Three Types of Murder in the City of God
I began this article with a simple goal in mind: Write something, anything, about one of my all-time favorite movies, City of God. An unexpected challenge then arose: There’s so much I love about this movie that I had a hard time narrowing it down to just one topic. For example, I could write you a whole article about the unusual narrative structure or the opening shot of the knife being sharpened against the stone. Hell, I could probably write you a whole book about the editing. However, in the end, I chose to write about the violence. Because that’s what we all need right now, right?
Though I’d bring City of God with me on a desert island, it’s a hard movie to recommend in certain situations. It tells the story of the escalation of gang violence in the Cidade de Deus (“City of God”) neighborhood of Rio in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and it has, shall we say, a rather high body count. Furthermore, despite all the murder and mayhem, the movie maintains an unexpectedly vibrant tone, which is another difficult concept to explain to those who already don’t have a stomach for violence. It’s one thing to watch a bloody movie about the poor and disenfranchised. It’s another thing to try to sell someone on the idea that City of God isn’t depressing. (Or at least not depressing in the traditional sense.)
However, I’d argue that the tone of City of God works so well because it does a great job of showing the audience that violence is only a part of what defines the city, and that it doesn’t treat murder like many an American crime movie. No death is pointless, and even the more blasé killings contribute to the bigger picture.
There’s a lot of nuance to each of the many murders we see in City of God. However, as you may have gathered from the title of this article, there are three types I want to highlight. After all, there’s a difference between how murder is portrayed in City of God and the way many films gleefully show you a Sylvester Stallone type butchering his way through a horde of unnamed goons. Let’s explore some of those differences, shall we?
Spoilers for City of God below. Also, as City of God has an astoundingly complex structure, if you haven’t seen the movie before, most of the plot descriptions will probably sound like gibberish. I’d watch the movie before reading if you haven’t already.
The Emotional Murders
These are the more traditional murders in City of God. They happen to the characters with whom the audience has spent the most time, or the characters with a more empathetic backstory. As such, the story sets these murders up for maximum emotional impact and they’re usually shot in such a way as to set them apart. Of course, all the slayings in City of God are tragic. But in the confines of this particular story, these are the ones that hit us the hardest.
The first emotional murder in City of God is the killing of Shaggy, one third of the Tender Trio. In the beginning of the film, the Tender Trio are introduced as three teenage robbers and good friends. While they’re not averse to a beating or two, they refrain from killing if they can avoid it. (A rule most of the gangsters we spend time with later don’t follow.) One night, the trio, along with Li’l Dice, a kid who hangs out with the gang, rob a motel. The Trio get out without murdering anyone, but everyone in the motel still meets a grizzly fate at the hands of Li’l Dice (we’ll get to this later), and thus they take the blame. As a result, the Trio become the most wanted criminals in the city.
After the robbery, the Trio split. Shaggy ends up finding Bernice, a young woman with a low opinion of the criminal lifestyle. The two eventually fall in love and plan to leave the City of God to pursue a peaceful life outside of Rio. Unfortunately, circumstances, of which we’ll get to a little later, conspire, and Shaggy is shot by the cops on the way to his new life.
Shaggy’s is not the first killing we’ve seen in the movie so far. It is, however, the first one framed as a tragedy. Shaggy was no saint, but he wasn’t a murderer. He was a kid who made some bad decisions, and he was on his way out. But Shaggy is also a poor kid in the slums, and on the word of a less than reputable source (which, again, we’ll get to later), the police have all the justification they need to shoot Shaggy on sight.
If the context around Shaggy’s murder weren’t rough enough, the way the killing is shot makes the heartbreak even worse. After Shaggy takes the first bullet, the camera lingers on Shaggy as he tries to run away. We know he’s doomed, but human emotions are not always governed by rationality, and if you’re watching the film for the first time, you may think to yourself that maybe, just maybe, Shaggy we’ll get away. Or perhaps you know that Shaggy’s already dead, and you’re touched by the poetic nature of how we’re going to watch him die running.
Either way, this is the first death we mourn. And it’s also the death that sets up much of the rest of the movie. The cop who Bernice shoots after Shaggy takes his bullet is the one person preventing his partner from going full-on corrupt. Eventually, his partner will cause much more suffering.
Our next emotional murder is that of Benny, Shaggy’s younger brother and arguably the most consequential death in the entire film.
Benny, as a kid, was Li’l Dice’s best friend, and he remains so when Li’l Dice grows up and starts going by Li’l Zé. As Zé rapidly takes over the city, Benny remains his partner in crime. But he also has a much more important function as that of Zé’s last connection to humanity. Benny stops many an unnecessary murder and he’s the only thing preventing Zé from going to war with Carrot, a rival drug dealer whom Zé constantly wants to kill so he can take his territory.
However, Benny’s priorities begin to shift. He begins to develop an eye for fashion and parties, as well as a loving relationship with Angélica. Soon enough, he becomes the most popular man in all the City of God. But he develops a distaste for the gangster life, and he and Angélica, just like Shaggy and Bernice, decide to leave. At Benny and Angélica’s massive farewell party, Zé practically begs him to stay, but Benny tells him that he has to do what’s best for him, and he’ll always be his friend. Zé doesn’t take it well, and he takes it even worse when Benny is accidentally shot with a bullet that was meant for him. Benny dies in Zé’s arms, and from here on in, there’ll be no more peace in the city.
Much of what was said about Shaggy could be said about his younger brother. Unlike Shaggy, Benny has killed and he’s certainly been an accomplice. (It’s a detail you might not catch, but you can see Benny shoot people in an earlier montage.) However, City of God is a story about the escalation of crime and violence as a whole. The city was never entirely safe, but up to this point, it’s never devolved into an all out war-zone, and that’s thanks in large part to Benny holding Li’l Zé back. Without Benny’s presence, Li’l Zé would’ve gone to war with Carrot ages ago. Benny’s far from a saint, but he was a keeper of peace, and that’s not nothing.
Whether Benny earned your sympathy is up to you. (Personally, I go back and forth.) But the heartbreak is more than one person dying. It’s the fact that we now know that on some level, the city is doomed, because now, one way or another, there’s nothing stopping an all-out bloodbath. Nobody is safe anymore. Not even the innocent.
The omens are also present in how the scene is filmed. Shaggy’s death was shot slow, in an almost romanticized fashion. We know where he is and where the bullets come from. Benny’s death is chaos. Benny and Zé are in the middle of a crowded dance floor. As the music shifts from Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” to Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Hold Back The Water,” the DJ turns on the strobes, and we can barely tell what’s going on. We see Blacky (yes, that’s the character’s name) approach, we hear a gun shot, we see Benny hit the ground, we see the crowd disperse, and we see how Zé and Angélica take it. But the strobes remain, and the whole sequence is intentionally disorienting.
We mourn the loss of Benny. (Or we don’t.) But even if you can’t tell where the story is going, there’s a feeling that accompanies the visual disorder: Very bad things are afoot.
Our final examples are the deaths of Knockout Ned and his young murderer, Otto.
Shaggy and Benny entered the criminal life partially out of necessity, but mostly out of greed and want. Knockout Ned joined for revenge. Ned has had less than friendly encounters with Zé before, and this culminates in a particularly gruesome moment where Zé, literally on his way to kill Carrot, rapes Ned’s girlfriend and kills his brother. Ned picks up a gun, joins up with Carrot, and the war is on.
As much as Ned tries to avoid other criminal elements that have nothing to do with killing Zé, he ends up falling deeper and deeper into the life. He helps rob stores. He gives out guns indiscriminately. He kills a security guard during a bank job. At the end of the movie, Ned and Carrot launch a final assault on Zé where dozens of people are killed. In the midst of the assault, Ned tries to nurse Otto, a kid in his gang who just got shot by Zé. However, Otto shoots Ned in the back, and it’s revealed that Otto infiltrated Carrot and Ned’s gang to kill Ned after he murdered his father, the security guard at the bank.
Ned is presented to us as a righteous man who hates violence. We meet him for the first time about halfway through the movie, and he tells our narrator Rocket to get out of the city to avoid the bloodshed and the gangs. But his desire for revenge overcomes him, and Ned travels further down the path of violence than most of the characters we’ve met so far. The tragedy isn’t just how he ended up dead in the streets, but that his murderer’s cause was just as seemingly righteous as his own.
Thus when the sound drowns out while Ned’s being shot, we’re not left with a sense of hope that maybe he’ll make it like Shaggy, nor are we met with the dread that comes in the wake of Benny’s death. We’re left with a deliberate emptiness while we contemplate the tragedy of how seemingly inevitable it was that a man who was essentially a hippy ended up a killer, and he would up being murdered by a dying child whose demise was the result of a war Ned started when he first picked up his gun.
The moment you enter the gangster life in Rio, you’re doomed. There is no escape, even if the reasons you entered are ultimately sympathetic. Ned’s reasons may have been, but by showing the audience the story of Otto right before he shoots Ned, we know Ned was doomed before he fired his first round in the assault. So when all the audio mutes, it hits us with ultimate impact that this once honorable man is going to die in the street with no one and nothing. No matter his actions, it’s hard not to feel something.
The “Casual” Murders
The emotional murders are designed to pull our heartstrings. The “casual” murders don’t hit us as hard. In many ways, these are the kinds of murder that have more in common with American action movies. These are the deaths of a lot of nameless characters, or in this case, of characters we only barely know by name or characters we know quite well but whose deaths are met with little fanfare in order to make a point.
Though these murders may not break our hearts, I’d argue that they pull their weight on a subtextual level. These murders may not make a big impression on first glance, but pack a wallop if we think about how these killings are set up in the story or the way they’re filmed. They’re intellectual murders, so to speak.
Our first example of a casual murder is the death of Aristotle, a friend of future crime boss and enemy of Li’l Zé, Carrot.
In the beginning of act two, we’re treated to “The Story of the Apartment.” On the surface, it’s a montage where we learn about the apartment our narrator Rocket finds himself standing in when he’s buying weed for Angélica. In reality, it’s the story of the rise of Carrot.
Back in the day, a woman named Dona Zelia started selling drugs out of the apartment. She also started trading drugs for sex with the local men. One of these men was Big Boy, who took the apartment from her by force to sell the drugs himself. He used the local kids as dealers, which included Blacky and Carrot. Carrot rose fast, and eventually became a manager. One day, he gave his good friend Aristotle, whose family gave Carrot a home, a package so he could raise the money for his wife’s surgery. Aristotle didn’t pay what he owed, so Big Boy made Carrot kill his friend under threat of death himself. Carrot wanted revenge, but Big Boy was arrested and would eventually die in prison. Carrot took control of Big Boy’s empire, and gave the apartment to Blacky.
Aristotle is not vital to the audience’s understanding of the story. He’s on screen for about thirty seconds, all of which is contained in the structure of a montage, and if we want to get into the nitty gritty, he could’ve been cut out of the movie and the story would’ve been relatively unaffected. This murder is essentially presented to the audience as mere background information.
That said, I think Aristotle’s murder is vital in giving us a complete picture, one we may not have known we’d have wanted if we didn’t have it. From a narrative standpoint, Aristotle’s death is only necessary in telling the story of Carrot. However, at least for me, this murder made me wonder: Carrot wields more power than most, but he’s hardly the only drug dealer in the city. How many other loved ones or friends had to die so that someone could advance or save their own skin?
Death is such a common occurrence in this world that it could be part of just about anyone’s story, whether they’re nobodies in the criminal world or they’re sitting on the throne.
And there’s a deeper and arguably more tragic element to the death of Aristotle: Carrot murdered a man he says is practically his brother and in the grand scheme of his story, it means almost nothing. Sure, it tells the audience that Carrot can be ruthless. And it was almost the impetus for righteous revenge against Big Boy. But Big Boy was already destined for death in prison. Effectively, it’s just another thing that happened.
We don’t know much about Aristotle, but his family gave Carrot a home and he was trying to raise money for his wife’s surgery. We can assume that there’s at least some level of humanity in this man. But in the end, it didn’t matter. You enter the criminal world in Rio, it doesn’t matter if you’re a good guy who just wants to sell some dime bags. You’re doomed.
Our next example of casual murder is that of Tuba, the perpetually annoying foot soldier in Li’l Zé’s empire.
Tuba is a character that pops up every now and then for the sole purpose of irritating Li’l Zé. One of his earliest appearances is at Zé’s eighteenth birthday party, when he was still going by Li’l Dice. Right as Zé is about to present Benny with his plan to rapidly take over the drug trade in the city, Tuba blusters into Dice’s path, loudly wishes him a happy birthday, and accidentally spits a bunch of food into Dice’s face. Dice shoves him and tells him to go away.
This is how most of Zé’s interactions with Tuba go. Zé has other things on his mind, Tuba shows up and annoys him, and Zé assaults him and tells him to fuck off. It’s either that, or Zé’s just generally making Tuba his whipping boy and insulting him. This cycle continues until the night Zé earns the wrath of Knockout Ned, who sets off the war by killing one of Zé’s men and shooting Tuba in the arm. You’d figure that be enough to shut Tuba up, but after the attack, Zé’s in no mood to entertain, and he shoots Tuba dead for talking too much.
So what did we learn from Tuba’s death? Unlike Carrot being forced to kill Aristotle, there’s no sense of Shakespearian tragedy. Tuba was a more-than-willing accomplice in Zé’s empire who never showed any signs of remorse or desire to leave the life behind him. He’s almost comic relief, his death means nothing from a narrative perspective, and his inherent disposability is part of the reason he’s funny.
But a little bit of context is important.
In the previous section, we talked about the sense of dread we feel after Benny’s death. Indeed, before Benny’s murder, every act of violence we saw at least had a reason. We know that Shaggy dies because he’s blamed for the motel murders. We watch a montage of Zé and his soldiers kill the other crime bosses because we’re learning how Zé came to be the boss.
After Benny’s death, Zé’s truly free to do as he pleases. This is the nightmare scenario for the citizens of the City of God, and Tuba’s death represents how indiscriminate the violence is about to become. Now we’re in a world where you can be killed for being annoying.
But it also represents just how far things are about to spiral out of control. The war between Zé and Knockout Ned (as well as Ned’s partner Carrot) vastly accelerates the flow of guns into the city, and as a result, the violence becomes much more arbitrary. Now if you need a gun for any reason, no matter how old you are, you will be happily supplied with one by either Zé or Carrot. Tuba was just the start.
Our final example of a casual murder is the death of Tiago, Angélica’s ex-boyfriend, former beach bum, drug addict, and finally, foot soldier for Li’l Zé.
Unlike Aristotle and Tuba, we’ve spent a substantial amount of time with Tiago. We first meet him on the beach, where he’s dating Angélica, much to the chagrin of Rocket. It doesn’t take long to spot some red flags as one of the first things out of Tiago’s mouth is his glowing endorsement of cocaine. Tiago ends up befriending Benny, who tasks him with buying all his new clothes and completing his transformation into the coolest guy in the city. However, when you’re around drug dealers, you’re also around drugs, and after Tiago and Angélica break up, Tiago becomes a full blown junky. Eventually, he joins up with Li’l Zé’s gang to get more drugs and meets his fate in the final shoot-out when he takes a bullet in the head from Knockout Ned. (Specifically, he’s shot trying to drive Zé away from the gunfire in a stolen gas truck, mirroring the opening robbery by the Tender Trio.)
Of course, the narrative framing of Tiago’s death is tragic enough. In a certain sense Tiago’s life is almost worth its own movie, as the tale of how a hippy beach kid descends into the life of a gangster has a built in sense of irony and tragedy.
However, the reason I want to call attention to this particular death is how it’s shot and how the film handles the aftermath.
City of God ends with a final shoot-out between team Li’l Zé and team Knockout Ned/Carrot. The shoot-out takes up most of the final fifteen minutes of the movie, and it’s an incredible execution of organized disorder. It’s shot in a way that you generally know where everyone is and what’s happening, but only if you’re paying attention. (And even if you aren’t, information is provided in such a way that you know what’s happening anyway.) In the midst of the shoot-out, Zé and Tiago steal the gas truck. If you’re not paying attention, it’s entirely possible to not notice the detail that Tiago is the one driving. Granted, it’s a difficult detail to miss, but it is possible, particularly since most of the visual emphasis goes to Zé. As they drive down the road, Ned emerges from cover and shoots Tiago. Zé takes the wheel and shoots Otto, thus dooming Ned in the process.
The editing in this sequence is incredibly fast, and despite the significance of Tiago as a character, we linger on him just enough to process the information before Zé takes over the frame. Then we cut away, and while we get the occasional quick shot of Tiago’s corpse, we never stay on the shot for more than a second or two, and even in those shots, Tiago is never the emphasis.
This is a character we’ve spent a sizable percentage of the movie with, and he’s killed off like it’s nothing. More importantly, the film never grieves his loss. Granted, the movie never goes particularly far out of its way to make you feel for him. In fact, he’s introduced as kind of/sort of/not really villain. But he’s never advances to the role of full-blown antagonist either, and on paper, he’s not a “bad guy” in the same sense as Li’l Zé. Thus, if you take into account his downfall, on some level he has our sympathy. Or at least we feel something for him.
Yet he dies like many of the nameless soldiers, and his death is filmed as such.
The Jarring Murders
When it comes to City of God, some murders are meant to break our hearts, and some are meant to frame the violence in a new angle, provided we the audience are willing to engage. As we’ve discussed, City of God has a high body count. (One source says that the film’s body count is sixty. I haven’t gone through and counted myself, but that sounds about right.) Of course, it’s not easy to classify each and every murder, but most of them fall in between the two categories we’ve discussed so far, and the more prominent killings left are designed to knock the audience off balance.
Action movies, provided they’re effective, have a way of lulling us into accepting often ridiculous amounts of brutality and bloodshed. We’re presented with worlds where, say, a hitman can mow down men by the dozens, and we the audience never question it. (Not knocking it by the way. You want to watch John Wick? Let’s watch John Wick.) Most of City of God has the same effect. But sometimes, it wants us to realize that what we’re seeing is far from ordinary, and there’s something eerie about the fact that we take it at face value. That’s why some of the murders in the film are designed to unsettle us. To punish us for our complacency. To remind the audience, “No, this is actually pretty fucked up.”
The first of these jarring murders are the killings at the Motel Miami. This is the location of the robbery that puts the Tender Trio on the map, for better and, mostly, for worse. The robbery itself goes pretty smoothly. Li’l Dice stands watch with instructions to shoot a window if the cops show up while the Trio go into the motel. They tie up the staff, rob all the guests and the motel itself, and make the occasional joke at the expense of the copulating patrons. However, Dice shoots a window, and the Trio flee in a car, leaving Dice behind because they hear gunfire and assume the cops got him.
The Trio never a fire a single bullet. Yet once they leave, we’re shown these slow tracking shots of the now dead motel staff and guests, leaving the audience to wonder what the hell happened.
(Apologies for the lack of subtitles in this video. It’s the only one I could find. This video includes them fleeing, the the shots of the bodies, and then their escape. It also includes the introduction of a character we’ll be talking about later.)
The motel murders happen around thirteen minutes into the film. Every scene in those thirteen minutes have, so far, provided nothing but a sense of boundless energy. We’re robbing gas trucks, we’re running around the favela, we’re jumping back in time, we’re all over the place. And even when we’re watching crimes, there’s an infectious restlessness to it.
Then we track across those bodies, and the illusion is shattered. Now we know how bad things can get in this world.
The motel killings are the first murders we see in City of God, and they provide a chilling tone and some bad omens. This won’t be the last time we watch slow silent shots of dead bodies piling up, particularly in the coming war between Li’l Zé and Knockout Ned. And the dead in the later portions will include children and other innocents.
To a certain extent, this is a point of no return for the movie. We’ll eventually learn that all these people were killed by Li’l Dice, a young boy. Given the fate of Shaggy and the Trio, it’s not hard to guess that Li’l Dice will meet a similar fate when he inflicts even more chaos onto the city.
Our second of these uncomfortable murders is the death of Shorty’s Wife, the unfortunately unnamed wife of, as you may have guessed, Shorty, the town snitch who plays a role in the unravelling of the Tender Trio.
After the motel murders, fate puts the Tender Trio on separate paths. Shaggy finds Bernice. Clipper, the least talkative member of the Trio, has a vision while hiding from the cops in the woods and eventually joins the church, never to be heard from again. (Hey, maybe you can escape after all!) Goose, Rocket’s brother, goes to work for his father as a fishmonger. However, Goose starts sleeping with Shorty’s Wife, causing Shorty to brutally murder her with a shovel when he catches them in the act.
(Apologies for the poor quality of the video. I believe it’s an Italian dub and it doesn’t have subtitles. But it’s the best I could find. Basically, Shorty watches Goose hit on his wife, Shorty’s Wife talks with her friend about a fun thing you can do in bed with a banana, she does it with Goose, and then Shorty catches them.)
Murder in City of God is, relatively speaking, a straightforward affair. There are only two murders that aren’t committed with a gun (at least I think that’s the case), and the other non-gun murder is that of Blacky’s girlfriend, whom Blacky beats to death offscreen so he could “avenge his honor” a little over halfway through the film.
In other words, Shorty’s Wife is the only killing that indulges in any grim serial killer style of murder. It’s quick, it’s unexpected, and it becomes even more off-putting once we see how Shorty attempts to get rid of the body.
There’s something about burying a body in the ground literally beneath the bed that weirds me out.
All of this is to say nothing of how the scene is actually shot and put together. We don’t actually see the death on screen, but the brutality is more than made up for, at least for me, by the audio of the impact of the shovel. We hear it multiple times, and each time is a little bit more stomach churning. It may not be the most graphic murder in the film, but it might be the one we feel the most on a physical level because it allows our mind to fill in the blanks.
Much like the death of Aristotle, it’s only a tiny fragment in the patchwork of the story. But it has massive consequences. As Shorty is being arrested, he sees Shaggy trying to escape with Bernice, and identifies him as one of the robbers. In a sense, this is the murder that also dooms Shaggy.
Our final jarring murder is the incident involving The Runts.
Part of why Li’l Zé keeps control of the city for such a lengthy period of time, besides the presence of Benny, is that Li’l Zé maintains a strict zero crime policy in the slums. (Or at least for crime he doesn’t control.) Murder brings attention. Robberies bring attention. Attention means business stops, which means money doesn’t come in. Thus if you commit crimes in the City of God, you have to face Li’l Zé. Nobody’s stupid enough to mess with Zé, and everybody understands the message.
Except The Runts. The Runts are a group of little kids who regularly roam the streets of the city, causing mayhem and robbing stores everywhere they roam. On their first introduction, they’re relatively harmless. They don’t have guns and they commit most of their robberies by throwing things at the shopkeepers and running away with their collective junk. Compared to Zé, they’re a mere nuisance. But their antics bring attention, and Carrot refuses to do anything about them. So Zé decides to handle things his own way.
Fun story: In my freshman year screenwriting class in college, we all had to pick a movie and make a chart of its structure, and everyone had to watch each others movies to prepare for the presentations. I picked City of God. (At the time, I thought I was being clever because of the way the story is divided into chapters. Little did I know that I created a nightmare for myself.) I showed the movie to some friends. It had been a while since I’d seen it, and for whatever reason, I had completely forgotten about this scene. Then we got to this scene, and a feeling of dread consumed me because I was worried that I had inadvertently traumatized my whole class.
Not everyone has a stomach for cinematic violence. Personally, there’s always something in the back of my mind that knows it’s fake. But some stuff gets to me, and this scene is one of them.
It’s not hard to figure out why. After all, it’s a scene of a group of men torturing two very young children, than having another child murder one of them, and it’s shot in an intentionally claustrophobic manner designed to hit you in the gut. You don’t need me to explain what makes this particular scene uncomfortable.
However, let’s ask ourselves a question: Does City of God have a protagonist? If so, who is it? Is it Rocket? Personally, I’d say no. True, he’s our narrator, and equally as true, he’s one of the few characters who never descends into the criminal underworld. (Though there is a section where he tries, albeit haphazardly.) However, Rocket doesn’t really have an arc, and the events in his life are rarely the result of his own decisions but rather the changing circumstances around him.
I don’t personally think City of God has a protagonist. In fact, I don’t think this is a movie that deals with “good” guys and “bad” guys in the traditional sense. It’s an ensemble film where everyone’s actions effect one another, and the only real difference is that there are those in the slum who have power and those who don’t.
However, could an argument be made for Li’l Zé? He goes from a poor kid, to a kingpin, to losing his best friend, to dead in an alley. There’s an arc there. One that’s not entirely unlike other gangster movies like Scarface. More importantly, his decisions are the most consequential in the story. He kills the people in the motel. As a result, the Tender Trio ends and Shaggy (and Goose) wind up dead. He kills most of the other drug bosses. As a result, he becomes the most powerful man in the city. He rapes Ned’s girlfriend and kills his brother. As a result, the City of God plunges into war and it costs him his life.
Characters who make decisions and act on them, who drive the story and keep the momentum going forward, earn something from the audience. It may not be sympathy, but we want to see what they do next. In Zé’s case, we may not be rooting for his success. He is, to put it mildly, a shit human being. However, for the vast majority of the film, he’s not exactly acting against an easily identifiable protagonist. Granted, I’m focusing on the technical definition of things a little too much, but my point is that for the first half of the movie, I don’t think it’s as easy to call him an “antagonist” as you may think it is.
Then this scene happens, and the brutality of it sends a clear message: Zé has to go.
Now who’ll be our knight? It’s certainly not Rocket. In fact, I’d argue at this point that if we want anything from him, it’s for Rocket to succeed as a photographer and leave the Cidade de Deus behind him forever. How about Ned? Nobody has a more righteous claim to Zé’s life than Ned. However, our sympathies towards Ned eventually falter as he becomes complicit in the extreme escalation of violence in the city. Is it the other Runts? They also have a claim, but then we’d be rooting for a group of young boys to commit murder.
There is no easy answer, but we know there’s a limit. We know that there are acts heinous enough to provoke a sense of justice. Men like Zé will always get what’s coming. Even if it takes years.
But it’s strongly hinted that The Runts will grow up to become the Comando Vermelho. Maybe the Runts will do things just like Zé. Maybe the cycle can only repeat itself. As we learn later, the party selling the guns to Zé and Ned’s gang is the same corrupt cop from Shaggy’s killing. Maybe so long as there’s a system where corrupt cops can profit off of kids in the slum shooting each other, nothing will ever change.
