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Rolando B. Tolentino

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The Masses in the Films of Joseph Estrada

Joseph Estrada, an action hero for four decades, was elected thirteenth president of the Philippines in 1998. He won with the biggest margin in presidential election history, garnering 39.9 percent of the votes cast in a field of 11 candidates. Estrada won big, by using the masses (masa) as a cornerstone of his presidential campaign and governance. Despite his affluent background, he succeeded, owing to his star system, to project himself as one of the masses. Estrada comes out of the local action film genre, the aksyon film or the bakbakan, “films that focuses mainly on physical conflict.” His action films depicted characters in solidarity with and providing leadership for the masses.

Until he was deposed in January 2001, Estrada was holding on to the discourse of class struggle, pitting elite rich against the poor masa. The masses in Estrada’s film are, however, massified, i.e., individuals forced by circumstance to bond together and to search for a liberator. In politics, such a representation remains sublimely real. Estrada coached the masses to posit him as their ally and salvation. And the masses, which comprised the huge voting population, gave him the ultimate chance to serve them.

Geron Busabos (1964) narrates the life of Geron (Estrada), a young intermittent laborer and leader of a homeless group of beggars, sex workers and other laborers. Geron could have joined a protection racket syndicate, yet he chose to earn a living by working as a hand in the market. Even with his measly income, Geron does not succumb to the lures of easy money. A friend who robs a Caucasian to get cash for the treatment of the sick child and who uses Geron’s name to extort money from stall owners is twice disavowed by Geron. By conniving with the syndicate, this person frames Geron for killing an underworld character. The film ends in a chase. Geron is wounded but proves his innocence and determination.

The purity of the oppressed class is echoed further in politics. When an anti-Estrada rally led by Cardinal Sin and former president Corazon Aquino was mounted, for example, Estrada was quick to pick up the class issue. Pitting against the anti-government elitist forces was his own participation in the predated birthday party celebration of Brother Mike Velarde, who leads a flock of millions. Cardinal Sin’s rally, held in Makati, the country’s financial district, represents elite interests while that of Brother Mike, a fudamentalist preacher with massive following in the D and E class, and who played a decisive role in Estrada’s election victory, is represented as a mass rally, held in Luneta, known as the “people’s park.” Estrada spoke of aspiring “to bring the large majority of our people in to the mainstreams of productive economic activities in [the] country because they matter most to [him].”

In Diligin Mo ng Hamog ang Uhaw na Lupa (1975), David (Estrada) enjoins the masses to make him serve as their leader when the older leader is killed by the landlord’s forces. The landlord plans to transform the land into a subdivision to be able to take up the challenge of the booming nation. He orders the tenants’ houses bulldozed, and the leader killed. Filmed like Moses’ exodus, the tenants desert their land with David leading them. Despite persistent harassment from the landlord’s forces, they continue to clear the grass land, work on irrigation, and construct new dwellings. When the dam is destroyed by the landlord’s men, they consolidate their forces to fight off new dangers and to rebuild their source of livelihood.

David’s religious figure is uncanny. He is David, battler of giants or the young wise leader; Moses, leader of the exodus and postwar reconstruction; and Jesus, sufferer and liberator. The masses are thrown to him to be lead. The masses also provide the backdrop for his epiphanies. When David and the woman make love, the masses sing the theme song, thereby fusing the issue of land reform and sexual consummation. The interior scene of lovemaking is intercut with the exterior scene of the masses singing around the bon fire.

The film was made at the height of Marcos’ martial rule, whose cornerstone was land reform. Marcos’ own iconography for the land reform involved him heartily smiling while planting rice seedlings in muddy fields. Marcos knew that land was the cause of massive discontent with the various national governments. What resulted, however, was dismal--a privileging of landed oligarchs and new cronies in agricultural businesses.

Estrada’s own venture into politics was heralded through a close liaison with the Marcoses. Becoming mayor of a suburban town, he dwelled on greater benefits for the police while extolling them to greater professionalism, and built a public market and a public high school. Such architectonics recall Geron’s Quiapo or David’s promised land, and the aspiration for the modern and traditional. The two leaders were involved in parallel modernization of the nation.

The masses in Marcos’ realm become politicized only when they are massified for public spectacle--e.g., lining the streets, awaiting the arrival of international figures, paid to be mobilized for Marcos’ rallies, or to participate in historical parades instantly climaxing in the Marcos’ regime. Estrada’s masses in Diligin Mo ng Hamog... are no less different, becoming the units that form the spectacle in the mass exodus and the agents of transformation of the barren into productive lands

In Sa Kuko ng Aguila (1988), Tonio (Estrada) is a jeepney driver who witnesses the daily atrocities engineered by the presence of a United States military base in Olongapo, the biggest outside the mainland--a fisher folk friend is killed when fishing in sea territory marked by the bases as restricted, a sex worker friend is jailed for killing a serviceman during a rape attempt, a ward is raped by an American, and so on. Without intending to, he shoots two hatchet men in self-defense. He flees and hides, only to resurface to clear his name. He falls for the journalist (played by now Senator Nikki Coseteng) who exposes the rape of his ward. The gang lord- aspirant mayor is exonerated by the courts. In the end, Tonio is cheered by the people, chanting his name while marching on the streets with the various enlightened sectors of the anti-bases coalition.

Olongapo is an allegory of the Philippines sieged by literal and epistemic dominance of U.S. imperialism. As an allegory, the conditions of oppression and liberation in the film’s location become the mediated experience in which Estrada is heralded as a national figure, a defender of the national masses. His filmic experience in politicizing the various sectors (except the women and female sex workers, a task taken up by the journalist) becomes a mode in which he propagandizes his national aspiration for Filipinos. Surely enough, such strong nationalist sentiments produced alliances between Estrada and the mass movement in Aquino and Ramos’ administration, and produced his now realized presidential ambition.

Estrada is able to reinvent himself from a close Marcos ally to a staunch nationalist politician in the subsequent presidential administrations. Estrada’s own temporal isolation from local politics during the Marcoses’ exile led to an ingenious maneuver--that is, his resurrection as a nationalist, understanding of yet still disenchanted with the transformations of the Aquino and Ramos’ administrations. From a comprador of special administrative favors from Marcos that ensured efficient delivery of civic dole-outs, Estrada becomes a nationalist citizen-subject in the subsequent administrations, a move which opened up the possibility of staging the national through a nationalist rhetoric and performance.

The masses in Sa Kuko ng Aguila provided for him the paradigmatic shift to nationalist politics, a strategy for political longevity and viability. The politicized masses, however, remain enmeshed in personality politics, chanting Tonio’s name instead of militant slogans. The significance of sound in the last slow-motion scene becomes uncanny, providing the impetus of the personality of the traditional politician in the coming wave of a new and more militant politics.

The masses are central to Estrada’s filmic and political star systems. However, there remains a conscious representation of Estrada as iconographic of the “defender of the masses.” His ordinary fashion (dirtied and even tattered shirts, denim jackets and pants, converse rubber shoes), pomaded hair, lean moustache, angry-young-man look, hefty weight, and black wristband are markers of his working class yet masculine affinity. His characters are usually outsiders either in terms of origin or in terms of class relations, yet maintaining great virtue and patience. He is the protector of the marginal. Thus, violence is never gratuitous, and opposite sex relations favor the virtuous woman.

In Estrada’s films, however, the masses do not speak or they speak only in unison. They remain integral fixtures in Estrada’s trajectory of an individual’s quest for success and consequent infamy. Thus, Estrada’s masses have been massified and distorted for his own political agenda. And the end is frightfully still nowhere in sight. Bulatlat.com

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