The Brazilian way of
dealing with emotions, especially those that
concern relationships is partially shaped by the most popular
genre in Brazilian television: the novela. Social inequality is not
addressed as such in the small screen, however. And political
problems in Brazil are always reduced to moral ones.
by: Renato
Janine Ribeiro
I will argue that Brazilian society conceives of politics—or should I
say of human relationships in general, including ethics—in a way that
is heavily indebted to the main contribution of our country to mass media,
I mean, soap opera. In our version of Portuguese, soap opera is called telenovela
or simply novela, our word for "novella" in the sense of
a long short story.
For a long time we had
them in the radio, then novelas spread to television and broke with
their half-Cuba, half-Mexican heritage of tears and incest. It became a truly
modern genre, able to discuss present day issues of morality and politics,
and it helped, for the better and for the worse, to shape our conceptions
of society both large and small.
Either if we want to discuss
society as a whole, according to the main tradition of sociology, or if we
intend to analyze society as a network of small groups, in the Foucaultian
tradition of the microphysics of power, we must take soap opera into account.
My discussion will be
centered in some points that arose during the 90s, namely the Fernando Collor
presidency, its demise, and the post-mortem constitution of the Formula One
champion Ayrton Senna as a paradigm of public man. But my main presupposition
will be that our way of dealing with emotions, especially those emotions that
concern relationships with other people, is at least partially shaped by the
most popular genre in Brazilian television.
Since most Brazilians
read few newspapers and even less books, but 98 per cent of us are connected
in our homes to television, this brand of mass media acquires in our country
an importance that should not be held as negligible.
Incidentally this will
imply that in our account of Brazilian society we will break with what we
could call a Habermasian view of politics as mainly, or potentially, rational:
we will emphasize its emotional and even non-rational, as distinct as irrational,
side. But let us begin1.
First of all, there is
something we could call soap opera morals. It has little or nothing to do
with the old morality that was present in the first soap operas, as the Cuban
hit of Felix Caignet El Derecho de Nacer, that had an enormous success
all around Latin America, including Brazil, for some decades.
Moral Revolution
Old morality dealt hysterically
and essentially with sex. There were plenty of single mothers, but in order
that they could get sympathy it was essential that they would have been innocent
victims of social prejudice. Innocence was a main point of those novelas.
Ironically sex was very
present but at the same time it was deemed to be dangerous: so, if those many
single mothers were non-virgins from the point of view of their bodies, they
were truly virginal from the viewpoint of their conscience, innocence, morals,
and even stupidity.
But in the last twenty
or thirty years all this has changed in Brazil. Our main TV network, Globo,
has unleashed an informal but coherent campaign, already in the 1970s, in
order to change old style morality. This meant challenging machismo and the
roles of men and women, that in the United States you call gender issues.
For instance, since in
our culture boys were always taught that they should never cry, in a soap
opera of the late 70s the character of an important Brazilian actor, Fernando
Torres, was shown weeping for some long minutes. Women began to work, to discuss
sex, to earn their own money, to have ideas and values of their own that would
often challenge their male partners’.
Equality between men and
women was and is presented as essential and I dare say that this has been
and still is the main contribution of TV to Brazilian morals. Something close
to a true revolution has happened in the small screen.
Discrimination against
Negroes was also criticized (I will not employ the Americanized expression
"Afro-Brazilians" since it would convey a rather artificial description
of Brazilian Negroes; the word Negro, in Portuguese, carries no pejorative
sense; furthermore the problem with the American expression "Afro-Brazilian"
is that it ascribes foreign roots to people who feel rather Brazilian; we
could not say Italo-Brazilian or German-Brazilian in the way Americans of
our days say Irish-American, Italian-American etc.).
One soap opera of the
1980s showed literally that the "same blood runs in the veins of both
blacks and whites." A rich white farmer owed his life to the blood donated
by his son’s girlfriend, a black professional woman who had been humiliated
by the landowner some hours before the accident that failed killing him.
Middle-class families
of African descent also came to be shown on TV since the mid-1980s, sometimes
even having white domestic servants, something that may happen in "real"
life but is very far from being the rule. But this departure from everyday
experience should not be criticized as giving a false image of the country.
Even if one of the reasons
for the success of soap operas in Brazil since Janete Clair in the 1970s was
the fact that it broke with a tradition of excessively romantic stories that
had no link at all with real Brazilian life, and that it endeavored to show
dramatis personae that could be recognized in everybody’s daily experience,
one of the purposes of novelas has always been to give people some
ideals; and it is interesting that one of these ideas be that of promoting
equality among men and women, and among people irrespectively of their ethnic
origins.
One last comment about
the role of Negroes in television: Brazil boasts itself of being a "racial
democracy", and it is true that open-handed prejudice against blacks
is rarely to be heard. In Brazil there never was something comparable to South
African apartheid or North American segregation. The main problem is social:
the division of classes recovers and reinforces the ethnic one.
Blacks are poor and sometimes
very poor. The abolition of slavery, in 1888, was not followed by any policy
that would give the former slaves social conditions to improve their sort.
We come then to a paradox. No one with a minimum of sense will speak against
racial equality, even if many still speak against gender equality. It would
then seem that we have a stronger consensus about equality between blacks
and whites than about equality between men and women.
But things are not so
simple. To preach a true ethnic equality on television would imply to address
social issues and to challenge the iniquitous economic inequality that pervades
Brazilian society. Television has been an important weapon of national control
under military rule (1964-1985) and in the following years it has been instrumental
in ensuring that left-wing parties be kept away from power.
TV Taboos
Policies that would effectively
reduce social inequality are not discussed in the small screen. You can quite
well propose changes in private life, but neither the genre nor TV owners
will allow you to suggest crucial changes in public and political life. Matters
of gender equality may require much from individuals, but they do not put
a heavy burden on traditional politics, so they can be tolerated in the air.
Of course I am not hinting
that this division would be consciously and deliberately practiced; what I
am discussing is the logic of television in Brazil, not the intentions of
the people who have power over it.
What is really difficult
in television is to recognize the rights of homosexuals. Couples of gay men
are more or less accepted in novelas, but couples of lesbians usually
die very soon. Since the 80s some novela writers have been trying to
gain acceptance for lesbians, but the continual surveys of popular reactions
that monitor every telenovela have always forced them to kill homosexual
women in accidents.
These misfortunes happen
in the first two or three months of stories that would normally comprehend
some seven months at the rate of six episodes a week. It is expected however
that some day lesbians will be allowed to live as much as other people, I
mean, more than a semester (in the screen, of course).
Incidentally the fact
that these surveys happen and have a dernier mot on the life and success
of dramatis personae shows that novela authors and even network managers
are not as powerful as some critics of media would have us believe. There
is a dialectics between the authors and their public of some tens of millions.
Authors are often eager
to introduce some new subjects or approaches—especially in the most important
novela of the day, the one called "novela das 8" (8
p.m. soap opera), which usually begins between 8.30 and 9 p.m.—but it
is crucial that the public accept it. The idea that people are passively manipulated
seems a very crude picture of a relationship that is much more complex.
In addition, the network—and
when I refer to "the network" I speak mainly of Globo, the most
important and the best among the private-owned TV networks of Brazil—gives
its authors a large amount of autonomy as far, at least, as they succeed in
maintaining a meaningful leadership among spectators.
Padrão Globo de
Qualidade (Globo pattern of quality), as it is known, implies that bad writers
or, in what here concerns us, those with ethnic, gender or any other visible
prejudices will not be hired to write novelas.
Politically Incorrect
To return to homosexuals,
we should add that, contrarily to blacks but someway in the same sense as
women, they are often mocked in TV humor programs. It is unfortunate that
TV humor is full of old prejudices. Two facts are witnesses to this.
In the late 80s, old style
TV humor was losing its momentum and a group of new and young humor writers
and actors created new programs at TV Globo, among them TV Pirata. They ironized
and criticized the old school comedians like Chico Anysio.
However, after a certain
time they returned to the usual stereotypes of women and gay people. Since
their public and style are more sophisticated than those of their colleagues,
however, their diction often appears as a sort of irony, a second degree way
of talking about things.
One of their main targets
is political correctness, which in Brazil sounds as something rather exaggerated
and even comic. Since TV Pirata mocks everything and has this sort of second-degree
way of saying things, it can even mock blacks without, it seems, offending
them too much.
This also means that stereotypes
of women and gay men as frivolous (curiously lesbians are less present in
TV humor programs) should not always be read at their face value. They have
a double sense. They can be translated by some at their first level of meaning,
as an old-style criticism of women and gays, but they can also be understood
as a satire that conveys no prejudice, as an intelligent mockery of both prejudice
and political correctness.
The other fact is a curious
one. Jô Soares, arguably the most popular comic in Brazilian television,
created in the early 80s several characters that mocked the agonizing military
dictatorship. However, most of his jokes still dealt with women and gays following
the usual stereotypes. We had then a blend of some political jokes that were
really intelligent and many jokes about mores that of course were not as intelligent.
In the late 80s, Jô
Soares left Globo for SBT (Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão) network,
which provided him with the opportunity he had long dreamt of: he would have
a nightly talk-show. It rapidly became the most important talk-show in Brazil,
and after some time Jô suppressed his humor program. Of course the prejudices
aired in the mores section of his humor show had no place in his talk-show,
and I suppose he felt uncomfortable mocking women and gays.
Novelas vs. Humor
To sum it up we should
conclude that women are considered the equals of men in novelas, but
not in comic programs. Blacks are shown as equal to whites in novelas,
but with less emphasis than women are afforded. From another perspective,
color prejudice is held as something too delicate to allow jokes, so they
constitute a subject rather absent from TV humor.
Homosexual men, if they
are the target of those TV humor programs of doubtful quality, can at least
be somewhat tolerated, which is not the case of lesbians—but these latter,
conversely, can enjoy a sort of non-visibility, which means that if they are
not talked of they are not the target of any real hostility.
Lastly, in our short survey
of TV morality, we should remark that novelas, especially those of
Globo, witness of a tolerance and seriousness in dealing with ethical questions
that would be impossible to find in TV humor programs. Comedy and farce seem
to gather the most conservative programs of Brazilian TV, while novelas,
if they are no more the heirs to tragedy (as was the case with the first novelas,
inspired by their Cuban and Mexican originals), as heirs to 19th century drama
can deal in a more respectful way with some human dramas of private life.
Politics and the
Tube
We should notice that
personal honesty is often emphasized, in contrast with the mores attributed
to politicians, usually deemed—in soap operas but also in everyday street
conversation—to be corrupt. It can be even funny and has already been
remarked that some minutes after the rather conservative 8 p.m. TV news has
shown as great men some old right-wing politicians, the novela will
unmask as crooks some characters that are their faithful translation into
the realm of fiction.
One of the novelas
of lasting impact in Brazil, Dias Gomes’s Roque Santeiro (1985), had
as its anti-hero Sinhozinho Malta, an autocratic landowner who exhibited several
features of ministers and politicians from Northeast that had served the military
and at that time held important posts in the first civilian government in
20 years. Honesty is estimated as an attribute of the person: politicians
are widely considered not to have it.
We can now come to soap
opera politics. Its apex was during the presidency of Fernando Collor, who
after being elected in December 1989 in the first presidential polls in almost
30 years, held office from March 1990 to September 1992, when he was the first
Brazilian President to be impeached by Congress.
His election was due to
many factors, but one of them was a last moment soap opera expedient. Collor
had a former girlfriend of his left-wing opponent, Lula, tell on TV that he
had asked her to abort their child. The child, then already a teen-ager girl,
went to television to abide by her father, but the coup was felt and Lula
was defeated.
Another novela
feature was a coincidence. Since in 1989 the world celebrated the bicentennial
of French Revolution and Brazil remembered the 200 years of a revolutionary
movement known as Inconfidência Mineira, Globo produced a soap opera
about an imaginary ancien régime monarchy (the kingdom of Avilan)
where aristocrats were deeply corrupt and a young prince came to challenge
and of course finally defeat them.
Gradually, as an outsider
politician from the small and little known Northeast State of Alagoas, Fernando
Collor de Mello, gathered popular support to his moral criticism of President
José Sarney. The image of the young prince was both consciously and
unconsciously associated with his own persona. The novela, Que rei
sou eu? (What sort of king am I?) ended a few months before election and,
since its message could be lost, Globo decided to rerun it in the afternoon
shortly after its prime-time run.
Reruns, usually, happen
years after the original presentation of a novela. Of course it would
be a mistake to ascribe Collor’s election to that soap opera, but it is important
to notice that his constitution as a popular hero challenging corruption had
novelas as an important paradigm.
If novelas may
have played a role in his election, his government was also hero-like, full
of images of energy. It was widely reported in early1990, when he made the
usual world tour by every Brazilian president-elect, that George Bush was
so impressed by Collor that the called him "Indiana Collor".
Indiana Jones was a blend
of an energetic hero and of a scholar, while neither Collor nor Bush held
scholarship in high esteem—the Brazilian President came short of destroying
important cultural agencies of the Federal Government—but it is interesting
to point that energy as heroism would be the main feature in Collor’s public
image.
His measures against inflation,
which had reached an all-time record in Brazilian history of 85 per cent in
the month preceding his inauguration, were heralded as a bullet shot in the
eye of a tiger (i.e., inflation) and as a fatal coup in a Japanese martial
art that—by more than mere chance—was practiced by the President.
Some years later, it would
be known that he had had an exercise academy built for himself in the basement
of the Presidential Palace. During the first year of his presidency, Fernando
Collor would practice a different sport every Sunday, most of them radical
ones, and his spokesman and himself would often present his foes as old or
weak men. They were derided as people unable to make decisions and to put
them into practice.
Epic Collor
It would be more exact
to say that his government was not only a soap opera one: it was an epic government.
Heroism and even irrationalism or anti-intellectualism were part of it. Novelas
entered it in order to arouse popular emotions that could be favorable to
official policies. But what can be interesting is the crisis that brought
Collor’s government to its demise. It was a soap opera crisis.
In the first months of
1992, the epic or heroic style was exhausting itself. The last remaining ministers
of his first cabinet, most of them outsiders to the establishment, were finally
replaced either by old style politicians or by some new and respected technocrats.
The President had himself shot—by cameramen, I mean—holding a copy
of Norberto Bobbio’s Dictionary of Politics.
This implied a big departure
from his previous aversion to intellectuals. He also invited the Partido da
Social Democracia Brasileira, PSDB (Brazilian Social-Democrat Party), to join
his government. Not being able to convince them to accept a post in the cabinet
he composed a new ministry of serious, competent, moderate men. Prose began
to take its place in power.
Soap opera took its revenge,
if I can say that, with a vengeance. The President’s brother, Pedro Collor,
told Brazilian most important weekly magazine, Veja, several secrets about
corruption in the highest levels of government. A family crisis—Pedro
had been kept apart, against his will, of the network of corruption—quickly
became a national one.
Their mother, who two
years before had asked all Brazilians to write to her son the President enjoining
him to quit the dangerous sports he then practiced, did all she could in order
to solve the crisis keeping it inside the family. Not being able to do that,
she entered into a coma and died at the time her son Fernando lost his office
after being convicted by the Senate in the impeachment case. Some compared
the crisis to a second hand version of the Greek story of the Atrids.
Prose also had its place
in the impeachment proceedings. Some newspapermen did their best in order
to expose the entrails of a corrupt government. At the same time, this Habermas-style
vendetta of prose and reason was supported by the emotion of millions of young
men and women marching through the country to demand Collor’s impeachment.
So it would be wrong to
describe this social process as a triumph of prose over epics. It was a blend
of reason and emotions; rather, it was a full-scale catharsis, where emotion
fought emotion.
Collor came to power while
TV was showing Que rei sou eu? Now, a shorter TV series, with an episode
aired every night during a few weeks, Os anos rebeldes (The rebel years,
1992), provided the young with an emotional language able to convey their
revolt and indignation. Os anos rebeldes dealt with Brazilian 1968.
That year, student movements were repressed by the military. They would become
an armed struggle, which would last some two or three years.
While the guerrilla-like
movement had no popular support at the time, in later years it was able to
gather if not a succès de public, at least a strong succès
de critique et d’estime which is quite important in any case in the middle
classes. After Collor was convicted by the Senate, in the Federal elections
of 1994 at least one deputy would be elected as representative of the caras-pintadas2,
the young women and men who went to the streets to demonstrate against Collor
and corruption.
Bad Politics
Novelas can be
quite efficient taking morality questions to the fore, and have been instrumental
if not in bringing some behavioral changes in Brazil at least in reinforcing
new trends—but their politics cannot receive the same appraisal. Social
inequality is not addressed as such in the small screen. And political problems
are always reduced to moral ones.
Some people can be quite
surprised when they hear the degree of criticism against politicians in Brazilian
television—which is indeed surprising since most local televisions that
retransmit Globo programs belong to House representatives or senators—but
everything is understood if we remember that the moralization of politics
avoids a true political discussion.
Seldom will you witness
a discussion of Right and Left. The problem with morals is that you have right
and wrong, not Right and Left: so it becomes quite impossible to discuss different
strategies for the country. This of course means that many if not most people
become disaffected with politics.
Probably the most common
statement by Brazilians from every social class concerning politics is that
all politicians are thieves. People vote, however, since voting is a legal
obligation in Brazil, and this implies that every two years they get to the
polls in order to elect men and women they morally scorn.
Hero Race Driver
At the end of 1992, the
image of a new-brand politician, Fernando Collor as the "hunter of maharajahs3",
was dead. In less than two years, however, it would be replaced in some measure
by that of another national hero: Ayrton Senna, the Formula One world champion,
who died tragically on May 1, 1994, in Imola, Italy.
Some days after his death,
a reader wrote to the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo to convey his
feelings that it was unacceptable that Senna’s wake should happen in the premises
of the São Paulo State Assembly: how could so worthy a man as the late
champion be deemed the equal of corrupts, i.e., politicians?
Another idea of public
man was getting its place under the sun: the hero who deals with machines,
not with men. We can understand the replacement of the bad politician by the
dead hero as meaning that Brazilians find it very difficult if we return to
the two Greek verbs that Aristotle employs to distinguish between two ideas
of action. There is to prattein (whence the noun praxis), which refers
to the action on men that can re-act themselves, and that is why we prefer
the action referred to by the noun techné, i.e., the action
practiced on things and/or irrational beings.
But of course Brazilians
can prattein. What they find truly difficult is another thing: to deal
with human beings in a political and not moral level. Moral action is very
popular in Brazil and if NGOs develop in our country it is partly because
they can profit of a favorable moral bias, which also implies, incidentally,
that participation and voluntary action will often mean charitable work.
Morality Vs. Politics
We should now come to
another telenovela, Fera ferida (Wounded beast), which aired
in 1993-94. A small town—novelas often have or acquire an allegoric
meaning: the town came to mean the country—has politicians who are so
corrupt that the story ends with a terrible storm which destroys it completely:
literally, what in English would be called an act of God.
A short epilogue tells
us however that two years later everything is rebuilt and the town knows a
new, prosper life, due to the endeavors of independent people—small entrepreneurs,
the equivalent of non-government organizations etc. But the old politicians
keep the power, at least traditional power: they still hold the offices of
mayor and local councilors.
I think the moral of this
story is quite simple but strong: the Brazilian society is able to regenerate
itself but politics is still wicked. Society can renew itself insofar as social
relations are moral, but it is unable to cope with the level where they have
to be political. As far as you can convert social intercourse into a moral
one, you can deal with it quite well. But if you translate society in political
terms—or maybe if you recognize the political character of social relations—things
cease to work.
Most Brazilians are indifferent
to politics and criticize politicians because they do not feel represented
by them. So, since the public sphere is abandoned to politicians—who
govern the country in a way despised by most people who however do not feel
able or maybe willing to change this reality—we are often forced to do
on our own the same things that should be the responsibility of the State.
We pay taxes for a State
school system, for a State health system and a public system of transportation,
and we pay again for the private schools, hospitals and cars we use. There
seems to be a Brazil that more or less coincides with the State, and then
another Brazil, a sort of a clone of the first one, but a good, a renewed
or repaired clone, an ideal Brazil. Of course this means that it is very costly
to live in Brazil, since everything must be done twice: we live in two countries,
sometimes three.
We come then to the risks
of politics without politicians: a moral prospect is unable to deal with the
great problems, with society as a whole. It can fix local problems, not solve
national or global ones. This is why I have been proposing to you a rather
pessimistic view of contemporary Brazil.
But I prefer to end with
two, let us say, optimistic remarks. First, coping with each other people
can develop abilities to deal—in the long run, of course—with great
things. If we want a grassroots democracy instead of an only formal one this
can be the best way to build it.
My second and final remark
will be more important. It seems that till now I have held politics as morals,
or politics without politicians, as more or less responsible not exactly for
my country’s social problems but at least for our incapacity to solve them,
but it must have remained a little mysterious why this could also be called
a Brazilian dream.
I will then say that maybe
this is not only a Brazilian dream. It could quite easily be a global dream,
a dream dreamt of by people from all countries. Maybe politicians’ politics
is coming to an end in the world as a whole, and we should devise something
new.
The model that prevails
in North Atlantic countries has been fruitful since the 18th century, but
its main, Mandevillean idea is that from private vices stem public benefits—i.e.,
that we can have good institutions ensuring a fair society even if private
individuals are mainly egotistic4.
But this way of dealing
with the relationship between individual and society has meant that an important
dimension of life, i.e., affective and affectionate life, has been excluded
from social life and is confined to private life. So that, either we have
affection in politics, and it is conservative and even authoritarian, or we
have the rule of law, democracy and Habermas, but it is emotionally very cold,
almost empty.
Maybe what a Third World
country can bring in the scope of redefining politics is the possibility of
a politics with affection, where emotions will no more be held hostage by
authoritarian leaders. This is an important, a global hope.
This was a paper presented
to the 500th anniversary Congress of Brazil at Dartmouth College.
1 This paper
is an abridgement of the chapters "Uma política sem políticos:
Collor e Senna" and "O Brasil pela novela" of my book A sociedade
contra o social: o alto custo da vida pública no Brasil (Society against
social: the high cost of public life in Brazil), São Paulo, Companhia
das Letras, 2000.
2 Literally,
painted faces. This name comes from Argentina, where right-wing military who
staged a series of revolts against President Alfonsin in the 1980s used to
paint their faces as if they were going to fight in the jungle. The word underwent
an extraordinary change as it was appropriated by Brazilian youth. In a weekday
of August 1992, President Collor urged his followers to lend him their support
in the impeachment crisis going to the streets in the next week-end with the
national colors, yellow and green.
The first reaction of
the opposition was to counter-demonstrate with black, to tell Brazil was mourning
the fact it had a corrupt government. Anyway pro-Collor demonstrators showed
themselves in negligible numbers, while millions protested him throughout
the country. This allowed the opposition to recover the national colors and
to demonstrate with them; the young then painted their faces in yellow and
green, and this gave the protests the profile of an enormous and spontaneous
party.
3 As Governor
of Alagoas, Fernando Collor challenged some civil servants of his State who
earned enormous salaries. It is not sure who began to employ the word maharajah
to designate them: it may have been introduced by the Governor’s supporters,
but it may also have been adopted by one of his foes, who styled himself maharajah,
in contempt of the initiative. Anyway it was this endeavor of Collor’s that
made him popular across the country.
4 See Mandeville,
"Fable of the bees," also known as "Private vices, public benefits".
Renato Janine Ribeiro teaches Ethics and Political Philosophy at USP (Universidade
de São Paulo) and is a visiting professor at the Center of Brazilian
Studies from University of Columbia in New York. Ribeiro is also the author
of several books, including A sociedade contra o social: o alto custo
da vida pública no Brasil" (2000, Jabuti Award from 2001)
and A universidade e a vida atual – Fellini não via filmes
(2003).He has his own website – www.renatojanine.pro.br
– and can be reached at rjanine@usp.br.
