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6 Taglish, or the phantom power of the lingua franca Vicente L. Rafael Introduction In her celebrated novel, Dogeaters, the Filipina-American mestiza writer Jessica Hagedorn begins with a memory of watching a Hollywood movie in a Manila theater in the 1950s. She evokes the pleasures of anonymous looking amid the intimate presence of foreign images and unknown bodies: 1956. The air-conditioned darkness of the Avenue Theater smells of flowery pomade, sugary chocolates, cigarette smoke and sweat. ‘All That Heaven Allows’ is playing in Cinemascope and Technicolor. Starring Jane Wyman as the rich widow, Rock Hudson as the handsome young gardener, and Agnes Moorehead as Jane’s faithful friend, the movie also features the unsung starlet Gloria Talbott as Jane’s spoiled teenage daughter, a feisty brunette with catlike features and an innocent ponytail. … Huddled with our chaperone Lorenza, my cousin Pucha Gonzaga and I sit enthralled in the upper section of the balcony in Manila’s ‘Finest! First Run! English Movies Only!’ theater, ignoring the furtive lovers stealing noisy kisses in the pitch-black darkness all around us. Jane Wyman’s soft putty face. Rock Hudson’s singular, pitying expression. Flared skirts, wide cinch belts, prim white blouses, a single strand of delicate blue-white pearls. Thick penciled eyebrows and blood red vampire lips; the virgin pastel-pink cashmere cardigan draped over Gloria Talbott’s shoulders. Cousin Pucha and I are impressed by her brash style; we gasp at Gloria’s cool indifference, the offhand way she treats her grieving mother. Her casual arrogance seems inherently American, modern and enviable. (1990: 3–4) Before the brilliantly colored images and magnified sounds of this Douglas Sirk film, the narrator, Rio, and her cousin Pucha — mestiza girls of privileged means in neo-colonial Philippine society — initially acknowledge the strangeness of the theater. Plunged in darkness, they are surrounded by odors from unknown sources and the obscured figures of lovers. But as consumers of the film, they take delight in the novelty of their surroundings, avidly 102 Vicente L. Rafael attending to the cinematic images, especially the movie stars. Absorbed in the intimate details of the stars’ appearance, they recount the colors and textures of the objects on the screen. Thus they are filled with a sense of something missing in their lives. Rio and Pucha regard the stars with envy, seeing in them clues to what might lend form to their own sense of lack. Here, looking takes on the quality of a residual religiosity. The Filipina viewers approach images from the United States as if they were devotees facing saintly icons. Seeing leads to a desire to fuse with the objects of vision, as images take on the feel of objects available for touching. By lingering over specific scenes and details, the viewers disengage themselves from the sheer narrative trajectory of the love story. As such, Rio, Pucha, and presumably their servant Lorenza are joined momentarily in their common absorption into the cinematic images. Yet that absorption, like the sense of identification with the stars, is precisely that: momentary. Emerging from the movie, the three also emerge into the light of social differences signaled by the workings of a vernacular sensibility: We compare notes after the movie, sipping TruColas under the watchful gaze of the taciturn Lorenza. ‘I don’t like her face,’ Pucha complains about Jane Wyman, ‘I hate when Rock starts kissing her.’ ‘What’s wrong with it?’ I want to know, irritated by my blond cousin’s constant criticism. She wrinkles her mestiza nose, the nose she is so proud of because it’s pointy and straight. ‘Ay! Que corny! I dunno what Rock sees in her’ — she wails. ‘It’s a love story,’ I say in my driest tone of voice. … ‘It’s a corny love story, when you think about it,’ Pucha snorts. Being corny is the worst sin you can commit in her eyes. ‘What about Gloria Talbott? You liked her, didn’t you? She’s so …’ — I search frantically through my limited vocabulary for just the right adjective to describe my feline heroine — ‘interesting.’ Pucha rolls her eyes. ‘Ay! Puede ba, you have weird taste! She’s really cara de achay if you ask me.’ She purses her lips to emphasize her distaste, comparing the starlet to an ugly servant without, as usual, giving a thought to Lorenza’s presence. I avoid Lorenza’s eyes. ‘She looks like a cat — that’s why she’s so strange and interesting.’ I go on...

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