Pedro Lauria presented this work at the XXIV SOCINE Meeting in the session: CI Figures of the monster and fantastic cinema: comparative approaches.
The original text can be found in the Annals of SOCINE 2021:
https://www.socine.org/wp-content/uploads/anais/AnaisDeTextosCompletos2021(XXIV).pdf
This text is an automatic translation of a work in Brazilian Portuguese to increase its accessibility. Small errors may be present.
Esse artigo tem uma versão em português: https://oca.observatorio.uff.br/?p=2469
Abstract:
The present work seeks to understand how the suburban fantastic cinema has been produced in Brazil based on the analysis of three films: Mate-me Por Favor (Anita Rocha da Silveira, 2015), O Escaravelho do Diabo (Carlo Milani, 2016) and Turma da Mônica – Laços (Daniel Resende, 2019). We will do it based on the semantic, syntactic and narrative comparison of these works, seeking to highlight the potential of our Brazilianness in this subgenre so deeply rooted in American cinema.
Keywords:
Suburban Fantastic Cinema; Brazilian Cinema; Film Genre; Middle Class
Introduction
Suburban Fantastic is a cinematic sub-genre conceptualized by Angus McFadzean. According to him, it is about:
a set of Hollywood movies that started to appear in the 1980s, in which pre-teen and teenage boys living within the suburbs are called upon to confront a disruptive fantastic force – ghosts, aliens, vampires, gremlins and malevolent robots. These films emerged out of adult-focused, suburban-set melodramas, children’s fantasy stories, and old-fashioned sf, horror, fantasy and adventure films and television mainly of the 1950s, and became synonymous with the work of Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Robert Zemeckis and Chris Columbus.Typicalliy marked as children’s films or “family “ films, they were key parts of the childhood of late-Generation Xer’s and Millenials.” (McFADZEAN, 2019, p.1)
These are narratives usually set in middle-class American suburbs and include films with young protagonists involved in adventures initiated by extraordinary elements (it could be anything outside the everyday suburban life as aliens or house thieves). Syntactically, the subgenre links the coming-of-age narrative typical of Bildungsroman dramas with the hero’s melodrama from the fantasy genre. This link is done through the synchronization between the protagonist’s maturation and the adventure’s outcome, usually linked to the resolution of the disruption caused by the extraordinary element and the consequent return to the status quo. Classic examples of suburban fantastic cinema are E.T. – The Extraterrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982), The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985), Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985), Home Alone, (Chris Columbus, 1990) and Jumanji (Joe Johnston, 1995).
McFadzean emphasizes that such works have male, white and heterosexual protagonists: of the more than 50 films he analyzed from 1982 to 1999, only three have female protagonists. They are Short Circuit (John Badham, 1986), Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 1988) and Casper (Brad Siberling, 1995). It should be noted that the protagonist shares screen time (and protagonism) with a fantastic masculine figure in all of them. In the case of black characters, it is even more discrepant: only one film among those analyzed have a non-white protagonist. It is the case of The People Under the Stairs (Wes Craven, 1991) whose protagonist is a black boy who lives on the urban periphery but ventures into the house of sinister white suburban landlords.
Suburban Fantastic Cinema has returned in the last decade with a more nostalgic and reflective perspective (McFADZEAN, 2019), marked by works such as Super 8 (J.J. Abrahms, 2011), Stranger Things (Duffer Brothers, Netflix, 2016-) and It – Chapter 1 (Andy Muschietti, 2017). And, even if these works only nod to the inclusion of non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual bodies in their plots, the subgenre has been gaining more and more productions in recent years that contest this representation. This is the case of works such as See You Yesterday (Stefon Bristol, 2019), Vampires vs. The Bronx (Osmany Rodrigues, 2020), The Witches (Robert Zemeckis, 2020), Fear Street: 1994 (Leigh Janiak, 2021) that feature black, Latin and/or Queer men and women as protagonists.
This more inclusive movement, in turn, also expands the subgenre’s settings beyond the suburbs and small towns, including the urban peripheries, as a possible setting for the narratives. It is worth mentioning that this “exit from the suburbs” does not affect the suburban fantastic as a genre. It is important to note that since the 1980s some films have already presented this possibility of a non suburban setting, such as *batteries not included (Matthew Robbins, 1987) and Home Alone 2 (Chris Columbus, 1992) which takes place in Manhattan and Back to the Future 3 (Robert Zemeckis, 1990) which takes place in the American Wild West.
This possibility of moving to settings beyond the American suburbs leads us to the question of the present work: how does Brazil reproduce these narratives? What are our possibilities to contribute to the evolution of the subgenre? To delve deeper into these questions, we will contrast three works of the subgenre released in the last decade: O Escaravelho do Diabo (Carlo Milani, 2016), Turma da Mônica – Laços (Daniel Resende, 2019) and Mate-me por Favor (Anita Rocha da Silveira, 2015). This analysis will consider their semantic and syntactic contributions, in addition to their narrative innovations, specificities, peculiarities, and the incorporation of counter-hegemonic bodies in their plots.
The Brazilian Suburban Fantastic
Before delving into the films mentioned above, it is crucial to highlight some historical similarities that Brazil’s literary tradition has with suburban fantastic as a subgenre. Therefore, I underline it from at least two different perspectives. The first relates to our history of success with children’s productions with fantastic elements, a legacy of our audiovisual tradition with magical realism (YOUNG, 1995) among which the numerous adaptations of Sítio do Pica-Pau Amarelo certainly stand out. The second is related to our history of spectatorship, since the exhibitions of suburban fantastic films marked an entire millennial generation within what Santos defines as “Filmes da Sessão da Tarde” (2004), a nomenclature given due to the TV Globo’s afternoon program in which these films were shown during the 1980s and 1990s.
It is from the affective mark that this subgenre had throughout a generation that the context of the three highlighted films should be understood: all of them are directed by millennials or produced with the intention of reaching this audience. That said, among the three works, the first point that draws attention is the temporal location of these films. Contrary to what is seen in recent US Suburban Fantastic productions, both O Escaravelho do Diabo, and Mate-me Por Favor have a contemporary setting. This means that they don’t place as much emphasis on analog technostalgia as works from the 1980s (which invest in the Walkman, walkie talkies, radios and tube TV as semantic elements). According to Campopiano, technostalgia occurs as a result of a reminiscence or desire for an outdated technology (2014, p.75).
The exception is Turma da Mônica – Laços, which proposes a timeless perspective and doesn’t show any element of digital technology (it is worth remembering that the 1980s were marked by the beginning of the transition from analog to digital). However, despite the original Turma da Mônica Graphic Novel being located in the 1980s, it is not possible to establish an exact time stamp for the film adaptation, which also does not focus on the use of analog technologies linked to the 1980s. This strategy, in turn, allows different audiences that followed the Turma da Mônica comics (originating in the 1960s) can have a temporal identification with the plot.
A point that should be stated is that, despite not being set in the 1980s, O Escaravelho do Diabo is based on the work of Lucia Machado de Almeida, whose book is one of the most recognized releases of the Vaga-Lume children’s literature series. Reference in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the collection was marked by coming with work supplements that brought activities aimed at being used in the educational system, which helped to guarantee its presence in school libraries and classrooms throughout Brazil, and with a significant impact on the youth of the period (DE PAULA, 2005, p.120). For this reason, as much as the cinematographic work seeks to reach a young audience (including decreasing the age of the protagonist, who in the book has more than twenty years old, and in the film has eleven), it also has a very evident connection with the 80’s period.
Another point worth noting is the different possibilities of geographic setting that the Brazilian Suburban Fantastic brings. In O Escaravelho do Diabo, the narrative is set in the fictional city of Vale das Flores, filmed entirely in the São Paulo countryside and features a small town configuration. Even so, Vale das Flores takes on certain connotations of a suburb, whether due to the hybridity between urban and rural or due to the proximity that the city has to São Paulo. The protagonist, for example, is portrayed as a member of a wealthy family whose income comes directly from this intermediate position between rural and metropolis since they are flower traders who supply the capital city.
Turma da Mônica – Laços tries to create the fictional neighborhood of Limoeiro with a collage of different places. While the residential part is filmed in Holambra (SP) (figure), the squares and parks are filmed mainly in Poços de Caldas (MG). Thus, attention is drawn to the attempt to emulate an idyllic environment based on clippings from small cities in the Southeast, which bear little resemblance to Cambuí (figure), a neighborhood in the city of Campinas that inspired Maurício de Souza in the comics. In this sense, it is necessary to emphasize that a recurring criticism of Turma da Mônica itself is the “lack of Brazilianness.” Verdolini (2007) points out that Maurício de Souza’s comics have always left the Brazilian location in the background in the search for a more universal setting to compete with Disney’s comics. In Turma da Mônica – Laços, it should be noted how Limoeiro refers to the classic portrait of American suburbs, with houses with backyards, low fences, and little automotive traffic. It is worth mentioning that while Campinas (which inspired the comics) is a large city with over 1 million inhabitants, the population of Holambra (where the residential part of the film was shot) does not reach 20,000 residents.
Above: Bairro do Limoeiro in Turma da Mônica – Laços compared to the neighborhood of Cambuí, in Campinas.
In this sense, Mate-me por Favor is the film that brings the most original setting (since it does not replicate the small town or the American suburb). It does it by placing its narrative in Barra da Tijuca, a neighborhood in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro marked by its urbanization full of upper-middle class condominiums. With a very critical look at Barra, the film finds very interesting proximities between the neighborhood with the American suburbs: 1) The middle-class inhabitants; 2) The fact that they are closed communities with great resistance to strangers; 3) The fact that the exploration of the surroundings is restricted to young people; 4) The high dependency of the car. By building a narrative typical of the suburban fantastic subgenre, Mate-me por Favor emphasizes its criticism of Barra as a simulacrum of the American middle class.
Another particularly interesting point to be analyzed in Brazilian Suburban Fantastic films is the soundtrack. After all, one of the hallmarks of 2010’s suburban fantastic is precisely the use of hits from the 1980s, such as Blondie’s Heart of Glass in Super 8, Should I Stay, Should I Go by The Clash in Stranger Things and You Got It by New Kids on the Block in It – Chapter 1. Since the Brazilian audience corroborates the nostalgia for these songs due to our American cultural consumption, it is interesting to analyze how the soundtracks of our suburban fantastic films are presented: if they bring national songs, or if they just replicate the international hits.
In the case of O Escaravelho do Diabo, for example, Milani’s work invests in original songs such as the rap Brisa Fria and the melancholic pop O Mal e a Cura. A similar strategy is used by Turma da Mônica – Laços, which features Tiago Iorc performing the theme song. However, unlike O Escaravelho do Diabo, Turma da Mônica – Laços invests in music steeped in nostalgia. Such choices open the marketing strategy of both films. While Escaravelho do Diabo tries to bring a modern and cool atmosphere, the adaptation of the Graphic Novel by Turma da Mônica, focuses on a timeless and familiar one.
Mate-me por Favor also has its share of original compositions, such as Novinha vem Cá and Sangue de Jesus. However, the work is marked by a track of international dance hits such as Don’t Stop the Rock, In my Eyes and Take Me in Your Arms. Where the film differs from American Suburban Fantastic, however, is that it also uses classic Brazilian scores. The romantic funk Nosso Sonho by Claudinho e Bochecha, for example, is possibly the most outstanding song of the entire soundtrack, being played in one of the most remarkable moments of the film. In this way, the work imbues the narrative with a nostalgic Brazilian feeling.
Considerations
It is essential to point out that Brazilian Suburban Fantastic does not end in these three productions. Works such as O Segredo dos Diamantes (Helvécio Ratton, 2014), for example, bring semantic possibilities to be further explored: such as the possibility of incorporating the colonial interior of Minas Gerais as the stage for their narratives, differentiating the aseptic and idealized construction of the American suburbs, and bringing a greater Brazilianness.
However, a gap becomes clear: our (extremely diverse) Brazilian suburbs still present as a blank slate for these productions. Even the Rio de Janeiro suburbs, so crucial in our audiovisual production, have not yet consolidated themselves as environments to receive the subgenre’s narratives. There is thus an underrepresentation of bodies and environments in our suburbanist productions at the same time as there is an underproduction of these narratives. This is particularly striking when considering the critical (Mate-me por Favor won important awards at the Rio festival) and box office sucesses (Turma da Mônica – Laços was the third highest grossing Brazilian box office of 2019) that some of his works had, indicate quite a lot potential for the future of the subgenre in the country.
Finally, I hope this work will help researchers and filmmakers investigate our possibilities within a cinematographic subgenre with great market appeal and a strong nostalgia sense as the Suburban Fantastic.
Bibliography
CAMPOPIANO, J. Memory, Temporality & Manifestations of Tech-Nostalgia. Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture (PDT&C), 43(3), 75-85. 2014
DE PAULA, Z. Leia o livro, veja o filme, compre o disco: a formação do cinema juvenil brasileiro Maringá: EDUEM, 2016
McFADZEAN, A. Suburban Fantastic Cinema: Growing Up in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: Wallflower Press, 2019
SANTOS, C. Filmes “Sessão da Tarde”: O Clube dos Cinco e Seu Lugar Histórico na Cinematografia. Revista Vernáculo, UFPR, pp.49-60, 2004
VERDOLINI, T. Turma da Mônica: Trajetória Intertextual em 40 anos de História. Mackenzie, São Paulo, 2007
YOUNG, T. Um Realismo Mágico no Brasil ?: Um Levantamento. Mester, 24(1) 1995
