Who Shall Heal Murder?: Lino Brocka’s Cain and Abel

“Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.”—Genesis 4:11

From ancient oral storytelling to modern literature, the biblical myth from which Lino Brocka’s Cain at Abel (Cain and Abel,1982) takes its title has fuelled myriad responses and reworkings. Its stark, primordial tension is sibling rivalry – two brothers make sacrifices to God: Cain, a farmer, gives fruit of the ground; while Abel, a herdsman, offers the firstborn of his flock. When God expresses regard for Abel’s sacrifice rather than Cain’s, Cain is enraged; he leads his brother into a field and kills him.

Opinions have varied over which brother is more sympathetic. Writers of antiquity favoured Abel; they saw in him a symbol for righteousness,¹ atonement,² the promotion of religion-centred culture,³ even a martyr’s willingness to die for their beliefs.⁴ From the perspective of religion, Cain’s envy was abhorrent because he rejected the given conditions of existence; his quarrel was an unholy one with God.⁵ Others, closer to our time, have been moved by the pathos of Cain’s anguish in the face of rejection. Picture, for cinematic example, the damaged sensitivity of James Dean’s incarnation of Cain-surrogate Caleb Trask in East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), adapted from Steinbeck. In this secular, Californian, 20th century retelling of the myth, Caleb, wayward yet eager to please, suffers from his father’s unyielding lack of indulgence. In comparison, his dutiful brother Aron appears conventional and limited.

With Cain and Abel, a distinctly Filipino version of the story, Cain is again aggrieved – but as it turns out, no single character will make up its emotional centre. Like in East of Eden, the two brothers – Lorens and Ellis – belong to a wealthy landowning family, albeit separated by station: Lorens (Phillip Salvador), a hardworking, hard-drinking labourer, runs the farm; while Ellis (Christopher de Leon), a yuppie and a mama’s boy, returns from Manila, having dropped out of university. Since childhood, their mother Señora Pina – the family’s widowed matriarch, played by Mona Lisa – has treated Ellis with near-incestual favouritism. When Ellis selfishly asks Pina to bequeath the farm to him instead of Lorens – on top of the fortune he will already receive – she buckles. With its sensitivity to class, the film’s lens of scrutiny encompasses not just the biblical myth’s focus on the fallout, but also the man-made order of things. In an early, wounded sequence, Lorens watches on as Ellis entertains the family with a piano concert and a magic show – the younger brother’s easy, cultivated charm a conjuring act of its own.⁶

The family backdrop also includes Lorens’s wife Becky (Baby Delgado) – mother of their two sons, and pregnant with a third – and Zita (Carmi Martin), Ellis’s fashionable girlfriend brought home from Manila. The fiery pair show, to a greater degree than their male partners, clearer insight into Pina’s capriciousness. Pina criticises Zita for her sexual liberty, and wants Ellis to break up with her – transparently aware of the threat Zita poses to her own hold over him. In a soap-opera-style twist, we learn that this isn’t the first time Pina has meddled in Ellis’s love life: after Rina (Cecille Castillo) the house servant was impregnated by Ellis, Pina paid Rina’s family to carry the pregnancy to term, so as to fulfil her own wish for a grandchild. Rina still holds a flame for Ellis and, in a crushing moment that recalls Lorens’s wounded look, listens in the night as he makes passionate love to Zita, her fingers gently stroking a necklace he recently gave her.

Brocka’s filmmaking, with its embrace of the vernacular of the poor – soap, comic books, heightened emotion – eschewed the preciosity of Filipino yuppies and intellectuals. The professional classes tended to look down at local film product as trashy and provincial, referring to them dismissively as bakya (“wooden clogs”). “I start with the premise that they are intelligent,” Brocka said of the masses. “They may not be intelligent in the sense that they went to school, but they have basic common sense.”⁷ Abetted by the injection of rising literary star Ricky Lee as screenwriter, Cain and Abel achieves a Sirkian fusion of sentimentality and sophistication. The production – lavish by local standards – nonetheless retains an earthy feel: faces drip with dewy sweat, makeup smears, overdubbed sighs sit forward in the mix. Max Jocson’s score includes heart-rending, church-organ-like melodies, along with tense, bent, discordant synth tones that provide a touch of the avant-garde. When, in the heat of a family argument, a serious accident befalls Becky, the film’s careful plotting gives way to fast-paced action; its blistering tension wells up and bursts into bloody vendetta.

What follows is brilliantly, elliptically edited to give a frightening sense of guardrails falling off, such that the viewer is forced to play catch-up to the hurtling, spiralling situation. On one side of the feud is Lorens and a group of provincial gangster friends; on the other, Ellis and Zita’s brother Robert (Michael Zandico), along with a band of rich, high-grade-rifle-packing hooligans. The atmosphere – reeking thick with threat and psychological acuity – is the stuff of Sam Peckinpah, whose action-thriller Straw Dogs (1971) gets name-checked by Robert in a fatally overenthusiastic reading. As the traditional code of justice “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” (“mata sa mata; ngipin sa ngipin”) is invoked by Ellis and Lorens’s allies, life becomes cheapened before our eyes. Amongst the carnage, the exchanges of revenge take on a self-perpetuating life beyond their original scope, their instigating motives all but forgotten.

For local audiences who received Cain and Abel in 1982, despotic rule and rampant violence were all too familiar. In his book on Brocka, film scholar Joseph B. Capino has pointed out broad resonances between the film and political issues of its day.⁸ Pina, with her irrational authoritarianism, bears resemblance to the country’s kleptocrat president Fernando Marcos who – a decade before the film’s release – had declared martial law, claimed as a last resort of defence against dissenting student protestors, communists, and Muslim separatists. The bitter conflict that escalated as a result of Marcosian rule is echoed in the film: Lorens and his goon allies call to mind the countryside’s militant insurgents; while Robert and his friends resemble both the vicious offspring of public officials and gun-crazy military operatives. The unending clashes, reinforced by rigid ideology, were exacerbated by the government’s corruption and lack of due process, its brazen executions and cynical condoning of anti-communist vigilantism.

In light of this context, Cain and Abel links to another detail of the biblical tale: when Cain is banished as punishment for Abel’s murder, God inscribes him with a protective mark to ward off violent retaliation from others who may find him. Experts have linked this detail with a concern for spiralling blood vengeance⁹ – a problem all societies to varying degrees try to address, pulling out enmity’s teeth by regulating its exchanges and replacing it with a public, impersonal authority.¹⁰ As Filipino history attests, havoc is wreaked when this authority is defective, when a fair and effective criminal justice system is lacking or absent.¹¹ In Cain and Abel, we see how quickly blood spreads if friendship stands in for the basic protection system – when my friend’s foes and my foe’s friends become targeted as my own enemy.

The underprivileged characters of Brocka’s cinema – like those of Martin Scorsese, who, like Brocka, was raised Catholic – are not spared judgment on account of their victimisation. Cain and Abel‘s boiling sense of social justice seethes just as strong, for instance, when witnessing Lorens’s friends’ predatory misogyny as it does when depicting the chauvinism of the wealthy. When Lorens scolds his sons for leaving their belongings in Ellis’s room, his cruelty resembles, at smaller scale, the jawdropping transference that takes place for the heroine of Brocka’s Insiang (1976), when – in channelling her fury and humiliation – she uses her rapist as tool of revenge against both her ex-boyfriend and mother. In both films, each character takes their turn on the bottom end of the whirligig of fortune; there is even room in Cain and Abel to pity Pina, its most difficult character, as she dies in her mansion – now termite-infested, empty and haunted – not knowing what has become of her sons.

Beyond the simple finger-pointing of blame, Cain and Abel keeps with the project of Brocka’s politicised art to show clearly the conditions of society. Brocka, a fixture on the picket line, held firebrand attitudes against the abuse of power that were far from those of meek respectability¹² – but by the film’s climax, the common condition of violence made licit has become an inescapable issue for everyone, and the film’s sense of righteous fury intermingles with a mediating sense of atonement and forbearance. There is a moment – where Lorens, in a thicket of gunfire, refuses a chance to take revenge – that offers a glimpse of a religious image: Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, having accepted the bitter cup of sacrifice to which his imminent arrest will lead, tells a companion, “Put your sword back into its place; for those who take the sword with perish by it.”¹³ That Lorens and Ellis realise this too late – with no further promise that society might be redeemed – makes their denouement all the more heart-rending. We end, in this case, not with the bloody birth pangs of a better world, but the abortion of the future. Per Peckinpah, again – whose The Wild Bunch (1969) is alluded to in Cain and Abel‘s opening shot of two spiders fighting to the death – “The violence in us, in all of us, has to be expressed constructively or it will sink us.”¹⁴

Cain at Abel/Cain and Abel (1982 Philippines 111 mins)

Prod Co: Cine Suerte Prod: Benjamin G. Yalung Dir: Lino Brocka Scr: Ricky Lee Phot: Conrado Baltazar Mus: Max Jocson Ed: Efren Jarlego Prod Des: Joey Luna

Cast: Christopher de Leon, Phillip Salvador, Mona Lisa, Carmi Martin, Cecille Castillo, Baby Delgado, Ruel Vernal, Michael Zandico, Venchito Galvez

Endnotes