I WAS right about my critique of Goyo. Be that as it may, I hope the readers realized that I was not reviewing the said film anymore as I was really commenting about the histories our historians write and those we read and believe in.
If anything, the reactions and responses the readers gave after I posted online my review revealed that Filipinos are not natural iconoclasts. We are not able to bring ourselves to destroying idols. That is why idols abound in this republic. We attempt to shatter images that narratives of the nation hold up for us to revere but, after the destruction, we readily pick up the pieces. We are cloying lovers of an affair created by the illusion of a land that nurtured the myths of identities and collective destiny. We are a doormat when it comes to the love of a land that, in the first place, was not created to love and care for its citizens. Our being inhabitants of this archipelago is a creation of a colonial mind, and when we are made aware of it by cinematic depiction of greatness and its unerring opposites, we gather all the forces of our intellect—and heart—to find excuses for those so-called heroes created out of necessity. We can never find it in ourselves to look at those faces that gild our troubled currencies; we are battered partners always waiting for assurance that the lies uttered by the individuals we hold dear are really lies. When, at last, the perfidies are discovered, we weep, we smirk and, then, we forget about everything. There is always that sunrise at the terminus of the tales of our heritage. We do not ride into the sunset; our heroes
- We are left watching, holding an empty basket that gives us nothing. We are pathetic before the onslaught of histories. Thus, the first reactions to Goyo included the dismissal of the imagination. Fiction is allowed in films. When the filmmakers insist on the power of the creative mind, we hesitate with our criticism. We turn to psychology. Guidance counselors and child-rearing experts we become. And so, we excuse Gregorio del Pilar for his youth. And so we berate ourselves for not being kind enough to the boy-warrior. And so we find reasons for the lack of logic in the life and the direction of that life in a young “hero.”
Strangely, the same generation of critics who feel we have not given the maturity/immaturity of a young general a chance to bloom, to taunt us into a romantic ideation, is the same breed that mocks the escape goat of this present lifetime—the millennials.
The sweet problem of Goyo and Heneral Luna and all other films that describe themselves as historical is precisely in the history those film purport to consider as the wellspring of ideas. When one talks of history, one invariably speaks of truth. One cannot make a historical narrative and follow it with a caveat about how certain phases in the lives of the characters have been tampered for the sake of creativity, the latter being more open to conjuring rather than plain remembering.
Here, at this point, can we bring in the compelling decisions made by those who made Balangiga: Howling Wilderness. The in-your face caveat about how Balangiga is “not the film of Khavn de la Cruz” saves it from the limitations of the archives. Who has summoned the memories of the people in Samar to remember the cruelty and violence of that day? If there were, those memories never became mainstream and official. The Americans had the monopoly of the narrative of that day in Samar. They still do: their histories are the official histories of our land.
It is perhaps unfair to say this but, after watching Goyo, I fancied these lines moving across the screen, announcing: “This is not the history of Tirad Pass.”
Let me say this again: as a film, one cannot dismiss Goyo. For it to make sense though, one has to go for other frameworks.
Films do not only reflect societies; they also refract. If we step away from the cinema of
heroism that Heneral Luna and Goyo have come to typify, we actually have a grounding, a new consciousness about the power of cinema to depict history or histories.
Robert A. Rosenstone in his paper, “The Historical Film as Real History,” presents another perspective: “Let’s face the facts and admit it: historical films trouble and disturb [most] professional historians. Why? We all know the obvious answers. Because, historians will say, films are inaccurate. They distort the past. They fictionalize, trivialize, and romanticize important people, events, and movements. They falsify History.”
But what if the falsification comes from “historians.”
Rosenstone continues: “As a subtext to these overt answers, we can hear some different, unspoken answers: Film is out of the control of historians. Film shows that academics do not own the past. Film creates a historical world with which the written word cannot compete, at least for popularity. Film is a disturbing symbol of an increasingly postliterate world [in which people can read but won’t].”
If I’m to sum up the contribution of Goyo to the discourses of identities and nationalism, it is that this film is inserting itself in moments when histories are suspect, when tales of brave men are slowly diminishing. We are having these films as responses to the lack of answers to questions of nation and “Filipinoness,” even to the basic notions of principles and uprightness.
The government makes no sense. Justice has been redefined, altered to suit the whims of those who believe they have the mark of the just.
Comes a film that disrespects what is supposedly the ultimate stand of truth—history. Comes this film that proposes a different direction in how one creates a good past by destroying one that has been manufactured hastily and with prejudice.
Come to think of it—and many of you would definitely not agree—Tarog’s Goyo and Khavn de la Cruz’s Balangiga are ideological twins. Both films do not believe in the false and falsified grandeur of a written past. Both brave the current of mainstream historical storytelling as they drop all the pretenses that the past was beautiful, the present alright and the future bright. Both films, if we just listen to them, are asking us to ask questions and not rely on the ready answers.