Why 'The Kingmaker' Sparks Memories of Terror and Defiance
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Director Lauren Greenfield interviewing Imelda Marcos (Source: Showtime Documentary Films)
This was not the case with Lauren Greenfield's The Kingmaker. Writing about this remarkable film on the narcissism, megalomania, and Machiavellianism of Imelda Marcos was an emotional roller-coaster. My generation lived through those times and witnessed the despicable talents of Mrs. Marcos. We and the ones before us also experienced the brutality of the dictatorship.
Watching The Kingmaker was all memory lane -- remembered with anger.
The sight of Imelda supervising the construction of the Film Center recalls how, in her haste to build that monstrosity just in time for the Manila Film Festival, her people left the bodies of the 26 workers killed in a site accident embedded in the structure. When Mila Llorin, the marketing head of the Manila Film Center, was asked what they did to the dead bodies, her answer was as despicable: "I was told that they just cut up all of the ones that were exposed…remove and build over" (http://rogue.ph/enduring-nightmare-manila-film-center/).
Etta Rosales, Pete Lacaba, and May Rodriguez told Greenfield of their torture by the dictatorship. The torturers battered their bodies. They held on to their humanity. They molested Etta and ran electrodes in her body. She recovered by going back to the classroom after her release and continued teaching students who included those who spied on her and brutalized her. Pete Lacaba wrote and produced some of his best writings even as he still could feel the pain in his body, and the agony of his losing his NPA guerrilla brother. Finally, May calmly narrated how her interrogators ran their hands over her naked body before inserting a finger into her vagina purportedly to look for hidden notes.
The Kingmaker's parodies also made us laugh.
And I cannot stifle a smile of surprise upon hearing Ferdinand Marcos' voice singing to the delight of his two-year lover Dovie Beams. All the while, many of us thought that the police had the love tape when they ended the Diliman Commune. Apparently, someone was able to save the tape. Now it will be more fun reading Hermie Rotea's "Marcos' Lovey Dovie: The Torrid Love Triangle that Shook the World!" again; the enjoyable transcript of the presidential sex which drove Imelda to General Carlos Romulo's shoulder, crying "I gave him everything I have, he still cheats on me!"
Every time Imelda said "beautiful" in the film, the stories of her narcissism that I picked up from friends and comrades through those years returned. Two of my favorite tales were that of Imelda promising a fountain for the large buildings if she was appointed UP President. Imelda was also said to have urged then-Dean Francisco Nemenzo "to create an ideology for my husband." He would piss off Marcos a year later when he supported the first massive open protest at UP over an attempt to raise tuition fees and vowed to stand alongside us if and when the police attacked the Diliman campus again.
Most of all, The Kingmaker brought out the defiant in us.
“The Kingmaker is about opposing the return of a parvenu vulgar elite, which, in Imelda’s words, “loves a strong leader.””
Etta's, Pete's, and May's ordeals made me recall our quiet effort to get copies of the Task Force Detainees’ reports on torture. We were ready to invoke academic freedom in case the military decided that the UP Third World Studies Center was worth raiding for concealing "subversive documents" (they were right). It was painful reading those accounts and watching them told in a film for the first time by these brave souls.
We destroyed Imelda's illusion of becoming UP President with a carefully-staged protest that disrupted her husband's speech in the 1976 graduation ceremony. The military heard of the planned protest and surrounded the graduating class with a wall of its trainees poorly disguised as UP students. They failed to stop us, and the Class of 1976 and their parents were the grateful recipients of our manifesto condemning the dictatorship.
Those who self-righteously upbraid the documentary as flawed because a white person directed it are utterly mistaken. The Kingmaker is about opposing the return of a parvenu vulgar elite, which, in Imelda's words, "loves a strong leader." It is a fight in the name of the poor and the powerless. It is a struggle for democracy's sake.
And for this war against the Marcoses’ attempt at “redemption” to gain traction, the broadest of unity is called for.
Patricio Abinales
Patricio N. Abinales teaches Philippine politics.
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