When a government is corrupt, truth is compromised, and reality becomes unclear. Reality is turned upside down on many levels in Dogeaters. It begins at the top with the corrupt politicians and trickles down to the people, who do not know what truth is anymore. The first lady is interviewed on national television and “cheerfully lies” to the world. She is the ultimate actress, the queen of beauty queens. “Corrupt regime—a dictatorship? Heavens no,” she insists. “We don’t throw bananas in the trash while children starve. We don’t take American money and run. Where would we run to? We don’t make deals with the Japs. We don’t let our sugar rot in warehouses.” In fact, she is guilty of all of these things and worse. She is the woman who ordered cement poured over the dead bodies of construction workers so that her foreign film project could be finished on time. The American reporter interviewing her becomes “drained and exhausted” trying to reconcile her lies with his mental images of the truth.

Movies and tsismis (gossip) are recurring motifs in Dogeaters, both of which give the people a false sense of reality. Senator Avila describes the Philippines as a nation that was “betrayed and united only by our hunger for glamour and our Hollywood dreams.” The culture that the characters borrow from American movies, however, has given the Filipinos only dreams because few have the resources to make those dreams real. Movies illustrate the tendency of the Philippine people to lull themselves into a false sense of reality. Fueled by the movies, they escape into their dreams to avoid the pain of life. Delores Gonzaga, Rio’s “Rita Hayworth Mother,” escapes into her bedroom, where she can dream that she is not getting old. She has designed her mauve bedroom to be a soothing “womb.” Romeo Rosales dreams of making it big as a movie star and speaks in phony dialogue that he has memorized from movies. Lolita Luna’s real life is far from glamorous. The Alacrans and Gonzaga families must keep up appearances even though their marriages are a sham. The first lady explains—“We Filipinos . . . embrace the movies. It is one of our few earthly rewards, and I long to be part of it!” She is a big part of it. The reality of a corrupt country offers only the unreality of movies as a cure for its ailments. That is why the Philippines are swept up by American movies in this novel. According to Hagedorn, movies are a great “colonial tool,” a form of entertainment that “seduces the minds and the hearts of people.” Everything is larger than life in the movies. They tell a good story in a short amount of time. It is easy to believe that the stories are true. Everybody looks good. “It’s as close to life as you can imagine,” says Hagedorn. Movies are “hyper-ugly, hyper-violent, hyper-beautiful,” but also hyper-unreal.

The characters are addicted to gossip almost as much as they are to movies. “Ahh, tsismis. I forget,” says General Ledesma. “This country thrives on misinformation.” Throughout the novel, the author mixes tsismis, movies, and dreams with news stories and historical writings, enforcing the idea that the characters cannot or will not separate fact from fiction in their lives. If they do not possess all the facts, they fill in the rest with tsismis. Cora Comacho, “the Barbara Walters of the Philippines,” is always first on the scene to report her special brand of gossip-laced news. The first lady attempts to dispel the unjust tsismis about her extravagance and the...