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glorification of filmed violence, which makes it implicitly
another glorification of all violence. But the movie is self-aware
if not necessarily self-reflexive: even though we the audience
take pleasure in each confrontation, the protagonist himself
makes every effort to avoid the violence in his neighborhood
— until he gets a camera, at which point that same violence
becomes entertaining spectacle as his vacant eagerness embodies
the active-passivity of the postmodern witness, i.e. the conflation
of director and audience. It is a loss of self, but a loss
of self at the expense of others. The obvious criticism here
is that all photojournalism is inherently cinematic. What’s
problematic is not that the suffering of others is fictionalized,
but that it’s there for our enjoyment. Of course this
enjoyment may be predicated on its becoming a fiction in the
first place, but one could argue (e.g. Shakespeare’s
“All the world’s a stage”; Lacan’s
symbolic ‘reality’; Ice Cube: “Life ain’t
nothin’ but bitches and money”) that all human
interaction is already play-acting, scripted as well as improvisatory,
which makes of global politics for example the largest game
of Dungeons & Dragons ever. Further complicating the movie’s
tactics is its claim of “based on a true story”
(the pairing of ‘story’ with ‘true’
is a perennial example of reality being validated by its fictional
characteristics), and complicating that claim is its decision
to hold off on making it until the end. [ed note: I initially
spelled ‘Further’ as ‘Fuhrer’]. So
that what we get is a retroactive exploitation of actual suffering
designed to validate a fiction by calling that fiction into
question. This kind of ambivalence is extended by the casting
of non-actors who actually live in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro
to play all the principle roles (the protagonist & antagonist
(Alexandre Rodrigues & Leandro Firmino de Hora) are from
the titular city itself), which is both an exploitation of
their poverty for dramatic effect as well as an opportunity
for them to escape that poverty (via actor’s salary
and the possibility of an acting career) by imprinting it
forever on celluloid. This extratextual socio-economic tension
is paralleled in the movie’s subtext (if we can regress
a bit here): in order to remove himself from the violence
literally, Rocket (Rodrigues) must first remove himself figuratively,
i.e. his making a fiction of his reality by taking pictures
of it is his ticket out of it. Pragmatic escape is implicitly
linked with media escapism, which leads to the following,
trans-sentence question: Is aligning the self-voyeuristic
detachment of the post-millennial condition with geo-economic
promotion a justification of the trend toward making all reality
virtual by removing it of visceral, immediate impact? that
what is intangible is vicariously tangible because its effects
are tangible? that it’s still business as usual, that
the post-millennial unreal reality is just an era-specific
manifestation of what it is to be a real human being? Whatever
the answer may be, the question is fucked. But it wouldn’t
be a movie without my sensory experience of it, and after
an initial hesitance toward its open agon with Scorsese (Goodfellas
Goes to Rio) I warmed up to the characters and the (non)actors
playing them. I liked the movie, but like everything else
it’s got some issues.
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