In 2010 Brazil will hold presidential elections. After Lula’s two mandates, PT is trying to continue in power through the candidature of Dilma Rousseff. While we all wait for the official campaigns to start, the two main candidates do their best to turn construction sites and syndicate meetings into their own unofficial candidature platforms - newspapers and the media in general are also helping out, of course.

But around all the in-between-the-lines discussions between pre-candidates, one particular event seemed to spring to the foreground and take the limelight, just before the actual pre-candidatures began. It was the film about Lula’s life, Lula, the Son of Brazil (2009) which was released on the 1st of January.

Though no doubt an important film - which had to be made at some point - the film’s release date and the fact that it was financed with private funds (clearly showing a concern with dispelling the suspicion that it could be a piece of publicity for the PT) tend to show that the movie had very much a purpose to serve within Brazil’s political scenery.

All of that is fine. The more clear the film’s purpose, the more political use - for worse but also for good - it can have. But the attempt to cover up its possible relation to the PT was shown not only in the manner the film was promoted, but also in the content of the film. It is also known that the film was adapted from an authorized biography and that the producers of the film met with the president to get his consent. So the film’s position is in some ways supported by the image the government wants to display of its leader.

The film’s director, Fábio Barreto, answered the questions of what was his political position, and of how did it influence the movie, by saying that he just wanted to show “Lula, the man”, the human being. He justified it by saying that because he wanted to show the human side of Lula, he chose to tell the story only from his childhood to his syndicalist years - and not adventure into the PT formation or anything after that.

The “humanization” discourse quickly finds its purpose if one attentively watches the film.

Lula, the human being, is a man who speaks to his fellow workers not of revolution and overthrowing power, but of working together with the factory businessman to create a better future. Lula, the man behind the legend, is a caring husband, who preaches about better work conditions for the working class, but in no way comes close to touching the “abstract” worries of changing how the actual system works.

It was with some surprise - for the unaware, at least - that the brazilians realized that Lula’s government was turning out to be much more conservative than PT's previous government programs could imply. Setting aside the many reasons for this adjustment of political posture, the fact is that a certain discourse had to be reviewed now that Lula occupied a new position in Brazil’s political panorama.

What Lula, the Son of Brazil tried to accomplish is exactly that: to re-inscribe back into Lula’s history how he had always been the neo-liberal president he turned out to be. This is what is called ‘humanization’ in the arts: To immerse the character so deeply in the capitalist ideology that his story in the world is no longer the site of the struggle of the Idea, but could only have it as the natural background over which the story develops, confusing the capitalist premisses with the very core of humanity.

Robin Hood didn’t run for prime minister in Britain’s recent elections, but this only serves to emphasize that Ridley Scott’s film contributes to a much broader type of propaganda.

Robin Hood (2010) was actually supposed to be called ‘Nottingham’, because the original script was deeply focused on Robin Hood the man, not the legend - actually, he was so human that he wasn’t even the main character of the film, the Sheriff was! There was such a focus on humanizing him that the studios realized that people wouldn’t probably know the film was about Robin Hood if that wasn’t spelled out in the title. So they went back to the ‘legendary’ name.

The film starts while Robin Longstride is still a faithful soldier of King Richard the Lionheart - “honest and brave...and naive”, in the words of the King - then, after he tells the King that his Crusades are corrupted, promoting the massacre of uncountable innocent lives, the King dies in battle and Robin flees back to England.

In the meantime, the French plan an ambush to murder the (already dead) King, killing other english soldiers instead. Amongst their possessions was the british crown, which was on its way back to England. Robin and a couple of other renegade soldiers, who witnessed the ambush, manage to steal the crown back and return to England under the pretense of being the actual soldiers supposed to bring the crown.

Under a false name, Robin ends up in Nottingham, meeting the (now ex-)wife and father of the man whose name he is using as an alias. He is there fulfilling a promise he made to the dying man, of returning his sword to his father. The father, Sir Walter Loxley, is an old, blind and slightly demented land Lord. His land is extremely poor and he doesn’t have the money to pay his taxes. In the role of the strong minded hysteric who does the job the men are not capable of, is Cate Blanchett’s character, Marion, his daughter.

After the ‘Lionheart’ King, the figure of the brave King, we get this second figure of the Master, the old and blind man - a ridiculous obverse to King Richard, who was so full of life and ambition that his mere appearance as a tired aging man could only come minutes before he was killed in battle. This second King, on the other hand, is pure decadence.

Robin is invited to stay with the Loxleys under the disguise of being Sir Walter’s son (and Marion’s husband), to help them avoiding higher taxing from the government. Until here, we are within traditional legendary tales of Hollywood - we get the idealized version of the hero, with just some ‘grittier’ complements, to make “the movie experience” more exciting.

The third figure of the King, the recently promoted Prince John, is maybe the most interesting: being the villain - the arrogant, false and immature man who unbalances the plot - he is so full of defects that he becomes almost too human for a humanized character. But this is not apparent in the film, since all he needs to do is to incite Robin Longstride to correct the mistakes that he is about to make.

So this third caricatural King demands that more and more money be collected from the poor. The second King, dying and very poor himself, cannot obey the majesties’ request - and it is left for Robin to do something about it, in the name of the first King, who died as to become a beacon of honor and decency.

The main twist of the film comes right at this junction. After learning of the terrible situation of the men living in Sir Loxley’s land (and also after flirting enough with his daughter to suppose that what she wants is a noble and courageous lover) Robin decides to steal back from the church the grains that they have been collecting from the workers in the name of God. He ambushes the church helpers in the middle of the night, takes the grain back and uses it to seed the lifeless ground of the village. It all seemed like the known story of Robin Wood...

...But the morning after, when he sits down for breakfast with sir Loxley, under the loving eyes of Marion (Cate Blanchett’s not so loving eyes), the dying father confesses to him that he knew Robin’s father.

He then goes on to tell the story of how Robin had been brought up by his father who was already fighting for the poor. The sword he had promised to bring back to sir Loxley, for example, beard some engravings that spelled “Rise and rise again, until lamb become lions”. Robin thought he recognized those words, but only when sir Loxley tells the story of his childhood can he then remember that his father was the one who wrote them first, on a big stone by their village’s main monument.

Not only that, his father also had more ambitious political ideas, so he wrote down as some sort of bill of rights (which coincidentally, sir Loxley has in his possession!), stating the basic rights that all free men should have. Like the right of private property, for example.

Abruptly, the film develops a much broader scope, and we find ourselves in the midst of a battle between England and France. The French had been charging even higher taxes from the british farmers, disguised as english troops, trying to revolt the people against the King. The new and unpopular King was having a hard time controlling the masses and France wanted to use this fragility as an advantage in battle.

Who comes then, holding in his hand a document that could unite all the land in the name of fairness of exchange and property rights? Robin Longstride.

Actually, in the film he is called ‘Robin Hood’ only once or twice, but actually as ‘the so called Robin from the Hood’ (was this the filmmakers’ attempt to make the character more identifiable for the people living in the Bronx or is it just me?)

From the Lionheart King - the very image (though we don’t actually see it) of the Master that is alive and breathing, whose life is not only the life of the master, but the mastery of life - then to the dying King - still noble and good, but unable to sustain himself in the rising of this new world - and finally to the yuppie King John, who cannot be taken as a solid figure of identification, an arrogant man who does not care for his people. It is this figure that finally opens the space for the act of Robin, who offers something everyone can identify to instead.

After King John promises to make effective the document that Robin brought, everyone goes to war and defeat the French. After the war, of course, King John takes his word back, burns the document and curses Robin, calling him a traitor. But the damage is done. The King had to renounce the document, so that it could be implemented independently from the visible figure of the master.

Robin ‘from the Hood’ will now continue - after all, he didn’t know it, but he had always been - fighting for the rights of every man to be his own little master. It goes without saying that someone else will have to play the little slave, but this is not Robin Longstride’s concern.

Let us rejoice over this short dialog that exemplifies really well the position of our hero - this is the catch phrase that turns all the film around, uniting all the people before the war:

“Prince John: [sarcastically] Would every man have a castle?
Robin Longstride: In England, every man's home is his castle.”

Notice how this can be read in two ways: it could mean that a man has all he needs in his small share of land, that a man treated with respect will not extend his ambitious beyond the realm of what he needs - or it can mean that every man has the right to treat his little share of land with the same ruthless exploiting methods that the feudal castle previously detained only for itself.

Robin Hood was supposed (by us, at least) to give back to the poor what already belonged to them, but this incarnation of the hero - not the legend, but the human being - actually gives to the poor that which belonged to the rich in the most radical sense: the universalized Idea of usury! In the same way that his ‘every man’s home is his castle’ slogan brings some very dark overtones, doesn’t the same apply for ‘until lambs become lions’?

And all this politically charged developments are done in the name of a natural background, something which had always been there, and so tangled up with the notion of humanity itself, that Robin’s path into accepting his father’s heritage is confused with the acceptance and universalization of the capitalist principles.

In 2009, Alain Badiou published a book called The meaning of Sarkozy, about what it meant to elect Nicolas Sarkozy as the new president of France. After wards, in an interview, Sarkozy accused Badiou of not being a humanist. Badiou, as a good student of Althusser’s anti-humanism, answered brilliantly by saying that of course he was not a humanist - he had no idea of what a criteria for humanity could be - but he knew of a certain discourse which was very much based on a criteria for what a man is (and is not.): fascism.

What Badiou’s answer reminds us of, is that the humanization of an otherwise legendary character does not serve the purpose of unveiling how he ‘actually is/was’, with his faults and imperfections. Inscribed in the choice of what imperfections should be portrayed in the film is a very particular choice of what is universal to man. This way, under the pretense of ‘showing man as he is’, one naturalizes the criteria of what is a man in the first place. And the more ‘natural’ it is, the more ‘righteous’ it is to equate giving people dignity and a propriety, for example.

Hegel repeatedly - and enthusiastically - emphasized to us throughout his oeuvre how the Spirit is not beyond the world, like a God overseeing the world from a far, but goes through its different stages in its appearance in the world. What this means is that changes to the application of ideas are changes in the Idea itself - if a man is fighting for a new mode of organizing society, he is not doing so against the background of an immutable Idea of society, he is struggling with the actual Idea. A real change in the world is a break so deep within the realm of the Idea, that one can’t even think about the concept in the same way. (To make this point clear, please refer to this brilliant explanation by Zizek)

This is the true reason behind apparently ‘flat’ characters - they are not legendary and flawless because we idealize them, but because they bring the Idea to the world, and re-invent it in its own ground. They do not rise, they bring the Idea down to appearance. Why would we have an use for such characters, if not because of this? There is no (apparent) use for flawed, psychologically justified characters besides justifying the very Idea through which they are defined as flawed. This is the true way of idealizing a character, of rising him to the level of an immutable Idea or God, which is ‘naturally’ above us, waiting for our acceptance of its inevitability.

Here we can remember Bertold Brecht, who showed us how radical concern with the structure of social relations and the flatness of men reduced to their “smallest greatness” can coincide in dramatic representations: To show a man how he really is, is to show him as totally artificial and let him construct through his work his own essence.

Focusing again on Robin Hood, we can see that the reference to Hegel is very fruitful, because the same process we see happening with Robin happens to the passage of Spirit in english society as a whole. It is not only Robin who accepts who he was all along, but the line of the three Kings - the Brave, the Blind and the Wall Street’s Charlie Sheen - follows a movement which answers to the same structure.

In this film, the passage from feudalism to capitalism is justified by the simple removal of identification with the King: we fully identify with the first, with the man and with the function, then we can only identify with the function in the second one, then we can’t identify with any of it in the third one. And then the new law can be implemented as if by no authority.

On the passage from feudalism to capitalism, Zizek writes:

“The passage from feudalism to Protestantism is not of the same nature as the passage from Protestantism to bourgeois everyday life with its privatized religion. The first passage concerns "content" (under the guise of preserving the religious form or even its strengthening, the crucial shift - the assertion of the ascetic acquisitive stance in economic activity as the domain of manifestation of Grace - takes place), whereas the second passage is a purely formal act, a change of form (as soon as Protestantism is realized as the ascetic acquisitive stance, it can fall off as form).” (For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political factor)

We could read the passage from the second to the third King in the same way: it is not a matter of content anymore - it is obvious that the King cannot live up to his function, but what was a matter of failure of the content in the sir Loxley’s case, becomes the very form of the function of the King for King John.

Lula’s government in Brazil - specially taking in consideration the film which ‘crowns’ it - can also serve as a good example of the effects of this ‘humanization’ of the leader. From the syndicalist who spoke in the name of the People, Lula cannot speak in the name of no one anymore - he doesn’t want to function as the One of the people, which could have many serious consequences for brazilian politics as it is, because he is just one of the people. And his bio-pic comes to attest to this. He is a ‘surviver’, he’s rose from the bottom up to presidency - he is the perfect neo-liberal now, he is the one who can say “I’ve seen it. This is the only way. The natural way.”

Jacques Lacan, in his The other side of psychoanalysis (1969) talks in great details of this passage from the ‘old’ master’s discourse to the ‘new’ one, a discourse that now does not guarantee the law through the figure of a One, but by creating an appearance that its knowledge is immediate and natural. But he warns us:

“the master signifier only appears even more unassailable, precisely in its impossibility. Where is it? How can it be named? How can it be located - other than through its murderous effects, of course.” (Lacan, 1991, pp. 169)

All we are left to witness are the murderous effects of a function that the very supporters of this discourse could swear not to be functional anymore. The King is dead...Long live the King.

We could still wonder why it is that Robin Hood was so focused on broad geo-political matters instead of the everyday heroic acts of Robin (which could also surely be portrayed in an way coherent with the film’s ideology). But then again, not only does the ‘humanization’ find its proper justification - Robin Hood is just a man/ what is happening to the world is also just the natural course of events - but it prevents the film from falling into an uncanny short circuit:

“What if...” - to paraphrase our true hero - in the violent outburst for justice from our all too human protagonist, looting the riches in the night, we saw flashes of the even more human men and women in Haiti, trying to survive today, struggling against the “murderous effects” of the very feudal principles that Robin Hood’s tale so universally naturalized - to the point that an earthquake can be seen as the immediate call-sign for more humanitarian capitalist interference?