Split screen love team Alden Richards and Meine Mendoza as Yaya Dub
Everyone was talking about it. Yet no one could describe it without going into a long discussion. From what they said I couldn’t figure out what it was really. It sounded like something strange was happening to Philippine national television and in the social network, all at the same time. So I checked it on TV twice to see what’s going on.
And there was AlDub, the live kalye serye (street serial) on the noontime variety show Eat Bulaga, focusing on the romance between Alden Richards and Maine Mendoza (recruited in the program after she became a Dubsmash hit).
They both started in the program as co-hosts in separate segments where they would report separately yet often simultaneously in a split screen. When that happened, the girl could not hide her admiration for the guy and the audience—more importantly, the program producers—noticed.
A kalye serye, which itself is a parody of a mainstream telenovela, was thus created out of the emerging love team. The two had not yet met face to face . Producers claim that they tried to maintain the spirit of spontaneity and accident that marked the origin of AlDub. The running story was left unscripted, acting unrehearsed and totally improvised live on screen. The public was smitten. Eat Bulaga’s viewership increased 300 percent. All AlDub hashtags have been trending online.
AlDub was getting so popular that sociologists and media experts had to be consulted. They all talked about the power of social media and how the Filipino audience could relate to the Cinderella complex of the female protagonist.
They noted the usual escapist entertainment and corporate media’s manipulation of public sentiment to rake in profits.
What they don’t see is the emergence of a new art form or rather the blending of different art forms and other disciplines into something that goes beyond conventional categories. A series of accidents, which began with that Maine Mendoza’s Dubsmash post, led to the emergence of this show, which has brought together soap opera, improvisational theatre, reality TV, advertising, journalism and social media into one unique cultural expression.
As such it’s born out of chance, a randomness in its development that the philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call “rhizomic”. AlDub defies the usual linear structure that underlies the telenovela and other narrative genres of television. It is totally organic and no one can predict where it is going, not the audience or the show’s producers.
In the meantime, no other show on TV has truly captured the pulse of the public, the Pinoy weakness for cheesy romance in particular. But it’s not so much the content as the form, which for me is postmodern art in its highest—or lowest—level.
Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner in the late 19th century looked forward to the fusion of theatre, painting, poetry, music, dance, and all other art forms into one “total art” that would also reunite the artist with the people in a single collective expression of folk sentiment similar to how tragedy provided catharsis to the ancient Athenians.
Wagner attempted to replicate that in his opera hoping that it would give voice to the German volkgeist or national spirit.
Today’s postmodern art takes that character of hybridity, the blending of genres, the blurring of the line between high culture and the low, and that between art and life itself. We see these qualities in AlDub.
And yet, it does not present itself as art. People take it as cheap mindless entertainment, an escape from reality.
Indeed, like the Greek tragedy, it provides what Nietzsche calls a “metaphysical comfort” without which we would have been led to more antisocial tendencies or worse, suicide. But beyond the escapism, there’s more in the medium that’s telling about the nature of art in our time or, for better or worse, about who we are as an audience, as a nation.
That’s the message I got from watching AlDub twice. I don’t see the point of watching some more.