The Silences of ‘Heneral Luna’
The Silences of ‘Heneral Luna’
Ten years have passed since Heneral Luna stormed Philippine theaters and revived public interest in the Philippine-American War. Antonio Luna, previously a marginal character in our collective historical memory, became a household name overnight. The film positions him as a tragic hero of the war, the soldier who could have turned the tide and won it all for us if only he had not been killed by his fellow Filipinos. Or as the Americans in the film describe the tragedy, “you killed the only real general you had.”
Picture this:
Why did the Filipinos lose the war against the Americans?
Because they betrayed their own people. In the film Heneral Luna, we learn that one of our greatest generals was killed by his fellow Filipinos. Just like Andres Bonifacio, Antonio Luna was also ordered dead by the Aguinaldo-led government. This is exemplified by the film’s famous line: “Ang totoong kaaway ng mga Pilipino ay ang sarili niya.” (The true enemy of the Filipino is himself.)
How many times do you think those words have been written by students throughout the country over the last decade? How accurate is the sentiment? What does it even really mean?
If we truly believe in the importance of learning from the mistakes of our past, we need to be just as critical about the media that depicts our history as we are of the history itself. We have so few cinematic depictions of the Philippine-American War that each one needs to be held to a higher level of scrutiny. We need to understand what this film adds to our cultural discourse. As Haitian historian Michel-Rolf Trouillot wrote in his masterpiece Silencing the Past, “each historical narrative renews a claim to truth.” [1]
Even though the opening lines of the film claim it’s not meant to be historical, that it focuses on “bigger truths about the Filipino nation that can only be reached by combining the real and the imaginary,” [2] the reality is that art both defines and constrains the limits of our historical discourse. How our media depicts the past affects how we collectively see it. And every depiction of the past changes what lessons the public draws from it. And what do we learn from the film, that the enemies are actually within?
Much has already been written about the political impact of Heneral Luna on the ascendancy of strongman Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency. Luna was brutal and violent, but we forgave him because he cared about the future of the country. He was the only one who could have led us to victory against the Americans, or so they say. Rewatching it after the 2022 win of Bongbong Marcos adds another tart layer of irony to the film. The message of UniTeam over tribalism echoes bitterly. The real world has shown us that an ideology of unity can just as easily be used as a smokescreen to serve the interests of factional ruling oligarchies. The Filipino people continue to lose out.
What we’ve learned over the last decade is that promoting unity as an end is not enough. It was never enough. The legacy of Heneral Luna lies in its shallow portrayal of the past. It collapsed the complex contours of the Philippine-American War into a battle between national unity and factional dissent, into a war amongst Filipinos. In an attempt to create a mythology out of Antonio Luna’s life, the film failed the Filipino people by fostering an uncritical nationalism that simplified the moral political binary to that of being for-the-country or against-it. And what has this done for us so far?
Mon Confiado as General Emilio Aguinaldo. Just like the film’s main source material, Aguinaldo is the film’s main villain, although it is still up for historical debate if he actually ordered Luna’s death.
Uncovering Historical Silences
According to Trouillot, “any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences, the result of a unique process, and the operation required to deconstruct these silences will vary accordingly.” Perhaps to better understand Heneral Luna, we must pay equal attention to its silences, to what it leaves out of its mythology.
For one, it seems to eschew any critical analysis of the colonial transition itself. The Americans oddly loom tucked away in the background, often literally off-screen. The violence of their actions is tempered by that of Luna’s own outbursts. It’s odd that a film about the Philippine-American War is so intent on focusing on the violence of Filipinos towards each other. Perhaps the purpose is to double down on its message that the Filipino’s worst enemy is himself. It’s easy to come away from the film more frustrated at Emilio Aguinaldo, Pedro Paterno, and the rest of the government, than at the American soldiers who have needlessly come to kill Filipinos. Even up to the last frames of the film we’re reminded that Filipino scouts (Macabebes) captured Aguinaldo.
The real issue, according to the film, is “Who can you really trust amongst your so-called countrymen?” We come out of the film thinking: two sides fought, we could have won, but we chose to kill Luna, so we lost. But regret is the root of rot. To truly understand the troubles of the past we can’t just offer counterfactuals, we need to investigate the system that left us with these few options. And to do so we need to get our basic facts straight.
Rewriting the Philippine-American War
The first thing we need to understand is that it is ahistorical—it is factually incorrect— that the fate of the Philippine-American War was in the hands of a single person, let alone Antonio Luna. He was by all accounts a great general, that is not what is up for debate.
The issue is how the film frames its myth perpetuates a glaring historical revisionism: that there was only one primary front against the Americans, that the main fulcrum of Philippine history was the plight of the Tagalogs. This is incorrect. It’s not even accurate to say that the government of Aguinaldo was accepted by the masses in Luzon. According to historian Milagros Guerrero, many towns were “wracked by tax riots, demonstrations and peasant uprisings” against them. [3]
The reality is that the battle between the Malolos Government and the Americans was but one among many at the end of the 19th century. The reason why we think of it as so important is because the central characters of that movement set the stage for the American-led governments in the decades afterwards. Many members of the Malolos Government ended up joining the Americans to rule the Philippines under its colonial system. [4] They played key roles in setting up our country’s structures and systems. And so their history became national history. The rest of the scope of the war was reduced to a footnote.
There’s no reason why we have to limit ourselves to this point of view over a century later.
One of the most evocative shots of Heneral Luna is this recreation of those gruesome images of Filipino soldiers piled on top of each other during the Philippine-American War.
This myopic historical frame is set from the film’s very opening lines. We are introduced to Luna as the “one man [who] struggles to unite the country into one tidal wave of resistance,” a member of the so-called “Philippine Army.” What Philippine Army? Before a single line of dialogue, the film presents the Malolos army as if it were a national force. In reality, there was no army that meaningfully included most Filipinos. If the “Philippine Army” of the film had truly been inclusive, we would have seen or heard from Filipinos in the Visayas and Mindanao. Instead, the rest of the archipelago is effectively missing, as if they spent the war on the sidelines, waiting on the outcomes of the battles up North.
That the war extended beyond the Tagalog regions was not unknown to the Malolos revolutionaries. Apolinario Mabini himself writes of the need to coordinate with other armies in his 1901 history of the war, La Revolución Filipina.
On the Malolos-led army, historian Resil B. Mojares writes that it “was often ‘national’ more in form than in substance,” losing the war largely “by its failure to become what it claimed to be.” He emphasizes that this failure was “less a matter of strategy and tactics as it was, in the final instance, an outcome of the conditions of social and national formation at the time the war was fought.” Given the way society was structured and the short time in which events unfolded, he argues, “it could not have been otherwise.” [5] The war wasn’t lost on singular betrayals. To understand what happened we need to study the social circumstances of that time in Philippine society.
Asking the Right Questions
The film’s main issue is that it asks the wrong questions. Simple questions get simple answers.
Instead of asking, “Who betrayed the revolution?” or “Who could have won the revolution?”, perhaps more useful questions for the 21st century would be:
“What was happening to the rest of the country during the revolution?”
“Was there really just one main revolution?”
“And if there were other simultaneous revolutions, what were their ideologies? How did they imagine the future of their regions? The future of the whole Philippines?”
“What can we learn from their perspectives?”
What we tend to forget amidst all this discourse is that there is a meaningful difference between factionalism amongst elites and regionalism amongst masses in an archipelagic nation. And even these elite-masa and resistor-collaborator binaries are historically outdated. According to Mojares, these simple dichotomies are inadequate to understand the complex social formations of Philippine society at the turn of the century—especially outside of Manila.
Regionalism is not at fault. Perhaps instead of blaming it for our mistakes, we should instead look to its history and learn from it. We should work to understand the realities of those who live outside the national capital and accept that their histories are just as important as ours. If we are to truly be united as a country, it must start with taking the histories of all regions seriously.
Luna comes into conflict with Tomás Mascardo (Lorenz Martinez), who refuses to follow his orders.
Rejecting Colonial Narratives
Meditate on these lines from the film:
“Kung magiging isang bansa man tayo kailangan natin ng isang radikal na pagbabago. Mga kapatid, mayroon tayong mas malaking kaaway kaysa Amerikano. Ang ating sarili.”
(“If we are to become one nation, we need a radical transformation. Brothers, we have an enemy greater than the Americans: ourselves.)
“Mas masahol pa sa mga Amerikano ang mga taong inilalagay ang pangsariling interes, ang sumusumpa ng katapatan para lamang sa sariling rehiyon o tribo. ‘Yan ang pagpapatunay na hindi pa tayo handang pamunuan ang ating sarili”
(“Even worse than the Americans are those who put their own interests first, who swear allegiance only to their own region or tribe. That proves we are not yet ready to govern ourselves.”)
Filipinos who think regionally are worse than the Americans who came to colonize us? Seriously? Regionalism is why we are not fit to govern ourselves? Are these really the lessons we want to take into our nationalism today?
Ironically, this mentality mirrors the justifications the Americans used to colonize us. They argued that it was better for them to rule us than to leave us to fight amongst each other. According to Vicente Rafael, American intervention “was understood, in official accounts, as an altruistic act motivated by American concern for the natives’ welfare on the part of the United States. U.S. troops did not shoot Filipinos to kill them but to save them from killing one another.” [6]
Or in the words of postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon, our colonizers sought to be seen as a “mother who constantly prevents her basically perverse child from committing suicide or giving free rein to its malevolent instincts.” [7]
Over a century ago our disunity was used to justify our need to be colonized. It was said to be a sign we were less civilized. Surely we can’t just be repeating the same old narratives today?
Remembering Regional Resistance
The film concludes with text saying, “On April 19, 1901, Aguinaldo called on all Filipinos to surrender. On July 1, 1902, the Philippine-American War officially ended.” But it only “officially ended” then according to the Americans. That was their declared date. In reality, it only effectively ended in the Tagalog areas. The implication here is that when Aguinaldo fell, so did the rest of the country, like dominoes tumbling over one by one. But this is far from the truth on the ground. In fact, violent clashes continued afterwards throughout the archipelago outside of Manila. In Moro Mindanao, the war would last for another decade, ending with a hundred thousand total Muslims killed. [8] Artemio Ricarte famously never took an oath of allegiance to the United States and resisted them until his death in 1945. [9]
Let’s remember our history fully. It’s the only way we can properly learn from it. Perhaps instead of resisting our regionalism, we need to embrace it. Instead of considering it a sign of backwardness as the colonial narratives did, we can consider it as a necessary starting point to build histories anew. Perhaps it is exactly this multiplicity that makes us uniquely Filipino. To embrace this starts with resisting the narratives that erase the regions from our past. We need to enrich our understanding of ourselves.
And finally, we need to take seriously the violence of colonization, not just physically, but ideologically. We need to remember how it changed even how we saw ourselves. The history of the early Philippine government was of Filipinos trying to prove themselves to the Americans that they were worth taking seriously, that they could handle a democratic government.
To accept the American narratives of the war is to believe in our own inferiority, to foster an internalized racism. It’s about time we shed this mindset. To genuinely decolonize means to undo the narratives that were enforced on us during the colonial eras. To do so we need to further decentralize our histories for them to truly rise to the category of Filipino. [10]
The film’s dramatization of Luna’s murder.
Rewriting the Future
One might argue that Heneral Luna is only a film about one man, and cannot be faulted for failing to capture the complexities of the war. But the film itself refuses that modesty: it presents Luna as the nation’s last hope, frames the war as hinging on his survival, and in doing so, rewrites the meaning of the Philippine-American War for its viewers. Yes, it is a work of fiction. But fiction still needs to be held accountable to its impact, especially for the popular arts like cinema. One disclaimer at the start of the film is not going to stop audience members from internalizing the colonial narrative that the greatest enemy of the Filipino people is himself.
Ultimately, Heneral Luna falls short because its conservative depiction of the past does not serve the needs of the present or the future. It reinforces a dominant historical narrative that makes invisible, or worse, marginal, the resistance of Filipinos outside of the Tagalog regions. If we want to productively move forward as a nation we need to reimagine our perspectives on the past. We need to listen to our regional scholars and historians and work together to forge new visions of the country’s history. Let’s not merely repeat the same tired narratives that have been used to justify our need for autocratic domination: that it was our fault that we lost the war, our fault that we could not be independent. Unity cannot be founded on erasure. It must be rebuilt with the voices of those written out of history, collectively.
To the younger generations of artists emerging across the country, it’s up to you to remedy the myopias of the past. The future of the Philippines is yours to write.
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1. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon Press, 1995).
2. The exact disclaimer at the start of the film is as follows: “While historical accuracy is important, there are bigger truths about the Filipino nation that can only be reached by combining the real and the imaginary.”
3. “There is no evidence that the Malolos Congress considered or even proclaimed interest in social reform, even if implementation was to be made in the distant future. As the Ilustrados were quick to claim leadership of the Revolution, so too did members of the peasant masses who immediately made urgent demands that they too should partake of the rewards of the Revolution, with the abolition of taxes and forced labor and the legitimization of their claim to land, foremost among their demands. When these were not forthcoming or were consistently blocked by the municipal and provincial elites, many towns were wracked by tax riots, demonstrations and peasant uprisings.” Milagros C. Guerrero, Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898-1902 (University of Michigan, 1977)
4. “The colonizer installs chiefs who support him and who are to some degree accepted by the masses; he gives these chiefs material privileges such as education for their eldest children, creates chiefdoms where they did not exist before… And, above all, by means of the repressive organs of colonial administration, he guarantees economic and social privileges to the ruling class in their relations with the masses.” Amílcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amílcar Cabral (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973)
5. Resil B. Mojares, The War against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 1899–1906 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999)
6. Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000)
7. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963)
8. For more on the clashes between the Moros and the Americans, see Michael C. Hawkins, Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines’ Muslim South (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012); and Patricio N. Abinales, Making Mindanao: Cotabato and Davao in the Formation of the Philippine Nation-State(Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000).
9. Nick Joaquin, A Question of Heroes (Manila: National Book Store, 1977).
10. “They talk to me about progress, about “achievements,” diseases cured, improved standards of living. I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. I am talking about millions of men in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, behave like flunkies. I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted— harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population—about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials.” Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000; originally published 1950).
