Guilt by Association

Ruel S. De Vera Associate Editor THE very idea of the guilty pleasure is an exercise in wonderful indulgence. After all, the point is to be enjoying something that other people would frown upon—thus we don’t want to admit to it, thus we feel guilt at savoring such an experience. Yet the indulgence, the extravagance lies in the fact that a guilty pleasure is a continued activity. In other words, we enjoy it so much that the guilt and the implied subterfuge fail to end it. There is also the added dimension of the guilty pleasure being something contrary to the way other people perceive us—but not how we view ourselves. It is a tantalizing glimpse of the secret, authentic you—and it happens under everybody’s noses, bwahaha. Now I suppose one person’s guilty pleasure is another person’s regular pleasure depending on the thickness of your skin or relative indifference to how others perceive you. I guess it also has all to do with the relative level of sophistication (or lack thereof) you believe yourself to possess. Truth be told, I find it very difficult to conceive why any pleasure should be seen as a guilty pleasure save for the fact that some of these things are so awful they should cause guilt. But still, I believe I have observed enough of these so-called guilty pleasures in our fellow Filipinos to list a few: 1) Archie digests: It is odd that so many people feign not to read them, but I have it on very good authority that Archie digests (which of course also star the other denizens of time-lost Riverdale, Veronica, Betty, Jughead and even later member Sabrina the Teenage Witch) sell like hotcakes to this very day. Where are they? Well, they are stacked willy-nilly in our bathrooms, many of the Double-Digests bearing the telltale warped cover from having been wet and then dried after. 2) Barry Manilow songs: It is really eerie how the lyrics of every single Barry Manilow song seem to have been hard-wired into the brain of all Filipino babies. This becomes evident when a Barry Manilow song comes on—be it on the radio, videoke or Myx—and then we find ourselves unconsciously singing along—YET CORRECTLY SINGING EVERY SINGLE LINE! This is particularly effective when the songs “Somewhere Down the Road” and “Copacobana” come on. Eerie. 3) Movies shot in the Philippines: No matter how bad the movie is, we can’t tear our eyes away when it is clear the movie we’re watching was shot here in these tropical isles, even if they are standing if for another Southeast Asian country, most often Vietnam. Sometimes, it is very cool, such as Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” or Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” but sometimes it can be B-movie territory such as the gloriously over-the-top Chuck Norris flick “Missing in Action.” It feels like a somewhat twisted sense of national pride even if our country is standing in for some other nation. It gets even weirder when we watch another country being passed off as the Philippines, as was the case with the latter parts of the Edsa 1 movie “A Dangerous Life,” which featured Sri Lanka because the filmmakers weren’t given permission to shoot in Malacanang. 4) Filipinos in foreign movies: This is an extension of the previous one, and it can be fun, such as catching Tetchie Agbayani in the bizarre Tom Hanks bomb “The Money Pit” or Cesar Montano in “The Great Raid.” Sometimes it is a startling celebrity sighting such as Donita Rose in the David Hasselhoff film “Legacy” or a downright alarming yet hilarious portrayal such as the mail order bride with the propulsive talent played by Julia Cortez in “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” There are more, I am sure, but what strikes me is that these are actually pretty fun and self-aware pleasures by themselves. They’re pretty guilt-free, if you ask me. Check out other guilty pleasures in the July 12, 2009 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine.