Entrapment in the Godless City Andrea Sabbadini

Fepal - XXVI Congreso Latinoamericano de Psicoanálisis "El legado de Freud a 150 años de su nacimiento" Lima, Perú - Octubre 2006

Entrapment in the godless city

Andrea Sabbadini

Fernando Meirelles’s Cidade de Deus [City of God] (2002) is one of the key films in the recent Buena Onda renaissance of Latin American cinema. It makes compelling use of an original narrative style, of a large cast of local, carefully selected and well trained non- professional actors, and of such techniques as break-neck fast cutting in the editing, shooting with hand-held cameras, using different filters to signify distinctive periods of time, split screen, speeded-up action sequences, and repeated scenes sometimes shot from a slightly different point of view as a device to introduce new details. A work of fiction, yet one based on actual events that occurred in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s and ‘70s (things are probably not much different today), Cidade de Deus emerges as a devastatingly powerful portrait of the social and moral reality of Brazilian favelas (though things are probably not much different elsewhere). Such a condition, the film implies, is tolerated, if not actively encouraged, by governments incompetent or unwilling to deal with the problems – in primis extreme poverty and social injustice - that feed its existence. All societies tend to marginalize into literally and metaphorically separate areas those of their members whose behaviour, or even just presence, they find unacceptable: the schizophrenic in the lunatic asylum, the whore in the red light district, the Jew in the ghetto, the criminal in the prison, the corpse buried in the graveyard, the hoodlum rampaging in the favela… It seems that for those fortunate enough to belong elsewhere, these locations – sometimes kept at a safe distance from the civilized world of the benpensanti, other times just next door to it (favelas often border with wealthy neighbourhoods) – can also function as targets of massive projections. In people’s fantasies these places thus become the receptacles of much more than is actually there: crueller attacks, more hallucinogenic drug abuse, wilder frenzied madness, more transgressive polymorphous perversities… At times, however, things are actually even more extreme than we may imagine them to be. For instance, some of us may not have been aware, before watching Cidade de Deus, of the role played by young children in the Brazilian slums. In this respect, the film must also be valued as an important document about this tragic social phenomenon. Compared by some critics to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), City of God is, in the words of one of them, ‘part tender coming-of-age film and part gang-warfare epic from the Brazilian favela told from the viewpoint of the children who manage to be both its underclass and its criminal overlords. The City of God is like one vast, dysfunctional family, neighbours from hell with no neighbours, with no parents or concerned adults. It is a cross between an orphanage and an abattoir’ (Bradshaw 2003). A gun culture, then, that doesn’t spare young kids as both its victims and perpetrators; a violence which is pervasive, as well as often gratuitous; corruption contaminating the state institutions that should instead fight against it; the massive spread of drug dealing and drug addiction; the lack of family and community support, as well as of positive models of identification: these are the realities dominating the existence of favela dwellers, cornered into the ‘Cidade de Deus’ that gives its ironic title to the film. Much as they try, most of them cannot get out. I am reminded here, mutatis mutandis, of Buñuel’s film El Ángel exterminador[The Exterminating Angel] (1962) where, after a dinner party, the guests are unable, in that case for rather surrealistic reasons, to leave their hosts’ mansion. The favela’s dwellers are born inside a trap and in that same trap they are doomed to die – probably at a young age. Such a sense of entrapment is an experience some of us know about from our psychoanalytic work with patients who, as children, were raised within physically, emotionally and sexually abusive families or institutions. The almost insurmountable obstacles they find in stepping out from such conditions are often painfully re-experienced by these patients in the transference, and mirrored by our countertransference, as our therapeutic understanding and skills can become almost paralysed. While City of God should be seen as expressing quite literally the dehumanizing

2 realities, and resulting collective and individual suffering, of a section of contemporary Brazilian society, it can also be interpreted as representing a wider human condition, affecting all those who find themselves unable, for whatever complex reasons, to overcome the hurdles that life puts between them and the achievement of their ambitions, or the realization of their dreams.

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In the favela, becoming an adult, and indeed survival itself, are equated since early childhood with owning a gun rather than, say, with learning to read and write: ‘Are you crazy? You’re just a kid!’ ‘A kid? I smoke, snort, I’ve killed and robbed. I’m a man’, boasts a child no more than ten or twelve years old. These children’s despair manifests itself through their struggle to acquire power at all costs. Honest work is hardly an option in an environment dominated by the greedy making and losing of a fast real. Gang-culture is a poor relation to family and community solidarity. Only the naïve can expect kindness and compassion to thrive where ruthlessness and revenge are the accepted values. As a result, these children from the City of God do not hesitate to indulge in violence and all sorts of transgressive behaviour in order to reach a God-like omnipotence - an attitude which also happens to be consistent with religious fundamentalism and totalitarian political systems built on the ‘cult of personality’. Even if their respect for the leaders is based on fear rather than loyalty, these kids’ ultimate sense of entrapment is to a large extent the outcome of their identification with idealized negative paternal figures. Perhaps we could even generalize this statement and suggest that idealizations inevitably lead to entrapment. Yet a young man known as Rocket, one of the favela’s dwellers and the narrator of City of God - not unlike, self-referentially, both film director Fernando Meirelles and writer Paulo Lins, the author of the novel on which the movie is based – seems to succeed in somehow escaping its deadly clutch. Through a mixture of diplomatic skills, human decency and the sheer good luck of finding himself in the right place at the right time, Rocket, while himself at first flirting with crime, also develops a secret passion for

3 photography. As he gets behind his camera – a tool which, like psychoanalysis, can capture, stop and freeze time, thus giving us a chance for reflection 1 - Rocket, from victim of the slum, becomes its recorder, the witness and the reporter of its tragically repetitive history. The fact that his camera is a stolen one seems to suggest that on the one hand Rocket is forced to participate in the world of criminality in order to escape from it; and, on the other, that he knows how to use creatively, rather than dishonestly, an object belonging to such a culture. The anti-hero of the film, the heartless gang-leader Li’l Zé, antagonist to Rocket and indeed to everyone else, appears to be emotionally blind. We watch him grow up into an ambition-driven and power-hungry young man, who seems unstoppable, other than by bullets, in his attempts to rule the favela. At this point, I would like to propose a psychoanalytic reading of at least a couple of dramatic scenes in City of God involving Li’l Zé, which seem to provide explicit illustrations of two central and inter-related mythologies, or allegories, described by Freud in his reconstructions of human history, both personal and collective. In the first of these sequences Li’l Zé ‘castrates’ two of the favela’s children by shooting them in the foot when he experiences the boys as potential threats to his ‘paternal’ authority. The reference here is to the Sophoclean tragedy of Oedipus Tyrannus, but not to its central drama of murder and incest that, over two millennia later, was to become, in its Freudian interpretation, the centrepiece of our psychoanalytic developmental model. Quite the opposite, the story here, as narrated by Jocasta, is about a murder that was supposed to prevent that very drama to occur: I am referring to the intended filicide of Oedipus, still a baby, on the grounds that he was predicted to be threatening the authority of Laius, father and king.

And my son - God's mercy! - scarcely the third day was gone, When Laius took, and by another's hand Out on the desert mountain, where the land Is rock, cast him to die. Through both his feet A blade of iron they drove. Thus did we cheat

1 I am grateful for this last observation to Alexander Stein.

4 Apollo of his will. My child could slay No father, and the King could cast away The fear that dogged him, by his child to die Murdered’ (Sophocles, pp. 183-184).

The other scene I want to mention here is the one where the ‘Runts’, a new generation of hoodlums-in-the-bud armed by their ‘fathers’ but ultimately disloyal to them, gang up to rebel against Li’l Zé and – at the end of the film – shoot him dead. Li’l Zé is not killed by another gang leader, such as his arch-rival Carrot, nor by a Police force too corrupt to be effective, but by prepubescent children who take turns in casually firing their rounds of bullets in his back. In the godless City of God it is cruel revenge, when it is not mindless and meaningless violence, that dictates its bleak history. What is tragic here is not so much Li’l Zé’s death (he was the ‘villain of the piece’, after all), but his killers’ complete unawareness (they are only kids, after all) that with their actions they also reassert their own entrapped condition. By killing the father they idealize and with whom they identify, they actually become like him, thus condemning themselves to become the future fathers of other patricidal sons… The cycle of violence is repeated ad infinitum. The kids, and their favela, are doomed. This scene illustrates the other Freudian myth, Oedipal again in its structure and the almost inevitable consequence of the first one, concerning the children’s jealousy of, and hostility towards, the original father. Eventually, they take their revenge by ganging up to massacre him (and, in the ‘totemic meal’ version of it, also to eat his body) in order to acquire his power and his women. In the fourth essay of Totem and Taboo Freud states:

The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers; and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength (1913, p. 142). Implied in these mythological, socio-historical, filmic or psychoanalytic narratives is, of course, the vast theme of sexuality. Even if addressed only marginally in Cidade de

5 Deus, its underlying importance in shaping its characters, their relationships and their vicissitudes is ever-present. In particular, Li’l Zé’s clumsiness with women - a reflection of his emotional blindness, insensitivity and incapacity to identify with others, if not also of his actual physical impotence outside the context of rape - must account for at least some of his sadistic cruelty. I am suggesting here that his psychopathic need to assert power through abuse, violence and murder against men is also an attempt to compensate for his lack of potency in relation to women. Closely associated to these dynamics is his, and other characters’, envy towards those like Benny and Rocket who aspire, and to some extent succeed, to form rewarding, stable and mutually respectful object relationships, based on love rather than on hatred. Another related manifestation of what I called Li’l Zé’s emotional blindness is his overblown narcissism. It emerges in particular as he gloats with childish exhibitionistic satisfaction when he finds the self-aggrandizing picture of himself, surrounded by fellow hoodlums and big phallic weapons, on the front page of the Jornal do Brasil. His narcissistic sense of omnipotence prevents him to consciously realize that the image that is to give him a short-lived popularity among the newspaper’s voyeuristic readers is also going to be his death sentence. Unable to get in touch with his own unconscious guilt driving him towards self-destructiveness, Li’l Zé ends up enacting it. What finally provides him with some access, however spurious, to the world outside the favela turns out to be his downfall. Paradoxically, that same picture that precipitates Li’l Zé’s damnation represents for Rocket a potential bridge away from the sufferings of the favela and towards the external world - a step which we would like to believe will lead towards his salvation.

6 REFERENCES

Bradshaw, P. (2003). Review of City of God. In The Guardian, 3 January, 2003. Freud, S. (1913). Totem and Taboo. In Standard Edition, Vol. XIII. London: Hogarth Press, 1953. Sophocles. Oedipus, King of Thebes. Transl. Gilbert Murray, in Fifteen Greek Plays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1943.