Decolonize the Western: Bacurau and the Aesthetics of Humiliation

Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and a box-office hit in Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles's Bacurau has been widely received as both a riveting genre mashup and a remarkable political allegory. 1 Hailed as a "modern-day Western that Sam Peckinpah might have made," as a "rallying cry against structural injustice told through a satisfying blend of western and science fiction influences," and as an "exhilarating fusion of high and low" with "razor-sharp politics and rivers of blood," Mendonça and Dornelles's film has earned countless accolades abroad.2 Brazilian critics have been noticeably more divided, either denouncing the film as nothing more than a violent, Tarantinoesque form of "political propaganda" or, alternatively, celebrating its use of conventions long associated with genre films in the service of a critique of violence that "exists on the frontiers of capitalism and of the state."3 Everybody agrees that Bacurau is marked by an intense interest in genre, which, in turn, is central to its politics, though what that politics is exactly remains a matter of debate. I want to argue that understanding Bacurau's politics involves viewing it as powerfully dramatizing what it would mean to take seriously decolonial thinking, particularly within the context of cinema and its claims on the world.4

Set "a few years in the future," Mendonça and Dornelles's film tells the story of the small, eponymous town located in the middle of the semi-arid region of Brazil's Northeast known as the sertão. With its violent history of state terror, racial conflict, and popular rebellion — a history commemorated in the film by the town's tiny museum — the poverty-stricken sertão is part of a rich, if complicated tradition within Brazilian literature and cinema.5 The first half of Bacurau looks like yet another rural drama in that tradition, focusing largely on the town's eccentric inhabitants, including the strong-willed doctor Domingas (Sonia Braga), the fierce yet loyal bandit Pacote (Thomas Aquino), and the sleezy mayor Tony Junior (Thardelly Lima). But a series of increasingly unsettling events suggests things aren't as they seem: first, the village vanishes from GPS maps; later, a drone resembling a flying saucer is spotted hovering over the town; a stable of horses bolts down the street in the middle of the night; and the truck that delivers water pulls up riddled with bullet holes. The narrative comes to a head with the arrival of two strangers, a man (Antonio Saboia) and a woman (Karine Teles) from the south of Brazil who the screenplay (with clear ironic intent) identifies only as "Foreigners" (Forasteiro and Forasteira). Viewers learn that the strangers have been hired as "local contractors" by a group of Americans who, led by the German expatriate Michael (Udo Kier), have traveled to Brazil to hunt men, women, and children for sport.

What follows is a sequence that exposes the attitude animating the group's zeal for such murderous pursuits. Explaining that they come from a "very rich region, with German and Italian colonies," one of the Brazilian contractors tells the Americans, "We're like you guys." Visibly unsettled by the comparison, a member of the hunting party incredulously asks, "Like us? . . . How can you be like us? We're white. You're not white," to which another responds, "Well, you know. They kind of look white. But they're not. Her lips and nose give it away, you know?" The group guns down the Brazilian man and woman and the scene concludes with another American repeatedly shouting, "I shot her!" in hope of getting credit for the kill.

A decade earlier, on the eve of the G20 summit in 2009 and at the height of the financial crisis that began the year before, then president of Brazil, Inácio "Lula" da Silva, introduced a similar plot twist, observing that, "This crisis was caused by no black man or woman or by no indigenous person or by no poor person." Standing alongside the visibly uncomfortable British PM, Gordon Brown, Lula added, "This crisis was fostered and boosted by irrational behavior of some people that are white, blue-eyed."6 Lula was, in a sense, not wrong. After all, the vast majority of managers and board members at multinational investment banks like Lehman Brothers, and JPMorgan Chase, at financial services companies like Berkshire Hathaway, and at international financial institutions like the World Bank, were and continue to be disproportionately white men. Lula's comments, moreover, could apply just as much to Brazil, where whites of European descent are disproportionately represented in financial institutions and companies — as well as within the National Congress and among the wealthy — even as the majority of Brazilians (52.2%) identify as non-white. And if it is white men who, in this sense, control the levers of the global economy, then it doesn't take too much to see how they are in fact to blame for the financial meltdown that occurred the previous year and that would throw the Brazilian economy into a tailspin two years later from which it has yet to recover. Not unlike Bacurau's "white, blue-eyed" foreign invaders, Lula's villains play their own version of "The Most Dangerous Game," wielding the power not of guns but of financial instruments, while making black men and women, indigenous peoples, and the poor their victims. But if Lula gets it right in noting that the mechanism of domination is finance, part of what Bacurau demonstrates — albeit inadvertently — is that he gets it wrong in conceiving race as the primary problem.

Indeed, the pivotal scene in Mendonça and Dornelles's film not only reveals who is behind the strange events unfolding in Bacurau, but also projects a similar vision of the world as Lula's by foregrounding the sense of racial superiority behind the group's horrific disregard for human life and the Brazilian Forasteiros's willingness to sell out their fellow countryfolk. What appeared to be a somewhat unconventional rural drama in which villagers are assailed by the machinations of unseen forces turns out to be a siege film in which "foreign" white supremacists are in control of those forces. Introducing viewers to the film's true villains, this unexpected shift also reveals that the real conflict at the heart of the film is a racial conflict or clash of civilizations. Film genre is not simply an element of Bacurau's cinematic ambitions but the key to dramatizing its distinct vision of the world.

One way to begin to understand that vision would be to consider what Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano described in the 1990s as a structure of power that finds its origins over five hundred years ago in the European conquest of the Americas and the ensuing genocide and enslavement of indigenous peoples and Africans. Central to Quijano's thesis and to the body of work associated with decolonial thinking is the idea that colonialism did not just establish a "relation of direct, political, social, and cultural domination over the conquered of all continents." It also produced "social discriminations that were later codified as 'racial,' 'ethnic,' 'anthropological,' or 'national.'" Further, the consequences of these "intersubjective constructions" are everywhere apparent today in the fact that the "vast majority of the exploited, the dominated, the discriminated, are precisely the members of 'races,' of 'ethnicities,' or of 'nations' that colonized populations were categorized into" under European colonial rule and, later, US imperialism.7 Thus, while colonialism formally ended with the decolonization movements of the decades following the end of World War II, colonial domination was founded on the "systematic repression" of knowledge, perspectives, and forms of expression that persists to this day. The name Quijano gives to this systematic repression is the coloniality of power, and what makes this power the defining quality of the global order across five centuries is the "social classification of the world's population around the idea of race," or racism.8 Decolonial theory consequently proposes the "liberation of intercultural relations from the prison of coloniality" as an alternative that "also implies the freedom of all peoples to choose, individually or collectively, such relations."9

Quijano's vision of a world divided primarily into, on one hand, "'Western' European dominators and their Euro-North American descendants" and, on the other, the "exploited and dominated of Latin America and Africa," finds a ready equivalent in the principal conflict in Bacurau.10 The Americans and their "local contractors" give voice to the kinds of social discriminations Quijano identifies with the colonial social order; we might even say that it is their racism that makes Bacurau's invaders into the "descendants" of the decolonial critic's "Western European dominators" and the villagers into the dominated in much the same way their own Latin American and African ancestors were. Indeed, the sequence that introduces viewers to the villains begins with a close-up of a cotton gin prominently displaying its provenance as "Bridgewater Mass.," indicating that the invaders have made an abandoned cotton plantation their base of operations, while drawing a connection to the history of slavery not just in Brazil but throughout the Americas. (Fig. 1)

Bacurau's directors are even more explicit about this lineage. Recounting how they came across their filming location, Mendonça explains that, "the Brazilian sertão is actually extremely white," adding that, "We were ready to film in a mostly white town with its wonderful inhabitants, but then during scouting we came across a quilombo," one of many communities in Brazil that were historically created by runaway slaves.11 Noticing a "very clear separation between the city that served as our base, and which was about 90 percent white, and the quilombo, which was entirely black," Mendonça and Dornelles decided that, "From then on, the unstated but absolutely crucial idea for our film was that Bacurau is a type of 'remixed quilombo': a black community, a historical place of resistance, but with some white, indigenous, trans, and other inhabitants."12 Imagining Bacurau as a quilombo under attack, the film extends an uninterrupted line of racial domination and conflict from the sixteenth century to the present in much the same way Quijano's coloniality of power does, while conceiving it as "remixed" broadens the sociologist's definition of "social discriminations" to include the victims not just of racism or ethnocentrism but of sexism and transphobia as well. Or, as Dornelles puts it elsewhere, Bacurau "is not a regular backwater town because it is built on the idea of diversity like the rest of Brazil."13

Perhaps for this reason, it doesn't take much to see why critics have viewed Bacurau as an explicitly political film. Writing in Harper's, Ela Bittencourt observes that Mendonça and Dornelles's film, "with an apocalyptic setting perfectly suited for these times, offers a crystal-clear critique of the era of Bolsonaro, but also Brazil's fraught past." No doubt a good deal of Bacurau, from its opening shot of an Amazon in flames, through the corruption of local politicians, to the violent assault of blacks, indigenous peoples, and queer people, resonates with recent events in Brazil and the rise of bolsonarismo, including the current government's rollbacks on environmental protections, the lava jato (Car Wash) and vaza jato (Car Leaks) scandals, and the murder of the black, queer, and socialist city councilor, Marielle Franco.14 More to the point, Bittencourt reminds us that, "While Brazilian cities are highly segregated (a fact visible even in the architecture), the quilombos currently awaiting recognition depend on Bolsonaro, who has continuously supported the interests of agribusiness (with large land holdings historically concentrated in the hands of rich, white landowners) against quilombo and indigenous claims."15 Planted in the past, the seeds of Bacurau's dystopian future appear to have already begun to bear fruit in the present.

Critics also discern broader and more global concerns in the film's Brazilian context. Comparing Bacurau to Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019), Jacobin film critic Eileen Jones not only mentions the filmmakers' common debt to the "same great genre films of the 1970s and 1980s," but also alludes to their "unsparing representations of class war, which eclipses national boundaries."16 But if Jones believes "location is significant to both directors, because its people are the rural and small-town proletarian figures who make a living hiring themselves out to the urban upper class," Mendonça and Dornelles's decision to modulate the film's verisimilitude ("the Brazilian sertão is actually extremely white") in favor of a village that embodies the "idea of diversity like the rest of Brazil" suggests Bacurau's principal conflict is drawn along identitarian not class lines. To be clear, my point is not that Mendonça and Dornelles choose race or gender over class. Rather, my point is that they treat class as an identity like race and gender, redefining poverty as a problem of how the poor are viewed, as a matter of social discrimination. And the directors suggest as much when they describe Bacurau itself as "poor but full of dignity" and as a place where "everybody is poor but nobody is pitied."17 On this view, when the hunting party's leader Michael describes Bacurau as a "shithole town" — echoing Trump's reprehensible remarks on "shithole countries" — we're made to understand that what is offensive is not so much the town's immiseration as it is this attitude toward the victims of such immiseration, who are made to feel humiliated.

To be sure, it is this attitude — what Quijano would most likely identify with the coloniality of power — that allows the invaders to kill innocent human beings without hesitation or remorse, and that, from the perspective of decolonial theory, contributes to making the descendants of Latin Americans and Africans murdered and enslaved by European colonizers disproportionally the subjects of exploitation today. As Charles Hatfield convincingly shows, this also means that Quijano's argument demands we treat our current social order not merely as a consequence or effect of sixteenth-century colonialism but rather as "structured by the same thing that structured the colonial social order."18 There is a sense in which this is obviously true: colonialism and contemporary inequalities are both structured by the history of capitalism and the division of labor, while racism — and the idea of race itself — have played an instrumental role in that system's expansion and entrenchment on a global scale. Quijano suggests as much when he notes that, "Domination is the requisite for exploitation, and race is the most effective instrument for domination that, associated with exploitation, serves as the universal classifier in the current global model of power."19 Yet, he also insists that the "necessities of capital as such alone do not exhaust, could not exhaust, the explanation of the character and trajectory" of Eurocentric thinking and the social discriminations coloniality names.20 Thus, if Quijano is interested in highlighting the historical imbrication of exploitation and domination, or of capitalism and race, he also insists that capitalism is not an exhaustive explanation for the durability of coloniality across five centuries. His point, in other words, is that these are two different problems and, therefore, the solution to one — capitalism — is not the solution to the other — coloniality. Hence, his attentiveness to the "intersubjective constructions" and "intercultural relations" that, on his view, an economistic approach will invariably overlook. But this attentiveness also runs the risk of obscuring the system of exploitation that requires instruments for domination like race by mistakenly imagining such constructions and relations are the problem to be solved.21

Mendonça and Dornelles's film stages what acting on that mistake might look like. Society's marginalized and excluded have their day in Bacurau, as the film concludes with an extremely bloody — and brilliantly filmed — action sequence in which the villagers outsmart and outgun the invaders in a counteroffensive led by the local hero-outlaw Lunga (Silvero Pereira). The Americans lose their heads, the corrupt mayor gets his comeuppance, and the German-but-not-a-Nazi-American presiding over this cruel sport is buried alive beneath the village. In exercising violence, "nobody is pitied." At the same time, water remains scarce and the villagers are no less poor. By the end of the film, Bacurau survives, but what exactly has changed?

Mendonça offers one response to this question when, elaborating on the film's attentiveness to genre, he explains that "There's this [stereotype] about villagers being inbred, ignorant, psychotic killers. We made them the heroes in the film, and that's quite unusual in Brazilian cinema." He continues, "Of course, we did this within the structure of a classic Western: it takes place on a single street with houses and a church and a school" and the "villagers find themselves being attacked by a band of outsiders." "But in our film," Dornelles adds, "the invaders aren't Indians, as in the classic Westerns."22 Bacurau thus establishes the villagers as the protagonists, soliciting a form of identification from the viewer, not just by shifting the Western's perspective from the "cowboys" to the "Indians," but also, and importantly, by means of the rural drama, which allows viewers to become familiar with its cast of characters. By the time the Americans show up, viewers are asked not to choose sides but to recognize which side they're already on (which isn't the same thing as saying that there aren't viewers who won't side with the Americans). And in cheering on Bacurau's protagonists, we recognize that, where their poverty remains the same, the villagers are "full of dignity." A series of point-of-view shots toward the end of the film even suggest what the fate of those who refuse this dual recognition might be. (Figs. 2-4)

Subverting the genre, in this sense, means intervening in the "intersubjective constructions" and "intercultural relations" between the poor living in the Northeast of Brazil and the moviegoers in the theater. It means, in other words, decolonizing the Western with an eye to undermining those social discriminations that, according to decolonial theory, proceed in a more or less direct line from European colonialism to the present. The pluralizing vision animating Bacurau's subversion of the Western and embodied in its town "built on the idea of diversity" consequently begins to look like an instance of what Quijano calls decoloniality, an emancipation from the singular worldview associated with Europe and the West in favor of one that acknowledges the "heterogeneity of all reality."23

Not unlike Bacurau, decolonial theory also alters what it means to decolonize. In contrast to the revolutionary movements of the postwar period, which aimed to wrest state power from colonial and imperialist command with an eye to the radical reorganization of property relations, decolonization today, Walter Mignolo writes, "still means to undo, but undoing starts from 'epistemological decolonization as decoloniality.'"24 Conceiving decolonization primarily as a project devoted to questioning the validity and scope of knowledge itself presupposes a more capacious notion of emancipation, one which is, according to Mignolo, "larger than delinking from capitalism" because it entails freeing Latin America and the global south from the "colonial matrix of power."25 To this end, decolonization — or what Mignolo identifies as the "decolonial option" — is directed at confronting "spheres of coloniality," including racist and sexist forms of "knowing, believing, and sensing."26

At the same time, decoloniality also radicalizes decolonization because it "no longer claims recognition by or inclusion in," but rather "engages in epistemic disobedience and de-linking from the magic of the Western idea of modernity, ideals of humanity, and promises of economic growth and financial prosperity."27 Mendonça and Dornelles's neo-Western rehearses the decolonial critic's commitment to such disobedience and de-linking not just by breaking with the perspective of Western rationality (marked, for example, by the return of the dead matriarch Carmelita toward the end), or by refusing such recognition in favor of violence, but by insisting that there is dignity in life no matter how poverty-stricken. Redefining decolonization as "epistemic disobedience," decoloniality similarly makes the problem of poverty into a matter of freeing its millions of victims across the globe not from the political and economic structure that engenders such indigence, but from the perspectives and attitudes that would deny the dignity of those victims instead. Bacurau assumes a similar notion of decolonization aimed at a structure of intersubjective and intercultural relations that nonetheless makes a structure like capitalism all the more difficult to see.

Mendonça and Dornelles might, for this reason, be understood as extending what curator and art historian Julieta González identifies as an "overarching concern, a common ground for the successive twentieth-century avant-gardes in Latin American": namely, the "desire to stake out an identity, amidst the contradictory forces of modernity."28 For González, this is especially true of the "decolonial turn" in the sui generis artistic practices and discourses produced in the region beginning in the early 1960s, "characterized by the articulation of a counter-narrative to the rhetoric of developmentalism."29 And it is this counter-narrative that she considers an early instance of what decolonial theory would later define as epistemic disobedience. "To decolonize by way of epistemic disobedience," she concludes, "seemed to be the only way out."30

Bacurau performs a similar kind of disobedience at a moment that bears more than a passing resemblance to the watershed of the 1960s in Brazil. Not unlike the radicalization of the right that culminated in the 1964 military coup, itself a response to President João Goulart's left populist reforms, the resurgence of the right resulting in Bolsonaro's presidency in 2018 responds similarly to the successes and shortcomings of the social democratic project advanced by Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party), itself made possible largely by the commodity boom of the 2000s.31 And yet, as the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz recently observed, the "situations echo each other, but they are not the same." "For better or worse," he continued, "in 1964 left and right both promised to overcome underdevelopment, a horizon that nobody dreams of today." Fully integrated into the circuits of global capitalism, though no closer to prevailing over the inequalities inherent to it, Brazil today bears witness to what Schwarz describes as the "neo-backwardness of bolsonarismo" marked by a "de-secularization of politics, the theology of prosperity, firearms in civilian life, the attacks on speed cameras, the hatred of organized workers." These, he insists, "aren't archaic customs from a bygone era. They are antisocial, but they germinate in the soil of contemporary society, in the vacuum left by the state."32 It doesn't take much to see that this is the same soil in which Mendonça and Dornelles's dystopian future takes root.

Or, as the philosopher Rodrigo Guimarães Nunes puts it, "What the film does is take a characteristic of the present and extend it into the future," projecting "an increasingly possible scenario," in which "there are more and more pockets of people left on the margins, without access to the benefits of development" and "extractivism and exterminism finally became entirely reversible."33 In the face of such extremism, Bacurau insists that that "you either say no to barbarism or say nothing at all." But even the choice between saying no and saying nothing at all, I am arguing, is a choice that remains external to the film, which asks viewers not to choose a side but to recognize which side they're already on instead. Linking Bacurau to Bong's Parasite and Todd Phillip's Joker (2019), sociologist Gabriel Feltran observes that their "plots are equally focused on the quotidian lives of well-informed wretches," who "know how the rich live, even though the opposite is not true."34 "The oppressed, in the three films," he writes, " rise against humiliation, more than against exclusion; they rise up after being ridiculed, more than exploited. With their dignity offended, more than removed from the same material comfort that animates the need for adventure that characterize the rich today."35 "These poor people rise," he concludes, "not with public and political arguments, with social movements, but with their own hands, blades and bullets."36

Depicting a violence not so much directed at an economic structure that demands inequality as it is aimed at conferring a dignity to its victims, Bacurau, we might say, produces an aesthetics of humiliation.37 Everything in the film, from the plotline to the genres it draws on, indicates that Mendonça and Dornelles intend to tell the story from the perspective of the Bacurauans, soliciting the viewer's empathy, while sidestepping public and political arguments altogether. Who doesn't roar with approval when Damiano (Carlos Francisco) blows the head off of the racist American with what appears to be a homemade shotgun, or when Lunga violently machetes another? The film merely bears out what the viewer already knows: the white supremacists are villains and should be resisted by any means necessary. And even if the viewer takes sides with the white supremacists — which is to say even if he or she is a racist asshole — the film can only validate his or her sense that such "barbarism" ought to be met with equal barbarism. The question of which side to choose is not even raised; or, if there is a choice, it isn't a matter of disagreement since there is no claim with which the viewer might disagree or even agree. Everybody's beliefs are confirmed. Nobody is convinced.

With its emphasis on dignity, Bacurau's aesthetics of humiliation can also be said to perform an intervention into the intersubjective constructions and intercultural relations that Quijano describes as "epistemic disobedience" and that Mignolo views as central to the decolonial option. As a corrective to a kind of politics that foregrounds economic justice, the decolonial emphasis on epistemological decolonization foregrounds the recovery of knowledge, perspectives, and forms of expression belonging to the victims of colonialism and their descendants whose systematic repression lies at the heart of Eurocentrism and its ideas about progress, development, and modernity. But while we have reason to be skeptical of such ideas as nothing more than a provincialism posing as a universal, the problem of poverty remains on the table. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly, though, from the perspective of decoloniality: the point is to change the way we look at it. If this is a politics, it is one that also raises the question of how one might go about intervening in the conditions that give rise to poverty and immiseration in the first place in a world in which political arguments against such conditions hold no water. This too is the semi-arid world of Bacurau, where violence is a necessary means of survival and the neo-backwardness of contemporary capitalism remains unchecked.

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Emilio Sauri is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His research focuses on literature and visual art from Latin America and the United States, and reads these in relation to the development of the global economy from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. He has co-edited two essay collections, Literature and the Global Contemporary (Palgrave, 2017) and Literary Materialisms (Palgrave, 2013), and he is currently finishing up a monograph on literature and the ends of autonomy in the Americas (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press).

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