Insiang and the Lack of Agency in an Unforgiving Environment
‘Insiang’ and the Lack of Agency in an Unforgiving Environment
Insiang revolves around the story of a young teenager living in the slums.
To show the annihilation of a human being, the loss of human dignity caused by the physical and social environment, and to point out the need to change these life conditions.
— Lino Brocka
When critics said that Insiang was Lino Brocka’s most perfectly-crafted movie, they weren’t mistaken. Every frame of this film epitomizes the deteriorating conditions the slums had to endure under Marcos’s dictatorship in the 70s. It’s a social realist venture into the very soul of the Filipino people in a time replete with turmoil. The opening scene is jarring, and it sucks you into a world that almost certainly couldn’t have been true. Yet, it shouldn’t be far-fetched to believe that this kind of social environment was far from being fiction back then, and maybe even until now.
Hilda Koronel’s portrayal of the eponymous character reminds us of the people who were victims of societal conditions in which they had no say. Having agency means being able to produce actions with intended effects, but Insiang is hindered from even feeling like she’s capable of doing the most basic things. She’s burdened by the hapless circumstances of her community; she’s unaware of what’s at stake in a world dominated by the haves and have-nots. Her surroundings permeate with individuals who hustle and construct arbitrary lines to denote who has power and who doesn’t. The irony though, encapsulated vicariously through the perfidious and roguish character of Dado and the daft men in the film, is that they all try to one-up each other despite all being in the same predicament. They swindle and chisel both on an economic and social level those who are similarly less fortunate. It’s a commentary on the power struggles that have defined most of the toxic masculine traits that still pervade in communities dominated by men.
A still from the film depicting the daft men in Tondo, Manila.
The male gaze plays a prominent role in highlighting the lack of agency that Filipino women continually endure. Conrado Baltazar’s excellent cinematography frames scenes in which the male characters have complete command of what the film shows us. He zooms out from a rectangular mirror in a pedicab perfectly symmetric to the eyes of Dado as he gazes at Insiang. Without any words spoken, we are revealed his amorous desires for her. Even though we have a character like Tonya, the mother, who believes that she is expressing her agency to love someone despite what her neighbors might think, that agency is still superficial. Unbeknownst to her, it is just a ploy by her younger boyfriend, Dado, to subvert her stern and authoritarian control over his real target, Insiang.
Even the way each character’s socio-economic role is portrayed elucidates a clear distinction between the men and women in the shantytown of Tondo. Dado and his fellow men work as meat butchers. Bebot, Insiang’s love interest, also works as a car mechanic. Meanwhile, if you look at Tonya and Insiang’s labor, their roles also serve as a reflection of the prevailing and suffocating sexist culture. Tonya sells fish in a wet market to a swarm of fellow women, Insiang works as a laundry woman, cleaning and delivering clothes that usually are never hers. Their labor relies on appearances and the selling of commodities, they are never the producers. All Dado does is butcher pigs that can’t resist and Bebot provides the veneer of a man who can fix things; they exploit these roles to their advantage and create an unhealthy power dynamic in the community.
The film also subtly depicts how only Insiang and her mother are affected by the pejorative rumors spread by their neighbors; the women are still at a disadvantage even in their legitimate desires due to the cold manipulation of the patriarchy. We never once witness a scene wherein Dado is questioned for his relationship with an older widowed woman. He is continually depicted as a masculine character who exudes intimidation and demands respect within the community. The way Brocka refused to depict such means we can infer two things: (1) Men wield immense power in society, so much so that every action they perform are construed as legitimate and acceptable desires; (2) The people in the community already presupposed what his true intentions were, but still remained powerless in the face of the patriarchy.
Insiang’s mother Tonya is played by the late legendary actress Mona Lisa.
Throughout the beginning parts of the film, Insiang lacked agency. Pierre Rissient, a renowned film critic, perfectly encapsulates her; she is like a flower sullied, sullied by the world around her. Every time Insiang goes to buy at the store, the camera frames her in an unsavory light, she is in prison constructed by the social environment in which she has no control over. She effectively realizes that her boyfriend, whom she recklessly trusts, doesn’t truly see her as a person but as a sexual object, and she’s thrust into a captive situation by the gaslighting boyfriend of her mother. It is after these parts of the film when Insiang learns an unforgettable lesson. Both men who have wronged her had something that Insiang had not, complete and total agency. Even Insiang’s male cousin at the start of the film did not need to do grueling labor as she did. He can carouse and harass anyone he pleased because that was simply the norm he participated in. It is also the arrival of a man that incentivizes Tonya to kick out her sister-in-law and her family that similarly suffered from an impoverished state. These men control and hegemonize the agency that would otherwise belong to women.
Nonetheless, Mario O’Hara, the scriptwriter, builds up how Insiang eventually exploits her situation, which finally bestows upon her the agency we’ve craved to see. Yet what’s saddening is that Insiang’s agency comes at a cost, in the end, it is still revenge. Her actions are occasioned by the men who dictate what is right and what is wrong under a patriarchal society. It’s tantalizing to realize that after everything that happened, you realize that Insiang was innocent from the start. But, it was indeed the destitute, patricentric, and unforgiving environment that determined her necessary actions in the end.
