Page 55 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

40 Chapter 2

example of what Edwin Jurriëns calls TVRI’s “monologism disguised as dialogism.”
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In Witoelar’s words, such conversation is “boring.” For the speaker, “it is no problem,
but s/he does not know the TV sets in people’s homes are all being shut off.” What
viewers really seek, Witoelar argues, are unscripted conversations. These conversa-
tions can be about anything—the key is that people think for themselves when they
feel they are “part of the conversation,” that “there is something still unresolved to
be discussed.”
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Perspektif delivered open-endedness, spontaneity, and ventures into the taboo, cre-
ating the commercially profitable tensions missing from government-produced talk
shows. Finally, the show added one more element that violated the regime’s prefer-
ence for resolution and closure. Like the foreign soap operas that proved so popu-
lar with Indonesians, Witoelar’s show kept audiences tuned in through commercials
by using conversational cliff-hangers—breaks at dramatic moments in an unfolding
dialogue.
A 1995 Perspektif interview with author Seno Gumira Ajidarma, “Expression
through the Short Story,” exemplifies these elements. What begins as a discussion of
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literature, focusing on an intriguing, if grotesque, short story by Ajidarma, veers into
perhaps the most sensitive political terrain of the Suharto era—Indonesia’s military
pacification of East Timor, the site of an ongoing struggle for independence. This topic
alone pushed at the boundaries of acceptable speech, creating the kind of tension that
made the talk show format alluring, if not addictive. The conversation that followed,
however, committed a deeper transgression by raising questions about freedom and
its proper limits and then leaving them unanswered, dangling in suspension for audi-
ences to contemplate on their own.
Witoelar begins by providing viewers with a summary of Ajidarma’s short story,
“Telinga” (“Ear”), about a beautiful girl who gets a package from her boyfriend, who is
at war, and finds a severed ear “with blood still on it.” Presently, “she receives another
ear, then several, more and more,” and begins “stringing them up in her house, blood
still dripping.” Ajidarma confirms that these ears belong to people who have heard
something forbidden, presumably from “spies.” Witoelar then asks, “OK, but why do
more and more [ears] come—because more and more people are having their ears
cut off? More and more people hear news that’s not allowed to be heard?” Perhaps,
Witoelar speculates, as “more and more people want to rebel . . . the eyes must be cut
out, or simply the whole head [until] eventually his girlfriend is sent a head.” He ends
by asking: “OK, what does all this mean?”
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Until this point, the interview concerns a story about a soldier, a girlfriend, and
severed body parts. The story’s implicit suggestion that soldiers of any nationality
are committing actual atrocities is a risky topic of conversation. But an Indonesian
audience would be in suspense, wondering whether Ajidarma will admit to criticizing
Indonesia’s military. Defying this anticipation, Ajidarma neither confirms nor denies,
but instead ventures into even more dangerous territory: “Yeah, it’s like this. As far
as the concrete idea, why an ear, that is because of a news story published by [the
magazine] Jakarta-Jakarta sometime around 1992 that shocked me. At that time, the
governor of East Timor . . . Mário Carascalão, received guests who were going to file a
complaint. The article wrote that when four youth entered, two of these did not have
ears. Cut off . . . These two lines hooked, stuck [ nyantel ] directly into my head.”
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Through this conversational twist, an invisible political line has been crossed.
Ajidarma has broached the taboo subject of East Timor and implied that the military
is censoring information or committing atrocities—or both. Yet in keeping with the