Confronting the Strongman

In June 2019, a Chinese maritime vessel sunk a Philippine fishing boat in disputed international waters. The incident escalated Sino-Philippine tensions surrounding the contested West Philippine Sea—or South China Sea, depending on your outlook. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte merely shrugged off the incident, blaming instead the local populace for making a big fuss out of the incident.

The Republic of the Philippines, since Duterte’s inauguration in June 2016, has been characterized by this reversed dynamic of conflict in which hostilities or disputes with foreign powers are downplayed. The country’s problems are instead seen primarily as of domestic origin, including drug lords and addicts, political rivals, investigative journalists, and destabilization conspirators. The Philippines today is embroiled in a struggle with itself.

In the past, the Philippines demonstrated a more confrontational stance against other countries. Though lacking in military power, it resisted in particular any attempts by colonial powers to take advantage of its natural resources. From its initial declaration of independence from Spain in 1898—following the Spanish–American War, when it was annexed by the United States as a colonial territory—to the 1946 Treaty of Manila when America relinquished its control, the Philippines throughout its history has rebelled against colonial powers and potential invaders alike.

Today, however, politics in the Philippines has taken an inward turn. Having declared that the enemy is within, Duterte rules the country with an iron fist and his brutal political reign, notorious for a bloody brand of populist nationalism that condones extrajudical killings by death squads, has become a matter of serious concern to its citizens, politicians, and human rights organizations. In recent years, even before Duterte’s rise to power, Filipino filmmakers have also begun to play an important role in examining the nation’s social decay and moral rot.

Throughout the last two decades, the Philippine film industry was characterized by its endless production of sappy romances and inane comedies, relying on a lowbrow strategy peddling cookie-cutter genre films in an attempt to maximize ticket sales. These films featured well-known celebrities, recycled the same type of slapstick humor, and directly copied (or parodied) contemporaneous pop-culture references. Many of these films featured a caricatured gay man as a comic-relief character. For example, Moron 5 and the Crying Lady—a 2012 comedy directed by Wenn V. Deramas, whose title blatantly parodied the American alternative rock band Maroon 5—pits five bumbling male friends against a gay man obsessed with getting the group arrested for murder. A more notorious example is Tony Y. Reyes’s Enteng Kabisote, a series of ten fantasy/comedy films, which exploited the timeworn tropes of the genre. This franchise, which stars Vic Sotto, host of the long-running TV program Eat Bulaga, also repeatedly featured coworkers from his popular daytime variety show, with each film offering metatextual references to badly dated jokes and cultural references. The series’ latest entry, 2016’s Enteng Kabisote 10 and the Abangers, is a shameless reference to Marvel’s The Avengers.

On the margins of mindless mainstream cinema, a more distinguished group of filmmakers presented their films internationally, by and large avoiding the local exhibition scene. Noted “Slow Cinema” director Lav Diaz, for example, has released his incredibly long films, with running times ranging from four to seven hours, to film festival audiences abroad before scheduling a local release. Several of his recent releases, including Norte, the End of History (2013), From What Is Before (2014), and The Woman Who Left (2016), won numerous awards and critical accolades abroad. His films have not been successful in local theaters, however, drawing viewers primarily from academic and cinephile circles. Other independent filmmakers have followed in his footsteps, with varying degrees of success. Director Erik Matti premiered his critically acclaimed crime thriller On the Job during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival before releasing it locally. Much like its highly lauded international release, the film was well received locally. Matti’s film was a political barometer for things to come. For perhaps the first time in many years, perhaps since the work of Lino Brocka (1939–1991), an independent film offering critical commentary on modern Filipino society garnered praise in both international and local contexts. Other Filipino filmmakers took notice.

Sensing a changing of the cinematic climate, other Filipino filmmakers have attempted to echo On the Job’s success, making films other than the standard fare, and have found local audiences receptive to them. Whether opportunistically exploiting a successful trend or sincerely attempting to make provocative films that might spark social debate and change, several directors have introduced some much-needed social commentary in their films.

More than their predecessors, these contemporary Filipino filmmakers have utilized a variety of cinematic styles and narrative approaches, including genre formats, to portray Filipino society. They could be seen, in fact, to be waging a battle for the moviegoing populace. Who can represent the Filipino people most accurately? Who can most significantly broach the major social ills afflicting Filipino society? Compared to traditional movie fare, these new films have inspired changes in both the film industry and encouraged public debate in Filipino society.

One of these new cinematic strands has focused a microscopic eye on Philippine history. In most general education programs in the country, Filipino revolutionaries are portrayed as unblemished national heroes taking a stand against the foreign invader. Countless tales are told of revolutionary figures such as José Rizal (1861–1896), Emilio Aguinaldo (1869–1964), and Andrés Bonifacio (1863–1897). For decades, their faces have adorned Philippine coins and banknotes, immortalizing their heroic status. Of course, authentic history was never a black-and-white battle between good and evil. Pockmarks often litter the fabric of time.

In 2014, a new independent film studio, Artikulo Uno Productions, sought to revitalize both Philippine history and the nation’s depiction in cinema, and announced a planned trilogy of movies. Each would focus on an underrepresented figure in the revolutionary era of Philippine history—General Antonio Luna, General Gregorio del Pilar, and President Manuel Quezon. Besides shining a larger spotlight on these figures, the ambitious project aimed to show a darker side of Philippine history, dramatizing stories not depicted in general history books. In 2015, the first film, Heneral Luna, opened in Philippine cinemas nationwide, and soon became the highest-grossing Filipino historical film of all time. It also received overwhelmingly positive critical acclaim and calls for a renewed nationalism.

Directed by Jerrold Tarog, Heneral Luna is a biopic of the eponymous real-life General Antonio Luna (portrayed by John Arcilla) during the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), recounting controversial details of the period. Other figures from this era are better known. President Emilio Aguinaldo was celebrated as the country’s first president. Andrés Bonifacio was the revolution’s staunchest leader, launching a bloody rebellion against the colonizers. Rather than retelling well-known history, Heneral Luna offers a more controversial take, revealing the political infighting during the brief period of the First Philippine Republic, suggesting that Aguinaldo ordered the assassinations of both Bonifacio and Luna. Apart from more advanced studies, this controversial issue is rarely taught in general classroom curricula. Most courses regale students with narratives of overwhelming bravery in the face of colonizers. In contrast, Heneral Luna offers a healthy dose of introspective doubt for consideration by the general populace.

Simply because of its historical setting, Heneral Luna marked a cinematic milestone by dramatizing a previously underrepresented time period. The Philippine colonial era included conflicts with three colonizing nations—Spain, America, and Japan. Today’s history students often learn only about the Spanish Occupation, which, because of its sheer length (333 years from 1565-1898), reduces the periods of the American (48 years from 1898-1946) and the Japanese (3 years from 1942-1945) occupations to mere footnotes.

Heneral Luna focuses on the American period, beginning as the long-standing Spanish colonizers surrender control over the Philippines to the Americans in a farcical battle meant only to save Spain’s dignity. Emancipated for the first time in three centuries, the Filipino people prematurely celebrated their independence. The Americans quickly moved in, claiming the islands as their own colony. Sensing a mere changing of the guard, Filipino revolutionaries bristled at the new occupying power. The fledgling Philippine government, headed by Aguinaldo, nevertheless welcomed the possibility of a peaceful coexistence with the new colonizers.

The film thus sets the stage for a civil war between two ideologies. On one side, Aguinaldo sits supplicant to bootlicking businessmen and colonizers. On the other, Antonio Luna poses as a braggadocious alpha-male figure, supposedly the country’s needed savior. The film’s premise immediately harks back to the age-old colonial conundrum: whether to fight or collaborate with the colonial power. To its credit, Heneral Luna subverts expectations, hinting at an internal conflict that presents a more immediate dilemma than the colonizer.

Despite its historicity, Heneral Luna draws much of its power from its protagonist’s charisma. Luna carries himself like a Western movie star, toting guns and proclaiming his devotion to a patriotic cause. With a revolver in hand, he stands up to Americans and lackadaisical Filipinos alike. To the Americans, Luna was a feared military tactician. To his Filipino compatriots, he was a harsh, iron-fisted disciplinarian. His biggest decree as a military leader—the dreaded “Artikulo Uno”—rang perilously in the ears of his subordinates. Regarded as a bloody cry for patriotism, Artikulo Uno was a simple order—anyone who disobeys orders will, without a trial, be stripped of rank and weapons and immediately executed. Lacking any fear himself, Luna instilled crippling fear in the minds of his countrymen.

Like the typical action-film star, Luna was beholden to the women in his life—his mother, his mistress, and his medics. To Luna, femininity was a tool to bolster his own chivalrous masculinity. Isabel, Luna’s mistress, would even subordinate herself to war, Luna’s “true wife.” Luna’s perfect strongman image was complete—commanding, charismatic, and selfless.

From Luna’s perspective, the Filipino people were an opportunistic rabble, content in their comforts and concerned only with lining their own pockets. They served as the perfect strawmen for Luna’s iron-clad strongman. The American colonizers figure in only a small part of the film, praising the tactics of the strongman confronting them and laughing at the Philippine government’s internal struggles. The film thus functions as an allegory—Luna, the strongman the country needs versus a corrupt Philippine government. Heneral Luna isn’t about the Philippines battling the American invasion but Filipino versus Filipino. Metaphorically, it laments contemporary Filipino society’s lack of unity and widespread corruption.

During the film’s theatrical release, another strongman was already on the rise in the Philippines. The mayor of Davao City, Rodrigo Duterte, had continually flirted with a presidential campaign for the 2016 presidential elections. His eventual political platform, in an echo of Luna’s brutal Artikulo Uno, emphasized his brutal mayoral technique of extrajudicial killings. He wanted to clean up the Philippines by using the same militaristic tactics in an all-out war on drugs. Drugs—both dealers and users, he contended—were the nation’s most pressing problem.

Since Heneral Luna glorified strongman tactics, Duterte’s supporters quickly latched onto Luna’s personality as an analogue in the effort to promote their candidate’s national political legitimacy. Politically, Duterte’s presidential campaign never actually used the film as a promotional vehicle. Duterte’s comparisons with the iron-fisted general were never officially sanctioned by either Duterte’s camp or the film’s producers. Nevertheless, the compelling portrayal of Luna’s exercise of ironclad discipline ingrained the image of the strongman into public consciousness. The stage was set.

Retroactively, Duterte’s critics denied the influence of Heneral Luna as a crucial factor in Duterte’s decisive electoral victory. A Filipino historian, Lisandro Claudio, wrote that Heneral Luna “foregrounded a strong, dictatorial leader at a time when people were sick of effete and opportunistic liberals.”1 The coincidence was too damning.

Responding to these charges, the film’s director, Jerrold Tarog, washed his hands of any blame, denying that his film romanticized dictators.2 In Tarog’s defense, Luna was a flawed figure, constantly relying on his friends for moral guidance. Having his film herald a potential dictator was never the filmmaker’s intention. He criticized Claudio for using his academic prestige as an adversarial tool against aspirational filmmakers. But he did acknowledge the film’s fallibility. “Because a lot of Filipinos seem to have a fondness for strongmen,” he commented, “we knew Luna’s behavior was the thing that will be remembered the most.”

Apart from the political controversy it generated, Heneral Luna’s box-office success presaged the new wave of social commentary films, which began offering in-depth examinations of more gruesome aspects of Philippine culture. The following year, Mikhail Red released his allegorical police procedural Birdshot. And in 2018, Erik Matti’s crime thriller BuyBust offered a brutal look at Duterte’s drug war. Notably, all three films opened theatrically either immediately before or during the Duterte Administration. While Heneral Luna, a historical biopic about a nationalist strongman, practically heralded the coming of the iron-fisted president. Birdshot and BuyBust, on the other hand, both decried the strongman, favoring their survivalist heroines instead. In addition, BuyBust directly criticized the Duterte’s bloody war on drugs.

Compared to Heneral Luna’s historicizing, Birdshot sets its crime drama in a more contemporary setting. Fourteen-year-old farm girl Maya (Mary Joy Apostol) inadvertently shoots an eagle. (The Philippine Eagle, a national symbol, is protected as an endangered species and killing one is punishable by law.) At the same time, local rookie policeman Domingo (Arnold Reyes) is investigating the mysterious disappearance of a bus heading to Manila, the nation’s capital. Midway through his investigation, Domingo’s superiors force him to drop the case, assigning him instead to find the missing eagle. His grizzled and cynical partner Mendoza (Heneral Luna’s John Arcilla) advises Domingo to follow orders. Meanwhile, Maya and her father (Ku Aquino) hasten to hide the incriminating evidence.

Birdshot is a tale mired in corruption. Though set in a quaint rural town, the film hints at shadier dealings outside of its provincial setting. The precinct’s sudden investigative shift to a smaller criminal case suggests the influence of unseen forces: corrupt politicians or money-hungry corporations. Like Heneral Luna, Birdshot does not reveal the identity of the mastermind of this subterfuge. Although we see only his victims, the film functions as a call for action, especially since Birdshot alludes to real-life incidents in the Philippines. The film’s missing bus investigation alludes to the controversial Maguindanao massacre in 2009, a horrendous politically motivated assassination of a politician’s family, supporters, and journalists. Eventually, Domingo discovers the missing passengers’ identities: Manila-bound farmers trying to dispute the illegal seizure of their farms by rich landowners. The film hereby alludes to just one of numerous land-claim cases throughout the country, particularly Hacienda Luisita, a sugar plantation in the northern part of the Philippines where striking farmworkers were massacred by police and soldiers.

After a threat to his family, Domingo accedes to the orders of his precinct superior. He drops the missing bus case and pursues the mystery of the eagle’s disappearance, for which he mistakenly accuses Maya’s father. In the end, Domingo, Mendoza, and Maya’s father end up in an armed confrontation, leading to death of the latter two.

In contrast, Maya does not share in Domingo’s idealism or Mendoza’s cynicism. Even though she killed the eagle, Maya maintains her innocence. She never truly understands the political implications of her act. Her two instances of violence are borne only out of the necessity for food. As she buries the eagle’s carcass, she cuts off a talon and fashions a good-luck amulet. In the end, she is faced with the opportunity to avenge her father’s murder. She points the shotgun at Domingo but lets him go. She never develops a taste for meaningless violence. She is a survivor, untainted by politics or corruption.

Maya does not follow in Antonio Luna’s footsteps. Her youth is in stark contrast to the latter’s heavy-handed military discipline. Nevertheless, the frail Maya survives unscathed. After falling asleep atop the bodies of the dead, including that of her father, she limps back to where she had killed the eagle, following the calls of the iconic bird. Upon returning to the reservation forest, she learns the truth about the missing farmers, discovering their corpses dumped unceremoniously in a mass grave. The sanctuary for a national symbol has been used to hide a brutal injustice from prying eyes. After revealing this gruesome scene, the camera tilts upward toward the pale blue sky. Two eagles fly overhead, seemingly guarding (or lamenting) the country’s victims. In her confusion, Maya unwittingly joins them as a keeper of the truth. Birdshot salutes the victims of wanton violence and political corruption. Whereas Heneral Luna screamed for violence, Birdshot calls for survival without it.

BuyBust features the heroine’s role in the film’s social commentary even more prominently. Rather than offering an allegory, Erik Matti’s crime thriller takes the battle directly to Duterte’s bloody drug war. A Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) squad takes on a slippery drug syndicate hidden within the labyrinthine alleyways of the Barangay Gracia ni Maria shantytown. After a double agent’s betrayal, the drug bust quickly becomes a game of survival against the brutal syndicate and an avenging populace.

BuyBust’s social commentary often manifests itself in the rivers of blood spilled in its unrelenting action sequences. Bullets rain down endlessly on both innocent citizens and criminals. A woman’s head is chopped off using garden shears. A man dumps a revving motorcycle on top of another man. In its graphic depiction of violence, the film paints a macabre picture of the Philippines’ current war on drugs: a deadly conflict between the government, the criminal underground, and an innocent populace.

Like Birdshot, BuyBust subverts the genre’s traditional modes of heroism. Instead of the burly male protagonist, BuyBust stars the lithe Anne Curtis—who usually graces romantic comedies like Bakit lahat ng gwapo may boyfriend?! (Why Does Every Handsome Guy Have a Boyfriend?!, 2016)—as the hardy but traumatized PDEA agent, Nina Manigan. Unlike Western cinema, Philippine cinema lags far behind in its portrayals of female heroes. Throughout most of Philippine cinema history, the action genre has been dominated by rugged men armed with wit, bravado, and heavy weaponry. BuyBust was thus a milestone for Philippine cinema.

Unlike the enraged Luna, Manigan is a reserved, struggling heroine. Her trauma—as the only surviving member of her former team—reveals her as a vulnerable but strong heroine. She doesn’t dazzle with her gunplay. She doesn’t blurt out witty one-liners after every kill. She is badly wounded by stabs and bruises. By the end, Manigan is a broken human being, barely able to stand. Still, her triumphant ordeal is portrayed as an act of survival and not the exploits of a hero.

In contrast, Brandon Vera, a mixed martial artist, plays the brusque Rico Yatco, Manigan’s squad partner. Compared to Manigan, Yatco looks more like an action hero, boasting an extraordinary physique, deadly fighting skills, and quick-witted one-liners. Indeed, minus the nationalistic fanaticism, Rico Yatco is Antonio Luna reborn. Like Luna, Yatco carries an anting-anting, a talisman that supposedly provides heavenly power. Luna had his mother’s medallion; Yatco has his flattened tansan (bottle cap). Whereas Luna died spectacularly as a martyr, Yatco dies without fanfare, off-screen, just one among the mountains of bodies piled up at the end of BuyBust’s bloodbath.

Manigan’s only action-packed exploit is portrayed in a continuous sequence shot showing her moving through claustrophobic streets and over crowded rooftops. Though impressive from a cinematic standpoint, it thinly veils a gruesome truth. Instead of leaving dead gang members in her wake, Manigan leaves only the broken bodies of enraged civilians. Her aggressors are not drug lords or users but members of the population she swore to protect. At the end, she finds herself broken among a sea of corpses, like Birdshot’s Maya, but Manigan has been an active participant in the brutal violence. BuyBust isn’t just a tale of good versus evil. It’s a ruthless portrait of a Filipino society where no one survives. It’s a peek into the country’s potential future: a nauseating sea of unidentifiable corpses masked as a glorious crusade.

Like Mikhail Red, Erik Matti reversed the masculine braggadocio of Tarog’s film. BuyBust reinforces the futility of a one-man crusade against society. As the film ends amid mass carnage, Manigan, the sole survivor, discovers a deeper conspiracy within her own agency. Her own government, she learns, is funding the same drug cartels she’s fighting against, perpetuating a never-ending war. Like Heneral Luna and Birdshot, the plot’s masterminds are never brought to light. They remain in the shadows waiting to be discovered.

Today, Filipino moviegoing audiences have joined the rising clamor for higher quality films, a new class of Philippine cinema that could put the country back on the map. Besides calls for civic action, a growing number of films have explored or decried the problems of Philippine culture. Some of them have even inspired or at least preceded much-needed social change. In the realm of sexuality, for example, Joel Lamangan’s 2018 film Rainbow’s Sunset (starring the late Eddie Garcia) explored homosexuality and the family in today’s still-homophobic Philippines. The following year, coincidentally, President Duterte approved the controversial Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity or Expression (SOGIE) Bill, a landmark piece of legislation that seeks to criminalize discrimination against the Filipino LGBT community.

Meanwhile, directors Matti and Tarog are trying to duplicate their past successes. Matti is in postproduction with On the Job 2, a sequel to his 2013 blockbuster that will supposedly focus on corruption and media censorship. Tarog recently released the second film in his planned historical trilogy, Goyo: The Boy General. Unlike the bombastic Heneral Luna, Goyo tapers off into a more reflective take on the Philippine–American War. Tarog is currently directing the third and final film in the series, a biopic of President Manuel Quezon.

Philippine cinema today seems to be in good hands. Matti, Red, and Tarog have offered three different views of Filipino society and history. Despite their diverse approaches and ideologies, each of these filmmakers relates the same fundamental truth—a creeping cancer is destroying society from inside. Each of their films presents an appeal to action, whether it is merely to survive or to confront the problem. Regardless, they all declare the impossibility of inaction. We are all either victims or enablers.

The Philippine film industry has come a long way from its domination by cheap comedies and corny romances. Despite the persistence of cookie-cutter formula productions, the resurgence of socially conscious filmmakers has breathed fresh life and a new hope into a stagnating art form. In this renaissance, the film industry has presented an accurate and provocative picture of contemporary Filipino society. The nation is still at a crossroads under the administration of its polarizing leader. In this latest age of the strongman, society is constrained by inaction and subservience, often reduced to mere hopes for survival. If the social commentary offered by some of the leading filmmakers in the Philippines today is any indication, the country’s future will be defined by those who will dare to act.

Edited and published on Cineaste Magazine.