War in Rio: the city goes to the movies

Abstract

Urban violence exacerbates existing trends of inefficient urban planning and social fracture. On the one hand, some actors instrumentalize violence to legitimate aggressive security plans and, on the other hand, discourses that depict specific urban territories as territories of violence and others as ordered spaces polarize citizens in two groups, as if each was irreconcilable, and circulate an atmosphere of generalized anxiety. Getting ready for the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics has implied numerous and regular surges of violence for the Cidade Maravilhosa. If those events activated debates about public security in Rio de Janeiro and in Brazil in general, another event, this one cultural, has also created a debate on the same issues. The two movies Tropa de Elite (2007) and Tropa de Elite 2 (2010) by director José Padilha, not only were the most popular movies of Brazilian cinema but also occupied a great deal of the news. Rapidly, the line between the discourse circulated about the violence in Rio and the discourse about the movies was blurred. My paper seeks to explore how Tropa de Elite 1 and 2 produced and circulated a specific conception of place, violence and the city. My intention is, thus, not to consider movies as an object giving a more or less accurate representation of reality, but as set of relations that together create specific subjectivities and, ultimately, territorial representations. These representations will be looked at in the context of the preparation for the 2016 Olympics.