Tilik and the Tradition of Visiting the Sick: Representation of Javanese Local Culture in a Semiotic Study of a Short Film

Abstract

The tradition of tilik, the collective visiting of a sick relative or neighbour, is a form of Javanese local wisdom still widely practised, and it functions as a social space in which collective values such as guyub (togetherness) and rukun (harmony) are sustained. This article examines how the short film Tilik (2018), directed by Wahyu Agung Prasetyo, represents that tradition while simultaneously exposing rasan-rasan (gossip) as a cultural practice that accompanies it. The study applies a descriptive qualitative design grounded in the triadic semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and in the orders of signification proposed by Roland Barthes. The corpus is the complete thirty-two-minute film, from which eighteen key scenes were selected against three explicit criteria and coded independently by the two authors before being synthesised into five narrative stages. The analysis finds that gossip in the film works in two directions at once: as a social adhesive that reinforces the solidarity of the group, and as an informal mechanism of control over women’s bodies and reputations that requires no formal authority. The escalation stage occupies the largest share of the analysed scenes, which indicates that the production of gossip, rather than the act of visiting, is the film’s principal narrative engine. The narrative irony of the closing scenes, in which the entire construction of gossip is shown to be false, operates as a reflexive critique of rasan-rasan culture that does not negate the value of guyub-rukun embedded in the visiting tradition. The article contributes a two-tiered reading model, moving from scene to narrative structure, and situates a culturally specific Javanese practice within the comparative literature on gossip as a near-universal social form.