White Horror in Bacurau

Abstract

Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau (2019) was released to significant hype in Brazil and around the world. The film has been widely received as an interpretation of Brazilian society as plagued by the ravages of predatory global capitalism and U.S imperialism combined with the ineptitude and corruption of the national political class, leading to a fantasy of ultra-violent uprising by the people of the interior. Although the film was criticized from the political right and center as propagandist or as defending unacceptable violence, it has received little critique from left perspectives. In addition, numerous reviews and an increasing body of scholarship have noted that Bacurau draws on a variety of film genres such as the Western, science fiction, and horror to produce its highly reflexive text, but relatively little has been done to interpret its engagement with horror. This essay shows how Bacurau’s incorporation of resources from horror cinema reveals a problematic centering of whiteness within a project that presents itself as anti-racist.

Keywords:

• Bacurau (2019)
• Brazilian cinema
• horror
• Kleber Mendonça Filho

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Correction

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08831157.2023.2209009)

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Kate Beall, Benjamin Legg, Stephanie Reist and two anonymous reviewers for Romance Quarterly for their many insightful criticisms and suggestions at various stages of this project. In addition, I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the "Intérpretes do Brasil" panel series that convened at the 2022 Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association, in which I presented an earlier version of this paper. The views expressed in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force Academy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

Disclosure statement

The author reports that there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Though reviews outside Brazil tended to be overwhelmingly positive, the generally positive reception of the film was challenged within the country. For a critical review from a right-leaning perspective, see Demétrio Magnoli; for a more centrist criticism, see Eduardo Escorel.

2 Needless to say, I do not offer here a fully formed theory for reading cinematic projects that, like Bacurau, cite and blend numerous genres in contemporary auteur films. But my assumption is that any such theory would privilege the question of how a film makes use of the generic resources of the specific genres that it cites before addressing the issue of how to read together the competing generic codes or aesthetics present in a particular picture. My goal in this essay is to flesh out the apparent implications of how Dornelles and Mendonça Filho employ cinematic horror. This I believe is necessary before much more can be said about the film’s engagement with, for instance, the Western genre, and I hope it will allow critical discussion to move beyond facile remarks about the filmmakers’ love of genre movies and facilitate deeper analysis of their work.

3 In theorizing the pleasures of horror spectatorship in terms of Freud’s second account of anxiety, Urbano in fact renames the “mise-en-scène of ‘all hell breaking loose’” as the “mise-en-scène of the trauma of birth,” since in his psychoanalytic terms all anxieties and correspondingly our voluntary cultivation of anxiety through horror cinema have their roots in the birth trauma. The specifics of this account, however, need not concern us here.

4 As others including Bruno Guaraná and Marcelo Ikeda have noted, the echoes of Euclides da Cunha in Bacurau are of course also mediated by the interpretations and appropriations of Os sertões by Cinema Novo giants Gláuber Rocha (Deus e o diabo na terra do sol) and, via Graciliano Ramos, Nelson Pereira dos Santos (Vidas secas).

5 Compare Mendonça Filho’s comment, quoted in part above, in response to Bittencourt’s prompt, “There’s also the question of who’s white and who’s not,” on choosing as the location for filming a quilombo situated in the sertão: “Even more specifically: who is white in Brazilian society. The Brazilian sertão is actually extremely white. For many, even for many Brazilians living in the South, it’s surprising to learn just how white the Northeast hinterlands are. We were ready to film in a mostly white town, but during our scouting came across a quilombo. The two communities did not mix. From then on, the unstated but crucial idea was that Bacurau is a “remixed” quilombo: a historical place of resistance, but with some white, indigenous, trans, and other inhabitants. Carmelita, the matriarch who passes away in the film, is the matriarch of the quilombo—though we never use this word” (“Rise Up!”). Given the historic prevalence of mixed-race ancestry among the population of the interior Northeast, this comment appears rather puzzling, unless Mendonça Filho is counting all pardos as white (or potentially white), which might account for his arithmetic but remain a rather peculiar view of racialization in Brazil. For the national distribution of pretos and pardos as of 2010, see the map published by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, Distribuição espacial da população segundo cor ou raça – Pretos e Pardos – 2010.

6 Francisco Quinteiro Pires points out that the latter homage occurs in O som ao redor as well.

7 Tony Williams’s critique of Carpenter’s Assault is even more pointed but just as relevant for the argument about Bacurau offered here: “On the level on which Carpenter chooses to work, Assault is a technically professional work based upon classical Hollywood tradition. In its utilization of materials it recognizes the proximity of the Western and horror traditions. But Assault can not advance beyond the level of homage and probe into the nature of the materials it uses. It is a perfectly constructed mythic artifact but no more than this. Knowledge of the utilised traditions brings many levels of interpretation to the film. Carpenter’s refusal to examine the nature of this material is highly disturbing. There is a conflict between the director’s intention and the sub-text generated by the material, a conflict which is illuminating in regard to its contradictions but damaging to the film’s integrity” (67).

8 It is worth remembering that Carpenter’s film was made and released in the midst of the 1970s “law and order” politics that produced the rapid militarization of police forces and explosion of the carceral apparatus—as Elizabeth Hinton has shown, a backlash to the civil rights movement and significant uprisings by Black Americans. The horror premise of armed revolt is stated explicitly in a newscast by the police commissioner at the outset: after a “highly unusual interracial mixture” of outlaw youths come into possession of a powerful arsenal, “law enforcement is being driven to deplorable extremes, but those guns are out there. And believe me, if the people who have them get organized, no one will stand a chance.”

9 Cherry draws on a number of writings by Audre Lorde and other authors in drawing out her theory, but Lorde’s famous essay “The Uses of Anger” is of course emblematic of the approach.