On Fascism: Tropa de Elite

José Padilha's Bus 174 was an excellent documentary that managed to stick its fingers into a range of issues—the plight of Brazil's poor, drug addiction, an inept and violent police force, and the manipulation of the media, to name but a few—while juggling several stories and maintaining a gut-wringing level of suspense.

Tropa de Elite, Padilha's newest creation and still-hot Berlinale winner, isn't quite up to that standard, but it's certainly an interesting and suspenseful film in its own right.


For one, there's the near-legendary story of its pre-premiere leak and release onto the streets of Rio and then onto the internet, where it subsequently began circulating and circulating and circulating (for much less than a theatre ticket, mind you!), gaining buzz and popularity that might have made it the most-seen Brazilian film in Brazil's history long before it ever actually played on the big screen.

Then there's its style: an inventive and smart amalgam of war film, documentary, and melodrama that drips irony even as most critics seem not to notice. That the film contains a measured, obtrusive voice-over narration is, for example, part of the point—not a weakness in a Brazilian remake of Training Day.

But, it's the film's story and narrative point-of-view, coupled with critical and political reaction to those aspects, that is undeniably Elite's most interesting point for discussion.

In a nutshell, Padilha tells the story of several members of Brazil's Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE) while they prepare to guarantee the safety of a Rio slum where the Pope wants to stay on his visit to the Brazilian metropolis in 1997. Think City of God's drug war (the comparison seems to be a staple of every professional review) told from the point-of-view of a special police force rather than slum-dwelling drug dealers.

But, as the film shows us, these are no ordinary cops. BOPE officers wear black, not blue; arm themselves with heavy firepower and are trained in urban warfare; torture; and have no pretense about using violence as a first and only resort. When dispatched to the favelas to battle the drug lords, they're well-trained, brutal, and extremely lethal.

One of the film's signature shots is a bloodied face writhing inside a clear plastic bag with a BOPE officer standing behind it, repeating, repeating a question.


Now, toss two crucial factors into the mix: Padilha, though he certainly doesn't portray BOPE as saints, doesn't demonize them, either—plainly, they're shown as a necessary reaction to a rotten situation; and, even more crucial, the reaction of regular Brazilians to BOPE and the film has been surprisingly positive, with the film's BOPE captain main character (based on a real person) made into a popular hero of sorts.

And, finally, add also the film's mocking of well-to-do liberal academics and students who, at best, are shown as bubble-bound and uninformed on reality, and, at worst, as slimy potheads who finance both sides of the drug war through their own consumption while protesting "police brutality" and working with NGOs to improve the plight of those caught on the war's front lines.

What do you get?

Reviews like this one, from Variety's Jay Weissberg, which calls the film "a one-note celebration of violence-for-good that plays like a recruitment film for fascist thugs" and this one, courtesy of Shane Danielsen of indieWIRE, which decries Elite's "genuinely fascist sensibility", and this one, by Conor Foley of the Guardian, which expounds on the topic of "Fascism on film".

I have a friend who once made the genuinely perceptive observation that fascism is the world's only 7-letter 4-letter word. And these are choice examples of exactly that: people tossing the term fascism around without a clue about what fascism actually is.

Hence, when Padilha took time out at press conference to call Variety on their use of the term, he was absolutely correct in saying that "to call the film fascist is to ignore what the word fascist means" and that "anyone who says Elite Squad promotes fascism has no idea what fascism is all about".

Weissberg, Danielsen, Foley, and more to come I'm sure, are—to steal a phrase from Persepolis writer and co-director Marjane Satrapi, which she used, appropriately enough, to describe Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci for drawing parallels between radical Islam and Nazi Germany—quite simply, dumbasses.

Much like Spain's Francisco Franco, who got slapped with the fascist tag ad nauseum when Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth started gaining international recognition, BOPE may be conservative, but it's not fascist. Because, at its core, fascism is always a revolutionary ideology; it seeks the creation of a "new man", the destruction of the existing system, and the creation of something radically different. Conservatism, on the other hand, seeks a return to the status quo, seeks to use existing institutions and structures to gain and hold onto power.

Note, for example, that one of Hitler's promises was to achieve power through the existing German liberal democracy only so that he could then destroy that democracy once in power; or that one of the few groups that didn't vote for the National Socialists were the Catholics. Mussolini's relationship with the Catholic Church, in case you're wondering, was equally rocky, and Il Duce sometimes referred to priests as "black germs".

In Padilha's Elite, however, BOPE is a violent tool used to squash the crime of the favelas and return to a life as usual. Furthermore, the film's central police action is carried out not to destroy any traditional institutions but to protect the leader of the Catholic Church. In fact, it's mostly Rio's university students who are opposed to BOPE—the social group that was one of Nazism's earliest and most ardent supporters!

Eugen Weber, in his Varieties of Fascism (the best book about fascism I've read), says it better than I can, however, when discussing a fascist "order":

"But Fascist order envisages not the status quo—or the status quo ante—but a more or less definite order of its own. The Fascist leader, now that God is dead, cannot conceive of himself as the elect of God. He believes he is elect, but does not quite know of what—presumably of history or obscure historical forces. The elect of God establishes or guards God’s order; the Fascist leader seeks a similar justification—but in the absence of ultimate authority, the order is one that he defines himself."

So, why is fascism so misunderstood, and why is Padilha's Tropa de Elite pegged as a fascist film?

Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism explains:

"Everyone is sure they know what fascism is. The most self-consciously visual of all political forms, fascism presents itself to us in vivid primary images: a chauvinist demagogue...

Check: Elite's main character gets angry at his wife, whom Padilha shows as a baby-making, dinner-preparing non-character.

...haranguing an ecstatic crowd;

Check: Elite's BOPE-sided voice-over talking to us.

disciplined ranks of marching youths;

Check: Elite's training scenes, which are contrasted with drug parties and chaotic university classrooms.

colored-shirted militants beating up members of some demonized minority;

Check: BOPE's shirts are black, not blue, as the voice-over makes sure to point out, and the demonized ("dehumanized", in most reviews) minority are the slum-dwellers.

surprise invasions at dawn;

Check: Elite has a few invasions, but I don't remember if they're staged at dusk.

and fit soldiers parading through a captured city;

Check: BOPE marches through a slum cleared of danger and ready for the arrival of the Pope.

Examined more closely, however, some of these familiar images induce facile errors.

And that's why some movie critics use language they don't understand to express sensational and stupid conclusions about movies whose politics they don't like: because the popular images of fascism, sometimes deliberately manipulated, have obscured its actual meaning to the point that fascism can now be defined as anything a "progressive" Westerner doesn't agree with.

This is also why Marjane Satrapi can call George Bush a fascist (and remember, this is coming from someone who thinks that comparing Islamism to fascism makes you a "dumbass"!) and why acclaimed German-Turkish director Fatih Akin can wear a t-shirt adorned by a swastika replacing the s in Bush, and then explain it thus:

"Bush's policy is comparable with that of the Third Reich. I think that under Bush, Hollywood has been making certain films at the request of the Pentagon to normalise things like torture and Guantanamo. I'm convinced the Bush administration wants a third world war. I think they're fascists."

José Padilha's Tropa de Elite is a stylistically-interesting, well-made action film with political overtones. But the stories surrounding the film may just end up being more interesting than the film itself.