JAKARTA TEN-TEN

The Monas mystery gold heist:  Episode One

 Why doesn’t Indonesian television produce local detective programs?

Instead of banal sinetron following a predictable plot, viewers could pit their wits against cunning sleuths battling vile villains across Southeast Asia’s Sin City, home to 12 million stories.

The BBC has been telecasting such programs since John Logie Baird first caught a cathode ray.  The US has never let go of the genre.  Nor has Hong Kong where kung fu cops jump off 40 storey towers to chop up snakeheads..

So why no Achmad of the Archipelago, a silat-master righting the wrongs, defending the poor, confronting the corrupt?  What an arresting idea!

Maybe there’s insufficient wrongdoing in the Republic to stimulate scriptwriters?  Methinks it safe to eliminate that theory.

Could such programs be haram?  Negative: Goodies always vanquish the baddies, though sometimes the two can be inseparable.

So here’s a few suggestions to get the creative juices haemorrhaging.  First we need a hero.

Haji Sjahrit Holmes (I Gusti Ayu Puspawati ) of Jl Bond, disguised as a street musician deducts the obvious others have overlooked while giving his pipe a workout in the kampong. Tobacco sponsorship?  Elementary, my dear Wayan.

Hamzah Poirot promenading La Rue des Thamrin spots clues missed by the clumsy gendarmerie, revealing the dominatrix in the Hyatt as the guilty one, not the scowling satpam.

Nyonya Marples would have no problem seeing the flaws in the alibis of a sinister itinerant vendor poisoning the innocent with toxic bakso. (Is there any other sort?)  This would be The Curious Case of the Kaki Lima.

Murder on the Yogyakarta Express could have a cast of candidates, one wearing a yellow jacket, another green and the third red.  One goes missing. The train gathers speed. It’s heading downhill.  The guard has disappeared.  The emergency lever doesn’t work. A metaphor for the state of politics?

Not interested?  So how about a police series:  The Thick Khaki Line could feature the gallant gumshoes of Precinct 13 covering the notorious Tanjung Priok waterfront. The lads ensure nothing gets through without their knowledge.  And cut.

Too British?  Here’s an original idea – let’s steal from the States.

The Funda Mentalist would have a bland, near mute actor (Nicholas Saputra) playing the role of a psychic.  He and his sidekick Fatima (Alya Rohali) fetching in a blue burqa with matching sunglasses, dispenses with old fashioned policing methods, like door knocking and DNA testing. 

They solve the crime in 38 minutes plus commercials just by looking mysterious.  Should do well in superstitious Java.

There’s no shortage of adaptable ideas to suit Indonesian tastes.  The Modest City, (preserving Asian values), The Touchables (story consultants - KPK), Irian Five-0 (“obscure, confused,” say critics) and BD (Big Durian) Confidential (the smell says it all).

Ponder the plotlines.  It’s dawn at Matabukit Police Station in an overcrowded, rubble-strewn industrial area known for its sleaze.  And that’s just the cops.

A man rushes in, blowing a whistle, waking the duty sergeant.  “The 50 kilograms of gold atop Monas has been stolen,” he shouts, and is promptly arrested for disturbing the police.

What the flatfoot doesn’t know is that the whistleblower has top contacts.  Minutes later the phone rings.  Within seconds the crimson-faced cop releases the prisoner.

The man then reveals himself as Jusuf Bond (Dude Harlino), famous foreign agent assigned by Blok M (Christine Hakim) on the trail of the crim behind the Great Monas Mystery.

Some character tweaks would be required.  Yusuf’s tipple is three fingers of Teh Botol on ice.  His favorite car is a custom-built black Kijang with a bed in the back for kips during daylong traffic jams.

Pak Bond only beds his wives, but being polygamous is allowed four.  They always wear headscarves so their tresses don’t tangle in helicopter blades while choppering over the Presidential Palace or speed-boating down the Ciliwung. Proprieties must be maintained.

Enough imagining.  Now it’s over to the TV stations. Naysayers might argue that viewers aren’t ready yet for programs featuring smart and honest police – the idea is just too fantastic.

Far more believable to the poor are the antics of the rotten and restless in millionaires’ mansions.  Duncan Graham

(First published in The Sunday Post 26 August 2012)

SINETRON AND SHAKESPEARE

Where there’s a Will, there’s a sinetron Duncan Graham

If you consider sinetrons (soap operas) much ado about nothing, the most base Indonesian art form loitering at the depths where tectonic plates jostle for space, then this BTW is about to change your mind.

Lend me your tears, for I come not to bury sinetrons, but to praise them.

My extensive research shows that sinetrons have style and substance. They embrace the wit and wisdom of our times, expose emotions, drive visions, reveal truths. Watch closely and you’ll notice they’re really high culture, up there with Shakespeare.

The prolific penman from Stratford-on-Avon had a way (or as he was wont to say at home, Hathaway) with plots. And so does Raam Punjabi, the producer from Jakarta-on-Ciliwung and boss of PT Multivision Plus, custodian of this republic’s rich tele-literature and clearly a Shakespearean scholar of note. Mainly large currencies,

Take the use of soliloquies. The Bard employed this technique to avoid scene building and shifting and it’s an equally handy cost saver for a budget shoot. The tousle-haired lad who ponders on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as the Prince of Demak, astonished at the arrival of Islam in his hometown, has other things on his mind. He’s just learned that his family is more dysfunctional than the House of Windsor. Better to muse aloud than employ set designers.

Black magic practitioners are the unstable staple of a good sinetron. On the small screen they’re usually men with bad teeth and rank hair and a fondness for goat-skull arrangements. But just like the three hags from the highlands they make vile brews, rabbit on over their steaming road-kill menu and unleash fearsome threats we know will come to pass, like night the day.

Scenes in cemeteries are a dead giveaway of the plagiarism, with a grove of frangipani sheltering the mist-shrouded tombstones the tropic equivalent of a blasted heath. Bringing on the banshees is a masterful piece of theater equally effective on SCTV as it was in the Globe where the God-fearing Elizabethans were as partial to a haunting as any modern Javanese.

Treason, treachery and trauma – but what about love? Muhammad Montague and Sri Capulet are faithful remakes of the timeless theme. In Indonesia these involve teenage trysts set in the local high school, a furnace of raw emotions where trigonometry means plotting a three-way affair.

Mr Punjabi knows well that though the path of true love never did run smooth it does lead to his bank.

Who hasn’t thrilled at the sequence where the red-lipped, rouge-cheeked nymph in her seam-straining white shirt and black skirtlet flits and flirts from class to class on level two?

Missed it? No worries, you can catch it tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Meanwhile her beau with a showroom-fresh Mercedes CLK 350 coupe parked among the clapped-out Yamahas gets a glimpse of her long black locks as she steals a glance over the wall of cancerous concrete.

Don’t tell me this clip doesn’t have a direct lineage to Mr WS’s static balcony scene.

The world’s finest wordsmith was flexible enough to add bawdiness to his plots, a bit of light relief for the folk in the pits. Sinetrons follow suit with comedies of errors, using dishevelled security guards as the knockabout buffoons, indifferent to the needs of the anti-hero desperately seeking to break into his mother-in-law’s house and drip caustic soda into her happy soda.

Not that she doesn’t deserve the crimson phial treatment. These brutal, scheming maid-monstering matrons are determined to thwart young love. They make the mad Scotswoman’s ambitions for her weak-kneed soldier hubby a toddler’s bedtime story.

But all’s well that ends well. The villains in the best sinetrons realise that using shabu-shabu as an elixir isn’t so smart (a message that’s lost on some actors if the gossip tabloids are right). Overnight their tattoos vanish and they awake from their midsummer night’s dream with neat haircuts and no interest in a cold Bintang or a winning hand at cards. So they return to mum, the mosque and the patient virgin in the headscarf.

So don’t knock Indonesia’s sinetrons. There’s method in their madness. Remember – the play’s the thing.

(First published in the Sunday Post 7 september 08)

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SIMPLY SINETRON, STUPID!

Rachmah Ida
WATCH WHAT I SAY YOU WATCH © Duncan Graham 2007

Imagine a production-line where the manufacturer knows little of the consumers, but still claims to understand their tastes.
Imagine a mega-business controlled and dominated by men where the customers are overwhelmingly female – yet women have no say in the product.
Imagine not - this is real. Welcome to Indonesia’s sinetron (TV soap opera) industry, a father-knows-best dream factory that’s way out of touch with its audience, according to Dr Rachmah Ida.
This professional media observer said she’s found that the Indonesian TV industry is conceited, arrogant, overwhelmingly male and unadventurous.
Ida, 38, a lecturer in media at Surabaya’s prestigious Airlangga University, has spent four years studying and analysing audience reactions to sinetron.
She is also a researcher at the university’s Center for Women’s Studies and has written on the way women – and particularly celebrities - are portrayed on TV.
Another interest is the way women are supposed to be seen as the moral guardians of the nation, though seldom as individuals.
Ida studied in Australia under an Australian aid scholarship. She has been awarded a PhD from Western Australia’s Curtin University for her cathode ray marathon viewing, and of course, her academic analyses.
“The audience I found is quite different from the one imagined by the sinetron producers,” she said. “They rely on surveys by media research companies for audience profiles and numbers.
“I spent four months in a Surabaya kampung watching women watch sinetrons. I found viewers to be highly critical of the programs and the characters.
“Their education had stopped after junior high school, but their tastes were quite sophisticated. They often ridiculed the glamour and settings; for them the storyline was most important, particularly if it related to their world.”
For many Indonesians TV watching is a group activity and the source of comment. People watch with friends and neighbors. Often the set is on as background to the domestic chores, though not in Ida’s house where her daughter’s homework, reading and personal study take priority.
In her research Ida found kampong audiences weren’t satisfied with the stations’ offerings. The women also bought and rented VCDs, including soft-porn titles – debunking the idea that sex on the screen is strictly men’s business.
Ida said the sinetron market was dominated by one major production house, PT Multivision Plus, which reportedly controls 80 per cent of the industry. It’s run by Surabaya-born Indian Raam Punjabi.
So his tastes determine the content and his boosters claim he shapes society. But that doesn’t match Ida’s findings. She says the viewers know it’s all froth and bubble and doesn’t change their lives.
Actresses may be forever bulging their eyeballs across the screen, but women feature off-screen only as make-up artists and caterers. The producers, directors, scriptwriters and technical crew are mostly male, according to Ida.
The highest-ranking woman in the industry is Punjabi’s wife and business partner, Raakhe.
If you think some sinetron scenes break the rules of cinematography, you’re right. The producers believe their audiences watch on small TV sets so need prolonged close ups and high-contrast colours to impact.
However Ida’s research showed kampong viewers have big screen sets and can catch plot lines without having slow zooms and close-ups repeated. And repeated.
Sinetrons tend to fall into four main categories:
· Moral Muslims. A hothead youngster goes astray but is rescued by benign friends and relatives wearing well-pressed headscarves and sarong who lead the backslider back to the mosque.
· Morbid mysteries. Superstition, black magic and things that go bump in the night. Devious folk in discourse with devils. The resurrection of those with rigor mortis is de-rigueur. Humans transmogrifying into beasts is the weekly scene-stealer – but don’t expect Spielberg-quality special effects. These ghouls are for giggles.
· Dysfunctional families. Machiavellian mothers-in-law and manipulative maids brew poisons and plan the demise of their dearly unbeloved – while the naïve Bapak is otherwise engaged. Expect many faces to be slapped and doors slammed.
· Campus crises. Boy (with big car) meets girl (with big ambitions). Boy looses girl to rotten rival. Girl realizes mistake, repents. Education? The kids in these teen traumas are more interested in sex and status than studies.
Indonesia’s population of around 240 million is so diverse and scattered there can’t be any typical TV viewer. Generalities are inevitable. But Ida claims the sinetron producers and telecasters using research data to construct an audience have got it wrong.
“Neither the TV stations nor programming producers nor production houses know who they’re talking to and what the public is,” she said. “Even worse they don’t know what will sell well in the market.
“No-one else has conducted a survey like mine with a real audience.
“Viewers aren’t fooled. They’re contemptuous of many stock characters like the scheming mother-in-law and the femme fatale. Such figures don’t feature in their experience. They jeer at some situations as being beyond credibility, or just plain stupid.
“The audience isn’t passive. It’s critical of much of the fare. The women I encountered saw most sinetrons as Jakarta-centric and unreal. Few teenagers are interested.
“Television is an important part of Indonesian life. People want entertainment. But they also want stories that relate to the lives they lead. They don’t want the fantasies of a fictional world constructed by men in the metropolis.
“The producers’ position is obvious and instantly recognisable; any talk about the sinetron as art is for them the height of absurdity.
Ida said viewers were labelled gluttons for goods, wallets to be opened to advertisers. The agenda was about raising rupiah, not intellectual standards.
In her research Ida also learned that you never visit an Indonesian TV station on a Wednesday afternoon hoping to interview an executive. For that’s the wrist-slashing or champagne-popping time when the ratings are released.
In the commercial television circus, ratings are the thumbs up or down equivalent of Roman gladiatorial games. If the figures are plunging, so are executives’ careers.
Few of the people at the top were prepared to talk to her for her research. An exception was Ishadi SK, the president director of Trans TV who told Ida: ‘There’s no idealism behind this business, only how to be profitable.’
There are more than 60 local stations operating across the nation. Another 50 applications for new services await approval. Does more choice mean diversity?
Commented Ida: “After the resignation of Suharto (in 1998) there’s been little significant change among the players in the television business.
“Ownership is concentrated in the hands of a few and is all about creating the so-called ‘little kings’ of regional ownership. Having more TV stations doesn’t lead to more diversity in programming.
“To minimise their risks and uncertainties private TV stations tend to play safe by repeating programs or copying other stations’ productions rather than having the courage to introduce alternative or new programming models.
“The future is scary because media ownership is so restricted. I’m not optimistic of any meaningful change.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 27 August 07)

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