitz. In contrast to my demand to increase the prominence of historical context to the story, The Guardian’s 2013 review by Alexis Soloski, focused on the New York show, renders history as “not essential, as the lyrics and banks of video monitors explicate the action.”9 Unlike the London review by The Guardian in 2014, the lack of libretto is here considered impressive for showing “Byrne’s ability to convey through song all the more striking,” for it successfully evokes in a “haunting” way “the horror of martial law.” The choice of the word “haunting” captures how this is slight. We don’t see the horror of it for we see the play from the eyes of its perpetrator, who does not wrestle in any way with her crimes but instead focuses on why her people don’t love her instead. There is a lack of historical information that the physical immersion of the play distracts us from noticing until later, as Billington well argues. Unlike Billington, most reviewers actually celebrate the shallow proximity the musical achieves and easily forgive the lack of history in the musical. The Entertainment Weekly review suggests the musical “successfully tells political corruption without a heavy hand.”10 The choice of the word “heavy hand” indicates a desire for a lighter touch, which may not be appropriate for the crimes surrounding these events. There is no mention of the need for more historical information that implicates our gaze and immersion as Americans in a site corrupted and distorted by our imperializing country. Instead, the review commends the “easy seduction” and “tight storytelling” that chooses to tell the story “through the eyes of Imelda”—​which is a crucial observation. To see the world through her eyes—​her rise from poverty to dictatorial power—​is normalized without mentioning the gargantuan leap toward thievery she came to espouse. Rather than track how stealing not just a little, but so exorbitantly became acceptable and deliberate practice, the musical focuses on her persona, which the reviewer commends. He says: Imelda is infused by the actor “with just the right amount of strength and sensitivity.” But for what kind of person—​a dictator’s wife who may have stolen more from their people than any other in the history of humanity?11

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  193 The Newsday music critic Glenn Gamboa, of Filipino heritage himself says, “While a working knowledge of Filipino history makes Byrne’s accomplishment extra-​impressive, it isn’t necessary to follow the story of Imelda, played with sweetness and steel by Ruthie Ann Miles.” The word “sweet” frequently appears in reviews of the character Imelda, the dictator’s wife and the governor of Manila herself. Here, the emphasis on character’s “sweetness” follows the same ahistorical logic. Proximity to the performance provides contact with history so it can actually stand in for it. And here, indeed, a different history of the dictatorship emerges when Gamboa concludes his review with “the show’s heart. Here Lies Love is inventive and glamorous, a must-​see experience made even more worthwhile by the hopefulness and sweetness at its core.” The word choices of “hopefulness and sweetness” refers specifically to the sing-​along-​like moment at the end of the musical when testimonies of participants in the People Power Revolution describe their joining the protest on the very day it erupted. However, the tone of sweetness and innocence infuses Imelda’s character too—​in songs that precede it like, “Why Don’t You Love Me?” where the choice of telling the story from Imelda’s perspective de-​emphasizes the meticulous cheating and thieving that had to be conducted, otherwise the amounts of loot—​for example, 24 gold bars engraved with 24th wedding anniversary greetings—​would not have been transported intact along with so many other assets—​on the night of the Marcos’s escape. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney concurs with not needing much history to understand the subject presented in the musical. Like Billington, he identifies the strength of the immersive: “the visceral experience does effective double-​duty; it gives the feeling of being on a crowded dance floor, or alternately caught in a throng of revelers or protestors on the streets of Manila.”12 Yet, in this physical placement in the shoes and settings of Filipin@x during the era of the People Power Revolution, we don’t necessarily need to fill out the story outline conducted in “broad-​strokes”—​for Rooney says “little or proper knowledge of the Marcos regime is required to get a full impression of the protagonist’s story.” The achievement here may be participating in the technical production skill of herding an audience into a highly orchestrated machine of a show’s many moving parts rather than what it takes to transform from a poor person who makes everyone else more poor, as she takes so much from them that generations of their descendants still feel the burden today. The historical context is thus de-​emphasized for

194  The Proximity of Other Skins the sake of spotlighting the protagonist’s character, though not just as an extraordinary thief but as one without guilt. To emphasize character, as context dissipates, creates distance between spectator and subject. Alexis Soloski notes this is the danger of the immersive style and the “sweetness” of the actor that Gamboa also speaks of—​for it “becomes more difficult to judge or be critical of the characters—​dancing with Imelda makes you more likely to sympathize with her and her husband . . . despite knowing better.” So if the play is, as she says, composed “largely from found text, speeches and interviews gently massaged to fit Byrne’s rhythms and DJ Fatboy Slim’s beats,” the proximity is ultimately deceiving because of the lack of historical depth, including what it means for an American to author this story. As an author, David Byrne is an American implicated in the Philippines and Filipin@x peoples due to the history of American colonialism. However, he enters the story not from the authenticity of a genuine Filipin@x person but from the authentic standpoint of being captured by and then capturing Imelda’s self-​aggrandizement, her dreams, her imagination, and the hard work she performs to erase her past. What is the impact on Filipin@x people of Byrne’s surrender to his fascination for this particular Filipin@? Indeed, it is not new for Westerners to create work about the Southeast or Asian women, and this work by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim feels fresh and new, yet also rehearses the limits of working from their standpoint as outsiders. The newness and the re-​articulation of limits occur in three areas:  (1) its presentation format in a dynamic disco setting where the audience act as participants in the show’s historical events—​which I will study in terms of the dynamic of physical immersion and historical distance; (2) a primarily Filipin@x cast who are given the opportunity to play Filipin@x people as Filipin@x people as authenticating and eruptive both; and (3)  world-​ renowned U.S.  auteurs who mindfully refer to Filipin@x fascination with American pop culture while clearly obsessing over Filipin@x culture in the very show, converging into a fascinating awareness of subject/​abject dynamics. The musical’s presentation format places the audience in the shoes of Filipin@x witnessing Imelda’s rise and fall, voting in the elections for Marcos as president, watching from nearby the Marcoses’ honeymoon. The musical spans various historical events as spectacles that the audience achieves close proximity to:  dancing with Imelda in Studio 54, witnessing the shocking

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  195 killing of Ninoy Aquino, and marching along inside the People Power Movement. The scene that New York Daily News reviewer Joe Dziemianowicz finds most striking is the one of Imelda “visiting New York . . . twirling while decked out in mink, a martini hoisted high in her upraised hand.”13 This image is indeed striking, for Imelda is center on stage, holding up her microphone like a martini glass as dancers flank her—​portraying how her world is organized around her entirely. It is a shot of self-​centeredness. In this scene, we can see that we are in personal spaces and historical events, yet we don’t get history in a thoroughly inserted manner. He uses the word “sweet” to describe the performance alongside his historical knowledge of the “disastrous rule of the Marcoses” as one that is “deservedly short-​lived.” In this analysis, history must be inserted by the critic to discipline the glitz, so we can recognize and interpret it for the crime it represents. Dancing in Studio 54 is enabled by theft and supported by a logic of enjoyment on behalf of the people. Yet history is not inserted there to frame this sight, which involves our own dancing. As critics and theorists, we must entrench the play into history within our work, rather than say it is not needed to understand the world of the character or the musical. The vulture.com review perhaps says it best: when

Figure 5.1  Imelda Marcos (Ruthie Ann Miles) dances on center stage with dancers behind her in Here Lies Love.

196  The Proximity of Other Skins Imelda sings “Why Don’t You Love Me?” we realize “she still does not get it, and you’re left to sort out the morality for yourself.”14 This I hope is the goal. The vulture.com reviewer asserts: “perhaps that’s the point: our complicity through nonchalance. Awful things happened and keep happening, but they’re over there.” I build my critique from here: the proximity created by the immersive physical experience during the performance actually creates distance because of the lack of history. The reviewer continues: “The horrible truth beneath the coyness and danceable beat . . . (is) about our vague and distant response . . . it’s like someone having a freakout on the other side of the dance floor,” or the world, actually. So Imelda retains an otherness based on distance, even if our presence is roped into the production as if we are witnesses. We know less and see less than what is present before us and around us. This method of immersing the viewer into the scene to seduce them, occurs in the production of the song “Camelot,” as we follow the newlywed Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos on their honeymoon travels as if we are their fellow resort guests or companions. While they prance and display themselves in Lily Pulitzer–​style beach wear, their fit bodies are creatively revealed in skimpier swimwear. The lights in the theater mimic the sun to expose their brown skin, which is very striking in a scene where no one else is denuded, including the audience. When the brown bodies in swimsuits were exposed in the musical, I heard an audible gasp and felt the audience dance even harder, almost in celebration of the revelation. That is, there is a heightening of physical awareness because of the sweaty, glistening bodies now exposed. Perhaps a titillating proximity is achieved by the partial nudity that then heightens the audience’s enjoyment in feeling so close, not only to celebrity characters who are historical figures but also to the very fit and beautiful actors who seem to be sharing the scene with them. So here is the distancing at work: we are exposed to these historical figures as carnal and sexual beings—​and we focus on that physical presence—​the meatiness of their bodies—​their sexual energy—​and it is felt. The other carnalities that they perpetrate—​torture and rape—​are not seen and not felt. Later, when young Ferdinand Marcos campaigns for the presidency, a television camera follows him among the people. He sings directly into the camera’s eye as he walks through the crowd in a perfectly crisp suit and shiny, coiffed hair. No sweating, all polish. And the images from the live video camera featuring the audience are broadcast all over the walls. We focus on our appearance in this representation of history elsewhere, or elsewhere’s

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  197 history. Marcos brings the voting public (the audience) into the camera frame with him, as he convinces them to vote for him. It heightens one’s experience—​the possibility of being roped into representation from audience to actor. The startled audience members play along, agreeing to vote for him, while also performing on their face the incredulity and thrill of being on video projected so massively on stage. The people’s seduction by the couple is the focus of this part of the musical and we participate as voters. What we do not know is that Marcos himself was accused of killing his father’s political opponent with a weapon from the university team of which he was captain. He argued for himself in the court trial and won, launching a political career. A fascination, though begrudging, landed him the presidency. We understand the seduction by him as a charismatic candidate, yet we do not know the extent of his brutal history. Later, in a flipping of roles, the audience becomes protestors during the People Power Movement as effigies of Ferdinand and Imelda are touted about. We still do not know enough. What is missing is the fear of being hunted, attacked, abducted, or killed that does not occur for the audience in the musical. The scenes that counter the Marcos subjectivity is where Ninoy Aquino and his family fear his return. It is performed at a distance from us when we are also waiting at the airport as they say goodbye. Yet the death is told through a song by his mom about his wanting to be a drummer boy. The song, focused on the past of his childhood, does not attain the same immersive effect as the Marcoses’ pleasures and enjoyments transpiring before us as they partake in them now. The production at the Seattle Repertory Theater in 2017 also included an exhibition in the lobby of Filipin@ American history in the city of Seattle itself, where two anti-​Marcos defectors were killed and where the Marcoses are named as linked to these events.15 The musical was thus presented within the context of a Filipin@ American history of community activism and resistance to Marcos-​era corruption and repression through descriptions in the program and in the lobby. This choice of display was very different from the New York Public Theater production, where, according to attendees like historian Genevieve Clutario, the displays brought together “framed photos of Imelda with Virgin Mary statues” with “roses scattered” among them in an “overabundance of kitsch reminiscent of a religious altar.”16 This description of decorative religious kitsch sounds quite different from the exhibition of activism by the community in Seattle, a US-​based Filipin@ American resis­ tance struggle that plays prominently in the lobby, framing our entry into the musical and directly linking us to a US arm of the People Power Movement.

198  The Proximity of Other Skins The presentations differ by context—​the New York show uses an aesthetic one that focuses on religious iconography, while the Seattle show asserts that context matters for the show to educate at the level of emotion. There were deaths here in Seattle of Filipino American activists, and their demise was directly linked to the Marcoses. Here, the historical context allows for representation to generate not only knowing but also feeling for the fate of people, to go beyond an aesthetic enjoyment. So history, while less present in the performance, is more recognized as important by the latest production when framing the experience of the audience coming into and exiting the lobby. The critical mass of Filipin@ diasporic actors performing the music rose past the music itself. While the music is fine enough, the voices that emerged testified to the talent of the Filipin@x cast across the diaspora and the need to see such talent. Audience members like myself who bought tickets to the orchestra, entered the club through a tunnel, then immediately had to gun for a good position near the narrow stage placed in the center of the dance floor with a giant disco ball on it. We stood around as if waiting for a club act while a DJ was perched high above us in an elevated open-​air booth. Brightly dressed party boosters moved people along while dancing and singing to the blasting music enveloping us. As the lights suddenly dimmed, the DJ welcomed us to Club Millennium as Filipin@x men and women pranced, danced, and sang on stage to the song “American Troglodyte,” about their admiring gaze on Americans and their cultural practices. I  absorbed the multicolored jeans and the crisp white shirts of the skilled Filipin@x cast of singer-​dancers along with the music that was recognizably Fat Boy Slim and David Byrne’s. Then the predominantly Filipin@x cast perform a song that externalizes an observation of America from the perspective of launching colonial mimicry. That is, the colonizer’s mundane practices hold fascination for the Filipin@x singers and dancers, and they not only articulate but also give vocabulary to that gaze, directly identifying their performance of bodily mimicry. The audience was encouraged to dance among them, not just watch them. By our own dancing in the proscenium stage, where the fourth wall between the actors and audience is broken, we also mimicked the dance that expressed our gaze of admiration for the colonizer. I discussed this earlier as the power of the immersive as a kind of standing in the shoes of those seduced by the charisma of the Philippine Camelot. The lubricant to this powerful experience are the agents who are the actors and performers. To be clear, the music is amazing, but it is the bodies and the singing of the Filipin@x performers that make it so much more. Reviewers

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  199 note this in various ways. The reviewer Billington of The Guardian comments this is the best-​looking cast he’s seen in decades. Or David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter lauds the “entire company—​refreshingly all-​Asian—​[as they] ace their acting duties, vocals, and [choreographer] Parsons’ eclectic dance moves.” The New York Daily News reviewer Joe Dziemianowicz, who had listened to the album, observes how the “songs make more sense and come to life in a whole new way.”17 One almost needs to see the show for the music to be moved and understand them more fully. The casting itself captures the rise of a number of stars, like television and theater actor Conrad Ricamora, who played Benigno Aquino in New York and Seattle; Broadway actor Jose Llana; and Philippine pop star Mark Bautista, who played Ferdinand Marcos in New York and London/​Seattle, respectively, along with the actors playing Imelda:  Ruthie Ann Miles in New York City, who has since launched a Broadway and television career; Natalie Mendoza in London; Jaygee Macapugay and Belinda Allyn (understudy) in Seattle; and Melody Bitiu, who played Estrella, Imelda’s estranged friend and caregiver, in both the New York and Seattle productions. Here the musical provided a stage for talented Filipin@x to represent themselves. Yet their presence is also eruptive—​in showing the multiple versions of Filipin@x in the diaspora, they disunite what Filipin@x look, sound, dance, and sing like in all their heterogeneity—​as evident in the cast of leads where they each represent their characters in ways particular to their bodies and personas. While it is not new that a Western, white, male group of auteurs would pen and helm a production about Asians, as was the case with Miss Saigon,18 these have achieved pop-​cultural iconicity in other seemingly unrelated fields. Their foray into the musical genre is unexpected. Their celebrity precedes their taking on a subject that is surprising for them, and they do so within the context of that very history of Western authorship. For well-​known white Western men to give words and music to emerging Filipin@x actors to revisit and tell a largely sensationalized history is not inherently wrong nor is it already a misrepresentation. Here Lies Love is an opportunity to explore power dynamics that deserve accounting in a US and European landscape—​ where Here Lies Love played—​and where Filipin@x authorship at the helm of major productions is rare. I am interested in the power dynamics of authorship and the perspective taken here. Is David Byrne mining the ridiculous that ultimately makes a woman known as the “co-​dictator” of the Philippines entertaining? To understand Byrne’s work within this framework is to ignore what he is actually doing beyond the law of authenticity; in other words,

200  The Proximity of Other Skins more than asking who gets to represent people, we need to ask how they are representing people. Theater critic Alexis Soloski describes how “Polymath musician David Byrne stumbled on this odd fact” of how Imelda “installed a disco ball in her New York apartment and built a dance floor on the roof of her palace in Manila.” He “used it as inspiration for the boogie musical Here Lies Love, a title borrowed from Imelda’s preferred epitaph.”19 In using the disco ball in her penthouse as his entry point to imagine her life, Byrne focuses his representation on Imelda’s ability to fantasize herself into a whole way of being. He looks at the part of her that willed a fantasy to justify the suffering she inflicted on people. This creative choice homes in on her character, beyond the historical truths of what she did. When I  first arrived to the United States in 1983, David Byrne’s band Talking Heads and their album Speaking in Tongues (1983) was a big hit nationally, and especially in my alternative and experimental public high school culture in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The band’s concert film album Stop Making Sense (1984) became the basis of a memorable musical number produced by the theater department, which included my classmates dressing in David Byrne’s iconic white suit singing “Once in a Lifetime,” replete with the awkward robotic and uncomfortable dancing. It was performed as a kind of anthem for a critical youth disenfranchisement that really struck me, woke me, and stayed with me in its unique and creative voice that was different from other music that typically played on the radio or TV. A song by Byrne and Slim, performed by Byrne in the original concept album that preceded the musical, represents Aquino’s love for his country in his own voice: “To all my Filipinos going through the struggle, you may feel like nobody sees you, but Aquino’s got your back.” Representing the Filipino dream of justice, he hopes to “giv[e]‌our people a break!” through education and unionization. So, seeing the third number of Byrne’s musical depicting Benigno Aquino singing “I Am a Child of the Philippines” in the national martyr’s own iconic white suit, which echoes Byrne’s Stop Making Sense outfit, really brought together my own Filipin@ diasporic experience. Byrne and Aquino’s white suits, which they both wore in 1983, converged in a remarkable diasporic moment for me as an iconic American lyricist and musician gave voice—​through catchy song and dance—​to a figure familiar and central to my own migration and the Philippine revolt of my youth. As a child, I knew of Aquino, and as a teenager had actually visited his modernist house in the Philippines to meet with a family friend from Boston who

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  201 was staying there. This friend was helping us move to Boston, where Aquino was then living while in exile from the Philippines. Soon after arriving in Boston, the city he had just left, I watched on television Aquino’s emergence from the plane. He returned to Manila after seven years in exile. It was on television in my apartment that I watched his assassination, while I myself was still computing the time difference and still converting the American dollar’s value in relation to the Philippine peso. While I did not personally know him, I was still very much between here and there as Aquino himself bridged the divide in going back home. Within seconds of Aquino’s disembarking the plane, flanked by security guards in brown suits, he was shot dead on the tarmac. And this is the white suit in which Aquino was assassinated, shot in the head, mere minutes after his arrival. Today, the bloody suit is on display at the airport named after him. The musical for me retells lost time and brings to vivid life the person—​ Aquino—​who died and galvanized a nation into action. Nationalist history comes alive in American pop culture now. In Seattle in the summer of 2017, I  brought my husband and living son to the show to connect better with the past through musical immersion. At 14 years old, my child was close to my own age when I came to the United States at 13. The musical presented one way for me to give him access to heritage, national history, postcolonial theory, and political movement in the form of a recent revolution—​all appropriate to his name, Bayan, which means home, belonging, nation, country, homeland, our people. It is also appropriate because Aquino founded the political party Lakas ng Bayan (LABAN). Lakas was his brother, my younger child, whose name means strength, both inner power and of the people. I  found the show so worthwhile that I  bought us plane tickets from San Francisco to Seattle just to see the show (at the orchestra level) and return home on the same day in June. I tried to convince many friends to do the same. It was not cheap, I know, but it was not London or New York either, where for years people told me the flight to see the show would be worth it even if I did not stay and just returned home on the same day. I agree. Each act in the musical achieves proximity to these events that shaped the dictatorship and the here and thereness of both Filipin@x/​American history and our family history. This show, then, which brings us to intense physical proximity to the performance of historical events, yet does so with a lack of historical depth, is told by a non-​Filipin@x, more precisely, an American who does not emphasize the American role in enabling the corruption and the human rights

202  The Proximity of Other Skins violations by the regime. And tells the story from the perspective of the villain, both sweet and innocent. It is less calculating and implicated when the emphasis is on the personal. These observations fuel my question about what it means for a white American author to be communicating history like this. My close readings thus far argue that the immersive presentation for the audience actually distances us from history. Then the introduction of a primarily Filipin@x cast authenticates and erupts any unity of a Filipin@x identity. And the awareness of a mutual looking is now captured by a mindful attention to how the colonized and the colonizer fascinate each other. Yet there needs to be more acknowledgment of the power dynamics in feeling for Filipin@x people and not just touring around them in dance and song. I now interview the Filipin@x actors in Here Lies Love so as to underscore their voices and to amplify their creativity. How do these Filipin@x women bring their perspective to the world as they tell the story of a woman so focused on herself at the expense of so many lives in an entire nation? Through the authorship of David Byrne, a different form of voicing occurs for the Filipin@x actors Jaygee Macapugay and Melody Bitiu, who are able to index the significance of this opportunity, and the meaning of Filipin@x womanhood gone awry, as the material they inherit as actors.

Here Lies Love and the Emergence of Filipin@x Voices Through interview, I attempt to achieve proximity with the creative process undertaken by the Filipin@x actors in relation to the representation. I spoke with Jaygee Macapugay, who played Imelda in the Seattle Repertory production, and Melody Bitiu, who performed Estrella Cumas, Imelda’s childhood friend and helper, in both the New York and Seattle productions. As the show closed, I spoke with them individually and specifically about how they came to be in the musical, directly confronting the emergence of their voices within a production created by a white American male author. The criterion of authenticity plays such a prominent role in our judgment of what is exploitative. An adage frequently articulated by working Filipino American actors, such as television star Conrad Ricamora (Aquino) and Broadway regular Jose Llana (Marcos), is that it is not the actors’ job to tell you what to think, as they are simply representing the truth of the event as

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  203 written in the play. In doing so, they must perform the life of the person, and explore the truth of their actions and their words. Ferdinand Marcos and Imelda Romualdez did marry after 11 days. Benigno Aquino and Imelda did date early in life. We have video and pictures of them, which the actors studied and depicted in their performances. They also conducted research to find meaning for their performances as acts of creativity and authorship. The key fact, however, is that the actors presented the life of their characters as framed by the celebrated artist David Byrne. The actors I  interviewed were united in their assertions that this version of the story has value. They were clear-​headed in their defense of David Byrne as a white author who understands he does not speak for or as a Filipin@x. They clearly reject the criticism that derides Byrne’s representation of Imelda as a white man’s fantasy and strongly laud his ability to tell the story and for Filipin@x people. They also argue that he succeeds in telling the story even though he is not Filipin@x, and that success also depends on the fact that he gives voice to Filipin@x actors. Melody Bitiu, who plays the Romualdez family caregiver, Estrella,20 whom Imelda abandoned, in response to my question about her take on the authorship of David Byrne, explained: “There is a commitment to a female story in the musical. It never feels to me like a white man’s perspective. We tell our stories through his music.” She says that she “will defend David Byrne to the end of Earth. He has given [me] such an amazing gift—​as a Filipina. Because David is white does not mean it is an illegitimate version of history.” In their process of working together, “he is open and collaborative,” she asserted. “We are telling our history.” Melody Bitiu found that the musical succeeded because its authors did not present themselves as “authorities” on Filipino history, rightly confirming the limits of using authenticity as a measure for artistry. Rather, they entered the story with a fascination “for people who live in a bubble.” When David Byrne came across the story that Imelda had a disco ball in her New York penthouse, she says that detail allowed him to imagine what her soundtrack must be and what it would sound like. That entry point of curiosity and imagination guided his exploration of the obstacles she faced and her rise to power and corruption as it grew. Melody Bitiu said she feels very “fortunate to tell Filipino America the story.” For her, the fuel for the musical is history, which she remembers having a place in her family. She remembers her parents talking about it and watching Ninoy Aquino assassinated on the news. She is proud to tell this history—which for her is certainly in the work of the musical. She sees herself as “helping to put the Philippines on the map for people who do not know it and

204  The Proximity of Other Skins for them to learn history because they are excited about it and moved by it to learn more.” For her, the lack of history that I problematize is actually a promising effect of the musical—which is to awaken audiences to research history! For Melody Bitiu, telling the story has impact and leads audience members to search on Google and YouTube for Imelda Marcos. She noted that there is a cultural specificity to the story, too, because of the relationship between the United States and Philippines, which has an obsession with American popular culture: “There are obsessions with American pop culture because the Philippines was a U.S. colony. Filipino DJs love American stuff, for example.” She essentially theorizes that the musical has the potential to reverse that direction if it inspires Americans to learn and study Philippine history for their own creativity and even self-​understanding. Playing Estrella most importantly makes Melody confront herself and her own sense of security in now wanting to be seen or be visible. As an actor, she has to examine making her voice heard. Bakirathi Mani, in her Aspiring to Home (2012) chapter on the musical Broadway Dreams describes how there is a feeling of worthiness in being seen.21 While that musical was written by South Asian Meera Syal, it was directed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, so the question of relating to white authorship is somewhat different. Acting makes one confront personal issues and reflect daily on challenging oneself and standing up for oneself. In discussing her own research, Bitiu collaborates with the research of the producers, too. She does not feel like they are simply “employing Filipinos” to authenticate their version of history. She felt it to be Filipino—​and identifies a kernel of proximity occurring here. It feels true, essentially. There is a truth in this relationship that is then made visible. There is truth in the proximity, and that has repercussions in how I, as a viewer, feel it in their embodiment of the musical, too. I am instrumental to the musical, as are the actors. In speaking with Melody Bitiu, what I learn is that the truth of the show is not in its “authenticity” and reality—​of its being told by a Filipin@x cast. In this way, the actors should not even have to defend him on the basis of our authority as Filipin@x or his as not. A more critical assessment of this is needed that focuses on what representation does regarding a particular topic. In this case, the creative choice is not about representing Filipin@x but the character of a person who is able to exploit an entire people when she herself came from experiencing that very exploitation. Perhaps the inauthentic speaks to us more closely and proximately than the authentic. Perhaps it is the power of the dream and the way Imelda willed herself to produce a narrative that was so distant from the authentic. She

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  205 clearly wanted to make her past distant, to relinquish the friendship of her helper, Estrella, so she could present a different self. She may have grown up in poverty, but she got out of it, must be her thinking. She did not feel connected to her poverty. She was never there, in that she was elsewhere as she was poor, imagining she was not. The thing that is fascinating about Imelda is her flight from her past. She presents herself as a wealthy person trapped in a poor family. She is an economically trans person in a sense, and this is the focus of the story that exceeds the more popular image of her 3,000+ shoes that made her not only recognizable, but a joke. The self does not always need to be authentic to itself. This is not entirely what the self is. Your self is also your memories, your losses, your proximities, and your otherness in representation. There is the self that you dream in a way that defies your reality, as Imelda well embodies. David Byrne is not Filipin@x but this is not the basis of his representation. Rather, he focuses on the power of imagination, his and his subject’s both. I asked Jaygee Macapugay, the lead actor who plays Imelda in Seattle, about what it means to be in a show produced by white men—​talented, world-​class, yes, and also white men making work about the topic of the Philippines. How did their authorship strike her? She responded that there is a tradition, as is the case with Miss Saigon and The King and I, of imagining Asia in the theater. She read about how Byrne’s intentions were not to make an Asian musical like these per se, but about approaching how powerful people live in a bubble. As Macapugay was cast from swing to understudy to lead, she became more involved in the creative process. In Seattle, she worked with David Byrne, Alex Timbers (director), and the choreographer Annie Bea to change things, explore ideas, and with the introduction of the balcony, shifted elements of the show to complete new configurations. The choreography changed with her in mind, as did her duet with Melody, which was changed so she could make the role “her own.” She is essential to it, and the work is essential to her as well. This collaborative and personal process could be seen as a form of co-authorship , though she did not quite see it that way. As an actor, you take the role and the music based on your experiences and bring it to life with your own character. The older I get, I embrace my own history and my own life in its beauty, complexity, truth, and hardship. I help bring the piece to the stage. I consider authorship to be the writing, the text, the music. David Byrne and Alex Timbers are smart to ask: what would Filipinos say here? “Putang ina mo,” for example, during one song, comes from the cast’s texting parents.

206  The Proximity of Other Skins So Macapugay understands that the actors contribute, but the authorship is not theirs. They contribute through their performance and their small edits in a sense. Macapugay says the musical fits in the trajectory of her career in a magnificent way. She says: “If I never do another show again, I am good. The most important piece of art I  will ever do in my life is this. It is a dream come true to do a successful commercial musical with a Filipino story and a Filipino cast. I have bigger dreams.” Because of her work on it, she hopes to help bring the show to Broadway and do more plays, more films that are Filipino stories. Along the way, it also introduced her to more opportunities and landed her a spot on Broadway in the musical School of Rock. “These would not be possible without Here Lies Love. It is street cred.” Therefore, working in this white-​authored production actually gave her opportunities to collaborate and help tell Filipin@x stories. It opened up her career to more prominent venues including performing in Soft Power (2018), the latest play by David Henry Hwang in San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater (ACT) with Conrad Ricamora that is now en route to Broadway. The play helps to further establish the careers of these Filipin@x American actors. This is something that critiques based on authenticity, or who is allowed to tell whose story, misses. When Macapugay auditioned for the production of Here Lies Love, she saw the “production values, heard the lyrics, and immediately recognized in its immersive quality how [it was] going to change theater and how Filipinos [were] viewed. Finally!” When she was cast in the show, she felt she had become part of something special, something fleeting, and something that may never happen again. This ephemerality and impermanence also relate to my discussion of the proximity that representation enables, as it is fleeting, too. Macapugay considers the filmmaker Ramona Diaz a “goddess” for her film Imelda, which she used to achieve proximity to the role she performed in Here Lies Love. Diaz’s is an ethical representation that brings intimacy and proximity in the way that she structured her film to communicate what the subject wanted to say and share. Its influence on Here Lies Love makes the latter an ethical work in relation to Imelda Marcos, too. The pairing of the musical with the documentary feels very true to the actors because Ramona Diaz was able to get so close to Imelda and let her speak; that is, as a subject, she describes herself with her actions and her own words. In the film, you can see that young girl from Leyte, and yet Imelda still comes across as larger than life. She is nothing but representation, which is hard to capture

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  207 in the flesh because of her personality and drive to construct her own image and narrative. And this is what Ramona Diaz captures: exactly how Imelda Marcos forwards this version and exposes its production as contradictory and delusional farce.

Intimately with Imelda (though with Interruption) Ramona Diaz’s Imelda is the first feature film of the Filipina diasporic filmmaker, whose career is devoted to representing the full and complex lives of Filipin@x peoples in the diaspora. Spirits Rising (1996), her thesis film from Stanford University’s renowned documentary program, focused on the role of women in the People Power Movement of 1986. The film won a Student Academy Award among other honors in prominent festivals, such as the San Francisco International Film Festival, and awards from the International Documentary Association and the Director’s Guild of America. While screening this film at various film festivals, Diaz floated the idea of her next film as a feature on Imelda Marcos, for which she immediately received funding from the National Asian American Telecommunications Association, now the Center for Asian American Media. She has since made feature films like The Learning (2008) focused on Filipin@x teachers who migrate from the Philippines to teach in Baltimore schools, in a reversal of the migration of US teachers at the turn of the last century to the Philippines. Don’t Stop Believin’: Everyman’s Journey (2013) followed the unlikely stardom of Filipino singer Arnel Pineda, discovered on YouTube and tapped as lead singer for the legendary American rock band Journey. Her latest film, Motherland (2017), is an immersive documentary about reproductive rights shot within the busiest maternity ward in the world, located in the Philippines. In her award-​winning body of work, Ramona Diaz achieves intimacy with her subjects in ways that enabled the musical Here Lies Love. And unlike it, never lets go of historical context, as a testament to the different approaches and accomplishments between documentaries and musicals. In the film Imelda by Ramona Diaz, Imelda Marcos herself is brought to us with impressive proximity: in the flesh via documentary representation. She narrates her own life as a young woman who was caught in a whirlwind romance and justifies her actions as First Lady and Governor of Manila as love and service to her people. The film begins with crowds of Filipino people flanking her under umbrellas, trying to touch her. In the opening shot of the film, we hear Imelda’s son Bong Bong demand that we “get beyond the shoes,”

208  The Proximity of Other Skins because that is simply a “funny side of the story.” Imelda then launches a nonsensical tirade about her philosophy of totality rather than a specific perspective. This adds up to a kind of self-​forgiveness from God by the time the film concludes. Ramona Diaz indulges Imelda Marcos by letting her read from a book she has written about her philosophy on love and beauty, before Diaz then delves into Imelda’s history as a young girl who loses her mother at just nine years old. The shot is of her in a pink jacket as she holds up her book before opening it to doodle and draw. Her friends and teachers tout her beauty at a young age, while also testifying to her poverty and how she wore dresses made from “parachutes and bed sheets.” But her physical beauty helped lift her out of that poverty.” In the documentary, the narration of Imelda’s life is intercut constantly with different versions of her story. The filmmaker counters Imelda’s narration of becoming a supportive wife of a politician. Imelda describes getting sick and worn down by campaigning. She suffered from the public life, but when her husband said he would give it up for her, she changed her attitude completely—​taking to campaigning “like a fish to water” and changing the role of a candidate’s wife and then first lady along the way. Ramona Diaz intercuts the footage of the campaign tour with an another interview of a close confidant of Imelda’s describing Imelda’s suffering as a young wife, some of which was caused by her husband Ferdinand Marcos’s infidelities. The friend added here that Marcos controlled Imelda by dictating what food she should eat and determining how much she should weigh when Imelda describes a more romantic story of a devoted and doting husband. Imelda Marcos biographer Katherine Ellison says the couple cultivated their image very effectively, “as fresh talent to help the country advance.” Life Magazine praised the “fabulous First Lady” on its cover. Meanwhile, the couple robbed the country and imprisoned the opposition as Imelda traveled all over the world, giving speeches, buying art and real estate, and hosting parties. She commissioned dresses and shopped. In the film she says she has to be both “a star and a slave” for her people. They need her to be a standard bearer, and she says she has to “enslave [herself] so everybody becomes a star.” In the documentary, journalists countered this vision by saying the people she represented were poor, unfree, and victims of violence. She also justified her purchasing art in the $25 million range as an act that may look wasteful but is not within the context of God, beauty, and love, saying: “You cannot quantify beauty, you cannot quantify love.” Meanwhile, the film cuts to her dresses hanging as poor people hang their own clothes while living

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  209 next to train tracks. The contrast presented by the filmmaker exposes the centrality of glamour that the musical focuses on without the contrast of how the people she stole from lived. In the musical, thus, we remain at the level of the pornography of her wealth, not as a theft, but within her enjoyment of the loot. The film visits her childhood home—​with its 18 dioramas depicting her life as if Christ’s Stations of the Cross. Here, this woman clearly lives her life through her own representation. Her obsession with beauty and power counters the reality of ugly poverty she inflicts on her people. When placed in contrast to the evidence of reality—​such as the transformation of Malacañang, the Presidential Palace, to an air-​conditioned facility to seal itself from the putrid smell of the Pasig River nearby—​her fabrications reveal how reality had to be suppressed. Reality does not matter, representation is all. She wants the vivid and imaginative world of her life to be a musical where she is perpetually under the disco ball. I argue that the musical is that world that the documentary does not let stand alone. Her sense of reality is so distorted that she responds to questions about Aquino’s killing by twisting it to say, “We, the Marcoses, were the ultimate victims in the assassination of Aquino.” His death did change everything, however, as the Filipino people could no longer hold their rage and ran them out of town. She laughs that the US Customs declared that they entered their exile in the United States with “diamonds and diapers (for her grandchildren).” And with a straight face, she complains, “All I got was an eleven-​carat diamond ring and a seventy-​carat diamond ring.” To calculate the value of such jewels in the face of the poverty of her people is to recognize the criminality of her perspective. When visiting his mausoleum, where her husband is preserved under glass, she notes that his tombstone says “Filipino,” while she declares that hers will say, “Here lies love.” This is the first time she articulates these words in popular culture, which we encounter in the title of David Byrne’s musical. However, this quote from Imelda Marcos comes from Ramona Diaz’s interview skills. Her question generates the answer that becomes the very title of the musical. Yet, unfortunately, the film is not quoted nor credited in the musical’s program I saw in Seattle or anywhere in the exhibits in the lobby. Due to the inequalities in who gets to represent whom, the prominent musical by white artists should credit Filipin@x artists whose work provide the material that appears as its very title. Ramona Diaz directly interviews Imelda herself, who claims that she “has been misunderstood . . . (that she) has a different perspective in life—​(one

210  The Proximity of Other Skins she perceives) from totality rather than one specific point of view.” Thus, the documentary immediately promises to get her subject’s perspective, but does not let that perspective stand alone or untouched by other perspectives and realities. Ramona Diaz follows Imelda as she interacts with crowds of fans on the street from inside her van, from where the camera also captures her. Always impeccably dressed, Imelda dons elegant, structured, custom-​ made suits of black decorated with a flashy brooch, or emerald green cape-​ like tunics over slacks with an expensive Hermés-​style scarf creatively tied through its button, or a pink suit jacket with scallop sleeves over a blue shirt, or a blue suit with a yellow silk-​looking blouse. The outfits are somewhat interchangeable in their bright colored pant suits designed to emphasize her height and in how they all create a slimming silhouette. The cut is always structured with interesting sleeves, unique collars that expose her neck, and scarves fashioned across her throat or draped over one shoulder while emerging between button holes on her chest. A pin or brooch on her left breast or shoulder adorns her frequently. Her hair is always coiffed in a big puff of a bouffant. She emphasizes her height with her hair and the uninterrupted line of her clothes. We see her tall, statuesque figure as she towers above her adoring fans and, at times, looks somewhat confused as they express giddy excitement in her midst. Proximity to Imelda means becoming privy to her long meditations on beauty, nature, the cosmos, the universe—​what people like priests and heads of state and others exposed to it have called embarrassing nonsense that went on for hours uninterrupted, according to the film. And when she would lose her voice, she would play her audience tapes of her speaking. She would then speak as the tape plays so the listener would get “two Imeldas” according to one priest in the documentary who had to endure such an encounter. And when Imelda does speak in the documentary, the director intercuts her speech to show her making drawings of hearts, the video game character Pacman, and the peace sign while sharing bits such as “It is easy to be beautiful, because it is natural.” In shooting Imelda speaking with such self-​aggrandizement while drawing these banal images in her book, Diaz highlights her ridiculousness. The intimacy that Ramona Diaz achieves allows us to see how Imelda resorts to a childlike persona that relinquishes responsibility for her actions; things just “somehow” happen to her. She speaks like a little girl about how she was “naive” and about how, among the hundreds of men who courted her, she had never seen anyone “so in love” with her as Marcos was. Yet, her biography reveals her own ruthless agency in matters that concerned her upward mobility. She doggedly pursued the title of Miss Philippines in a beauty

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  211

Figure 5.2  In the documentary by Ramona Diaz, Imelda Marcos holds up the book she has written on her philosophy.

contest. When she won second runner-​up, she went directly to the mayor of Manila, at that time, scandalously unchaperoned. Her visit yielded his change of decision and he appointed her “The Muse of Manila.” Because he was famous for his preference for young women, this story of her pursuit of the title by convincing him in private quarters followed her for years. The gossip included attributing the paternity of her first child to the mayor. Similarly, Marcos’s pursuit of her was a rather mutual and not simply a one-​sided enterprise. She was hedging her bets. As the popular story goes, she married him within eleven days. According to her biographer, however, it was actually just three days. Imelda weighed this seemingly sudden decision heavily as she was also fielding another offer from a married man seeking an annulment. Yet, Imelda propagates a story of innocence in the film as she holds the front of her dress, swaying side to side, speaking in a sing-​song voice like a little girl about how Marcos loved her so much that “he could not eat, he could not sleep.” Ramona Diaz counters Imelda’s narrative by intercutting her speech with an interview with journalist Conrado De Quiros, who attests to Ferdinand Marcos’s ruthless politics of “calculation”; Marcos recognized her beauty as an accessory and her name as a member (despite her own poverty) of a powerful political family as aid to his ambitions. Carmen Nakpil, a friend of Imelda’s, describes how their courtship was indeed “whirlwind,”

212  The Proximity of Other Skins yet the event required calculation about its long-​term implications. Imelda describes how her uncle, the Speaker of the House, essentially convinced her that not marrying Marcos would be “stupid.” It is striking that Imelda has the tendency to describe things as happening to her rather than draw attention to how she makes things happen for herself. Ramona Diaz’s intercutting of various versions of the story she tells interrupts, critiques, and questions her passive role in her life story. When giving a tour of her and Ferdinand’s private bedrooms, she says “somehow” (several times) when explaining they had separate bedrooms and despite this, “we were always together.” The contradictory and opposing descriptions come out of her mouth so easily. For example, she says upon entering her own bedroom, “This was somehow the looks of my bedroom,” presenting her version of their separate sleeping arrangement. So far, she has been saying that each room has a king bed and they sleep together. A mere moment later, the story changes. “Somehow, President Marcos and I wanted to see each other in the morning as if we are going on a date again.” In this version, they actually don’t sleep together but apart, so they can see each other with fresh eyes after waking up. Are they always together or did they like seeing each other anew? Two totally opposite ways of living spoken in the same breath, exposing the ease with which she lies. Her childhood friends Josie Vergil De Dios and Locsin, through Ramona Diaz’s intercutting, counter Imelda’s version of events when they claim Imelda could not bear that “he had other women.” This information more clearly explains the arrangement of separate rooms with separate doors while next to each other in the suite than the multiple versions she provides. In both the documentary and the musical, versions of stories and attendant images matter. And the Marcoses cultivated their image as a young couple, partnered and helping each other, as a model for the country’s citizenry. The documentary presents footage of the young first lady, with her signature bouffant hair, wearing a tunic shirt and fitted pants, soliciting votes while the press follows the couple around. Marcos wears a hat and striped shirt tucked into slim pants. They walk through a forest among staff. He looks like a young, hip, and attentive husband to her even more energetic, youthful vivacity. In the documentary, the journalist Conrado de Quiros describes how their image also captivated the Americans, who looked on them as creating an Asian Camelot à la Jack and Jackie Kennedy, as Ramona Diaz shows us Life Magazine covers of Imelda and full-​page pictures of them inside. Imelda Marcos was aware of and controlled her self-​representation,

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  213 which Ramona Diaz was able to capture, and at times counter, through her intimate portraiture. For example, the spectator can see how rudely Imelda treats her servants, when at one point, a maid attempts to hand Imelda mail, but is ignored, indefinitely. The maid’s arm hangs between them awkwardly. Thus, the montage of historical footage, journalistic critique, and current behavior embody her character in ways that give a fuller picture that is less seductive in its presentation of Imelda in the musical. Unlike the musical, which centers Imelda’s perspective, the documentary ruptures that perspective and deems it untrustworthy repeatedly through the interruptive device of intercutting. Her version does not take hold. In contrast, the musical keeps her version whole, uninterrupted—​a valid version that gets center stage, and is accompanied by other versions from Estrella or other unnamed women who sing a different perspective. In a sense, the competing perspectives take turns. But Imelda remains central and the others recede (Estrella) or disappear, not making a dent in her primacy in the musical. Her version of herself as one who deserves love as star and slave gets loud billing, uninterrupted and unquestioned. She remains sweet and unknowing when her conniving is not engaged or her transformation from mere first lady to dictator’s wife is not contended with internally through song or dance. This is a loss, for the lying and erasing of the past is complex for Imelda, too, in ways that deserve representation. So far, The Proximity of Other Skins identifies subject/​abject relations in intimacies across radical inequality. It questions what we can know in personal and historical constructions of the past, across inequality, and of intimacy. In the chapter on Never Forever and Heading South, I show how sexual settings never relent. In the work of Brillante Mendoza, the poor never stop fighting for life. And in the Korean films The Housemaid and The Handmaiden, exploitative relations between master and servant transpire through sexuality in ways that aggravate inequality and in other ways rupture established relations. In the musical about Imelda, the abjected poor do not come to voice as prominently as she. History subsides. The poor nonetheless rise to protest. The documentary about Imelda shows us how not to let history subside or how not to suppress the voice of the abjected through the power of interruption. It shows that if context remains prominent, we cannot achieve transcendent relations of intimacy that are separate from inequality. What I hope to highlight about ethics and representation that the film achieves is the mobilization of the power of history as one that never lets go of any event. Across difference, ethical intimacies can be achieved via attunement to the other and a decentering of the self. The musical centers Imelda and gives

214  The Proximity of Other Skins voice to her abjected friend and caregiver Estrella. The musical brings us in proximity to Imelda’s rise, yet we are not privy to her brutality or her ascent into the highest ranks of thievery in world history. We are not implicated as Americans however. We are not decentered even if we occupy the shoes of Filipin@x people at the events that shaped their country. What still needs to be clarified, however, is the question of who gets to author, access voice, and represent the abject and the other? I go to Imelda because she represents the Third World and its salvation through her own elevation as an individual and the importance of how those who represent her story demonstrate an awareness of their own structural location in their authorship.

Ramona Diaz’s Filipin@x American Immigrant Location as Filmmaker I interviewed Ramona Diaz in November of 2017, when she was in San Francisco for Cinematografo, the new Filipin@ American film festival sponsored by The Filipino Channel, the third of its kind in the Bay Area. Ramona Diaz first got Imelda to be in her Stanford thesis film at the very last minute. A friend knew her son Bong Bong and gave him her thesis-​film description at a cocktail party. Imelda agreed to a five-​minute interview. She was at the hospital. She was no longer First Lady and perhaps missing media attention, Ramona Diaz surmises. The only stipulation was she could talk about anything other than the Revolution. Diaz ended up spending hours with Imelda and cut her into the last minutes of the film. This experience led to Imelda’s agreeing to be part of Ramona’s feature-​length documentary. As Ramona Diaz’s documentary about Imelda was about to premiere at Sundance, Imelda called Ramona at 3 a.m. with a complaint. “Hija, I have a problem so many women went blind (when making her thousands of dresses in little time). It is not true.” The statement was delivered in the documentary as straight from the couturier, Ramona counters, as she explains the advance copy of the film was shared with Imelda as a courtesy. Imelda Marcos’s complaint is fascinating to the filmmaker. Imelda had no problem with human rights violations represented in the documentary, just that one moment where the couturier describes the blinding of women as they made her many clothes. Six months later, after a theatrical screening release at the Film Forum in New  York, the New  York Times review called Imelda Marcos a pariah. Ramona Diaz says: “She sued me and the distributor. What started out as

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  215 small stories, migrated to the front page and a dramatic press conference with a temporary restraining order. At the end, in the court, they threw it out.” Imelda had signed off on an “air-​tight release form” and the case was dismissed. In retrospect, Diaz wonders if this was Imelda’s plan all along, to create notoriety, to make the film more popular in an act of savvy media manipulation. The representation of a representation—​the media coverage of the documentary—​is what seemingly matters to Imelda. Her lawsuit is a testament to her fight over authorship as a worthwhile battle. I deliberately interview the Filipin@x women who are creating and helping to create the story, and not Byrne nor Slim. The material the women present is what compels me instead. And I am also fascinated by their involvement with the text as actors and singers in the musical, and as the director of the documentary. These are very different texts that show ethical proximity can manifest in different contexts. The broader implications regard how we can relate to each other across difference, not just between the text and the consumer but also in the voices we hear. In terms of the proximity she was able to achieve with her subject, Diaz describes how Imelda was very aware of the camera. “She was very performative,” and it informed the way Diaz framed her as a subject when she directed her cinematographer to embrace Imelda’s performance. “That’s what she wants to give us. Let’s do that. She’s always performing in a very telling way about her character and her inner life.” Essentially, Diaz argues, the form the film took was made by what Imelda Marcos was “willing to give us. . . . You cannot force her to be someone she’s not. It will never happen.” Diaz explained that it was so difficult to get access to Imelda that when she was there right in front of her, the director saw how her subject was delivering a great film. What Diaz found most unexpected as a director is the result of the process: “learning about myself as a filmmaker and not wasting opportunity.” Diaz came to be attuned and attentive to what was not said and to read instead what she was supposed to follow in her subject. “I remember one time interviewing her and she got up and left. Twenty minutes later, I am told she went to this specific restaurant for lunch. I realized she wants us to go there and follow her. We had to follow her again to Leyte on a plane.” Diaz describes her shoot as a game of cat and mouse. In the Director’s Statement for pbs.org, Ramona Diaz describes how she learned her style of filmmaking from this film.22 In following Imelda Marcos for a month, every day she did not know what to expect. Imelda was either there or “hundreds of miles away.” Diaz threw away her perfectly crafted shot lists. Her associate producer learned to book flights

216  The Proximity of Other Skins to the islands Imelda frequented so as to be ready to fly at a moment’s notice. This attunement to what proximity allows, shows Diaz arriving into her stature as a great director whose work resulted in not only an award-​winning documentary but one that influenced other works on Imelda. Here Lies Love is clearly influenced by Diaz’s proximity to Imelda. During the theatrical release of the film Imelda at Film Forum in 2004, Diaz was told that David Byrne was doing a “disco piece” on Imelda. She met with Byrne and talked with him about Imelda’s place in history. “I know for a fact from the cast and crew, like Conrad Ricamora, Jose Llana and Jaygee Macapugay, that they watch my film for research.” The musical is thus derivative of the film. To give credit to the filmmaker matters. Authorship remains important because Filipin@x American voices are so scarce in popular representation. And clearly, Filipin@x stories resonate with others. So far, we can see that the musical gives us physical proximity to a spectacle and the documentary gives us proximity to history and the person who shaped it. This is the tricky thing about proximity—​it represents a specific experience but also reaches for something beyond it. The proximity I seek is the sensation the viewer feels in relation to the film or musical. Specific representations also matter to people whose access to the tools of representation and global audiences are more limited. Diaz shares this concern when she asks: “How do you make it resonate beyond the Filipino audience but also not water it down? It must stay true to the Filipino voice. That is the challenge.” Authenticity changes as I conclude this chapter. Authenticity is not speaking as a Filipin@x but speaking closely and with concern for the experiences and ramifications of story for Filipin@x people. In my work in this book, I hope in my interviews, my own meditations on the actors’ and director’s responses, and my own memory and ethnography of being there at the musical and with the filmmaker, our presences, our investments, and our emotions are felt when it comes to representations. Do you feel for Filipin@x people? In the musical, the singing voices, the acting, and the dancing by a predominantly Filipin@x cast goes beyond authenticating the work, but creates feelings by a people in this moment. History needs to be more primary in the work in order for these feelings to be felt. Musicals are not history lessons, yet history enables a more ethical telling and closeness to feeling, as the documentary proves. The story of Imelda Marcos in particular is fraught—​what happened to the billions stolen? The very family who did the stealing rises back to power today in a testament to what happens when history is forsaken. The musical also needs to give credit to Filipin@x authors like the director Ramona Diaz, whose skills as a director generated the knowledge of what Imelda wants in her epitaph, which becomes the

The Ethics of Representing Oneself and Others  217 very title of the work. It is a powerful phrase, for it crystallizes her character—​ out of touch and self-​centered, with an insistence on innocence despite the corruption. It was a difficult scene for Ramona Diaz to secure, to convince Imelda Marcos to shoot in her husband’s mausoleum. And in shooting there, finally, Diaz was able to ask questions that garnered this perfect phrasing. Yet, within an arena of authorship, not giving credit to the source of such knowledge about Imelda and how she perceives herself, reveals how who speaks and who is cited is hierarchized. The insistence too , by critics, on not needing history is the most brutal of all—​the experiences of Filipin@x people in the aftermath of their robbing by their own leaders—​is rendered from the perspective of the villain. What did it take to survive the rampant killings and stifling of protest over a period of 20 years? What does it take for an author to be cited for her work? Thus, I link the de-historicizing argument to the problem of not crediting Diaz’s authorship. De-historicizing is about the erasure of people who died and continue to suffer. This is a problem of representation that is analogous to the erasure at the level of artistic production, which speaks to the ethics of making and producing as well as consuming images. We need to see representations of people but are we giving proper credit to people of color who produce the knowledge we use? Her voice, her body, her craft, and her identity is removed from the record she herself created. Authenticity is not about identity. But which identity gets to speak, which voices are heard, or heard more, and which are not? It is not about particular identities not being able to tell the story off another identity. The cis male white person’s version gets more publicity, more celebration, and more exposure than the Filipin@ woman who is eclipsed, obscured, deprived of the prominence she deserves. So it is not just our presences on stage that we need but also our critique through the life and work we make around what we see and experience in popular culture and historical events that matter not just as citation but also as history and as protest. Don’t suppress our voices as creators, critics, and audiences.

Notes 1. See “The Unwatchability of Whiteness,” a special issue of Asian Diasporas and Visual Cultures of the Americas edited by J. Reid Miller, Richard T. Rodriguez, and Celine Parreñas Shimizu (New York: Brill, 2018). 2. International Reporting on the Pulitzer Prizes website https://​ www.pulitzer.org/​ winners/​lewis-​m-​simons-​pete-​carey-​and-​katherine-​ellison, accessed on July 1,  2019. 3. Carmen Navarro Pedrosa, The Rise and Fall of Imelda Marcos (Manila: Bookmark, 1987), p. 152. 4. Katherine Ellison, “Imelda Marcos: The Steel Butterfly Still Soars,” New York Times, October 7, 2010 (http://​www.nytimes.com/​2012/​10/​07/​opinion/​sunday/​imelda-​ marcos-​the-​steel-​butterfly-​still-​soars.html).

218  The Proximity of Other Skins 5. While this is a quote from Ellison, Byrne is also cited as saying this in Time Magazine. Douglas Wolk, “The Imelda Marcos Story—​As Told by David Byrne,” published on April 10, 2010 (http://​content.time.com/​time/​arts/​article/​0,8599,1981028,00.html), accessed on March 31, 2019. 6. Jason Gutierrez, “Hundreds Get Food Poisoning at Imelda Marcos’s 90th Birthday Party,” The New York Times, July 3, 2019. 7. Nick Davies, “The Ten Billion Dollar Question:  What Happened to the Marcos Millions?” (https://​www.theguardian.com/​world/​2016/​may/​07/​10bn-​dollar-​ question-​marcos-​millions-​nick-​davies), accessed on March 21, 2019. 8. Michael Billington, “Here Lies Love Review—​David Byrne and Fat Boy Slim Show Lacks Substance” (https://​www.theguardian.com/​stage/​2014/​oct/​14/​here-​lies-​love-​ byrne-​marcos-​review), accessed on March 24, 2019. 9. Alexis Soloski, “Here Lies Love—​Review,” published on April 23, 2013 (https://​www. theguardian.com/​stage/​2013/​apr/​23/​here-​lies-​love-​stage-​review), accessed on March 24, 2019. 10. Kyle Anderson, “Here Lies Love,” published in April 23, 2013 (https://​ew.com/​article/​ 2013/​04/​23/​here-​lies-​love-​2/​), accessed on March 24, 2019. 11. Davies, “Ten Billion Dollar Question.” 12. David Rooney, “Here Lies Love—​ Theater Review,” published on April 23, 2013 (https://​www.hollywoodreporter.com/​review/​lies-​love-​theater-​review-​444813?utm_​ source=twitterfeed&utm_​medium=twitter&utm_​campaign=Feed%253A+thr%252Fnew s+%2528The+Hollywood+Reporter+-​+Top+Stories%2529), accessed on March 24, 2019. 13. Joe Dziemianowicz, “Here Lies Love Theater Review,” published on April 23, 2013 (https://​www.nydailynews.com/​entertainment/​music-​arts/​lies-​love-​theater-​review-​ article-​1.1325278), accessed on March 24, 2019. 14. Jesse Green, “Theater Review:  Imelda Is More Than a Woman in Here Lies Love,” published on May 1, 2014 (https://​www.vulture.com/​2013/​04/​theater-​review-​here-​ lies-​love.html?mid=googlenews), accessed on March 24, 2019. 15. Davies, “Ten Billion Dollar Question.” 16. Genevieve Clutario, e-​mail conversation, February 23, 2019. 17. Dziemianowicz, “Here Lies Love Theater Review.” 18. I discuss this in my chapter “The Bind of Representation” in The Hypersexuality of Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 19. Soloski, “Here Lies Love—​Review.” 20. Estrella was 10 when Imelda’s mother recruited her to care for her children and stepchildren. This is a similar relationship to the one described in the controversial article by Alex Tizon, “My Family’s Slave,” The Atlantic, May 22, 2017, wherein family relations or country cousins come to Manila in a kind of indentured relationship to wealthier families. Remedios, Imelda’s mother, purportedly promised that any successful children would repay her service. In her desire to erase stories of her poverty, Imelda relinquished any ties with Estrella. 21. Bakirathi Mani, Aspiring to Home (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012); and Bombay Dreams, music by A. R. Rahman, lyrics by Don Black, and book by Meera Syal and Thomas Meehan, originally produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber, 2002. 22. Ramona Diaz in her pbs.org statement about the film (http://​www.pbs.org/​ independentlens/​imelda/​statement.html), accessed on March 29, 2019.

6  Epilogue Memory and Death (2013–​Present)

A trip to my homeland is my movie that closes the book, making it about what representations can do and what exceeds it. In 2012, my husband, Dan, and I  visit Manila specifically to bring our two young mixed-​race white, Japanese, and Filipin@x American sons, then nine and six, to the country where I was born. I want to immerse them in the place where I grew up before leaving as a teen. I want them to achieve proximity to Manila—​not my Manila, but for them to know it sensationally, beyond a place their mother lost. I want Manila to get under their own skin. This visit seeks to achieve proximity to my past, so as to make it undeniably their past, too. I want my children to recognize the Philippines as an ancestral home place. By coming here, I want my boys to learn for themselves the inventive innovations of surviving American, Japanese, Spanish, and other colonial influences, in the formation of a distinct culture, so they may understand a different humor, broaden their palates, incorporate different cadences to speech, define home more widely, find the riches of different rituals, and see the multiplicity of Filipin@x people like themselves. My boys see their names everywhere in the city. This is unsurprising because their names mean something significant in Filipino. They know theirs are heritage names, honorific and prideful. “Bayan” (meaning home in the sense of belonging, country, and even nation) and “Lakas” (meaning both inner and physical strength and individual power, as well as power to the people) are emblazoned on busses and billboards. I keep pointing out how many times they appear, making an especially big ruckus when their names appear together: Ninoy Aquino’s Lakas ng Bayan, or “strength of the homeland/​people.” My husband and I  include this visit in our family archive of standout memories—​to see the place of my girlhood, continents away from where we live, where I first dreamed of him whom I did not yet know and my sons whom I did not yet know to imagine. As a child, I did not know I would

220  The Proximity of Other Skins be whole as a family of four, my own. In this way, there is something about closing my book with this story of us that can no longer be, that goes beyond the politics of representation and that has something to do with loss and memory in seeking proximity. And also something about imagination, creativity, and dreaming of possibility and future through intimacy that representation can and cannot provide. The visit is a memory we can talk about now, my older son and I. It is a time that is a dream, for it includes Bayan and Lakas both. Today, Bayan is growing. Lakas is missing. He died suddenly in 2013, just a year and a half after our visit to Manila. We can no longer travel as the four of us. At that time, the trip was about the future of us, and of their claiming Filipin@x/​ Japanese/​Spanish/​American selves for their own future families. The point of bringing them both there was to make memories and show them evidence of our history as a diasporic people. Seeing themselves written in the public space would lead them to claim this place as theirs. They were there, too. But the future is no longer what we imagined. I memorialize this trip by writing. This experience is not far from me. Just seven years ago, Lakas was six. He died at eight. He would be fourteen when this book enters the world. As I write, I am holding together many proximities, losses, destructions, and creations. Space in the United States and in the Philippines. My own childhood. My own adult life. Their childhood. Their life now. One lost his life. We live in the aftermath. We suffer and thrive. We still live in the house where we were four, yet we may not always live here. This is an unexpected cast to the proximity I hold now. A different family life line. I remember walking through the campus of the University of Santo Tomas among college students in their mid-​teens, my family and I enter a large auditorium with hundreds of uniformed students there to hear me talk. My boys are dressed in such vibrant colors, as if to help my memory now: Lakas in green pants with a coral shirt that reads “Cool Bro” on the chest and Bayan in starred blue shorts with a thin, neon yellow shirt. It is hot. They find their seats in the cool dark back. I step up on stage, surrounded by the pomp-​and-​ circumstance ceremony of musicians, several speeches of welcome by various university dignitaries, a presentation of an award certificate, and a gift of flower bouquets just ahead of my speech. As non-​churchgoing Americans, this may be the closest my boys will come to a Filipin@x-​style ritual celebration. The boys primarily play on their Nintendo DS, watching me in a half-​ focused way, a developmentally appropriate response at six and nine, while my husband watches over them.

Epilogue: Memory and Death  221 On this trip, we also attend the Wall Street Journal–​celebrated performance artist and activist Carlos Celdran’s memorable walking tour of Intramuros, the historic district where the Filipino national hero Jose Rizal was shot by a firing squad in the Philippine Revolution against Spain in 1896. Wielding one boom box, Carlos Celdran manages to provide a completely immersive experience, as if history is a movie we are inside of and that is transpiring in real time now. After the show, the monsoon rains come down hard on this summer night, and within half an hour, the streets flood up to my knees. I regret not hiring the hotel car to wait for us, as no taxis will take us back, and we stand drenched under the thin awnings above us as the water threatens to rise further. Hours later, in a taxi that hits another car on our way back, we finally return to the sanctuary of the hotel. We stay at the fancy Shangri-​La Hotel in Makati, the shiny and glamorous commercial district, though the buttons to operate the flashing walking signals to and from the nearby malls do not function. The great disparity between the rich minority and the abject masses remains today; maybe it has even worsened since my youth. Our taxi passes by an infant sleeping in the gutter with its mother. Crowds pass as they splay out on the sidewalk together. A lanky, dark, and dirty man with dreadlocks, naked except for a loin cloth around his genitals, looks like abjection itself as he stands among fully dressed crowds who do not, or pretend not to, notice him. Out in the open, he stands still like a monument to shame, denigration, and defilement, with passers-​by who must be accustomed to the sight of him in their midst in this everyday bare form. Strikingly, I encounter a similarly abject figure on the tony streets of Pacific Heights in San Francisco just recently. In contrast to the teeming bustle of the streets, the majestic Shangri-la hotel lobby is nearly empty. Two grand staircases flank a toweringly abundant flower arrangement in the center of the round foyer. Elegant female staff in gown-​like uniforms walk as if on a runway moving slowly. Tourists take pictures in front of the flowers. The decor signals opulence reserved for the rich, as armed guards stand nearby. Similarly, the fluorescent nightclub-​ like entry to the breakfast/​lunch/​dinner buffet enticingly warns of the obscene abundance inside. Hundreds of pastries, savory selections of food specific to the cultures of Japanese, Chinese, and American tourists, and the widest representation of Filipino food is stacked artfully along several aisles. I spy bibingka, rice cake on a banana leaf, that I remember eating as a child, primarily at Christmas time. The Shang, the nickname for this hotel, also serves champorado—​a chocolate breakfast rice porridge that my boys do not enjoy, though a pudgy boy right next to us, and just about their same

222  The Proximity of Other Skins age, heartily enjoys several bowls spoon-​fed by his exceedingly attentive uniformed nanny. One morning, among the hundreds of patrons at breakfast, a very fit, tall, and good-​looking young man in his twenties wielding two tennis rackets in a sport bag and wearing crisp whites from head to toe, rivets everyone, and we all watch him intently as he prances from food stall to stall. We collectively stare as he selects his breakfast. We see the opposite of abjection and are captured completely. I wonder if he is a movie star obliviously accustomed to the adoration, or the nonchalant owner of the place, as he saunters confidently without hurry or concern, as if he eats extravagantly like this every day. The commotion all stops to focus on him like he is a movie idol and we are his enraptured fans. I hear his name whispered among the crowds. “Borgy.” A word distinctive enough to Google easily, so I quickly discover he is the grandchild of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. My proximity to the grandson of Imelda Marcos makes me think about the politics of representation beyond the authenticity of identity that we use to assess images. Unlike Imelda’s drive to erase her past, I return to Manila to grasp mine—​the actual places where I grew up, went to school, and the streets where I spent my childhood years until I became a teen—​in order to relay it to my own family so they may possess it, too. Thirty years later, these places are lost. They are different and already something else beyond me and my memory. The gray house where I lived is now peach and impenetrable with its high iron gates. The sleeping unmovable guard dog won’t let us enter so I can examine the past more closely. Gone is the open lawn in front of the house and the much wider streets where I played games of chase that felt endless. The width of the street between the houses is somewhat minuscule now—​I can take it in three to five big steps as an adult. In returning to the place where I grew up, I cannot find my authentic past. It is not here for me to take and pass on. There is no authentic or recognizable past, for places change with time, and the subject, too, is transformed by the forces of other places and times. Yet the politics of representation are guided by the force of authenticity: as if the past stands still and in place, ready to capture and hand over. My memories of this trip are not my children’s memories. My older son does not remember the buffet or the food or the boy being spoon-​fed by a doting nanny. He remembers the video game arcades, Rico’s Nachos at the movie theater, a sculpture made of old cell phones, and singing Journey songs in our private karaoke booth at the Green Hills Mall. Journey was our

Epilogue: Memory and Death  223 band that year, since I was writing an article about lead singer Arnel Pineda.1 At nine and six, both know the lyrics of the ’80s band’s songs, which we sang all summer in the car. So much has changed since. Lakas is no longer physically here. His vivacious voice, his vibrant life, and his keenly observant eyes accompany my memories every day. Yet, loss is not the only thing that memory carries for me. I look at the movies of my memories not as nostalgia but as a way to become close and intimate with the dream of our lives together as whole. The four of us still. Imagining those times, recreating them here through writing, brings them back to life, including who I am and understand myself to be. A mother of two loving boys writing about works that compose our world, that help us make sense not only of how we relate to each other across our differences but also of what can be possible when we imagine ourselves through representation, and when we step back to say there is nothing left for us to do here but learn and listen in the world in which we live and love together with our dead.

Note 1. Celine Parreñas Shimizu, “Can the Subaltern Sing, and in a Power Ballad?,” Concentric:  Literary and Cultural Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (March 2013), pp. 53–​ 75  (http://​w ww.concentric-​l iterature.url.tw/​i ssues/​D ocumenting%20Asia%20 Pacific/​4.pdf).

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226 References Choueiti, Marc, Stacy L. Sith, and Katherine Pieper, “Critic’s Choice? Gender and Race/​ Ethnicity of Film Reviewers across 100 Top Films of 2017.” http://​assets.uscannenberg. org/​docs/​cricits-​choice-​2018.pdf. Davies, Nick, “The Ten Billion Dollar Question:  What Happened to the Marcos Millions?” https://​www.theguardian.com/​world/​2016/​may/​07/​10bn-​dollar-​question​marcos-​millions-​nick-​davies. Diaz, Ramona, http://​www.pbs.org/​independentlens/​imelda/​statement.html. Accessed on March 21, 2019. Dziemianowicz, Joe, “Here Lies Love Theater Review.” Published on April 23, 2013. https://​www.nydailynews.com/​entertainment/​music-​arts/​lies-​love-​theater-​review-​ article-​1.1325278. De La Cruz, Enrique, Jorge Emmanuel, Abe Ignacio, and Helen Toribio, eds., The Forbidden Book:  The Philippine American War in Political Cartoons. Berkeley, CA: EastWind Books, 2014. Dickson-​Carr, Darryl, The Columbia Guide to African American Fiction. New  York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Ebert, Roger, “What Were They Thinking Of?” Published on May 16, 2009. http://​www. rogerebert.com/​rogers-​journal/​cannes-​4-​what-​were-​they-​thinking-​of. Accessed on September 28, 2017. Ellison, Katherine, Imelda, Steel Butterfly of the Philippines. New York: McGraw Hill, 1988. Erikson, Erik, Identity, Youth and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968. Faeir, Leiba, Intimate Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Feng, Peter X., Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Field, Allyson Nadia, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Foucault, Michel, “Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity,” in Ethics:  Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, pp. 163–​174. New York: The New Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, pp. 223–​252. New York: The New Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel, Nicolae Morar, and Daniel W. Smith, “The Gay Science” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 385–​403, Spring 2011. Fregoso, Rosa Linda, The Bronze Screen:  Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Gabriel, Teshome, “A Cinema of Wax and Gold” in Jump Cut, No. 27, pp. 31–​33, July 1982. Gaines, Jane, “Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama and Oscar Micheaux,” in Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era, pp. 161–​184. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2001. Glazer, Andrew, “Duterte’s War on Drugs through a Local Photographer’s Eyes” in New York Times, March 27, 2017. https://​lens.blogs.nytimes.com/​2017/​03/​27/​dutertes-​ war-​on-​drugs-​through-​a-​local-​photographers-​eyes/​ Accessed on October 4, 2017. Gilbert, Elizabeth, Eat, Pray, Love. New York: Penguin, 2006. Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1959. Green, Jesse, “Theater Review:  Imelda Is More Than a Woman in Here Lies Love.” Published on May 1, 2014. https://​www.vulture.com/​2013/​04/​theater-​review-​here-​ lies-​love.html?mid=googlenews. Grewal, Inderpal, Home and Harem:  Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

References  227 Guerrero, Ed, Framing Blackness:  The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Hagedorn, Jessica, Dogeaters. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Hastie, Amelie, “Cinema of Compassion” in Lola Journal, No. 4: Walks. Published August 2013. http://​www.lolajournal.com/​4/​compassion.html. Accessed on February 1, 2019. Heung, Marina, “What’s the Matter with Sara-​Jane? Daughters and Mothers in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life” in Cinema Journal, Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 21–​43, Spring 1987. Holden, Stephen, “Laurent Cantet’s ‘Heading South’ Shows the Ache of Blinding Lust in A  Sexual Paradise Lost” in New  York Times, July 7, 2006. http://​www.nytimes.com/​ 2006/​07/​07/​movies/​07sout.html Accessed on March 30, 2019. Hughey, Matthew, “Cinematic Racism:  White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in ‘Magical Negro’ Films” in Social Problems, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 543–​577, August 2009. Human Rights Watch, “‘Just Let Us Be:’ Discrimination against LGBT Students in the Philippines” in Human Rights Watch. Published on June 21, 2017. https://​www.hrw.org/​ report/​2017/​06/​21/​just-​let-​us-​be/​discrimination-​against-​lgbt-​students-​philippines. Accessed on September 28, 2017. Hurston, Zora Neale, Tell My Horse. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Irigaray, Luce, “When Our Lips Speak Together” in Signs, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 843–​855, 1980. King, Martin Luther, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam.” A  speech delivered on April 4, 1967, in New  York, NY. https://​kinginstitute.stanford.edu/​king-​papers/​documents/​beyond-​ vietnam. Accessed on March 30, 2019. Lee, Robert G., Orientals:  Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia:  Temple University Press, 1999. Keeling, Kara, The Witch’s Flight:  The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Lee, Maggie, “Empty.” Published on May 18, 2009. http://​www.hollywoodreporter.com/​ news/​film-​review-​kinatay-​84186. Accessed on September 28, 2017. Levinas, Emanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Lui, Mary, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-​of-​the-​Century New York City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Mahmood, Saba, The Politics of Piety:  The Islamic Revival and The Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Mani, Bakirathi, Aspiring to Home. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012 Marks, Laura, “Video Haptics and Erotics” in Screen, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 331–​348, Winter 1998. Marks, Laura, The Skin of the Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Marks, Laura, “Thinking Multisensory Culture,” in Paragraph, Vol. 31, No. 2: “Cinema and the Senses,” pp. 123–​137, July 2008. Meyers, Diana T., Subjection and Subjectivity:  Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2014. Miller, J. Reid, Stain Removal: Ethics and Race. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Miller, J. Reid, Richard T. Rodriguez, and Celine Parreñas Shimizu, “The Unwatchability of Whiteness” a special issue of Asian Diasporas and Visual Cultures of the Americas journal, pp. 235–​243. New York: Brill, 2018. Mimura, Glen, Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

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References  229 Shimizu, Celine Parreñas, “Claiming Bruce Lee’s Sex” in Frontiers, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 92–​120,  2017. Sinnerbrink, Robert, Cinematic Ethics:  Exploring Ethical Experience through Film. New York: Routledge, 2016. Soloski, Alexis, “Here Lies Love—​Review.” Published on April 23, 2013. https://​www. theguardian.com/​stage/​2013/​apr/​23/​here-​lies-​love-​stage-​review. Snorton, C. Riley, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma, Migrating to the Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Tadiar, Neferti X., “Life-​Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism” in Social Text, Vol. 31, No. 2 (115), pp. 19–​48, Summer 2013. Tizon, Alex, “My Family’s Slave” in The Atlantic, May 22, 2017. Valenti, Jessica, “Women Deserve Orgasm Equality” in The Guardian. Published on June 5, 2015. https://​www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/​2015/​jun/​05/​women-​deserve-​ orgasm-​equality. Accessed on March 30, 2019. Wallace, Michele, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory. New York: Verso, 2008. Waters, Sarah, Fingersmith. New York: Riverhead, 2002. Weil, Simone, “Human Personality,” in Selected Essays, 1934–​1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings, trans. and ed. Richard Rees. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015. Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace. New York: Routledge Classics, 2002. Weissberg, Jay, “Kinatay: An Unpleasant Journey into a Brutal Heart of Darkness” in Variety, May 17, 2009. http://​variety.com/​2009/​film/​markets-​festivals/​kinatay-​1117940277/​. Accessed September 28, 2017. White, Patricia, “A Handmaiden’s Tale.” Published on November 11, 2016. http://​www. publicbooks.org/​a-​handmaidens-​tale/​. Accessed on January 10, 2018. Williams, Linda, “Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 288–​340, Winter 2006, Wolk, Douglas, “The Imelda Marcos Story—​As Told by David Byrne.” Published on April 10, 2010. http://​content.time.com/​time/​arts/​article/​0,8599,1981028,00.html. Zacharek, Stephanie, “Heading South” in Salon, July 7, 2006. http://​www.salon.com/​2006/​ 07/​07/​heading_​south/​. Accessed on March 30, 2019. Zafra, Jessica, “The Things We Don’t Want to See” in PhilStar, June 12, 2009. www.philstar. com/​young-​star/​476341/​things-​we-​don’t-​want-​see. Accessed September 24, 2017. Zafra, Jessica, “A Filipino Director Dares Viewers Not to Look Away” in Newsweek, June 11, 2009. http://​www.newsweek.com/​filipino-​director-​dares-​viewers-​not-​look-​away-​ 80465. Accessed on September 28, 2017. Zelizer, Viviana, The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2005.

Films and Performances Bedalyn’s Beat, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=M0QM-​rvER84. Published on September 29, 2017. Accessed on March 30, 2019. Blue Is The Warmest Color. Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche. Performances by Lea Seydooux and Adele Exarchopoulos. France, Belgium and Spain:  Wild Bunch, 2013.

230 References Bombay Dreams. Music by A. R. Rahman, lyrics by Don Black, and book by Meera Syal and Thomas Meehan, originally produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber, 2002. Brillante Mendoza in the Press Conference for Kinatay at Cannes Film Festival. https://​ www.festival-​cannes.com/​en/​films/​kinatay. Accessed on October 29, 2018. Eat. Pray. Love. Directed by Ryan Murphy. Performance by Julia Roberts. Plan B Entertainment, 2010. Entre les murs (The Class). Directed by Laurent Cantet. Performance by François Bégaudeau. Haut et Court, 2008. Final Recipe. Directed by Gina Kim. Performance by Michelle Yeoh. CJ Entertainment, 2013. Foster Child. Directed by Brillante Mendoza. Performance by Cherry Pie Picache. Philippines: Seiko Films, 2007. The Handmaiden. Directed by Park Chan-​wook. Performance by Kim Tae-​ri. South Korea: Moho Film and Yong Film, 2016. Heading South. Directed by Laurent Cantet. Performance by Charlotte Rampling. France and Canada: Haut et Court, 2005. Here Lies Love, by David Byrne and Fat Boy Slim. Directed by Alex Timbers. Performance by Jaygee Macapugay. Seattle Repertory Theater, 2017. The Housemaid. Directed by Im Sang-​ soo. Performance by Jeon Do-​ yeon. South Korea: Mirovision, 2010. Imelda. Directed by Ramona Diaz. Performance by Imelda Marcos. Philippines: CineDiaz, 2005. Insiang. Directed by Lino Brocka. Performance by Hilda Koronel. Philippines: CineManila, 1976. Invisible Light. Directed by Gina Kim. Performance by Yoon Sun Choi. Picture Book Movies and UniKorea Pictures, 2003. Kinatay. Directed by Brillante Mendoza. Performance by Coco Martin. Philippines and France: Centerstage, 2009. L’atelier (The Workshop). Directed by Laurent Cantet. Performance by Marina Fois. France: Archipel 35, France 2 Cinéma, Canal+, 2017. Ma’ Rosa. Directed by Brillante Mendoza. Performance by Jaclyn Jose. Philippines: Center Stage Productions, 2016. Macho Dancer. Directed by Lino Brocka. Performance by Daniel Fernando. Philippines: Award Film, Special People Productions and Viva Films, 1988. Masahista (The Masseuse). Directed by Brillante Mendoza. Performance by Coco Martin. Philippines: Gee Films International and Centerstage Productions, 2005. Mga Gabing Kasinghaba Ng Hair Ko (Those Long Haired Nights). Directed by Gerardo Calagui. Performance by Rocky Salumbides. Philippines:  Epic Media and Outpost Visual Frontier, 2017. Never Forever. Directed by Gina Kim. Performance by Vera Farmiga. South Korea and United States: Now Films and Vox3 Films, 2007. Serbis. Directed by Brillante Mendoza. Performance by Jaclyn Jose. Centerstage Productions and Swift Productions, 2008. Shoot for the Contents. Directed by Trinh T. Minh-​ha. New York: Women Make Movies, 1991. The Slanted Screen. Directed by Jeff Adachi. Performance by Frank Chin. Passion River, 2006.

References  231 Tirador. Directed by Brillante Mendoza. Performance by Coco Martin. Philippines: Centerstage Productions, 2007. The World of Suzie Wong. Directed by Richard Quine. Performance by Nancy Kwan. United Kingdom and United States: World Enterprises, World Film and Paramount British Productions, 1961.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Note: Figures are indicated by f following the page number   abjection Berlant, Lauren, Desire/​Love,  30–​31 and personal agency, 31, 36, 38–​39 Bersani, Leo, on origins of homophobia plane of, 9 and heterosexism, 20 sexual intimacy in context of, 154 ‘Beyond Vietnam’ (King), 104–​5 viewers' responses to, 38–​39 Bianchi, Gabriel, ‘Intimacy: abjection, cinema of From Transformation to and displacing Hollywood notions of Transmutation,’  44–​45 romance, sex, and care, 5–​8 Billington, Michael, criticism of Here Lies forms of violence depicted, 9–​10 Love, 191–​92,  198–​99 location, significance of, 26 Bitiu, Melody, role in Here Lies spectatorship and, 26–​27 Love,  203–​4 abjects and subjects in filmmaking, 9–​21 Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of abjection, plane of, 9 Trans Identity (Snorton), 9–​10 misnaming, 15 bodily needs, addressing poverty and misrecognition, 15 alienation through, 116–​17 proximity of death for abjects, 16–​17 Bordwell, David, on classical Hollywood subject's self certainty as cinema, 3 privilege,  14–​15 Bradshaw, Peter, review of Heading Accented Cinema, An (Naficy), 7–​8 South,  80–​81 adornment, significance of, 13 Brennan, Denise, What's Love Got to Do affliction, witnessing in film, 101–​2, 103 with It?,  71–​72 agency, of marginalized individuals, Brocka, Lino 31, 73, 75 films of, 105–​6 Aguiluz, Tikoy, rise of new Filipin@x Insiang,  106–​7 cinema,  95–​96 Macho Dancer, 107 Ahmed, Sara, on proximity, 109–​10 business vs. personal relations, shifts Aquino, Benigno ‘Ninoy’ between, 57 and Here Lies Love, 196–​97,  200–​1 Byrne, David, Here Lies Love, 183–​87, 195f reaction of Imelda Marcos to death actress Jaygee Macapugay, interview of, 209 with,  205–​7 authority, violations of in The Housemaid, actress Melody Bitiu, interview 150–​53,  152f with,  203–​4 authorship, limits to, 35, 36 background of musical, 200   carnalities displayed in, 196 bar hostesses, lives in Japan, 68–​69 character, emphasis on, 193–​94 Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, 153 criticism of, 188, 191–​94, 198–​99

234 Index Byrne, David (cont.) and emergence of Filipin@x voices,  202–​7 Filipin@ diasporic performers in,  198–​99 historical context and criticism of,  195–​96 Imelda Marcos, authentic representation of, 188 Imelda Marcos, relationship to poverty and wealth, 189–​90 Imelda Marcos and the will to dream, 189–​202 performance, historical context and, 196–​98,  201–​2 perspective of American filmmakers in, 194 plot of, 187 presentation format, 194–​95 proximity of audience, 191 rearticulation of limits in, 194 shallow proximity of, 192 Western white male authorship of, 199–​ 200, 203, 205   Cabillan, Julita, 18f Calagui, Gerardo, Those Long Haired Nights, 9–​17, 12f misnaming of transgender women, 15 misrecognition of transgender women, 15 recasting narrative of death, 9–​10 recasting narrative of denigration, 11 Call Her Ganda, subject/​abject relations in,  17–​19 family relationships, 17 portrait of Jennifer Laude, 18f camera, hand-​held,  6–​7 Cantet, Laurent, Heading South, 65–​85, 67f confession of rape, 77–​80, 81 and female sexuality and demand for orgasm, 71 film reviews, 80–​81 intimacy in context of inequality, 66 limits of personal agency, 73, 75 privileged perspectives in, 82 sex tourism, forms of attention, 74, 75 sex tourism, forms of payment, 73–​74

sex tourism, local experience of, 72, 74–​75,  82–​83 sex tourism, practices of, 66–​68 sex tourism, violations of ethical intimacy in, 69–​71, 75–​80 sexual settings, 43, 65–​66, 71 sex workers, perspective of, 66 transnational desires and dreams, 71–​72 Capino, J. B., Dream Factories of a Former Colony,  105–​6 care, displacing Hollywood notions of, 5–​8 censorship, of onscreen sex and violence, 109 character, emphasis on in Here Lies Love,  193–​94 Chinatown Trunk Mystery, The (Lui),  45–​46 cinema ethical intimacy in, 21–​24 global cinema and expanding worldviews,  7–​8 postcolonial and global, 26–​33 ‘Cinema of Wax and Gold, A’ (Gabriel),  29–​30 cinematic ethics, 101–​2, 104 cinematic language of physical wounds, 113–​14 and self-​displacement,  31–​32 and sensory detail of scenes, 32–​33 cinematic proximity, and expanding worldviews, 8, 99–​100, 101–​2 cinematic traditions, within individual countries, 3 cinematic witnessing, of inequality, 2 class, as context for sexuality, 29–​30, 36–​37 class subjection, in globalization, 49–​50 cliche, or first level of intimacy, 45 coexistence, as stage of intimacy, 45 collaboration, as stage of intimacy, 45 colonial imperialism as context for Filopin@x filmmakers, 4 perpetuating colonial gaze in cinema,  105–​6 racial privilege in colonial contexts, 43 sex tourism, limits of personal agency in, 73, 75 sex tourism, violations of ethical intimacy in, 69–​71, 75–​80, 81

Index  235 common future, or fourth level of intimacy, 45, 56–​57 compassion acting in response to, 104–​5 inequality and cinematic compassion,  89–​90 and the Other, 99–​105 potential of film to teach, 28–​29, 31–​32 and shared spectatorship, 33–​36, 103–​4,  131–​34 and viewers' responses to abjection,  38–​39 and viewing of marginalized people,  34–​35 corruption as depicted in Ma'Rosa,  130–​31 as depicted in Tirador (Slingshot),  125–​29 costume design and hierarchies in The Housemaid,  148–​49 and status in The Handmaiden,  165–​66 criticism of Heading South,  80–​81 of Here Lies Love, 188, 191–​94, 198–​99 historical context, significance of,  195–​96 of The Housemaid, 141 of Kinatay, 93–​94,  97–​98 lack of women and people of color among critics, 33–​34 critics, shared spectatorship with viewers and filmmakers, 87, 93–​95, 97–​99 culture, as context for sexuality, 29–​30,  36–​37 cross-​cultural development of intimacy,  45–​46 and economic inequality, 42–​43   death, memories in context of loss and,  219–​23 Declan, Matt, on transgender subject, 14 degradation, witnessing in film, 103 denigration, abject as object of, 17–​18,  143–​44 Desire/​Love (Berlant), 30–​31 Diaz, Lav, ‘slow cinema’ of, 95–​96 Diaz, Ramona

as Filipin@x American filmmaker, 214–​17 interview of Imelda Marcos, 214 Diaz, Ramona, Imelda, 8, 183–​87, 207–​14,  211f background of, 185–​86 childhood, portrayal of, 209 clothing favored by Imelda Marcos,  209–​10 marriage, portrayal of, 208–​9, 211–​12 perspectives included, 212–​13 proximity of Imelda Marcos in, 207–​8, 210–​11,  215–​16 Diaz, Ramona, Spirits Rising and other films of, 207 displacement forms and remedies, 57–​58 and notions of romance, sex, and care, 5–​8 and recasting film's significance, 5 and use of cinematic language, 31–​32 documentaries, production and spectatorship, 186 domestic work, depicting proximity of,  37–​38 Dominican Republic, sex tourism in,  71–​72 Dream Factories of a Former Colony (Capino),  105–​6 dreams, role in representing oneself,  183–​84 drug dealing, within poverty and corruption,  129–​31 Dziemianowicz, Joe, review of Here Lies Love, 194–​95,  198–​99   economic context, of responses to infertility in Never Forever,  51–​52 economic status intimacy at site of inequality, 46 social significance of, 46 Ellison, Katherine ‘The Steel Butterfly Still Soars,’ 188 empathy and the Other, 99–​105 potential of film to teach, 28–​29, 31–​32,  88 and shared spectatorship, 33–​36 and viewers' responses to abjection,  38–​39

236 Index Empire of Love (Povinelli), 113, 115, 121 Erikson, Erik, levels of intimacy, 45 ethical intimacy acquiring, 39 and depiction of subaltern, 7 and genealogy of ethics, 24 in global cinema, 21–​24 and on-​screen depiction of sexuality,  24–​26 potential of film to depict, 29 violations of in sex tourism, 69–​71, 75–​80,  81 vs. Hollywood self-​centrality, 3 ethics cinematic ethics, 101–​2, 104 film studies and, 26–​33 genealogy of, 24 relationship with privilege, 82 and shared spectatorship, 33–​36 exclusion, logic of, 9 exoticism, accusations of promoting in cinema, 107   Fabulous (Moore), 13 factual relations, or second level of intimacy, 45 Faeir, Leiba, Intimate Encounters,  68–​69 family relationships as depicted in Call Her Ganda, 17 in Serbis, 112, 114–​16 fear, basis of in lives of transgender women,  17–​18 female orgasm, demand for equity in, 71 fertility and sexual intimacy in Never Forever, 51, 53 socioeconomic context in Never Forever,  51–​52 fiction, subjects and abjects in Those Long Haired Nights,  9–​17 Filipina bar hostesses, working lives in Japan,  68–​69 Filipin@x, origin of term, 40n3 Filipin@x cinema, rise of new, 93–​99, 105–​6,  109 and haptic turn in cinema studies,  96–​97 heritage of, 105 and Ramona Diaz, 214–​17

Filipin@x diasporic performers, in Here Lies Love,  198–​99 Filipin@x filmmakers, in context of colonial imperialism, 4 Filipin@x voices, Here Lies Love and emergence of, 202–​7 film criticism of Heading South,  80–​81 of The Housemaid, 141 of Kinatay, 93–​94,  97–​98 lack of women and people of color among critics, 33–​34 filmmakers, shared spectatorship with viewers and critics, 87, 93–​95,  97–​99 filmmaking ethical intimacy in, 21–​24 intimacy of using hand-​held camera,  6–​7 filmmaking, subjects and abjects in, 9–​21 abjection, plane of, 9 misnaming, 15 misrecognition, 15 proximity of death for abjects, 16–​17 subject's self certainty as privilege,  14–​15 film phenomenology, and haptic visuality,  109–​12 film studies and ethics, postcolonial and global cinema, 26–​33 forgiveness depiction and resolution of, 58–​61 as sixth stage of intimacy, 45 Foucault, Michel on origins of homophobia and heterosexism, 20 urgency of gay sex, 56–​57   Gabriel, Teshome, ‘A Cinema of Wax and Gold,’  29–​30 Gaines, Jane, 34–​35 Gamboa, Glenn, review of Here Lies Love, 193 ‘Gay Science, The,’ interview with Michel Foucault, 20 gender, putting on mask of, 14 gender and sex normativities power and, 20–​21 radical inequality and, 20–​21, 22–​23

Index  237 gender roles, reconstitution in Never Forever, 54 global cinema ethical intimacy in, 21–​24 and expanding worldviews, 7–​8 globalization cinema traditions and, 3 class and racial subjection in, 49–​50 inequality of relations within, 1 intimacy across locales, 2–​3 and transnational mobility, 64 Global South and Global North, examining bifurcation between, 31 goat, role in Serbis,  118–​19 Goffman, Erving, The Presentation of the Self,  138–​40 Gopinath, Gayatri, ‘Who's Your Daddy,’ 27 Grewal, Inderpal, Home and Harem, 75   Haiti, sex tourism in. See Heading South, political and libidinal economies in hand-​held camera, filming with, 6–​7 Handmaiden, The, 163–​79, 172f,  180–​81 background of, 137–​38 changes of direction, 168–​70 embodied montage, 138, 165–​67 emergence of new roles, 172–​37–​ emergence of sexual intimacy, 172–​74 eruptions of intimacy, 138–​41 eruptions of truthfulness, 168–​69 expansive roles, 166, 168–​69 as feminist intervention, 179 intimacy in context of inequality, 171 intimacy through expansion of roles,  170–​71 kinship, power of intimate, 172–​79 masters and servants, 138–​39 plot and structure, 163–​65 production design, 165, 180–​81 production design and performance,  165–​71 sex scenes, undoing inequality in, 163 slapping, significance of, 175 sound, use of diegetic and semidiegetic, 166–​68, 169, 171 structure and plot, 163–​65, 176–​78 suicide, as punishment of self and others,  175–​76 voiceover narration, 165

haptic visuality, 44 and annihilation and affliction in Serbis,  92–​93 film phenomenology and, 109–​12 and rise of new Filipin@x cinema,  96–​97 of sex scenes in Serbis,  118–​20 and shared spectatorship of the Other, 100 Hastie, Amelie, on cinematic compassion,  89–​90 Heading South, 8, 29–​30 Heading South, political and libidinal economies in, 65–​85, 67f confession of rape, 77–​80, 81 economic status and inequality, 46 female sexuality and demand for orgasm, 71 film reviews, 80–​81 haptic visuality, 44 intimacy, as source of individual identity,  46–​47 intimacy, in context of inequality, 44–​50,  66 money, coexistence with intimacy,  47–​49 personal agency, limits of, 73, 75 privileged perspectives in, 82 representations of sex, 43 sex tourism, forms of attention, 74, 75 sex tourism, forms of payment, 73–​74 sex tourism, local experience of, 72, 74–​75,  82–​83 sex tourism, practices of, 66–​68 sex tourism, violations of ethical intimacy in, 69–​71, 75–​80 sexual intimacy in context of economic inequality,  42–​43 sexual settings, 65–​66, 71 sex workers, perspective of, 66 skin as metonym, 44 transnational desires and dreams, 71–​72 use of sexual settings, 43 Here Lies Love, 8, 183–​87, 195f actress Jaygee Macapugay, interview with,  205–​7 actress Melody Bitiu, interview with,  203–​4 background of, 200

238 Index Here Lies Love (cont.) carnalities displayed in, 196 character, emphasis on, 193–​94 criticism of, 188, 191–​94, 198–​99 and emergence of Filipin@x voices,  202–​7 Filipin@ diasporic performers in,  198–​99 historical context and criticism of,  195–​96 Imelda Marcos, authentic representation of, 188 Imelda Marcos, relationship to poverty and wealth, 189–​90 Imelda Marcos and the will to dream, 189–​202 performance, historical context and, 196–​98,  201–​2 perspective of American filmmakers in, 194 plot of, 187 presentation format, 194–​95 proximity of audience, 191 rearticulation of limits in, 194 shallow proximity of, 192 Western white male authorship of, 199–​ 200, 203, 205 See also Marcos, Imelda heterosexism, origins of, 20 hierarchies, staging and sensing in The Housemaid,  143–​49 historical context criticism, significance in, 195–​96 performance, significance in, 196–​97 representation, significance in, 190–​92 Holden, Stephen, review of Heading South, 80 Hollywood classical cinema, influence of, 3 displacing notions of romance, sex, and care,  5–​8 Hollywood self-​centrality and global cinema, 3 Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (Grewal), 75 homonationalism,  30–​31 homophobia, origins of, 20

homosexuality and gay cultural life in Philippines,  122–​23 queer sex and phenomenology, 124–​25 Housemaid, The, 8, 141–​63, 180–​81 background of, 137–​38, 141–​42 bodily eruptions in, 150–​55 costume design, and hierarchies in,  148–​49 embodied montage, 138, 155–​60 eruptions of intimacy, 138–​41 father, self-​presentation of, 145 final scene, 162–​63 hierarchies, staging and sensing, 143–​49 housemaids, characters of, 143–​44 inequality of sense experience, 144–​45 masters and servants, expressions of respect between, 145–​46 masters and servants, generational recognition of, 146 masters and servants in, 138–​39,  143–​44 mastery, eruptions to, 155–​60 miscarriage in, 159–​60 plot of, 142–​43 pregnancy and miscarriage in, 156–​60 production design, 180–​81 self-​immolation, as feminist intervention by subaltern, 161 servility, presentations of, 153, 155 servitude, eruptions to, 155–​60 sexual intimacy in context of inequality,  153–​55 shared spectatorship of, 141 slapping, significance of, 156–​57,  158–​59 suicide, as punishment of self and others,  160–​63 violations of authority in, 150–​53, 152f wealth and entitlement, narrative of, 157 wealth and privilege, production design denoting,  146–​49 wife and mother, character of, 143 ‘Human Personality’ (Weil), 102–​3 Hurston, Zora Neale, Tell My Horse,  72–​73

Index  239 identity and defining love and desire, 30–​31 intimacy as source of individual identity,  46–​47 Imelda, 8, 183–​87, 207–​14, 211f background of, 185–​86 childhood, portrayal of, 209 clothing favored by Imelda Marcos,  209–​10 marriage, portrayal of, 208–​9, 211–​12 perspectives included, 212–​13 proximity of Imelda Marcos in, 207–​8, 210–​11,  215–​16 See also Marcos, Imelda Im Sang-​soo, The Housemaid, 141–​63,  180–​81 background of, 137–​38, 141–​42 bodily eruptions in, 150–​55 costume design, and hierarchies in,  148–​49 embodied montage, 138, 155–​60 eruptions of intimacy, 138–​41 father, self-​presentation of, 145 final scene, 162–​63 hierarchies, staging and sensing, 143–​49 housemaids, characters of, 143–​44 inequality of sense experience, 144–​45 masters and servants, expressions of respect between, 145–​46 masters and servants, generational recognition of, 146 masters and servants in, 138–​39,  143–​44 mastery, eruptions to, 155–​60 miscarriage in, 159–​60 plot of, 142–​43 pregnancy and miscarriage in, 156–​60 production design, 180–​81 self-​immolation, as feminist intervention by subaltern, 161 servility, presentations of, 153, 155 servitude, eruptions to, 155–​60 sexual intimacy in context of inequality,  153–​55 shared spectatorship of, 141 slapping, significance of, 156–​57,  158–​59

suicide, as punishment of self and others,  160–​63 violations of authority, 150–​53, 152f wealth and entitlement, narrative of, 157 wealth and privilege, production design denoting,  146–​49 wife and mother, character of, 143 inequality boil in Serbis as marker of, 113–​14 and cinematic compassion, 89–​90 dynamics of, 38 ethics of representing, 190–​91 and gender and sex normativities, 20–​21,  22–​23 inability of intimacy to transcend, 55 intimacy across, 2–​3, 4–​5, 180–​81 intimacy at the site of, 44–​50 intimacy in context of, in Heading South, 66 intimacy in the context of, in The Handmaiden, 171 radical inequality within intimacy, 19 of sense experience, 144–​45 sexual intimacy in context of, 42–​43 sexual intimacy in context of, in The Housemaid,  153–​55 Western spectators as beneficiaries,  88–​89 inequality of relations cinematic witnessing of, 2 within globalization, 1 infertility and sexual intimacy in Never Forever, 51, 53 socioeconomic context in Never Forever,  51–​52 Insiang,  106–​7 intimacy across locales, 2–​3 context of in Serbis,  117–​18 and ‘crafting the self,’ 68–​69 creation and value of, 44–​45 cross-​cultural development of, 45–​46 as depicted in various genres, 186 and dynamics of power, 43 eruptions of, 138–​41

240 Index intimacy (cont.) establishing sites of, 24–​26, 27–​28 and expansion of roles in The Handmaiden,  170–​71 framing of in Philippine cinema, 107–​8 inability to transcend inequality, 55 individual identity, as source of, 46–​47 inequality, at site of, 4–​5, 44–​50 inequality, in context of, 42–​43, 66, 171,  180–​81 infinity of intimate relations, 30–​31 kinship, power of intimate, 172–​79 loneliness as context for, 56 money, coexistence with, 47–​49, 50, 57–​58,  62 racial observations in, 53–​54 and racial privilege in colonial contexts, 43 and radical inequality, 19 seven levels of, 45, 56–​57 spectatorship and scenes of, 27, 35–​36 transformations through, 60–​61 ‘Intimacy: From Transformation to Transmutation’ (Bianchi), 44–​45 Intimate Encounters (Faeir), 68–​69   Japan, Filipina bar hostesses in, 68–​69 jealousy, depiction and resolution of,  58–​61   Kim, Gina, Never Forever, 60f,  83–​85 characters, desperation of, 52–​53 counterhegemonic ending, 64 economic status and inequality, 46 gender roles, reconstitution of, 54 haptic visuality, 44 infertility, response to, 51 intimacy as source of individual identity,  46–​47 intimacy at the site of inequality, 44–​50 jealousy and forgiveness, depiction of,  58–​61 loneliness as context for intimacy, 56 money, coexistence with intimacy, 47–​49,  62 personal vs. business relations, shifts between, 57 political and libidinal economies in,  50–​64

power, visualization of, 62–​63 pregnancy and heteronormative family life, 61–​62, 64 privileged perspectives in, 82 sex, representations of, 43 sexual intimacy, and dynamics of power,  54–​55 sexual intimacy, in context of economic inequality,  42–​43 sexual settings, use of, 43 skin as metonym, 44 socioeconomic context of, 51–​52 space, transformation with intimacy,  62–​64 transnational mobility, 64 Kinatay background and significance of, 3–​4 multisensorial representation of,  107–​8 shared spectatorship of, 93–​95 use of sound, 100–​1 King, Martin Luther, Jr., ‘Beyond Vietnam,’  104–​5 kinship, power of intimate, 172–​79 Kristeva, Julia on Georges Bataille and plane of abjection, 9 insecurity of subject power, 13–​14   language, entrenchment of, 15 Lao, Armando, screenplay for Serbis,  111–​12 Laude, Jennifer death of, 12–​13, 17–​19 portrait with mother, 18f legitimate needs, as seventh stage of intimacy, 45 location, significance in depicting abjection, 26 loneliness, as context for intimacy, 56 loss, memories in context of death and,  219–​23 Lui, Mary, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery,  45–​46   Macapugay, Jaygee, role in Here Lies Love,  205–​7 Macho Dancer, 107 Mahmood, Saba, The Politics of Piety, 31

Index  241 Manila poverty of in Ma'Rosa,  129–​31 poverty of in Tirador (Slingshot),  125–​29 Marcos, Ferdinand campaigning of, 208 corruption practiced by, 190 marriage to Imelda, 208–​9, 211–​12 portrayal in Here Lies Love,  196–​97 Marcos, Imelda, 211f campaigning by, 208 childhood caregiver, 218n18 clothing favored by, 209–​10 corruption practiced by, 190 death of Benigno Aquino, reaction to, 209 and dynamics of inequality, 38 extravagant lifestyle of, 186, 200 Imelda, reaction to, 214–​15 intimacy, representations of, 185 marriage to Ferdinand, 208–​9, 211–​12 poverty and wealth, relationship to, 189–​90,  204–​5 self-​representation, role of dreams in, 184, 200, 204–​5 and will to dream, 189–​202 See also Here Lies Love; Imelda marginalization, and personal agency, 31, 36,  38–​39 marginalized populations, compassionate viewing of, 34–​35 Marks, Laura haptic visuality, 110–​11 inequity of sense experience, 144 The Skin of the Film, 44 ‘Video Haptics and Erotics,’ 100 Ma'Rosa, annihilation and affliction in,  129–​31 mastery, eruptions to, 155–​60 memories, in context of loss and death,  219–​23 Mendoza, Brillante accusations of exploitation and ‘poverty porn,’  87–​88 annihilation and affliction in films of, 92–​93,  131–​34 and haptic turn in cinema studies,  96–​97 and haptic visuality, 109–​12

and heritage of Philippine cinema,  105–​7 Ma'Rosa,  129–​31 nature of films, 4 and rise of new Filipin@x cinema,  93–​99 sexuality, on-​screen depiction of, 25 shared spectatorship and the Other,  99–​105 Tirador (Slingshot), 5–​7, 8, 125–​29 visible tactility of film in works of, 123 Mendoza, Brillante, Kinatay background and significance of, 3–​4 shared spectatorship, 93–​95 use of sound, 100–​1 Mendoza, Brillante, Serbis annihilation and affliction in, 90–​93, 91f,  122–​23 cinematic language of scenes, 32–​33 close readings of, 112–​24 ethical intimacy in, 21–​23, 24–​26 and gay cultural life in Philippines,  122–​23 haptic visuality in, 92–​93 production design, 92–​93, 122–​23 queer sex and phenomenology, 124–​25 sensory detail, and cinematic language,  123–​24 spectatorship and scenes of intimacy, 27 visible tactility of film, 123 Miller, J. Reid, Stain Removal, 24 Minaj, Nicki, and demand for equity in female orgasm, 71 Minh-​ha, Trinh T., Shoot for the Contents, 34 miscarriage, in The Housemaid,  159–​60 miscegenation, history of laws prohibiting,  45–​46 misnaming, of transgender women, 15 misrecognition, of transgender women, 15 money, coexistence with intimacy, 47–​49, 50, 57–​58, 62 Moore, Madison, Fabulous, 13 Mumbo Jumbo (Reed), 72–​73 musicals production and spectatorship, 186 See also Here Lies Love ‘My Family's Slave’ (Tizon), 218n18

242 Index mythical figures, and transformative experiences, 72–​73,  75–​77   Naficy, Hamid, An Accented Cinema,  7–​8 narration, in The Handmaiden, 165 national cinemas, and classical Hollywood tradition, 3 Never Forever, 8 Never Forever, political and libidinal economies in, 50–​64, 60f,  83–​85 counterhegemonic ending of, 64 desperation of characters in, 52–​53 economic status and inequality, 46 gender roles, reconstitution of, 54 haptic visuality, 44 infertility, response to, 51 intimacy as source of individual identity,  46–​47 intimacy at the site of inequality, 44–​50 jealousy and forgiveness, depiction of,  58–​61 loneliness as context for intimacy, 56 money, coexistence with intimacy, 47–​49,  62 personal vs. business relations, shifts between, 57 pregnancy and heteronormative family life, 61–​62, 64 privileged perspectives in, 82 sex, representations of, 43 sexual intimacy and dynamics of power,  54–​55 sexual intimacy in context of economic inequality,  42–​43 sexual settings, use of, 43 skin as metonym, 44 socioeconomic context of, 51–​52 space, transformation with intimacy,  62–​64 transnational mobility, 64 and visualization of power, 62–​63   ‘Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies’ (Williams),  24–​25 optic visuality, 119–​20 orgasm, demand for equity in female, 71  

Park Chan-​wook, The Handmaiden, 163–​ 79, 172f,  180–​81 background,  137–​38 changes of direction, 168–​70 embodied montage, 138, 165–​67 emergence of new roles, 172–​37–​ emergence of sexual intimacy in,  172–​74 eruptions of intimacy, 138–​41 eruptions of truthfulness, 168–​69 expansive roles, 166, 168–​69 as feminist intervention, 179 intimacy, in context of inequality, 171 intimacy, through expansion of roles in,  170–​71 kinship, power of intimate, 172–​79 masters and servants, 138–​39 plot and structure, 163–​65, 176–​78 production design, 165, 180–​81 production design and performance,  165–​71 sex scenes, undoing inequality in, 163 slapping, significance of, 175 sound, use of diegetic and semidiegetic, 166–​68, 169, 171 structure and plot, 163–​65, 176–​78 suicide, as punishment of self and others,  175–​76 voiceover narration, 165 Parreñas, Rhacel, ethnographic studies, 69 performance and historical context in Here Lies Love,  196–​97 production of in The Handmaiden,  165–​71 personal vs. business relations, shifts between, 57 perspective of American filmmakers in Here Lies Love, 194 privileged perspectives in Heading South and Never Forever, 82 of sex workers in Heading South, 66 phenomenology and haptic visuality, 109–​12 queer sex and phenomenology, 124–​25

Index  243 Philippine cinema, and poverty pornography,  105–​9 framing of intimacy, 107–​8 and local censorship, 109 multisensorial representation, 107–​9 Philippines cinematography of poverty in, 7 colonial domination of, 3–​4 and cultural context in Serbis,  121–​22 gay cultural life in, 122–​23 physicality, of sex scenes in Serbis,  113–​14 political corruption as depicted in Ma'Rosa,  130–​31 as depicted in Tirador (Slingshot),  125–​29 poverty and annihilation and affliction in Serbis,  90–​93 cinematography of, 7 denigration within, 5–​6 drug dealing within, 129–​31 of Imelda Marcos in childhood, 189–​90 political corruption within, 125–​29 poverty porn, 37, 87–​88 poverty porn, and local censorship, 109 poverty porn, Philippine cinema and,  105–​9 and proximity of smell, 144–​45 sexuality within, 23, 25–​26 Povinelli, Elizabeth, Empire of Love, 113, 115, 121 power annihilating dimensions of, 18–​20 gender and sex normativities and,  20–​21 and on-​screen depiction of sexuality,  25–​26 sexual intimacy and dynamics of, 43,  54–​55 sexuality and dynamics of, 37–​38 and violations of authority in The Housemaid, 150–​53, 152f visualization of in sexual settings, 62–​63 pregnancy and heteronormative family life, 61–​62,  64 in The Housemaid,  156–​60

Presentation of the Self, The (Goffman),  138–​40 privilege privileged perspectives in Heading South and Never Forever, 82 relationship with ethics, 82 production design and annihilation and affliction in Serbis, 92–​93,  122–​23 in The Handmaiden, 165 playful and seductive qualities of,  180–​81 and wealth and privilege in The Housemaid,  146–​49 proximity and carnalities displayed in Here Lies Love, 196 of characters in Here Lies Love,  193–​94 of Imelda Marcos in Imelda, 207–​8, 210–​11,  215–​16 shallowness of in Here Lies Love, 192 of spectators at Here Lies Love, 191 proximity, cinematic and expanding worldviews, 8, 99–​100,  101–​2 and film phenomenology, 109–​12 and sensory detail, 123–​24 psychic violence, routinization of, 16–​17 Puar, Jasbir, on homonationalism, 30–​31 Purchase of Intimacy, The (Zelizer), 47–​49, 50, 52, 59   queer sex, and phenomenology, 124–​25   race, as context for sexuality, 29–​30, 36–​37 cross-​cultural development of intimacy,  45–​46 and economic inequality, 42–​43 racial observations of partner, 53–​54 racial privilege in colonial contexts, 43 racial subjection in globalization, 49–​50 racial subjection, in globalization, 49–​50 rape confession of in Heading South, 77–​80,  81 and violations of authority in The Housemaid, 150–​53, 152f

244 Index Raval, P. J., Call Her Ganda,  17–​19 family relationships in, 17 portrait of Jennifer Laude, 18f recognition as fifth level of intimacy, 45 lack of for abjects, 15 Reed, Ishmael, Mumbo Jumbo,  72–​73 relationship, as third level of intimacy, 45 representation, of oneself and others,  183–​87 authentic representation, 188 dreams, role of, 183–​84 historical context, 190–​92, 196–​97 Imelda Marcos, corruption practiced by, 190 Imelda Marcos and childhood poverty,  189–​90 inequality, ethics of representing,  190–​91 power and marginality, role of, 188 shallow proximity, recognizing, 192 romance, displacing Hollywood notions of,  5–​8 Rooney, David, review of Here Lies Love, 193–​94,  198–​99 Rubin, Gayle, ‘Thinking Sex,’ 9   screenwriting, and accommodation of Filipino experience, 111–​12 Second Sex, The (Beauvoir), 153 self-​actualization, in setting of sex tourism, 72 self-​immolation, as feminist intervention by subaltern, 161 self-​presentation, of father in The Housemaid, 145 self-​representation by Imelda Marcos, 212 role of dreams in, 183–​84 sensory detail, and cinematic language, 32–​33, 123–​24,  144–​45 Serbis annihilation and affliction in, 90–​93,  91f haptic visuality, 92–​93 production design, 92–​93, 122–​23 queer sex and phenomenology, 124–​25 Serbis, close readings of, 112–​24

bodily needs, addressing poverty and alienation through, 116–​17 cleanliness, attempts at, 115–​16 family relationships, 112, 114–​16 filth, depiction of, 114–​15 goat, role and significance of, 118–​19 haptic visuality of sex scenes, 118–​20 homosexuality, and gay cultural life in Philippines,  122–​23 Philippine cultural context, 121–​22 physicality of sex scenes, 113–​14 physical wounds, cinematic language of, 113–​14,  115 sensory detail, and cinematic language,  123–​24 sexual intimacy, contexts for, 117–​18 sound, use of in darkness, 118–​19 visible tactility of film, 123 Serbis, ethical intimacy in, 21–​23, 24–​26 cinematic language of scenes, 32–​33 spectatorship and, 27 servility, presentations of in The Housemaid, 153, 155 servitude, eruptions to, 155–​60 sex, displacing Hollywood notions of, 5–​8 sex acts, defining intimacy as, 28 sex and gender normativities power and, 20–​21 radical inequality and, 20–​21, 22–​23 sex scenes physicality of in Serbis,  113–​14 undoing inequality in, 163 sex tourism forms of attention, 74, 75 forms of payment, 73–​74 limits of personal agency, 73, 75 local experience of, 72, 74–​75, 82–​83 practices of, 66–​68 self-​actualization in setting of, 72 violations of ethical intimacy in, 69–​71, 75–​80,  81 sexual intimacy abjection, in context of, 154 beyond pleasure and companionship, 179, 185, 186 bodily eruptions in The Housemaid,  150–​55 context of in Serbis,  117–​18

Index  245 and ‘crafting the self,’ 68–​69 as depicted in various genres, 186 and dynamics of power, 43 economic inequality, in context of, 42–​ 43, 171, 180–​81 and economic inequality, in The Housemaid,  153–​55 emergence of in The Handmaiden,  172–​74 and fertility in Never Forever, 51, 53 forging self through, 163 inability to transcend inequality, 55 and inequality in Heading South, 66 kinship, power of intimate, 172–​79 loneliness as context for, 56 money, coexistence with, 47–​49, 50, 57–​58,  62 racial observations in, 53–​54 and racial privilege in colonial contexts, 43 through expansion of roles in The Handmaiden,  170–​71 transformations through, 60–​61 sexuality attempts to define, 121–​22 beyond pleasure and companionship, 179, 185, 186 bodily eruptions in The Housemaid,  150–​55 cultural and other contexts of, 29–​30,  36–​37 cultural pressures regarding, 23 and dynamics of power, 37–​38 ethical intimacy and on-​screen depiction of, 24–​26 forging self through, 163 hierarchies of, 20 sexual settings context of in Serbis,  117–​18 ‘crafting the self ’ in, 68–​69 forms of attention in, 74, 75 forms of payment in, 73–​74 and haptic visuality, 44 in Heading South, 65–​66, 71 and intricacies of power, 43 self-​actualization in, 72 and transnational desires and dreams,  71–​72

violations of ethical intimacy in, 81 and visualization of power, 62–​63 sex workers, perspective of in Heading South, 66 Shoot for the Contents, 34 Sinnerbrink, Robert, cinematic ethics,  101–​2 skin, as metonym, 44 Skin of the Film, The (Marks), 44 slapping significance of in The Handmaiden, 175 significance of in The Housemaid, 156–​57,  158–​59 Slingshot (Tirador), annihilation and affliction in, 5–​7, 8, 125–​29 ‘slow cinema’ of Lav Diaz, 95–​96 smell, poverty and proximity of, 144–​45 Snorton, C. Riley, Black on Both Sides,  9–​10 social class as context for sexuality, 29–​30, 36–​37,  55–​56 economic status and capacity, 46 social order, hierarchies of sexuality in, 20 social roles definition of, 139 performance of, 139–​40 socioeconomic context for Philippine filmmakers, 106–​7 of responses to infertility in Never Forever,  51–​52 Soloski, Alexis, review of Here Lies Love, 192, 194, 200 sound diegetic and semidiegetic in The Handmaiden, 166–​68, 169, 171 use in Kinatay,  100–​1 use in Serbis,  118–​19 space, transformation with intimacy,  62–​64 Speaking in Tongues, 200 spectatorship and cinema of abjection, 26–​27 and cinematic ethics, 101–​2 and distancing from bodies portrayed, 108–​9,  110 documentaries and, 186

246 Index spectatorship (cont.) limits to, 35, 36 musicals and, 186 and the Other, 99–​105 power and marginality in, 188 proximity of audience at Here Lies Love, 191 and scenes of intimacy, 27, 35–​36 shared spectatorship, 33–​36, 93–​95 shared spectatorship, and compassion,  103–​4 shared spectatorship, and the Other,  99–​105 and witnessing affliction in film, 103 spectatorship, compassion of shared accusations of exploitation and ‘poverty porn,’  87–​88 among filmmakers, viewers, and critics, 87, 97–​99,  131–​34 beneficiaries of inequality, 88–​89 empathy, power of film to teach, 88 Spirits Rising, 207 Stain Removal (Miller), 24 ‘Steel Butterfly Still Soars, The’ (Ellison), 188 Stop Making Sense, 200 subaltern culpability of West in lives of, 4 ethical intimacy and depiction of, 7 self-​immolation as feminist intervention by, 161 subject/​abject relationality, and shared spectatorship, 35 subjects and abjects in filmmaking, 9–​21 abjection, plane of, 9 misnaming, 15 misrecognition, 15 proximity of death for abjects, 16–​17 subject's self certainty as privilege,  14–​15 suicide, as punishment of self and others, 160–​63,  175–​76 sympathy, and the Other, 99–​105   Talking Heads, 200 Tell My Horse (Hurston), 72–​73 theft, as depicted in Tirador (Slingshot),  127–​29

The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Mahmood), 31 ‘Thinking Sex’ (Rubin), 9 Those Long Haired Nights, subject/​abject relations in, 9–​17, 12f denigration, recasting of, 12–​13 and forms of violence, 9–​10 misnaming, 15 misrecognition, 15 narrative of death, recasting, 9–​10 narrative of denigration, recasting, 11 specter of violence, 11 subject's self-​certainty as privilege,  14–​15 vignettes, 10 Tirador (Slingshot), annihilation and affliction in, 5–​7, 8, 125–​29 Tizon, Alex, ‘My Family's Slave,’ 218n18 tourism, proported effect of cinema on,  107–​8 transformation, possible through intimacy,  60–​61 transgender women denigration, recasting of, 12–​13 fear in lives of, 17–​18 misnaming of, 15 misrecognition of, 15 psychic violence toward, 16–​17 representation in films from the Philippines, 14 specter of violence toward, 11 struggle for regard in lives of sex workers,  19–​20 in Those Long Haired Nights, 12f violence toward, 9–​10 Trap Door,  9–​10   undocumented workers, and socioeconomic context of infertility, 52   viewers, shared spectatorship with filmmakers and critics, 87, 93–​95,  97–​99 viewership, effect of intended, 29–​30 violence and depicting abjection, 9–​10

Index  247 recasting in life-​affirming fiction, 12–​13 routinization of psychic violence, 16–​17 specter of toward transgender women, 11 visuality, haptic, 44 and annihilation and affliction in Serbis,  92–​93 film phenomenology and, 109–​12 and rise of new Filipin@x cinema,  96–​97 of sex scenes in Serbis,  118–​20 and shared spectatorship of the Other, 100 visuality, optic, 119–​20 voiceover narration, in The Handmaiden, 165   Weil, Simone, 96, 101, 102–​3 What's Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex

Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Brennan),  71–​72 White, Patricia, on The Handmaiden, 163,  164–​65 ‘Who's Your Daddy: Queer Diasporic Framings of the Region’ (Gopinath), 27 Williams, Linda, ‘Of Kisses and Ellipses,’  24–​25 worldviews and cinematic proximity, 99–​100,  101–​2 global cinema ad expansion of, 7–​8 wounds, cinematic language of, 113–​14   Zachareck, Stephanie, review of Heading South,  80–​81 Zelizer, Viviana, The Purchase of Intimacy, 47–​49, 50, 52, 59 Zuleta, Lito, on Kinatay, 98