“Showing that they don’t care about me, or caring that I should know they don’t care about me, still denotes dependence… They show me respect precisely by showing me that they don’t respect me.”
These words by Søren Kierkegaard jotted in his diary reflect his understanding of how hate operates and how haters drive it. Hate, the engine that drives such modern concepts as bullying and trolling, has lived as long as we have. The currency of bullying and trolling operates on this dependency. The film in question, “John Denver Trending (2020)”, foregrounds this human condition in a blend of the haplessness that is both the end product of this hatred of the hater and the helplessness of the prey.
Released just four months before the world took a hiatus due to the pandemic, “John Denver Trending” (Arden Rod Condez, 2020), in a way, presaged the infodemic that accompanied the pandemic. In “John Denver Trending,” a 14-year-old Filipino boy, John Denver Cabungcal, has to wrongfully bear the accusations of theft. He is accused of stealing his classmate’s expensive iPad. When his classmates accuse him and confiscate his bag to search for it, the situation escalates into a brawl. One of his classmates, Samulde, grabs this as an opportunity to record a video and share it on Facebook with a narrative that does not have John Denver’s goodwill in mind.
The video finds widespread circulation among John Denver’s community in Pandan, situated in the province of Antique region in the Philippines, and he is instantly vilified and disowned. He refutes the claims, and his mother demands an investigation. However, the only investigation that his society knows is the one that is underpinned by hearsay. The accusations are not so much findings based on pieces of evidence as they are stereotypes indicating myopic attitudes towards those who are disadvantaged in terms of their socio-economic position in society.
The school goes as far as forming a fact-finding committee, albeit to appease the more unruly parents. John Denver only receives support from his mother, who goes far and wide to prove her son’s innocence. What makes the victimized boy even more vulnerable is the absence of a father. In the end, unable to bear the shame and guilt surrounding what has transpired, and in the face of constant humiliation, John Denver kills himself.
Put simply and explicitly, “John Denver Trending” is a story of the far-reaching and adverse effects of misinformation and bullying. It concerns itself with a contemporary concern with ancient roots—that of witch-hunting facilitated by the Internet. Keeping that in view, I read the film as one that attempts to acquaint the audience with the principles and characteristics of the new media like no other film, principles that make misinformation an accepted by-product of the system.
The ‘new media’ is a term that demands definitions and redefinitions. In short, it is the mode of digital communication facilitated by the Internet. Unlike traditional, legacy media like newspapers and television, the new media works on the logic of an interactive, porous channel. It is continuously evolving, more audience-driven, and definitely more individualistic. That being said, an element of lethality also resides as its untapped energy, ready to rear its head when the time is suitable.
The idea is not to find all the principles at once in the film but to acknowledge the ones that are very apparent. The new media, though accessible, is unforgiving—it never forgets. There is no way it offers a return to the state of things that existed before. It preserves both the truths and the lies but dissolves the threshold that keeps lies from becoming truths. For Lev Manovich, “a new media object is not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite versions.” So, when Samulde, the classmate majorly responsible for John’s plight, is asked to delete the video, he says it is too late, highlighting the possibility of multiple copies of the video in existence.
Deleting the video that Samulde made would be akin to pelting a stone at a gigantic monster. So vast is the reach that the media object takes up a new and perhaps formidable personality of its own. It no longer remains obedient to its ‘original’ form; perhaps there remains no ‘original’ form as such. With new media, the users are no longer bound to the duties of passive consumers; they become the producers themselves. We get a taste of it when John Denver’s neighbor uploads a video condemning him.
However, in the first video, John is never directly accused of stealing the iPad. The footage later goes through some editing software, gaining a life of its own, where parts are cut and assembled together to form the utterance “I saw him selling…the iPad”. The presence of “…” before the “iPad,” the presence of a glitched surface in an utterance that should have been seamless otherwise, gives a hint towards revelation—the revelation of the presence of concealment. But as the accused has been determined and the figurative coffin has been set, the hint slinks into oblivion.
The new media also has the capacity to blindside. People are made to believe that with the propagation of modern science and technology, development and justice are given. However, the technology here and the new media, if anything, only relegate the marginalized further into the shadows. Rather than uplifting, it works as a tool for oppression. The theory of technological determinism espouses the belief that technology always has the upper hand and is the decisive factor that molds social and cultural structures.
So, if it is to be believed, with the ushering in of technology, a sign of modernity, justice, and law—essential pillars of modern society– would unquestionably prevail and result in a withering away of traditional structures based on discrimination. “John Denver Trending” stands opposed to this reductionist idea, proving that such a theory only has limited validity. Throughout the narrative, the socio-cultural abyss between John Denver and that of the others is palpable. As for technology, the new media only plays a subservient role to the interests of the privileged class. Neither the school nor the social worker, and definitely not the police, can save John Denver, whose condition is so because of the fact that he is up against the other side of a class that can afford an iPad.
What makes the tension palpable for me is John Denver’s attempt to capture internet connections from here and there and his lone and desperate attempts to fight off an online mob that is gung-ho about incriminating him. It is not difficult for the entire Pandan to single him out, and when they indeed do that, there is no going back.
Awarded Best Film in the 15th Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival, this limited-budget movie acquaints its audience with a society where social media and the internet coexist alongside shamanism and black magic. The witch-hunting induced by John Denver’s old neighbor parallels the virtual witch-hunting of John Denver himself.
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