THERE was really no other way for the film John Denver Trending to end. With young students acting like upstart viragos, local politicians out to amicably settle everything and displaying no leadership skills at all, teachers so tame they are helpless, a social worker who is inept enough to leave a distraught young “suspect” in a room with a policeman who materializes from nowhere in order to extract suspicion from a boy—how can one ever live happy in a place like Antique? (unless Pandan, Antique, is just an incidental location).
John Denver Trending tells the story of a young boy who figures in a fight with a bully (if we are following the story from one angle). As the fight ensues, a classmate documents the scene with the ubiquitous cell phone. The video is uploaded and goes viral. John Denver develops overnight a notoriety beyond any one’s imagination. The response to the video is relentlessly against the boy.
Recall another similar event, which transpired in Ateneo de Manila several months back. Immediately, after the video was seen by many, there was a debate that raged online. There were many sides, the majority being judgmental, but there was also a critical mass who positioned themselves outside the event and posited questions. These “other” voices helped calm the situation and allowed the parties involved to pause and rethink.
In John Denver Trending, no online debate took place. The world is one in saying the boy is the devil. No one sides with John Denver. The closest sympathetic voice outside of his mother’s is another teacher who consistently provides a modulated voice to the hysteria. This is the teacher who leaves her room so as to remind the head teacher (or is she the principal?) that the mother of John should be summoned at least. This is the same teacher who assures the mother that John must be somewhere taking stock of things and that she should not worry.
In terms of screenplay, John Denver Trending has a densely exotic structure. First, the narrative unfolds in a rural community and not in a city.
The sociologists are right—the city does not need to bring urbanization to the towns; the towns get closer to urbanized settlements because of technology. There is a compelling assumption here: that technologies at present have somewhat
breached the great divide between the urban and the rural. More than just the socioeconomic status locating the story, the difference between the young consumers of mobile phone culture in the big, rich city and those in the small, subsistence societies is blurred. Everyone is tied to each other online and everyone appraises everyone through the small screen of cell phones.
There is a second layer of complexity and exotica involved in the narrative of John Denver Trending, and this has to do with that part in any of our rural societies, the segment of everyday living contending with the unseen and the nonrational. Here is a community where some subscribe to the belief of witches causing harm and death, where diviners
can find out through the swinging of a pair of scissors who the thief is.
If there is something that is terrifically compelling in John Denver Trending, it is this attempt of the film to situate a story of bullying, fake news and the unlimited evil forces of a video gone viral in a community imbued with a different logic and where an altogether different way of seeing eludes reason and any notion of verifiable truth. What the film appears to tell us is that in this small community where witches are haunted—and decimated—any accusation that is supported by authorities is declared to be right and proper.
The trope of a witch hunt is localized in John Denver Trending. The metaphor saves the film from the pit of hopelessness but there is a stronger light (or darkness) emanating from it. This is the moralizing, usually misguided and bigoted, assumed in authorities who do not know any better, or those kind souls that do nothing in the face of cruelty made by adults on children.
Let the viewers be cautioned that bullying is just the surface story of John Denver Trending.
Hiding and hidden, liminal and submerged are images compelling us to be more critical of cinema.
In the hands of its director, Arden Rod Condez, images pass before the eyes of John Denver Cabungcal—and our own. We are not witnesses but voyeurs as we glance at the suspected witch walking at night, of a policeman arresting a y0ung man, of the witch ending by the roadside, of a healer performing rites not of propitiation but of exorcism. Let us not forget one of the earlier comments made on the bullying video involving students of the Ateneo asking that we should not stop sharing the video until it reaches “Digong.”
This is my politics and I do not expect my readers to share this, but I dread the day when our young children pin their hope on the administration that is being accused of murdering the children and the marginalized.
For all these negative traits, the film, John Denver Trending remains an important film deserving of our own attention. Meryll Soriano gives a decent performance although her dialogues in Tagalog/Pilipino are a dissonant sound against the Karay-a language used by the rest of the actors. Every time she speaks, we are dislocated from the scene and brought back to the greater artifice of the film. With due respect to Soriano, who is a fine actress, what stopped the production from getting an actor who could at least approximate the piquant—pardon my ethnocentrism—tone of the Antique language?
Jansen Magpusao as John Denver has been discovered and awarded already as Best Actor. His pauses and troubled glances are for the books. His boy-actor does not bear the bad, workshop-induced skills of Manila-based child actors, and that is good. But why give him “moments,” when he is good enough, enduring and authentic in silence. He has no need for the gratuitous and predictably vulgar breakdown scenes required in many films aiming to tap the thespian in any actor. Jansen Magpusao has all the time in the world (god forbid!) to do that when he does commercial films.
As I write this, I have been watching also the hot welcome the town of Pandan is giving the film. Young boys and girls and the great portion of the population line up along the street waving white flags to welcome the filmmakers and the actors. The film indeed deserves the honor for it has put on the map not only Antique but this fourth class municipality known for having the cleanest inland body of water in the country.
I wonder though if the proud welcoming pumuluyo (citizens and inhabitants) of Pandan are discussing among themselves what John Denver Trending has told us: that a society that does not examine its thoughts properly can be a violent, killing society.