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.
Fascinating reading. Alexis and I were talking about Munoz’s Disidentification being ten years old already, but I do think a lot of the ideas haven’t fully permeated yet. I love that you call this appropriation queer, because I do think the same mechanism is at work.
Your reading of whose gaze is ultimately desired and invoked is interesting, but I wonder whether that complexity isn’t already implicit in the Youtube upload and its going viral, i.e., does at some point whatever agency there is (and I know nothing about them…who organizes/choreographs? Is it a self-determined appropriation/spectacle or are there levels of force involved?) get transfered as (white) western viewers start commenting and framing the vid (and just reading through some of the comments in often quite condescending ways)?
That is a good point about the transfer of agency that takes place in the viral spread of the video, and you’re right that as the vid circulates globally, power and agency also flow and transform and different groups are empowered in different ways.
I am trying to surface here something that is more nuanced than simple outrage at the Thriller vid being made the object of much Western mockery – trying to get at the pleasure, for a Filipino media consumer, of the vid itself and the pleasure at the vid’s fame, the scale of the statement that it has been allowed to make – and then also trying to reconcile that with the (inevitable?) moment of realization that my pleasure at a spectacular appropriation is minute compared to the strength of the fascination of the Western gaze and the Western commentary and framing (your term, and a great one). There is a sort of process I am trying to get at (obviously still working on it!) that involves the idea of “notoriety”: Filipinos are allowed to be quite famous in the U.S., but only in the sense that they become notorious – Imelda Marcos for her hundreds and hundreds of shoes, both the Marcoses for their karaoke singing at extravagant parties, all the Filipino American Idol contestants. There’s a kind of clowning on U.S. media culture that I appreciate, and then there’s the realization that we’re clowns for America. I’m attempting to parse out the difference and the transition from one state to another.
Yes, that’s a really important differentiation and, of course, both things can occur simultaneously. I fear both the theoretical oppression of a hegemony that flattens everything it beholds/co-opts as well as the subversive naivite that overreads a minuscule agency…so balancing the two and seeing where the returned gaze ultimately becomes a spectacle in itself…very interesting project!
I also think as much as we loathe intent and authorial anything, there’s a real difference to me whether the pleasure/amusement is shared or not. Hmm…how to say that better. I’m thinking of the Praise You video, where to me there’s a real difference as to whether these are actors performing this awkwardness or amateurs being held up for our amusement. Of course, you might argue that their pleasure in performing would nevertheless work against our laughter?
Which I think is why I was so interested in who the “author” was–the inmates? Some prison authority? Was participation wholly voluntary?
And then there’s my very clearly utterly binary approach to it as in me western viewer: them Filipino performers, whereas your response emphasizes the pleasure in *your* viewer position, right?
Sorry…I’m not even sure I’m contributing anything useful, given that I don’t follow viral videos and had never even heard of this (do I need to return my non-existent media studies degree now? : ) But it is a fascinating video in terms of gaze and power distribution…
Privatise says : I absolutely agree with this !
Thanks for your comment!
Gail!
I read this essay a long time ago and forgot about it until last week while reading Franz Fanon’s This Is the Voice of Algeria. I’m almost positive you have probably read Fanon but just in case – Fanon’s essay is about the Algerian revolution under French colonization in the 1960s. He speaks about the radio as an object brought into contact with native Algerian society because of the colonizer. However, it seems that his point is that the radio is essentially a neutral object until it is absorbed into the ideological world. In the colonized world, the radio is first a symbol to be abhorred by the “true” natives because it was purely a symbol of Radio-Alger, the voice of the French colonizer. However, as the revolution (very apparent at that time) gained mass recognition, the radio became appropriated into the native world to support the opposite of what the radio initially sumbolized – it became the Voice of Algeria, a voice to give agency to the natives, for the colonized to speak on the radio in order to learn about what the hell was going on with the revolution elsewhere in the world, and also how to band together as a Algerian nation in order to combat the colonizer. Amazing things started happening when the French found out about the Alerigian radio station and then jammed the air waves which would cut off the Algerian voice and turn it into a mess of static and electronic wave sounds… until the Algerians were listening for the voice so hard that they started having hallucinations about what was actually going on, but these hallucinations actually compressed the common people’s ideology farther into social revolution. They began to create an “imaginary” story with fragmented facts in order to share with each other and rise up a nationalist spirit.
What does this have to do with your essay? This youtube video is definitely a symbol of cultural appriopriation and agency on the part of the Filipino… but I feel like no one, at least the majority of the American masses, get it (get the dimesion of truth that you get)- I feel like they don’t get the real stuff that this video is presenting. I feel like the majority just sits and thinks: “ha, ha, ha there are these crazy people in the Philippines who dance around in jail cells to Michael Jackson”
Kinda like how, when the Algerians were using the radio to have their own radio station, the French started jamming it so it couldn’t be heard and the French decided that the Algerians were just crazy and “hallucinating” the truth (maybe like the Western viewer of this video). I think maybe the way the masses think of this video is similar to that because the West has the powerful gaze, and the Filipinos are just crazy and hallucinating over in the Philippines, but using a western site, i.e. youTube, to try to say something that doesn’t make any sense, it’s just a funny image.
The masses are jamming the truth away. But I think the “revolution” is when we can fill in the blanks, and I think you are filling in the blanks and that you are creating a true story by explaining what exactly this video means, aside from the fact that it is just some crazy Filipinos dancing and hallucinating, but actually a symbol of something much, much greater – the development of agency and the appropriation of technology into parts of the world that aren’t necessarily the powerful gaze. It’s kind of a mockery of the Western masses, who don’t really get much of it, except the part that it symbolizes themselves… which is sad, because first of all they symbolize themselves as peeps (a dumb looking bunny rabbit sugar candy) who took over (just so we can eat them up), and also, because it’s just not as funny or imaginative as real life can be! and truthful too!
Thanks Gail! I hope this makes sense. blah blah blah I miss you!!!!
everybody appreciates a well planned party… with synchronized dancing of course