Dancing to distraction: mediating 'docile bodies' in 'Philippine Thriller video'.

This essay examines the conditions behind the 'Philippine Prison Thriller' video, a YouTube spectacle featuring the 1,500 inmates of Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Centre (CPDRC) dancing to Michael Jackson's hit song 'Thriller'. The video achieved viral status after it was uploaded onto the video-sharing platform in 2007, and sparked online debates as to whether this video, containing recorded moving images of allegedly forced dancing, was a form of cruel and inhumane punishment or a novel approach to rehabilitation. The immense popularity of the video inspired creative responses from viewers, and this international popularity caused the CPDRC to host a monthly live dance show held in the prison yard, now in its seventh year. The essay explores how seemingly innocuous products of user-generated-content are imbued with ideologies that obscure or reduce relations of race, agency, power and control. By contextualising the video's origins, I highlight current Philippine prison conditions and introduce how video-maker/programme inventor/prison warden Byron Garcia sought to distance his facility from the Philippine prison majority. I then investigate the 'mediation' of 'Thriller' through three main issues. One, I examine the commodification and transformation from viral video to a thana-tourist destination; two, the global appeal of 'Thriller' is founded on public penal intrigue and essentialist Filipino tropes, mixed with a certain novelty factor widely suffused in YouTube formats; three, how dance performance and its mediation here are conducive to creating Foucault's docile bodies, which operate as a tool of distraction for the masses and ultimately serve the interests of the state far more than it rehabilitates(unconvicted and therefore innocent) inmates.