Why whitewash?

I have never really understood the local entertainment industry. I keep a fascinated eye on it — you don’t really have much of a choice when you’re surrounded by people who consume media at the rate that my friends and colleagues do; you kind of absorb all that information by osmosis — but I don’t get it. There are so many things I don’t get about it.

I have always been bewildered by the public’s seeming inability to separate fiction from reality. There is that obsession with love teams, for one. The Itchyworms wrote a brilliant song about the phenomenon in their 2005 album Noontime Show, with an equally brilliant accompanying video starring then-love team Kim Chiu and Gerald Anderson (whose saga I followed like the real life telenovela it was), about a pairing where only half of the love team had actual feelings for the other, but they had to pretend to be together in public. And I don’t get it, how studios and networks often sell a pairing more than the story in films. Throw a hot love team into a film, any film, probably a rom-com, probably with the same basic plot as every other film they’ve done before with a few situation or character tweaks here and there, or maybe a sequel to an existing hit, and it’ll sell. The formula is always the same. Love team + bland romance with the same base premise + love song as title and as movie theme song = box office hit.

Some of these love teams can leave the love team onscreen and carry on with their real lives, only getting together to do press duties and talk about what great friends they are off-screen. But for some others, usually the younger ones, the pairing extends into real life. I can’t imagine how difficult that must be, to be in what are essentially still formative years (because we all change in major ways from our late teens to our mid-twenties), and to have the pressure of maintaining that relationship on your young shoulders — all for the sake of your fans. To live such a sensitive and important part of your life in the eye of the public. To have to be so careful. To have all these strangers chiming in on your relationship, for them to be so invested in something as personal and intimate as your love story. I can only imagine that the very public breakups must be infinitely worse, because by then, everyone seems to feel entitled to have an opinion about your heartbreak — something they know nothing about.

I have also never understood why it’s so hard to let our actors act. Why it’s so hard to separate a role from the person playing that role. And this isn’t only true of the masa — I’ve known people who suddenly changed their minds about artistas they used to detest because said artistas started playing more likeable characters on teleseryes. “I always thought she was malandi and maarte but I like her now, she’s so nice on (name of show here)!” I suppose this must be why it’s considered a daring career move for a male star to portray a homosexual character, why it’s a risk for an actress to go for the juicy kontrabida role — because in this country, you are who you play onscreen. How many of our celebrities are essentially just playing themselves — or whatever version of themselves their management packages them to be? Is he always going to play a bad boy with a heart of gold? Is she always going to play a scrappy but lovable (and really pretty, once she goes through the token makeover scene) tomboy? Will she always be the brusque comedienne? Are they always going to be shut in whatever boxes they first enter showbiz in?

But what has puzzled me most is the whitewashing of our celebrities. It’s something I only really took note of when I started watching ASAP with my mother on the regular. (It’s our Sunday thing, both of us in our pajamas commenting on how effortlessly funny Lucky Manzano is, and how Maja Salvador dances like it’s breathing — you know, without the heavy final-pose panting you get from most other artistas after a dance number.)

Our A-list equivalents mostly still look like themselves, of course. Then again, most of them are already half-something, or have some mix or the other in their blood. (These days, being part-something seems like a showbiz pre-requisite, whether you’re part-Caucasian or part-From-a-Famous-Showbiz-Family.) At most, they dye their hair a shade or two lighter than their natural black or dark brown (if at all, or in the case of the more aesthetically adventurous, maybe something like red). Maybe they wear hazel or gray contacts — still dark enough to look pretty realistic, but light enough to make a smoky eye really pop. (I still don’t understand why they bother with the contacts, though. What’s wrong with dark brown eyes? Everyone has them, and you’re not fooling anyone into thinking you’re a greater percentage Caucasian than you actually are. The contacts seem superfluous; our celebrities are beautiful enough without them.)

But it feels like so many other celebrities are in a competition to gradually become as white as it is humanly possible for a morena plucked from the province to look. And it’s depressing, this mestizafication. I see it all the time.

There is a young singer who popped up on our radar — and all over my Facebook feed — in 2012 when she first auditioned for a talent show. I remember being absolutely blown away by her voice, by her ability, and everyone on my Timeline seemed to feel the same way. The YouTube link was reposted by just about everybody. Considering the fact that most of my Facebook contacts are in the local music industry, all of them musicians who might never have hit the mainstream but whose talent and creativity and musicianship I respect deeply, this was saying something. Everyone was so thrilled to have someone so real look like she was on the cusp of breaking into the mainstream. To have someone whose sound was so authentic and so different from the biritera standard catch the eye — and ear — of the masses. It was thrilling.

And now, she looks completely unlike the girl I remember rooting for all those years ago. A little blonder. Whiter, like she takes a glutathione shot with every meal. More conservatively dressed. I’m sure — absolutely sure, beyond the shadow of a doubt — that her talent is still there, that it is still as potent as it was when we all first saw her. The voice is still there. Maybe singing a different kind of tune, with a different soul than the one she showed up with, but that’s a creative choice, and that’s fine. Artists are allowed to change. And yeah, maybe the makeover was a creative choice, too. Maybe the makeover was necessary. But it grates on me, that talent has to come in such an aesthetically generic package in order to be considered more bankable, more palatable to the public. How people initially lauded for their uniqueness and individuality are eventually driven to conform to that mainstream mold in order to make it. And if the makeover is merely a matter of insecurity, how sad it is that such amazing women feel insecure about the way they look, because our view of what is beautiful is so narrow and so limited and so Western, when the true spectrum is — or at least should be — so broad.

The blue contacts aren’t fooling anybody. You don’t need them. If you want them, that’s fine, but just know that you don’t need them.