First, an apology seems to be in order: this paper is not completely critical, as it also is not completely personal. Perhaps, the best term for it is an explanation to the self, in the guise of explaining to the thinking populace which creates “popular culture”, in the tradition of John Fiske, why things appear in a certain manner in our local television. To write a paper of this sort is something that might be unimaginable, but at best, it attempts at that “critical possibility”, so to speak. For in this day and age, how could we completely detach the critical from the personal? Or even the political? In the age of criticality, hybridized performances of discourse and the thought process are encouraged by wide-ranging theoretical methodologies, albeit seldom undertaken. I am writing in this way with textuality in mind, and with the awareness that this necessary textualizing entails a clear delineation of ideas, and also, a confession of where I am coming from as a male, Filipino, middle-class academic, whose point of view might easily be dismissed for whatever critical representation I seemingly lack. I challenge myself to perform a phenomenology of the self, by carrying out a problematique of commentary and subjectivity, in the light of historical—and even historicist standpoints. I stand here to expose the latent sources of my positions, viewing myself and my own experience not merely as a creator of meaning, but foremost, as an active participant—a performer—in this specific meaning-making system. I call this “methodology” “critico-personal” because I problematize my subject, and myself seeing, viewing, this aforementioned subject. Viewing here is the chief gesture of performance since I would be talking about television, and current screen culture in the Philippines. Viewing is also regarded here as the critical practice, a medium or way of reading and making sense what might have become common sense. I set into text what I see as best explications of the experience based on certain practical popular culture studies principles and related assessments.
Allow me to begin with the story of my engagement with that creature we now call the “Koreanovela”. I began watching Koreanovelas when the Korean soap opera phenomenon Winter Sonata aired around 2003. And when I say “watching”, I mean making sure not to miss episodes, or if time would not permit, catching up with it as soon as I can. The “watching” here is quite simple to talk about, since “watching” is self-explanatory: I anticipated its airing on TV, and when I could not take the slow paced episodes as managed by the stations’ daily mediation of airing it, I opted to indulge at my own time and pace, its DVDd, “Tagalised” episodes available in pirated video stores from the pirated sections of Divisoria. I am certain these “practices” were also shared by many avid fans of the soaps, especially the hardliners who vowed never to miss any episode. I could not call myself a hardliner for very obvious reasons: I watch at my own whim since I have other “real” worlds to live in, more real and compelling at that, I would like to believe. Or as they say of the popular, it’s merely passing fancy, isang pampalipas oras, or in Soledad Reyes’ criticism, entertainment or aliw. Koreanovelas, like its “sister” forms in Philippine popular culture—the soap opera, the telenovela, the fantaserye, the sineserye, and finally, the teleserye—could be easily dismissed as escapist and only peddling alternative but nevertheless artificial realities in a world of poverty and instability. This kind of positioning in the realm of popular culture in the Philippines is usually the rule, more than the exception. Despite the numerous revaluations on popular texts like a soap opera, the scene is generally polarized by the fact that this textual dichotomy, long ago bridged by Adorno’s culture industry, still stands. The Philippines has not yet completely come to terms with the popular’s textuality in spite of advances in Philippine critical practice, and despite the theoretical blurring of differences. And I do not mean of course that we have not really properly explicated the soap opera, lest, the “romance mode”, as Reyes herself explained it; in fact, the soap opera as romantic and dramatic had already been written time and time again. When I say that this “opposition” still stands, I refer to the general sentiments of people about the soap opera as subject-text. Many of us still prefer subjects of study in line with class tastes, even in cultural studies where one is expected to be discerningly open.
I want to problematize the act of “watching” Koreanovelas further by considering it as a reading practice, and not merely as passive reception of cultures peddled by television, or even as “moments of identification and distancing,” as the scholar Chua Beng Huat suggests. At least until today, we Filipinos have not yet really undertaken the task of explaining our own processes of acceptance of the image-concepts shown us through the foreign/Asian soap opera. The idea of critic Rolando Tolentino, in his recent book, Gitnang Uring Fantasya, or middle class fantasy, could easily be applied to characterize the reception of the Koreanovela in the Philippines. Most, if not, all Koreanovelas that I have watched show typical First World lives engulfed by various human concerns. The characters dress—and undress to the extent that is permissible—to show their “aspirational” qualities, from within and without (beautiful skin, chocholate abs, signature clothes, luxury cars, the latest gadgets, high-end living, basically). The more affluent Koreanovelas show settings that are built on corporate or even royal culture (consider, for instance, the Prince and Princess Hours series, or even the latest The Big Thing, dramatizing the political landscape of South Korea). The Korean economy is good, and it seems that everything works in it efficiently for the benefit of the society. Koreanovelas seen in the Philippine lens embody a national desire, a national fantasy, not only for but also to be this nation. Somehow, the consumption of these Koreanovelas expresses the ardent desire for mobility in most of the Philippine audience, a mobility that may finally transport the country to become that hardly-believable First World imaginary society. Korea then has become an alternative nation for Filipinos during primetime. Thus, “viewing” here is very relevant for it is actually an act of choice, a conscious processing of propositions in the medium of television. Seeing, the corollary of viewing, precedes words, according to the art critic John Berger, and viewing seen in this manner presupposes not an accidental encounter but a well-defined desire to watch—we want to be entertained in this wretched world of ours. But the audience after Fiske have already transformed into a thinking mass, thus this desire for entertainment also entails a certain politics that needs apprehension. The Filipino penchant for the Koreanovela must be consequently seen as telling of the social and economic conditions of the country, which continues to thrive in fantasy productions and peddled virtual hope (the game show, and reality shows franchised from the West, are other texts that beg to be read). Perhaps our own denial of these very reasons makes it easy for many of us in the business of scholarship to explain the phenomenon as simply entertainment.
This I think is the main reason why there is scant explanation of Hallyu, or the Korean Wave in the Philippines, even after almost a decade of its strong showing in Philippine culture. We have studied the folk, but we have yet to account for the everyday. While we have long commented on the “romance mode” in Philippine popular literature, through Joi Barrios’ theory-praxis interventions in Filipino romance novels, and on its othering tendencies that are clearly romanticized, as investigated by Rosario Cruz Lucero, our own notions of the popular have not immediately compelled us to create explications of sorts about current popular culture—an ironic twist, to think that the term “popular” itself thrives in currency and contemporaneity. Our situation is indeed a far cry from how other Asian scholars have produced explications on the Korean Wave and its place in their respective cultures, some of them collected in a book I encountered while researching for this paper-confession—the East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave, edited by Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi for the Hong Kong University Press in 2008. But the Korean Wave has truly invaded the Philippines in various forms, and not just through the “Koreanovela”—a neologistic compounding of “Korea”, the soap operas’ country of origin and “telenovela”, the “genre” of serialized popular drama. Here and there, we find fandom at work for each and every form of the Hallyu—in Facebook alone, we could encounter groups devoted solely for individual members of boybands such as Super Junior and other song-and-dance groups composing the highly evolved K-Pop culture. There is also a cultivated interest in Korean culture, as some individuals go as far as learning Hangul, the language, or even go as far as Korea itself to pay homage to the Koreanovelas they love by visiting the set locations. The presence alone of a growing Korean community in various parts of the country show that indeed, the culture has come to the country, not necessarily conquer, but to engage with our culture. After beginning to flock to the Philippines in the early 2000s to study English (I was once part of the educational workforce who catered to their needs), I must say that they have probably found their way to somehow “root” themselves in Philippine soil. They have not only made their mark; they are today, influential. They have been changing the landscape in many ways.
At a time of social change and reformism under President Benigno Aquino III in the Philippines, I look at my experiences of Winter Sonata, and the other Koreanovelas I have watched, such as Lovers in Paris, Dae Jang Geum: Jewel in the Palace, Boys Over Flowers, and the many others airing at present, as only reflective of what we may call “necessary imaginings” in the target culture of these dramas (please take note that all of these Korean dramas were shown under the corruption-marred presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, making them relevant as embodiments of the ideal imaginary). I talk about “target culture” recalling the reality that the airing of these Koreanovelas were basically an exercise of translation. Quite literally, we see and hear the stories and aspirations of the main characters of these soaps transferred, transliterated in our own register. The local languaging which happens in the dubbing process comes to terms with the completely foreign culture depicted on the screen. The realities, as first “imagined” in the originary Korean culture is explicated in Filipino culture, and the process clearly becomes a study in contrast. The process of watching the soap operas, and experiencing the translation process, may be considered another assault of what Rizal once described as the demonios de los comparaciones, the spectre of comparisons, as recalled by Benedict Anderson, who instituted our notions of imagination and nationality. This is the tendency, if we think about the imagery of progress, stability and First World Korean lifestyles translated, languaged into our popular cultural conditions. However, I have the feeling that the act of watching these Koreanovelas are to a certain extent not just consumption of fantasy production but also an engagement with the regionally shared social imagination. Our collective experiences of Koreanovelas daily/nightly may be read as an expression of the wish to be as prosperous and progressive as South Korea, a desire which could easily be considered too simplistic through and through. The Philippine colonial past has been subject to interrogation, and most recently, the critic Resil Mojares already expressed the Filipino need to fully claim its “Asianness”. Perhaps Koreanovelas provide that opportunity by showing a mirror of values that shape common beliefs and practices. Speculatively, after romancing the slums for many years (this screen culture is founded by our film noir and Lino Brocka traditions), we might have seen through the Koreanovelas, a light at the end of the tunnel. Though ideologically, I do not want to leave the discussion at that because of its critical implications.
Our notions of the “dramatic”—and up to some point, transformative, having been reared in the classical tradition of peripeteia through our long engagement with formalism—have been fed to us by the colonial experience (that’s about three centuries in a convent, and some 50 years more in Hollywood, as they say). In Virgilio S. Almario, culture is severely afflicted by what he calls “malungkuting salamisim” or melancholic imagination. Transformation for us is brought about by dealing head on with suffering, the way Christ of the Banal na Pasyon carried his cross and in the end, resurrected. There is much suffering in in both our literature and popular culture that it consequently became a reservoir of our optimistic belief system. Kung may tiyaga, may nilaga, the popular Tagalog proverb says. We have to go through each harrowing experiences of life because an eternal, blissful end awaits us in the journey. Subliminally, we have been obliged to submit in this way by the missionaries, but it didn’t last long. Reynaldo Ileto had already explained that the Pasyon itself, as the new master-myth, had revolutionary possibilities and that, the reading of it every Holy Week by the populace—almost comparable to watching any soap opera on television today—planted the seeds of the revolutionary consciousness. But still, the sadness pervaded, and found itself, even in the drama simbolika such as Kahapon, Ngayon, at Bukas, Walang Sugat, and Hindi Aco Patay, plays that are considered subversive during the American period. We are a sad republic, says Francisco Balagtas, in his Florante at Laura, and we wallow in this sadness of the imagination because colonialism seemed to never end, even after Zoilo Galang’s Child of Sorrow (which eventually became the film, Anak Dalita). This sadness has found its way through radio drama, and eventually, the screen. We all resonated with the archetype of the suffering because that was precisely how we were, at least according to colonial orientations and orientalisms—in perpetual anguish and distress. In other words, suffering, with the hope of a resurrection. And even Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and the El Filibusterismo, despite their biting sarcasm, were generally, melancholic, tragic. Despite attempts to indigenize the Filipino soap opera—we have today as an exemplar, the drama Amaya, whose lady warrior protagonist is similar to the period character Dae Jang Geum of Korea, and whose thesis attempts to reveal an “unknown history” in Binukot society, a culture of special women in Panay—the current, well-researched material clearly demonstrates influential anxiety with the colonial dramatic tradition. The heroine suffers and is earlier ostracized because she was born with a snake for a twin. She even at one time had to lose her dungan or soul and fall unconscious for a long time. In recent episodes, she gets embroiled with a power struggle within her community. Like Dae Jang Geum, she plays a pivotal part in her society—only after completing her morphological quest of self-awareness.
A little speculation on the history of the soap opera in the Philippines clearly puts the television genre, in line with the local dramatic tradition. “Teleserye” (literally, TV series, and a compounding of tele, television, and serye, series) , the current byword for the Filipino soap opera, and which was first used in 2000 through the soap Pangako Sa ‘Yo, is a reaction to the dramatic wave pervading that time—the Latin American “telenovelas”. For most of our television lives, Filipinos have been used to the slow-paced, multifariously plotted dramatic soaps that lorded the landscape and created television princesses like Janice de Belen, the late Julie Vega and Judy Ann Santos. ABS-CBN, the network which introduced the teleserye concept “canonizes” as its high point, Santos’ Mara Clara, a soap that ran for five years, and chronicled the story of two girls caught in a quagmire of family vendetta and changed identities. Mara Clara’s position was shaken with the introduction of an accidental acquisition of a Mexican telenovela by a government-sequestered TV network—the hit series Marimar, featuring a voluptuous heroine finding her way back to the father who abandoned her, and to the man she really loves, a horse riding, soccer hunk and son of a haciendero. Marimar was the game changer of sorts, and the soaps produced from then on became known as “telenovelas”, among them, the ever popular Mula sa Puso, which is basically a Cinderella story, with a carnivalesque antagonist for an aunt who seemed never to die. The changes in the genre naming tell us a lot of things about the landscape of soap operas during the time when the Korean Wave was about to be introduced. Other genre names have been invented, proposing newness and variety—the “sineserye”, which supposedly attempted the cinematic in television; the “fantaserye”, involving the magical and the fantastic; and so many other names that were expected to “niche” the show, like the initial “Asianovela”, with the introduction of the Taiwanese hit TV series Meteor Garden, the precursor of all Koreanovelas. The word “teleserye”, I would like to believe, became an umbrella term of all these kinds of soap operas in the Philippines (and as used by all the TV stations today), a genre, and at the same time, a practice of production in discoursing the Philippine dramatic tradition. And we say that it is still very much in line with this existing dramatic tradition, not only because it still speaks of the same social conditions (the hegemonic and feudal of the landed gentry, in soap operas whose settings are haciendas or manors such as the romance novel-adapted Kristine, and the oppressive rural-urban dichotomies in many other stories, like TV5’s Babaeng Hampaslupa), but it also still depends on the melancholic imagination perpetrated through history. The trope of the suffering character is still being patronized, and Koreanovelas settled in very easily in Philippine television precisely because of its being easily accommodated.
I remember being startled by the first Endless Love Koreanovela I have seen, Autumn in My Heart. I had the impression that Korean culture had no penchant for happy endings—though this could easily be traced from the culture’s own spiritualities and views on temporality. In the Philippines, soap operas would usually end in weddings and happy ever afters. But Autumn in My Heart ended in double tragedy—the heroine dies of a certain sickness, and the man grieves deeply. What complicates the situation is the fact that the two could not really be together, even if the woman gets well—they are siblings. The soap ends with the man dying after being hit by a truck (or was it suicidal, since the last sequence shows him appearing like he really wanted to be run over). Perhaps, love is merely emphasized as endless when chance itself, as represented by the soap, provides the avenue for the two to finally come together. This happens too, in my favorite segment of the Endless Love series, Winter Sonata. The two characters are simply entangled in complexities that it would take time for them to be together. They will be prevented by an accident, third parties on both ends, and that Filipino complexity favorite, amnesia, suffered by the man because of a road mishap (so much for this Barthian spectre!). The two, however complex their situation, still fall for each other, and fight for their relationship, only to be stalled by another ploy by the man’s vindictive mother: she tells everyone that, again, they are siblings (incestuous slippages!). The truth however is told through a DNA test, but the enormity of the complications (Filipinos just love this) compel the two to part ways. In the end, the man, who earlier had developed a brain condition, and who gets completely blind, puts up a house supposedly designed, dreamed is the word, by the woman, an architect by profession. The woman discovers the house in a magazine, and seeks its location—and yes, with the hope of finding out finally, the whereabouts of her love she almost abandons. Their love is proven endless despite the loss of the man’s vision, and somehow, they live happily ever after.
I read this Koreanovela as a springboard in analyzing how the whole Korean Wave in television happened to transform the Filipino teleserye. The revolution, I believe is both transformative and acculturative, and we could see both in several soap operas produced by the major networks ABS-CBN, GMA, and TV5. Firstly, the transformative process took place when the TV outfits themselves bought franchises of particular Korean soap operas to localize and produce them. ABS-CBN’s Lovers in Paris, a trans-production of the Korean original featured KC Conception and Piolo Pascual followed the story pattern in a localized manner. The transformation process of Trans-production was also employed by GMA, when it produced local versions of Kim Sam Sung featuring Regine Velasquez, Stairway to Heaven, which starred Dingdong Dantes and Marian Rivera and Full House, which had Richard Gutierrez and Heart Evangelista. The esthetics, of course, is largely Filipino, since there seemed to be no clear desire to process the culture from which the originals were coming from. Eventually, Korean esthetics and worldview have slowly been acculturated in the process of transformation, as exemplified by Trans-productions such as Only You on ABS-CBN. Cinematic shots, reflective of the Korean worldview of humanity and the picturing of human smallness in the presence of the vast natural surroundings are just one of the more notable current practices by Philippine television in the transformative process. The transformative process, we may conclude, was the direct response of Philippine television production in attempting to make the Korean Wave their own. It was the space where they first drew on the Korean dramatic mode to enrich their own productions. In trans-producing the works, they were able to understand, to “close read” the works in order for them to understand the mechanisms of production, as texts, with the hope of fully creating their own.
Acculturation meanwhile already implies an evolution of the genre as informed by the Korean Wave, among other influences. To say the least, Philippine production does not only gather material and inspiration from Korea, but from other cultural wellsprings and sources. For instance, there still persists a strong Spanish and Latin American influence in the way we produce drama. Hollywood also continues to define much of our production because of the unsaid inferiority and the need to be always at par with America. The exercise of transformative processing however led to an Asianization of sorts in Philippine teleseryes, and that is Asianization in various remarkable levels. Geographically, the Philippines found itself discoursing with Asia through drama with the recently concluded ABS-CBN teleserye Green Rose, also a trans-production of a Korean original. The story happens not in one place, but in two—Manila and Seoul. The characters move in and out of the shared spaces, embodying cultural engagements and exchanges along the way. Another soap opera that attempted to Asianize—and I mean this as a way of positioning in a regional and individual level—was Jericho Rosales’ Kahit Isang Saglit, also happening in two settings—Manila and Kuala Lumpur. In this soap, Rosales teams up with actress Carmen Soo, to perform the collaboration of ABS-CBN and the Malaysian counterpart Double Vision. The soap relates the story of a man searching for justice. He eventually meets the woman played by Soo, a Malaysian, who would be his love interest in the quest. Discourses of interracial love, organized crime, and cultural differences made this teleserye a groundbreaking, border-crossing text.
The idea too of temporality had been acculturated in the Philippine dramatic production, though this I think is not entirely Korean, but may have been hammered down by our Korean engagements. The length of the teleserye, though still dependent on market acceptability, was redefined by the way Koreans produced their Koreanovelas, as they are shown here. They come at a very precise period, and the plots are usually lineated to follow the template of compact, fast-paced, storytelling. This process of acculturation, I suppose, changed the way viewers saw teleseryes. After some time, there happened a shift away from the dragging stories, or the too complicated ones that get nowhere. The phrase, I think, is to compel, and Koreanovelas were the compelling sort of shows that made you want to know more in the fastest way possible, perhaps because of their brevity. Mara Clara’s story in the late 90’s went so far as keeping a most valued diary of secrets out of sight for three months. When Filipinos saw the urgency and the development of characters in Marimar, and eventually in the likes of Endless Love, the idea of variety had probably been broached. We didn’t have to contend with stories going on and on for years just to be entertained. The Koreanovela, or the telenovela option (as in the Marimar tradition) proposed the alternative and the revision to the Philippine form. TV5 for instance, recently offered what it calls, the “sineserye”, a soap opera that ran for exactly a month. Its first offering was titled, Sa Ngalan ng Ina, the comeback show of Philippine superstar Nora Aunor, in a family-political drama of sorts that depicted corruption and massive electioneering, greed for power and money, and what any mother would do to save her family from turmoil. Earlier, ABS-CBN offered 100 Day to Heaven, an astute story of a greedy toy-company owning business woman, who was killed, and was sent back to earth to make up for her deeds, as a little girl. The premise was for her to complete the mission, in “100 days”, and the soap opera practically aired episodes along that number.
I would like to end my “critico-personal” discussion by finally locating the “Filipino” in this review of the history of a phenomenon. Despite the novelty brought about by specific influences of the Koreanovela in the teleserye landscape in the Philippines, I would like to believe that the discourse has remained Filipino, in so far as the television subjects and themes are concerned. For instance, Angel Locsin’s Only You properly delineated the issue of the Overseas Filipino Worker in the trans-production project. In Marianne Rivera’s Amaya, the warrior story became a contemporary glimpse to Filipino folklore and pre-colonial culture. Sa Ngalan ng Ina meanwhile tackled the very Asian culture of elections, and how it figures in the lives of the people. In recent times, ABS-CBN began airing a new teleserye, My Binondo Girl, featuring the actress Kim Chiu as one of the heiress of a Chinese business empire. The gloss of the show is very Koreanovelaesque, but the storytelling very Filipino—it captures and represents the usually marginal presence of the Chinese in Philippine culture despite its Cinderella plot persistence. The writers in the anthology I have mentioned earlier talk about transnational exchanges that clearly shape the interactions between the cultures involved in the soap opera translations, trans-production and acculturation. There are various issues—and even problems and problematique—that could be posed in the usually welcoming, cosmopolitan attitude of the local to this foreign cultural wave. The realm of the Koreanovela is just one plane of intervention we could look into to properly contextualize globalization in our era. After Hallyu, this has become of our television culture in its continued pursuit of rootedness despite various assaults of the global, and the foreign.
