Infidel-ity: The Religious Cheater and His Hijabi Mistress in Indonesian Muslim Media
Studying representations of adultery in Indonesian cinema and social media
The Infidel and Infidelity
In Ipar Adalah Maut (The In-Law Is Death), the latest in the ever-profitable sub-genre of Indonesian movies dramatizing the destruction of the traditional nuclear family in the wake of infidelity, scenes of forbidden passion consummated between a family man and his own sister-in-law are interspersed with moments of unabashed expressions of the Islamic faith.
Coming from other filmmakers, this constant oscillation between the spiritual and the carnal might suggest a winking gesture of recognition (if not outright skepticism) regarding the uneasy relationship between the needs of the flesh and the spirit.
Portrayed by veteran Indonesian director Hanung Bramantyo in Ipar Adalah Maut, however, this tension becomes muted — religion and its rituals are automatically granted the superior position as the absolver of sins, including those incurred by bodily desires.
To watch the movie is to be projected an image of the contemporary Muslim Indonesian culture and its unique tradition of feminism — as well as the contradictions that exist in between: The conception of what I coin here as the “Promiscuous Hijabi” villain archetype in a narrative based on a “true infidelity” story and the notion of female empowerment that fetishizes and capitalizes on a story of abuse.
An Unfaithful Legacy
Stories about unfaithful married people are as old as the media itself, if not older. The narrative form of this subject matter arguably reached its zenith with the work of American filmmaker Adrian Lyne which includes the likes of Fatal Attraction (1987) and Unfaithful (2002), with the former widely regarded as the definitive model for this particular sub-genre of drama movies, codifying the tropes and establishing societal expectations for the typical gender dynamics through its various representational elements.
The popularity of infidelity narratives can be attributed to a complex tangle of often clashing sociocultural interests (they can be feminist, but also misogynistic in a single breath), but mostly it’s because these stories touch on and articulate the unspoken anxieties of contemporary monogamous (heterosexual) coupledom and the society at large. In the sense that infidelity stories serve as an undiluted expression and reflection of societal concerns, they are more in line with the spirit of the horror and thriller genres — which probably explains traces of those genres coexisting within the archetypal infidelity drama.
Indonesia has its own rich cultural legacy of infidelity stories in popular media, consisting of countless movies and soap operas (locally known as sinetron) about cheating husbands and wives over at least the past two decades. In the streaming and peak-TikTok era of the 2020s, this trend continues with the major commercial success of web shows like WeTV’s Layangan Putus (2021) that spawned a theatrical sequel, Layangan Putus the Movie (2023). In legacy media, TV soap operas like Ikatan Cinta (2020–2024) and Cinta Setelah Cinta (2022–2023) — both centering on the disrupted nuclear family dynamics amid extramarital pursuits — essentially became the new defining examples of the sub-genre in the current era.
Enabled by the internet meme culture, many of these cultural products have managed to penetrate public consciousness through a series of high-impact social media campaigns that highlight the shows’ explosive scenes of conflict between a husband and wife, intended for mass dissemination and replication.
This particular narrative denouement, where the continuation of the nuclear family is at the mercy of the now-standard fight scene between spouses, is undoubtedly the main reason why we keep coming back to this kind of story. Each of them has one. It encapsulates what remains so instinctively compelling about the infidelity narrative: The moment when the wife (typically serving as the audience surrogate) is vindicated for all of her suspicions of a love affair between her husband and another woman, which offers a cathartic high to all of us who may have spent a good part of our lives seeking this level of emotional clarity in our relationships. Usually, this rupturing of the institution of marriage is preceded or followed by a verbal and/or physical clash between two women, the wife and the mistress. Both tropes (one coded as a feminist gesture, the other intended as a pulpy “bitch fight” fantasy) epitomize the contradictions at the heart of the infidelity narrative.
At Once a Secular and Religious Affair
Throughout most of its history, the typical Indonesian infidelity drama is set against a secular, cosmopolitan, and urban backdrop. Although we are made vaguely aware of what the main characters do for a living and their social class (which is predictably upper-middle), we are rarely given a glimpse of their spiritual belief and their political leanings. Essentially, the vast majority of these stories depict the slightly twisted versions of the nuclear family caricature from your average Indonesian TV commercial.
The reason for this anonymous portrayal is largely financial: Indonesia, despite being home to the world’s largest Muslim population, consists of various ethnicities and faiths that showbiz capitalists would like to target equally in their pursuit of maximum profit.
However, every once in a while, we do get something like Ipar Adalah Maut, where the central conflict of infidelity is peppered with enough discernible sociocultural textures to carry semiotic significance in themselves. In this particular movie’s case, the members of the picture-perfect middle-class Muslim family are shown to have a specific religious routine independent of the main plot: They recite the Holy Quran, perform the daily prayers, and attend sermons at the neighborhood mosque. These signifiers might seem like mere window-dressing, but they actually form a cohesive social and cultural profile that directly reflects the values of the dominant Muslim society in this particular moment in Indonesian history.
The movie’s director, Hanung Bramantyo, is no stranger to framing stories through the lens of Islam. The man has been hugely responsible for the wave of Islamic drama movies (drama reliji) that took Indonesian movie theaters by storm in the 2000s. His 2008 mega-hit Ayat-ayat Cinta was enough of a commercial success to basically invent an entire sub-genre, giving rise to numerous imitators that — while received warmly by the public on their own — could only hope to have the same cultural impact as Bramantyo’s seminal work. That said, his politics is vague at best, incoherent at worst. One thing is for sure: Islam has been the cornerstone of Bramantyo’s cinema, if not its animating force.
The Religious Cheater and the Hijabi Mistress
Bramantyo’s 49th movie and his latest as of this writing, Ipar Adalah Maut, sees him return to the Islamic milieu he knows best. The movie, written by Layangan Putus screenwriter Oka Aurora based on the viral “true story” TikToks by Muslim entrepreneur Elizasifaa (whom we will discuss in greater detail later), tells its infidelity story around a very specific interpersonal configuration: University teacher Aris (played by Deva Mahenra) who has been happily married to culinary entrepreneur Nissa (Michelle Ziudith), “falls victim” to his primal lust for Nissa’s younger sister Rani (Devina Karamoy) shortly after she has moved into the couple’s home.
It must be noted here the creative choices made to craft and establish the character of Rani, the titular “deadly” in-law: Even though both sisters are presented as having the same kind of religious upbringing which is signified by their hijabs (Muslim headscarves), one receives significantly less screentime with her hijab on. In fact, the movie establishes Rani from the get-go as an erotic figure in one of her early scenes where the camera shoots her from the back sans hijab, basically nudging us to relish this private moment of a girl swishing her freshly-washed hair in slow motion. By framing Rani as a more lax hijabi, the movie codifies her as the less devout and the “sluttier” half of the two sisters — the Promiscuous Hijabi who ends up “entrapping” the innocent family man, turning him into the Religious Cheater.
One of the movie’s many narrative turning points depicts a sexual harassment being committed against Rani in her university library, during which Aris — who happens to be her teacher — charges in and saves her from the male assailants. In the car shortly afterward, Rani and Aris share an accidental kiss, marking the beginning of their love affair. That Rani is not allowed even five seconds of peace to process what must have been a highly traumatizing experience before she falls in the hands of another man perfectly sums up the movie’s ethos toward Rani: She is merely a plot device whose inner life and emotions are non-existent, as she is only there to advance the story and serve as the moral counterpoint for her sister Nissa, who is codified as the Good Hijabi, and her nuclear family.
Even though superficially we are made to also loathe Aris for his moral transgressions by sexually engaging with his sister-in-law, the movie ultimately spares him from the worst of our ire by codifying him as the Religious Cheater. In this role, Aris is granted a series of scenes where he gets to learn important life lessons, and where he cries while asking for God’s forgiveness in a mosque. Metatextually, Aris asks for our forgiveness — and by giving him the opportunity to do this, the movie apologizes on his behalf. Most tellingly, the movie doesn’t give Rani this moral nuance.
No matter how faithful the movie claims to be in translating the real-life events on which it is said to be based, it actively makes creative choices that are entirely its own and, through them, articulates its thoughts on gender roles.
The Religious Cheater — the man — is absolved of his sins, whereas the Promiscuous Hijabi is granted none of the same courtesy, doomed as she is to face the wrath of audiences.
The Feminist Capitalism of Commodified Infidelity
In this peak (or post-?) social media era, the most popular infidelity stories in Indonesia spring not from the realm of overtly manufactured fiction, but rather from the algorithmic recommendations of the For You page — most notably, content authored by Muslim women. Layangan Putus, for instance, is based on the Facebook confessions of Eca Prasatya (under her pseudonym Mommy ASF). Similarly, as noted above, Ipar Adalah Maut is a highly dramatized interpretation of a real-life account chronicled methodically by Elizasifaa in a series of TikToks.
In these bite-sized videos, Elizasifaa “spilled the tea” on real-life events shared by her massive following by role-playing as various people relevant to her stories, costumes and all. Watching these TikToks, one gets the feeling of being immersed in a compelling drama web series, therefore blurring the line between fact and fiction — which somewhat correlates with our current collective fascination with “true crime” in this cultural zeitgeist where truth as presented by social media tends to be stranger than fiction.
These women are often praised for bravely sharing with the general public voices of the victims of abusive men. As the clicks stack up, women with real-life infidelity stories to share become the rightful owners of media empires built on women’s lived experiences, effectively becoming this era’s feminist capitalists. The commodification of these “true infidelity” stories create a strange feedback loop where being at the disadvantaged end of a love affair provides an alternative channel to commercial success and fame.
In my view, this phenomenon complicates the conventional (largely Western) notion of female empowerment which typically defines an empowered woman by her liberation from physical, emotional, and sexual oppression — not by her constant lingering in (and, in the case of these Indonesian feminist capitalists, recreation of) her pain.
In their popular adaptations, the stories by Muslim women Mommy ASF and Elizasifaa’s are often explicitly framed as a feminist plea for empowerment, despite their often dismissive attitude toward the other woman, which has created a hunger for “bitch fight” spectacles among pop culture consumers. Again, this approach to their storytelling throws a wrench in our common understanding of what passes as feminist media.
A Tough and Religious Girl
Ipar Adalah Maut turns into a full-fledged Islamic movie toward its end. The story concludes with a voiceover from Nissa, who hopes that her daughter would grow up to be a “tough and religious” woman, so as to avoid the same tragedy that befell her in adulthood. Before the end credits roll, we are told a hadith (a quote attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) — from which the movie apparently got its name — warning the dangers of letting an in-law into the home of a married couple.
“Tough and religious” aptly illustrates the contradictory moral nature of Ipar Adalah Maut, as well as that of contemporary Indonesian infidelity spectacles in general.
We have the Promiscuous Hijabi caricature on one hand and a portrait of the empowered female survivor on the other; the scandalized victim on one hand and the feminist capitalist on the other; and — lastly — the secular on one hand and the religious on the other.
