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By Johven Velasco
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Bong Revilla |
LAST week (“Pinay with Flexed
Muscles, Pinoy with Fluttering Eyelashes”), I wrote about how the
contemporary Filipino woman has assumed a stronger disposition and a
tougher demeanor as presented on mainstream Filipino films, at least
in the romance dramas and romantic comedies of the leading film
outfits, notably Star Cinema.
On the other hand, the Pinoy
macho has certainly paled in comparison. He has shown weakness in
character spine and resolve, unlike the traditional screen macho we
used to see on the big screen, often portrayed as the action hero
whose manliness was hinged on physical strength and skills in hand
combat and fight stunts, or in his hero-and-redeemer-like resolve.
As exemplified by the likes of Fernando Poe Jr., Joseph Estrada,
Lito Lapid, Rudy Fernandez, and much later Phillip Salvador and Bong
Revilla, the traditional macho on screen was the mythical or the
working-class hero out to save his townspeople from oppression and
bondage caused by “evil forces” by the ruling class and their
ilk in films of social realism.
Traditional macho was also the
debonair matinee idol of romantic films and musicals, the likes of
Leopoldo Salcedo, Rogelio de la Rosa and Jaime de la Rosa, Nestor de
Villa, Armando Goyena, Luis Gonzales and Eddie Rodriguez of the
1940s, 50s, and early 60s. They were the morally upright lead male
characters who may not have been spared from temptation
(particularly Eddie Rodriguez of the mid sixties in
husband-wife-mistress domestic triangles such as Sapagkat Kami ay
Tao Lamang) but who, after succumbing to one if ever, has the
courage and integrity to amend and atone for his sins.
Christopher de Leon (Relasyon,
Broken Marriage) and Richard Gomez (Ikaw ang Lahat sa Akin)
continued the tradition even as they also started the image of the
sensitive male on screen, fraught with as much emotional problems
their female counterparts, openly shedding tears—as none of the
earlier and older leading men would be caught doing on the big
screen—or rage in brat-like tantrums and irrationality. Man enough
to admit his faults and oftentimes a good family provider, it is
when he is not the latter that he undergoes a personal emotional
crisis of self-worth. In other words, we still find these characters
as traditionally feudal and patriarchal in outlook, ever protective
of his macho pride as family head and chief provider.
Aga Muhlach continued the
sensitive male image. His is a cross between the suave, debonair and
the man-child types, unembarrassed in showing some “softer”
qualities (Ano Ba ang L8test, Kung Ako Na Lang Sana, Kailangan
Kita), naturally starting with sensitivity and extra tenderness and
sweetness—close to being soft—expanding but not limited to
engaging in what are traditionally regarded as largely female
preoccupations such as cooking and housekeeping. More significantly,
the sensitive male is willing to share with his woman some
limelight, especially as partner and contributor to the family’s
material upkeep. Here, somehow, traditional boundaries set for
gender roles and demeanor are transgressed and blurred.
Much later, the sensitive male
would morph into a variant, the androgenous “beautiful boy”
projected by Piolo Pascual and Sam Milby especially in the early
part of their careers (see their publicity pictorials). Besides the
suave leads and the bad boy machos, there is another “macho” on
screen—that of the beefcake actor who showed more muscles and
flesh in sex-oriented movies from the late 70s through the 90s.
Leading the pack were the Seiko hunks: Gardo Versoza, Leandro
Baldemor, Leonardo Litton, Rodel Velayo, and Anton Bernardo. Much
earlier, in the 1970s and 80s, there were Vic Vargas, Ricky Belmonte,
Ernie Garcia, Al Tantay, Orestes Ojeda, Gino Antonio and Daniel
Fernando. Even the “sweet-faced” young boys like Patrick de la
Rosa and Albert Martinez; and serious young actors like Christopher
de Leon, Mark Gil, Michael de Mesa, Phillip Salvador, Richard Gomez
and Cesar Montano were all stripped of their clothes on the big
screen and in fan magazines. These days, the stripped
machos—actor-turned-models and model-turned actors—are seen on
the covers and the inside pages of glossy fashion and gay-oriented
magazines or endorsing skimpy underwear in posters and
larger-than-life billboards on national highways.
And let us not forget the film
ingénues. They are the innocent, adolescent boys initiated into the
mundane and corrupt adult world where they eventually take center
stage as macho dancers, masahistas, or call boys. These were the
characters that launched to stardom Alan Paule (Macho Dancer),
Lawrence David (Sibak), Coco Martin (Masahista), and most recently
Tyron Perez (Twilight Dancers) via films directed by noted
filmmakers like Lino Brocka, Mel Chionglo and Brillante Mendoza, and
which made the rounds in the international film festival circuits
abroad.
The male ingénue on the local
movie screen is a crossover of gender boundary lines. His prototype
and female counterpart was the nubile nymphet of the early 70s, Alma
Moreno, as she appeared in Ishmael Bernal’s Ligaw na Bulaklak and
Menor de Edad.
Curiously, in paintings and
sculptures such as, for example, Michelangelo’s murals on the
ceiling of no less than the Sistine Chapel in Rome, or in the
Spanish artist Goya’s Maja Desnuda (The Naked Maja), the naked
human form abound. No big deal! But the nude male or female on the
screen is fair game to voyeuristic gaze and pleasure. It must be the
nature of film, a medium which is inherently voyeuristic, where an
spectator, through the camera, can enter into the privacy of a
character’s bedroom, be privy to her most intimate secrets, and
probe into his mind and feelings in more expressionistic cinematic
styles.
Once thought to be a symbol of
virility and sex liberation, the male sex symbol on screen and in
magazines is now deemed “feminized,” not necessarily because
disrobed, he looks more feminine—although some of them do—but
because he becomes a commodity as much as the female sex symbol
before him. By stripping him of his clothes, he is consigned to an
object position, no better than where the naked woman on screen has
been. Similarly, he becomes an object of the controlling gaze and
desire, this time not of the patriarchal male but of the liberated
female as well as of the male gay. Some of the latter have joined
the ranks of film directors, writers—producers even—and many of
them now stand to be openly counted among the audiences for films
showing naked male bodies, unlike before when they sat discreetly in
the dark among the other members of the cinematic audiences, mum
about their true sex fantasies and desires. Could a similar one also
be a reason why these days we have stronger female characters on the
screen—the “masculine” females—who become, on the other
hand, subjects of identification? Or characters created in the image
and likeness of their creators?
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