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'John Denver Trending': A review
"John Denver Trending," the Kinaray-a feature by Arden Rod Condez, is certainly the big winner in this year’s Cinemalaya. It didn’t only win the lion’s share of the awards; during the weeklong festival, it was also an audience favorite.
RELATED: ‘John Denver Trending’ bags Best Film award at Cinemalaya 2019
Like many of the other films in this year’s line-up, the subject of "John Denver Trending" is topical, drawn directly — almost — from the news. The film tells a cautionary tale about the power of social media to literally break lives, especially those which are already materially precarious to begin with.
Set in a coastal town in Antique, the film centers on the character of a poor high school student who is falsely accused of stealing a classmate’s iPad. He is caught on video fighting back this classmate, and because he’s not exactly a popular kid—and because he committed some misdemeanors in the past—this video turns viciously viral.
He is roundly condemned by both local and national communities as a thief and a bully, the monstrosity of the viral image virtually crushing him, despite the abiding love and faith of his mother, whose heroic efforts to fend off the blood-thirsty wolves prove to be in vain, in the end.
It’s a simple story told simply and effectively, in well-executed cinematic moments that see the actors — especially the winsome newcomer the lead Jansen Magpusao— turning in nuanced and powerful performances.
Also worth noting is Meryll Soriano, who enfleshes John Denver’s mother with the kind of quiet but forceful dignity and devotion that the role requires.
A clear strength of the film is its rural and “regional” world, with its culturally simultaneous reality being succinctly captured in the depiction of communal faith healers paradoxically coexisting with smart phones, thereby suggesting not so much rupture as continuity between the regime of memory and the regime of data, especially where the residual but entirely determinative power of orality is concerned.
As against appearances, both forms of social technology presuppose and function through the same cognitive mode, which in its immediacy and high turn-over rate we may still call oral (video being, finally, not so much a scriptural as an audiovisual text).
In contrast to the literate mind, whose imagination can embrace a plurality of visions, the oral mind’s visual field is affectively familial and communal. It is simply ill-equipped to imagine and cross-identify outside the familiar circles of its own immediate experience.
The condemnation that falls squarely on the shoulders of the wrongly accused boy is enabled not only by the manipulability—and the selectivity—of video as a medium, but also by this unfortunate boy’s (class) identity, his unimportance and “dispensability” as a marginal person in this world.
It’s entirely meaningful—and, given the film’s tragic conclusion, painfully ironic—that the high school’s morning ritual includes the recitation of the “Panatang Makabayan,” a writerly text that exhorts the young speaker to broaden their imaginations, and to embrace the capacious fiction that is the Filipino nation.
Needless to say, this is a task that requires, among other things, fraternal solidarity, which is the commitment to consider one’s fellow Filipinos as indispensable, precisely.
Sadly, as in many other instances in our country’s difficult life, in this film’s story orality trumps literacy, with the force of local and familial bonds overpowering the promise of national belonging and the kind of social justice that it invokes.
On the downside, we feel that there was some room in the tightly written screenplay to turn a little more “reflective”: for instance, while his reticence and stoicism are themselves dramatically interesting (and revealing), the boy’s inner life could’ve been “realized” some more.
His relationships with his siblings and the few school friends—as well as to the memory of his absent father—are somewhat crucial to the plot (whose “turn,” we must remember, rests on the question of his emotional and mental state), and they are not treated satisfyingly.
While this kind of “neorealist” story decrees that the protagonist must simply be beleaguered and downtrodden (and young), still one gets the feeling that the odds need not have been so massively—and definitively—stacked against such a small and helpless self.
Clearly, what had occasioned this troubling and excellent film was last year’s viral video of a boy, a pint-sized “bully” beating up a classmate in the comfort room of an elite high school in Quezon City. Thinking back, the sheer cruelty of the commentaries—both on social and traditional media—that this video “generated” does give one pause, for it ironically amounts to its own (heartless) form of cyber “bullying.”
John Denver Trending admonishes us against just this kind of social media abuse, by calling out the assemblage, the artifice, the “art” that is social media itself. This is an art that while sourced from life, certainly cannot compare to or be greater than life’s irreplaceable dignity and worth.
Because the tools of information technology may not so much thicken as attenuate memory, maybe it makes sense to banish them from the classroom, and urge a return to more traditional forms of (print) literacy. In intimately involving and cultivating the individual imagination, even or precisely in the age of digitality, reading—rather than viewing—still presents itself, for the young especially, as a most effective vehicle for empathy. — LA, GMA News
