Chaos and Order in Lino Brocka’s Insiang (1976)

Abstract

The Marcos regime’s seizure of culture® and the first couple’s promulgation of “truth, beauty, and goodness” as guiding cultural principles® was more than an act of political repression. It was the purposeful and incisive reimagining of Filipino subjectivity for the global capitalist paradigms of the cold war order. This essay analyzes Lino Brocka’s 1976 film Insiang as a visualization of authoritarian violence that acknowledges the insidiousness of Marcosian cultural reforms and their adamant demand to affect and seize Filipino sensibilities. The film illustrates the ways that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’s mandates for morality, beauty, and humanity were impossible within the impoverished conditions of Manila’s urbanity. More importantly, I argue that the film disrupts the coherency of the Marcoses’ renditions of Filipino subjectivity by making a case for lifemaking practices bred and cultivated by chaos itself.