September 30th, 2011 | 
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In this age of information explosion, we like it if we’re first to catch a whiff of something–whether it’s the latest Internet hoax, the most recent scandal, the cutest, darndest YouTube video about cats and dogs and hamsters, the most popular internet meme, the most talked-about film or video, the most obscure music.
This is an age where we pride ourselves for the things we’ve seen. (Oh you still haven’t seen 2 Girls and 1 Cup? You simply must. You don’t know what the Cinnamon Challenge is? You don’t know who Bell X1 is? What? You haven’t seen Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance music video yet?!) It’s like it’s a crime–not being updated.
With too many things to watch out for, no one can take stock of everything and be updated enough. Sure, you can make a vocation of hunting for the latest, taking it upon yourself to be the first to share the link, but that’s tiring. Trust me, it’s perfectly okay if you haven’t watched/seen yet or don’t know at all this so and so film/music video/clip. No one’s going to hold it against you. No one’s taking tab.
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Having said all these, I won’t be ashamed to admit I just watched The Beach two days ago. Yes, The Beach. By Danny Boyle, based on the Alex Garland novel, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. That Beach, with long the /e/. (Care must always be exercised in pronouncing the title, or else it mutates into a whore, or a female dog.) I won’t be ashamed to admit that I’ve never gotten around to watching it. I did see All Saints‘ Pure Shores video (Gahd, I miss those ladies), but that doesn’t count.
And the Beach stars Tilda Swinton too, long before I knew her name. (And since we’re in the act of blunt confessions anyway, the first time I saw Tilda was in The Chronicles of Narnia–The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is a kiddie film, but what’s wrong with that? It’s by Lewis, and all 7 books in his series were written well.)
Back to the Beach. It’s like Trainspotting gone to an excursion. Robert Carlyle’s accent is unmistakeable, his acting piercing, instantly brings back memories of his liquor bottle-throwing and head-bashing days at the bar with Renton and the gang. But this time, his new friend in Thailand is the beautiful, lanky, and very young (to the point of being impressionable) Leonardo DiCaprio. The friendly Daffy (Carlyle) can’t keep a secret anymore and does Richard (DiCaprio) a favor by leaving him a map to the legendary Beach.
And so Richard invites the couple two doors down in his hotel–a French guy named Etienne and his girlfriend Francoise–and together they look for and go to an exciting beach vacation, because the current beach they have is too unwieldy, too naive, too fun.
As luck would have it, the legendary Beach does exist. And Richard and his friends successfully find it, and happily integrate themselves into the self-sufficient Benetton ad-esque international community of the secluded island. The population is almost homogenous–everyone is young and carefree–with a penchant for drugs, sex, and booze. In short, hedonism. Which is okay, but they’ve unknowingly become elitists, only after their own fun (which, come to think of it, is the point of hedonism, really), to the point that they’ll eradicate whoever spoils that fun..
But wait, what am I doing? You probably know about the Beach already. You’ve seen the Beach. That was more than a decade ago. So Ill just go ahead and say that what struck me most about the film was Etienne (of Love Me If You Dare). Yeah, I’m always a sucker for the nice guy who faithfully sticks it out with the shark-bitten chap facing gangrene and all inside a tent, abandoned by our beautiful hedonists back at camp. And okay, the glowing plankton.
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The Beach is the kind of movie that, well, makes you want to go to the beach. My aunt almost went to Boracay a week ago, courtesy of ticket paid full for her by her sister. They were supposed to four in the trip, but then the night before, high blood pressure came or something like that, and she cancelled at the last minute. The ticket–bought off a promo since it’s not peak season– was unfortunately non-refundable and non-transferable though.
The morale of the story? I don’t know. We need a revised law for promo tickets to the beach? Anyone who can’t go to the beach can always sit out. Anyone who likes to go can go now.
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I’ve never been to Boracay. I’ve never had white sand under my feet. I imagine Boracay as only for those with beautiful bodies, and I’m not in the business of regarding my body as beautiful, no matter how many self-motivational gurus tell us that our bodies are works of art. I imagine Boracay as the beach people go to for them to be seen. Everyone going there bent on fun. The same way I felt about Baguio–every cramming as many tourist sites as possible in a day–bent on looking for adventure and fun and the exotic as the guy ahead and behind you.
Whenever me and Edge go to the beach, we have to ask around and search for the water. Often, our beaches are obscure (though not for obvious reasons). They may not be white sand; on the contrary, they’re sharp reefs and rowdy waves, but at least we found them.
We didn’t plan it that way. But there’s some pride and joy to be had in knowing that we found our beach on our own. No maps, no tour guides, no legends rolling around it in mists and shadows. Our only rule of thumb is that it has to be a place that borders on water, and we’ll take it from there.
Once, the owner of a nipa cottage who rented out the place for us asked us why we didn’t bring “chicks” and girls along. It was such a hard question.
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I watched a real nice National Geographic documentary on marine life the other day. So many marine life under all that water of the oceans. Stuff you didn’t know existed. Idiosyncracies and oddities you wouldn’t think the fishes and the shrimps and the Portuguese-man-o-war and the other sea creatures are capable of. So much bustle going down there while we smoke our lives away aboveground and proclaim the night fun. (Clown fishes [the likes of Nemo in Finding Nemo], for instance, have a dependency on anemones for their survival, so caging them in an aquarium is very, very cruel. Which goes for any fish and other animals, of course.
What’s the connection to the beach? None.
I guess it’s okay if I haven’t been to Boracay or any of the white sand beaches before. No one’s taking tab.
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