From Magical Realism to Criminal Populism: The Auteur-Brand and the Return(s) of Vanishing Mediators in José Padilha’s "Narcos"

• In Event: Literatura, Identidad, Campo Cultural II

Abstract

In an interview shortly after the release of the series Narcos, the Brazilian director and producer José Padilha proclaimed that, in contrast with Hollywood production, mediums like Netflix renewed the possibility of a kind of auteur cinema. Like the series’ initial inscription of the genre of magical realism, this claim would seem to be much more about branding than a return to the individual style of the classical auteur-director and his associated actors: the series has multiple directors and Padilha shares the role of executive producer with several others, so the already problematic notion of the auteur would seem to ring doubly false. Nevertheless, I will argue here that, precisely through the commodity logic of branding, both magical realism and Padilha’s auteur-function provide important vanishing mediators in Narcos. In the first season, “magical realism” works as a vanishing mediator between a lingering left populist aesthetics and the aesthetics of criminal populism embodied by Pablo Escobar (Wagner Moura). While a paradigmatic vanishing mediator for critical theory is the forgotten or repressed role played by extralegal violence in the transition from an aristocratic to a bourgeois order during the French Revolution, like Padilha’s films, Narcos depicts the potential returns of extralegal violence in contemporary Latin America through a dialectic between criminality and the militarized police. In Padilha’s transnational allegory of narco capitalism, though, criminal populism also risks turning over into the crime of populism, a view of politics that repeatedly relies on both the form and violence of this police logic.

Author

• Peter J Lehman, University of California/Los Angeles