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BY HERBERT VEGO
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YESTERDAY, I spent time breezing through YouTube trailers of the movie version of the controversial Inferno novel by Dan Brown, hoping to see at least a scene shot in Manila. There was none. The movie – filmed in the European cities of Budapest, Venice and Florence – tackles the problem of spiraling world population.
I “Googled,” asking why Columbia Pictures had scrapped Manila. Director Ron Howard’s answer: to fit the movie into two hours.
I would rather not pass judgment on the “insignificance” of the exclusion of the Manila scenery. The omission could be good for Manila, which the Brown novel described as “gates of hell.”
I clearly remember that in 2013 when the novel came out, Brown drew flak from then Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) chairman Francis Tolentino, who wrote the author: “While we are aware that yours is a work of fiction, we are greatly disappointed by your inaccurate portrayal of our beloved metropolis.”
In a chapter of the novel, an English lady doctor, Sienna Brooks, found herself rubbing elbows with the poor, congested squatters of Manila.
“Sienna could only gape in horror,” Brown said of her. “She had never seen poverty on this scale.”
Anybody who has gone to Manila has seen what is described in the novel as “six-hour traffic jams, suffocating pollution, and a horrifying sex trade…” It is a reality that Brown himself must have personally seen.
Shouldn’t government take the blame for the rise of the so-called “dregs of society” in squatter colonies? Long before the publication of the controversial American novel, Filipino film makers had been producing movies exposing poverty and criminality in Manila. One of them is the award-winning classic Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag, directed by the late Lino Brocka.
Having worked as a journalist for 11 straight years in Metro Manila, I know from unforgettable personal experiences that the scenes in the Brown novel mirror realities. A morbid one occurred while I was walking on Rizal Avenue near Galaxy theater. The scene unfolding a few feet away from me was that of a man stabbing another man. The victim, clutching his bloodied chest, managed to run to the front seat of a passing jeep but died before he could be taken to a hospital.
A few years later, while walking out of my office on Ronquillo Street, I met a group of knife-wielding teenagers. To my surprise, they surrounded me. Remembering the Galaxy stabbing incident, I thought the end was near.
“Hindi ‘yan,” one of them shouted, apparently realizing they had mistaken me for someone else. I heaved a sigh of relief; the end was not near yet.
There was a time when I woke up looking for my cash-full wallet. My wife confessed that she had not fished it out of my hanging pants. On later noticing a window wide open, I knew a thief had invaded our room while we were asleep. I composed myself and thanked God I had not awakened while the thief was at work. If he were armed, I could have died fending him off.
The second time I lost a wallet was when I fell victim to a “laglag barya” gang inside a passenger jeepney. Seeing some coins fall, I bended to pick and pass them to the driver, only to discover later that my back pocket no longer had my wallet. Apparently, the passenger at my right had deftly pulled it while I was picking coins.
The aforementioned incidents were among the reasons why I abandoned living in Metro Manila. If all this could happen to me, I thought, why not to the moneyed and unsuspecting foreign tourists?/PN
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