Notes on General Admission

 

Filipinos are storytellers, and thus, love a good story. Stories rouse the imagination, create histories, keep us informed and inspire us. But like all things, stories have dark sides too. Paired with the truth, stories can do all the things mentioned above and more. Without the truth as a partner, stories become gossip, creating their own false truths as they go. Unfortunately, we have made an industry of it, and the tragedies that spring from this commercialization of half truths is the main focus of Jeffrey Hidalgo's General Admission.

Katja (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) suffers an "accident" on live TV. The showbiz press reports on the issue, which soon spirals out of control. Layers upon layers of new details mutate and distort the original story until it leads to something unexpected.

The look and feel of the film evokes theatre, exaggeration, artificiality. It works as a component of the film's satirical nature, but it also evokes the atmosphere of a circus, and that's exactly what this film feels like. As the stories grow more and more ridiculous, the pundits that spread these stories strip them of nuance, guiding (or rather, forcing) their own narratives. We want catharsis, but these pundits get out of the situation relatively unscathed. Yes, I can hear some say, don't shoot the messenger, but when the messenger begins making up their own stories, you eventually kind of have to.

And what of the people at the center of these stories? Therein lies perhaps the film's biggest weakness: it doesn't quite dwell on the consequences of these narratives on the people it affects, instead preferring to dwell on the spectacle itself. A major factor in the film's climax is a story all on its own, yet it is used as a "gotcha" moment, and we are given little time to ruminate on it. To be fair, it can also work in a meta sense - in that we easily dismissed this plot point earlier in the story as true or plausible, making us no different from the audiences in the film.

One can also fault the film for not incorporating social media as it is today, a cancerous growth that has only grown exponentially in the past five years - the film, in that respect, feels dated. But the central tenet of General Admission points to a larger malaise in our society that I feel is universal even today. I'm referring to how these stories oversaturate our senses, overwhelming us with trivialities and sensationalized falsehoods, to the point where such superficial appeasements keep us placated while people in power take advantage of our stupor. We drown in bread and circuses and all the world's a joke - it's just that the joke is ultimately on us.