I don’t think that it will be any exaggeration to say that whatever attempts at cultural intervention today that deals with tapping into hearts and minds, at the very least in popular culture in the metropolis, will be weighed in contrast to what transpired last September 21, 2025 at Mendiola. It is this generation’s cultural Event. The trauma that haunts our popular imagination that every attempt at a new spectacle, performance, and press releases will try to suppress.
For the first time in decades, we have faced a flood of the Real. The bodies on the tarmac of August 21 1983 is merely an apparition, whose image led to a religious moment. The clash of bodies and weapons, pursues not the divine of the martyr, but the profoundness of direct organized action against the profanity of state terrorism. The context surrounding the protest, the scandal over flood control construction contractors corrupting public works funding, seem secondary against the strength of the images of September 21, but nonetheless, important to consider if we are to expand the scale.
But unlike Baudrillard’s desert, the flood of the Real subsides. Symbolic articulation of state forces and their apparati effectively activates flood control only against the overspill of insurrectionary desire.
It is from this scale of historical weight that I would like to consider Manila’s Finest, a recent film co-produced by Cignal and MQuest Ventures, subsidiaries of the media conglomerate owned by Manuel V. Pangilinan (MVP), a member of the 1%. It is of particular interest that the film is paralleled against the events of September 21, 2025 since it features as parts of its many plot shifts the titular Manila’s Finest, a moniker that a certain precinct in the city of Manila calls themselves, responding and suppressing protests held at Mendiola and the US embassy. Of course, the imagery is incomparable as the film directed by Raymond Red fails on every spectacular aspect. But it is interesting to note how this failure of imagery reflects the failure of imagination of its core material (which was penned by Moira Lang, Michiko Yamamoto, and Sherad Anthony Sanchez as credited).
The MVP rendition of a supposedly Mendiola rally in 1969 treats the protesters with disinterest, treating chants as soundbed which intelligible calls do not even present an organized logic, with anachronistic slogans in their placards. Whether one looks at this either as a lack of research or production haste does not matter at this point. To present them at the final material is already a posture of subject position. As the film takes the perspective of the police force ready and itching to hit unarmed and flimsy protesters with their batons, it does not really care much of the intricacies of how protests are organized and pretty much indifferent to the aesthetics of chants and slogans.
What Manila’s Finest cares about the most, through its protagonist Homer Magtibay (played by Piolo Pascual, ⅓ of the producers through Spring Films), is the existence of the agitator, the agent provocateur, portrayed hiding in the midst of the protesters. The same dubious figure is seen behind an arson in a small urban community. The narrative rationale of this pursuit for the provocateur is to depict destabilizers within the very forces of the state to justify expansion of power, in the context of the film’s setting, term extension of government officials through Martial Law. In this sense, the Pangilinan picture paints a portrait of a government which has force and power so great that no kind of resistance can ever escape it. Its view of the other side is also true, as the lens of the 1% sees protests as futile, and worse, co-opted for the purposes of contrived destabilization that benefits the very 1% and their government cohorts that they expose.
It is the same kind of paranoia against a provocateur that lead the very cynicism among the petitbourgeois liberals who are not even at Mendiola in September 21 to opine that the violence was “misguided” and ultimately just benefitting the Duterte camp since it paints a bad picture against the Marcos Jr. administration. In the fight between two children of fascists, the cynical petitbourgeoisie played the game of the lesser evil, with Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as their avatar. This cynicism extends towards the protesters and rioters, whose expression of violence is seen as just a participation to their imaginary game and not an actual expression of a frustrated agency.
To extend this cynicism against political agency through the perspective of the police, who are already at the brink of their fascist enjoyment of suppressing protests with batons, shields, and goons, is the core of Manila’s Finest the film. Raymond Red, playing the auteur, added his usual flare of cowardice to his police characters that cowers at the face of bureaucratic challenge. It is almost perverse, really, that every turn of the members of Homer’s team towards success is enjoyed with frustrations from the Metrocom (the defacto central committee, so to say, of the police force at the time). It’s like edging, with the film experiencing a jouissance of sorts by not exploding into catharsis, and wallowing into scenes where the characters just stare and stare. All of those maneuvers only to give the final shot of the gun to the greater power, like a submissive kink.
At the brink of a historical moment, when people, especially the youth, are finally finding their way towards agency, to scare bureaucrat capitalists into seeing that they do not have the monopoly in shaping history and society through violence, Manila’s Finest gave forewarning and assurance for the bourgeois and the petitbourgeoisie that everything will be alright for them, if they just believe what they have always believed: that the protesters are controlled by an unknown figure who ultimately serves a certain faction of the ruling power, whether it’s an opposing political figure (or China if we recall what Mike de Leon suggests in his last short films). The police will always be there to serve and protect the ruling class and the interest of the force, even at the expense of their pitiful and sad lives after they enjoy murdering young protesters. (Oh they are so sad!) The film is 119 minutes given for Pangilinan and the likes of him to chuckle in the background, for the profit and for seeing that the class structure remains the same, while we watch this badly written, badly designed, badly shot, badly directed, sad excuse of a film.
Maybe, next time, we should flood Mendiola with the blood of the 1%.
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