Patrick D. Flores
The film He Who Is Without Sin (2020) ends as it begins: by way of how the character of Martin Pangan (Elijah Canlas) is initiated into the ways of appearing and being recognized. First through a simulation of a newscast in his classroom in which as a distracted student of mass communication he is taught the consequences of image. Then through a mirror in a toilet while he fretfully rids his shirt of stain as a platoon of cadets mimics a drill in the background, after which he performs the self-important role as a news reader with signature sanctimony. We glean in both instances a subject-in-the-making in a film that is waxing and waning. The apparatus is the school; the devices are the mirror and the camera; the medium is the media; and the ambience is the proto- or para-military, the monopoly of which force is presumed to belong to the state. This milieu shapes Martin as he sorts out the complexity of truth telling within seemingly apparent mediations: after all, news and the mirror are not supposed to lie. From first scene to last, Martin struggles with the real.
The 17-year old Martin comes from Pampanga, a province not so far from the capital of Metro Manila. He studies to become a media person in the big city. One time, he chances upon one of his exemplars in the profession, the broadcast journalist Lawrence Manalastas of the famous network FBC, who had come from the same university and taken the same course. In this meeting in which Lawrence speaks to people on the street about sightings of unidentified flying objects in Bulacan, the filter between reality and media dissolves, as apt pupil and vain idol meet face to face in an actuality that would later become the condition of complex fact. And not only that: Martin gets to appear in the primetime broadcast, interviewed by Lawrence, and so mediatized as well as starstruck in the moment of encounter.
There are many vital impulses to grasp in the film, written and directed by Jason Paul Laxamana with alacrity. This is a tribute to a clever screenplay, deft editing, and thoughtful performances by Elijah Canlas and Enzo Pineda. There is at the outset the crafting of a subjectivity that is fortunately not reduced to psychology. It is rather enmeshed in the social relations of power, the confoundedness of volition, the mess of libidinal exchange, and a local moral world that alternatingly dilates and sharpens.
The film lingers on the sexual narrative involving the guileless Martin and the wily Lawrence. It is a tale of violence, as it is one of reciprocal and protracted seduction that ends in interrupted foreplay. The element of gayness emerges incrementally, from homoerotic fantasy between an admirer and a personality to queer flirtation, from banter in a coffee shop to groping in the car. Hovering around these events is a climate of sensuousness and prurience: the sexual scandal of a celebrity virally circulating in cyberspace; the flashing of pubic hair in the toilet; and extreme, fetish pornography. Martin, trained as a journalist to be objective, cannot describe what has happened between him and Lawrence straightforwardly. The details are mottled and the mind is addled. He shares the story, at once sordid and unforgettable, to a friend from the province, and a peer. Releasing repressed romantic and homosexual panic, both point to Lawrence’s gayness and his being a sexual predator; while Martin sees so many gradations in both queerness and predation. Was he molested? Did he take pleasure in the act? Was he forced? Or did he court it? Why did he lure Lawrence into his room? Was it the same as Lawrence’s invitation for them to share the public toilet? Why did he not resist with enough interest? Was he flattered by the lust? As the tricky erotic materiality plays out so does the psychoanalytic intricacy of misrecognition unravel. Was the violence desired or desirable? Was the desire violent or violating? Was being desired the desire? Cinema attracts this trouble because it invests in the suspension of disbelief and because its aesthetic rests on repetition like the work of trauma. The film rightly keeps the iteration present, not resolving it in some conclusive realization or even a consummation of known or knowable desire. The yarn, therefore, thickens with variations, with each spin gaining novel nuances or mutations of the sensible: the touch on the face, the scent of the skin, the style of the shirt, the side glances, the rituals of ablution.
The film, therefore, is patient in revealing how consciousness or reality is rendered natural, intimately and structurally. We see Martin gazing at the bodies of men playing basketball and at himself in the mirror, touching his armpits, and then lapsing into a relay of gestures snatched from the news, advertising, and entertainment in his imaginary mediascape. This whirl is vital, and not neurotic. And the bath room is the punctum that tends to stage the primal scene of awakening and temptation.
Finally, we feel this immense burden of truth in all its psycho-erotic and philosophical dimensions. In the current climate of so-called social-media fake news, such truth might come in the guise of “information” that inevitably congeals into claims to incontrovertible, transparent gospel. While the film may dwell on the details of the variants of the telling a la the Japanese Rashomon and the Philippine Salome, it takes us as well to the more fundamental basis of how the medium of news is constituted via the subjectivity of the reporter and the economy of the institution. It may well answer the question: To what kind of people is the public granting the franchise of media? Here, the righteousness of the media is subjected to critique, laying bare its hypocrisy in a very damning rebuke of the wholesomeness and nobility of a network that profits on the projection of being a “family,” which it is if seen in the context of the rent-seeking cacique class in the Philippines. This is anticipated early on in the film when the news being simulated in the classroom is the modus operandi of a woman pretending to be a victim of vehicular accidents. The network, hailed as the paragon of press freedom, is a scam. The film’s title cites the Biblical injunction of non-judgement and the assumption that we may all be too tainted, or complicit, and therefore too guilty, or Catholic, to cast the first stone, or at least aspersion, and seek redress. Scripture speaks of an adulterous woman who deserves to be stoned to death owing to the exceptional transgression. The exegesis, however, tells us that sin is not solitary; it is intersubjective as it is structural. Thus, in this cinematic sermon, the phrase is left elliptical, lest it become a static noun, and as if giving the interpreter of the sacred text the chance to complete the thinking, and the judging. The motif at work in He Who Is Without Sin is one of rehearsal, the constant reenactments of event, the repetition of trauma in a simulacrum, like the effects of the disaster which Martin pretends to report to a virtual audience in his mind with either corncob or toothbrush as ersatz acoustic source, that only sinners can have the nerve to revisit and hopefully live away— and even broadcast.