THE POWER OF BU TEJO AND DIAN? THE ANALYSIS OF FEMINIST POWER RELATION IN THE FILM TILIK

Tilik is a short film directed by Wahyu Agung Prasetyo. Given that the film's plot is primarily focused on the relationships of its female characters, the problem of female representation cannot be ignored. This article focuses on the power dynamic between the film's two central female characters, Bu Tejo and Dian, through the lens of Amy Allen's feminist perspective on power. The analysis identifies four dimensions of representation that contribute significantly to the development of their power relationship: physical appearance, marital status, gender role depiction, and socioeconomic status. The underlying significance of the power relationship between Bu Tejo and Dian in the film is analyzed through qualitative Content Analysis and Contextual Analysis approaches. This study reveals that the film portrays both women ambiguously, how patriarchal society creates an ecosystem that pits women against one another for power, and how the minor male characters in the film continue to exert signifficant influence over Bu Tejo and Dian in acquiring, maintaining, and exercising their power in a patriarchal society.


INTRODUCTION
Film, as a form of art and mass entertainment, is one of the most prevalent media products which does not give us the perception of what reality is but instead it provides a certain view of the world, that is 133 always given to us based on a particular perspective and angle (Longhurst et.al. 2008). Thus, according to Smelik (2016), rather than presenting the world as it is, it instead gives a representation from a particular position or viewpoint of a particular ideological view of reality.
Feminist theory is one of the fields that concerned with the issue of representation in mass media, particularly on how woman is being represented, or misrepresented, in film. Tuchman (1981) argues that in pop culture, women experienced what he called 'symbolic annihilation' which refers to the absence, marginalization, or stereotyping of women in many aspects of popular culture.
Although, there are evidences of how women gaining a more prominent and active roles in the media, it does not change the fact that women continue to be mostly depicted in the mass media mostly as sexual objects, and/or fulfilling their traditional roles as wives, mothers, and partners to men (Longhurst et.al. 2008).
Thus, Lauretis in Sutandio (2020) highlighted the importance of feminist criticism in film which could provide the public with awareness on the gender bias that has been normalized and socially constructed by a patriarchal mindset.
According to Longhurst (2008), patriarchy is a social system that is seen as dominated and centered around male through the construction of cultural conventions that provide men with power and exclude women from it. Thus, feminist film critics emphasized on understanding the outreaching power of patriarchal ideology through imageries with the help of structuralist theoretical frameworks (Smelik, 2016). From  According to Allen (1998) when Feminist perspective is being used as a tool to approach a certain issue or phenomenon related to gender, women, and power, it tends to compete or even contradict one another. According to her, the existing feminist account of power tends to only focus only on one-sided perspective and neglect the other aspect that often interrelated by nature. The onesided approaches that she is referring to here is between what she called the domination theorists and the empowerment theorists. Allen (1998)  Allen posits the importance to find a middle-ground for the two one-sided approaches when talking about feminist power dynamic in order to recognize the crucial roles that "some women play in subordination of others, and the way different women are differently empowered by particular practices" (Allen 1998).
Moreover, the approach must be able to address "the complex and multifarious power relations in which women find themselves, wherein they can be both dominated and empowered at the same time." (Allen) Thus, in order to mediate those two existing perspectives, she proposed three categorizations of power in analyzing feminist power dynamic which are power-over, power-to, and power with.
Firstly, Allen defined power-over as "the ability of an actor or set of actors to constrain the choices available to another actor or set of actors in a nontrivial way." The important things to be noted is that the concept of 'power-over' sees feministrelevant power as something that often exercised daily by those who do not deliberately intend to do so. For power-to, Allen defined it as "the ability of an individual actor to attain an end or series of ends." In other words, power to is used to explain the capacity that allows an agent to act despite of the power that others have over them. Lastly, Allen defined power-with as "the ability of a collectivity to act together for the attainment of a common or shared end or series of ends" in order to achieve a collective empowerment. These three concepts of power cannot be understood as three separate types of power but rather interrelated with one another. Additionally, when utilizing them to analyze a complex feminist power relation in particular cases, all concepts may be present or some may be absent depends on the context of the situations.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Few months after its release on but also include the potential aspect of empowerment and solidarity by applying the concept of interrelated triad of power consists of power-over, power-to, and power-with by Amy Allen (1998) which as far as I am aware, has not been done using this short film in particular.

METHOD
The research was conducted through qualitative approach which is an approach that allow a researcher to examine and take note of small cues to decide how to make sense of the context as well as building larger knowledge claims about a particular culture that may help people to understand the world, their society, and its institutions. (Tracy, 2019). This qualitative approach combines content analysis with contextual analysis in film studies. Content Analysis, according to Smith (2017), is a type of analysis that deals with the assessment of materials in a given text in order to obtain a deeper meaning out of it.
On this research, the content analysis will specifically be used to reveal the deeper

DISCUSSION
On this discussion, the analysis is generally divided into two parts. The first part will focus on Bu Tejo and Dian's representation analysis and the second part will focus more on the power-relation analysis between them.  Gotrek: "Okay, let's settle this, how if we elect Dian to be the Mayor? But Tejo: "Ew, no way in hell"

Analysis
Gotrek: "All men would pick her for sure." The Housewives: "Don't you dare to think about that; please don't let her. Knock on woods." Bu Tejo: "Our village would come to an end" (Prasetyo, 2018, 11:56-12:19) The last scene is during the Although, the downside from that is that women are more likely to be "rendered financially dependent on and therefore subservient to, men…left women exposed and impoverished if the relationship came to end." (Auchmuty, 2012

The Gender Role Portrayal of Bu Tejo and Dian
Gender role is defined as roles that "men and women are expected to occupy based on their sex" (Blackstone, 2003).
Blackstone (2003)  In the film, Bu Tejo is portrayed to adopt the traditional woman gender role as a wife and a mother. It is shown from how she mentions her husband to others several times in the film as well as the way she addressed him to others as 'bapaknya  (Prasetyo, 2018, 25:55-26:03).   The nature of the relationship between Dian and Minto is revealed when she expresses her frustration having to hide their relationship and wishes that Fikri could approve their intention to get married.
He then asked her to be patient and to trust him in handling the situation, which is revealed from the following dialogue.
Dian: "I think I can't handle it anymore. Living under the radar like this. When would it be the time Fikri accept that his father is going to remarried?" Minto: "Be patient, dear. I need you to be patient. Take a leap of faith in me. (Prasetyo, 2018, 29:33-29:58) The dialogue above raises two points about Dian gender portrayal, the first one is the fact that she is willing to marry a much older man shows that she is once again going against the society's expectation who expect her to marry a man closer to her age. The dialogue also indicates that she is actually aware of all the negative rumors about her and wants to change the situation by marrying Minto. However, this dialogue also reveals the second points about Dian which is the fact that she is actually helpless and has to depend on two male figures to change the situation that she is in which are Fikri and Minto. Without Fikri's approval and Minto's action, Dian on her own are unable to clear her name in the public eyes and unable to change her current circumstances which further display that she has no power to solve her own predicament without men's assistance. The way the film portrayed Dian shows that even though Dian as a woman is able to show some degree of choices to act against the gender expectation that is forced upon her, in the end she still has to rely on men to fix her life.

Socioeconomic Status of Bu Tejo and Dian
The last representation aspect that is Ning about her husband candidacy (Prasetyo, 2018, 10:52-12:04). In this scene, she is shown to wear gold jewelries on both of her hands. On the same scene, it is also shown from how she gave a money envelope from her husband to Gotrek which are shown from Figure  The fact that Bu Tejo is the only one who wear such jewelries and able to give Gotrek some additional money from her husband shows that she has higher SES among the other housewives on the truck.
The second scene which display Bu Tejo's higher SES is when she had an argument with Yuk Ning who she considered to offended her because she talks badly about her husband (Prasetyo, 2018, 18:48-19:10). On this particular scene, she mentioned about the fact that her husband is a successful contractor and has a lot of connection with politicians.
Such claim for her shows that she does have a higher SES thanks to the financial success of her husband that also elevating her SES as his wife. From the two scenes above it can be seen that Bu Tejo does have a higher SES but it is important to note that the social status and material "I'm sure she has plenty of side jobs, right? It's impossible she just got one job. But what's the other we don't know. A girl just got a job, suddenly got that much money. Of course, people asking around." (Prasetyo, 2018, 3:12-3:27) Bu Tejo's statements reveal that in the eyes of the people around her, Dian does not have a favorable SES due to the her being young and single yet seems to be able to gain a lot amount of money from her newly obtained job which is considered illogical for Bu Tejo and the people of her village.
Furthermore, the circumstances behind Dian's SES is explained through Bu Tejo's statements about her education and family background. She reveals that Dian is not coming from a well-off family which is shown from the following dialogue.
"Just think about, I'm not saying about their family. Her father left her when she was a child, her mother just has a little plot of rice field. That's why she didn't go to college. She just started working suddenly her phone is new, so does her motorcycle. Where does that money come from?" (Prasetyo, 2018, 3:48-4:15) From the dialogue above, it is revealed that she was raised by a single mother and her

Analysis
After analyzing the four aspects of representation, on this part of the discussion I am going to elaborate on the power relation between Bu Tejo and Dian using Allen's (1998) Table.1) and connecting the concepts with how both characters' representation in the film. Allen (1998) defined the concept of Power-To as "the ability of an individual actor to attain an end or series of ends…how members of subordinated groups retain the power to act despite their subordination." Meanwhile, in the context of a film, power to is defined as "sense of personal control; self-efficacy; mastery" (Sutherland, 2017). How power-to is revealed in a movie is divided into three categories (as seen in Table. However, the film also shows that both of them are still highly dependent on men figures in their lives. Bu Tejo is highly dependent on her husband when it comes to her SES as well as her public identity of which without him, she will lose them all.

Power-To
That is why the presence of woman like Dian who is younger and beautiful is considered as a potential threat for her current position. Meanwhile Dian's lower SES is due to the absence of her father that robbed her the opportunity of having a better education and subsequently made her unable to get a better career for herself.
Thus, in the film, she chooses Minto as a way out from her current predicament and try to get close to Fikri to gain favor from him so that she could get approval to marry his father which show how dependent she is to male figures in order to gain SES in similar fashion like Bu Tejo did with her husband.

Power-Over
When it comes to power-over, Allen (1998) defined it as "the ability of an actor or set of actors to constrain the choices available to another actor or set of actors in a nontrivial way." In the context of a film, Sutherland (2017) defined power over as "An actor can carry out his/her will over another; Domination, empowerment." In the movie, Dian is not shown to be able to carry her will over other characters at all due to her minimum appearance and interaction with other characters as well as due to her weaker social standing in society. However, what Dian actually has is the potential to have power over others by exploiting her feminine qualities which is her attractiveness as a woman that could allow her to have power over men that are attracted to her and over other women that are not as attractive as her. However, in the film she is not shown to exercise that power because such actions, that are considered inappropriate for a 'good' woman to do, will put her under scrutiny and ostracism even more. That potential that she has is the very reason why Bu Tejo is exercising the power that she has over Dian in this film.
Bu Tejo's actions and representation in the film falls under the first two categories of power-over that Sutherland (2017) posits (see Table.

Power-With
Power-with according to Allen (1998) is defined as "the ability of a collectivity to act together for the attainment of a common or shared end or series of ends." Meanwhile, in the context of film, Sutherland (2017)