last semester we were lucky to watch “the little black book” and “the paper”. two movies which presented ethics, responsibilities, and how to play the game of media, just in the industry of talkshow and print media.
“tuhog”, a Filipino film which is an example of a movie in a movie best portrays the concept of exaggerating stories.
exagerrating, which literally means to describe things more than or less than what is actually the case. another way of imitating but basically applying revisions, twists, or adding or reducing detais of the original story.
i wonder how will Plato react after seeing “tuhog”? Definitely, it is not the person that was imitated in the film, based on my perception, it was the story itself. for our known great mind, an imitation is three times away from the truth, the real story which is considerd to be the first degree, when the rape victims retold the stories was the second, and the director’s and writer’s version of the story, or it can even go fourth and so on.
on the second degree, the essence of the original idea might have reduces because the mother and the daughter may have skipped or forgotten somethings. on the other hand, it was very evident that the re-enactment changed, that the thought of the story affected the reputation of the victims to the perception of those acquainted to them, but still the essence remained but only little was left.
taking the side of Aristotle, according to his 3 ways of how modes of imitation differ from one another, the means, objects and manner, the director used the movements/actions, dialogues and voices as means to imitate the object, rape case in the manner of acting and puting it into film.
it even followed the Freytag’s triangle having the suffering under the harassment of their father/grandfather as the conflict, up to the attempt of fighting his cruelness as the climax and putting an end to his life as the resolution.
imitation, either said to be inherent to a human being’s instinct or learned with the influence of his/her social group, what was shown in the movie, “tuhog”, was a total violation against what is legal and moral.
