Suprisingly Spiritual Films #1: “Passing Through” in Elite Squad
#1 : Passing Through in Elite Squad
By Simon Augustine
“When you pass through, no one can pin you down, no one can call you back.”
- Yung-An
In Rio de Janiero, the ghettos are ruled by two things: stunning poverty, and drug lords who offer potential escape from a pervasive life of want. These criminal bosses reign over the lives and economics of the ghetto with a grip so powerful it approaches a brand of free reign. As the narrator tells us at the outset of Jose Padilha’s Elite Squad, the most popular film of 2007 in Brazil, Rio de Janiero’s conventional police forces are increasingly ill-equipped to combat and control the drug lords because of a recent influx of high-performance automatic weapons into the hands of the outlaws. This advanced weaponry has created a kind of tipping point: police have lost an essential advantage that once weighed the power balance in their favor. As a consequence, out of futility and their own economic trouble, many, if not most police succumb to corruption.
One partial solution to this problem comes in the form of the Brazilian BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais), a unique police force trained to infiltrate and curtail the influence of the drug lords by means of highly-skilled tactical maneuvers. The members of the BOPE are also held to the highest ethical standard – “the Untouchables” of the Brazilian police force. And they match ethics with the power to back it up: like the Spartans in 300, each one has the aura of being worth a thousand regular policemen in combat, and they aggressively confront the drug lords with a viciousness that brooks no hesitation or doubt. The “Elite Squad” as the BOPE is known, holds cultural fascination in the same way that other highly-specialized, expertly trained military or police units do – special forces like SWAT, the NAVY Seals, Green Berets or even their ancient brethren, the Ninjas and Samurai of feudal Japan: a category of warriors possessing rare skills, who are esteemed and feared with an almost sacred reverence because their ranks are composed of men able to execute missions seemingly superhuman; men astonishing in their mastery of combat techniques beyond the reach of most others What is even more intriguing, however, is the question of how normal men become the elite; how Man is transformed into Superman. The answer is found in the training protocol used to prepare these men to exercise their seeming fearlessness.
This protocol has a self-contained, consistent logic to it: it is a deliberate process with a profound understanding of human psychology – and the way its limitations and its untapped powers can be manipulated for a specific goal. Essentially, the process consists of “breaking” the usual constraints and parameters of the Self, or conventional ego, through exposure to extreme situations intended to starve or expand or blast the senses to the point that they become overwhelmed. This “breakdown” is followed by a phase in which the Self is methodically remade: the new model may be a different version of the Self, a Self sublimated to an ultimate purpose, or an absence of self replaced by a higher state of consciousness or transcendent existence – whatever the case, however, it is fashioned in the image of both the modus operandi and raison d’etre of the group. These methods of psychological restructuring, in different variations, are used in the training and practice of groups as diverse as Zen Buddhists, Born Again Christians, religious cults, armies, corporations, and Communist and Fascist States.
A familiar case in point is training in the Marine Corps, itself an elite unit. Once a recruit enters boot camp, almost everything she or he encounters is meant to de-humanize her or him, so that a psychological organism with a strict function – that is, killing, invading, or defending against the designated enemy – can replace the conventional human self through first its deflation and then the restructuring of its psychological apparatus. (In religious cults, a variant of this type of training is known as “programming;” and two hard-to-find but worthwhile films from the early 80s – Ticket to Heaven and Split Image, graphically portray the “deprogramming” that a cult member must endure at the hands of family or friends trying to rescue them from the grip of the cult leader. Ostensibly, “deprogrammers” have psychological training geared to reversing the effects of brainwashing, group intimidation, and sensory deprivation/overload methods.) The demeaning shouts, the rigid order, the strenuous physical demands in the Corps are all used to break down personal barriers and individuality. As the saying goes, a recruit’s “soul belongs to God, but his ass belongs to the Corps.” It is an ambitious task to prepare a person to kill other human beings halfway across the world he or she does not even know the names of, and to make this possible the conventional, questioning self must be reformed by first, trauma, and then initiation into a new mindset – one of purpose and not reflection, deliberation or hesitation.
The first section of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket brilliantly shows how the Corps attempts to replace the normal human identity with one whose main expression is killing, and whose persona becomes inseparable from the tools of destruction, often to darkly comic effects (“this is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun” or “this is my rifle; there are many like it, but this one is mine”). The slow, sweet Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) experiences the “breakdown” phase at the hands of a particularly effective drill sergeant (R. Lee Ermey, once a drill sergeant in real life), and then i
n the devastating disillusionment that comes when his bunk mates beat him for making a mistake in training. But Pyle cannot submit his humanity in order to move past breakdown to the next phase; he resists the transformation by shooting the sadistic sergeant and then putting the gun he was ordered to fetishize in his own mouth and spraying his brains across a bathroom wall. If a human in normal circumstances needs emotional connection, tenderness, and reason to function and thrive, a marine prepared and deployed on a mission must in a sense reverse these expectations: to disconnect from other human beings, to deliver death instead of a humane response.
Perhaps the most legendary example of extreme training in the US military is that of Navy SEALS. In a transcendent form of college hazing, the “pledges” who aspire to become part of this elite squad must pass a final test after the bulk of their training is completed, in which they are kept awake for days with little food, thrown into simulated combat situations, screamed at and brutalized constantly, and with minimal sustenance or sleep perform unbelievably rigorous obstacles courses and physical feats. The slim percentage who pass the test seem to cross a mysterious threshold, by which normal human fear or pride or hesitance is relinquished; if they make it, on the other side, the surrender of human will is rewarded and replaced with seemingly superhuman capabilities. Because they have survived this rite of passage, the SEALS seem to access a steeliness and modes of execution beyond the merely human, and we regard them with a bit of awe, as if they virtually represent the creation of a different species of men, or mind. It is no accident that, rightly or wrongly, we regard the Zen master with the same awe, since the rites of passage he or she undergoes maintains a similar structure: a shedding of human will that allows the flourishing of broader, transcendent powers. The difference is that SEALS gain and possess these powers for the objective of invading impossible physical terrain by water and land, to accomplish the most demanding military operations conceivable in which lesser men are left behind; the Zen master’s terrain is that of the mind – she or he has conquered conventional human psychological responses in order to access a mind that has been freed from the bounds of the ego and can fully inhabit the present moment in a way most others cannot; as such, they develop the ability to touch other minds to help them glimpse freedom in the now. The trial by fire that burns away the individual imprint can be used for good or ill, destruction or liberation; it can be a training that serves an institution or philosophy, humanitarian cause or national purpose. (/It is interesting that modern twelve step programs emphasize a similar process of renouncing human will –i.e. “let go and let god;” while they sometimes disconcertedly resemble a cult, these groups at the same time help millions to be freed from the grip of alcoholism.)
Reminiscent of City of God and Amores Perros, two other violent and very popular Brazilian films, Elite Squad maintains an intensely frenetic pace throughout almost its entire length; like many action films coming out of South America in the last decade, it excels at creating a pulsing, electric atmosphere of immediacy, in this case not only in the battle scenes but in the emotionally traumatic after-effects of violence on both the criminals and police. The BOPE leader it centers upon, Captain Nascimento (played by Wagner Moura with amazing fierceness and commitment) has the demeanor of the invincible and the damned; we watch his marriage disintegrate and his hands shake as he gulps down pills to sustain his icy determination; we see remnants of a frightened man peek through the armor of the transformed and elite. At the same time, we follow the unfolding transformation of Andre ( Andre Ramiro) one of Nascimento’s new recruits, as he moves from a mild-mannered, bespectacled law student surrounded by leftist friends who despise the police, and some of whom are dealers, to a fearsome Elite Squad member who will not question the necessity of unflinching brutality in fighting the ghetto lords.
Elite Squad is composed roughly of three sections: the first in which we follow the path of Andre and another recruit as they are selected by leaders of the BOPE to replace them in the Elite Squad, the second in which we witness their harrowing preparation and training, and the third in which we see their training put into action as the new members of BOPE infiltrate a ghetto to avenge the death of one of their own at the hands of a drug dealer. The reputation of the Elite Squad, who number only 100 but seem to present more of a threat to the ghetto lords then the rest of the entire police force put together, is evident in the drug dealer’s mortal panic upon realizing he has killed one of them – he knows BOPE will not stop until they avenge their comrade and he is now tantamount to a dead man walking. The last “shot” of the film, in which Andre commits a stunning act of revenge against the singled-out dealer, signifies the completion of his movement from mere man to member of BOPE. It closes the argument over his identity and loyalty with stunning finality. Elite Squad has come under fire for its supposedly Fascist attitude towards law and order. But it is a shallow argument, since the film espouses no view but has the courage to show the moral complexity and interconnection of law enforcement, violent methods, criminals, and the desperation of the poor. Director Padilha cut his teeth on a documentary called Bus 174, a documentary with the same hot intensity as Elite Squad, about a Brazilian man from the ghetto who takes a city bus hostage to shock the public into seeing the plight and deprivation of poverty in his country. Padhila’s sympathy for that cause of the ghettos is evident in Bus 174, so his ambivalent portrait of BOPE’s unforgiving methods is by no means an endorsement. Rather, it is concerned with posing complex moral questions.
Although the climactic, hurtling death-search for the marked drug lord is electrifying, as the Elite Squad cuts a swath of single-minded destruction through the ghetto, the most absorbing section of the film is the penultimate one, showing how certain men are selected and prepared for this very type of mission. The process by which men become soldiers, whether of God or the BOPE, is inherently fascinating: a witch’s brew of sound and fury, torturous feats, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and indoctrination of macho codes or philosophic principles, or both. Elite Squad does an impressive job with it, graphically conveying in compact scenes how conventional boundaries of persona are peeled away, so that an iron core can be forged out of what lies naked beneath. Unlike the scenes with the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, in this training we realize there are no lines that will not be crossed in the ritual between student and teacher, there is no underlying ethical limit sponsoring participants with a safety net governing what can be done to them in the name of the institution. The goal – a few men worthy of Elite Squad – justifies any means of tutelage. At times it makes the SEALS training look downright civilized. And for this it all the more frightening.
The key moment in this sequence is a brief one and odd one: it arrives when Captain Nascimento spills food that looks like it came out of a dumpster on the grounds where the recruits are training, and they are forced to drop to their knees and scarf it up. One poor recruit enrages Moura, so he makes everyone stop eating and forces the recruit to try to finish off the rest of the food, which makes him vomit. Then it happens: Moura goes one step further and makes all the other men eat the vomited food up again. It is precisely acts like these in which men bear such transgression to normal or comfortable behavior, that a kind of release occurs – you feel the change in this dark and exhilarating act; before our eyes, men are changing into someone more – or less, than human. They are inculcating a level of numbness, of flintiness, that will later allow them to do inhuman things.
What are the spiritual implications of this technique? They arise in the same way we get the sense of an image in a photograph by looking at its negative. The same techniques used in Elite Squad’s training sequence, and similarly structured training protocols – rigorous physical challenges, sensory deprivation, exposure to extremes, violation of personal barriers and even concept of selfhood – are in some cases used in spiritual contexts to further spiritual maturation and insight into the nature of the relation between Self and reality. The asceticism and social isolation of a Carthusian monastery such as that documented in the recent film Into Great Silence, the rigorous meditation training and often aggressive teaching tactics used in a Zen monastery, the experimentation with isolation tanks (given surreal treatment by Ken Russell in Altered States) during the 1960’s in an attempt to let the mind’s productions arise in “zero gravity.” or use of peyote and mescaline in Native American cultures in both North and South America to open or expand consciousness or alter awareness, the sweat lodge of the Native Americans, flagellation in performances of the Stations of the Cross, advanced yoga, the whirling dervishes of Sufi mystics, the speaking in tongues in US Evangelical churches, ecstatic drumming and dancing in African religions, the physically rhythmic recitation of the Torah by Rabbis, Tantric sex as practiced in its original religious form – all of these use the same pattern of cracking open the conventional contours of the Self through highly specialized and sophisticated experiences designed to release and transform the mind.
Yet, what makes the crucial difference in determining whether a transgressive practice breaks the Self for destructive purposes or liberates one from the Self for constructive ones? Intention and function. In the marine Corps, or a cult, or a totalitarian state, the Self is replaced with a kind of larger representative Selfhood – a broader institutional organism – country, state, cult group – modeled upon on the individual ego in the sense that it has selfish goals and needs and desires and objectives to which the individual dedicates and sublimates her or himself. In a Buddhist monastery, where men and women shave their heads just as they might in the Marine Corps, the individual identity is questioned systematically in order to release human consciousness beyond the construction of the ego, ushering it into a transcendent state that is selfless and concerned with compassion. The first moves toward a extension of Self that deepens worldly power; the second reduces Self to a non-attachment that renounces worldly power.
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Posted by Lights! Editorial Staff
on Mar 3 2009 Filed under On The Marquee, Our Feature Presentation, Suprisingly Spiritual.
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