Trilogies of State Failure

Introduction

Global audiences may recognize José Padilha from his divisive remake of Robocop (2014) and production of Netflix’s Narcos (2017–2020), projects which in many ways adapt the director’s trademark preoccupations—dystopian urbanism, narcotrafficking, and the dehumanization of police authority—visible even before his first feature, Tropa de elite (Elite Squad, 2007).¹ This earlier motion picture gained international notoriety after contentiously snagging the Golden Bear at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival (Gibbons), yet it had been generating controversy in Padilha’s native Brazil long before it was officially released. Set against the backdrop of Pope John Paul’s 1997 visit to Rio de Janeiro, the film is narrated by Captain Roberto Nascimento (played by Wagner Moura), the leader of Rio de Janeiro’s Special Police Operations Battalion (BOPE), which is ironically tasked with pacifying favelas as a security measure for the religious leader’s peace tour. The plot ostensibly follows Nascimento’s attempts to train two police recruits so that he can retire to salvage his family life, simultaneously detailing the transformation of these initially naïve protégés, Matias and Neto, into pitiless agents of state-sanctioned violence. According to co-scriptwriter Rodrigo Pimentel, a former BOPE captain erroneously credited as the real-life Nascimento, the film’s true purpose was not to apologize for military force, but rather to alert citizens to the problematic actions of a then-unknown public security institution. Accordingly, he maintains the film’s “faithfulness” to reality works to expose a dehumanizing cycle of armed conflict perpetuated by the elite battalion’s training in urban warfare, inhumane initiation rituals, and extrajudicial torture (Arantes 2006a).

Despite these purported denunciations, the actual messaging proved substantially more ambiguous for audiences; Hollywood-influenced aesthetics, pulsating action sequences, a bestselling soundtrack, and Moura’s charismatic screen presence transformed the anti-hero Nascimento into a cultural phenomenon. Corporate motivational speaking tours styled themselves as BOPE boot camps; fans chanted Moura’s militant catchphrases in soccer stadiums; and some audience members at the Rio Film Festival even famously clapped during graphic scenes in which drug traffickers are tortured (Prado 2008; Sampiao 2011; Xéxeo 2007). On the opposite side of the political spectrum, progressive critics condemned Padilha as a reactionary, an apologist for state-sponsored violence who glorified torture. An enormous debate erupted over whether the movie, and by extension Padilha himself, was fascist.² That label has continued to follow the filmmaker through his most recent adaptation, the polemical Netflix series O mecanismo, (The Mechanism, 2018–19). While he later apologized for his precipitately sympathetic portrayal of federal judge Sergio Moro, for many it was too little and too late (Marthe 2022).³ In perhaps the most in-depth analysis of the film’s aesthetics and stylistic strategies, Jeremy Lehnen avoids discussing Padilha, but rather views the product Tropa de elite as the paradigmatic example of contemporary Brazilian crime films that normalize “neo-masculine” discourse. This authoritarian attitude has roots in the hegemonic masculinity that was valorized by the military dictatorship and that has seen a resurgence in response to the increasing democratization and social inclusion consolidated under President Lula in the first decade of the twenty-first century (2022 10, 18). Such observations take on renewed importance in the wake of the pro-Bolsonarista rioters who attacked government buildings including the National Congress on January 8, 2023.

The film’s unflinching portrayals of torture, assault, and repression are certainly not up for debate, nor is cinema’s invariable aestheticization of violence. Instead, the ideological flashpoint centers on whether Tropa de elite condones the state’s hyperviolent methods or merely critically documents such realities. Proponents of the film have argued for the latter. A self-styled independent and vocal critic of President Lula, Padilha has publicly dismissed associations with authoritarianism, reminding an interviewer that he had been equally branded a “communist” after making his documentary Ônibus 174 (Bus 174, 2002), where he humanized the life of a former street child who took hostages on a public bus, criticizing BOPE’s handling of the event and censuring the state’s failed social and penal systems: “Then I do the same thing with a cop [look at the larger context behind his violent actions], and I’m now a ‘radical right-winger’ … what matters to me is what’s actually going on” (Gibbons 2010). Cast members and reviewers have equally cautioned against conflating narrator Nascimento’s condemnable opinions with its director’s, proposing that divergent reactions revealed more about viewers’ own prejudices (Caetano 2008; Moura 2007; Valente 2007; Xéxeo 2007). As former officer Pimentel put it, “A polícia reproduz as violências, os preconceitos e a corrupção da sociedade carioca. A nossa sociedade é violenta, é corrupta e aceita o falso herói como o Nascimento. A polícia acaba fazendo uma réplica da violência desses valores sociais” (Ortiz 2007, my italics).

The surprising resonance of Tropa de elite ultimately represents a complex intersection between fears about public safety and unexpected paratextual challenges that forced the project to alter its original messaging during its troubled production. Indeed, while the film may have served to popularize the special operations battalion, officials’ initial actions showed them bracing for the worst. In light of Padilha’s harsh exposé in Ônibus 174, BOPE leaders lodged multiple lawsuits to freeze the movie’s production, as the governor’s office denied its customary state funding while demanding access to the script. Shooting was then temporarily suspended (and some crew permanently abandoned the set) after four team members were kidnapped and ninety weapons being used as props were stolen while filming in gang-controlled favelas. Most famously, an unfinished bootleg was leaked and viewed more than ten million times on pirated DVDs, making it the most watched film of the year, in the process negating an estimated two-thirds of its box-office returns (Natal 2010).⁴ Given that the crux of the film’s popularity—and notoriety—has hinged on the seductive nature of Nascimento’s portrayal, the most fundamental challenge occurred when Padilha’s team decided on a radical shift after primary filming had already concluded, transforming Moura’s onscreen character into the protagonist of the film. Without the budget to shoot additional scenes, scriptwriter Braúlio Mantovani sutured the film together by inventing the captain’s voiceover, with unintended consequences.

Real-time media scrutiny of the issues that nearly conspired to derail the film may have paradoxically doubled as promotion to propel its domestic success, yet it has also led to reductive terms of engagement revolving around binary ideological categories, downplaying examination of the politics and production-oriented decisions behind the messaging. This article re-evaluates the divisive Tropa phenomenon by evaluating the largely ignored role that Luiz Eduardo Soares’s co-authored book Elite da tropa (Elite Squad, 2006) played in the creation and reception of both. Trained as an anthropologist and a political scientist, Soares was an Under Secretary and Coordinator of Public Safety in Rio de Janeiro (1999–2000) and later National Secretary of Public Safety (2003). He was ousted over his outspoken attempts to reform police corruption before going into exile in the United States to protect his family’s safety. Exemplifying what he terms “literary journalism,” the unexpected bestseller was written in collaboration with the same ex-BOPE officers who worked with Padilha on the film script (Rodrigo Pimentel and André Batista). Despite similarly facing BOPE intimidation and attempts to censor its release, the book sold more than two hundred thousand copies (Vianna; Soares “Interview”).⁵ And like the film, the book claimed to be the first in Brazil to explore the issue of urban violence from the perspective of the police rather than that of the peripheral communities affected.⁶ Significantly, however, no association with authoritarianism emerged in reviews until after Soares attended release events with Padilha (Soares n.d.).

Indeed, given the earlier release date of Soares’s journalistic docufiction, it has been largely taken for granted that the 2007 film is a derivation. The relationship has been consecrated in countless academic scholarship focused on Padilha, where it is a seemingly obligatory gesture to contextualize the feature in passing as a loose adaptation. While there have been few individual analyses of the book, several articles and graduate theses positing adaptation have been critical of the film’s lack of fidelity, arguing Padilha’s fast-pacing obscures the book’s more philosophical expression.⁷ Perhaps unwittingly, assertions like the above highlight a central problem: despite its later release, the film is not an adaptation, but rather an original script, as the works were developed concurrently. Soares’s and Padilha’s recollections regarding the exact timeline differ, yet the two men agree that the film was conceived first, and since Soares viewed an early draft of the screenplay, if anything, his book was the adaptation.⁸ Since the director had already determined the title of his film—Tropa de elite—Soares decided to reverse the terms to create Elite da tropa—a playful distinction elided by the English translation of both texts as Elite Squad—simultaneously establishing the book’s complementarity while asserting its generic and methodological differences (Soares 2019). Despite their relative autonomy, Soares also played a little-known role in the creation of Nascimento’s voiceover, as will be detailed shortly.

If Tropa de elite and Elite da tropa are not material adaptations, then they may be understood as thematic transpositions dating back to their first encounter on the set of Ônibus 174, both in terms of their initial motivation to address social justice questions and in their respective use of Pimento and Batista as informants. While proceeding autonomously in producing the content, Padilha and Soares did agree to observe three shared throughlines: a dedication to realism, a model of Batista’s own trajectory (i.e., the social contradiction illustrated by a policeman clandestinely studying law at a university during the day while extrajudicially combatting drug trafficking at night), and an ethically ambiguous tone that complicated categorical conceptions of morality. Moreover, both the script and book drafts mutually benefitted from informal feedback among the four men.⁹ Such shared structural characteristics mean that many of the same events and details appear in both the feature film and the first half of Soares’s book, yet they are used to different ends.

As opposed to an extended visual cinematic reading, I therefore propose to comparatively analyze both texts along the three established axes of realism, ethical ambiguity, and narrative praxis that formed the basis of their agreement. Both film and book have their distinct attributes, thus the purpose here is not to suggest a one-to-one equivalency or a template of fidelity, but rather to scrutinize the collaboration between the two projects—examining their origins, strategies, and reception. Essentially this takes assumptions about adaptation to their logical intermedial conclusion: (how) can the two works be understood in relation to one another? While Padilha’s controversial movie has been viewed as part of a greater trend in urban representations of violence, many analyses treat it as a closed text in isolation from its production history or its literary relations. I am particularly interested in how this case study of thematic collaboration helps to shed light on the understudied importance of adaptation in contemporary crime fiction cinema while also providing an alternative model to the corporatism that has increasingly governed literary and television adaptation in the twenty-first century.

By complicating reactions to Padilha’s final product, I demonstrate that Soares’s literary journalism merits consideration in its own right and that it can serve as a privileged lens for deciphering the ambiguous messaging of the motion picture. I am not interested in defending the director, who appears to actively court controversy in his work, and whose collaborative period with Soares was cut short due to both ideological and creative differences. In order to establish context, it will be necessary to characterize their alliance within the commercially inflected shifts in twenty-first century Brazilian film adaptation and adaptation studies in order to provide an alternative account of oft-discussed differences between cinema novo and the post-retomada approaches to representing violence. Next, I take stock of the confluence of their political trajectories beyond the spectacle of violence—what Soares has termed “writing the social,”¹⁰ since Tropa de elite and Elite da tropa served as the linchpins of what each artist independently describes as his personal trilogy documenting the Brazilian state’s failure. With this context established, I comparatively evaluate the divergent roles that ethical ambiguity and problematic narrators play in both works’ intended criticisms of BOPE culture, revealing complex responses to social identity theory and the “hyperconsciousness” of race.

Competing Models of Crime Adaptations in Cinema Novo and the Retomada

Despite Padilha and Soares’s refutation of the book-to-film connection, there are numerous reasons for the confusion that has emerged regarding Elite da tropa and Tropa de elite. Notably, the wave of urban/crime films emerging at the start of the twenty-first century—O invasor (2001), Cidade de Deus (2002), O homen do ano (2003), Carandiru (2004)—consisted of screen adaptations of contemporary literature, establishing a temporal pattern of marketable intellectual property and, in the case of author Marçal Aquino and director Beto Brant, extended creative partnerships.¹¹ Additionally, the originary status of Elite da tropa has been reinforced in countless newspaper articles, online blogs, and informational website. Given Soares’s history as a progressive scholar and public servant, reviews and marketing media were able to utilize his public stature as a tie-in to corroborate the film’s credibility. This symbiotic marketing also served to increase book sales, with the second edition’s cover image altered to feature a medium closeup of Captain Nascimento in his combat uniform above the tagline “Uma guerra tem muitas versões,” even though no such character is ever portrayed or even mentioned in the book.¹²

While the film is set over the course of six months in 1997, the book’s first half recombines a panorama of lightly fictionalized accounts of officers’ experiences without establishing a core narrative or timeframe. These tragic anecdotes are communicated via the first-person testimony of a cynical BOPE captain—loosely based on advisor Batista—who foregrounds his status as a black Brazilian and decides to retire after becoming demoralized by the loss of life he has witnessed. Soares and Padilha’s thematic collaboration was thus circumscribed by economic interests and public perception. However, to contextualize the novelty of their collective political project, we must historicize evolving attitudes towards representing violence and commercializing adaptation during the gradual recovery of the Brazilian film industry during the 1990s known as the retomada (1994–2002), which has frequently been counterpointed against the earlier cinema novo cycle led by figures such as Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Both periods of creative experimentation emerged out of crises in the industry, cinema novo in the years after the highly successful Vera Cruz Studios shuttered in 1954 and the retomada from the vacuum left when the state’s bankrupt production and distribution company Embrafilme was abandoned under President Collor’s privatization program (Diegues 2003, 23). Whereas cinema novo directors rejected Hollywood production models, turning instead to low-budget, black-and-white location filming, retomada projects were initially forced for economic reasons to adopt similar independent filming strategies. Leading up to Brazil’s quincentenary, projects focusing on national issues received greater support, yet the disconnect between pre-production funding and exhibition paradoxically led to a great diversity of projects, since there was little industry focus on maximizing profit (Caetano et al. 2005, 14–22). Embodied by Walter Salles’s Central do Brasil (1998), the frequent exploration of inner city and rural settings in search of an imagined national identity echoed neorealist attempts to document hardships in the country’s emerging favelas and the drought-stricken sertão that predominated in the earliest phase of cinema novo’s antinationalist political project.

Retomada production has been compared particularly unfavorably to its precursor in terms of its aesthetic approach to the spectacle of violence. It is telling that the first English translation of Glauber Rocha’s cinema novo manifesto “Uma estética da fome” (1965) appeared as “The Aesthetics of Violence” (Rocha 2014, 218). Rocha claimed that the movement’s diverse array of films was affiliated by attempts to shock middle-class audiences via direct representations of hunger and poverty ignored by the state. In contrast, Ivana Bentes castigated films at the turn of the twenty-first century for commodifying violent suffering without providing the ethical advocacy of Rocha’s contemporaries, coining the highly influential term “cosmética da fome” to characterize the evolving globalized strategies of retomada production (2001, 245). Such films reconciled themselves with the North American model of entertainment embraced by Vera Cruz Studios in the era preceding cinema novo’s revolt. More problematically, they “folklorized” poverty and naturalized violence within peripheral communities (Salvo 2006).

In his manifesto, Rocha also highlights an important reference that has received markedly less attention: the role and abundance of book-to-film adaptation in cinema novo. In a brief aside, he argues the visual capture of regional histories of exclusion, exploitation, and violence traced its origins to the social denunciations of Brazil’s modernist writers during the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, while literary adaptation played a pivotal role in the growth of Brazil’s nascent film industry at the start of the twentieth century, particularly the colonial heritage of nation-building epics celebrated by Romantic writers like José de Alencar and Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay, literary adaptations have by and large been associated with an auteur model, both in terms of directors and authors, rather than in terms of a systemic network of practices.¹³ For example, beginning with his masterpiece Vidas secas (1963), Pereira dos Santos would almost exclusively refashion the work of canonical authors for the rest of his career, adapting more fiction and nonfiction texts than any other director. And as Ismail Xavier has documented, playwright Nelson Rodrigues has been adapted more than any other Brazilian author, giving rise to his very own subgenre cinema rodrigueano.¹⁴

Cinema novo, however, has elicited greater interest in the study of the process of adaptations because of a shared reconsideration of the politics of production, particularly during its later stages as increasing censorship under the military dictatorship forced directors to find creative means to continue their critique of the state. While Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões (1902) served as a reference for Rocha’s explorations of the backlands, the second phase of the movement established a direct adaptive link, with transpositions of Graciliano Ramos, José Lins Rego, Carlos Drummond Andrade, and Guimarães Rosa all appearing shortly after the 1964 coup (Johnson and Stam 1988). It is the cannibalistic phase of the movement, however, coinciding with the anthropophagic revival by tropicalist artists in music, plastic arts, theater, and literature, that self-referentially redefined adaptive practice as intermedial appropriation rather than derivation.¹⁵ In response to the repressive media control consolidated under Institutional Act No. 5 in 1968, adaptations served an even more critical role through purposeful infidelity to their sources and as allegories for political dissent. The most studied examples of anthropophagic adaptation include Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1969), based on the homonymous novel, and Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Como era gostoso o meu francês (1971), based on a sixteenth-century German explorer’s diary, both of which actively deconstructed their sources while creating clear parallels with contemporary society. This cannibalistic attitude was also notable in Jorge Bodansky and Orlando Senna’s critique of developmentalism via Alencar’s foundational myth in Iracema: uma transa amazônica (1974). Bodansky took advantage of state funding for adaptations of national patrimony, though the international co-production went unseen by the Brazilian public for nearly a decade because of the regime’s censorship.

If redemocratization provided an ideological freedom to retomada filmmakers, increasingly neoliberal models posed challenges to the cinema novo auteur model, even if the central role of adaptations in this recovery was arguably greater, with four of the seven films that appeared in 1994 engaging literary or musical works.¹⁶ Appropriately, Pereira dos Santos initiated the period with Guimarães Rosa’s A terceira margem do rio (1994). Even with the establishment of the Brazilian Film Agency (Ancine) in 2001, filmmakers complained that the public-funding model did not subsidize distribution and exhibition, making competition with foreign films impossible. This began to change when Rede Globo expanded into the film sector in 1998, as Globo Filmes simultaneously restructured the configuration of funding incentives and evolved profit-oriented adaptive models. On the one hand, the media network began to produce films based on successful television formulas, and, in some cases, drew audiences back into the movie theater by repackaging television series. As Esther Hamburger has noted, one of the company’s first acts was to edit into a movie the micro-series O auto da compadecida (1999/2000), itself an adaptation of a 1955 play, the success of which prompted similar treatment for the series A invenção do Brasil (2000/2001) and later sitcoms like Os normais (2001/2003) (2017, 377). Conversely, Globo also revisited films it had helped produce—including Cidade de Deus (2002), Carandiru (2003), and Antônia (2006), and turned them into successful television series (i.e., Cidade dos homens, Carandiru: outras histórias, and Antônia) (Sangion 2012, 52). This hybrid content platform also catalyzed movement of aesthetic strategies across the two media, as filmmakers began incorporating successful television tropes into their scripts.

During the early 1990s, “the only television shows that displayed images of popular neighborhoods and of the people who live there were early evening sensational local newscasts on the smaller networks” (Hamburger 2017, 385), yet feature-length blockbusters like Cidade de Deus and Tropa de elite demonstrated the commercial viability of crime fiction. Unsurprisingly, then, Globo beat out HBO to sign the rights for a television spinoff of Tropa de elite, and even after contract talks broke down, Globo Filmes would distribute Padilha’s blockbuster sequel Tropa de elite 2 (Elite Squad 2, 2010), the feature film initially chosen to represent Brazil at the 2012 Oscars. After the success of Tropa de elite in 2007, Soares and Padilha sought to forge a similar collaborative relationship, with the intent of effecting political change rather than simply representing drug-related social problems. Soares wrote two screenplays that Padilha planned to film, even signing a co-production deal with Paramount Pictures, before bowing to pressure from the Brazilian government regarding concerns that Soares’s revelations might influence an ongoing police investigation into political corruption. Portions of one play would appear in Soares’s essay collection Rio de Janeiro: histórias de vida e morte (2015), though his second screenplay, which reflected his own role in exposing largescale governmental corruption, would be abandoned.¹⁷

When Padilha suggested working on their own respective Tropa sequels to take on Rio’s militia, Soares was initially hesitant, not wishing to sacrifice artistic integrity for profit. Despite pressure from Pimentel to follow the film’s model, Soares unsuccessfully sought to make the distinction between the two works more salient by purposefully moving away from BOPE.¹⁸ Nonetheless, the book and film sequel were released the same day to maximize cross-marketing and news outlets reprised the claim that the book served as the basis for the film, with some editions again featuring Nascimento on the front cover. Shortly thereafter, creative and political differences led the two men in different directions, as Padilha moved to the United States to pursue international projects, while Soares continued to lobby for national police reform through a combination of literary journalism and academic interventions.

While the above dynamic highlights an increasingly market-determined mediascape, the origins of Padilha and Soares’s collective project offers an important alternative based on sustained political engagement. Both exposés negotiated attempted censorship, though this is not to suggest their pedagogical representations of violence harken back to cinema novo-era dissent. Rather, their shared trajectories, which as noted they have characterized as distinct trilogies of disillusionment, demonstrate that the Tropa phenomenon needs to be understood as part of a creative continuum, itself the adaptation of an original idea across various media. Put differently, understanding the context behind the creation of Tropa is vital for understanding the distinct generic receptions it provoked.

Padilha’s and Soares’s Trilogies of the State

The collaboration between Padilha and Soares and their respective trajectories of disillusionment with the Brazilian state date back to the start of this millennium when Soares agreed to be interviewed for Ônibus 174, although the two men became disillusioned through disparate processes. Significantly, each man viewed Tropa as the second part of their respective trilogies dedicated to exposing the state’s role in the cycles of national poverty and violence, and the nature of these larger projects therefore sheds light on their intersection.

Luiz Eduardo Soares’s more than twenty books inhabit a variety of genres, oscillating between academic, public administrative, and creative production. The throughline from his first novel, O experimento do Avelar (1994), to his most recent nonfiction, Desmilitarizar: segurança pública e direitos humanos (2019) and Dentro da noite feroz: O fascismo no Brasil (2021), has been a preoccupation with tracing the evolution of violence in Brazil, from torture during the military dictatorship through President Jair Bolsanaro’s authoritarian policies. This interdisciplinary approach is representative of his own formation. Having earned an undergraduate degree in literature from the PUC-Rio de Janeiro, he obtained graduate degrees in Anthropology and Political Science while launching his academic career. In 1999, after being invited by Rio’s Governor Anthony Garotinho to serve as the Coordinator of Public Safety, Justice, and Citizenry, in the role of Under Secretary, Soares’s multiple attempts to initiate state reform in the police force led to internal tensions and his public dismissal, an experience he described in his memoir Meu casaco de general (2000), long-listed for the Jabuti Prize. During his governmental tenure, Soares formed a working relationship with Rodrigo Pimentel, began establishing relationships with residents of Rio’s favelas, and started learning of the latter’s mistrust of police. At the same time, he became increasingly conscious of the limited impact of academic studies in effecting policy change, leading him to turn to literary journalism to reach larger audiences with his message (Soares 2019).

His first opportunity to explore these opposing state poles followed shortly after Soares returned from exile, when emerging social activist-producer Celso Athayde co-founded the educational NGO Central Única das Favelas (CUFA) along with MV Bill in 1999, the same year that the rapper’s musical video “Soldado do Morro” prompted police persecution. When Athayde requested financial support for CUFA’s annual sponsored hip-hop festival, the latter suggested they write a book together and request an advance from the publisher. While making a pitch to Editora Objetiva, Soares negotiated a contract for a trilogy of books exploring the different stages of drug-related violence: the first, essentially in dialogue with Bill’s “Soldado do Morro,” would represent the involvement of adolescents in narcotrafficking from their own perspective; the second would address the enemies of favela residents, the police; and the third would examine the miscarriage of justice through an analysis of the prison system (Soares “Interview”). The first book in the series, Cabeça de porco (2005), consummated Soares’s collaboration with Athayde and Bill, who narrativized interviews they had conducted in favelas across the country, while Soares added his own journalistic recounting. Their goal was to avoid external moralizing, instead transmitting the complex realities that community youth had to negotiate to survive on a daily basis. The end result was a financial success, but even more rewarding for the authors was feedback from community residents who said the book had changed their lives, leading Athayde and Bill to embark on a series of written works and documentaries exploring other aspects of favela criminality frequently sensationalized in the media.¹⁹

Now under contract to write a second book, Soares sought to repeat the co-authorial model of Cabeça de porco with two partners who were immersed in the field of his chosen topic. Since he had previously decided to examine the opposing perspective to favela residents via the military police responsible for incursions, he contacted Pimentel, who revealed that he was coincidentally working on a similarly themed screenplay with Padilha and André Batista. The numbers were perfect: Soares was himself seeking two police officers as deponents. Since he had collaborated with Padilha on Ônibus 174, Soares met with the existing group, and they determined that each project would proceed autonomously yet follow the three previously mentioned guidelines. Soares met with both informants each week for a year to create an archive of their experiences before sending the narrative to the group for comments.

Unlike Padilha, Soares would not complete his trilogy with Elite da tropa 2, nor did he write on the prison system as originally intended. Instead, in Espírito Santo (2009), he explored corruption and criminality among judges theoretically entrusted with issuing unbiased prison sentences. Despite reprising his trademark blend of fact and fiction, and this time working with two legal representatives, the book’s focus on white collar crime did not tap into societal fears the same way the street-level clashes of his previous works did, and its disappointing sales limited its cultural impact. In the meantime, he began working on a sequel to Elite da tropa, but while topically aligned with Padilha on the subject of combatting Rio’s militia, he resisted Pimentel’s pressure to booster sales by playing to market expectations.

Padilha’s arrival at a similar sociopolitical disaffection took a much shorter course. After witnessing the role of the financial sector’s investment schemes in disenfranchising the lower classes in the late 1990s, Padilha left his corporate job to research a documentary with his friend Marco Prado that they would distribute via their newly formed company Zazen Productions (Ezabella 2015), dedicated to developing both fiction and nonfiction films that discuss social issues.²⁰ Shortly thereafter, Padilha began examining the 2000 hijacking of a public bus in Rio de Janeiro and the botched response by BOPE officers, which resulted in one hostage’s death and the kidnapper’s murder by police. After a year of research, the resulting award-winning documentary, Ônibus 174, both announced Padilha on the international stage and introduced him to Soares and the two BOPE officers who would serve as collaborators for his next two feature length projects.

Former Captain Pimentel had already been establishing himself as a critical voice regarding the battalion. In 1999, he had been tasked with limiting officers’ participation in João Moreira Salles’s documentary Notícias de uma guerra particular (News from a Personal War), but his disillusionment with the force prompted him to instead provide screen interviews, with the film’s title taken from one of his depositions. The increased visibility in turn led him to contribute a column about the police to Jornal do Brasil, but it also led to his demotion and transfer. One year later, he provided a damning indictment of the brigade’s response to the Sandro Nascimento hijacking on the popular newscast Fantástico, and the interview both assured his expulsion from BOPE and caught Padilha’s attention (Zorzato 2021). Despite Pimentel’s initial misgivings about Padilha’s potential heroization of Sandro Nascimento, he co-produced Ônibus 174, and he was the first to bring up the possibility of developing a fictional take on BOPE officers’ life experiences (Arantes 2006a; Mazza 2007). His recruitment of on-duty police at the scene of the crime led to the participation of André Batista, who would in turn put his own career in jeopardy by confirming the force’s errors on camera, subsequently serving as the model for protagonist André Matthias in Tropa de elite.

Padilha originally interspersed TV footage of the hostage situation and witness interviews to examine how the frenzied media spectacle of the kidnapping both compromised police response and incited the erratic Sandro Nascimento, as the hostage-taker began to perform for the camera. Nascimento had not only witnessed his mother’s murder at an early age, but he had also survived the 1994 police massacre of sleeping street children in front of Rio’s Candelária Church. Interviewed in his role as sociologist and authority on public safety, Soares stressed the invisibility of Brazil’s urban disenfranchised, which prompted the filmmaker to reconsider Nascimento’s troubled past instead as emblematic of the failure of multiple state institutions, included education, social services, the police, and the penal system. As he would later discuss, the transformative interview with Soares became the linchpin of the documentary, revealing that the state itself was responsible for creating the criminal Nascimento (Natal 2010).

Inspired by this reconsideration of governmental agencies, Padilha decided that his next documentary would conversely explore Brazil’s entrenched drug war from the perspective of favela inhabitants’ “enemies,” the military police. Curiously, the answer to what factors instilled their own violent behavior would also come back to the same source as Sandro Nascimento’s: the state. Since he had amassed interviews beyond what could fit in the runtime of Ônibus 174, Padilha initially planned to apply the unused material towards a documentary under the working title BOPE, but he soon realized the project would be doomed, as archival footage of favela incursions or executions was nonexistent, and convincing police to sit for interviews after Ônibus 174 would prove impossible because of internal retribution (Rahe 2010; Arantes 2006b). If Padilha had successfully merged documentary and melodrama in his first picture, then for this project he would transform real events into docudrama, demonstrating how poor pay and dangerous working conditions helped foment corruption in the military police, while the sense of separatism alternately instilled in BOPE recruits transformed them into violent killing machines. Tropa de elite would nonetheless adopt several techniques from Ônibus 174, from aerial drone shots of Rio’s favelas to its exploration of a violent aggressor as a product of society, as it was no accident kidnapper Sandro Nascimento’s surname reappeared via the fictitious Roberto Nascimento (Natal 2010).

Padilha initially claimed to be writing a script with rapper Gabriel o Pensador for his next film, an indictment of Brazil’s National Congress (Ortiz 2007), although he would instead begin developing Tropa de elite 2, which remained the most watched film in the history of Brazil for half a decade.²¹ The sequel has been received as a corrective to the original’s confused message, although Padilha insists the return completed his trilogy on the state’s role in perpetuating urban inequality. Thus, a more nuanced Nascimento, now a colonel ten-years divorced, is forced to reevaluate his earlier use of violent force after being promoted by corrupt politicians to the office of Under Secretary of Public Safety in an effort to neutralize his power. In his new role, he must not only negotiate the pitfalls of bureaucracy, but he discovers that BOPE is one of many pawns employed by Rio’s militias, mafia-like organizations of police officers who control commerce and security in “pacified” communities by inhabiting the vacuum of power left by the urban squad (Ezabella 2010).²² While similarly utilizing Nascimento’s narrative voiceover, the film shifts further away from documentary techniques, even as the crew inadvertently witnessed a militia execution meters from where they were filming their own pivotal execution scene (Natal 2010).

Conflicting Approaches to (De)Constructing Realism

Padilha entered into an agreement with Pimentel and Batista first, and while the director initially wanted Soares to narrativize the information deemed surplus to the film, in practice, the use of the same deponents meant many of the same themes and details appeared in both works. Having established the correspondence of the Tropa creators’ larger understandings of the state in previous sections, we can now utilize their thematic correspondence as a meaningful metric for examining the distinct ends these shared experiences serve. Unaffected by the production challenges that forced the feature film to evolve, Elite da tropa both showcases Soares’s interdisciplinary rhetorical strategies and serves as a prism for assessing the three stipulations binding the two (the foregrounding of realism, the role of narrative/ethical ambivalence, and the divergent fortunes of the focal character modeled on Batista).

From the use of handheld cameras to Nascimento’s voice-of-God narration, unfavorable assessments of Tropa de elite highlight authenticity as a key tactic underlying Nascimento’s authoritarian stance, although Padilha asserted realism was vital for audiences to buy into the violent situations. His only previous experience had been making nonfiction film, while the project’s origins lay in interviews taken during research for Ônibus 174; thus documentary elements unsurprisingly compete with the melodrama propelling Mathias’ss and Neto’s conversions to BOPE. Shortly after the opening credits, for example, Nascimento’s opposition to the Pope’s planned stay in a hilltop favela is accompanied by archival television footage of the religious leader in various public gatherings, reinforcing the film’s status as a nonfiction artifact. But the camera does more than simply register events, it also participates in their representation by creating claustrophobic spaces and using intimate character shots to insert the viewer into scenes (Lehnen 2022, 121). To depict the segregated communities affected by incursions, Padilha brought on board scriptwriter Braúlio Mantovani and editor Daniel Rezende, based on their successful creation of the isolated community setting of Cidade de Deus, and actors received scripts without dialogue so that early takes involved improvisation (Rahe 2010, 55–6).²³ Moreover, the cast was divided into different subsets including police, drug traffickers, and college students, coached in isolation by professional consultants to enhance the verisimilitude of the groups’ conflict when meeting onscreen. Those in the BOPE unit underwent training to physically and psychologically internalize that lifestyle and hierarchy. Ironically, the classificatory method ended up presenting characters as social stereotypes, thus it inadvertently made Nascimento appear to be the only dynamic character after he became the film’s center, strengthening his narrative resonance (Menezes 2013, 67–73).

Padilha also utilizes paratextual framing devices to highlight real-life sources. Some versions begin with a written claim regarding the feature’s basis in testimony by numerous police officers and a psychiatrist (Lehnen 2022, 120), although others feature a claim attributed to US social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1974, shortly before BOPE was formed: “Usualmente não é o caráter de uma pessoa que determina como ela age, mas sim a situação na qual ela se encontra.” In Milgram’s most famous study the previous decade, which tested men’s obedience to authority, participants believed they were administering increasingly stronger electric shocks as punishment to actors pretending to make task-related mistakes. Surprisingly, many of the subjects continued following orders to increase voltage until they would have caused the death of the purported learners had the shocks been real. While the citation frames the film in relation to scientific discourse and hints at the dehumanization of cadets that follows, Soares felt it was too esoteric since a majority of spectators were unaware of Milgram’s legacy.²⁴

As a literary text, Elite da tropa deploys a different set of framing strategies, geared more towards establishing the credibility of its collaborators. Documenting the same categorical distinction between corruptible military police and the equally impoverished, yet incorruptible, BOPE officers that informs Nascimento’s opening monologue, Soares’s preface reflects his sociological training, citing statistics and providing a brief history of the special unit’s creation. Essentially rephrasing what he elsewhere labels literary journalism, Soares points to the elements of fiction as a result of protecting police deponents, since “[o]s relatos que compõem este livro são ficcionais, no sentido de que todos os cenários, fatos e personagens foram alterados, recombinados e tiveram seus nomes trocados. Se, por acaso, nossa imaginação se equiparar ao que efetivamente acontece, talvez isso decorra do fato de termos escrito este livro a partir das nossas experiencias” (2006, 11). He stresses the book’s purpose “não é depreciar os profissionais da segurança, mas valorizá-los; não é atingir as instituições, mas promover seu aperfeiçoamento” (2006, 10–11).

Rather than actively critique, Soares allows the mentality of violence to simply contradict itself, evident in the distinct way music serves as evidence rather than entertainment.²⁵ A version of the war chant appearing in the movie’s bootcamp sequence is reproduced in its entirety in the preface, yet starved on the page of their performativity, the lyrics take on absurd, disturbing dimensions. Disdaining the criminals and the conventional police alike, they claim the unit’s mission is to spread violence, death, and terror to become the “herói da nação” (2006, 9). This equation of violence with valor is immediately contradicted by “Diário da Guerra,” the twenty fragmented depositions from an unidentified BOPE captain that make up the first half of the work. Narrating his experiences with a contradictory spectrum of law enforcement agents, from the sadistic to the evangelical, the voice lays bare the discrepancy between appearances of bravery and the reality of suffering on both sides of the drug war.

Indeed, extended literary monologue provides Soares space to cast doubt on the very reliability of personal testimony. After discovering a respected officer is leading a corrupt militia but without a means to seek justice, the narrator is sarcastically told by a superior to either denounce the individual to Internal Affairs or retire and write a book, a self-reflexive nod to Batista’s participation in the project. The captain’s final reflection in his “war diary” belies his loss of trust in the information he had been fed for years by politicians and police leaders: “Aos poucos, as fronteiras foram sendo apagadas pela sequência das loucuras mais extravagantes. A realidade foi se tornando mais grave, mais absurda e menos verossímil. A tal ponto que, poucos anos depois, o testemunho verdadeiro não se distinguiria do delírio” (2006, 148). The short anecdotes lead to a sense of fragmentation and eventual vulnerability in the captain’s persona, a far cry from how Nascimento’s omnipresent gaze constructs his own relationship to a failed system.

The titular sequence of Tropa de elite opens with an eight-minute sensorial overload of fragmented quick cuts that intersperse opening credits, dancing residents, partying traffickers, and converging police officers against a background of blasting baile funk. The tension comes from lack of context, as audience members do not know why cops Mathias and Neto shoot into an outdoor concert amidst a police payoff, while the jerky handheld camerawork provides the illusion of accompanying the outnumbered officers into the labyrinth of narrow passages as they exchange gunfire with gang members. Nascimento’s exposition acts as an antidote to the cacophony of bullets and screams, his voiceover didactically asserting the difference between conventional military police and BOPE in reductive terms. It is not only a question of his team’s training in urban warfare, their black uniforms and skull insignia, or their ability to ascend into hilltop communities, but ultimately one of temperament: regular police frequently turn to corruption to augment their poor monthly compensation, while incorruptible members of the elite unit subscribe to a code of honor as fanatical as it is violent. As Neto pulls the trigger, the frame freezes for several seconds to highlight Nascimento’s Manichaean take on choices facing law enforcement: “No Rio de Janeiro, quem quer ser policial tem que escolher: ou se corrompe, ou se omite ou vai para guerra. Naquela noite, o Neto e o Mathias fizeram a mesma escolha que eu tinha feito dez anos antes: eles foram para guerra” (Tropa de elite 2007, 5). At this point, it is not yet clear to whom the voice belongs, although Moura’s character ends the mystery when his heavily-armed team embarks up the slope to save Mathias and Neto, as the camera zooms to freeze on a closeup of his face: “Meu nome é Capitão Nascimento. Eu chefiava a equipe Alfa do BOPE. Eu já tava naquela guerra faz tempo, e estava começando a ficar cansado” (2007, 7). The basis for the flashback thus established, the camera cuts to the red-emblazoned movie title as the homonymous heavy metal song (by band Tijuana) immediately captures the same aggressive tone behind the unit’s chants (“Agora o bicho vai pegar!”). The captain’s cool delivery exemplifies professional authority, although the second half of the film slowly peels back layers to reveal an absent father, a willing torturer of innocent women who in turn verbally abuses his wife, and a callous executor of adult criminals and coerced children lookouts alike, forcing the audience to negotiate the contradictory gulf between his justifications and Mathias’s increasingly unhinged search for vengeance.

The Ends of Ethical Ambiguity

The above character flaws notwithstanding, Marta Peixoto determines that the “film’s critique of a police that tortures and kills indiscriminately will perhaps be visible only to those who bring to it their own already formed opinions” (2011 99), as undecided viewers will be captivated by Captain Nascimento’s seductive discourse, which invites identification through his use of familiar terms such “my friend,” along with confident declarations and numerous aphorisms. Jeremy Lehnen has put the matter even more starkly, noting that Nascimento is constructed through “total exposure: he is narrator, subject of the camera, and protagonist of the storyline” (2022, 119). When the film crew and cast insist on distinguishing between Nascimento’s and Padilha’s ideologies, they agree that Nascimento’s ideological stance is reprehensible, but they believe that his eventual unmasking clearly denotes a critique.

In this sense, their argument dovetails with Richard Gordon’s cinematic interpretation of ethical alignment. Drawing on social-psychological theory, Gordon explores how Brazilian films manipulate audience’s allegiance with characters onscreen to influence their own sense of in-group or national belonging.²⁶ Perceptual alignment can be encouraged through camerawork, such as by filming from a character’s point-of-view. A shared sense of the viewer’s values towards their own social in-group is also influenced through nonvisual means, including affective, motivational, and as Gordon adds, ethical terms, based upon a character’s moral compass (2012, 29). Just as these strategies have been deployed to create a sense of shared community, filmmakers who seek to provoke a crisis of values in their audiences may instead create alignment with an unappealing character or gradually affect disidentification with an individual by revealing dramatic flaws “that may lead spectators to take note of attributes of themselves they might not want to acknowledge.” The resulting realization “that Brazilian spectators are themselves the problem” (2012, 32) echoes the assertion that pro-authoritarian interpretations reveal more about audience members’ own sociopolitical in-groups.

The irony of Nascimento’s totalizing legacy is it diverged from the intended project for dramatic reasons. When reviewing the first cut, the editing team noted a lack of dramatic urgency until Moura’s character appeared nearly half-way through the production. The clear choice was to expand Nascimento’s role from secondary to primary, but there was a problem: both shooting and the budget were largely finished, meaning options were limited (Rahe 2010; Soares 2019). The creative, cost-saving decision was to replace Batista’s narration with Nascimento’s omniscient voiceover, which would provide the illusion of his onscreen presence without needing to add new sequences. This decision, in turn, required both a justification for his newly central role and an attendant reorganization of the film’s plot structure: his search for a replacement in Mathias and Neto, which drew inspiration from Pimentel’s own recruitment in the early 1990s. More complicated, however, was determining the vehicle for refashioning Mathias’s firsthand experience into the captain’s perspective. Mantovani found a workaround here as well by scrapping the narrative’s linear progression and building an extended flashback through the famous opening scene in which Mathias and Neto are saved.

Given that Nascimento was Padilha’s invention, Soares’s book ironically played an important role in the film crew’s decision to develop Moura’s “voice of God” narration as a solution to their reshooting conundrum. In anticipation of his 2006 book release, the anthropologist sought to bring the text to life, so he appealed to stage director Domingos de Oliveira, who would later adapt the second half of the book for a theater run, to organize a theatrical approach in which actors performed chapter scenes. When a BOPE major wrote an inflammatory newspaper editorial in O Globo a week before the release, the hired actors withdrew over personal safety concerns, so Soares asked if Oliveira could salvage the “literary soundtrack” by finding a single actor to pre-record himself reading in the guise of the narrator. To Soares’s surprise, Oliveira convinced Wagner Moura to do the voicework, despite not having played any role in the book’s formation. The release event appears to have occurred at a crucial moment in post-production, as Padilha excitedly informed Soares that the reading had found the voice—and apparently the cynical attitude—of the film (Soares 2019).

Indeed, the literary narrator casually describes laughing during extrajudicial sentencing of favela residents, and his rhetorical ticks could easily have served as a model for Nascimento’s macabre wryness. Soares attempts to mimic spontaneous oral delivery, also informally addressing an ideal reader as “friend.” The difference is that Soares utilizes such false intimacy not to establish authority, but to make the audience participate, complicit in his illicit acts. The implied “you” first appears in the second diary entry, when the narrator feigns concern over offending the sensibility of his middle-class audience: “Bem, na verdade, não quero que você feche o livro, nem gostaria que você ficasse com má impressão de mim. Não leve tão a sério o que eu digo … Quando você me conhecer melhor, vai ver que não é nada disso” (2006, 23–24). The BOPE captain engages in rhetorical ploys to disarm the reader by stressing transparency and confusing the distance between police and general public. In a section about improvised water torture caustically titled “Golfinhos de Miami,” his false analogy anticipates Nascimento’s own rhetorical tactics:

Bem, essa questão toda é muito enrolada e eu, por mim, saltaria essa parte, mas me sinto obrigado a contar algumas coisas, já que o acordo foi não esconder nada. Depois você avalia, faz seu próprio balanço e me diz se eu sou um covarde ou se fiz a coisa certa—ou, pelo menos, o que você teria feito em meu lugar … Se sua filha estivesse sequestrada, correndo risco de vida, nas mãos de uns doentes, vai me dizer que você não espancaria o filho da puta até a morte pra tirar dele a informação? (2006, 36)

And just as the war chants speak for themselves, so too do the snippets detailing how politicians utilize BOPE for public relations or how children become casualties in shootouts, belying the narrator’s frequently jocular disposition.

Soares has surmised that his and Padilha’s protagonist-narrators have been deemed provocative, subversive, and confusing by national audiences because of the moral ambiguity that each exploits through dialectical strategies specific to their medium. Offhandedly narrating the “unspeakable,” neither protagonist can be easily categorized or resolved, meaning the excesses they justify behind their ironic disposition are simultaneously terrifying and fascinating, moralizing and immoral (“Tropa de elite,” n.d.). Audiences conditioned to the social determinism of films like Cidade de Deus, which draw easy lines between villains and victims of circumstance, for example, are unsettled by the lack of any categorical ethical code since both Tropa works foreground the problem of the police without offering resolution. If the protagonists’ attitudes go unpunished, the onus falls upon the audience to draw its own conclusions, though Peixoto again countenances that because the consequences of police violence are shown onscreen less frequently than that of the drug industry, their ethical code is less difficult to identify with.²⁷

Racialized Discourse and Narratorial Focus

The film creates jarring forms of misalignment in the sense that Gordon defines, but it is not always successful. This is most obvious in its frenetic final ten minutes after Neto, who is initially chosen by Nascimento to head the unit, is murdered off duty on the orders of gang leader Baiano. Mathias is passed over because he believes in the law, while Neto is enlisted to “go to war,” but Nascimento cynically reveals to the audience during the latter’s funeral his intent to exploit Mathias’s sadness and complete the student’s transformation into a policeman. Nascimento freely admits torture is morally wrong, though he belittles one of his officers who protests their illegal tactics. For the first time in the film, the camera moves from exterior favela views to cramped interior shots of homes, where residents’ tranquility is destroyed by invading BOPE officers tracing Baiano’s whereabouts at any cost. Afraid for his life, a young lookout withstands a severe beating until Nascimento has Mathias prepare to sodomize him with a broom handle. This acts as preparation for the final task that Nascimento reveals will allow him to retire: as a wounded Baiano prepares for his rooftop execution, he requests his face be preserved for his funeral.

After Nascimento hands Mathias a shotgun, the camera adopts Baiano’s point of view via a closeup of the shaking officer, steadying himself before pulling the trigger. The doomed drug lord has done nothing to warrant empathy from the spectator, but the visual alignment is not designed to encourage ethical identification. Rather, its purpose is to reverse our voyeuristic distance, placing the general viewing public in an assassin’s line of fire. While secondary to Nascimento, Mathias remains the most morally forthright character up until his transformation reveals serious flaws. Multiple crew members had worked on Cidade de Deus, where they had employed a similar perceptual technique with greater success. When a young Zé Pequeno establishes his bloodthirsty legacy by murdering one of the likeable criminal protagonists from the first of the film’s three parts, for example, the camera similarly simulates the victim’s position via a medium closeup shot tilted from below to destroy distance from the spectacle. The tactic successfully creates a rupture in identification with the small boy, who goes on to become the film’s primary antagonist, but it clearly provoked a more diverse reaction in the final scene of Tropa de elite. A twofold reason helps explain this dynamic: while both Tropa works implicitly negotiate race via law enforcement’s targeting of young black males, Batista’s own intermediary subjectivity is on display via the book’s narrator, while Mathias’s ethnic alterity is both relegated to the background by Nascimento’s command of the narrative and confused with the public’s negative perception of the police.

As one reviewer has suggested, the film’s ending inverts the “ethnic consensus” of stereotypical associations between race and criminality. Confounding dominant media representations, honest cop Mathias is black, while drug leader Baiano is much lighter skinned (De Andrade 2008, 245). Law enforcement is one of the careers that provides a means of social ascension for Afro-Brazilians (Vargas 2004, 459), a statistic knowingly echoed in one of Nascimento’s first descriptions of his protégé: “No Brasil, um cara que nasce pobre e preto não tem muita chance na vida” (2007, 15). Nevertheless, the film thereafter avoids direct acknowledgment of the racial dynamic inflecting police and favela relations. While men of color inhabit the lower ranks of the military police in the film as background extras, Mathias is the only black military or BOPE police officer to receive lines of dialogue. Anthropologist João Costa Vargas observes that twenty-first century Brazilian news reportage and crime films (like Cidade de Deus) are marked by a “hyperconsciousness” of race that paradoxically “is manifested by the often vehement negation of the importance of race” (2004, 444). The contemporary dialectic, a historical legacy of racial democracy ideology popularized by Gilberto Freyre, treats racial disparity as a given within peripheral communities rather than interrogating its historical causes, as onscreen representations further systematize well-worn tropes. In other words, the stifling presence of racial discourse is articulated through the absence of its discussion.

Early drafts of the script reached an unwieldy two hundred pages, as Padilha planned to explore the special unit’s inception in 1978 along with establishing Mathias’s own childhood in Rio’s periphery (Vértiz 2008, 72). One of Mantovani’s first acts after being hired was to streamline the script by reducing it by nearly a quarter, jettisoning the historical contextualization, although the names of unused child actors who were to portray the two candidates for Nascimento’s replacement still appear in the end credits (Caetano 2008). The only nod to Mathias’s past occurs when he discovers that a boy in the Morro dos Prazeres community who underperforms at school does not suffer from behavioral issues as the NGO volunteers believe, but rather needs glasses. The policeman explains his offer to provide a pair as passing on the same act of kindness he received as a child, but any historicization of his motivation to join the police is elided in the process.

By contrast, the specter of race is never far from the events in Elite da tropa, in part because Soares thematizes the hyperconsciousness of racial negation. The very first entry in the “War Diary” focuses on the narrator’s conversation with friend and retired BOPE officer Amâncio as he lies dying in the hospital. Like Nascimento, he has left the front lines after having a child, transferring to the less dangerous Intelligence Unit. Amâncio’s tale mirrors the film’s opening sequence as he and his partner take a wrong turn into a favela and, after destroying their car by running over a roadblock protected by local gang leaders, have to outrun the survivors in the maze of staircases while they await BOPE backup. In a bitter twist of fate, after having survived numerous attacks over the years, the friend reveals that his mortal wound came not from the gang members, but from the “tiro amigo” of those officers sent to rescue him. “Agora, eu te pergunto, por quê? Está certo que sou negro e que estava armado e sem uniforme, mas, porra, para que atirar antes de identificar o camarada?” (2006, 19), he asks. The exchange suggests more than the former soldier realizes, revealing the dangerous cocktail of racial profiling and the battalion’s shoot-to-kill training. After his friend’s death, the narrator lays the groundwork for his own complex relationship with the force, explaining,

No enterro, na salva de tiros, tive vontade de mandar pararem aquela farsa, aquela palhaçada. Mas pensei na viúva, no filho, ponderei um pouco e achei que o melhor mesmo seria colocar uma pedra no caso. Melhor ter um pai herói, morto pelos inimigos, do que vítima de um mal-entendido. Digo mal-entendido para manter um certo nível de sobriedade, em homenagem à memória de um amigo querido. (2006, 19–20)

A bitter euphemism for racial prejudice, the “misunderstanding” contradicts the unit’s heroic appearance during the film’s opening salvo, illustrating the disconnect between official discourse and the actual victims who become collateral damage, whether they are police or community member.

The camera defers visual identification of the voiceover’s owner until cutting to the film’s theme song, yet the nonvisual nature of prose allows Soares to withhold the racial identity of his own narrator so that its revelation serves as an act of self-determination. After explaining his release of a drug user after burying him in a dumpster full of trash, despite BOPE’s policy of never taking prisoners, he councils the reader not to imagine he is Evangelical, before deconstructing the audience’s implicit preconceptions regarding a mediatic representation of the police: “Por falar em preconceito, assinale aí em sua agenda que sou negro. Negro na acepção politicamente correta da palavra, porque, do ponto de vista meramente físico, sou mulato, moreno, na verdade. Mas faço questão de deixar claro—sem trocadilho—que sou negro e prefiro que você pense em mim como negro, ok?” (2006, 23). His peripheral status is manifested through a racially inflected disdain for the city’s privileged, who “snort cocaine on Saturdays” and attend peace rallies on Sundays. In a flashback to his time in the military police, he describes being tasked with managing a street protest organized by university students at PUC-Rio, where he has been told to avoid any hint of excess that could serve as anti-police fodder for the city’s news reporters: “O país é ou não é uma merda? Se os pobres desdentados e negros descem o morro e fecham a avenida, a ordem é botar pra foder, baixar o cacete e, se o tempo fechar, atirar antes e perguntar depois. Agora, se são os filhinhos de papai da Zona Sul, lourinhos, com sobrenome de rua, o tratamento tem de ser cinco estrelas” (2006, 92). It is significant that the narrator successfully employs diplomatic negotiation by convincing one of the rally’s leaders to open up a single lane of traffic so that both parties can take credit, and the act results in PUC offering the narrator a full scholarship to study law. Even he admits that BOPE provides preferential treatment to middle-class users who are caught purchasing drugs in favelas. “Como você vê, a cor da pele é nossa bússola. E, nisso, somos apenas adeptos modestos e fiéis da cultura brasileira” (2006, 136), he notes without apology, since officers adopt the same criteria that governs the security fears of the middle class. This open declaration is corroborated by Vargas, who posits that “anti-black racism is not exclusive to white and to the well-off … [but] also operates among those who are themselves the object of discrimination” (2004, 459).

In the film, however, potential reflection on Mathias’s status as racial other is subsumed under the middle class’s antagonism towards the police, such that class warfare becomes the frame through which the police gauge its reception across communities (Vázquez 2014, 118). In the oft-cited PUC university scene in which Mathias ironically presents on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, students do not yet know his double identity. As they equate police oppression of the poor with that of the wealthy, the swiveling camera reveals him to be the only person of color in the room. He berates his white classmates for their privileged perspective on crime and corruption, but he codes racial disparity as geographical location (i.e., Rio’s south zone). As a black man, Mathias operates from a privileged position to speak of the racialization of state institutions, yet a curious visual phenomenon ensues: though the camera shots exaggerating his physical separation from the rest of the group mark his social ostracization, the cause of the students’ derision is his naïve, as Nascimento puts it, belief in the honesty of the military police. Indeed, when Mathias begins a romantic relationship with one of the students who volunteers at the NGO, she looks beyond their different racial and social statuses, but she immediately shuns him after discovering he is a policeman.

Notably, the film also includes a scene involving PUC student peace demonstrations in response to the murder of two NGO volunteers, yet Nascimento’s class fixation avoids the book’s racial characterization of the protesters to instead lament society’s underappreciation of police. In the wake of Neto’s ambush and Nascimento’s wife having left with their newborn in reaction to his violent verbal assault in their home, the captain superimposes his own frustration onto Mathias, who appears at the demonstration with no mind for diplomacy: “É engraçado, porque ninguém faz passeata quando morre policial. Protesto é só para a morte rica. Quando eu vejo passeata contra a violência, parceiro, eu tenho vontade de sair e meter numa porrada” (2007, 93’). Mathias’s racial contrast amid the mass of white faces and their symbolically white garments thus once again becomes secondary to his black BOPE fatigues, representative of his increasing separation from civilian life. Acting out his captain’s frustration, he walks through the group and assaults a drug-dealing student partially responsible for Neto’s murder, while shoving his ex-girlfriend when she attempts to calm him. In fact, the film goes out of its way to point a finger at the drug consumption of the middle class responsible for the chain of narcotrafficking whose violence directly impacts community residents, and the explicit reprisal of class discourse overshadows reflection on the complicated intersection between racial, socioeconomic, and political agency. The final scene featuring Mathias firing in the direction of the audience thus may reverse basic media stereotypes, but because it signals the policeman becoming Nascimento, the focus again is limited to police representation. The basic cyclicality of institutional violence is intimated, but not developed, whereas its literary counterpart affectively narrates the betrayal of officers when discovering the toll serving in BOPE takes on their own lives.

Conclusions

Historical issues relating to literacy and class dynamics have meant that cross-economic diffusion of Brazilian literature has long been overshadowed by the circulation of audiovisual media. Despite record national book sales, then, Soares’s literary journalism has been circumscribed by the cultural impact of Padilha’s two films, both consumed by more than eleven million spectators in Brazil alone. Why, then, bother to compare two autonomous texts that confound traditional definitions of literary-to-cinema adaptation? What are the ramifications for employing adaptation theory, foregrounding their procedural phases, thematic coherence, and socially engaged histories? The answer to both questions involves providing generalizable insight regarding important formal considerations in Brazilian cultural production.

First, by revealing shared institutional patterns, comparative case studies reconsider cultural production as a continuum—process as well as product. As opposed to a commercial for BOPE or a single individual’s politics, the film’s location within a larger cultural trajectory articulates a complex network of intersecting variables. When read side-by-side as part of both men’s pedagogically oriented trilogies, the shared informant partnerships and mutual patterns of ethical ambiguity support their authors’ similarly intended levels of institutional criticism. Awareness of the invisible collaborative processes between script and onscreen release can thus highlight the unintended compounding of challenges and choices that led the feature film away from its initial critical framework. To that same end, despite not being source material, Soares’s literary journalism and his original blueprint remained relatively constant throughout the book’s formation, thus serving as a byline for evaluating the feature film. More importantly, the book is neither simply a foil nor an exercise in documentary realism, and its self-aware deployment of rhetorical strategies merits separate analysis on its own grounds.

More generally, similar attempts to assert Elite da tropa 2 as inspiration for Padilha’s sequel (“Livro que deu origem” 2010) provide an entry point for reconsidering cultural assumptions regarding the film industry, as the ubiquity of literary sources means these adaptive relationships are often taken for granted. Renewed interest in literary sources that extends beyond evaluations of fidelity also helps place under the magnifying glass twenty-first Brazilian cinematic trends involving crime, social violence, and state intervention. Despite film theorists otherwise embracing poststructural approaches rooted in intertextuality, films considered under Bentes’s “cosmetic of hunger” rubric have largely been studied in generic isolation without examination of the equally popular increase of crime fiction or what aesthetic visual choices are influenced by the hypotexts. The increasing diversity of nova literatura marginal, however, has implications for the complex onscreen representations of racial, economic, and political inequality behind “writing the social.” Some critics worry that film trends represented by the Tropa series and Carandiru are emblematic of a tendency to privilege class over ethnic or gender commentary because their “narrative design and the use of authoritative male narrators are symptomatic of a continuation of dominant modes of socio-cinematic representation” (Vázquez 2014, 115–116). Exploring the extent to which these patriarchal attitudes are embedded or critiqued in their literary sources, as opposed to being symptomatic of commercial trends in visual media alone, will require developing new national theories of adaptation, but it will also reveal viable alternative forms of collaboration that navigate “cosmetic” market expectations while meaningfully sparking debates about social justice.