By IVANA BENTES*
The humanism of I'm still here It is a relief, but how can we restore a frayed social fabric, when extremists have taken up residence in the dining room and in the normative family itself?
While the movie I'm still here was being shown in cinemas across Brazil in November 2024, a right-wing extremist, dressed in a suit of playing cards like the character Joker, blew himself up with a bomb and devices intended to destroy the Statue of Justice and the STF building in Brasília.
That day, I wondered how many other “jokers” we have in the works today in Brazil, devising feasible or laughable antidemocratic plans, or even what the political conditions are for collective, organized and planned “outbreaks”, like those of January 8, 2023, when supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, defeated in the 2022 elections, invaded and vandalized the Planalto Palace, the National Congress and the Supreme Federal Court (STF) in an attempted coup d'état.
Watching Walter Salles’ film – which just awarded actress Fernanda Torres the Golden Globe for her masterful performance as Eunice Paiva, the widow of former congressman Rubens Paiva – who was arrested, tortured and murdered by the military in 1971 – I wondered how the military coup of 1964 and also the events of the bloody period of the Médici government could be reappropriated and reinterpreted by the “jokers”, by Bolsonaro supporters, by extremists, by right-wing members of Congress. How was the apology for exceptional regimes “normalized”?
From military tanks to Instagrammable coup
The fact is that “good citizens” naturalized a regime of death, violation of rights, and military intervention and sought to re-enact it in an attempted military coup that culminated on January 8, 2023.
38 years after the end of a military dictatorship that operated “in the shadows”, in the basements, in disappearances, a regime of obscurity that left deep scars on the history of Brazil – a new coup attempt was filmed and posted on social media by thousands of people in real time, in a media-friendly and explicit way, in broad daylight, histrionic, in an Instagrammable and exhibitionist way, with the participation of military personnel, businesspeople and ordinary people.
The media's attempt to recreate a coup by military intervention in 2023 had a basis. Of all the countries ravaged by military dictatorships in the 70s, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil was the one that least investigated, tried and punished the crimes of the dictatorship. In 1983, Argentina created its National Commission on the Disappeared during the 76-83 regime, investigated crimes, arrested generals and convicted more than a thousand people for state terrorism.
Here we had the National Truth Commission, which brought to light 1121 impressive and shocking testimonies. Revealing photos and documents of accused and victims of the dictatorship. The final report was delivered to then-president Dilma Roussef in 2014, who herself was tortured by the military, but despite the excellent work, our “transitional justice” did not punish anyone.[1]
That is why the spectacular and Instagrammable coup of January 8, 2023 needs a rigorous and pedagogical punishment, which began with the conviction by the Supreme Court of 371 people, more than 2 thousand investigated, 146 convicted of incitement and criminal association, and 527 released upon payment of fines. An unprecedented reversal of the tradition of impunity and conciliation.
January 8th proved how we move from narrative to action, from memes and fake news for a real and violent action that begins with incitement on social media and a draft of a coup d'état, printed in the Planalto Palace involving generals, colonels and the high command of the Armed Forces at the end of Jair Bolsonaro's government.
The episode questions the idea of a “freedom of expression” that legitimizes incitement to crimes or the defense of violations of the rule of law, as well as other criminal “freedoms.”
The coup draft, drawn up with the participation of the then President of the Republic, Jair Bolsonaro, invokes the 1988 Constitution, the most radically democratic constitution, to propose a coup d'état in Brazil, given Jair Bolsonaro's defeat at the polls in 2022: “After all, in view of all the above and to ensure the necessary restoration of the Democratic Rule of Law in Brazil, playing unconditionally within the four lines, based on express provisions of the Federal Constitution of 1988, I declare a State of Siege; and, as a continuous act, I decree an Operation to Guarantee Law and Order.” (Coup Draft, published in the 884 pages of the Federal Police investigation on 21/11/2024).[2]
In the name of the Constitution, the military proposes to violate the Constitution! This is what the astonishing draft says.
Inversions of meaning
The far-right's reversals are astonishing, but how is it possible to change the meaning of history? How many Brazilians know what the military dictatorship in Brazil really was?
During part of my adolescence in Rio Branco, Acre, in the 1970s, I never heard the word “dictatorship” in my home, at school, or in my neighborhood. I never knew that there had been a military coup, that torture was practiced, that there were political disappearances, repression, and censorship in Brazil.
It was only in 1984, while still studying communications at UFRJ, that I learned that Brazil had suffered a military coup in 1964, with the Diretas Já protests, the first political demonstration I had ever attended. Was I the alienated exception coming from the outskirts of Brazil? I'm afraid not.
“The left shouts 'no more dictatorship' and celebrates the Golden Globes, but they ignore the dictatorship we live in,” I read in a right-wing group that I monitor on Telegram at the same time that the windows of Copacabana shouted the name of Fernanda Torres celebrating the unprecedented award on January 05, 2025.
The inversion of signs, the falsification of history, the appropriation of words, creates feelings of “resistance” and “struggle” against their “tormentors”, and the extreme right uses the same language, the same words, the same narrative, semiotic, emotional strategies used to denounce the military dictatorship of 1964.
On the Bolsonaro family's social media, the “political prisoners” are the coup plotters themselves: “We are talking about justice, about pacifying the country. The January 8 prisoners are political prisoners and we will not give up on them. We are fighting for them every day! (Flávio Bolsonaro, 19/11/2024 on Telegram). They also mention journalist Allan dos Santos, as “censored” and former congressman Daniel Silveira, “unjustly imprisoned”, as “victims of the current dictatorship”.
Antidemocratic affection is a powerful “glue”
The far right has been appropriating all the slogans and activist language of the left. They have hacked memetic humor, the feeling of rebellion, the idea of revolution, the language of protests, occupations, camps, the definition of “freedom of expression,” the idea of “resistance,” “political prisoners,” “government of the people,” etc.
It is not rational political discourses that drive these inversions and resignifications of meaning. All of this comes before any ideological understanding, as we have seen in the behavior of groups, in what goes viral and swarms on social media, in what engages extremist groups and multiverses, inside and outside Brazil.
Antidemocratic affection is a powerful “glue” because it has a moral basis, it is life that the extreme right talks about, a life crossed by sad affections, resentments and death, but a construction that authorizes practically anything.
Moral panic mobilizes entire groups haunted by a delirious LGBTQ+ indoctrination in schools; by the fear of culture and the arts as vectors of “perversions” of all kinds; which demonizes artists, intellectuals, teachers, scientists, activists as vectors of progressive and emancipatory movements such as feminism, anti-racism, environmentalism and everything that calls into question the patriarchal and predatory mentality.
The contemporary world is seen as chaos and an emotional and effective threat, a behavioral threat, a threat and the destruction of family values. This is the strength of the far right in the world: the defense of the idyllic patriarchal family, the basis of thousands of Hollywood films and narratives and mythologies.
We are still here. Against polarizations, the archetypal force of the family?
What the movie I'm still here does, as a narrative, and what Marcelo Rubens Paiva's book already indicated, is exactly to use this archetypal force of the family and the woman (yes white, yes wealthy, yes normative) to place Eunice Paiva, the mother of five children, the widow torn from a happy idea of a loving family and throw her into hell with courage and assertive pragmatism.
Eunice Paiva is stripped of some of her class privileges and placed before a tyrannical State that usually directs its cruelty and violence against the poor, against black people, against the favela dwellers. But here, it is the normative family that ceases to be untouchable. “My husband is in danger,” says Eunice. “Everyone is in danger,” responds the friend she asks for help.
In the film, Walter Salles shows his narrative skill by introducing and involving us in this wealthy, progressive, white, desirable and happy family that will be violated by the Brazilian State. This is the “universal” identification and connection that Eunice Paiva has with any viewer: political trauma is not just about a rupture in the social order or an ideological dispute; it is an attack on a family.
I'm still here Does it tend, narratively, to dissolve or alleviate the political polarizations already rooted in Brazil in 2024, through the affections on stage and its humanism centered on the family? The film indicates a possible path, a chapter in the manual of the affective guerrilla warfare that we will have to wage in 2026 and beyond.
Is it possible to build “cordial networks”, spaces for coexistence and dialogue, to establish democratic pacts in the face of engagement in toxic networks, in the face of the business of hate, of enjoying the brutality and violence of polarizations?
There are no solutions that are not collective or that do not involve public policies, changes in mentality, effective justice, but the film gains power in this microcosm, in the reduced scale of the family, in the reconstruction of Eunice Paiva's personal story, which leads us to sympathize - beyond suffering with her and her lovely family - with the other victims of the macro history of the military dictatorship in Brazil.
It is through identification, analogy, projection, or humanist embarrassment (in the case of a conservative viewer) that the film installs us in this resistant becoming of Eunice in the face of a criminal State. Who could and who can confront State terrorism, its agents, its police, its lack of control?
The film takes care to defend and distance Rubens Paiva from any sympathy for the armed struggle or any radical gesture or speech. Paiva was a federal deputy elected and impeached in 1964, and gave a historic speech on Rádio Nacional, in defense of the legality of President João Goulart on April 1, 1964.
With the coup in full swing. Rubens Paiva was impeached, left Brazil, and returned to dedicate himself to his work as an engineer, but he did not stop working against the dictatorship, acting as a “courier” among political exiles, sending information about the dictatorship in Brazil to the international press and helping politically persecuted people escape the country. He paid for his activism with his life: he was arrested, tortured, and killed in 1971.
None of this is said, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) in the film is above all the good-natured and loving father, the husband of Eunice Paiva, the liberal and dedicated mother. The two form a couple bon vivant who raises five children between parties with friends, sea baths in Leblon, a comfortable and spacious house and the libertarian air of the counterculture. Wrapped up in the music of Gil, Cetano, Mutantes, Serge Gainsbourg, books, art, good food, and good living.
In the first 30 minutes, Rubens Paiva's family is portrayed with images of intense vivacity and freshness, using the fragmented and amateur aesthetics of super-8, such as those of the camera used by his daughter “Veroca”, chronicles and audiovisual diaries of summers, trips and parties, and also the countless images of a box/album overflowing with happy memories.
The sequence of the girls dancing to the sound of I love you, nothing more, by Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin; Eunice and Rubens Paiva twirling with their children to the sound of Take me Back to Piaui, by Juca Chaves, are touching and vibrant. Who would dare to attack such happiness?
The life of images. Super-8 and the family album
Contrary to the overly moralistic analyses about narcissism and happiness posted on social media, today, I see the display of everyday micro and macro happiness on platforms as the continuation of analog photos in family albums, a kind of imagery delirious that is a shield against chaos, a shield against the infinite suffering of the world.
Walter Salles uses all the power of amateur and domestic images in I'm still here: super-8 filming and projections, “film-letters” from his teenage daughter in London, the Pentax analog camera in his father’s hands, the boxes full of his mother’s photographs, the presence of film and photographic cameras at home, on the street, on the beach, in the car, photographs on the pages of newspapers.
We are immersed in a familiar iconography that is already the memory of the present; what remains with the disappearance of Rubens Paiva are his images. We will be just images, one day. This is our most likely form of resurrection.
The house as a microcosm
The military dictatorship in the film appears (as in a detective or horror film) through small clues: sounds of helicopters under the sea, military vehicles crossing the streets of the Leblon coast, a blitz in the Rebouças tunnel, news on TV about the kidnapping of the Swiss ambassador, distant noises that are apparently incapable of altering the sunny, festive, comfortable daily life that surrounds this upper-class family in their mansion by the sea.
But what is outside will enter the house and change everything. Fernanda Torres' skill, in her precise and magnanimous, restrained and tense performance, is to show this woman torn from this environment and stripping herself of a life, trying to "shield" her children from everything that was happening.
The living house is one of the eloquent characters in the narrative and it dies, with curtains being closed, taken by storm by the agents who take Rubens Paiva forever and settle in the house. Closed doors, low voices, and a false normality of the mother in front of her children who ignore what is happening.
The special treatment that military agents give to upper-class families is striking. They are poor people in the mansions of the rich, where they dine and play table football, very different from the kick-in-the-door and abuse of authority that is established in the favelas.
The iniquities of the dictatorship and prison are shared only by Eunice and one of her daughters, Eliana, just 15 years old, both taken to DOI-Codi and interrogated.
The hooded and stunned teenager was held captive for 24 hours. Eunice Paiva was held captive for 12 days at the DOI-Codi in Tijuca, here in Rio de Janeiro, the largest torture center in Latin America. Rubens Paiva, arrested on January 20, the day of Saint Sebastian, was interrogated, tortured and executed on the night of January 21 to 22, 1971.
But none of this is in the film, without dates or details, the experience we have is that of Eunice Paiva, disoriented, thrown from one cell to another, interrogated, hearing the screams of the tortured, seeing blood stains on the floor, asking in desperation for her 15-year-old daughter and her husband.
The sequence ends when Eunice Paiva is freed and returns home and washes herself in the bathroom, scrubbing every piece of skin as if she wanted to remove from her body the memory, smells and sounds of that time in hell.
But the terror that takes hold in the house is something equally terrifying that transforms Eunice, from a refined, well-served, happily married woman, into a mother terrorized by the State who has to dismiss her maid, sell the house by the sea, raise five children, go back to school and start her life over in another city.
A transformation that is felt by the children and the viewer, as in a horror or haunting film that leaves clues and fragmented evidence, creating a suffocating narrative. The emotional losses in the family, the disappearance of the father, are accompanied by these material losses.
Isn't one of the greatest universal fears, whether among the middle class, the economic elite or the poorest, precisely falling down the social ladder? For those who have a lot or a little, losing their provider, their home, their salary, their job, their support networks, is traumatic.
Bury the father
Narratively, the two most symbolic and terrifying moments in the film are, cinematically, the burial of Eunice's family pet dog, run over, accidentally or on purpose, while the house is guarded by military agents.
The hands of the children and the mother frantically digging a hole in the backyard and burying Pimpão's body wrapped in a blanket, his violent and atrocious death, is practically the symbolic and impossible burial of the father, a premonition and omen of his arbitrary and violent death. A terrifying family catharsis.
Another heartbreaking scene is the family leaving the mansion, the empty rooms, the remains of changes, the children's discontent as they leave paradise: Rio, the beach, their childhood, their adolescence, their friends, with their father gone. Anyone in the audience can feel the bitterness and melancholy of the scene: moving to another city, either by force or due to unfavorable circumstances in life.
Once again, a universal feeling, a daily mourning experienced by all those who leave, migrate, flee, change to ensure their survival. Once again, the micro family story translates a mix of contradictory feelings: goodbye and new life.
Life will work itself out
The entire third part of the film, after paradise lost and hell, is of gradual normality. 25 years later, life is getting back on track. From the sea and the oceanic feeling of Leblon to the tiled waters of a pool at the São Paulo club, life is reorganizing itself as best it can.
Eunice becomes a lawyer and activist for the indigenous cause; the story of the indigenous peoples expropriated from their lands and decimated during the military dictatorship has not yet been told; her son Marcelo Rubens Paiva becomes a writer. Happy old year, in 1982, the story of his fatal dive that left him quadriplegic, vibrating with its humor and irony, without realizing that it described the political context after the military dictatorship.
In addition to her writer son, Eunice Paiva's daughters are now adults. She immerses herself in her work, in the documents, and collects everything that comes out about her husband's disappearance. She struggles and receives, in 1996, 26 years later, the death certificate from the Brazilian State that acknowledges that Rubens Paiva is dead. Everything is more "light" and factual in this last part of the film.
Eunice Paiva poses smiling with Rubens Paiva's death certificate, because it is a huge personal and collective victory, achieved not only by her resilience and stoicism, but through the Law of the Dead and Disappeared, a public policy.
A law that was sanctioned in 1995, comforted families of those killed by the dictatorship, but was extinguished in 2022 by the government of Jair Bolsonaro and only resumed by President Lula, in 2024. A reparation in the field of memory, death certificates, but not in the field of justice, as the criminals were not punished.
Fernanda Torres's extraordinary performance is based on Eunice's disturbing self-control, which initially “shields” her family and children from the violence of the military regime. But it is obviously not a simple and unshakable sense of admirable individual self-esteem, but rather a clear notion of her rights and the perception of her social mobility.
If Eunice Paiva remains silent about the dictatorship at home, at the end of the film and of her life, nothing is taboo anymore, History and stories return to circulate at family lunches and daily reunions, because Brazil could now talk about the dictatorship, it was politically open. Memory and history are gradually released.
Eunice Paiva – alongside other relatives of the missing and dead of 64, with the support of organizations, institutions of the State itself, and international human rights bodies – reestablishes the historical truth about the disappearance, torture, and murder of Rubens Paiva by the military regime. But, paradoxically, Alzheimer's erases her personal memory, which is what we see in the detached expression of Fernanda Montenegro (old Eunice) or slightly smiling.
She is not in the film, but it is Eunice Paiva herself, according to Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who requested her judicial interdiction due to Alzheimer's, as the good lawyer that she was. Only the collective can save us, literally, from this final erasure of individual memory.
Off-field: where were the poor?
On far-right networks and those who defend the state of exception, it is suggested that the military dictatorship of 64 kept “everything normal” except for those who were arrested, murdered, tortured, exiled, artists, journalists, student politicians, the “communists”, “subversives”, long-haired people, “crickets”, the intellectualized, unionized, politicized urban middle classes.
The same discourse of the 2024 coup and far-right populism that speaks of a corrupt cultural elite in opposition to “the people”.
In a post on Jair Bolsonaro's Telegram group, it reads: “the groups from Leblon, Vila Madalena, the perfumed newsrooms, et caterva, they drink gourmet wines and eat expensive cheeses while discussing how chic and engaging Brazilian cinema is and planning their next trip to New York – this is because Havana is only good in the socialist stories of the bar table. What matters is that “love won”. (Publication of 13/12/2024. Telegram from Jair M. Bolsonaro 1).
Em I'm still here, Zezé, the black maid of the Paiva family (Pri Helena), is the loyal and silent witness to the family history, the maid who lives in the house and takes care of Eunice Paiva's children when she is taken to Doi-Codi.
If Eunice Paiva, in order to protect her family and start a new life without her husband, can sell the mansion, can take money from the bank, can move from Rio to São Paulo and maintain a certain standard of living, the maid Zezé has to be laid off and becomes unemployed. We do not know her fate in the story, but we do know how much the military dictatorship made life worse for the poorest.
Does the imaginary surrounding the “Economic Miracle”, the “Great Brazil”, the “Brazil, love it or leave it” still persist as a public and popular memory of the military dictatorship of 64?
It seems so! Little is said about how much the dictatorship worsened the lives of ordinary and poor Brazilians, produced an exodus of the unassisted rural population to the cities and slums, aborted systemic agendas, such as Agrarian Reform, worsened unfair work in the countryside, worsened and tried to hide endemic hunger in the Northeast, decimated indigenous groups and took their lands.
the cover of IstoÉ Magazine The October 1985 Censorship of Hunger speaks of the dictatorship’s “Censored Hunger.” The image shows a poor, naked child holding a rat. The data comes from a study on hunger in Brazil by the IBGE. The 1970 Census already contained alarming data that generated a strong national debate and disturbed the dictatorship by revealing the country’s levels of income inequality.[3]
The military president of the bloodiest period of the dictatorship, Garrastazu Médici, who in I'm still here appears only in a portrait on the wall, declares in 1974: “Brazil is doing well, the people are doing badly”. The economic miracle was falling apart with data on the unequal distribution of income, employment problems, precarious housing, sanitation and education.
The Brazil of Médici that was doing well was that of the narrative economy, the justification of the military dictatorship to ward off moral panic and feed the ghosts that reappear with the vigilante mob of January 8, 2023.
There is a compensatory moral narrative in all regimes of exception. The film I'm still here It is the film of the resilient, of the families of the dead and missing, of the Eunices of all social groups who realize their rights. But, almost off-screen, we already glimpse the extremists who dine with us and play table football with the children. Today they are on social media, like good citizens spreading fake news or circulating hate speech.
Micropolitics
The humanism of I'm still here It is a relief, but how can we restore a frayed social fabric, when extremists have taken up residence in the dining room and in the normative family itself?
We can imagine Eunice Paiva having to talk to apologists for the dictatorship, the historical and mediatic events of January 8th, listening at the gym (for now) or reading on social media hate speech against the STF, sexist, racist, homophobic speeches.
In the extremist networks that I monitor and research, one of the most common forms of mockery is the “government of love.” The emotional struggle in politics is impactful and disturbing. Lula’s love and affection produce a political effect and a virtuous circle that hate activism must combat.
After the hacking and misappropriation of left-wing slogans, the far right is attacking humanism (“poor people don’t eat love”) and human rights as a weakness.
Language-lives, the singularity that humanizes, the micro-history proposed by Ginzburg, telling, understanding, analyzing how ordinary people behave, interpret, resist or conform to religious and cultural doctrines, are increasingly important.
Don't abstract political agendas move us? We have life stories, micropolitics as conceived by Guattari/Deleuze, the micro-stories of Carolina Maria de Jesus, or the exuberant media narratives of Erika Hilton, the diaries of a young app delivery driver, Paulo Freire's brick pedagogy and a thousand other stories of anonymous people or celebrities to tell.
This is a decisive field of dispute and activism: family relationships, friendship networks, work environments, where values and behaviors are negotiated and reproduced.
*Ivana Bentes She is a professor at the School of Communication at UFRJ. Author, among other books, of Media-Crowd: communication aesthetics and biopolitics (Mauad X). [https://amzn.to/4aLr0vH]
Reference
I'm still here
Brazil, 2024, 135 minutes.
Directed by: Walter Salles.
Screenplay: Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega.
Cinematography: Adrian Teijido.
Editing: Affonso Gonçalves.
Art Direction: Carlos Conti
Music: Warren Ellis.
Cast: Fernanda Torres; Fernanda Montenegro; Selton Mello; Valentina Herszage, Luiza Kosovski, Barbara Luz, Guilherme Silveira and Cora Ramalho, Olivia Torres, Antonio Saboia, Marjorie Estiano, Maria Manoella and Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha.
Notes
[1] https://www.gov.br/memoriasreveladas/pt-br/assuntos/comissoes-da-verdade
[3] https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/cx0z199k8n3o
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