Apocalypse in the Tropics

Apocalypse-in-the-Tropics
Apocalypse in the Tropics

For many of Bolsonaro’s detractors, include non-Indigenous opponents of discrimination, environmental sabotage, the anti-abortion agenda, institutionalized homophobia, and denialism of COVID-19, his defeat in the last elections was certainly a relief, but hardly a triumphal change. It is true that the presidency is once again in the hands of former soldier Lula, leader of the Workers’ Party, but the struggle for power in the past decades as well as the fascist triumph that occurred recently, are still fresh in the memories of the people of this country marked by poverty and social unrest. “There is nothing which shall not be revealed,” says Petra Costa about her film “Apocalypse in the Tropics” which follows throughout the preceding months with some earnest historical revisionism and a sense of urgency towards the future.

The film’s protagonist, in the self-referentiality that Costa and her documentary subjects often display, draws the viewer’s attention back to her previous work probably most of all, and the viewer will not be as confounded as those who have not seen Costa’s previous doc should have expected such demonstrations of shame, fear, and, at best, a green and fragile hope are present in the film “Apocalypse in the Tropics.” Released in 2019 it covered in the context of deep analysis factors causing Brazil’s sharp turn for the right and viewed the newly elected president, Bolsonaro’s triumph with a broad scope of dismaying greatness. Directed by Petra Costa, who has collaborated with Brad Pitt on multiple projects, including a film that actually won an Oscar, The Edge Of Democracy, It received the kind of attention everyone wanted. This follows after its global premiere at Venice where it was also nominated in the berceuse with options to add executive producers.

Five years and one global pandemic after, while Costa may be happy to recount the events of Bolsonaro’s regime in the past tense, she is not finished with the reasons and effects of this regime on the country as a whole. For Brother films made at the time of two divergent political contexts, ‘The Edge of Democracy’ and ’Apocalypse in the Tropics’ however have the same outlook and approach. But this does not mean that they have the remnants of the same talking points. The new film, as it has already been suggested in the name taken from the Book of Revelation, deals in greater stress on one social diverse phenomenon which Costa confesses she did not examine in detail in her previous film: the dramatic rise of the poorest sections of society in Brazil towards evangelic Christianity which numbers more than thirty percent of the country’s population now compared to five percent just forty years ago.

According to Costa, this is one of the fastest changes in religion recorded so far in history it is the sort of monumental change in population that cannot be restricted to only one side of the church-state division. Because she has grown up in a secular setting, the filmmaker acknowledges lacking understanding of Evangelical beliefs as well as being rather idealistic about how those ideologies would weave themselves into the culture of Brazil. Therefore, she makes it a point to read the Bible the New Testament’s part most specifically very closely. However, the more she reads the Bible, the more she realizes that Brazilian national Evangelical leaders do not consider the words of God, but the words of capitalism instead.

The principal figure in “Apocalypse in the Tropics” is neither Bolsonaro nor Lula unless one takes into account the fact that Costa, a brave and disarming, gets some face time with the latter, a man raised in a Catholic tradition but who has had to make some gestures to the US Evangelical base (such as a promise not to change abortion law) in his recent presidential campaign. It’s rather the American televangelist Silas Malafaia who has been portrayed as an emblematic figure of this new populist politics with whom the people of Brazil will be able to connect and follow. Silas Malafaia is a self-avowed political operative who is quite conservative in all of his views. It is Malafaia, not the politicians he promotes as appropriate representatives of American Evangelicalism in the Brazilian parliament and supreme court, who is more powerful and more effective than them.

Definitely a magnetic character, Malafaia appears to spout anything close to hate speech in his remarkably warm conversations with Costa, where he advocates for a more extreme Christian agenda that includes strong anti-homosexuality and anti-abortion policies as the true sentiments of the Brazilian majority. Leaving aside the obvious argument that Evangelicals are not the majority block for now, Costa retorts instead on the very definition of democracy Should it not require the safeguarding of the minority groups no matter what the majority wishes? A flat no is what he gave along with a fun chuckle as if the question was bizarre. “How could the same Jesus whom I loved, who preached love and compassion, be used to justify a cruel regime?” Costa notes in a voiceover montage. Nevertheless, self-justification does not factor very much into Evangelical politics apparently, when one declares God to be on their side, there is no reason to apologize or negotiate about one’s convictions.

Although the left has seemingly regained power, Costa is curious as to how Brazil could one day progress to a theocracy. The film is divided into themes called the bible, yet all the classical images revolve around the graceless Malafaia’s media bluster. Costa’s previous work also included a personal narrative which this film shifts away from. Costa agrees with other interpretations and points to the enormous presence of American television personality and preacher Billy Graham as helping to export American Evangelicalism to Brazil during his stadium tours and who they claim was assisting with American efforts to beat back the spread of leftist Brazilian Catholicism.

Now in the present, her vision turns to the poor, ostracized masses that are pliant to religious language. One election cycle later, she meets a single mother who works as a maid, and who supports Lula’s views “I would vote for him, but the Gospel governs my decisions.” In this regard, the Gospel is Malafaia, who influences the masses with efficiency as he is favorable towards prosperity theology that has many benefits for him and little for the working class, Evangelicals.

Religious piety and party allegiance are depicted in the film as a combination that can be abused, with extreme consequences as illustrated by the events of January 2023 when Bolsonaro’s followers rallied after he lost the election seeing that the president and Malafaia have been calling for “military intervention”, a horde of furious Bolsonaro voters overwhelmed and vandalized the Congress houses in Brasilia. It angers the film’s makers to have to say that there is a parallel here with the Trumpist fans’ invasion of the Capitol two years prior. Just like the film’s viewers, they do not need the director to explain that Trump’s people did not only target the United States.

Such extreme behaviors, in Costa’s opinion, are supposed to be exercised by the followers who interpret the apocalyptic manifestations of the Day of Judgement as portrayed in the Book of Revelation. Her camera pans across the now-dilapidated construction works of Luis Jove, and the former-blissful National Congress Palace; you can only ask where in the timeline humanity could be at.

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