Jaime Oscar M. Salazar
In late 2017, a 15-year-old boy in Bago City, Negros Occidental died by suicide. His mother, a farmer, sought aid from an anti-crime civil society organization in shedding light on the circumstances of his death. It emerged that the boy, unbeknown to his family, had been blamed for stealing a classmate’s iPad.
Notwithstanding slight differences of detail in the news articles that covered the situation, it appears that, following the disappearance of the device, a sale ad for it surfaced on the boy’s social media account, prompting a flurry of derogatory messages that wound up spreading through his school, where he was allegedly shamed in public, during a flag ceremony, for theft. He was then brought to the city police station by his adviser, but, she claimed, it was only so that she could assist him in filing a formal complaint that his account had been hacked to frame him. Unfortunately, the police said that hacking was beyond their jurisdiction.
The same adviser later returned to the police station, this time at the behest of the owner of the missing iPad, with a view to obtaining support for the organization of an entrapment operation against the boy. The operation was set into motion, but failed; the boy did not show up at the designated time and place, because he had already taken his own life.
The Commission on Human Rights, which was asked to conduct an investigation into the matter by the above-mentioned civil society organization, concluded that cyberbullying was the “proximate cause” of the demise of the boy, an honor student whom his mother described as having had so many dreams. It is not clear if the iPad ever turned up.
Arden Rod Condez has largely drawn on this tragedy for his first feature, John Denver Trending (2019), which he wrote and directed. It is not merely faithful transcription or facile dramatization, however. Nor does it have to be reduced to a cautionary tale about cyberbullying, which, in any case, as a legal term of art, is restricted to technology-enabled acts or expressions of hostility between students at basic education level. The film, whose dialogue is almost entirely in Kinaray-a, makes out of the rural town of Pandan, Antique a richly textured and terrifying microcosm of the country, where notions of truth, justice, and due process have become the objects of increasingly fierce—or, at the very least, increasingly visible and tangible—contestation, thanks in no small part to how social media incent and exacerbate confirmation bias, affective polarization, and unreflective response. It moreover rehearses long-held and lingering anxieties over the fallibility of audiovisual representations, which abstract and ambiguate even as they are purported merely to capture and transcribe truth, as exemplified in the present day by the notions of hulicam and resibo. Finally, the ways in which the film alludes and resonates with the current sanguinary regime, headed by a parochial-minded “president mayor” whose rise to power and maintenance of control have derived, to a substantial degree, from the machinations of an army of online trolls, cannot be missed.
Moments after he is pantsed and taunted for his tattered underwear during a dance practice session that is being broadcast via Facebook Live, John Denver, an eighth-grade student at Sta. Ines Catholic High School, storms away from the other members of the dance troupe to retrieve his backpack from a nearby classroom, so that he can then meet his mother at the public market. The shot lingers on the spot from which John Denver takes the said backpack, showing a charger that is plugged into a socket, but attached to no device. As John Denver gets ready to leave the school, his fellow dancers yell at him to stop: Makoy’s iPad, which had been left charging in the classroom, is gone, and given that John Denver was the last one to be seen exiting from the room, he must have taken the tablet—a gift from Makoy’s dad, who works in Saudi Arabia.
John Denver angrily denies even having seen the iPad, much less swiped it, which does not deter Makoy from grabbing John Denver’s backpack with the aim of examining its contents. This sets off a chase involving around a dozen boys that culminates on the rooftop of one of the school’s buildings. Makoy is about to open the backpack when John Denver catches up to him, and the two begin to shove and kick each other, with John Denver quickly gaining the upper hand. Most of the other boys are content to watch and egg on the scufflers; one of them, Carlos, opts to perform a defining gesture of the contemporary period: whip out his mobile phone in order to capture the event on video.
Uploaded by Carlos to his Facebook account, the video—accompanied by photographs of the injured Makoy, an accusation of theft against John Denver, and exhortations to “make this bastard famous” and “like and share until it reaches President Duterte”—takes on a sensational life of its own, circulating within and beyond Pandan, and prompting widespread condemnation of John Denver. The school principal launches an investigation, which is complicated by the decision of Elvisa, Makoy’s mother, to bring in a police officer, SPO1 Rolando Corpus, to intimidate John Denver into confessing to the crime. Public outrage is further fueled when several of his peers, frustrated that John Denver has not been immediately penalized, set up a dedicated Facebook page to document and amplify his past wrongdoings.
Amid all this, John Denver’s sole ally and defender is Marites, his mother, who insists that nothing has come to light to implicate him: surely her son’s history of wayward behavior and her family’s poverty cannot stand in place of solid proof? Elvisa is unsympathetic, and Marites’s appeals to the barangay captain and the mayor to look into the controversy and clear her son’s name are ultimately met with indifference. “We can’t control what other people think,” the mayor tells her.
Jansen Magpusao, in his first film role, endows the sullen, scrappy John Denver with an air of vulnerability that, as his ordeal drags on, gradually turns into hauntedness, inspiring both pity and rage. Meryll Soriano’s Marites is prickly, ever ready to reproach her troublesome eldest son, but resolute in her devotion to him.
At the heart of the film lies a provocative proposal: even as digital culture may be perceived as generally disruptive of small-town mores, there is an essential continuity between them. The predicament of John Denver is paralleled, if in a manner that could have been more fully fleshed out, by that of Dolores, an old woman who is rumored to be a witch and believed to be responsible for the recent passing of one of John Denver’s neighbors. As with John Denver, the evidence against Dolores is circumstantial at absolute best, and yet functions as no impediment to the traffic of denunciatory speculation about her: that she is a harbinger of evil that must be fought off, whether through the interventions of local shaman Tay Bining or the conduct of warding rituals like tire-burning, comes across as so broadly and deeply held a conviction that alternative explanations are difficult to entertain.
Moving along this vein, the small town could be understood as anticipating the exclusionary epistemic structures that social media, by design, tend to encourage their users to form—which is not to say that either the small town or the social-media epistemic structure is necessarily monolithic or monologic. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen suggests that social-media epistemic structures may be conceptually distinguished into two types: the epistemic bubble, in which members leave out, irrespective of malice or deliberate intent, relevant sources of information; and the echo chamber, in which members actively nurture insularity and discredit relevant sources of information that are identified with non-members. While exposure to omitted sources is usually sufficient to pop the epistemic bubble, doing so only reinforces the echo chamber, as such sources have already been pre-emptively undermined, in a process that Nguyen compares to cult indoctrination. To unmake an echo chamber—no easy task—it is imperative to “to work to repair the broken trust between echo chamber members and the outside social world“.
This account of the echo chamber helps illuminate how purveyors of disinformation are able to sustain their sway over their constituencies, regardless of the sheer outlandishness of their assertions or the utter thoroughness with which these might be debunked. In John Denver Trending, the purveyor in question is the presumably Manila-based, because Tagalog-using, Ka-Tol Marvin, a high-profile pseudonymous commentator on political issues and public affairs who operates the “Ka-Tol Marvin Blog” page on Facebook. Learning of the dispute involving John Denver, Ka-Tol speaks with Mando, a neighbor of John Denver’s, whose carabao’s expiry the boy had inadvertently contributed to roughly a month before—Marites has been paying for the value of the animal through her labor at Mando’s coprahan, to the detriment of her own mat- and bag-weaving micro-enterprise.
Ka-Tol Marvin, living up to his slogan, “Tunay na Pagbabago”, doctors the record of his video call with Mando so that Mando appears to have outrightly inculpated John Denver for the theft of the iPad and then publishes it on his page, goading the priests who run Sta. Ines to cease dragging their feet and take decisive action, now that he has dug up ostensibly reliable testimony.
Although the film might be said to lapse into excess at this juncture—Mando, while far from well-disposed to John Denver, could have assailed the integrity of the doctored video—a crucial point is underscored here: the sundry harms that young people suffer in relation to social media are, to a significant extent, facilitated or directly perpetrated by the adults who are supposed to provide them with care and protection. Ka-Tol Marvin is appallingly rapacious in his eagerness to attack a virtually defenseless teenager for gain, even if just in terms of that most elusive of currencies, online clout, but the opportunity that he exploits is the collective creation of the various figures of authority in Pandan—other children’s parents, teachers, school administrators, priests, politicians, police officers, social welfare workers—who fail John Denver and the ideals that they, by virtue of their positions in institutions that are vital to the formation and cultivation of the young, are bound to uphold.
The magnitude of their failure is intimated by the religious and patriotic materials—songs, prayers, pledges—that are woven into the sound design of the film, and accentuated by John Denver’s anguished arrival at a point, hastened by a harrowing interview with the gratuitously brutal SPO1 Corpus, where he is unable to muster the will to imagine a future more compelling than death. As he careers toward his end, the camera judders to ravenous life in hot pursuit: first, as predator, then, as scavenger.
The film closes with a sequence of passage that denies the camera—and by extension, the viewers—its contentious function of witness. After having waited in vain at Sta. Ines for her son to come back from the police station, Marites is shown walking away from the school and toward the camera in a tracking shot, John Denver’s classmates curiously peering after her, to the non-diegetic strains of the Marian hymn “Bulahan nga Nanay”, before the film cuts to black: at once a holding in abeyance of Marites’s discovery that she has lost her son, and, perhaps more to the point, a withholding from the viewers of the sight of her suffering—their recognition of the horror and grief to come does not depend upon their beholding her.
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the 30th Annual Circle Citations for Distinguished Achievement in Film for 2019 is now scheduled on the first quarter of 2021 as a virtual event. The list of nominated and winning films can be found here. Reviews for these films, as well as other long-listed films, will be posted this week.