Lino Brocka’s film from 1976, Insiang, opens in a slaughterhouse. Hung by their hind legs, loud squealing pigs meet their end by a decisive stab down the neck. We never meet anymore pigs, alive or dead, later in the film, which means this is but a grisly foreshadowing for things to come. As viewers, we are jolted in preparation for something both violent and banal; the world of Lino Brocka is not for the lily-livered, living in abject poverty means putting up with humiliations on a daily basis – to a point, people are beaten to a pulp and killed for seemingly unjustifiable reasons. Brocka prepares then inures us for this degradation through the dark tale of the eponymous Insiang, a young woman who lives in the slums of Manila with her market trader mother. Her father abandoned the family years ago, much to Insiang’s mother’s unremitting humiliation.
Played by the biracial Philippine actor Hilda Koronel, Insiang’s striking fawn-like beauty has echoes of Nastassja Kinski in Tess, her physique gliding over the slum residents like a cloud in a world of grot and grey. Her beauty is incongruous to her insalubrious surroundings – there is mud everywhere and not a patch of grass – as if this is not where she should be, that her destiny is actually elsewhere, for the most part out of this god-forsaken place. At the beginning of the film, she doesn’t yet know this, appearing minimally content with her lot in life. She has good friends – mainly the women of the slums – with whom she tries out makeup with and buys stewed fish from. She also has a boyfriend, Bebot, whose maturity remains stunted at early adolescence. All is well enough until a singular event – the sexual harassment of Insiang’s shopkeeper friend by her male cousin – becomes a catalyst to a downward spiral for Insiang and her mother.
Insiang’s uncouth cousin and his family are evicted from the house they live together with Insiang and her mother, creating a much-needed vacancy for her mother’s much younger lover Dado, the local thug, a man whose job is wandering the slums terrorising and humiliating lesser men, men like Bebot. In the domestic space, Dado is much more reduced as a man, no better than a leach on Insiang’s mother’s material capabilities and her narcissistic desire for validation. When Dado sexually assaults Insiang, her mother takes his side, punishes her instead for ‘seducing’ him. Word travels in the slums and the women, including Insiang’s friends, shun her. It is a familiar story by this point; a woman punished for male indiscretions. Even the pathetic Bebot has the temerity to treat her like a disposable plaything.
Now fully aware of her descent down the slippery moral totem pole, Insiang realises she has to make the journey back up, back to some restoration of self-respect. But how? This is the Philippines under Marcos, it means a lonely climb out of the swamp of injustice. But it is not clear if this journey is upwards or down. She seduces and grooms Dado into becoming her monster; in turn he pulverises Bebot to avenge her, he makes plans to escape his parasitic relationship with her mother by finding work outside, far away from the slums so they can putatively start over, so that maybe he won’t need to be a useless thug anymore, but a proper man with means, a sincere lover without the material struggles that pervert one’s moral compass. Insiang knows all this would devastate her mother, now her nemesis, and ensures that Dado’s future-faking is within earshot of their tiny ramshackle house. When her mother finally finds out she stabs him to death in a blinding rage.
What does one do when yet another humiliation tips the balance of order? And what sort of order had that been, that was tolerable enough to hold together scraps of dignity? For Insiang, matters were snatched back into her hands when the small pen of agency available to her became even more constricted. After Dado’s attack, she couldn’t go and see her shopkeeper friend anymore, couldn’t walk in her community without being the object of scornful, leering eyes, and her last, marginally reliable path out had abandoned her.
The social realist tradition of Southeast Asian cinema in this period typically pits downtrodden but tough women eking out a living against feckless, un(der)employed men. These men would find ways to torment everyone around them, and it is a matter of time before they are put in their place. In this postcolonial period hardened by authoritarianism and corruption, this means extralegal justice. In the fantasy of cinema, it is meted out by the least likely figures, mainly fallen women and female ghosts. For this reason, it is exhilarating, and darkly cheering, to see the women of Brocka’s social realist films of this period – Insiang and Bona (1980) – go from wide-eyed and lovestruck for unworthy men to clear-eyed and vengeful towards those same men. These films end with a freeze-frame of revenge and male pain; Bona scalds her philandering, film-extra object of devotion, Gardo, with a boiling pot of water, his screams never to be pacified by feminine mercy. Insiang watches in both horror and satisfaction as her mother rips into her deceitful lover Dado with a large carving knife.
Unlike Bona, which ends on the highest point of a crescendo, there is a haunting moral coda in Insiang that rings out long after the film ends. With Dado gone, there is still the mother-daughter drama to resolve, or what’s left of it. In the final scene, Insiang’s mother is locked up in prison. Insiang comes by to visit her, to confess that she manipulated Dado out of revenge all along, with the hope of seeking her mother’s forgiveness. Contrition, however, is one-sided. Her mother is shocked to feel humiliated yet again by her daughter, but murdering Dado was the right to do; if she can’t have him, neither can Insiang. She rejects Insiang’s pleas for forgiveness and love; Insiang’s heartbreaking ‘I love you’ hangs unreciprocated in the air. From start to finish Brocka checks all the traits of the narcissistic mother figure.
That is all Insiang needs to (not) hear when she walks away from the prison house; she is free at last from her the mother, seen standing wordlessly, helplessly, in narcissistic collapse, behind bars, watching the young woman, a woman whose mother has forsaken her, walk further away from Catholic pieties in the background and towards the victorious horizon of revenge at the foreground of the screen.
Alicia Izharuddin 