Jaime Oscar M. Salazar
Still from A Thousand Cuts screener.
A Thousand Cuts (2020), directed by Ramona S. Diaz, depicts the harrowing ordeals that representatives of the news organization Rappler are forced to work through or around as they are targeted by the administration of Pres. Rodrigo Duterte with rumors, innuendoes, threats, and lawsuits. It focuses, in particular, on the tribulations of Maria Ressa, Rappler’s executive editor and chief executive officer. Although the 2019 midterm elections serve as its immediate context, the film endeavors to situate these in relation to the Duterte government’s bloody war on illegal drugs, which has taken the lives of thousands of people via extra-judicial killings, as well as its social-media networks of propaganda and disinformation, which have factored into the erosion of a sense of consensual reality that makes possible discussion, negotiation, and action as a community and as a polity.
That the documentary is reportedly carved out of some 800 hours of footage would appear to indicate the sprawl of its ambition, on the one hand, and the unwieldiness of its material, on the other. It is unfortunate that A Thousand Cuts relies for its structure on facile dichotomies that it demonstrates scant interest in troubling or complicating. These include: Ressa vs. Duterte; Samira Gutoc vs. Bato dela Rosa; women vs. men; good vs. evil; and hatred vs. love. Perhaps the most insiduous—as well as the most conspicuously ahistorical—among these dichotomies is the one that the film, in the course of following Ressa, tends to set up between the Philippines and its former colonizer, the United States of America: invariably, the former is associated with pandemonium and peril, and the latter with security and serenity.
In addition, the documentary evinces little curiosity about, much less engagement with, the fraught, episodically lethal history of journalism in the Philippines. As such, the predicament faced by Rappler, and Ressa specifically, comes across as sui generis, rather than as a fresh iteration of longstanding problems, inflected with elements peculiar to the early 21st century—the Philippines has been cited often enough for being one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists. Nor does the film attempt to touch on Rappler’s development as a self-defined social news network that had bristled with Silicon Valley–style technological optimism at its inception and, according to the “About the Author” section in Ressa’s 2013 book From Facebook to Bin Laden, “uses a hearts-and-minds approach to news through a patented mood navigator”. This is the same approach whose contribution, no matter how unwitting or begrudging, to the rise in prominence of Duterte—a figure with strong and durable appeal for the socio-economic classes of voters to which people lodged in the ownership structure of Rappler belong—cannot be gainsaid. During a 2018 interview with ABS-CBN News Channel, Ressa, reacting to recent goverment moves to shut down Rappler, claimed that Rappler’s fair and balanced reporting probably got Duterte elected.
Still from A Thousand Cuts (2020) screener.
In a speech from which the documentary draws its title, Ressa characterizes the attacks against her and Rappler as representing the death of Philippine democracy by a thousand cuts—a visceral metaphor alluding to lingchi, a gruesome form of torture and capital punishment once practiced in China, which entails methodically slicing off various parts of the condemned person’s flesh. There can be no doubt as to the strength and courage that Ressa has had to muster in order to bear up under and speak out against ongoing state-supported harassment; the film does her no favors by seeming to idealize her into a resolutely unflappable persona who is utterly removed from the daily lived experiences of the people for whose sake she professes to be practicing journalism and clamoring to uphold democracy. For all the access to Ressa that Diaz had been permitted, Diaz appears to have been unable, or unwilling, to provide fuller, more intricate insight into Ressa’s values and motives, much less risk questioning these values and motives in connection with the welfare of Filipino citizens. They are simply presupposed to derive advantage from Ressa’s, and Rappler’s, predominantly English-language, social media–driven reportage and analyses as they participate in civic life, even if Rappler is but one player in the Philippine media ecosystem, and by no means alone in challenging official narratives about the dire state of the nation.
One example in this regard might be found in a conversation that Ressa has with her sister during a family dinner. The proposal of an outing prompts Ressa to rifle through her planner for free dates. In the process, she rattles off a series of forthcoming globe-trotting appointments for the cause of freedom of the press that prevent her from spending time with her loved ones. It well may be that the film seeks here to underscore the scale of Ressa’s sacrifices, which are immense indeed, but it does so without adequate acknowledgment of the scale of her privileges. How many Filipinos, journalists or otherwise, after all, can “choose” the Philippines as their home, in the way that she avers to have done in the wake of the 1986 People Power Revolution? For that matter, how many Filipinos could depend upon the protection and assistance of the United States government in the event that they find themselves in extremis, in the way that Ressa, a dual citizen of the Philippines and the United States, could?
Yet another example unreels toward the close of the film. At a public forum organized in light of a Duterte spokesperson’s release of a specious one-page document identfiying organizations and indviduals alleged to be involved in a plot to oust Duterte, a grey-haired woman approaches the microphone to address Ressa. The woman concedes that drug suspects and media workers have been persecuted by the Duterte government, but says that she, for her part, has been helped by it in that she has seen her retirement pay increase and feels safer from crime. She then asks what Ressa intends to do to make her, and people like her, grasp what the victims of the government have gone or are going through. Ressa responds by intoning German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s “First they came…” It is difficult not to read this scene as anything but patronizing, especially in view of the fact that this is the sole instance in the documentary where an ordinary citizen, who occupies a social location different from that of Ressa and her colleagues, is allowed to share her perspective.
Still from A Thousand Cuts (2020) screener.
The lack of an on-screen follow-up with the woman—whose response to having Niemöller quoted at her is not even registered—or with Ressa ought to be counted as a glaring failure of the film; that the exchange takes place at all, in the manner that it does, is telling of who Ressa imagines to be her, and Rappler’s, audiences, and, conversely, who she imagines them not to be. Worth noting at this juncture is that Ressa has exhibited a paternalistic attitude toward the publics of news, which might be best signaled by her decision, when describing the ills of the Internet in the Philippines, to deploy from time to time the titular catchphrase from Andrew Keen’s incoherent, bombastic screed against Web 2.0, first published in 2007: the cult of the amateur.
None of the above, obviously, is meant to deny the significance of the documentary as a damning chronicle of the Duterte regime’s systematic intimidation of reporters who deliver unfavorable or critical coverage, or, worse, to declare that the nefarious efforts that the Duterte regime has pursued against Ressa and Rappler, and media workers in general, should be in any way trivialized, condoned, or accepted. Rather, the aim is to express deep regret that A Thousand Cuts, likely out of an understandable zeal to drum up solidarity in the United States and beyond for the embattled journalist and her organization, is not as incisive or as nuanced as it could have been, in view of the opportunities that it seems to have had. Its narrowness of vision constrains the film to neglect accounting sufficiently and sensitively for the Filipino people whose struggles and sufferings under their defective democracy—rooted in American imperial adventurism, and now being ravaged by American computational capitalism—constitute so much more than a faraway, if compelling, abstraction or “lesson” for the rest of the world to ponder or lament, even if from the relative discomforts of Davos, Geneva, New York, and similar locales. Freedom of expression and freedom of information cannot be treated as necessary and desirable ends unto themselves; nor should their vexing conditions of possibility and ultimate beneficiaries—only with whose bodies can such freedoms be over and over claimed, held fast, and defended—be taken for granted.