This article was originally published by Pedro Lauria at Esferas Magazine from Universidade Católica de Brasília (UCB) and can be acessed here.
A versão original desde artigo está em português. Essa é uma tradução automática.
Abstract
The suburban fantastic cinema is a subgenre defined by linking the protagonist’s maturation to the hero’s journey of fantasy works – marked by a white and androcentric perspective. Therefore, it is important when Bia, the protagonist of Mate-em por Favor, subverts the usual elements of the subgenre. In this article, we will compare it with the classic of suburban fantastic cinema, Stand by Me, in order to understand its contributions to the subgenre.
Keywords: Suburban Fantastic Cinema. Narrative. Genre Studies. Hero’s Journey. Androcentrism
1. Introduction
This article focuses on Angus McFazean’s statement that Suburban Fantastic is a cinematic subgenre that privileges men, specifically white, cis, middle-class, and heterosexual (2019, p.53). Not that he is misguided in doing so: throughout the 1980s and 1990s, non-white, non-male protagonists were practically non-existent. This characteristic ends up reverberating in the syntax of suburban fantastic cinema itself.
First, however, let us make some conceptual clarifications. Suburban Fantastic as a subgenre was conceived a few years ago, categorized by Angus McFadzean (2017; 2019) using Altman’s semantic/syntactic conceptualization (1984; 2000). The subgenre encompasses a set of Hollywood films that began to appear in the 1980s as E.T. – The Extraterrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982), Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984), Back to the Future ( Robert Zemeckis, 1985), The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985) ) and Home Alone (Cris Columbus, 1990).
According to McFadzean (2017; 2019), semantically, the subgenre is marked by an amalgamation of elements linked to middle-class everyday life and fantastic events that disrupt the environment in which the protagonist lives (usually the suburbs). Syntactically, the work relates the hero’s journey, typical of the fantasy genre, to the protagonist’s maturation narrative, characteristic of coming-of-age dramas. The coming-of-age dramas are marked by the narrative centrality of the youth maturation process and focus on the facts that impact this development (SANTOS, 2016).
However, this interweaving of these formative novels with the classic hero’s journey creates perceptions peculiar to the subgenre. For example, they support the notion that in suburban fantastic cinema it is “easier to save the world than to express your feelings or apologize” (McFADZEAN, 2019, p.15). In other words, maturing in these works usually requires a heroic, physical, and courageous act. Thus, at the end of the plot, the resolution of the fantastic event would be inherently linked to the maturation of the character, as based on the hero’s journey described by Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth (2009). The hero’s journey was already discussed by feminist critics as conceived in an androcentric way (MURDOCK, 1990), that is, from the male perspective.
However, suppose one of the hallmarks of the classic hero’s journey is precisely its trajectory beyond the known world toward the adventures of undiscovered mysteries. In that case, suburban fantastic brings a significant inversion in its narratives. In Suburban Fantastic, it’s the extraordinary that comes to the protagonist, disrupting his home – whether it’s time travel, an alien, gremlins, or burglars. Jewett and Lawrence (2002) describe this narrative construction as one of the variations belonging to the American monomyth:
“A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity.”.(LAWRENCE & JEWETT, 2002, p.215)
This perspective, in turn, brings a certain reactionary character to the subgenre – since its narratives do not come from a protagonist impelled to transform society but who wants to return it to its status quo. Such restitutive interests, in turn, are closely linked to the very social demography that the subgenre represents: middle-class suburbs, marked by economic elitism and ethnic-racial exclusivism that existed since the (sub)urbanization boom of the 1950s, rooted in the idea of the “American Dream” (COONTZ, 2000). This, in turn, also extends to the genre of its protagonist, since privileged by the constitution of a sexist and patriarchal society, his journey becomes to return a order that (re)assures his class and gender privileges.
Suburban Fantastic was practically forgotten from the second half of the 1990s onwards, replaced by fantasy and superhero genres. His expressive return takes place in the 2010s – in what Angus McFadzean calls a “reflexive” cycle (which rethinks the formula and its classics), marked by works such as Super 8 (J.J.Abrams, 2011), Stranger Things (Duffer Brothers, Netflix, 2016-) and It – Chapter 1 and 2 (Andy Muschiett, 2017, 2019). Brazil has also collaborated with the subgenre in works such as Eu e Meu Guarda-Chuva (Toni Vanzolini, 2010), O Escaravelho do Diabo (Carlo Milani, 2016) and Turma da Mônica – Laços (Daniel Resende, 2019).
More interesting for us, however, was that this new cycle represented the entry of new bodies starring this subgenre as women, blacks, Latinos, and LGBTQIA+*. I highlight works such as Attack the Block (Joe Cornish, 2011), See You Yesterday (Stefon Bristol, 2019), Vampires vs. The Bronx (Osmany Rodriguez, 2020), The Witches (Robert Zemeckis, 2020), (A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting (Rachel Talalay, 2020) and Fear Street Trilogy (Leigh Janiak, 2021).
Such a contemporary perception leads us to question whether such characteristics linked to masculinity and androcentrism observed by McFadzean are constitutive of the subgenre itself or are marks of its first cycle (1982-2000). That is linked to the context of Reaganite entertainment in the 1980s – a period in which the subgenre was founded. This conjuncture was marked by the production of high concept works [1] with striking visual elements that generated the “excitement” of going to the movies and criticized as part of the “escapist entertainment” of the Reagan Era (Ehrman, 2005; Troy, 2005). According to Britton, generating “products as wonderful as they are insignificant” (2009, p.101). Robin Wood will be categorical in affirming that this repetition of structures and elements aims to “reduce and disarm all the social movements that gained momentum in the 1970s: radical feminism, black militancy, LGBTQIA+ liberation and attacks on patriarchy” ( 1996, p.204). In short, by giving primacy to the repetition of the figure of the heterosexual white man as a hero, no space was given to the representation and subjectivity of other bodies that fought for space.
This perspective that androcentrism and the whiteness of the subgenre are the results of a conjuncture that has coincided with the genesis of suburban fantastic (and is not inherent or constitutive of it), demands an analysis of the new syntactic and narrative proposals brought by contemporary films. With this objective in mind, in this article we propose a syntactic and narrative analysis of Mate-Me Por Favor (Anita da Rocha Silveira, 2015), since it presents itself as one of the most exciting works to discuss possibilities and perspectives of suburban fantastic cinema.
Anita da Rocha Silveira’s debut film tells the story of the coming-of-age of schoolgirls as bodies turn up dead and raped in the thickets of Barra da Tijuca. Bia and her friends are particularly fascinated with death and the dead, going after their bodies and following the crime news. By bringing an entirely female cast, the work presents a coming-of-age narrative quite divergent from the one shown and iconized in the first decades of suburban fantastic. In addition, the film also subverts the way the “Other” (the fantastic) is treated in the subgenre and brings a very scathing critique of Brazilian middle class and their emulation of the “American Dream”.
To highlight the innovations in Anita’s film for the subgenre and make explicit the subversions represented by its heroine, we will do a comparative analysis of one of the most famous works of suburban fantastic: Stand By Me (Rob Reiner, 1986). The 1980s work also tells the story of four friends and their fascination with death, which leads them to go out into the woods near their hometown in search of a missing body.
2. Two Different Journeys
In addition to their (sub)genres and themes, the first similarity that draws our attention between Stand by Me and Mate-me por Favor is how their protagonists are organized. Both are formed by CCPs (Collective Children Protagonists or Groups of Young Protagonists) of four young people. However, with a fundamental gender divergence: while Stand by Me follows the journey of four boys, in Mate-Me Por Favor, the protagonists are four girls.
As an inherent part of suburban fantastic, these young people will follow a journey that will imply their maturation (McFADZEAN, 2019) by overcoming the obstacles presented. This overcoming will be done through an accelerated process of developing specific capabilities, to which Ashley Carranza will refer from the self-determination theory (2018, p.15). According to her, the theory explains the development of three basic psychological needs of every human being: competence (the need to be efficient within one’s own environment), autonomy (the need to control one’s own life), and empathy (the need to have relationships with other people).
In both plots, the CCPs are driven by the same force that threatens them: curiosity and a fascination with death. While the male group, led by Gordie, plans a journey into the woods to recover the missing body of a young man who was injured, the girls, led by Bia, surround the vacant lots of Barra da Tijuca, looking for possible victims of a murderer (figure 1). ). Their movements are intrinsically linked with the lack of family zeal and the inefficiency of the authorities work. That is, the journey of both groups only exists because the adults failed to keep them protected. As stated by Carranza, “in a world where young people are savagely murdered, and their parents are unable to do anything about it, they learn to count on each other to protect themselves and others” (2018, p.15).
Figure 1 – The four protagonists of Mate-me por Favor find themselves in a vacant lot. (film frame)
Some points must be drawn regarding the narrative structure under which each film’s protagonist’s journey takes place. While in the American film the fantastic leads the characters to “make their world known”, in the Brazilian one, Bia and her friends opt for an intermittent approach, making several expeditions to the wastelands of Barra da Tijuca. In such a way, it is possible to find a cyclical nature in their journeys: going to the deserted areas of the Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone becomes a kind of ritual. This already configures itself as a subversion of the classic structure of the American monomyth impregnated in the subgenre: it is not a linear journey with a clear end. In such a way, it is implied that even a resolution of that situation (the arrest of the murderer) will not return the status quo of the girls – after all, that event will already have been part of the characters and that world.
If Angus McFadzean (2019) defines that suburban fantastic is marked by linking the maturation of the protagonist(s) with the resolution of conflict, in Mate-me por Favor this correlation is not so binding. Conflict is also intermittent and cannot be resolved once and for all. Therefore, there is no possibility for a “happy ending” (in terms of conflict resolution) as classic Hollywood cinema advocates.
Edgar Morin (2011) will delve into how this “happy ending culture” found in Hollywood cinema breaks with the millenary tradition of Greek tragedy and aspires to be a process of psychic liberation that it can only take place in an idealized (and therefore socially inconceivable) universe. I emphasize how this perception is very much in line with Andrew Britton’s criticism of Reaganite entertainment itself. The author emphasizes that the works of this conjuncture sought to be an antithesis to mundane problems and that they insisted on demonstrating that they did not have a serious relationship with real life (BRITTON, 2009, p.101).
These aspects found in Mate-me por Favor are even more representative because Rob Reiner’s film, despite presenting itself as a persistent criticism of American society, on a more careful reading, shows elements that reinforce the hegemonic values of that society. For example, in Stand by Me it is unmistakable that young people embody the spirit of the colonizers and set out on a journey to discover the unknown (both wild and death and growth). Such a narrative is completely linked to the notion of rugged individualism, a value seen as the essence of the American spirit according to hegemonic rhetoric. This concept was coined under the name “American Individualism” by Herbert Hoover, who would later become president in 1929.
Our individualism differs from all others because it embraces these great ideals: that while we build our society upon the attainment of the individual, we shall safeguard to every individual an equality of opportunity to take that position in the community to which his intelligence, character, ability, and ambition entitle him; that we keep the social solution free from frozen strata of classes; that we shall stimulate effort of each individual to achievement; that through an enlarging sense of responsibility and understanding we shall assist him to this attainment; while he in turn must stand up to the emery wheel of competition. (HOOVER, 1922, p.3)
It is worth remembering that Stand by Me is a narration – Gordie, as an adult, shares the experiences and difficulties described in the film, which were essential in the formation of his character. According to Eric Lars Olson (2011, p.30) the protagonists of Stand by Me “are useful to their colleagues, not because they have traveled the road of trials before, but for being on that road at the same time as them, physically and emotionally”. Thus, the researcher suggests a utilitarian view of friendship and individualist rhetoric. That is, as much as the bonds of friendship are true, their duration is conditioned – valid only as long as the characters have similar trajectories.
This perspective becomes even more evident when we compare Gordie’s condition with his childhood friends. Gordie is portrayed as an upper-middle-class suburban father, close to his children – making it clear that he has come to terms with middle-class American values and assimilated their main attributes. (McFADZEAN, 2019). The same is not true of his friends: Vern stayed poor, Teddy was arrested and Chris was killed. However, rather than this blatant inequality causing Gordie to be displeased, he seems more concerned with his childhood nostalgia. According to his own words “it is normal for each one to move away, but the memories remain”. At no time does Gordie appear to be bothered by the class structure that has imposed that degree of violence on his friends.
Talvez o pior caso seja o de Chris. Desde o início do filme o jovem é retratado diante de um retórica de determinismo social, ao ponto Gordie chega a dizer que “a família de Chris não prestava, e nós sabíamos que ele seria igual”. E mesmo que a obra apresente como traço redentor desse personagem a capacidade de abdicar da mesma violência que lhe foi infligida (LAWRENCE & JEWETT, 2002, p.89), seu destino é trágico: ele morre esfaqueado depois de tentar separar a briga entre dois homens em um bar. A reação de Gordie ao saber do ocorrido, por sua vez, é voltada para a reafirmação de seus próprios valores: o homem apenas relembra de sua infância e se compromete a ser um pai melhor para seus filhos. Dentro de uma nação forjada no conceito do individualismo robusto, Gordie supostamente teve a “autonomia” e “competência” para se tornar parte daquela sociedade, a mesma que virou as costas para seus amigos.
This “victory” of rugged individualism does not happen in Mate-me Por Favor. The Brazilian film does not suggest that Bia has assimilated the predicates of the society that violates her. Such a conception opposes the needs of the subgenre and classic narrative cinema to mark the end of a journey from resolving a conflict. Or rather, from an external conflict. If the classic formula of fantastic suburbanism proposes that there needs to be a resolution of the fantastic for the protagonist’s personal growth, in the Brazilian film, maturation takes place regardless of this. Even if the authorities are inept at arresting the murderer, the work does not propose a narrative that a young woman will be able to do so. To be a hero, in the work’s conception, is not to resolve violence magically but to survive it. And not in the literal sense, as in some horror films (a genre with which the work shares some semantic elements), but in the personal one: the deaths do not brutalize or desensitize Bia. On the contrary, they reinforce their identification with the dead teenagers.
In this sense, it is impossible not to link the gender of the protagonists of Mate-me por Favor to the dangers of the plot. From the beginning, the work reinforces that female maturation involves the logic of surviving the violence caused by the sexist, patriarchal and heteronormative social conjuncture. This is quite explicit in the opening scene, where the Michelle reports a nightmare to her friends in which she is raped and killed.
The struggle to survive this condition of violence is reflected in a sequence of the third act when we see the faces of the four main characters marked by injuries and/or diseases (figure 2). Growing up, especially as a woman, is presented as overcoming various forms of violence – both literal and figurative. In this sense, it is necessary to refer to the maxim worked by Barbara Hudson that adolescence is a male construct. In other words, the performativity of young women comes under the social scrutiny of being accused of lack of maturity (since they are young) as well as femininity (since adolescence would be linked to masculinity) (HUDSON, 1991, p.35).
Figure 2 – Sequence that shows the bruised faces of the four protagonists of Mate-me por Favor. (film frame)
Thus, Anita da Rocha Silveira’s position in placing her characters playing sports and exhibiting characteristics such as competitiveness, active sexuality and physical dispute – considered by the “unconscious of the patriarchy” as masculine (DE LAURETIS, 1987, p.1), it is a restitution of the right to perform as such. And more than that, it claims the right of its characters to be part of a subgenre whose main syntax is that of maturation and which, until then, was linked to masculinity by the hegemonic cinema.
This argument, of course, does not infer that being a middle/lower-class boy in a small town in the early 1960s is easy. On the contrary, Stand by Me shows problems such as the issue of an abusive home, toxic masculinity, and the violence that threatens the bodies of these young people. However, the causes of these pains are also mostly other men (OLSON, 2011, p.29) and the film insists on dissociating from American society as a whole. After all, let’s remember that for Gordie the “American Dream” was achieved at the end of the plot. Thus, the work abdicates from criticizing the project of American society but directs the critics to its institutions and authorities. This was the same discourse echoed by Reagan’s liberal rhetoric, which puts Stand By Me (and Suburban Fantastic in general) even more positioned within the context of Reaganite entertainment.
From a contextual point of view, Regan and his government were marked by a profoundly liberal and individualistic perspective on American society. In his government, social programs were accused of being “social engineering” that failed. (MARCUS, 2004, p.53). These programs were legacies of Lyndon Johnson’s “The Great Society” (president 1963-1969), which brought a sociological perspective to poverty (TROY, 2005, p.89). In place of these, the doctrine of “Law and Order” was imposed, attributing a more individual and family perspective to crime. In other words, violence was no longer conditioned by an unequal society project but linked to collapsed families and/or the individual’s own “nature”. In Reagan’s United States, the discourse was that the main form of social ascension would be based on replicating the country’s traditional values: personal initiative and hard work. In other words, rugged individualism. Crime and poverty, then, would be a consequence of those who failed to perform it, although there was always a “chance” for those who “strove” and “turn around” – predicates inherent to liberal meritocratic discourse.
Mate-me por Favor brings a much more explicit and critical perspective on society’s role in forming these young people. It is worth remembering that the film was released in 2015, after successive Left-wing governments in Brazil, which, regardless of problems and criticism, had social programs as the primary validation motto. This conjuncture helps us to understand the most sensitive look at the impact of society on its characters. So while the parental absence in Mate-me por Favor is explicit (we don’t know the whereabouts of Bia’s father and her mother is only mentioned through the money she leaves for her ) – society as a whole seems to fail those young people. At school, for example, an impersonal loudspeaker whic warns that a student has been murdered. The church, more preoccupied with the spectacle, proves unable to bring any comfort to youthful anxieties. Barra da Tijuca seems uninhabited and features large undeveloped sites, dark streets, and cars passing by at high speed (XAVIER, 2020, p.7): the portrait of abandoned construction land, in a clearly problematic Olympic Project. Public power, on the other hand, is incapable of protecting young people from a murderer. So, in the end, when young people appear, putting up posters with the words “Who will pay for this”, these seem more addressed to the whole society than to a specific figure.
And if such perspectives on society are profoundly dissonant between the two films, so is how the characters of Stand by Me and Mate-Me Por Favor are positioned in front of them. In the American film, for example, the boys decide to look for the teenager’s body for the fame it would bring them, reproducing the most explicit form of this rugged individualism idea that seeks personal merits. Chris even says “If we find the body, we’ll be in the paper” and Teddy adds “Or on TV. We will be heroes.” In the end, the ethical character of the protagonists comes precisely from giving up the fame that the discovery of the body would bring them. But, as we have seen, retribution for those young people is not given by the recognition of their virtues and heroic acts, but for those who manage to “make peace” with American society and its values – that is, Gordie.
In the case of Mate-me por Favor, this original intention for recognition does not exist. What drives the protagonists’ search for bodies is a mixture of curiosity and identification. Therefore, Bia’s maturation takes place differently than in Stand by Me. First, this maturation occurs from the development of sisterhood and empathy with the “Other”. In the case of other women afflicted by violence, as when Bia comforts a woman in her last moments of life (figure 3).
Figure 3 – Bia, protagonist of Mate-me por Favor, comforts a raped woman in her final moments. (film frame)
However, maturation also comes through identification with those dead. As Amanda D. said in her article in Verberenas magazine, “With every death announced, girls imagine themselves dying. With each death in the vacant lot, empty between the buildings in a rarefied city, they died a little” (D., 2015). The apex of this feeling occurs in the final scene when Bia sleeps in the open and becomes a body like so many others left in the thickets of Barra da Tijuca. This poetic and phantasmagoric ending in which she gets up with the bodies (figure 4) says more about the metaphorical death she and other teenagers suffer in that society than about the literal death at the hands of a murderer. The development of her identification with the situation of those young women is also represented by the reception she gives to her friend, Mariana, after a fight between the two. The apology, almost non-existent in suburban fantastic, is the heroine’s redeeming trait – that she doesn’t need to avoid the murders or find the killer to positively impact that world.
Figure 4 – Bia cross the vacant lots with the bodies of the dead. (film frame)
The simple act of apology is utterly revolutionary in a subgenre marked by the fantasy of romanticizing physical heroism. As Olson (2011) sums it up well with the title of his thesis, “Great Expectations”, suburban fantastic is marked by proposing that it is up to children and adolescents to solve the problems of their world and make peace with the values of that society. The expectation that falls on them is part of the conditioning of a society that uses the rhetoric of autonomy and competence as a subterfuge to justify the lack of care. In Mate-me por Favor, Bia’s journey becomes heroic by highlighting the scarcity and lack of empathy: one of the needs proposed by the theory of self-determination (CARRANZA, 2018). In a subgenre ruled by the disruption caused by the Other, Bia brings the perspectives of overcoming necropolitics present in (neo)liberalism in which “the Other is seen not as similar, but as a threatening object, from which it is necessary to protect or destroy” (MBEMBE, 2014, p.26).
By playing the critical role and stipulating that there is no possible happy ending in her reality – Bia goes against the epitome of Reaganite entertainment: there is no redeeming feeling that society is or will be in order when the spectator leaves the movie theater. While at the end of Stand By Me, Gordie, now an adult, looks at the paradisiacal condition of childhood and goes to play with his children (OLSON, 2011, p.31), replicating the values of that society, Bia follows another path: she joins the marginalized bodies.
It is worth remembering that suburban fantastic is, above all, a subgenre of criticism and/or reconciliation with middle-class values. Both the group led by Bia and by Gordie suffer from a community that closes in on its own problems. In this sense, the condominiums in Barra da Tijuca, so striking in the geography of Mate-me por Favor, are a kind of monument to these desires. Its gates and walls are symbols of isolation. However, there are differences in the films’ positions with the middle class and capitalist society. While in Stand By Me, Gordie becomes complacent with friends separating and following individual trajectories (even if it means suffering from violence), Bia cannot abandon the “Other” – whoever he is. And as Glênis Cardoso didactically summarized, in a patriarchal society, “anyone who is not a straight white cis man is seen as the “Other” (2018).
Considerations
First of all, it is important to emphasize that at no point in this work did I attempt to make a qualitative comparison of both films. As a researcher and spectator, I respect the historical place of Stand by Me as one of the most touching works on adolescence, manifested in its critical and public acclaim ( the film appears in the top 250 of the best films on Imdb). It is precise because of this impact on his audiences that we feel the urge to choose him as a counterpoint to the Brazilian film. Thus, we seek to highlight points in Stand by Me, which at the same time mythologize the role of the individual and do not criticize the middle class and society, reinforcing particular worldviews.
In this sense, it is noteworthy that it is a work from outside the hegemonic axis, written and directed by a woman, which presents other possibilities of protagonism. Bia’s journey in Mate-me por Favor reinforces that it is not up to a teenager to save the world from the old generations. The “great expectations” placed on the young protagonists of these films, and romanticized by the heroic melodrama, help to build a vision of a society that wants to isolate itself from criticism, using the rhetoric of autonomy and meritocracy. Mate me por Favor’s critical look at the middle class goes against the basic premise of Reaganite entertainment, moving away from characteristics until then seen as intrinsic to suburban fantastic cinema (McFADZEAN, 2019).
In addition, Anita Rocha da Silveira’s film highlights the potential in the entry of new bodies of a subgenre marked by androcentrism – primarily based on the syntax of maturation and the journey of the classic hero described by Campbell (2009). And if Campbell said that “a woman does not need a journey in the mythological tradition, as she is already complete”, this double standard has already been challenged by the feminist critic, iconized by Maureen Murdock – who claims a woman’s right to have her own journey ( 1990, p.26). Thus, it is also demanded the right to star in suburban fantastic cinema from their own narratives and syntactic elements.
The inclusion of new protagonists and perspectives, also accompanied by other more contemporary suburbanist productions, can provide the necessary narrative depth so that the subgenre does not fall into oblivion again. More than that, they can also serve as critical new paradigms for more recent generations. We remember that non-hegemonic bodies born in the 1970s and 1980s grew up without the possibility of identification with narratives from an entire audiovisual subgenre. And even if they tried to identify themselves, they were still narratives that asked them to save the world and assimilate the values of a patriarchal society. In this sense, the resignification of elements considered inherent in suburban fantastic is more than necessary. The society’s and audiovisual’s duty is that these bodies exercise their right to protagonism.
[1] Films that are based on narratives that are easy to explain, usually focused on attracting the attention of a large audience based on their premise.
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