Willing Willie and the politics of desperation

Tuesday, 29 March 2011 03:10

Written by Danilo Araña Arao

You may already know the context but let me just repeat it for those who may not know.

Last March 12, a six-year old boy was a contestant in the highly-rated game show Willing Willie on TV5. He clearly didn’t want to be there as he cried in the middle of the interview.

He continued to cry as he showed his talent to the viewing public. What he did was less of a dance and more of a gyration. Host Willie Revillame himself joked that he only sees such things done by macho dancers in night clubs. Since the studio audience (including the boy’s aunt) were very much entertained at the sight of a six-year old doing sexually suggestive body movements, Revillame decided to prolong the child’s “agony” by repeatedly egging him on to gyrate.

What did the boy get for embarrassing himself in public? P10,000. Of course, his aunt was a bit lucky as she only needed to hug Revillame to get a smaller amount of P3,000. It is clear that Revillame knows what the child was going through. In the video I watched on YouTube , he made the following remarks after the boy’s production number: “Ganyan ho ang hirap ng buhay ng tao...May luha pa iyan, ha? Kaya niya ginagawa 'yon para sa pamilya.”

Suffice it to say that I fully agree with the Department of Social Work and Development’s (DSWD) statement denouncing what it considered “emotional abuse and humiliation.” But more than the issue of child abuse, I was expecting the DSWD to also condemn how game shows like Willing Willie capitalize on the desperation of majority of our population.

Much as the family is partly responsible for the emotional trauma that the six-year old boy went through, can we totally put the blame on the family for allowing the six-year old to be humiliated on national television? I am a bit ambivalent as regards the family’s culpability, a case no different from a poor mother caught shoplifting medicines for her sick baby. While we feel they should be punished, we cannot help but also think about the even bigger crime of perpetuating a social system that has pushed them to do the unthinkable and unacceptable.

In this context, we would realize that what happened in Willing Willie last March 12 is not an isolated incident. From Monday to Saturday, we lay witness to women, elderly, differently abled and other marginalized sectors of society subjected to the same emotional trauma and humiliation. They are made to sing or dance (or sometimes both) to Revillame’s content in exchange for thousands of pesos.

Consciously or unconsciously, we get “entertained” by the poor contestants’ ordeal which ends upon receiving their much-desired “bonus” of four- to five-figure sum of money. They hope to be on the good side of Revillame; if he’s in a good mood, he would allow a contestant to try his luck picking a key to start a brand-new van he or she could take home.

Yes, we now call this situation of desperation “entertainment.” Ironically, it took a six-year old boy to remind us of how warped our values have become, particularly how we get entertained at the expense of the desperate others.

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