Music Videos
Bebot: Second Gen
- The auntie in the beginning really reminded me of my aunties and Lola’s from the Filipino Community Hall I went to when I was young. They always asked me if I had eaten and tried to feed me if I hadn’t.
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- I don’t like how they sexualized the girls in the video. It’s gross.
The Debut
- The first thing I noticed was that in the beginning, almost all the drawings that Ben drew were of white people, which showed how he had some white idealism (?) going on. But towards the end of the movie, he started drawing people from the party, more specifically the painting of his father and Lolo, which shows that he’s becoming comfortable/ on better terms with the fact that he’s Filipino.
- The food and the dancing in the movie reminded me of the food and dancing in the Filipino Hall. I got really happy when I saw the lechon, which is something that shows up at parties a lot. I noticed that the Tinikling dance ( the dance with the bamboo poles) was slightly different than the dance I grew up watching. Was that because it was a style from a different province in the Philippines? Or was it altered during its time in the U.S.? Or maybe the dance that I grew up with was the one that was changed?
- Ben and his relationship with his dad is pretty unstable. It’s that thing where the parent wants their kid to be something they don’t want to be (doctor instead of artist) or has huge expectations that are hard for their kid to accomplish, which is something that I see in a lot of the books we’ve read (Donald Duk, Forgotten Country). In the latter part of the movie, we see that the dad also experienced that pressure from the Lolo, who made the dad become a doctor I think, instead of a singer. It’s a pressure that was passed down through the generations (intergenerational trauma), though the Lolo was more aggressive about it, shown in the scene when he started to choke out one of his sons after being told to calm down.
- I found the relationship of Gusto with his mother interesting. Someone pointed out that Ben and Gusto are almost the same but on opposite ends of the spectrum, where Ben idealizes white people while Gusto idealizes black culture. Was it because Gusto has a white dad? Also, is his white dad his blood-related dad, or is he his stepdad? Because Gusto seems to really hate him, while still having some respect for his mom. I’m curious.
- A surprising note to me is the fact that all the events happened in one night. In Donald Duk, Donald has a few weeks to come to better terms with being Chinese, but with Ben, it takes one night. A slow realization in one quick night.
- His white friends
- In the beginning, his friends are really gross and disrespectful, as seen in the part where they’re in Ben’s house and are making fun of the decorative items ( giant fork and spoon, guy in the barrel). When they’re at the party, they seem more curious to know more about Filipino culture than to uncaringly disrespect it, having their minds blown by one of the party members there who gives a huge speech on Filipino history (?) which I found hilarious and amazing. During the scene with Susie, they do seem to know that Susie was being a humongous bitch, but the blonde guy did try to defend her by saying that she was drunk and that she didn’t know what she was doing. At the end, they seem to have more respect for Filipino culture, but I still think they’re gross.
- Susie is a racist bitch and I felt huge satisfaction when she spilled her drink on herself and threw up. The fact that she not only said that Asians eat cats and dogs, but she also called Ben a “chink”, a racist slur for Chinese people. She’s irredeemable in my eyes.
- When Susie says all those things about Ben, it hits him pretty hard to be faced with such blatant racism by someone who he thinks of as a friend, and that they really meant it.
- I remember after the movie, someone in seminar talked about the scene where one of the characters gave a huge speech on Filipino history, saying that the car conspiracy took away Filipino history, and while some of that is true to an extent (?), that’s not the whole story. It’s the Philippines whole history of colonialism that took away Filipino history. It’s the Spanish colonization, it’s American colonization, its history books only mentioning the Philippines when its convenient in white history, its so many things that have erased and hidden Filipino history, not just the car conspiracy.
Dark Blue Suit
- Self-fulfilling prophecy, Colonialism= overbearing parent to child-> child becomes like parent cycle
- Aaron
- Vic’s wives -> Buddy’s wives
- Titles get rid of/ strips identity/personality/ characteristics that make them a person (Thief, stripper)