PLACE
So while the premise of Whammy Alcazaren’s Fisting seems far-fetched, the requirement to suspend one’s own disbelief wasn’t nearly needed as I watched his pristine, almost ascetic compositions make-up the outline of his visual narrative. Instead, what surprised me — even as I admit half of the time I really didn’t know what was going on, and my patience for tricky, corroded storytelling I have to say has waned precisely of late — and given that it also lacks any perceptible backbone to truncate loose ends, WTFs, and a whole lot of addendums in the form of 50s consumer advertisements, encyclopaedia pictures, lithographs, class slides, B&W cartoons (I’m just going to say a shitload of visual aids), Fisting is in fact a straight-up family drama that I found not nearly that difficult to sit through. It has all the elements: a father, a literal Shadow of himself; a deranged mother; and a lost child (in this instance, queer), who’s finally come home after a long period of absence to disrupt the household, and unearth, once more in a literal sense, filth hidden in a well preserved antique closet.
Only, what performative value aroused in any given family drama is immediately smashed by Whammy, and what drops on one’s lap is a kaleidoscope of passions, both tender and perverse, mundane and otherworldly (alien, as it were), withheld and eruptive. As one turns Fisting’s profusion of references, one gets what one sees with a few added kinks, but only if you give in. A movie for masochists, yes; but in order for an S&M play to attain maximum effectivity — as if reaching a quiet place where pain and pleasure loses its turgid boundaries and in a moment of intensity, congeal into something that isn’t necessarily a mismatch, as in joy and despair — consenting players must actually go beyond cheap token gestures like tolerance or acceptance or understanding. The play must actually move towards the suggestion that it has the capability of reconstructing an empathic body — which is almost impossible under the current strain of economically designed violence that favours the dictum of the unfeeling certainty of build, build, build, so that the value-added order of the day is simply to get by, much like a lazy fuck, simply to get off. Fisting, inspite all its deliberate aloofness was actually able to demonstrate this pleasurable/painful harmony for most of its sustained sadism.
ROOM
But strangely, there are no rooms in Fisting, only impressions of rooms, Shadows. I appreciate this. Dismembered torsos, incomplete bodies, depokado shots, facelessness. Even the spoken lines are outside, sometimes don’t match. What is previously not in focus now becomes the focus, and so displays candor or maybe vulnerability. But what I think really becomes the main gateway in exposing the vulnerability that is very much apparent in Fisting is its seeming inability to create a coherent visual dialogue. This mimics the feeling of apprehension, of someone stuttering because one is forced to divulge something of one’s self, as in a high tension interrogation. The queer son (partly I think a composite of Whammy) doesn’t know how to relate his anguish, anxiousness, familiar pains, inchoate voices that usually fill a young queer’s head the moment he is asked to come to terms with his trauma. A room then becomes a space to pause from this confessions.
Rooms in the practical expression of one's queer sexuality provide space to jostle with other queers where they discover and participate in the relentless joy of queer sex, transforming a readily sanctioned space normatively understood as occupied only by heterosexual desires (distinctly, a room with a bed), these queer bodies in turn also quickly mediate rooms suggestive of dirt – bodegas, rundown buildings, urinals, dimly lit public restrooms. This may not be readily apparent, as the first half of the film devotes its attention to various intimate configurations of two bodies in what looks like an impression of a motel room bathed in neon vaporwave (the stills a bit reminiscent of van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho). The two gay men exchange sweet nothings, vulnerable and undressed, as Fisting portrays sex as it is: ribbed with rational fear of a virus they don’t understand or the likelihood of having one’s skull bashed during casual encounters, but still teeming with rigor when skins touch, dripped with indecisiveness to be intimate yet demonstrative to the point of abrasiveness and full submission to the urge. It is portrayed as brilliantly disgusting, yes, salaula, but this is really how it is, writ large, permissive, and also somewhat incomprehensively divine. So this film does more edict on contemporary queer erotic navigation than any blatant alter sex video on Twitter pronouncing “sexual liberation”, the very medium it’s trying to process. Trauma mechanizes the queer to seek out what allays their fears but which also can potentially harm them; screens, gadgets, when there were still chat rooms, texts, virtual boxes brimming with smut and dickpics and assholes. Parts.
HOUSE
“And a house is not a home,” laments Miss Streisand, “when the two of us are far apart, and one of us has a broken heart.” If the rooms in Fisting are mere Shadows of rooms, the house on the other hand is the only thing materially present in the film, more than the characters I have to say; and also treated without any sort of ambivalence. The house here provides friction rather than condemned as setting (because the real setting, I think, is the phone used to shoot the whole film, the way memory, feelings, desires are currently attenuated by settings, filters, all data).
Everything is interior; but the interiority here is characterized by details and not the usual homely clutter — and so memory here is pre-fabricated, arranged like an Instagram top shot, as in the sequence of intricately arranged toys from the mother’s memory of the son’s childhood. All three characters in Fisting seem to be in a race to locate their place in both time and space, in both exigent and fantastic histories. They seem out of time, from the way they speak to the way they dress, as if napag-iwanan, the house especially with its carved wooden banisters, high windows, chairs and muebles that can only be snatched from 50s/60s magazines. I may infer that this probably speaks of the nuclear family as an outdated mode of subsistence, but then it is always the wound inflicted by the household of a childhood traumatized that really insists; it stands, it looms. Whammy spares us the destruction of the nuclear family or its doomed domesticity from the very beginning; he knows it will continue to fester for generations henceforth, as dominant structures do, even if they transform into stories of haunted houses, because still we care for the ghosts and ghouls that haunt it (in the film, a big ass snake). He avoids this tired trajectory by sublimating queerness vís-a-vís institutionalized, repressed modes where deviance is already latent (heterosexual marriage, nuclear family); to sublimate is to deflect an urge, and in the case of the film, the urge to queer the already latently queer. The mother is a trangendered woman who gives birth to a lemon (played by Meryll Soriano with such intelligent palpable campiness); while the father is always absent, always out of sight, and so the mother performs this transitory positions all by herself. This assertion does more than subvert traditional values and imaginings that seem to make unrecognized communities seem more acceptable, possibly easy to co-opt.
The film’s tongue-and-cheek reformulation of visualizing other genders however is to me what makes Fisting a worthwhile queer film to see — it foregoes the popularized manner of looking at the wilderness of gender as mere corollary of basic heterosexuality; take for example Fasifika Falayfay, a 50s baklang parlorista film character who assumes both mother and father roles but which has been the template for the doormat queer, gay, trans in film for way too long. And what about that shot of a transwoman’s body? Contestable, yes, but still there’s also something very interrogative in this anatomizing shot, devil’s advocate to some extent; didn’t Nick de Ocampo also anatomize the queer body of Oliver in his documentary? I mean, problems with essentializing — the very notion that penis is boy, vagina is girl — has to be addressed, has to open up somewhere. Fisting is a way to start.
NATURE
Finally, I like the way nature here is treated. The father is a serial killer, murdering transgendered women (for what, self-loathing, sport, internalized homophobia, or amply triggered by transphobic hate, it is unclear and we are left to assume, but Ricky Davao plays the distant imposing father, sans face mind you, with an engaging presence of a very dominating leather daddy). He also seems to have a knack for arranging the bodies beautifully that seem to replicate the ripples of the waves, the foliage in the landscape, the rocks by the cape. We are supposed to be disturbed by these deaths, all too familiar and all too real, but what substitutes for this missed apt response is endorsed in the film’s penultimate installation where we see the father getting fucked by a transgendered woman leather mistress. The once obscured faces are then shown in their respective states of ecstasy and agony: the father’s pained expressions in the act of insertion turned to pleasure, the delirious mother about to give birth, and the son dancing all by himself, anguished in an abandoned disco. Lush flora spills out from the father’s asshole. Nothing is healed here; these last moments of bleeding seem to coincide with a report heard all throughout the film about bodies exploding and authorities not calling the crime by its name, and the victims not considered so but only determined as subjects.
While this may hint at the ongoing aggressive policy of the state to supposedly rid the streets of all lumpens, drug addicts, and petty criminals with designed violence, what is most apparent in this filmic distillation is not how designed violence takes on many forms but the disjoint this perpetrates in terms of what it labels necessary collateral damage, the normalizing agent that reduces one’s ability to empathize completely (for the father’s claim, the other murdered transwomen are necessary killings to atone for his transgression of marrying what is considered an abomination). The very act of having the film’s title changed by order of Cinema One is somewhat tangential to this necessary collateral damage, from Fisting to Never Tear Us Apart. I don’t see this as mere issue of censorship as it is the very duty of institution to censure, like mommy and daddy telling you not to say that word or you’ll get slapped. This is the Shadow the film is alluding to, with its great capacity to permeate without anybody noticing until one is engulfed in totalizing darkness. Communities disappeared by state forces tend to be the same communities resurfaced and demonized in the name of peace and order, or as Imelda gushes in kitsch, the woman is the light and the man is the pillar of a home. For queers, gays, and tansfolks this order is called conditioned heteronormativity; for those killed in the crossfire of a madman’s war on the poor, it’s called normalized impunity.
And when the war on the poor began in 2016, among many of its first victims were transgendered women from poor communities. I may refute the way Whammy stylizes murder in his film, but its furtive attempt to establish wilderness (dalampasigan, kakahuyan, kabundukan) as a place for queers, gays and transfolks to return to, not merely revisit is, well, at some point convincing — you put us here then we shall thrive here. But it also doesn’t simplify the matter by pitting mechanization against nature. What I think Fisting might be proposing is a track that may eliminate the alienation queers, gays and transfolks feel, through perhaps a rethinking that integration and co-optation may not be the only course of reconciliation with those that damn us. Maybe reconciliation isn’t possible at all. Perhaps it is in the recognition that the very nature of our queerness, gayness, and transness is what actually humanizes us primarily. And so in a time of ever increasing mechanization, sanctification, and prescription of desires, this primary nature is what makes the queers, gays, and transfolks mesmerizing and dangerously unpredictable. Nature, always both.
Comments