Saint Sebastian on the Streets
By Ernest Lee
Streets are not purely transitory, planned spaces of bare concrete. They
are
deeply political. Who these sites include and exclude, what kind of
connections
the city facilitates, and whose lives ultimately come to matter within
them,
are
the concerns of director Petersen Vargas. How to Die Young in Manila,
through
the brief journey of a young boy searching for an anonymous hookup makes
for
a
simple plot, offers entry into a world of desire, doubt, disgust and
death.
A lingering scent of isolation and fear pervades the grimy bathrooms,
dirty
alleyways, and crowded underpasses that the boy passes through. The side
of
Manila that Vargas lingers on easily turn to cliché under clumsier
directing,
but here, familiar urban decay, erratic street lighting, and copious
amounts
of
trash artfully contribute to a queer cinematic of the city. Brief
moments of
heady sexuality and confusion, like a naked man inexplicably reclining
in a
concrete basin of water by the street. only reinforce this.
“I feel like, in their own beautiful, sometimes messy and chaotic ways,
that
all
queer stories are coming-of-age stories”, Vargas has remarked. How to Die Young
tilts towards the mess and chaos. Like the restless, anticipatory trail
of
the
unnamed protagonist, the cinematography shies away from lingering in any
one
setting. Tight, somewhat static camera angles create a distance between
him,
giving a sense one is being hunted – even stalked. Threat and
satisfaction
intermingle. The hustlers populating the streets might loosely share his
sexual
orientation, but their cliquey behaviour and predatory mannerisms mark
them
as a
threat nonetheless. At these moments, his uncertainty is palpable, but
it is
precisely this loneliness that makes his decisions to continue within
this
dangerous underworld equally understandable. Its well-crafted atmosphere
speaks
where its protagonist elects to remain silent.

The paucity of dialogue sets this short aside from the rest of Vargas’
filmography, lacking the banter of the webseries Hanging Out or the punchy
exchanges of 2 COOL 2 BE 4GOTTEN . Its ostensibly realist tone quickly
falters with sightings of grotesque, mutilated bodies, and various
dramatized deaths In turning away from being the unfiltered experience of a
boy’s search for companionship, moments of ambiguity arise. The
near-inscrutable expression of the protagonist lends an air of stoicism,
rather than desensitization. At times, he merely seems puzzled at graphic,
out-of-place incidents. Might the film’s nod towards the symbolic soften,
rather than refine,the violence and vulnerability of queer life?
Its most melodramatic, yet baffling moment occurs after an initial
misidentification leads the protagonist to unintentionally reject another
youth he initially chats with. Cut to the latter’s death in slow motion: now
clothed in nothing but white briefs, he writhes in anguish at the various
arrows that pierce his body, bathed in a luminous glow. This darkly comic
image recalls popular depictions of Saint Sebastian, but toys with its
iconographic referents. Who is being martyred, and who is doing the
martyring? Here, Vargas elevates the protagonist to the level of the
tyrannical Diocletian. If this is a veiled comment on the power dynamics and
asymmetries within the queer underground, it is also a visual argument that
detracts from the culpability of wider Filipino society in persecuting queer
existence. Moments of historical allusion ought to illuminate, not
obfuscate.
This is not to say that Vargas is thoroughly unconcerned with wider societal
structures. Still, How to Die Young in Manila largely succeeds in being the
timely, crucial intervention needed in a tumultuous social and political
environment. Even when blurring the line between reality and symbolic, he
produces a powerful visual reminder of cruel policies endangering Filipinos
of various walks of life. Queer underworlds feature in Filipino film canon,
like Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light (1975), but Vargas eschews
flamboyant stereotypes to comment on everyday, shared environments.
Ostensibly symbols of repressed desire and rejection, the bloodied, male
corpses recurring in the short also evoke more recent extrajudicial killings
sanctioned by President Rodrigo Duterte that terrorize the city. The victims
– alleged drug dealers – constitute another social category coded as
‘undesirable’, who lead precarious existences of their own kind. The short
is therefore a grueling reminder of states’ ‘necropolitics’, the power to
dictate that some may live, and others are exposed to death and killing. It
is telling that the short’s climax is filmed not in an ‘othered’, distinctly
hostile space, but a brightly-lit, busy underpass. A young man dies; no one
reacts.
Through an eminently relatable short, Vargas offers a creative reimagining
of Manila that gives due consideration to the various communities that
inhabit it. Even if dramatic, the story it tells is surely not exceptional.
Young, queer Filipinos constitute what Achille Mbembe deems the ‘walking
dead’, their lives less valuable and easily overlooked. How one comes to die
young in Manila, then, is less a matter of taking that first step into
nighttime streets, but a decision already made for them by cruel policy and
an indifferent society.