Why Aren’t You Watching - City Of God: The Fight Rages On?
The new series continues the story from the 2002 film with modern touches and criticisms.
In 2002, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s “City of God” was an international hit. Beginning the story with the Tender Trio and eventually shifting focus to Li'l Zé, Benny, and Rocket, the movie explores romance, ambition, and violence in a Brazilian favela. This sprawling and beautifully shot film was able to garner widespread critical acclaim.
This summer, HBO Max released the TV series “City of God: The Fight Rages On,” a spin-off of the movie that continues the story in the year the film was released. With the modern update, many of the actors reprise the roles of their original characters from the film, giving people a chance to see how the film's events affected the characters as they entered the new millennium. The series shows the women's agency in the favela and explores the gender dynamics lightly touched on in the movie. In the original film, women like Angelica, Berenice, Cinthia, and Marina are portrayed as objects of desire and serve to move the plot forward by being pursued, assaulted, or left tragically widowed by the main characters. These characters return in the new series, and we get a fuller picture of the women as people to great effect.
Roberta Rodrigues's portrayal of Berenice is that of a community pillar whose business helps provide a job for her boyfriend. Berenice works to stop her lover from replaying the patterns of crime she experienced in the original film, a key tension explored in the series. Cinthia, played by Sabrina Rosa, is a community mentor and neighborhood leader alongside Stringy, Rocket’s friend who is now running for office. The writers also introduce new characters like Jerusa, played by Andréia Horta, driven by an impulsive ambition, and Lígia, played by Eli Pereira, who pushes Rocket to take bolder steps as a journalist for justice.
The most interesting character addition is Rocket’s daughter, Leka, played by Luellem de Castro, a rapper who still lives in the City of God with whom our protagonist has a strained relationship. Leka’s lyrics explore the sexual agency of women and allow her an avenue to create an identity and earn resources outside of her father’s work. Her budding romance with a police officer in the second episode could be positioning her as being directly in tension with someone committed to changing things from inside the police force. Leka has a well-defined lens of right and wrong regarding exploiting people in the City Of God. It’s this understanding that leads to her confrontation with her father, who she accuses of selling “Black meat” to a white audience by publishing photos of the gang violence that fueled the movie and the series, spurring an explicit exploration of the complexity of Rocket’s role in the violence of the favela.
This is a particularly timely topic considering the role depictions of violence play in here in the United States. With sites like World Star Hip Hop regularly featuring videos of people being killed to the titillation of its audience, there’s a vital conversation to be had on the effect of what amounts to snuff films being sold for clicks. The proliferation of images being used to portray police violence, as in the case of Sonya Massey and Christine Lee and, more recently, the carnage in Gaza, also complicates this conversation.
The purpose of these images sits uncomfortably in the center of our discourse. Are they raising awareness, or are we becoming inured to the scenes of violence visited upon the suffering? One answer given in the series makes a direct connection to how the scenes of suffering pursued by the press feed into a political machinery of repression that only subjects the poor to more violence. Rocket’s photo of a young guitar player being shot in the back is the one that thrills his editors, who pass over the pictures of people helping each other to sell what he recognizes as “gold” to his middle-class audience. Immediately, this photo is seized upon by legislators calling for a crackdown on people in the favela. In this way, “The Fight Rages On” enters into a conversation with itself about the role of violence and Black death as a draw for prestige television and award show fodder.
I’m looking forward to the next four episodes and beyond exploring this dynamic further, with the series already being picked up for a second season by HBO.
I also wanted to share my Rap In Jazz playlist I put together last year when Andre 3000 was planning to release his flute album. I’ve been listening to BADBADNOTGOOD’s “Mid Spiral” album lately, and it’s gotten me into a jazzier space. I think the playlist has a nice flow, and I hope to share more playlists in this space moving forward.