Abstract
From being praised by the police for supposedly highlighting the successes of the drug war to being slammed by state security forces for allegedly being sympathetic to communist rebels amid an intensified anti-communist crackdown, primetime action soap FPJ’s Ang Probinsyano has emerged as a site of struggle between contending forces—dramatizing, mediating, and staging the intensifying contradictions that define Rodrigo Duterte’s regime. As such, this paper interrogates FPJ’s Ang Probinsyano and its role in the cultural production of state violence, and how the construction of protagonist Ricardo “Cardo” Dalisay constructs the national imaginary towards the Duterte regime’s populist fantasy by constituting the national public sphere as spectators in the spectacle of state violence. Deconstructing Cardo’s character throughout the teleserye as a policeman, fugitive, rebel, and vigilante reveals how his character is constituted as a hyperreal spectacle of violence typifying the struggle of the masses for social justice—inheriting a tradition from the action-hero character of the Philippine action film genre and its neocolonial cinematic roots—thus mediating and rearticulating the Duterte regime’s state rhetoric of populist mobilization and authoritarian rule. By reproducing this fantasy in the symbolic televisual realm in dramatizing the infliction of state violence, Cardo fulfills the ideological role of hailing the national mass audience to the populist fantasy as imaginary participants in the spectacle of state violence. While a site of struggle which allows the articulation of contesting imaginations, this spectacle becomes complicit to its own hegemonic processes in negotiating contradicting imaginations that allow the populist fantasy to reassert itself.
Presenters
Philip Magistrado JamillaStudent, Master of Arts in Philippine Studies, University of the Philippines, Philippines
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Teleserye, Populist fantasy, State violence, Television, Action film, Media cultures
