The Philippine Online Chronicles

Is it too much to say that TV is the trenches upon which the war for cultural control of a society is waged? Its effectivity as a nefarious tool for mind control lies in its undeniable ubiquity, cloaked in the shadow of mindless entertainment. For a large fraction of our population, TV is their only source of information, if not their most reliable. It sways public opinion. It allows us to remember, helps us forget – it controls our perception, our truths, and our perception of truth.

This is the reason why president wannabe Money Villar has already spent several thousand Filipino families’ fortunes in political advertising for TV, paying for airtime as well as Michael V and Manny Pacquiao and Sarah Geronimo and Dolphy to usher us into ignoring his largely off-putting impish grin and bully us into forgetting about the C5 Extension Project Scandal. We invite TV with all its offal and bile, i.e. Money Villar, unimpeded into our homes 24/7, largely unmonitored and unanalysed save for what passes as censorship as decided for us by the MTRCB.

The Movie and Television Review and Classification Board, the Marcos-appointed regulatory board for our visual broadcasting media, morally upright hatchetmen running with scissors under a presidential decree drafted to primarily undermine radical thinking against the state. A rundown of their track record – from their aborted intended massacrings of The Piano and Schindler's List to the pilyu-pilyo handling of the constantly insipid innuendoed rivalry between Willie Revillame and Joey de Leon, to Rosanna Roces’ PR-motivated ejection from Showtime – sheds light on their utterly Catholic-school mother-superior aesthetic: a repression of freedom of thought, monitored by a cadre of uppity hair-pulling zealots bent on moral maintenance, on sanitisation of speech, on a policing of thought that only applies itself towards easy issues of Joey de Leon’s everyday naughtiness to stave off what it sees as the slow snowballing downhill roll of national consciousness, purely ignoring the more chronic perversions of contemporary mass media: the shock tabloid aesthetics of TV journalism, the epistemic cultural buyouts of primetime advertising, the cutesyfication of human drama in derivative telenovelas, all perversions of reality that have warped us, continue to warp us, and will warp us still so irrevocably and so absolutely beyond repair more than any piece of profanity or nudity or insult ever will.

According to the MTRCB, it’s not okay for TV personalities to question the self-admittedly faulty public school system, but it’s okay for them to continue promoting less-than-moral people into public office as long as the talent fee and TV spot is sufficiently paid for – which is TV’s ultimate goal: the buy and the sell, the mindless thoughtless consumption, the hard earning of money and its easy burning – you are not cool if you don’t watch this show, girls won’t like you without this deodorant, you are patriotic if you have this cellphone plan, you can’t love your family without this beverage – it is a commodification of a culture that already runs on commodity, begetting a thoroughly materialistic society, and we don’t pay for it only with our wallets.

TV is an important aspect in promoting Commodity Culture, and it does us well to remember that Commodity Culture – TV – does not see us as individuals: it sees us as one teeming mass of bountiful flesh whose vitality it intends to siphon good and regular and in the most plentiful of amounts possible, and it is to Commodity Culture’s – TV’s – advantage that they control us and that we remain under their control, that we are scared, that we are fat, that we are simple and ignorant, that we remain as such our whole lives, if not up until the next commercial break.

And censorship is one of the most effective tools to exert this control: censorship is regulation, of thought and ideas – the life blood of culture – and most especially commodity – the life blood of materialism – so in its core, censorship is a system of control for other systems of control, a realization that begs the questions: Who decides what to censor? Should we willingly submit control of what we see and hear and say over to a committee who at their best decides arbitrarily and at their worst aims for us to become Consumers for Christ? Who controls those who control? And now a few words from our sponsors after this break.

Photo is a movie still from David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1982).