The Years of Permanent Midnight: The Liberalist Construction of the Philippine Nation in Cinema Under the US-Aquino Administration

Abstract

This study seeks to define the role of cinema in the formation/construction of the nation amidst the acceleration of global capital and the heightened need for outsourced and remotely-managed workers (both were manifested to the fruition of the BPO industry) in the earlier part of 2010s – both of which are supported by the intensification of the liberal economics and politics of the then administration of Benigno Aquino, III. Cinema is not referred in this study as a general aspect of nation- formation/construction, but rather a node from a wide network of apparatuses deployed to support and maintain the nation and subjects that were continually produced/reproduced. Jonathan Beller referred to this network of apparatuses as the World-Media System which, for him, is also a “dominant network of abstractions that would organize all social processes in the service of capital.” The study aims to arrive at
the kind of nation formed/constructed by these setting through the subjects produced by the World-Media System. The nation, as Kojin Karatani would stress coming from Benedict Anderson, is imagined through a certain mode of exchange. Karatani, however, would like to think of another kind of exchange than commodity-exchange. This study would depart from that notion considering the differences of historical developments between the global north and
south: between the historical developments of former colonizers and former colonies. It is concluded in this study that the kind of subjects produced / reproduced by the World-Media System in the Philippines in 2010-2016 reflects much of the liberalist economics and politics of the then administration. These subjects produced, which I would later identify as the modern cynic, constitute a wider aspect of the definition of the nation.