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Abstract
Director José Mojica Marins is both the mastermind and actor behind Zé do Caixão, an icon within Brazilian popular culture and an international cult sensation. Marins encountered numerous conflicts with Brazil’s military dictatorship, and after producing the first two films of an intended trilogy, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967), the third film, Embodiment of Evil, was not made until 2008. Throughout this trilogy, Zé do Caixão kidnaps, tortures, and murders scores of victims, effectively mimicking the human rights abuses that occurred under the dictatorship. He advocates liberation from the oppression of traditional morality while reinscribing its rhetorical raison d’être: purpose through procreation. The popular appeal of these films, their political intentionality, and their production during and after the dictatorship allow for an analysis of the rhetorical strategies employed by Marins in his attempt to both shock audiences and instill in them a counterhegemonic consciousness. Despite the radical agenda at work in Marins’s films, I will argue that this trilogy is conservative in its rhetorical framework, serving as an example of Lee Edelman’s reproductive futurism, wherein political legitimacy is contingent upon procreation.
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/10.1080/13569325.2023.2262827).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. An interesting documentary by Paulo Henrique Fontonelle about the CIA’s possible connection to both Jango’s ousting and his eventual death by alleged heart attack while in exile in Argentina in 1976 was recently released in Brazilian theatres (Dossiê Jango, Citation2013).
2. In his book on the importance of death in the political imaginary (The Already Dead), Eric Cazdyn offers the popular Cold War call to arms ‘better dead than red’ to illustrate the existential imperative behind renouncing the possibility of revolutionary consciousness in the US.
3. All translations from the original Portuguese are from DVD subtitles.
4. Theoretical connections between Freud’s death drive and the sex drive have inspired much of the academic work done on the gothic and horror genres, including Nicholas Royle’s The Uncanny (Citation2003).
5. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman (Citation2004) refers to this as reproductive futurism: a phenomenon that is not so much a political strategy as it is a founding pillar of the greater institution that frames the political imaginary and all debate that occurs within it. Also see Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Citation2010).
6. The use of ‘real’ here is meant in its most colloquial sense; in many ways the exact opposite of the Lacanian real, which, by definition, resists referentiality and meaning.
7. Rodrigo Carreiro (Citation2013) has written an important study of Marins’s combination of styles from within a multicultural Brazil to produce a uniquely Brazilian villain and horror aesthetic (as opposed to horror films from other countries that seem to conform to the Anglo-Saxon paradigm). He also comments on the filmmaker’s combination of high and low culture: an interplay that complicates an analysis of Marins’ political intentionality.
8. In his Historical Dictionary of South American Cinema, Peter H. Rist notes that Rogério Sganzerla – the leading director of the udigrudi (underground) movement within Cinema Novo – ‘praised … At Midnight … thus counterposing his ideas to the key players in Cinema Novo, who universally hated it’ (Citation2014, 524), although Barcinski and Finotti have documented enthusiastic verbal praise from influential Cinema Novo director Glauber Rocha for the same film (Citation1998, 155).
9. Barcinski and Finotti assert that, in political conversations, Marins ‘didn’t differentiate between right and left’, and that when asked, he claimed to only make films ‘because I like to’ (Citation1998, 158, my translation). Totaro, however, notes in the same dictionary that Marinswent so far as to run ‘for political office, in 1982 (for congress with the Brazilian Labor Party), but apparently lost because the vast majority of those who voted for him wrote Zé do Caixão instead of José Mojica Marins!’ (Citation2014, 391). The political dimensions of the Zé do Caixão character are not lost on Rist: ‘Although an antihero on the one hand, Coffin Joe is also a whipping boy for various negative aspects of Brazilian patriarchy and politics, providing a cathartic release of repressed social anger against the establishment (church, authority figures, police), weak-willed conformists, and religious zealots. Marins’s films are at once primal and primitive, yet paradoxically contain an intellectual subtext with echoes of Friedrich Nietzsche – his “will to power”, “Overman”, and proclamation “God is dead” – and the Marquis de Sade (his theories on sexuality and human nature) for anyone willing to read into his alias’s twisted philosophy. In fact, Marins’s scripts are marked by as much discourse, in which characters express a philosophical viewpoint, as dialogue’ (390). Anselmo-Sequeira has also commented on ‘Coffin Joe’s … paradoxical characterization’ of the socio-political situation in 1960s Brazil and his ‘ambiguous … oscillati[on] between trashy horror and social criticism’ (Citation2014).
10. Serravalle observes that, while Afro-Brazilians make very few appearances in Marins’s films, the choice to cast the role of this particular man is significant in that his whipping reflects the historical and contemporary violence upon which the nation was founded and continues to operate (Citation2010, 159–60).
11. In her analysis of the ‘resistive possibilities’ of such academically discarded cultural productions as the widely popular Latin American horror and exploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s, Dolores Tierney has commented on the intersections between the social critique of Marins’s ‘aesthetics of poverty’ and the left-leaning avant-garde Cinema Novo movement that was mainly limited to an intellectually elite viewership and was eventually muzzled and reformulated under the Brazilian dictatorship.
12. The ending of Marins’s 1967 film This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse was radically altered and cut short by the censorship office in order to affirm the wrongness of Zé’s anti-theology by subordinating it to the transcendent morality of the Catholic Church. After spending the entirety of his 1964 and 1967 films criticising and mocking Brazilian society’s unquestioning adherence to Catholicism, Zé is forced at the end of the latter to admit to the error of his ways and to the ‘truth’ of the Church.
13. See Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine (Citation1994), Annette Burfoot and Susan Lord’s Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence (Citation2006), or Barry Keith Grant’s The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film (Citation1996).
14. Tierney discusses Marins’s use of sensorial shock as a vehicle for political critique. The infamous spider scene being described here would seem to be another example of this rhetorical strategy at work.
15. In contrast to Marins’s films from the 1960s, the opening credits for the 2008 film now include widely recognised institutional support such as Cinemark, Ancine (the National Cinema Agency) and federal, state, and municipal-level ministries of culture, thus pointing to the new political context of Marins’s films but also to the status they achieved in both international horror circles and Brazilian pop culture in previous decades despite a complete lack of institutional support.
16. I say ‘nearly’ interchangeable only because the whitest, blondest female body receives considerably more camera time than the other, equally racialised female bodies, who serve as generic representatives of some of Brazil’s racial minorities besides serving as generic, gendered vehicles of reproduction.
17. It is debatable whether or not this patently misogynistic visual grammar is intended to draw critical attention to the sexism that pervades contemporary Brazilian society, although Stephenson postulates that ‘the harsh violence inflicted on women’ in O despertar da besta/Awakening of the Beast (1970) ‘is figured as pure expression of a transcendent, patriarchal libido (In Zé’s words, the male is “the ruler of the life, and woman is his instrument”)’ (2011, 31). This hyperbolic targeting of female bodies likely serves a dual and contradictory purpose: that of criticising misogyny while simultaneously indulging in it as a requisite for success in the horror/exploitation genre.