On the Maid and Historical Distortion
Have you ever seen that episode of Family Guy where Quagmire is sentenced to prison and for some reason we actually feel sorry for the guy? This is, of course, played out for comedy purposes as anyone who actually watches Family Guy knows that Quagmire absolutely, 100%, belongs in prison. Yet the episode is framed in such a way that we actually root for Quagmire and without context of the show or the character of Quagmire, someone can absolutely say that this abuser does not deserve the treatment he is getting. Within a certain lens, a certain perspective, abusers can be portrayed as victims that do not deserve the things that are coming towards them. They can even be shown as misunderstood heroes.
Now, I know that it’s weird to begin an essay with a reference to Family Guy, but bear with me here. The use of media to put abusers in a lighter light is nothing new. But whether it is used as a means to satire or as a means to acquit a person or family is where it becomes funny or harmful. When used to downplay abuse or atrocity, it works to trivialize the suffering that people (even fictional characters) have went through in the hands of an abuser. Once abuse and atrocity have become trivial matters, its potency as fact or truth becomes a prime focus of attack by those people who wish to acquit the crimes of a criminal for whatever reason. It creates a strawman, by which, no matter the potency of truth, abusers and supporters of the abuser weaken the very facts that could have been potentially used to destroy the platform from which they preach and proselytize.
Within a month of the presidency of Marcos Jr., this is exactly what is being done with Maid in Malacañang through its destruction of historical context. By placing the Marcos family as protagonists and the EDSA revolutionaries as antagonists, it frames the story in such a way that the Marcos family becomes victims rather than perpetrators of abuse, murder, and oppression of the Filipino people. The crimes that they have committed and continue to commit are trivialized by portraying EDSA as a crucible of angry rioters, mob violence, and villagers participating in a witch hunt. It removes context as to why Philippine society reached that point in the first place. It is an active historical distortion that creates strawmen of the lived experiences of those thousands who were killed, made missing, raped, murdered, tortured, and oppressed by the two decades of Marcos rule over the Philippines. Without reference to any of these atrocities, the movie is simply a vessel by which people can distort collective memory and show the Marcoses as mere victims rather than perpetrators and active executors of atrocities against the Filipino people.
What this accomplishes is the humanization of the Marcos family as people who were simply trying to make the Philippines a better place and the dehumanization of EDSA — a collection of people who actually moved to make the Philippines a better place. By trivializing mass movement as nothing more than a mob, the Marcos regime continues its agenda of whitewashing (Imeldifying) one of the darkest eras in Philippine history. By this demolition job of key actors within the movement (i.e. the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church and Corazon Aquino herself) a continued onslaught of sanctioned, professionally produced, pro-Marcos media will take Philippine society to a point where atrocity is brushed off as if simply describing today’s weather. In a society where survivors of torture are brushed off and laughed at, soon it will not matter whether or not these stories are taken seriously — their potency as fact and lived experience has been watered down and excused.
More than this, by portraying the Marcoses as victims, the movie destroys historical context by acquitting them of all the crimes that they have committed against the Filipino people. The mad dash to Hawaii is shown as a hero’s exile rather than a thief stuffing their pockets with whatever they can before fleeing the scene of the crime. EDSA is a bloodthirsty mob rather than people seeking justice — witch hunters rather than the victim of the crimes the Marcoses perpetrated. The Church and Aquino family are hedonistic villains. History is flipped and made trivial.
What Maid does is to make historical truth more questionable. Armed with pithy, decontextualized quotes, Marcos supporters continue to pour acid on the monuments of history. This collaborative effort between content makers, movers of the Philippine culture industry, and the State work to further enforce the ahistorical consciousness that plague the collective memory of the Filipino people. A nation without memory has no future, the saying goes. By destroying history and making facticity a matter of opinion, the Marcos clan and all their oligarchs can continue to make larger plunder of the nation and abuse of the people that was dampened by the disruption caused by the 1986 EDSA Revolution. This Marcos restoration is making work of the culture industry to entertain people to death and bringing people closer to a Huxleyan dystopia where society no longer wishes to read, be informed, or take on the challenges of democracy but would prefer to be drugged, entertained, and told what to do, what to think, and what to feel.
Maid is not a phenomena isolated in and of itself, it is part of a larger project to bring the Marcoses back to power (which it already did), keep them in power, and keep the Filipino people cowed in order to avoid another EDSA. The movie, like the Family Guy episode, portrays an abuser in such a way that the audience excuses the crime in favor of the criminal. The future that this Marcos restoration is not Orwellian, we will not be subjected to a 20th century totalitarian state as Marcos Sr., had tried but to a Huxleyan dystopia where we will be entertained to death by the movies, TikToks, YouTube videos, and content creators allied with the State. We will be subjected to the telenovela of politics, to mere outrage, to reactionism, and the eternal replication of the culture and society we find ourselves in. History and all of its lessons will be left to the waste bin of, well, history. What will matter is that the people are entertained, not dignified. We do not need to fear that books will be banned or burned — nobody will be reading them anyway.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, the saying goes. What a concerned citizenry has to be on the lookout for is not merely the tell tale signs of coming fascism, but also the means by which consent can be manufactured. By destroying, distorting, and denying historical facticity, we are left to the whims of content creators who use coded language to sway citizens into giving up their rights in favor of security, solidarity, and unity. Maid is a means that consent is manufactured. It is not enough that Marcos won in a landslide, what is necessary is absolute control by means of entertainment and, later, force. The movie actively points us to the conclusion that Marcos is an exiled hero and that Marcos Jr., is the avenger that will right the historical slight. Rather than Nero fiddling while Rome burned, the Marcoses are welcomed by a triumphant mob looking for the blood of the villains who slighted the beloved Apo and his family.
Maid in Malacañang is truly one of the movies of all time. But it is not art, it is not film, it is not history. Its entire premise trivializes and disregards the blood, sweat, tears, and deaths that the Filipino people have lived through in order to oust the dictator. It destroys history by denying it, by denying it, its context lies within the family itself. Instead of criminals living off of the people’s resources, they are misunderstood heroes and innocent bystanders subject to the whims of an angry mob. It is distortion and nothing more.
What remains to be done is to reinforce the trust that people have on professional historians, to erode the allure of conspiracy theories and outright lies being sponsored by Marcos and company. While this does not sound exciting, it is the very first thing that should be done in order to memorialize memory and to honor those who died while fighting for democracy. The act itself will be tedious. We will have to engage those whom the lies have deceived to avoid a tide of deception that will smother historical truth (something, in practice, I’m not entirely sure of due to the presence of trolls and paid supporters). Silence works in the favor of the oppressor — if we go down, we will go down kicking in screaming in the name of Truth and not silent under a contraband unity in a sea of lies.
