Nick de Ocampo's
Intellectual Masturbation
Pedrong Palad (1999)
The Tagalog language gives a closer connection between palm (palad) and fortune (kapalaran) than, say, the English language. Link this relationship with the universal symbol for handiwork (the hand, but image-wise still the palm). It would be as if the Tagalog view would regard one's handiwork as his fortune, the future he created for himself, even though his handiwork might have been all from a gift written on his palm.
It is from this full circle that Pedrong Palad proceeds through a flow of faiths, doubts, truths, and deceptions, in a young man's (Ariel's) graduation from innocence as he moves away from his faith-healer father on to a circus team and the illusions of the city. It is a graduation that ultimately budges the movie audience towards an examination of the tug-of-war between the two eternally conflicting concepts of humanity: man's life as his fortune and man's life as product of his work.
As if to underscore the mood of these questions themselves, auteur Deocampo (de Ocampo?) sets up his narrative in a Fellini-like fabular mode that tries so much to be unrealistic. The acting is pushed to theatrical absurdities to strengthen that narrative position. This mental atmosphere, suspending our disbelief and then dragging it on the ground, gives Deocampo space to shift about in scrutinizing that dramatic war between reality and perception and its effect on a young man trying to grow into those illusions.
In the Fellini-esque landscape, everyone is weird. This, Deocampo achieves. Another Fellinian habit is the one that hauls in an element of rural-area-to-city movement. Important to Pedrong's theme, as this approach always kicks in the status of innocence in a progress towards realizations or the awareness of modes of deception. More importantly, though, the province-to-city development also underscores man's nature to seek in humanity itself the widest possible knowledge of character variants.
Ariel gets early lip service from his father on man's responsibility: "ang lahat ng nakikita mo ay bunga ng iyong guni-guni. Nasa sa iyo pa rin kung ano ang kahulugan ng lahat nang ito." The father proceeds to introduce his son to his own faith: "ang salamangka ay isang panlilinlang, ang panghihilot ko ay katotohanang nakatutulong sa kapwa." Unfortunately/fortunately, Ariel witnesses a conflict between the stalwarts of faith (his father and religion) and the promoters of deception (the circus magicians pushed away by religious folk on Holy Week). Also, the swing between virtue and sin, faith and doubt, in those who represent faith. Ariel, however, is still all questions -- symbol of the eternal child and probable ideal in Deocampo's metaphysics.
When Ariel reaches the city, he has already met all sorts of human gods, earthly and enchanted powers. He goes on to meet more explanation sources.
The narrator is of course the film's own god, the author-magician that pushes Ariel off a boat in the middle of the film, supposedly to death (which Ariel survives); this author-god also gives us the gist of what might be the ideal mental condition for man (ideal, for albeit already a truism is still constantly forgot): "tayo'y manonood lamang sa takbo ng buhay." Contrast this pronouncement with what Ariel's other city-employer, the quack medicine man, has to say about such issues: "naniniwala ako sa wala."
Ariel is tagged as "Pedrong Palad" by his first city-employer, the gay owner of a massage parlor for gays. The other massage boys only have masturbating feminine (or yin) "Mariang Palad," hands without faith, without mystical power, but also freed from extraordinary fates. (VISV III, July-August 2002 - April 2004)
Copyright © 2002, 2004 Vicente-Ignacio S. de Veyra III. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.