Wednesday 13 May 2020

On handsome swarthy artillerymen, Kleenex, and cultural awareness

A very attractive Dubai army officer stands at attention next to his gun. This unit seems to be in charge of parading every evening as part of some Muslim prayer ritual.

Mediacorp can go fuck themselves.

I mean the television side of the company, not the news side. I don't bite the hand that feeds me, and the news side of Mediacorp has been a great help to me professionally.

But the TV side just irks me no end.

Call me selfish or entitled. I don't care. I'm a Millennial, and aren't all of us supposed to be selfish and entitled?

A few months ago I wrote about Silvana Sin Lana, a Spanish telenovela that I had fallen in love with.

I wrote that after watching just a few episodes of the show. Everything I wrote back then still applies, except the part where I complained about the ear-raping quality of the dubbing. I've since gotten used to it and decided it's really not that bad.

Additionally, I've also realised that the show cleverly takes on two social issues from fresh angles.

The first is the class divide. The Villasenor family is from the upper class, at least until patriarch Antonio Jose gets disgraced and flees the country, forcing his wife Silvana, mother-in-law, and three daughters to move to a middle-class area.

As usual, there's plenty of condescension and snobbery from certain members of the Villasenor family, particularly the mother-in-law Trini and eldest daughter Maria Jose, towards their neighbours.

But the interesting thing is that the Villasenors are also subjected to discrimination by the middle-class. This is what I call reverse classism. Patent pending. :)

It seems to me that it has become fashionable nowadays to hate those who are better-off than us.

This was apparent in the backlash against a letter published in the Straits Times recently calling for more Covid-19 financial support for people living in private housing, perceived as a status symbol in Singapore where the majority of the population lives in public flats.

Many netizens, including influencer Mr Brown, dismissed the letter, taking the view that people in positions of such financial privilege don't have the right to ask for help.

A dangerous, sweepingly uncritical blanket approach, in my opinion, probably fuelled more by emotion than reason.

Silvana Sin Lana portrays reverse classism through, for example, key antagonists Margerita and Stella, who each embark on separate smear campaigns against second daughter Angie and Silvana herself over insecurities that their boyfriends George and Manuel are falling for the Villasenors.

A key pillar of their attack strategy is to engage in Othering, a legit sociological concept not created by me this time, painting the Villasenors as outsiders who don't belong in the neighbourhood.

The second social issue that Silvana Sin Lana takes on is female empowerment.

I like how the show takes the trope of the spoilt, rich housewife who can't do anything and turns it on its head. Silvana starts out as a spoilt, rich housewife who can't do anything, but quickly marshals the inner strength to learn everything from scratch, becoming a fiercely independent woman.

Yes she has the support of her sexy neighbour Manuel, but his impact on her everyday troubles is limited and she solves most of her problems herself.

Famous Latino singer Carlos Ponce is super hot, isn't he! He plays Manuel Gallardo, Silvana's neighbour and love interest. He also sings the show's theme song, which is very nice. Listen to it here.

I admire scriptwriting that's brave enough to subvert stereotypes, in this case gender roles and norms, and dares to be different and explore the question "What if?"

Another way in which Silvana Sin Lana's scriptwriting departs from convention in a tongue-in-cheek fashion: in one episode, a character runs into the middle of a busy road.

Tires screech, metal clashes against metal, and the camera zooms in on another character standing on the pavement making a horrified face.

But then the view changes to reveal that the character who charged onto the street is climbing over a bunch of wrecked cars that crashed into one another while missing her completely!

This is likely in reference to the traffic accident plot crutch that screenwriters of soap dramas often rely on.

If you've watched enough of the genre, you'll know what I mean. Even the Korean and Chinese drama serials, including those that Mediacorp makes for Channel 8, are guilty of this practice.

Vanishing act


Things were going so well. I was happily enjoying my Silvana Sin Lana on Mondays and Tuesdays at 11pm on Mediacorp Channel 5.

Opening screen of Silvana Sin Lana, showing the Telemundo logo. Telemundo is a Spanish-language production house.

Then the shit hit the fan.

For no rhyme or reason, Mediacorp canned the Monday screening and replaced it with a rerun of some trashy legal drama produced locally a decade ago. I mean, it's got Adrian Pang making his trademark constipated face. Obviously it can't be good to watch.

But this was just the foot in the door. Next, Mediacorp stuck its dirty fingers into my Tuesday slot as well. They pushed Silvana Sin Lana to 11.30pm, because they wanted to screen horror movies before it. They were creeping closer to their ultimate goal...

The endgame of which was finally revealed when they got rid of Silvana Sin Lana entirely. What. The. Hell!

I felt betrayed. I've always been a proponent of #supportlocal and faithfully follow local television productions like family soap drama Kin and police drama Code of Law.

Just when I'd decided to follow an imported show, they pull this stunt!? How can dis b allow?

It's such a dick move to start showing a series, then abruptly cut it off without a care for viewers who are now left dangling.

Thoroughly pissed off, I powered up my special Singaporean skill: I complained long and loud.

I wrote to Mediacorp Channel 5 on Facebook, Twitter, and email. They ignored me.

I tweeted to the various official accounts of Universal, the media conglomerate that owns the rights to the show.

I even wrote directly to the specific public relations officer in charge of Silvana Sin Lana at Telemundo, the studio that produced it. I received no reply; the woman probably thought I was loco.

She's probably right. I tend to develop unhealthy obsessions and when I do, I'm like a dog with a bone.

I embarked on the Kubler-Ross grief process. I started with denial: surely there was some mistake! I kept checking the schedule to see if miraculously, Silvana Sin Lana would reappear on the listing.

Then anger. To some extent I'm still angry. Bloody Mediacorp! What a disgraceful excuse for a television station. Run by a bunch of headless morons!

Next came bargaining. I couldn't accept that I could no longer watch Silvana Sin Lana. The last episode Mediacorp aired before brutally tearing it away from me ended with Manuel confessing to Silvana that he loved her. I desperately had to know how the story continued!

If I couldn't watch it on Mediacorp, maybe I could watch it somewhere else?

My hunt began on YouTube, where I discovered the Telemundo official channel. There was a playlist for Silvana Sin Lana! But each episode was only about 20 minutes long. The version on television has episodes that are around 40 minutes long. I think the ones on YouTube are abridged.

Anyway they were in Spanish, so they were of no use to me.

But in the comments section, I saw some people mention that the show is on Netflix with English subtitles. I was temporarily enthused by this revelation, but my optimism was short-lived after a quick check with an online Netflix database showed that Netflix Singapore doesn't carry the show.

Damn it, why must I be stuck on this godforsaken island!

The final nail in the coffin came when I found full episodes of Silvana Sin Lana on the Telemundo website. The video player options bar even had a setting for English closed captions. But I just couldn't get the videos to play.

I suspect they, too, were geographically restricted. When I used the built-in virtual private network on the Opera browser to spoof my location as the United States, I could get the video player to play... advertisements. :( Not the episodes proper.

Feeling deflated, I began the final two Kubler-Ross stages: depression and acceptance. To express my undying love for the series even though I could no longer watch it, I made a meme.

In my Instagram caption, I hashtagged #silvanasinlana, and my finger idly tapped onto it because I was curious to see how many other fans of the show there are around the world. I found an unexpectedly active community!

A little excited now, I hopped over to Twitter and searched the same hashtag. One post in particular would change my life.

Arabian Nights


It was by a @LaBonteLisa, who appears to be a hotshot business person. She had shared a tweet by Dubai One promoting Silvana Sin Lana. Further investigations revealed that Dubai One is a television channel in Dubai.


Lisa La Bonte's tweet had mentioned the irritating English voiceover too, so I knew that the version being screened by Dubai One was the same as the one screened by Mediacorp.

A rush of hope. Maybe there's a chance Dubai One has something like Mediacorp's MeWatch, where there's streaming video on demand. And maybe, just maybe, they would have Silvana Sin Lana accessible to me.

What the heck. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by going down this rabbit hole.

Heart pounding. Fingers flying. I searched the Dubai One website from top to bottom, clicking everything in sight and breaking every piece of cybersecurity advice in existence.

How was I to know what each button did when they were all plastered in squiggly Arabic script? I didn't care. I clicked them anyway.

If my cyberwellness teachers in school were dead, they'd be rolling over in their graves so vigorously that they'd resemble electrical turbines.

Somehow, I stumbled my way onto an affiliated site called Awaan, which I surmise to be the holding entity of Dubai One and several other channels. That would make it analogous to Mediacorp.

And I hit paydirt.

I fumbled and floundered blindly until I hit upon a switch to turn the entire site into English. Then, in a section labelled "Catch Up", I saw the magic words Silvana Sin Lana.

Silvana Sin Lana title screen.

My hand trembled as I clicked play. After fending off an aggressive Arabic female voice trying to, as far as I could ascertain, get me to buy a car, I was rewarded by the sight of Manuel...

Confessing his love to Silvana...

In English!

My luck has never been good. I still haven't got Bubbles the fishing skill pet in RuneScape despite having more than 5,000,000 experience points, which peeves me because I've seen noobs with under a million experience flaunting him.

Bubbles is a rare pet in RuneScape. Players stand a chance to obtain Bubbles each time they fish. At my fishing level of 90, I have a 0.00072% probability to get Bubbles every 2.4 seconds as long as my avatar is training the fishing skill. This probability is higher for players with higher levels in the corresponding skill. Credits: probability calculator here, picture taken from here.

But it appears that, in the case of Silvana Sin Lana, the stars had aligned for me.

Not only had Dubai One given me the opportunity to access Silvana Sin Lana for free, the episode they had shown the day before I found their site had been the last one I had seen on Mediacorp!

In other words, I could pick up the story seamlessly from where I had been!

Later, I also found the Awaan app on Google Play and installed it on my phone. Besides catch-up, I discovered I can also stream the channel live, so it's as if I'm sitting in Dubai watching it on my television set.

I already know how to screencast, so nowadays, I use my phone to stream Dubai One and cast it onto my television. I almost feel like wearing flowy white robes and buying myself a pet camel, whom I shall name Malika.

Unlike (cough, cough) Mediacorp, Dubai One has vastly superior primetime programming. Actually it's my primetime I'm referring to: 9pm to 12mn Singapore time, which is 5pm to 8pm Dubai time.

There's always a movie from 9pm to 11pm. And not some garbage like Fast and Furious or Kung Fu Panda for the bazillionth time like Mediacorp does. It's usually a lesser-known show, a little old but a goodie nonetheless.

For example, there was Legally Blonde and Failure to Launch. These are not B-grade movies! They have well-known leads. There was also Robot and Frank, which I'd never heard of but greatly enjoyed because of its intriguing and unusual premise.

I don't mind a broadcaster making this kind of film choices. I really don't care if a movie is a blockbuster or has famous people in it. As long as it makes me happy.

Stupid Mediacorp either goes for A-list movies from ten years ago or total B-grade nonsense that prominently feature supersized creatures animated by primary schoolers so that they look like bathtub toys.

A few weeks ago, they showed one such film, titled Big Ass Spider. But because we're a prudishly conservative society, they censored the title to Giant Spider instead.

Such a sad indictment of how dumb this country is.

Must be PAP's fault. ;)

Anyway, back to Dubai One. From 11pm to 12mn is Silvana Sin Lana. Yup, that's the same time as Mediacorp's original screening, except that now I get new episodes from Sunday to Thursday every week instead of only Monday and Tuesday. Screw you Mediacorp, the Arabs are better.

Between the movie and Silvana Sin Lana though, there are about 15 minutes of Muslim rituals. I'm atheist and always will be, but I still find it fascinating to watch how religions are practiced.

In Dubai, they seem to have a sunset gun salute and parade ceremony every day. A small squad of five soldiers spends about five minutes marching and waving their antique-looking rifles around, after which one of them fires a howitzer into the air.

Then some sort of prayer song is played. It's haunting, melodious, and utterly beautiful, even though I have no idea what it is saying.

The television station broadcasts daily evening prayers. I've seen similar things on Malaysian channels like RTM TV1, but this seems somehow more awe-inspiring. Maybe because Arabia is really close to the actual birthplace of Islam so its brand of the religion comes across more purely? Or perhaps it's simply because Arabia is further away from me so the whole experience benefits from feeling more exotic.

Dubai seems to be a very devout place. They have public service advertisements about Covid-19 telling people to stay safe at home, suggesting that they use their free time to "read Quran from cover to cover to stay close to Allah".

A bit extreme, maybe? When I was a Christian child I could never get past Genesis chapter 1 because that book was boring AF. Reading the whole thing might be worse than pulling teeth.

But nevertheless, such overt displays of religiosity are eye-opening for me and certainly something I'll never get to see in my sheltered Singaporean life.

Their subtle anti-Western propaganda is quite funny too. In an advertisement to discourage panic-buying, a man is shown wearing a t-shirt and pants and charging around the supermarket grabbing handfuls of stuff, with a heavy metal soundtrack playing in the background.

Abruptly cut to another man, this time wearing the traditional Arab attire of white robes. Piano music tinkles softly in the background as he paces sedately among the shelves, picking out one or two items at a time.

So it seems even the Arabs experience panic-buying. The coronavirus truly does bring the world together.

In fact most of the advertisements on Dubai One are related to Covid-19. But I don't mind watching them. Seeing foreign advertisements always gives me a thrill because it feels like I'm watching cable television.

Plus, the advertisement breaks on Dubai One are mercifully short so they don't compromise my viewing experience.

Emotional rollercoaster


And so this is the story of how it came to be, that I was sat in front of my television set, my phone lying next to it, crying my eyes out at Manuel and Silvana's forbidden love one moment, and laughing heartily at Trini and Benito's awkward antics the next, as the seasonal greeting "Ramadan Kareem" flashed across the screen every few minutes and spaghetti-like words appeared everywhere.

I enjoy watching Silvana Sin Lana because each episode takes me on an emotional rollercoaster ride. I feel like there's a chain around my throat, and the screenwriters are yanking me one way, then the other. But never did I imagine that I would have to go through an emotional rollercoaster in real life, as I journeyed across the internet to earn the right to go on the emotional rollercoaster in the show.
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