Northern Lights: A Journey to Love, set in Alaska, features Piolo Pascual as a sucky dad who’s super awkward at trying to be a parent to Piolo Jr. He becomes MU with Yen Santos, who joins an HRM conference in the same state (because there aren’t enough of them in Manila) while looking for her mother, and who is a better parent to Piolo Jr. than Piolo himself. Since the movie is part of the soft travel porn genre popular nowadays in many Filipino telenovelas and movies, the most emotional part of the movie is set under, duh, the Northern lights.
Race
1. Within the first fifteen minutes of Northern Lights, there are three white female extras. America is thus associated, as it has nearly always has been in Philippine pop culture, to whiteness. The three females (Piolo’s sexual partner, a maternal stranger and an accommodating stewardess that treat his son kindly) serve to disarm America as being a hostile place, especially in the age of Trump. Female, white America is the image the audience is made to fixate on to reassure us that things are still alright with the States even as a belligerent white American is deporting even Filipino migrants.
2. Some Filipinos (particularly older ones) don’t even know that African Americans descended from those enslaved by whites. The only black extras in the film are participants in the international seminar Yen Santos joined and are therefore not Americans. It is almost as if it presents only whites as Americans, never people of color.
It sheds some light on why many Filipinos who identify with America identify, in particular, with white America.
Gender
1. That a Filipino is able to bed a white woman (to be fair: it is Piolo Pascual) is a marker of sexual prowess, almost a reversal of sexual politics in the Philippines. While white men pick up Filipinas in Makati and elsewhere, Piolo, a Filipino, has sex with an American in Alaska.
The promiscuity that the white woman stands for stunts Piolo’s development as a padre de familia, his proper place as a Filipino. A relationship with Yen Santos inducts him into fatherhood and thus full Filipinoness.
The film suggests, then, that Filipinos can dabble in Western hedonism, but, eventually, they have to adopt their gender roles eventually. It’s no different, then, from a trip to the casino. Spend big but go to church on Sundays.
2. The women in the film have done wrongs that outweigh Charlie’s failure as a father. They have to suffer the stuff of melodrama. Yen Santos’s mother chose to stay in America away from her daughter; she was physically abused by her husband. The mother of Piolo’s child chose to leave him for another man and stay in the Philippines; she suffers a lethal disease.
The two fathers in the film have shortcomings for what turn out to be valid reasons and thus emerge heroes by the end of the film. The mothers commit transgressions which have to be fiercely counterbalanced by great suffering.
3. Northern Lights ends with Piolo coming home to the Philippines to probably marry Yen, and then they would raise Piolo Jr. There are no scenes portraying the death of the mother who raised Piolo Jr. for most of his life. The feel-good ending is the worst punishment for this “bad” woman.
Class
1. Piolo Pascual’s character is an entrepreneur and an owner of property: the epitome of the acceptable upwardly mobile OFW, part of the “model minority.” The film’s Alaska is a far cry from, say, San Francisco, where Filipinos are among other minorities and where there are homeless Filipinos.
2. In Piolo’s workplace (a canning factory), he is always only conversing with his fellow Filipino worker played by Jerald Napoles.
There are, however, white, male extras in the background in the cannery scenes. I’d like to imagine that they mumble to themselves that Filipinos are taking away their jobs. Alaska once had Sarah Palin as its governor and is a deep red state, with Donald Trump having won 51.3% of the vote.
3. Northern Lights was released about two weeks after the first Filipino was deported under Trump.
4. The setting might be exotically occidental (the titular Northern lights), but conflicts in such films are always familial or romantic, as is the case with media set even in the Philippines. In Northern Lights: Angel/Yen Santos’s mother, Piolo’s son’s questions about his parents, Piolo’s incapability of becoming a father.
Fate brings families old and new together, but it is the flow of capital and labor which pulls them apart in the first place. At least they get to go to really neat touristy places.
5. Piolo, with a smile, explains to Yen that the first Filipinos in America were able to migrate because of the Treaty of Paris. This is Filipino liberal historical revisionism, proving that it’s not only Marcos supporters that perform such erasures. The history of colonization is distorted as the first moment for Filipino success in America.
This is the only historical reference in the film. You don’t have what’s chronicled in Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart. In contrast to incredibly naive view of Northern Lights, Filipinos came to America because of poverty in the countryside due to the rule of absentee landlords. There, they didn’t find success, but exploitation, even in the Alaskan canneries where Piolo works. They found prosperity not from hard work (Piolo is presented as a hardworking father who made sacrifices to bring his family to America) but from collective struggles, unionization.
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