Director Fernando Meirelles uses the oppressive and glaring landscape of a Brazilian favela as both the setting and a major theme in his 2002 film City of God. The key issues being discussed in the movies include inequality and corruption, globalization and perpetual cycle of violence.Ominously perched on a hillside overlooking the affluent neighborhoods of Rio with fantastic views of the Ocean, the favela is a world onto itself, segregated from the rest of the city. In the film, the rest of Rio is a faint postcard, juxtaposed with the harsh realities of the favela. This dichotomy emphasizes inequality in Brazil and offers clear examples of the urban sociological concept of “cidade partida” , or split city, a concept first coined by Brazilian journalist Zuenir Ventura in 1994. He saw Rio divided by morro (hillside) and asfalto (tarmac) (Nagib 112). The characters in the City of God have no relationship with the “asfalto” . To them, everything outside the favela is seen as strange and alien. Leaving the favela is a cinematographic transition from claustrophobic darkness and aggressive urgency to a calming light. This reinforces the idea that the favela is more than a violent slum, it is a socioeconomic construct and inevitable consequence of a new “global city region” (Scott). Rio has been partitioned into insiders and outsiders, rich and poor, mostly black and mostly white.
Globalization is one aspect that emerged from the movie. Perlman describes the increasingly common “ informal developments” that crop up around the edges of cities around the world. The people who live in these ad-hoc cities are drawn to the city through the effects of globalization; and a general migration from rural farming communities (Perlman 81). In Brazil, for example, only 40% of Brazil’s population was living in cities in 1950. By 1980, it was well over 70% (Gugler, 16). The City of God favela was created in 1966 by the Brazilian government to create temporary housing for victims of the flood. Eventually it was used to relocate the poor away for the inner city, where the government ignored them, “left to their own devices, out of sight and out of mind of the beautiful people of Rio” (Burke). While urban development is simply an increase in the number of people living in a city, urbanization is a part of modernization and can be seen as a byproduct of globalism. This is a process of economic, social, and cultural change which involves a shift from agricultural to urban forms of work.
There are many concerns about the plight of the urban poor who are being segregated and stigmatized. This is despite the fact that the country’s economy is growing and the middle class expanding (Mehta). This economic disconnect between the poor and middle/upper classes is increasingly common in “global city regions” with populations over ten million that are experiencing rapid economic, political and social change (Scott, et. al 22). These global city regions are in developing countries and have become symbols of the “dark regressive side of globalism” (Scott, et. al 30). Meirelles shows the favela as a dysfunctional, hopeless and almost apocalyptic organism that eats up its inhabitants. There is little law or order and the police are portrayed as being even more corrupt than the drug dealers, who at least in the past, enforced some sort of the social contract with the locals. This lack of government control is typical in global city regions, where “there are often such great discrepancies between social need and economically-feasible supply that one can speak of veritable crisis conditions in many such cities” (Scott, et. al 33).
As the population of global city-regions swells, the cities struggle to provide basic services, enforce law and order or design effective urban planning. As a result, the underclass is alienated and not assimilated into the social, cultural and economic life of the city. Perlman emphasizes that in most cases, these residents lead their lives completely cut off from the “real” city, which makes their lives prone to poverty and crime:
The exclusion of a billion urban poor people from full
citizenship in the cities in which they live deprives
these cities of these people’s valuable intellectual capital
and problem-solving capacities, as well as a formidable
(Perlman 19).
Meirelles also believes excluding the poor from the urban environment creates chaos. He has said that the main theme of the City of God, is "the waste of lives" and perpetual cycle of violence in favela communities (Nagib 68). As the economics of globalism inflate cities and create new urban sprawl, overcrowded, badly organized and socially unresponsive cities have “become breeding grounds for violence and corruption” .
This cycle of violence and corruption is at the core of the City of God. As the film traces the evolution of this neighborhood from a relatively peaceful slum of the 1960’s into a drug-fueled war zone in 1980s, the living conditions actually get worse, as drug dealers operate with impunity and the corrupt police look the other way, and are often worse than the gangs. The characters may have moral and goals, but they are quickly eroded by the realities of favela life. Some of these characters include Rocket, Benny, and Ned. This is a major problem with the global city region. Without economic opportunities, young people turn to crime (Mehta).
The setting of the film brings out the element of inequality and perseverance of poverty. Even though the sun is considered to be for everyone, the beach is meant for the few. The beaches, for instance, the ones of Ipanema are for the rich people and affluent Brazilians. This implies that there is no cultural mixing between the poor and the rich.
In 2001, Brazil’s new City Statute wrote the “Right to the City” into federal law (Fernandes). The right to the city is a human rights idea that was first proposed by French sociologist Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville. Lefebvre summarizes the ideas as a "demandfor a transformed and renewed access to urban life" , and asserted that having equal access to everything a city has to offer is a basic human right. Lefebvre believed the city belonged to the people, both individually and collectively (Harvey). In City of God, the characters have no access to the city of Rio, just the limited resources the favela has to offer – which usually involves drugs, corruption and violence. When analyzed as social commentary on the partition of Rio into rich and poor enclaves, it shows that Rio has developed as a bipolar city, with each city cut off from the other. However, when asked if the film was an indictment of his home country, Meirelle said he was not only criticizing inequality in Brazilian society, but also larger global economic forces, saying that "no country is as unfair as the world itself." (Gonzales).
Works Cited
Burke, Jason. "Street Theatre: Revisiting City of God." The Guardian. N.p., 21 Mar. 2004. Web
Fernandes, Edésio. "Constructing the Right to the City in Brazil." Social & Legal Studies 16.2 (2007): 201-219.
Gonzales, Ed. "City of Gods: An Interview with Fernando Meirelles | Feature | Slant Magazine." Slant Magazine. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2014.
Mehta, Suketu. "In the Violent Favelas of Brazil by Suketu Mehta." New York Times Home. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Nov. 2014.
Nagib, Lúcia. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema and Utopia. IB Tauris, 2007.
Perlman, Janice. Favela: Four decades of living on the edge in Rio de Janeiro. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Roussel Monique, J. Gugler (ed.), “The Urbanization of the Third World” Revue Tiers Monde, 1988, vol. 29, issue 116, pages 1253-1253.
Scott, Allen J., ed. Global City-Regions: Trends, Theory, Policy: Trends, Theory, Policy. Oxford University Press, 2001.
Ventura, Zuenir. Cidade partida. Companhia das Letras, 1994.
Harvey, David. Social justice and the city. Vol. 1. University of Georgia Press, 2010.
