So of course everyone who ever watches any viral video of any kind has seen the video of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC)’s inmates’ performance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller:
In December 2007, TIME Magazine rated this vid #5 in its top 10 “most popular viral videos” of the year list.
And now, the vid has its own Peeps parody:
I found this mentioned in a recent entry on Defamer (http://defamer.com/371458/the-filipino-prison-peeps-perform-thriller) which reads:
The Washington Post’s Peeps Show II, possibly the greatest Peep diorama competition in history, has posted photos of this year’s 37 semi-finalists, culled from over 800 entries featuring the brightly colored, recoiling Easter treats. There’s way too many gems here—from the plumber crack to the Olympic diving competition to Marion Barry’s bust—to single out just one, but if you were to hold a marshmellow gun to our heads, none brought us more delight than the one above: A slavish, all-Peep recreation of 2007’s biggest viral video sensation, the Filipino prison “Thriller” showstopper.
As a Filipina American, my reaction to the enduring popularity of the Cebu Prison Thriller dance video is, on the whole, positive and enthusiastic. The Philippines is the greatest country of appropriation and remix. Saturated for years – decades – more than a century – by U.S. media, regarded from the moment of its colonization by the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War as a prime market for American exports, particularly media exports, Filipinos have had little choice but to become avid fans of U.S. pop culture. Filipino fandom of American media did not arise in some kind of spontaneous, unpolitical flare-up of adoration for Western singing, dancing, filmmaking and TV production; Filipino fandom of American media was constructed, consciously and deliberately, by American corporate and governmental interests (Kevin Robins and David Morley have written much on the theme of the political motivations of the U.S.’ domination of global media markets; Arjun Appadurai has written specifically on the case of the Philippines’ importation of Western media).
And so, as a Filipino fan of Filipino fannish appropriation of American pop culture, when I watch Filipino Thriller, I love it. I eat it up like it was bangus. Filipino appropriations of Americanness are beautiful, campy, revisionist, spectacular-spectacular thefts of, and claims of ownership over, well-known icons. They are reader-response incarnate and enacted. They are the postcolonial nation/people’s retort to the West’s exploitation. They are postcoloniality turned into exhilarating performance. If Filipino Thriller is so bad it’s good, if it’s so pitiful it’s ridiculous and awesome, well, welcome to the relationship of the postcolonial to its former colonizers and neo-colonizers, welcome to the subjectivity of the Third World vis-a-vis the First World. If the Third World has a paltry store of “it’s own” cultural productions next to the mighty archive (cf. Homi Bhabha) of the West, well, that isn’t an accident (and btw, yes, I know that all Third World cultures have tremendous stores of “local” productions, but I am referring to a perception widely held both in the Global South and in the West of the scarcity and meagerness of so-called “exclusively” non-Western culture [that is, "native" production, or even "authentic" "native" production]). Filipino Thriller makes me, and most people, cringe and wince and howl with laughter all at once, and that seems like the correct register of reception for a staging of the twisted knotted complexity of Filipino-Western, Asian-Western, Third World-Western (yes I know all of those first terms are not synonymous) media relations. So bad it’s good, so awful it’s awesome, so appalling and yet so, so fabulous. That recuperation of fabulousness from within a completely regimented and imposed fandom, the Filipino prisoners’ queering of the Western pop text, is an eloquent summary of what it is to be a Filipino imprisoned by his/her (forced, required, arranged) love (passion, desire, lust, longing) of/for the American media industries.
But when the Peep show comes around, I am reminded once again of “our” (Filipinos’/Asians’/Third Worlders’) radical state of passivity. Even as I interpret Filipino Thriller as a wonderful statement of agency by an appropriative active audience, I understand, through being Peeped, that we are, finally, primarily, subjects of the Western gaze. We feel as if we are the lookers, seers, the Ones Who Watch, and therefore that we are the readers/receivers/audience/beholders in whom meaning lies, we are the prime movers of Reception Theory who make meaning, create meaning, invest media objects with meaning and value, our own value, who value Thriller on our terms and no one else’s.
But, Peeped, we are the Looked Upon, the oddities in the circus, the Hottentot Venus on the platform, behind the bars, the tribespeople at the World’s Fair, the museum displays. We are the objects of the Gaze. We can look back, we can return the look and glare and stare and flirt, but we can never occupy that space, still and always reserved for the wealthy West, of the Beholder.
