Whilst many of Bacurau’s reviewers cover its deft manipulation of Post Western Cinema’s themes, few adequately discuss the specificities of Filho & Dornelles’ exploration of Neocolonialism.

Kleber Mendonça Filho and Julian Dornelles’ 2019 weird-/post-western thriller Bacurau is a tour-de-force exploration of the politics of race, technology, and revenge set and shot in Pernambuco, North Eastern Brazil. Starring Sonia Braga, Silvero Pereira, Barbara Colen, Thomas Aquino & Udo Keir, Bacurau is beautifully shot and scripted, combining a convincing presentation of rural Pernambuco with piece-meal dialogue, intense suspense and gorgeous soundtracking. This isn’t a review—but if it was I’d recommend you pause your evening plans and go watch it for the sheer pleasure.

If you care about spoilers please stop here, go watch the film, and come back afterwards.

Although Bacurau does offer “fun” and “pleasure” as a piece of cinema, its value far exceeds its shock factor. Neither “fun” nor “pleasurable” seem like the most appropriate descriptors for a film which shows children gunned down by white supremacists at close range. Nor is its presentation of the radical vulnerability of the town’s infrastructure pleasant to watch. It offers a kind of catharsis. But, if this is blown out of proportion, the fireworks of violent revenge obscure the real meat of analysis which emerges from the film’s visual language and dialogue, its subtle inversions of the tropes of the American “Post Western”, and strong allusions to contemporary neocolonial realities.

Besides the Bay-esque fireworks-heavy discussions of Bacurau that populate the review columns of the mainstream press, others—thinking themselves more astute—have reduced the movie to a pointed comment on the premiership of Jair Bolsonaro. Whilst some may have been keen to lend their analysis a sense of urgency by focussing on the latest Latin American ‘strongman’, it would seem unnecessary: Filho and Dornelles have been working on the film for the last 10 years, well before Bolsonaro’s ascendancy. Rather than being a “fun” political satire, or a silver bullet aimed at the Alvorada Palace, the drama of the film is born in its constant speculation on the state of contemporary neocolonial violence and the politics of infrastructure. As we might have expected, this might not be something that the genre-bending scions of “weird-west” analysis are up to approaching. 

So—when we scrape off the veneer of Bacurau’s visual beauty—is the violence we see really so weird in “The West”?

Bacurau’s “Post-Western” Borderland 

Whilst Bacurau’s debt to the Western loads its symbology with the shadow of struggle between colonial settlement and the sublime grandeur of the wilderness, it’s difficult to understand the film on this narrow basis. When asking about the cinematic difference between “The Western” and this “Post-Western”, we should really be paying attention to their political geography. The classic Western cinematises the “heroic” North American Colonial imagination. It dramatises the encounter between ‘great open spaces’ and colonial settlement as the formative moment of the development of “American” National character. Beyond this, it obscures both of the founding genocides of the United States behind the myth of European self-recreation, and settlers’ pioneering economism in ‘The New World.’  

The western borderlands of the United States were the expanding—but still contested—borders of the nation state. Its settlement program comprised a centuries-long process of violent demographic engineering, the development of agricultural, extractive and manufacturing industries, infrastructural extension (especially in transport and communications), and the establishment of military hegemony. Its strategic success was dependent on state-sponsored exploration: territorial mapping and the development of cartography as a technique of colonial expansion was a necessary prerequisite of successful settlement and the solidification of territorial control.  

It is this context which underlies the political geography of the Western, in which the allure of ‘the lone ranger’ (so brilliantly parodied through Udo Keir’s character, Michael) lies in their skilful traversal of a landscape which lies beyond the steady encroachment of the state. By the same token it provides the function of the lone ranger for the American imagination—they are the pathfinders, the avant garde of popular national character—and their tragedy: when their kingdom come, there shall be no place for them or their “just” violence-beyond-the-law within it. That is, unless they find an appropriate position in government—or the military—and a vulnerable country in the Global South. 

How does Bacurau’s borderland differ? First of all, we are not dealing with 19th Century white settlers on the North American frontier, but a just-futuristic mixed-race community in rural north-eastern Brazil. This community is not the social vanguard of an expanding settler colonial state, but rather a community “left behind” within a state built on and systematically mis-developed by European colonisation. Bacurau’s borderland is not characterised by a nation’s spatial expansion, but rather the struggle of a community to maintain their ways of living and quality of life in the face of a coastal concentration of wealth and political power, beyond which economic and political sovereignty partially and ineptly reaches. 

At the beginning of the film at least, Bacurau is not strictly a borderland in the vein of the Colonial frontier. It’s surrounded by gorgeous scenery for sure, but this isn't enough to qualify it. It’s a rural town within a state, a short drive from the next town. It has “Democracy” without public health; processed food without fresh water. Key (potentially irreplaceable) community figures discharge public services, folks live their various sexualities and gender identities, whilst the slow pace of living and a degree of self sufficiency provide time and impetus for creative life. Those who travel to the city are doctors or gunmen. Were the river not dammed upstream and Serra Verde not gripped in its “problems”, Bacura’s communitarian dispensation seems to be doing pretty well despite the odds.

The question is, what changes?  

And this is one of the achievements of Bacurau—it is an emotive and galling dramatisation of how the contradictions of a community and territory can be sharpened into the violence of a (neo-)colonial borderland. How sanctioned racist killing cuts a rift into civil society (no matter how geographically diffuse it may be), terminally severing communities from the duty of care from which states are supposed to derive their legitimacy.

The question of who in the end sanctions the violence is totally open, as of course, we never see the preparation stages—but in our neoliberal times where entrenched political elites are keen to furnish states with dependencies on private sector firms to provide services (and increasingly infrastructure) the difference between the state and private provision is like sand under a wave. What the directors show us are all the possible beneficiaries: from the Italian and German colonies on the coast, to the killers (God knows what they would have spent those “points” on), to the resident mayoral fuck-up Tony Jr (whether in the end all of this was for his gain—alas—we never learn).

As Bacurau suggests, re-opening the politics of the ‘borderland’ within states takes several things:

• The creation or exploitation of geographical isolation and containment, using natural or architectural means. 

• Surveillance, whether utilising “boots on the ground”, drone surveillance, or mass data gathering. Think of the retinal voting devices Tony Jr. delivers on his first visit to the town— the implications are pretty staggering.  

• Deprival of the “basic conditions” of life: water, food, shelter.

• Deprival of communications, digital presence, and the possibility of digital perception. In Bacurau this is represented through mobile phone network jamming and the removal of the town from Google maps.

• The creation of mentalities of terror via extra-judicial killing (whether targeted or indiscriminate).
  

Where Bacurau dramatises these tactics through the fictional visitation of a group of white supremacist genocide-tourists—leaving the rationale of the exercise only partially clear through situational evidence and the group’s testimonies—they comprise the standard toolbox of strategies used globally by militaries, paramilitaries and corporate mercenary groups to undertake actions ranging from assassination, to mass population displacement and genocide in the Global South.

Dornelles and Filho’s patient setting up of a huge unresolved inventory of motives for the action (reprisal against Lunga’s band, an assassination of Pacote, land clearance, racially and/or political motivated mass killing, points-based murder sport) provides a refractory focal point for the plurality of this kind of neocolonial borderland—within Brazil, and South America more broadly, but also within the USA itself. And it is the ambivalence of Bacurau in refusing to provide any closure that achieves this. The history of Bacurau and its inhabitants’ predicament is submerged beyond the cinematic frame, and whilst for some this partiality may be frustrating, its foregrounding of technologies of violence and their human cost is valuable and deeply challenging. Arguably, the directors’ emphasis throughout the build-up that Bacurau is its community (and really quite a community) is in turn a statement of the town’s radical vulnerability: Bacurau has nothing but this basic social fabric to protect it.

Where classic Western Cinema veiled the genocidal violence of American nation building behind the mystic heroism of the lone ranger, Filho and Dornelles paint a starkly defiant but nonetheless brutal picture—surreal, but not un-real. This relation of violence is based on the strategic atrophy, rather than the extension, of cartographic knowledge. It is a disappearing act. A murderous attempted erasure, planned off-screen with no visual receipts or transactions. First the water, then the highway, the digital presence, then—so the killers hope—the people. Our true histories all too often tell tales of people and places that vanish, and do not reappear.

The Absent Metropolis  

The failure of this disappearing act is deeply ironic, given that the metropolis has already disappeared in the cinematic geography of Bacurau. There is no march up the yellow-bricked road to the coast—the paths are laden with dirt, blood and water. There is no unmasking of Oz—whether doddering and benign or ‘evil sorcerer’—nor a confrontation with a final revelation of hypocrisy, machination, or the hollow thud of the apparent without substance. The neocolonial violence depicted through Bacurau is never allowed to fully take the impenetrable guise of the sublime in the eyes of its audience—we are constantly exposed to the contradictory repetition of its competing political-economic and psychological rationales and are given no closure.  

This tells us a few deeply important things. The originary, stymied rebellion reported in Bacurau’s Museum was not the beginning. The hallucinogen driven collective defence that the townspeople of Bacurau participate in is not the closing act. No matter how much we may want to view its somatic and trans-subjective aspects as a final reversal of the film’s violence. The burial of Michael before the church would seem to indicate that the violence that Bacurau is faced with can be repressed and staved off, but not mortally interred. Similarly, Tony Jr may ride away stripped and humiliated, but is nonetheless sent to a certain kind of freedom beyond the structure of a closed narrative. The people of Bacurau wave white handkerchiefs in the face of Carmelita’s death, but the killing starts nonetheless. She reappears before Michael, the matriarch staring down his leaden cannibalism. But even this haunting presence allows no escape. The question remains— if neither murder nor mercy are allowed to signal the closure of collective mortal trauma, where are we left to look? 

But something is missing for this question. Something the directors seem keen to communicate, something irreducibly structural—built into the peripheral geography of the film. As I said, the metropolis is absent. And if it would seem that Bacurau denies a linearity to violence in favour of circularity fed by re-exposure, we’re forced in the end to look through and beyond the screen. We have three paths before us: the testimonies of the murderers, the footage of Acacio's assassinations, and the few snippets we hear illustrating the director’s near-future neocolonial dispensation. Whilst the globe comes into focus in the opening credits, there is only land, no state borders, only the streetlights of the Andean Pacific and the sunlight of Brazil. In the face of this absence we have only words, “phantoms [that] haunt the wake.”

The directors constantly enmesh American social violence in the psychology of the killers. Early in the film the key question is posed: “How did I come to love this gun?” How have the characters come to invest both their identity, and their capacity for intimacy and ecstasy in the machines of death? Following Bacurau’s collage approach to social and political meaning, we’re given several answers. First, the Thompson behind the glass cabinet. Venerated, mortal symbol of the twisted glory of the NYC Mafia, ever so out of reach for the ‘nanny’, and yet passed from beyond the glass by the grand-paternal authority. “He placed it in my hand, and that was that.” A body invested with power by the ability to take life: from the nanny and the human resources specialist, to the police and correctional officers.  

Later in the film, Terry provides his own rationale. A divorcee unable to take either his ex-wife’s life or the lives of mall-goers in his own home town, “now God’s given [him] the opportunity” to get rid of his pain. “I feel like shooting something”, but ‘to feel’ is the operative verb. From the glorification of the weapons of war, to their instrumental use for suicidal (and sui-social) catharsis, the directors draw a clear line from the on-screen violence to the perversity of a will-to-live through murder—cutting a cultural line from the cowboy-come-gunslinger of the Western to the American pysche, waiting dormant in the parking lot of the mall, willing his traumatic loss to overtake him in one last orgasmic communion with the mortal coil.  

Contrasting with Terry’s near suicidal killing spree is the fact that—from my understanding—all of the killers expect to leave Bacurau alive, water bottles in hand in the back of Tony Jr’s transporter. There is not meant to be any mortal or existential price for murder here. As Michael is at pains to clarify, the epithet ‘murderer’ is reserved for those who kill “their own”: killing across the global colour line is a game, a rush, a reassurance to the killers themselves. The killing act is paid in “points” (to be spent, or accrued, for what purpose is never revealed), the killers bolstered by airborne eyes and infrastructural advantage which is assumed to elevate their capacities beyond all resistance. Here returns the violence of neocolonialism: an elevation of white killers above the mortal coil of their abjected targets, the elevation of the interests they serve (knowingly or unknowingly), faith in the technical capacity of modern warmaking to overcome any obstacle. To absolve any sin.

We’re told that there are German and Italian colonies on the coast of Brazil, but besides the cutting edge of the genocide tourists, no sign is given of what these precisely are. Again, we have to turn to and infer from what we are shown. Enter the drone. Rather than treating it as a fun, UFO-esque, reminder of the genre bending predilections of the directors, it’s important to take this cinematic intervention seriously. And a cinematic intervention it is. The lens of the drone draws us into the “sterile” space of modern technocratic warfare: it is a frame which inherently dehumanises, transforms the landscapes, geographies, and people within war zones into pixelated stand-ins. Obstacles to be overcome, to be ‘seen through’ by knowing eyes.

The politics of cinematised violence are emphatically stated in Pacote’s demand that the footage of his kills be turned off. He wants no glorification, wants to maintain the distance between himself and his actions. He has no wish to be the ‘Trigger King’. In this context, the image of Kate catching the drone as it lands, and Julia and her Scottish murder-buddy caught fucking on film during the massacre are key: “You guys know you’re on camera, right?” Yeah, she does. Where for the victims of drone warfare its cinematic lens is invisible—captures nothing of them but their explosive demise—in Bacurau drone footage captures the killers as people possessing a certain form of ownership over its killing gaze. It retains for the killers the capacity to express spontaneous sexuality (particularly morbid in this case) in a cinematic field usually reserved for the regular, chance-less, “surgical” work of impersonal killing from afar.  

And here’s “the problem” (if you feel it is one): despite the rich corona of information provided throughout the film detailing its politics of violence, we really have very little to say about its fictional surroundings. We can only approach the neocolonial metropolis as far as Bacurau’s psychodrama will allow. By the same token, its silence insinuates a particular form of dystopia, familiar to readers of Kafka. It is the dystopia at the edge of information. Where knowledge of rationales, the political meta-environment, and the possibility of fully informed action falls away. All we are left with is the meat grinder—the fact of killing, the fact of self defence, both represented in a capacity that prevents us from reaching further, beyond the screen, to any clear idea of the actual situation. Words are spoken into the killers’ ears, but we do not wear an earpiece. All we see is the rush to pull to the trigger.  

Considering the several scenes where information of incoming traffic flows into Bacurau, we’re reminded that when infrastructure retreats, the flow of information does not stop. But in our real world, this partial flow is often not enough to stop the incoming fatalities. I’m reminded of Operation Triton, the Frontex-led replacement to Operation Mare Nostrum in the Mediterranean in the mid 2010s. The EU substantially reduced infrastructure provision to assist people migrating from North Africa to Southern Europe, as they escaped the West’s bloodbath in Libya. The refusal of infrastructural assistance by the EU and member states led to a huge rise in deaths in the Mediterranean. It was a grievous chapter, showcasing the disdain with which European states view the lives of those fleeing the states that they themselves have “helped” disrupt beyond recognition. Whilst the reduction in assistance was policy in the EU, the news did not reach the camps on the south coast of the Mediterranean. The information did not come. People could not consider the risk fully, and couldn’t make a fully informed decision on the safety of crossing to Europe. This is another fraction of the kind of dystopia that Bacurau presents us with, inflected with white supremacy, the retreat of information and infrastructure, and traumatic decisions made in a shadow space between death and uncertainty. No global atrophy of the possibility of human life, but a concentration of where life matters, whose life is worth something, and where can be erased “without a trace”. 

It’s a miracle that so many of the townspeople of Bacurau survived their incursion. I don’t think we’ll ever get to see if they survive the next. Go watch the film, it’s brilliant. And maybe take time to ask yourself, “Is this really so “weird” in The  West?”

Written by Bertie Gmaj