D O X A AT L A R G E

Hijacked by Realism

Beatriz Jaguaribe

In an ordinary afternoon, numerous mourners attend the

funeral of a well-known upper-middle-class man. The funeral takes place in the
cemetery São João Baptista, located in the old neighborhood of Botafogo, in Rio
de Janeiro. The deceased man is to be buried in the oldest part of the cemetery,
in one of the plots shaded by trees where decaying majestic or pretentious tombs
are adorned by marbled sculptures. As the grave diggers prepare to lower the
casket, amid the muffled weeping distant popping sounds are heard. In the sec-
onds that follow, the sounds grow explosive, and the grave diggers calmly tell the
mourners to fling themselves to the ground, since the noises come from gunshots
exchanged between contending drug dealers located in a nearby favela perched
on a hill facing the back of the cemetery. As bullets whiz by, most of the mourn-
ers stumble against tombs and trample the funerary flowers in their frantic flight
toward the cemetery’s gates. The closest relatives of the dead man, a faithful few,
dodge the flying pellets. Some throw themselves to the ground, some hide below
dramatic funerary statues whose arms gesture toward the sky, and some seek
refuge behind marble angels whose unfurled wings the stray bullets threaten to
reduce to rubble.
As part of his daily ritual, a famous rock musician living in a grandiose man-
sion in the decaying old bohemian neighborhood of Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro,
takes his early-morning swim. As he does every morning, at the end of his exer-
cise he scans the blue depths of the pool for stray bullets. He does not find them
every day. But when he does, he adds them to the stray bullet collection on his
shelf.
At the end of another commonplace day, a working mother boards the col-
lective van toward a favela of Rio de Janeiro. As the van climbs the hill, the

I thank Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar for suggesting the title of this essay.

Public Culture 21:2  doi 10.1215/08992363-2008-026

Copyright 2009 by Duke University Press 219
Public Culture gore-splattered ground and the bodies of the dead warn her even before she gets
home that she may soon see the bloodied body of her adolescent son, shot by the
police.
Bypassing class barriers, violence in the metropolitan centers of Brazil extracts
its daily harvest of wounded and dead. The above-mentioned episodes were
told to me by people who had experienced them or had heard about them from
acquaintances. Whether exaggerated or factual, these narratives could have been
extracted from newspapers or viewed on television. Accounts of rapes, murders,
kidnappings, and assaults gain widespread circulation through the media, but the
perception of urban violence is also fueled by interpersonal rumors that shroud
the cartographies of the city as dreaded zones of danger.
Unlike cities that have been subjected to terrorist attack, ethnic strife, or civil
war, the major metropolitan areas of Brazil witness violence usually attributed to
social inequity, poor governance, and conflict wrought by the drug trade. Since the
1980s increases in social violence produced by the globalized drug trade and in the
flow of media images, consumer goods, and new cultural identities have caused a
crisis of representation of the city, of the favelas, and of the “national imagined
community.” Conversely, the democratization of Brazilian society has brought to
the forefront formerly silenced and invisible protagonists. As never before, the
urban poor, the favela communities, and the victims of social discrimination are
voicing their rights to consumption and representation. Despite fluctuating polls,
the popularity of President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva remains relatively secure
and indeed has risen incrementally because of the welfare policy of the “bolsa
família,” which provides basic subsidies to needy Brazilian families in the poorer
regions of the country. Furthermore, recent discoveries of oil reserves have given
the government of Lula, as da Silva is known, a boost in regard to the prospects of
increasing wealth and augmenting Brazilian autonomy in the future. Nonetheless,
while new democratic agendas are in the making, the disrepute of governmental
institutions by successive corruption scandals, the neglect of public health care,
the disrepair of airline and road transportation, the appalling conditions of Brazil-
ian prisons and the strength of criminal factions — as evidenced by the shutdown
of São Paulo in 2006 — and the daily reportage of urban social violence transmit-
ted by the media have created an atmosphere of radical uncertainty.
The mappings of social disarray tend to locate the favelas, the main terrain of
the drug trade and a zone of scarcity, as crucial areas of violence.1 The dramatic
1. See Luke Dowdney, Crianças no tráfico de drogas: Estudo de crianças dentro da ciolência
armada organizada no Rio de Janeiro (Children of the Drug Trade: A Case Study of Children in
Organized Armed Violence in Rio de Janeiro) (Rio de Janeiro: 7 Letras, 2003).

220
drop in price of real estate located next to the favelas is merely one indication Hijacked by Realism
of this phenomenon. Yet as evidenced by Mariana Cavalcanti’s recent anthro-
pological study, the favela dwellers’ own perceptions of the city’s danger-ridden
zones do not always correspond with the terrains of peril sketched by the middle-
class inhabitants.2 Furthermore, in a city such as Rio de Janeiro, where favelas of
the southern zone are embedded in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, the
demarcation between safe and unsafe regions becomes largely frayed. Nonethe-
less, favela inhabitants are far more likely than the city’s middle-class dwellers to
be subjected to violence by both the abusive police and the ruthless drug dealers.
Yet the sense of peril is widespread, and even formerly congenial, democratic
arenas, such as the beaches of Rio, have been — since the gang assaults of the
1990s — somewhat tainted by uncertainty. In subway stations, cemeteries, uni-
versity classrooms, public buildings, the alleys of the favelas, and the streets of
the city, victims hit by stray bullets from drug trade conflicts are found in almost
every part of this urban maze.
In the midst of such uncertainty, a veritable battle of representations is con-
tinuously unfolding in which new agendas of political agency and the demands
of civil society are recast in contradictory and ambiguous policies. Municipal
efforts ensuring the urbanization of the favelas have been made, and grassroots
movements represented by a plethora of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)
and community associations seek to promote the rights of the poor and disen-
franchised. Yet such rights are constantly violated by police repression, corrup-
tion, and continuing social inequity. Strident calls for a crackdown on bandits
and drug dealers and increasing demands for public security are voiced by politi-
cians, celebrities, and the anonymous middle and working classes, but the lack of
coordination among governmental agencies and pervasive institutional corruption
have undermined any immediate results. The overall sense of social instability
has crossed class barriers. While the upper classes retreat into fortified enclaves
protected by guards, gates, and electronic surveillance, the inhabitants of the
favelas and the poor peripheries are also investing in protective measures to keep
their children off the streets.
Given the urgency of this metropolitan crisis, it is not surprising that in recent
years there has been an outpouring of films, reportage, documentaries, and liter-
ary narratives that stress the social dismantlement of the nation’s urban centers.
Those that have gained widespread circulation generally use different realist aes-

2. See Mariana Cavalcanti, “Of Shacks, Houses, and Fortresses: An Ethnography of Favela Con-
solidation in Rio de Janeiro” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007).

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Public Culture thetic registers to convey forcefully the new portraits of Brazilian reality. These
realist registers function as a “pedagogy of social reality.” Yet they provide a
pedagogical framework in the vocabularies of the entertainment industry and
offer narratives and images easily digested by the public.
While writing a series of essays for a book on these new realist registers, I
was intrigued by how Brazilian cultural hybridity, carnivalesque imagination, and
multiple religious practices and beliefs are overruled or bracketed by realist rep-
resentation. Relying on naturalized notions of the quotidian based on the produc-
tion of the “reality effect,” such new realist registers in narratives, films, images,
and documentaries attempt to portray “life as it is.” Nevertheless, although they
stress a vital connection between “realist aesthetics” and social representation,
such productions provide an intensified sensation of reality precisely because they
make use of fictional strategies of dramatization, temporal framing, and invented
characters. The popularity of these diverse realist registers does not imply a
causal connection between social conflict and aesthetic responses, as I have pre-
viously argued, nor is realism as an aesthetic vocabulary either a homogeneous
or a dominant cultural code.3 Rather, the distinct forms and uses of realism differ
widely, and the production of realist narratives and images coexists with fantasies,
dreamworlds, and enchanted domains of magical practices.
But in recent essays I have suggested that in the midst of the chaos of Brazilian
cities, the media saturation and the overflow of spectacularized images produce a
demand for the “real” and the rendering of reality that become narrative ballasts
in times of crisis and uncertainty.4 Such a demand and dispute for the real and
the questioning of social reality are found worldwide, but in the case of Brazil
the search for the real and the new portraits of reality differ both from the realist
models of the nineteenth century and from modernist twentieth-century artis-
tic expressions, not only because they respond to new urban scenarios but also
because the lettered canons, nationalist imaginaries, and utopian agendas for the
future have been increasingly debunked or frayed. Contemporary realist registers
appropriate literary and artistic genres such as the detective novel, the gangster
film, and the cinematographic realism of mean-streets stories that are available
through global circulations of media. Catering to large audiences, such realist
productions become truly accessible to the vast majority of the population only
when translated or reworked for the television screen.

3. See Beatriz Jaguaribe, O choque do real: Estética, mídia e cultura (The Shock of the Real:
Aesthetics, Media, and Culture) (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2007).
4. Jaguaribe, O choque do real.

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 Many of these productions make use of what I have termed the aesthetic strat- Hijacked by Realism
egy of the shock of the real.5 By the shock of the real, I refer to specific repre-
sentations in both written narrative and visual imagery whose intense, dramatic
discharge destabilizes notions of a normative reality. I have argued that the shock
element resides in the nature of the event portrayed and in the convincing use of a
reality effect that nevertheless disrupts normative patterns. Unlike notions of the
sublime or the catastrophic that suggest a breakdown of representation by events
of such large scale or unexpected dimension they momentarily surpass concep-
tual coinage, the shock of the real in my sense is related to quotidian social occur-
rences: rapes, murders, muggings, fights — a host of events that evoke strong emo-
tional responses. In many ways the shock of the real seeks to achieve a catharsis,
but, contrary to the response elicited by Greek tragedy or romantic poetry, this
element does not necessarily provoke the classic sentiments of compassion and
pity or elevated sublimation. Rather, in many instances the cathartic trigger is
ambiguous. Such ambiguity is not related to the subtle ploys of narrative or image.
After all, realistic depictions of violence and emotionally charged narratives are
easily apprehended by readers or viewers. What is not so easily understood is the
meaning of such violence and emotion, not only because their reception varies
but also because there is no overarching interpretative ethos to provide meaning
to such cathartic representations. The shock of the real offers the contradictory
solace of a negative epiphany.6
As in many aesthetic endeavors that attempt to mobilize public opinion, these
realist productions also face the dilemma of saturation and fatigue not only
because the shock element ages but also because denunciatory representations of
social violence do not necessarily prompt an empathetic response or even ensure
box-office success. Yet in October 2007, when José Padilha’s film Elite Squad
(Tropa de elite) was released, the heated debate that followed evidenced a mas-
sive public response to the crisis of viability of the city. Prior to its release Elite
Squad had circulated widely via pirated copies sold by street vendors, as well as
on the Internet. According to a survey by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opi-
nion and Statistics, 11 million spectators had seen the film in pirated copies. In
the print media, the film was reviewed by all the major newspapers. Film critics,
artists, and journalists either considered it a cinematic breakthrough or dismissed

5. See Beatriz Jaguaribe, “The Shock of the Real: Realist Aesthetics and the Urban Experience,”
Space and Culture 8 (2005): 66 – 83.
6. In regard to the term negative epiphany, see Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 17.

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Public Culture it as fascist, reductive, trashy, and/or spectacularized. Even more than Fernando
Mereilles’s widely viewed film City of God (Cidade de Deus, 2002), Elite Squad
galvanized public opinion. When my book The Shock of the Real (O choque do
real, 2007) came out, it was reviewed primarily in relation to the film, although it
had been written before the film’s release.
Why should this particular film have such a bombastic resonance? Unlike City
of God, the prison drama Carandiru (dir. Hector Babenco, 2002), and the fic-
tion film Almost Two Brothers (Quase dois irmãos; dir. Lucia Murat, 2004), to
name just three, Elite Squad is largely narrated from the perspective of a police-
man, Roberto Nascimento, a member of the Special Police Operations Battalion
(BOPE). Although every sequence of character presentation is framed by Nas-
cimento’s voice-over, the actions involving NGO students, the police and drug
dealers, and an amorous relationship between a middle-class white student and
a black BOPE policeman are narrated by direct dialogue; Nascimento is absent
and not central to the unfolding of events. Nonetheless, Nascimento’s voice-over
punctuates the narrative sequences, and in this sense he becomes both a subjec-
tive voice and an omniscient third-person narrator. The skillful interweaving of
Nascimento’s viewpoint with the third-person narration allows the film to posit
a dialogical perspective. But this dialogical multiplicity is markedly ambiguous,
since the spectator cannot entirely rely on or deconstruct Nascimento’s subjective
perspective.
Nascimento’s voice-over explains the events of a fictional police operation in
1997 when Pope John Paul II was scheduled to visit Rio de Janeiro. The captain’s
mission was to guarantee the pope’s safety, since the Holy Pontificate had insisted
on being lodged on episcopal property surrounded by favela enclaves. The crucial
characteristic of Nascimento as a representative of the BOPE is that, contrary
to the usual police forces, he is depicted — despite his panic attacks and emo-
tional tangles — as an incorruptible and determined agent. In the film, the actual
emblem of the BOPE, a skull pierced by a knife and framed by crossed guns, is
followed by the motto “Mission decreed, mission accomplished.”
Nascimento’s methods of surveillance and protection include the torture of
favela dwellers, random arrests, and the extermination of drug dealers, as well as
the brutal training of his own forces. Included in the battles among drug dealers,
conventional police forces, and the BOPE is civil society, as represented by both
favela dwellers and middle-class students coordinating an NGO. With fast-paced
sequences, dramatic focus, and the filming of brutal events, Elite Squad follows
the mainstream realism of action films. But in the grittiness of the depicted sur-
roundings, in the construction of the characters, and in the deliberate use of docu-

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mentary “veracity” in the fictional structure, the film bypasses stylized glamoriza- Hijacked by Realism
tion and refuses to endorse Hollywood’s penchant for heroic typologies. Instead,
it creates another set of typologies: middle-class NGO students are depicted as
drug users and misguided readers of Michel Foucault, their political activism
amounting to camaraderie with the drug dealers and sentimentalized exchanges
with favela dwellers; the favela dwellers are mere props in the battle between
drug dealers and the police; and Captain Nascimento — despite his extreme
violence — is also a loving father and a panic-stricken individual. While avoiding
discussions of the legalization of drugs, the film stresses the connections between
the consumption of drugs by the middle classes, particularly middle-class stu-
dents, and the violence of the drug trade itself.
In the fray surrounding the film, Padilha declared that he had never sought
to depict Nascimento as a hero figure. Nonetheless, enrollments for the BOPE
increased after the release of the film, although a number of BOPE officials went
to the Court of Justice in a failed attempt to stop the film’s circulation. Like City of
God, Elite Squad also derives its inspirational motif from a book (Elite da tropa,
2006), written by former BOPE officials Rodrigo Pimentel and André Batista and
the sociologist Luiz Eduardo Soares. The Elite of the Squad calls itself a fictional
account, but it derives its legitimacy and authority from the biographical corre-
spondence between the former activities of the authors and the subject matter of
their fictional writing. Pimentel, who also featured in Padilha’s previous film, the
documentary Bus 174 (Ônibus 174, 2002), and who also participated in João Mor-
eira Salles’s documentary News from a Particular War (Notícias de uma guerra
particular, 1999), wrote the screenplay of Elite Squad with Padilha and Bráulio
Mantovani, the renowned scriptwriter of City of God. Other BOPE officers trained
the cast of Elite Squad according to the BOPE’s grueling techniques. Although
Padilha decided to make a fictional film to avoid political disputes, his choice of a
particular form of realist aesthetics and the pointed connections between the film
and the fictional book, as well as the ongoing conflicts of the urban drug trade,
are what give the film its punch and shock of the real. In simple terms, the film
would not have produced such contestation and intense debate if it had been nar-
rated according to an experimental, a surreal, or another aesthetic strategy that
did not rely on the impact of the reality effect naturalized by media coverage and
representations. Conversely, if it had been filmed with an overtly pedagogical
intent — if it had made use of time lags, pauses, the framing of its own devices
of fiction making, and real-time sequences, in which redundancy, slowness, and
outside interferences cancel the fictional suspension of disbelief — it also would
have failed to mobilize audiences. In its particular use of realist aesthetics, Elite

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Public Culture Squad provides a reductive “pedagogy of reality” as it frames causal connec-
tions and diagnoses social conflicts. But it does so by stretching the limits of
verisimilitude in adrenaline-drenched moments of violence and overacting that
nevertheless have a more dramatic “realistic” appeal than the fragmented, dis-
persive, intangible, and juxtaposed flow of quotidian existence. The film’s use of
realist encodings seeks to perform, in mainstream version, what Victor Shklovsky
declared art’s capacity to make “the stone, stoney.”7 The film undertakes both the
naturalization and the spectacularization of realist aesthetics that form part of the
fictionalization of reality. It quenches the desire for “real” fictions and imaginary
existences. All that said, it seems almost beside the point to ask if Elite Squad
reinforces clichéd typologies, perpetuates stereotypes, and eclipses alternative
forms of imagination. Aside from its aesthetic limitations or merits and beyond
its contested ideological affiliations, Elite Squad’s impact can be understood only
in the context of the tension and debates of public security in metropolitan sce-
narios. It highlights the political dimensions of the aesthetic register insofar as it
ignited public debate concerning public security measures, the role of the police,
the connections between the middle classes and the favela dwellers, and the social
consequences of the drug trade.
This brings me back to considerations in regard to realist aesthetics, spectacu-
larization, media visibility, and urban experiences. In late modernity it is com-
monly assumed that social realities are fabricated, contested, and disputed by a
multiplicity of agents, discourses, and practices. It is also somewhat banal to stress
that the “society of the spectacle” neutralizes critical agency because it conditions,
among other things, an apolitical and voyeuristic relation vis-à-vis media produc-
tions and reality making.8 Media productions form the spectral public arena of
contemporary societies. In the case of the realist registers mentioned here, I would
argue that they both foment political debate and are inevitably subsumed by spec-
tacularization as they circulate in the form of media products, entertainment, and
consumer items. In their diversity, the new aesthetics of realism have a power-
ful resonance not only because they address pressing daily issues with enticing
and comprehensible vocabularies but also because they tap into collective senti-
ments of fear, guilt, revenge, and anxiety without resorting to prescribed agendas
of political militancy or engagement. In this sense, they posit the perplexity of
expectations in relation to an uncertain present and an unpredictable future. The

7. See Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans.
Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12.
8. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle) (Paris: Buchet-Castel, 1967).

226
instability of metropolitan security instills a particular atmosphere in which even Hijacked by Realism
fragmented individual practices are framed by shared sentiments of insecurity.
Metropolitan insecurity and violence generate collective experiences that are no
longer redeemed by utopian agendas, totalizing political perspectives, or evoca-
tions of the national imagined community. Such collective experiences neverthe-
less address forms of reality making; they translate urgent individual and soci-
etal dilemmas in times of democratic debate and disenchantment. The question
remains whether reality making and critique need to be hijacked by mainstream
realism or whether other forms of political and aesthetic imagination can produce
alternative presents and alternative futures.

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