Circa '90s: 'Betamax' nightwatch

this is quite an old, old story... but wait for its sequel...

Tonight the house of Gertrudes Paler in the village of Villalimpia, is full of children, mothers and some men.

Since all the glass jalousies are shut tight, the smell of sourish sweat and hands stained with fish stew mingle and hover in the air like an unseen cloud.

The children settle down to sit, squat or sprawl on the clean linoleum floor. Their feet, unslippered, are speckled with sandy and grayish dust from the village footpath. Their rubber slippers are piled by the front door.

Meanwhile, at the neighborhood sari-sari store a few yards away, five-year-old Melissa Marquez tugs at her mother’s skirt.

But her mother, busy attending to someone who needs some garlic, ginger and onions to spice her evening’s quick soup of shellfish, cannot give her immediate attention.

The child starts climbing up a stack of cracker boxes, reaches out for the money box, opens it and chooses a silver-colored fifty-centavo coin.

“For the show at Getrudes,” explains the child to her mother.

Back at Gertrudes’s, as the lone 30-watt fluorescent lamp is turned off and the TV monitor is turned on, the children’s excited chirping stops.

This hush is sustained as the TV screen projects the title of tonight’s show, “Fight for Money.” It will turn out to be an enjoyable movie for almost everyone, with the actors, both women and men do nothing but fight in kung-fu and karate.

Every night, at seven-thirty till nine-thirty, the scene is like this at this fisher’s residence. For most villagers within a half kilometer radius, all roads would lead to the Paler’s – along a nameless street by the chapel that houses the statue of the San Judas Tadeus, the village patron saint.

The house of Gertrudes is one among the country’s more than 731,00 rural households in 27, 593 villages included in a nationwide rural electrification program. It has only been a little more than a decade since the villagefolks exchanged half-dark and shadowy evenings of petromax and kerosene lamps for electric power.

Gertrudes house is also one of the less than a dozen households in the village of 2,000 which has a video cassette player or VCR.

As of 1990, the video viewership in the rural areas has climbed steadily due to the multiplying factor of households which has turned this previously private entertainment into a home-based business.

So even as Manila population and those who inherit the nearby island of Mindanao continue to bear the unbarable routine of prolonged brown-outs, due to the lack of enough power supply, the folks in the province of Bohol manage to enjoy their evening leisures at the beta house. Most towns in the island of bohol get their power source from a power plant managed by the National Power Corposration and distributed through rural electric cooperatives.

“Beta” had become, in the people’s street lingo, the generic name for the home video. The word coined after Sony “betamax”, the brand name of a VCR manufactured by the Japanese company.

Even as the VCR brough home by Gertrudes’ son Venancio the sailor, is a VHS by Panasonic, still the people ask, “What’s on the beta tonight?”

A Tagbilaran-based appliance marketing company reveals that it sells an average of five VCRs each month. There are a dozen of these duly-registered businesses in the city.

At Gertrudes’, for a peso, adults can watch a two-hour show. Children pay half and can sit on the floor. To ward off those peepers who might avoid paying the fees, it has become SOP to close the windows tight before the evening show begins.

The older ones get to sit either on two long wooden benches that sits five each or on five other wooden and rattan chairs. The tecomers, adult or child, must sit on the floor farthest from the 10-inch TV.

Never perhaps in the visionary ken of the their inventors was it ever thought that the use of the hi-tech machine would evolve this way.

The VCR was originally made film viewing a home-based entertainment for those wwho can affortd it. But in this rural village, it had become a neighborhood treat, making cinema or a sense of it. accessible to a large number of people.

The VCR has become the newest addition to the home appliances that are symbols of social class and mobility in the rural setting. A brand-new set costs 15 thousand pesos and thus , can only be afforded by those who can earn more than the subsistence income.

These high income earners by rural standards would include those who are overseas workers like Venancio, those who are married to foreigners, businesspersons or government retirees who had just received their lump sums pensions. These groups constitute barely two percent of the village population.

For people who earn invariably between nothing and fifty pesos daily (approximately one dollar and seventy cents), the beta is the cheapest of thrills next to a gallon of tuba, the fresh native coconut wine or kulafu, the brand of a cheap liquor.

ON the other hand, a movie ticket costs 16 pesos. The nearest moviehouse is in Tagbilaran City, 18 kilometers away. A trip to the city costs another twelve pesos.

But for a week’s supply of movies on the VCR, a villager only has to shell out seven pesos, four times lesser than what one pays to see a single movie in the city — that is, sans a meal or snacks.

“Before it would have been a miracle if I could watch a single movie in the city once a year. With the neighbor’s beta, at least once a week,” says Nita Ductama, one of the neighbors.

“of course, I would prefer seeing a movie in the moviehouse,” said Alma Blasco. You sit well, the screen is larger and you can stay longer even as long as you want. But that would be very expensive. I wil have to dress up, too," she says. Tonight, she was wearing her comfy house dress of cotton with hibiscus prints.

Gerturdes’ 25-year-old daughter Lorrie gets the film cassette for the daily program. By nightfall, she bicycles to the nearby Poblacion to borrow a cassette for a fee of thirty pesos.

She chooses a daily fare of movies either English or Tagalog, the spoken language of the urbanized part of Luzon and Manila as well as the predominant language of the Philippine cinema.

The audience prefers action movies -- those that feature ninjas and kungfu and karake, with scenes of car chases, brawls, bombings, wars, plane fightings and occasionally, tearjerkers.

“The women love stories in Tagalog. But they complain about the crying. They hate those actresses who simply cry and do nothing about their oppression. Children, on the other hand, fall asleep or beg to go home when tearjerkers are shown.”

The show has become the mother’s informal way of managing kids. A promise of a night before the beta machine would engender good behavior in children.

Sometimes they are even willing to skip supper. Some mothers confide they would produce the few centavos for a show, enduring having supper of salt-laced nilugaw or boiled bananas.

“It also saves me nightly sex with my husband and from pregnancy,” says Dolor Ugis, of the advantage of watching the video for four times a week, Not a few wives agree.

It cannot be ascertained yet if this unexpected advantage could make a real difference in the lives of the women betawatchers.

Predomininatly Roman Catholic, couples in the province’s villages refuse to use contraceptives for fear of its malevolent effects and divine wrath as instilled by the patriarchal Roman Catholic church.

The country’s contraceptive prevalence is a mere two percent, two out of a hundred women use contraceptives while its fertility rate is 3.5, meaning an average of 3.5 children is born to every woman.

Having to watch a movie extends the wives’ waking hours , thus, allowing for less time for lovemaking, especially because the husbands are daytime workers who sleep early or are fishers who fish late in the evening.

Are the men aware of this bonus? Will they consider this as deceit, simple mischief or saving grace?

“My husbvand does not know and I don’t want him to know. He might notice later. I wll see what he will do. He might get angry but I’d rather tolerate his anger and be saved from a fifth child or wear an IUD. That would be a sin,” says Dolores.

Others worry more about the effects of video on the children. “Children have become beta addicts. They’d rather watch than play. Of course, that is better than drug addiction. But they may grow up uncritical about passivity, their own or that of others,” worries Linda Ganzon-Libante, a grade school teacher in the community. With this thought in mind, she refuses to allow betawatching as nighthly habit for her four-year-old Paul Jake.

Because the viewing of the home videos for pay is not regulated as the television programs or the regular wmoviehoues, there is nothing much that can be done to stave off the worries and alarms of mothers and teachers regarding the effect of VCRs on village life.

The beta patronage has also meant the further demise of the traditional nocturnal communal games. On moonlit nights, the village children and young people used to gather to play native games, using the deserted asphalt highway as their playfield.

That's why some women relish an occasional brown-out in the evenings. “As long as it does not last too long. It gives us time to watch the fireflies,” says Gertrudes, pointing to the row of 12-foot mangrove trees her husband planted ten years ago by the sideyard. Fireflies gather there to mate.

Dolores and her friends disagree. Brown-outs give opportunity to longer hours to stay in bed, read to mean more hours for lovemaking and --- making babies. ***