Politics as melodrama

I've often argued that our most popular literary form isn't lyric poetry, the short story and certainly not the novel — it's theater and, more specifically, melodrama.

- JOSE DALISAY

Born in the West in the 18th century, melodrama weaves its spell on a suggestible audience through sensational and often ridiculous plots, exaggerated action, overblown emotion and contrived solutions —all of which viewers happily lap up, and come back looking for more. When you think about it, it also happens to describe our politics, but more on that later.

I used to bring up melodrama when I taught playwriting and screenwriting, by way of analyzing how our Filipino sense of drama works. You don't have to be a theater scholar or critic to observe that we Pinoys love drama, which to us really means melodrama, whether onstage, on-screen or in real life.

Subtlety and silence have never been our strongest suit. We like to shout, to scream, to declare, to explain — and to explain some more. Take, for example, our preferred methods of murder. In Hamlet, the villainous Claudius pours poison into the king's, his brother's, ear. In The Seventh Seal, a knight faces Death on the chessboard. That may have been thrilling for fans of Shakespeare and Ingmar Bergman — but terribly dull and anesthetic for our kind of crowd.