‘The Kingmaker’ comes to town

An overripe tomato about to burst is the image one conjures when one sees the red-clad former First Lady, Imelda Marcos, on the screen of the UP Film Center on this humid afternoon.

It is the Philippine premiere of The Kingmaker, a blistering documentary by the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, Lauren Greenfield. The SRO crowd at the 4 p.m. and the 7:30 p.m. screenings was composed mostly of students who came, as they told me, “on their own” and were not assigned to watch by their teachers.

The documentary stunned some people in the audience overseas. But the Filipino crowd above 40 years old knows the story well, with its melodramatic overtones: how the poor provinciana grows up to be a tall and beautiful woman and marries the bright senator after a whirlwind courtship of 11 days. She has a nervous breakdown because all kinds of people enter their house day and night, and only comes around when her shrink tells her that her husband, Ferdinand, is willing to turn his back on politics if she so desires. But Imelda in the documentary, eyes blinking in disbelief that the world still wants to know her story so late in the day, says blithely: “But how could I ask my husband to turn his back on serving the country?”

Greenfield is a shrewd film-maker and she knows the stark power of contrasts. The cloying words of Imelda – coiffed,  perfumed, and made up like a figure in Madame Tussaud’s – are intercut with interviews of people locked up in the torture chambers of martial law: the poet Pete Lacaba, the teacher Etta Rosales, the student May Rodriguez.

There was grainy black-and-white footage where I could almost hear the “Bagong Lipunan” (New Society) march that we sang every morning before the flag ceremony in elementary school. They are then intercut with images of the animals on Calauit Island – giraffes and zebras and impalas – from Kenya who displaced 100 families in the Palawan island. Because of in-breeding, the animals are growing up weird, the giraffes’ weak necks snapping against each other. Edited in parallel with the Marcos dynasty, you have a damning statement about the lunacy that is Philippine politics.

If you believe the Sandiganbayan who convicted Imelda Marcos of bigtime graft, and if you believe The Guinness Book of World Records who listed Ferdinand Marcos Sr. as the world’s “biggest thief,” then the money that she freely gives away to the poor aren’t her own. In one scene, she goes to the Children’s Hospital, one of her pet projects during her husband’s dictatorship, and gives away P1,000 bills “to buy candies for the children.”

Buying their way back to respectability is one running thread in the documentary. Unlike the Ceausescu family members who were shot to death by the enraged Romanians on the 25th of December 1989, the Marcoses were lucky to be flown out in the nick of time, before the angry crowds could tear down the gates of the Palace.

But they are back, like royalty on their thrones, with Imelda as Congresswoman, Imee as Governor and now as Senator, and Bong almost making it as the Vice-President, just a heartbeat away from the presidency. When Bongbong was raising his hands in one political campaign, his armpits are shown drenched in sweat. One girl beside me said, “In spite of all their wealth, he cannot buy a strong enough anti-perspirant?” My only answer to that is you cannot have everything.

Part of my experience watching this documentary was listening to the millennials’ comments. But all of them fell silent, such that you could hear a pin drop, when Etta and Pete and May talked about the tortures: how the women were electrocuted and raped, and the men made to lie between two beds, like the San Juanico Bridge, the Bridge of Love that Marcos built between Samar and Leyte as a monument of his love for her.

I remember reading a news item in the Bulletin Today that he even wrote a love poem for her and recited it during the inauguration of the bridge. But what is the truth? It was a bridge that she allegedly asked him to build after she discovered he was cheating on her. The Diliman Republic, or the First Quarter Storm at the University of the Philippines, was where the tape of the American actress Dovie Beams and Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was first played. He sang “Pamulinawen” in his distinctive baritone and told her the things he wanted her to minister to him abed. Who taped it? She did, as a form of insurance, as a shield perhaps?, or a way to blackmail him? Who knows: human motivation, as all novelists know, always has murky depths.

If this were a modern novel you would ask about the unreliable narrator. The director, whose adroit screenplay has been nominated for an award by the Writers’ Guild of America, makes Imelda talk about her vanity projects, and then interviews the people who benefited from them. A gap as big as a galaxy then forms, pointing out who the big liar is. Mrs. Marcos calls former President Richard Nixon “a man misunderstood by the Americans.” The impeached American president was also their family friend.

Upon her return from exile (Why did we ever allow them to come back?), she said she visited Calauit Island and was heartbroken at how ugly it has become. Cut then to the feisty grandmother who says, “She never visited us. All they did was bring those animals from Africa, and these animals displaced us.”

Near the end, the documentary links the Marcos family to the presidential candidate, Davao City Mayor Rody Duterte. They financed his campaign; he allowed them to bury the dead dictator at the Heroes’ Cemetery when he won. It’s a deadly tit-for-tat, a dance of the macabre: it’s a history drenched in blood. I wish, though, that the documentary also showed other voices – the Muslims, the indigenous people – but there are enough images here to wake up an auditorium of students, like this girl behind me who piped up: “Syet, they really tortured people pala. How terrible.”

(Danton Remoto is the head of school and professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia. He can be reached at [email protected] Comments can be sent to [email protected])