Remembering Mario O’Hara

Last week, screenwriter, actor, and director Mario O’Hara passed away from leukemia. Describing O’Hara’s passing as a “final curtain” only because it is fitting wordplay for a cinematic figure’s death is heartfelt but absurd. All it takes is to witness the moving, breathing young O’Hara as Berto the leper, or, track O’Hara’s stepping out from behind the scenes and back in, and it seems necessary to force the ”final curtain” from closing abruptly for the sake of a platitude. For this post, I’ll be looking at two popular Brocka-O’Hara films in which, alongside director Lino Brocka, O’Hara was the principal
screenwriter: Tinimbang Ka ngunit Kulang (1974) and Insiang (1976).

THE LAW OF AUTHORITY

The films Tinimbang Ka ngunit Kulang (from here on called TKNK) and Insiang were released not long after Martial Law was established in 1972. A generational barrier may cause us to think that compared to the more explicitly political Brocka-Lacaba films, these two films were either a pastoral ode to the lives urban immigrants had left or simply ‘the city as the graveyard of dreams’ in which ‘promdis’ were swarming maggots.

But to place these films in its historical context is to see the violence of its constraints: a period of brutal censorship and the suffocation of freedom mockingly fronted by Imelda Marcos’s parading of ‘the true, the good and the beautiful’. Leftists retreated into the countryside, not only for their sorrows to be absorbed into the calloused but welcoming hands of a more idyllic Philippines, but in the Maoist belief that people’s warfare was born from the countryside, and to understand the sentiments of the peasantry is to understand where the real struggle lies.

Insiang may not have fit the archetypal rural setting of farmlands as it was set in Tondo, but without overt portrayals of city life, the setting was instead a closed ecosystem wherein social dynamics were the most prominent variable. In the film, the cityscape and the vehicular traffic fall away to reveal the bare bones of a community and subverts it further. The film posited the failures of a town’s social structure when transplanted into the city– and O’Hara’s public dialogue acts as a microlens to see where it cracks and floods. In a sense, the ‘town’ in Insiang is placeless– carrying the characteristics of urban density, but, much like rural towns, of a community built on bamboo and gossip.

With the gloating presence of state control in the city contrasting the expanse of rural flatlands or the alienating density of slums, you can see that these two films are both allegorical and realist, posturing an idea that clashed with Imelda’s modern Athens (she despised these films). Between artists and the state was a less than subtle game of apophasis.

An abortion. A slaughterhouse. For those who danced at the edge of Martial Law, the wrong step could set off a cliff dive of muffled mouths and murder. The two Brocka-O’Hara films both allude to the regime’s oppression, shocking the system by first shocking their unguarded audiences. TKNK opens to the middle of an abortion of a woman at the hands of a ruthless midwife. The cries of the woman resisting the violation of her body is stunted by a thick palm over her mouth and hands tying her down. Similarly confronting, Insiang starts with the anguished squeals of a line of upturned pigs in a slaughterhouse, in the process of being killed for mass human consumption. Beyond being suggestive of women’s rights and animal rights, an overarching point is being made to blanket the demise of social causes of the time: the artistic language needed to practice the code of allusion in a time where everything can no longer be said. The opening scenes spoke for all the issues that couldn’t be mentioned when it spoke of Martial Law.

THE LAW OF THE BIBLE

Both films carried the weight of holy law as though the bible were the ultimate judge to which everyone’s ankles were bound. It is suggested by the title, translated as “weighed but found wanting”, taken from a phantom finger (interpreted by Daniel to be a message from God) that wrote the inscription ‘mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’ during the excessive feast of Belshazzar. The suffocating presence of Christianity creates an almost universal moral cheat sheet from which stones can be cast.

From childhood, we are conditioned to typify biblical characters in order to understand the moral lesson of each story. Learning what kind of disease ‘leprosy’ has never been necessary for so long as we equated this with social exclusion. In a similar vein, O’Hara uses these biblical tropes to ease us into a multi-pronged plot whereby we were shown the politics of a conservative rural town, the growing relationship between the two outcasts, and the conflicts between these two worlds.

Throughout the film, we see Junior, the son of a womanizer and a nagging housewife, trying to find his place within the town. He grows increasingly sympathetic of the towns two outcasts, and as they come together, he becomes a weak protector who slowly learns not only to remove himself as a pawn of town gossip and tries, following his own form of self-righteousness to battle it.

TKNK reveals the machinery of town gossip to be one that cleans its shiny, God-fearing exterior from the build-up they sought to banish: Kuala the ‘barrio baliw’ and Berto the leper. Berto the leper, with a rattle in his hand, ‘trains’ Kuala to come home to him, at first for sex and company, but later for love and protection within a makeshift Eden far away from the jeers and shoves of the townsfolk. The town’s aversion to social disease pushed its castaways out, but only for it to implode inwards as a consequence. In the process, however, the black and white of right and wrong is eroded by the gray area of intrigue, hypocrisy and prejudice. When gossip spreads about Berto impregnating Kuala, the town riots to save not Kuala the outcast, but their own morally superior souls in the eyes of an apparently prejudiced God (‘prejudice’ in that the townsfolk take it upon themselves to believe Berto is one of the untouchables, and his social nonadmission is okay by God). However, the lead, played by a young Christopher de Leon, emerges as the Jesus figure that corrects moral over-ambition with the open heart and mind that the New Testament exists for.

THE LAW OF NATURE

O’Hara’s screenplays are in a way, an overthrowing of the ‘perfect family aspiration’ from its throne as an ideal core unit– and if the family should at all be ‘the core’. Similar to Kuala in TKNK, Insiang is a protagonist driven to madness out of an isolating innocence exaggerated by a traumatic experience. Her mother, embittered by her husband’s abandonment, yields her sharp tongue and takes it out to stab anyone who should so reach out to her, especially to her young daughter Insiang, whose maternal love has just reached its breaking point. Fronting as the antagonist, her mother’s young boytoy, Dado is a stranger turned surrogate father whose ‘caring’ advances towards Insiang are nothing but incestuously perverted. Unable to convince her mother, her boyfriend and her best friend, and unable to turn around the influence of town gossip, she caves in, staking her ‘rightful’ claim in the love triangle and spins it into its carnal end.

Is the family necessarily society’s core unit? Was it for Junior, who later finds out that his father was the Cesar who forced Kuala’s abortion and drove her to consequent madness? Was it for Insiang, whose mother takes the word of her boytoy Dado in a heartbeat, turns on her own daughter who claims that Dado, the outsider, raped her? It appears that the family is a failed core, and that the real core unit of society is town gossip. Berto the Leper and Kuala were separated to their deaths because of town gossip. Insiang and her mother were driven further apart when the news of the love triangle broke out. Of course, in real life this sounds preposterous. But the idea that gossip could be the core unit in these two films in itself is another allusion: with powerless protagonists not allowed free speech and with society unable to access information beyond lies and hearsay, the blackout sounds frighteningly similar to the politics of the day.

There is a compelling case to be made that Mario O’Hara’s Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos is the best Filipino film ever made. This layered psychological movie provokes our moral intuitions that have been conditioned by our collective memory and understanding of the Japanese Occupation, and it implicates the audience by casting doubt on our ability to arbitrate between good and evil. In Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos, O’Hara demonstrates his superior talent for deploying character, plot and conflict to make profound statements about the consequences, both intended and unintended, of war.

The central dilemma lies in the love triangle between the destitute barrio girl Rosario (Nora Aunor), her lover and Filipino guerilla fighter Crispin (Bembol Roco) and the half-Filipino, half-Japanese soldier Masugi (Christopher de Leon). I don’t know if O’Hara intended it, but the movie’s title can also be seen as a play on words – the word taong can be translated in two ways, and the title can be interpreted as Three Godless Years or Three Godless People. While the former is the official title of the film, the latter is still apt because of the three characters’ nebulous personal moralities.

The movie starts off with Crispin bidding Rosario goodbye as he leaves to fight in the war. While he is off fighting the Japanese, a lost Masugi stumbles into Rosario’s home and gets drunk on her family’s lambanog. In the height of his inebriation, he rapes Rosario in their basement. This sequence of events evokes the trauma of World War II, of the numerous women that were raped and abused by the invading soldiers just as their husbands and brothers were off fighting in the war. The minute Masugi enters their house, it is easy to foretell that things will end in tragedy. This scene is already something seared in our memories, O’Hara is merely conjuring it.

When Masugi returns a few days later to apologize to Rosario and her family, we instinctively are appalled by the gall of this monster to reenter the life of his victim. We have been taught us to unconditionally condemn perpetrators of sexual violence, especially during times of war. And of course I agree: rape is utterly inexcusable.

But what happens when the victim decides to forgive her aggressor? Should we be quick to judge her decision to grant the redemption that only she can provide?

***

Rosario initially rejects Masugi despite his romantic advances that turn out to be sincere and earnest. She rejects the advice of her family to forgive him after he gifts them with a bounty of rice and canned goods. Her dignity can not be bought, and she will not be wooed by someone who has desecrated her humanity. But then, as we soon learn, she gets pregnant with his child. And when Masugi’s closest confidante, the Spanish doctor Francis (Peque Gallaga), intimately tells her his life story and why he is someone worth loving, she changes her mind and learns to love and accept him anyway.

Because of the racial politics of World War 2, what makes this relationship detestable is the fact that Masugi is Japanese, which makes him far worse than any ordinary rapist. And even though she initially rejected all his gifts, Rosario gets ostracized from her community anyway because of the protection Masugi gives to her and her family in order to win her heart. She gets labelled as a “collaborator”, a powerful signifier of treason of the highest order. The fact that she chose to bear his child and marry him only aggravated the situation further, cementing her position in the village as a traitor.

It is here that O’Hara reverses our expectations on who the real heroes of the story are. With the war raging in the background, the guerrilla fighters symbolize the nationalist resistance that we have come to assume as the people on the “right” side of the war. They’re the protecters of the otherwise defenseless barrios in the countryside.

But curiously, we never see them do the actual defending. The entire war happens off-screen, and we only see them return to the village after their skirmishes. Crispin’s soliloquy early in the film on the horrors he had witnessed on the battlefield was precisely that — words that did not translate to images for us to consume. What we do see, however, is how quickly they turned against a member of their community the moment she was baselessly castigated for her supposed betrayal. This monstrous effervescence of the townspeople and the guerrillas that culminated in a ritualistic assault shows the pitfalls to the almost religious adherence that people have to their communal identities. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that their irruption happened in a church, the structure that embodied their village’s civic spirit.

***

And so the tables are turned — the monster is humanized and the dark side of the villagers are brought to the surface. The perversion of the bucolic communities living in pastoral hamlets is hardly anything new. From our very own folklore about creatures such as the manananggal and the movies that have projected these beasts such as the early Shake, Rattle and Roll films, we have always been slightly fearful of the possible existence of a wicked underside in these otherwise peaceful locales. Perhaps it is our urbanity that makes us cynical about these Edens and the supposedly idyllic lives therein. What O’Hara brings forth is a horror derived from the instability of a chaotic wartime environment, villagers who become unhinged because of their perceived abandonment by their two benevolent masters, the Americans and God.

But in the absence of any order, it is the love between Masugi and Rosario that prevents them from being dislocated and swallowed by the vicissitudes of strife. There is a climactic point in the movie when Rosario contemplates on doing a horrific act in order to correct the wrong that Masugi did to her. But her decision not to push through with it and embrace the new life she finds herself in is perhaps the purest form of humaneness in a brutal, godless world. Her choice to forgive Masugi transcends the evil of war. And because of that, neither the villagers nor the audience is in any position to condemn her for choosing to love.

***

Putting the movie in a historical context, when the Anti-Marcos protracted people’s revolution was happening in the provinces, there was a certain romanticization of the rural. O’Hara’s portrayal of this barrio both subverts the idealized imagination of the barrio and condemns the moral superiority that people who worship and come from these places usually engender.

What makes Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos a classic is the way O’Hara alters the contours of the moral landscape he sculpts. Yes, one might still take offense at the way he excuses Masugi’s rape by presenting a more insidious and arguably more malicious form of evil, but the manner in which he brings forth these questions on dignity and self-worth is anything but glib. Instead, O’Hara plays with our emotions, toying with our feelings of sympathy, compassion and self-righteousness without ever being sanctimonious, an achievement that to my mind still remains unsurpassed.

—We Talk About Movies

Archive

Remembering Mario O’Hara: The Laws of Authority, the Bible and Nature in the Brocka-O’Hara Films

Remembering Mario O’Hara: Tatlong Taong Walang Diyos

Follow “We Talk About Movies”