Fear of empty spaces–and silence

Some cultural anthropologists typify the Filipino as a lover of color, activity and hectic energy—but stricken with horror vacui, or a fear of empty spaces.

Nowhere is this more evident than on comedy TV shows, the sets and other visual elements of which are full of often clashing colors and “wall-to-wall” people.

Selectivity, discretion, nuance and other subtle traits and subterfuges are for the Japanese, who can experience an entire world of beauty and meaning in the few words of a haiku.

The Filipino isn’t a delicate poem, he’s—a jeepney, complete with a veritable embarrassment of excessive paint, chrome, plastic and other garish appurtenances and attachments, the better to delight and astound the pedestrian into joining its rip-roaring circus ride!

Tenets

Even in TV dramas, camera shots tend to be full of faces, all crammed into one long shot, thus wreaking havoc on the tenets of dramatic focus, contrast and artistic selectivity.

Why does everybody have to be in the shot all the time? Partly because our talents evaluate “exposure” on a literal rather than artistic level: “If I’m in the shot, even if I’m not doing or saying anything, then I’m still part of the show’s dramatic action (even if, truth to tell, I’m really not!)”

These days, the excesses of horror vacui have polluted even the soundtracks of our teleseryes. Have you noticed? It’s become fashionable for drama series to have their own specially composed tracks for background musical scoring—and, in complete keeping with our fear of vacuity and silence, the musical scoring is so loud and busy!

As a result, quite a number of shows are hard to listen to, because their music and sound effects are so distracting. Why is there so much music employed in our TV dramas? Sometimes, it’s used to cover-up extraneous sounds during location shoots.

Mood

More often, however, it’s used for “emotional blackmail,” to quickly get viewers in the “right” mood.

You would think that the shows would rely on their actors to provide the required empathetic emotionalizing, but their performances may not be deemed dependably dramatic enough to produce the desired effect, so the scoring has to do it—really loudly. —How cynically and lazily knee-jerk can you get? Very.

Incidentally, the “automatic” use of music has polluted even some of our radio shows, with some announcers playing a record as background music even during conversations, interviews and newscasts!

What they do is quickly up the music’s volume whenever they take a breath, as a sort of “punctuation mark” for whatever is being said.

Here, again, is the Filipino’s fear of empty spaces and silence in full display, and taken to its absurd heights—or depths. Everybody shut up or pipe down, please!