The business of multi-level marketing (MLM)—the storyline of Honor thy Father—is no different from the ways of the infamous Yellow Kid Weil. Regarded as the most notorious con-man in history, Weil preyed on man’s base interest—wealth and property. A common catchphrase by MLM lecturers is why work hard for meager wages if you can sit back, relax, and earn? A row of old-time investors will second the lecturer in glee, either by clapping, cheering, or praising God. On the sidelines, a long queue of excited investors collecting their paychecks is seen conspicuously to the audience. The power of suggestion will infect multitude of prospective investors, convincing young professionals, students, workers, and entrepreneurs to invest at least P7,000 of their hard-earned money for a venture that promises “passive income,” that is, income not from labor power (in exchange of wages), commodity production, or retail, but income from the investments of succeeding investors under one’s “downline.”
Honor thy Father then juxtaposes MLM with organized religion. In a similar vein, Bishop Tony (Tirso Cruz III) of the fictional Church of Yeshua appeals to another base interest of man—salvation from an impoverished world. Bishop Tony, though, trades the mystical concept of salvation for faith in Yeshua (God) by helping him build his Church throughout the country. And to build his Church, the believer has to give money to Tony, and by giving the believer will receive salvation, that is, a numbing feeling of approval from a Higher Being. Kaye (Meryll Soriano), an active member of the Church of Yeshua, recruits her fellow believers to her father’s MLM business in apparent good faith.
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Edgar (John Lloyd Cruz), the protagonist and Kaye’s husband, finds himself caught in the maelstrom of two shady organizations. The MLM business backfired with the murder of Kaye’s father, and Kaye’s investments were lost in the process, being merely her father’s “downline.” The people in Kaye’s downline lost their investments in the process, and among them, a powerful congressman, threatens to kill them if he will not be paid in two weeks.
The death threat was the turning point. It opened a can of worms about Edgar’s world—a real world shared by millions like him who have to repay their debts in order to survive. A world with a system founded not on the idea of cooperation and equality, but that of accumulation of property. A world founded on freedom from kingly rule but has transmogrified into the rule of a faceless, soulless entity—capital. A world that institutionalized the “human nature” of greed in the name of “development,” wherein the immense riches of the few will “trickle down” to the many.
That system, capitalism, started from large scale commodity production reliant on manual labor. The mass of manual laborers were later replaced by machines created by manual laborers of the past. The present manual laborers replaced by these more efficient machines form a vast reserve army of labor—unemployed or underemployed people waiting in vain for job opportunities.
Since capitalism cannot employ all, those in the reserve army have to think ways of survival—small business, conning through MLM, robbery, gold digging, corruption, praying to a lifeless God, or picking lost money in a filthy river. For middle class parents like Edgar and Kaye, the objective of survival is to provide a good future for their children. For manipulative losers like Bishop Tony, it is about living an Imeldific life. For the dirt poor (the people who jumped in the river for Tony’s scattered money), it is about fulfilling daily needs. There are only two consequences of survival—to end up earning, or to be mired in debt.
Such dog-eat-dog world was poignantly reflected in Honor thy Father, wherein love is lawless, religion is godless, and friendship is selfish. It is every man for himself and worse those in society’s lower strata are the ones eating each other out—sister against sister, comrade against comrade, worker against worker—while those in the upper echelon wallow in immense wealth created by the people below them.
At the end of the day, a common man like Edgar may have gone full circle against his enemies, surviving his Herculean ordeal. Still, at the end of the film, his life leads to nowhere. For the system offers no straight path to victory: only a rocky, winding road to misery.
