I AM embarrassed to admit that when I watched The Da Vinci Code, I was waiting for the cardinals whose deaths followed the thrill of a difficult puzzle. Till the last 30 minutes of that film, I did not realize that my mind was playing with the plot of Dan Brown’s least recognized novel, Angels and Demons, and not the film I was watching. I remember reading the Angels and Demons and scouring through the thick travelogue books brought in by my sister from her long-ago trip to Italy.

For the first time, I savored the bliss of the intertextual. The plot of the novel was bringing me out into the geography of old architectures and paintings and back again to the story of Brown about a Camerlengo whose good looks and good heart would form the backbone of the story’s cautionary angle. I formed early on my opinions about the characters and found fabulous pleasure in being proven wrong later.

If The Da Vinci Code, in book form and in film, was adamantly presenting itself as controversial, Angels and Demons was simply about sheer fun. The novel introduced a group called the Illuminati. Believe me, since then I had been looking at this lamp and light company along Quezon Avenue with more interest and deeper curiosity. Go look for it: the brand is “Illuminati.”

Were they real? Are they still around? In what form are they now?

The Vatican or those sectors that all got riled up and provoked with the theories and assumptions of The Da Vinci Code must have seen the entertainment factor of the Angels and Demons—neither sequel nor prequel—that there were no significant protests at all about the film.

What the film teaches us, if at all it is convincing enough for any viewer, is that those who look like angels may turn out to be evil; those who we see as demons may turn out to be well-meaning individuals.

Well, that is the film. In Philippine society, we are viewing every day, as it unfolds, the retelling of demons and angels. The lurid stories involving Hayden Kho Jr. are filled with so many characters that it is becoming doubly difficult for writers and observers—even psychologists and psychiatrists—to tell who are good and who are bad. In talk shows, for example, hosts are vainly trying to put on, once more, their own misguided objective stance. It is common to hear TV hosts talk about how everyone is a victim and how everyone has the right to keep quiet.

For those of us who remain as outsiders, what is happening is the exhibition of that which is annihilating the film and TV industry in terms not only of quality but also of the lack of any form of moral turpitude. Everything is really misplaced in this industry:  loyalty, aesthetics, and the basic notion of the good and the true.

All actions are token; all behaviors are geared to making money. The host cannot clearly make a stand because the person who is malignant before him is the same individual who is making sure his face is tight and his zits remain under the skin. The actor is not free to make a comment because he has a past that, if it does not stink of voyeurism, must parallel the present crisis in terms of sexual abuse and disrespect for women—and men as well. The victim is suspect because her career has heavily depended on marketing a body that pleases the fantasies of men. There is nothing wrong with this but if we follow the old dictum of the Golden Mean, everyone is fair game in the arena of selling the body and advertising fantasies—from male bulges to female curves. We are looking at an industry where films and TV programs are always marketed in terms of the physical endowments of the performers and not the endowments in their brains or art sense.

In this industry, the mediocre is fully celebrated and writers seem scared of excellence. Who is talking about Brillante Mendoza and his achievement? Who among the mainstream (this is scary) tabloid writers are writing about the achievement of independent films?

We are to blame. Remember the filmfest fiasco? That was the beginning of the death of the film industry. From then on, people saw that the individuals they lavished their attention with and almost worshipped did not have any qualms at all about cheating. There is no other word for those actions. That was blatant cheating of the most vulgar kind.

Now, we see another kind of cheating because people inside who should be shocked about what is happening in their household are not strong enough to confront the issue. The discourses appear to be about moving on. Moving on to what? To a blissful world where people pretend that fathers are not raping their children, and beautiful women earn more if they allow themselves to be manipulated; where hosts and commentators are hypocrites and pretentious. Come to think of it, we are again protesting because some foreigners uttered a racial slur against our women. One actor was quoted as saying we do not harm our women. Yeah, right. Count the marital battery if you can count them. Imagine the violence against our women and children, imagine, because they are hidden.

Amid this dim view and all that stupidity, there was a rainbow on Monday, with Sandra Aguinaldo presenting a GMA I-Witness episode, called “Book to School.” Aguinaldo, in that deceptively simple approach of hers, allowed us to accompany her as she documented the journey of books to some of the remotest sites of elementary schools. One journey took more than 12 hours, over muddy trails and streams and hills. At the end of the rainbow proverbially were the young children and the entire community who welcomed books for what they are—golden nuggets of wisdom.

There was minimal comment from Aguinaldo (which is good), perhaps to enable us to form our own insight on how our educational system is troubled by lack of money and lack of focus. Again, like her previous episodes on education, Aguinaldo took us once more to a world where there was no television and where bright young girls and boys could only dream of becoming doctors and teachers. They could only dream because the reality would not allow them to achieve those dreams.

We learn in this episode that it would take again some five years before new books will be delivered, if they are delivered at all. We see the entire community come out to welcome the Department of Education officials. We see them covering the books with plastic.

How many people watched this episode? And for those who watched, how many were bothered by how our world in Manila is really so far away from the greater realities of poverty and hopelessness in the other parts of the country? And for those who did not watch the episode and who do not think at all about what is happening out there in the mountains, how many will now think that this Hayden Kho issue is a curse on this city and its so-called celebrities and their sham world of glamour, these men and women who still believe the world revolves around them and their good skin and their Botoxed faces and the designers who design their gowns and the managers who run their lives and the fans who sullenly wait and are always ready to forgive these spoiled and dim-witted ingrates?