The Indonesian cinema of the 1980s marked a period of the highest annual film production and a self-sustaining industry. This achievement unfolded under the tight supervision of the Department of Information1 of the New Order regime, where film was positioned primarily as an ideological narrative medium (read: propaganda) rather than as an expression of art, culture, or grassroots movement. The regime of modernity at the time sought to shape the form, narrative, and style of Indonesian cinema through regulation, censorship, and institutional formalization.
The political economy of the New Order, influenced by developmentalist jargon, narrowed the space for cinematic expression. Melodrama, horror, and action were the genres most easily absorbed by the Indonesian market at the time, perhaps because such fictional narratives provided recreational relief from an increasingly restricted reality. Not only audiences, but filmmakers themselves continuously produced family melodramas as a compromise between market taste and strict censorship that limited governmental critique and ideological narratives.
As products of a specific historical and political context under the New Order regime, images of domestic harmony, individual success, and social stability were constructed through narratives that appeared simple on the surface. Yet the attempt to publicize the idealisation of the nuclear family through recorded media revealed deep ideological tensions. Through the films Bukan Sandiwara (Sjumandjaja, 1980), Secangkir Kopi Pahit (Teguh Karya, 1985), Istana Kecantikan (Wahyu Sihombing, 1988), and Merpati Tak Pernah Ingkar Janji (Wim Umboh, 1985), this essay examines how representations of Indonesian family life are reproduced, challenged, and negotiated through conflicts of identity, body, and social roles.
This article revisits films from the 1980s, more than a quarter century after the 1998 Reformation. This temporal distance ensures a context in which freedom of information and political rights have taken deeper root. From this standpoint, the films are seen primarily through melodramatic and narrative frames rather than cinematic technique, focusing on marriage and family as social institutions.
Family Ideation: Hamoraon, Hagabeon, and Hasangapon?
The image of the ideal family does not emerge from a vacuum. A domestically harmonious, orderly, and heteronormative family is, in fact, a social construction born from the intersection of custom, religion, and state policy. Through Bukan Sandiwara (Not a Performance), Secangkir Kopi Pahit (Bitter Coffee), Istana Kecantikan (Palace of Beauty), and Merpati Tak Pernah Ingkar Janji (The Dove Never Breaks Its Promise), we can observe how the values of modernity are negotiated, defended, or even reimagined. Films from this period provide evidence that the democratic state itself, as a product of modernity, must negotiate with adat and religion to sustain itself.
The shared production context of these films of the same decade of production allows them to record social and political policies through storytelling, characterization, and narrative. The state’s developmental zeal negotiates with local customs, religious conservatism, and norms of sex and gender through its limited instruments (read: law). Beyond the state framework, the films specifically framed negotiations between individualism and collectivism through each character’s relationship with their family.
In the Batak wisdom, an ideal family is structured around the concept of 3H: hamoraon (material wealth), hagabeon (descendants), and hasangapon (honor or social standing). Batak culture emphasizes these three elements as markers of a complete family life. And not only Batak, but this same ideal appears to animate the narratives of these films. After watching this series of 1980s films, it becomes difficult not to read family melodrama through the lens of 3H.
Togar, a Batak man who migrates to Jakarta as a journalist in Secangkir Kopi Pahit, embodies this tension. Amid numerous investigative cases and chaotic life events, the central conflict emerges only in the final third of the film as an internal struggle. The harshness of Jakarta life, far from dreams of stability, cultivates a sense of failure and shame. This shame is laid bare when Togar returns alone to attend his father’s funeral, without his wife and children. Arriving without prior notice and unwilling to bring his new family, his mother refuses to acknowledge him as her son. Her choking sobs and Togar’s defeated expression produce a reflective moment: the family ideal that burdens Togar ultimately creates distance from a mother who would have valued honesty over personal prestige.
The difficulty of fulfilling this family ideal is also proved in Bukan Sandiwara. Hendi, a middle-class man educated in a state academy during the New Order, abandons his conservative reasoning solely to have a child. Even Pia’s offer to adopt a neglected cousin is flatly rejected. Hendi persuades Pia to undergo artificial insemination. His actions are fully consistent with a feudal paradigm that positions him above his wife. The film somehow says, “wealth and honor are not enough for a successful man. A man must have children. No, do not adopt! His wife must conceive and give birth herself.”
The obsession with having children also drives Niko, a gay man in Istana Kecantikan. The film opens with Jakarta’s nightlife in a gay club, effectively capturing queer subcultural icons of the 1980s. Amid laser lights and shadows, Niko encounters an older man repeatedly rejected by others. They speak of aging homosexuality, of becoming undesirable, cursed to die alone. This moment seeds Niko’s internal conflict.
Fear of aging alone leads Niko to marry Siska, a woman pregnant with his coworker’s child. He wants the child to accompany him in his old age. Marriage becomes a mask, but more than that, Niko’s story reframes lineage not as biological duty but as affective continuity. Unlike Togar and Hendi, Niko figuratively exposes family as a site of emotional survival.
Perhaps the very idea of family is indeed something debated primarily among men. Maria, in Merpati Tak Pernah Ingkar Janji, proposes an entirely different way of thinking about family. Maria does not marry, does not want to conceive, and does not give birth. Yet her position presents what may be the most essential elements of family. Not wealth. Not blood relations. Not legality or status and honor. Maria’s story articulates love, sacrifice, and service as values that have, in fact, already been practiced by Inang, Pia, and Niko in different forms. Through an understanding of family that exceeds material frameworks, Maria’s narrative offers another form of family altogether, lived through her position as a member of a Catholic congregation.
In Merpati Tak Pernah Ingkar Janji, if not Maria, it is her father who seems to bear the burden of family idealisation. As a former brother2 who married a former nun, he carries this burden alone, striving to secure his own life and his child’s future while maintaining honor. Overwhelmed by social expectations and by the emotional weight of losing his wife, he takes refuge in religious authority. From an early age, he directs Maria to become a nun, forbids her from adorning herself, and restricts her social interactions and activities in the name of female honor, family honor, or—maybe—his own honor as the “head of the family.”
After being raised for years under her father’s strict control at home, Maria only enters public schooling when she attends a Catholic girls’ high school. There, she encounters a more moderate religious practice embodied by the nuns, who allow her to exercise, socialize with peers, and attend parties. This liberating experience strengthens Maria’s resolve to pursue a life not grounded in wealth, reproduction, or honor as mechanisms for controlling the body and disciplining the mind. Maria thus offers another proposition of family, the one based on aspirations of love, care, service, and devotion.
Family Biopolitics: State, Religion, Gender, and the Body
The unrealistic idealization of the “perfect family” has proven harmful to Togar, Hendi, Niko, and Maria. If fulfilling its requirements is so difficult for them, then who keeps maintaining this illusion of the ideal family? To address this question, Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics becomes highly relevant. Biopolitics describes how the state governs life through the body: managing populations, regulating reproduction, producing norms of health, and constructing the image of the family as a unit of development3.
During the New Order era, the family became the most strategic arena of biopolitics. The Family Planning (KB) campaign was not merely a demographic program but a project of modernity. The state indoctrinated the public with the idea that the nuclear family, which consists of a father, a mother, and two children, is orderly and progressive. Meanwhile, extended families, which have sustained the Indonesian archipelago to this day, were deemed outdated, backward, and unsophisticated. Rather than adapting bureaucracy to the ontological extended families in society, the state aggressively sought to shrink the archipelagic family structure. These policies positioned the family as the smallest unit of state control, as evidenced in New Order films that consistently normalized the heterosexual nuclear family as the only legitimate form of life4.
Beyond shaping the form and norms of the family, New Order biopolitics also operated powerfully within the sphere of global political economy. The Family Planning campaign, intensified since the early 1970s, cannot be separated from international development agendas and Cold War-era aid, particularly from the United States. At the time, population control was framed as a prerequisite for economic growth and stability. In this context, citizens’ bodies, especially women’s bodies, became the point of convergence between national and global policy modernism concerning reproduction, health, and poverty. The distribution of contraceptives and the massive propaganda promoting small families reached into everyday objects, such as statues in neighborhood streets, coins, and films.
The shrinking of the family was not only about determining family size but also functioned as a tool of social control, first through gender norms. Across the four films from the 1980s discussed here, it is clearly recorded that male characters, especially heterosexual men, are driven by visions of stability, lineage, and honor. Female characters, by contrast, function merely as supporters or even variables within those visions. This logic mirrors the state’s ideal family model, in which men are designated as heads of households through all available instruments of power.
The four films analyzed here can be read as evidence of the government’s efforts to ground the idealized family form as small (nuclear: father, mother, child), middle-class, and familiarity with religion, though not excessively devout. Bukan Sandiwara and Istana Kecantikan clearly record these aspects through conflicts arising from violations of religious, moral, and ethical values. Merpati Tak Pernah Ingkar Janji, likewise, unfolds in a private, middle-class school environment, with conflicts emerging from religious extremism. Secangkir Kopi Pahit stands apart as the only film that adopts the perspective of the lower class and extended family life, with a moderate religious orientation.
In Secangkir Kopi Pahit, Togar’s conflict does not stem solely from personal relationships but from the internalization of social norms operating through the extended family as an institution of moral judgment. Batak customary wisdom becomes a mechanism of legitimacy that determines the validity of marriage not on the basis of love and affection alone, but on stability, status, and the image of male success in the urban migrant context. Togar’s sense of inferiority arises from his unplanned marriage to Lola, a Manado widow with several children, who is also pregnant with his child. This reality bears no resemblance to the ideal family he imagined while dreaming of Jakarta’s developed image. Control over the ideal family narrative manifests when Togar withholds news of his marriage from his family in the village, especially when he returns home alone to mourn his father’s death. Togar’s mother refuses to acknowledge him as her son, not because he is poor or has failed, but because he did not share the hardships of his life with his family. She ultimately awakens Togar, who has functioned as an agent of family biopolitics (and customs), to reinterpret family as a safe place to return and express vulnerability.
In Istana Kecantikan, Niko’s family acts as an agent of family biopolitics by pressuring him to marry and provide them with descendants. Niko’s identity as a homosexual man, which he discloses to several characters, adds a distinct layer to his predicament. Ultimately, he compromises with the institution of marriage by deciding to marry Siska, who is pregnant with another man’s child. Unlike Siska, who fears being exposed for her pregnancy before marriage, Niko plans to raise the child as his own so that the child may accompany him in old age. This scene suggests that Niko does not fully function as an agent of family biopolitics, as his sexual orientation is not recognized within its framework. Meanwhile, Siska becomes a victim of family biopolitics through religion, due to her pregnancy by a man who is not her husband.
The standards of purity imposed on women by society are indeed peculiar. One can be certain that their source lies in authorities that have never identified themselves as women. Maria’s family in Merpati Tak Pernah Ingkar Janji serves as a metaphor of the state’s use of religion to control the family as the smallest unit of society. Maria’s father acts as an impeccable authority, determining both her way of life and her way of thinking. He even enforces a version of religion that sharply contrasts with the monastic life practiced by the nuns in the film, who uphold free will and Maria’s personal authority. When Maria begins to exercise her own authority, her father transforms into a tyrant who terrorizes her.
Just as Maria’s father imposes his ideas upon her, the state replicates its family ideology through religion. The state revised civil marriage regulations through the 1974 Marriage Law, making it nearly impossible for contemporary Indonesian films to depict civil marriage scenes such as Niko and Siska’s wedding in Istana Kecantikan. Since the enforcement of this law, marriage has been required to be sanctioned by religion, and religious traditions perpetuate the concept that men marry, and women are married. This narrative reinforces the husband’s authority as head of the household under positive law. Misogynistic interpretations are easily disseminated by those who hold power. Women are instructed to love men, to marry men, to conceive and give birth to male babies, and, even crazier, to preserve their virginity for their future husbands.
Women must love men. This narrative is clearly recorded in a scene from Secangkir Kopi Pahit when Togar becomes enraged at Lola after feeling trapped into impregnating her. Togar shouts, “Look at yourself! Look at me!” as if Lola must desire him. The reverse possibility is unthinkable, since Lola is an older widow with three children.
Women must marry men. This narrative is exemplified in Bukan Sandiwara, where Pia is persuaded by Hendi’s parents to marry immediately. No one considers Pia’s aspirations or plans, nor whether she is prepared to marry at the age of seventeen to a man ten years her senior. Pia’s opinion is rendered irrelevant, as a collective delusion persists that a woman’s purpose in life is to marry a financially established man.
Women must become pregnant and give birth. This idea is explicitly projected in Bukan Sandiwara and can be understood anecdotally in Istana Kecantikan. Niko, pressured by his family to have children, is presented with the solution of marrying a woman who is already pregnant by another man. Siska, too, bears the stigma that pregnancy outside marriage renders her “less honorable,” reinforcing the narrative that women must preserve their purity for their future husbands. Consequently, she agrees to marry Niko.
A Gaze from the Present
Textually, as cultural archives, these films reveal how the state deploys family, religion, and gender as instruments to shape citizens’ bodies and organize social life. Within this framework, the modern heteronormative nuclear family appears natural, yet in fact operates as a biopolitical strategy to produce citizens aligned with New Order–style developmentalism. Cinema proves to be an effective medium for normalizing this agenda by framing idealization as a universal, constructed truth and making it feel ordinary within the everyday situations depicted across the films. For this reason, the four films can be understood as evidence of how the state’s pedagogical censorship functioned as a modern apparatus that defined the “proper” family, determined which bodies were allowed to live, and prescribed which lifestyles were deemed acceptable.
Methodologically, the four films successfully maneuvered through censorship institutions and melodramatic conventions to convey deeply political issues, particularly the idealization of the family as something fractured from the outset. Niko’s plan to use marriage as a means to avoid growing old alone ultimately fails. Hendi’s decision to assert authority and perfection by persuading Pia to undergo artificial insemination results in a psychological burden he himself cannot contain. Togar, who feels diminished by a life far removed from wealth, lineage, and honor, ends up neither disowned by his mother nor reconciled, only to be left alone after his wife’s death. Meanwhile, Maria continues to choose life as a nun after growing up in an authoritarian family, rediscovering her freedom when she begins to reconnect with her friends.
Looking at urban life today, where many Indonesian extended families still live together under one roof, practice intergenerational childcare, share reproductive labor, and continually renegotiate gender roles in everyday life, it becomes clear that the New Order’s nuclear family project never fully succeeded. Forms of life once labeled “traditional,” “unmodern,” or “non-ideal” have instead endured as social practices that are adaptive, flexible, and responsive to ever-changing political-economic conditions. From this perspective, films of the 1980s offer a critical strategy that navigated the rigidity of censorship through empathy, ambivalence, and failure.
Footnotes
- Departemen Penerangan, in Indonesian, also means Department of Clarification ↩︎
- Catholic monk ↩︎
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 139.
↩︎ - Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 242–243.v ↩︎
This article was written and published as part of “BUKAN SANDIWARA” KRITIK! Film Criticism & Curatorial Lab by Forum Lenteng.
Read the Bahasa Indonesia version of this article HERE
