The Category Is Live: Mario Peixoto as a Dandy Modernist

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Abstract

I want to suggest that the anachronistic survival of dandyism within the avant-garde movement gives rise to peculiar connections between masculinity and spectacularization. Under this view, Mario Peixoto can be understood in a new way, other than the formalist artist and isolated man that define him as a result of only film, “Limite” (1931), which became the most celebrated film of Brazilian cinematic history after the 1970s. Born in 1908, Peixoto’s dandy sensibility appeared in his early life, through his interest in clothing, his desire to be an actor, and his failed masculinity. Peixoto was considered effeminate, and he himself thought he looked “girlish” although “maly” (sic), according to unpublished diaries that he wrote in English while living in England in 1927. As he came of age, and gained cultural and social visibility, this sensibility came to define his role with respect to both life and art, not as a professional but as an amateur. In the 1930s, he published his only book of poetry, the first volume of O Inútil de Cada Um. From that time until his death in 1992, he imagined much, wrote some, and accomplished little; he wrote screenplays that never became movies, poems that were published posthumously, and his mostly unpublished roman fleuve. I explore issues of uselessness, imagination, and failure, but also ways of reinventing and sharing life.

Author

• Denilson Lopes, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro