Parenting & Family Quote by Jessica Hagedorn

Nostalgia turns acidic in Hagedorn's mouth, and that pivot is the point. She starts with the intimacy of childhood spectatorship - "I loved all kinds of movies" - then uses the language of cultural ecology ("healthy film industry") to frame cinema as a living system that can be starved, captured, or poisoned. The small heartbreak is in the contrast: a pluralistic movie culture becomes a narrowed pipeline of sensation, where genre isn't entertainment so much as a symptom.

Her list at the end is brutally blunt on purpose. "Women get raped; men get shot" reads like a plot summary reduced to its ugliest mechanics, stripping away the alibis of style, star power, or "realism". It's also a gendered autopsy: women's bodies as spectacle, men's bodies as targets - two forms of disposable flesh that mirror a society trained to accept violence as normal, even profitable.

Context matters: Hagedorn is a Filipina American writer whose work sits in the wake of dictatorship, U.S. influence, and the churn of global media. When an industry "only" makes certain kinds of films, she's not just critiquing taste; she's pointing at economics, censorship, and audience conditioning. Exploitation cinema becomes a shorthand for what happens when imaginative range collapses: the screen stops reflecting a country's complexity and starts rehearsing its traumas, over and over, until repetition masquerades as truth.