NAILED & BONTOC - A. Flores

CRITICAL REFLECTION TO: NAILED & BONTOC
BONTOC

Bontoc is in line with Linton’s writing questioning the media’s ability to influence audience members. The danger he claims is that the presented media-material has a “direct and virtually inescapable impact.” And if there is no direct impact, “the media [in this case the film] could have indirect effects ‘by shaping the materials of knowledge, norms, and judgments which people acquire and then apply in everyday life.” The lack of detachment and lack of self-consciousness of this relationship between the viewer and the screen world cause him or her to the activities and events portrayed as more real than imaginary.

And that is exactly what Bontoc was warning against. Besides the immoral point of almost “kidnapping” human beings from their environments to be used as commodity for-profit (“Two Filipinos died from freezing in the train car”) the US clips, if one was to believe Linton’s article – portrayed Filipinos as vicious, tribal, dog-eaters. What some in mainstream America now believes.

NAILED

With my attached essay for ethical relativism, although I hate the notion that the colonialist ingrained in the Filipinos’ mental belief that the immoral practice of annually nailing someone is moral – from a religious culture, I have to go with liberty. The film should have been entitled “SCREWED,” - by the Catholic colonialist.

I have every reason to say the practice to be abhorrent, but hey, it is her religion. It is her choice. Beneficence prevail, because of the STRONG belief, although may be considered by some as deluded, that everything is momentary. Everything is temporary. Every suffering is rewarded for the next life awaiting in Utopia.

The more pain, such as whipping, the more absolution, hence your reward will be great. This is why we have extremist Muslims not afraid to, dare I say, perform what others may call immoral acts of terrorism.