‘Dahling Nick’: Cinema as literary tribute

Sari Dalena’s much-awaited film, “Dahling Nick” renders unabashed homage to one of Philippine literature’s greatest figures—a prodigious intellectual and multitalented writer who excelled in both literary and journalistic genres, and who was a loyal and unforgettable friend to so many other writers and artists.

A theatrical biopic—with “filmizations” of some of Nick Joaquin’s most beloved poetic and fictional texts thrown in for good measure—“Dahling Nick” works well enough as a docudrama. This is because, aside from the short audio and video clips of Joaquin being his own glibly histrionic and incomparable self and the interviews of relatives and friends talking about their goofy and always fond memories of him, the film also showcases several readings of a choice selection of his poetry and prose—the hybrid Anglo-Latinate and idiolectal turns of phrase and memorably lush (we might indeed say, emulating his own coinage, “tropically gothic”) way with words, through which the generosity of his extraordinary consciousness made itself manifest in the world, and that certainly carry its presence still, despite his irrefutable absence.

It’s most interesting to see the fact of his homosexuality being casually “admitted” by his closest associates, and among the filmmaker’s numerous lyrical passages what stand out for me are those moments when she dramatizes the spiritual turmoil Joaquin must have experienced prior to leaving the Dominican seminary in Hong Kong. As Dalena would picture it, there he must have had at least one other religious and possibly like-minded (and prepossessing) brother to confide and invest unconsummated desire in.

A “Mariological” reading is thereby proffered by this film, and while it may indeed conform to the image some of his friends and relatives have of him—as well as to the known facts about his Marian-devoted mother, whose influence on him would prove to be life-long and profound—broaching the topic of Joaquin’s personal anguish over his homosexuality and then quickly forgetting about it—in favor of a generally “sanitized” and desexualized reading of his life—is clearly the singularly insightful opportunity that this film willfully (and unfortunately) misses.

The interviewees are possibly the best people to have in this filmic project, but to the degree that it implicates actual texts from Joaquin’s exceptional oeuvre perhaps the filmmaker could’ve tapped not just Joaquin’s fellow writers but also a judiciously selected sampling of literary critics and scholars, who would’ve offered different and perhaps even counterintuitive kinds of interpretations for these selfsame texts. After all, what makes the many pieces in Joaquin’s corpus “great” as works of literature is their ability—borne out of the formal and thematic complexities in which they are couched—to “hypersemanticize” themselves, generating a plurality of readings precisely because they are nothing if not verbally “ambiguous,” well-wrought, and altogether astonishing products of the imagination. On the other hand, the part when the film registers the fact that Joaquin passionately championed Jose Garcia Villa—despite their varying commitments to the idea of formalist autonomy—would’ve been the perfect occasion to get some interesting critical discussion going about the “modernist” and obviously queer sympathy, fellowship, and love that both writers had for each other. (A personal and resonant memory: after he gave his tearful eulogy for his friend at the necrological service of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Joaquin sang Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” yet again, tweaking its lyrics to fit the occasion, as was his wont).

In any case, I’m happy to hear his poem, “Six P.M.” being read—although not necessarily by the clueless actress who, as far as I can imagine, is nowhere near what the legendary Virgie Moreno would’ve been like during her heyday (I suspect many in the audience who personally know her as well as a number of the other equally famous characters in this film would register their own demurrals against some of these half-hearted and inadequately scripted portrayals, too). It would’ve been nice if this poem had been discussed by any one (or two, or three) of the interviewees, who most certainly wouldn’t have missed its connection to the topic of forbidden eroticism, already thematized in Joaquin’s early and probably most famous poem about the proverbial conflict between the Spirit and the Flesh (“The Innocence of Solomon,” recited from perfervid memory by Professor Emeritus of the University of the Philippines, Gemino H. Abad.)

This is a conflict that Joaquin recognized and described again and again in his copious writings, whose sensuality and “worldliness” his own creative vision would eventually transfigure and ennoble, revealing the “rightness” of his decision to pursue transcendence through the pleasures of the sentient body (which is to say, through art). Inasmuch as life and art, while contiguous, don’t really perfectly coincide, then to my mind it should’ve been part of this film’s interest to inquire into the question of whether or not Joaquin was able to “resolve” the personal (and experiential) dimension of this conflict in any similarly gracious way.

Nonetheless, the film does admirably dwell on the drama of a comparable internal conflict that Joaquin famously wrestled with, when he had to turn his back on his own ethical and political conviction—against the iniquitous Marcos regime—by accepting its National Artist Award, if only to secure the release of the young poet and close friend, Jose “Pete” Lacaba (needless to say, this was the “condition” that he gave its smooth-talking and unctuous “representatives”). Dalena understood that this must have caused Joaquin immense moral suffering: she chose to dramatize the conferment ceremony as a kind of spread-eagled oblation on the part of the prolific and abundantly gifted writer, whose personal and aesthetic “endorsement” the corrupt and morally bankrupt administration desperately craved.

Here we must remark that the very essence of Joaquin’s life work has been—as with other Filipino writers—to promote the cause of literacy in a country whose people have only been minimally and unevenly literate over the course of a tumultuous century. This task is the same as insisting on the persistence of textual memory, and it’s made all the more remarkable because it dares to stake its claim in a residually and stubbornly oral culture, where principles are as malleable as the form and substance of hearsay, and just as “negotiable.” It’s this very same categorical mentality, cultivated through the capaciousness of Joaquin’s intensely literate imagination, that must have, on one hand enabled him to embrace the difficult and intractable abstraction of the Filipino nation (whose binding and breathtakingly beautiful “myths” he at once recuperated and lovingly fashioned and refashioned, again and again), and on the other alienated him implacably from it, precisely because given the profundity of his “archival consciousness” he could envision more capaciously and hold fast to ideals more uncompromisingly than many of its people ostensibly could.

Quite possibly, it was this very same categorically inclined and textually constituted mind—that had fed avidly on the Great Books early in its life— that at once anguished and consoled Joaquin as a gay man and a Marian devotee. (The “convergence” of these two identities has, I suspect, its own interesting Hispanic history in our country, whose Baroque evangelization was characterized by the promotion of religious pageantry and sumptuously theatricalized images of Catholic devotion, foremost of which would be those of La Santissima Virgen).

*   *   *

Six P.M.
by Nick Joaquin

Trouvere at night, grammarian in the morning,
ruefully architecting syllables—
but in the afternoon my ivory tower falls.
I take a place in the bus among people returning
to love (domesticated) and the smell of onions burning
and women reaping the washlines as the Angelus tolls.

But I—where am I bound?

My garden, my four walls
and you project strange shores upon my yearning:
Atlantis? The Caribbeans? Or Cathay?
Conductor, do I get off at Sinai?
Apocalypse awaits me: urgent my sorrow
towards the undiscovered world that I
from warm responding flesh for a while shall borrow:
conquistador tonight, clockpuncher tomorrow.

Indeed, while Nick Joaquin is better known for his prodigious prose—his voluminous and outstanding works in fiction and nonfiction, to be more specific—he did, early in his career as a writer, pen quite a few successful poems, most of which were allegorical and representationally ambiguous. In the curious poem “Six P.M.,” however, we are presented a rather specific portrait of a Manila journalist/editor—a professional identity to which Joaquin experientially had a lifelong claim—leading a “double-life,” the threshold or gateway between which is this fateful and reverential hour at dusk, during which the persona transitions from being a “grammarian” to being a bardic lover or “trouvere.”

This French word is of course a mere euphemism, for what the poem in fact attests to is the ubiquitous reality of the indulgence in casual—possibly contractual—sex, which the speaker, a representative of Manila’s innumerable daytime “clockpunchers,” enjoys.

Careful reading reveals that, on one hand, the poem’s text is addressed by the speaker as an apostrophe to the “you,” who is most likely a male bus conductor “projecting strange shores” upon “[his] yearning”; and on the other, that he frequents known sexual districts in the “sin city” that is post-War Manila (this was Joaquin's own memorable epithet for the capital, actually). This was a kind of behavior that was chronicled in feature articles by Joaquin himself, and it is referenced in this poem by metonymically displaced but entirely resonant place-names for the various venues where he borrows from the evening’s “warm responding flesh” an “undiscovered world.” Certainly, this kind of frank admission of what must be, among Catholics, a morally ambivalent and “dissonant” life was made all the easier by the fact that Joaquin, an undomesticated bachelor (and practicing journalist) to his dying day, couched it in English, whose intellectual and emotional history afforded the aesthetic distance that—especially at this time— permitted such candidness. — BM, GMA News

“Dahling Nick” is  currently being screened in select theaters as part of the C1 Originals Festival.