This article contains spoilers
The Secret Agent takes place in Brazil 1977, as the movie says: “A time of great mischief,” and our main character Armando (going under the assumed name Marcello) is caught up in this mischief. At its core, The Secret Agent is a film about memory, how authoritarianism and corruption attempt to erase it, and how the truth has a habit of resurfacing.
Brazil was under a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. 1977, when the movie takes place, is a moment when artists, journalists, and universities were being attacked in Brazil. The Secret Agent shows us that violence is everywhere. The opening scene shows a body left to rot for days with no intervention, no investigation, and no one even to clean up the mess. When the police do show up, they are not there to deal with the corpse, but to shake down Armando for a bribe. Business continues as usual. Other than occasionally chasing hungry dogs away, everyone pretends the body just is not there.
People who were “disappeared” under the regime are dumped unceremoniously into the sea, and no one is going to investigate because these deaths were deliberate acts of violence from the state. In order to try and escape this sort of “mischief,” Armando is in hiding with other political “refugees” in a sort of safe house in Recife. His goal is to get out of Brazil with his son, but until he can get documents sorted, he must lay low, stay out of trouble, and disappear himself.
While the people of Recife are unable to confront the violence around them, they line up to experience their fear, terror, and violence at the cinema, run by Armando’s father-in-law. The cinema functions as a place where these emotions can be expressed and felt. Armando’s son Fernando is obsessed with Jaws. He does not even have to see the film to be haunted by the violence implied just by the poster. We hear people screaming while watching Richard Donner’s The Omen. In this time of great mischief, the people of Recife go to the theatre to exorcise their own demons and feel fear collectively in a space where there is no real danger.
The cinema is also a place where Armando can find refuge. He uses it as a place where his contacts can reach him. It is where he tells his story, creating the tapes that Flavia eventually listens to. The cinema functions not only as a place that carries social memory but also as a cultural archive. Shared fear, collective experience from the audience, and Armando’s personal testimony all combine to preserve stories the state seeks to erase.
It is not only under the military dictatorship that memory is being erased. Armando is searching through the archives for any evidence of his mother’s existence, but “men are always easier,” says the man that Armando works for. We discover at the end of the film that Armando’s mother was essentially a slave, with no record, no control, and no power over her situation or her sons. Armando never finds proof of his mother and never finds her identity card.
Even if the government or society tries to erase these human beings, their existence and memory cannot be entirely erased. The body dumped into the ocean is eaten by a shark. Armando’s voice and story are captured in Elza’s tapes, and Armando’s mother lives in Armando in his blood, the way Armando lives in Fernando. Even if Fernando has lost all memory of his father, he has his blood and his face.
It is not just our family, love, and stories that can be forgotten. It is also the horrors. This film was made not long after Bolsonaro was elected president, running on a campaign that glorified the military dictatorship depicted in this film.
There was no righteous revolution that ended the military dictatorship in Brazil. Near the end of the dictatorship, an Amnesty law was passed that pardoned political exiles and activists and welcomed them back to Brazil. But the law also pardoned all members of the regime. The people who had committed these atrocities retired in peace or transitioned into other powerful positions under the new government. Brazil never wrestled with its past. The fears were never faced, and so, like the leg in the shark, like Armando’s voice in the tapes, these ideas, this great mischief, reemerged decades later.
The corrupt government faded to democracy only to reemerge later as Bolsonaro. The cinema, once colorful and full of culture and collective social experience, has now been drained of its color. The blood that used to be spilled in the streets is now systematically and sterilely collected in the blood bank, cataloged and tracked.
Fernando does not remember his father and does not want to talk about him, but Flavia has resurfaced it, like the hairy leg resurfacing in the belly of the shark, like the ideals of the dictatorship resurfacing in Bolsonaro.
The film ends with Fernando telling the story of how terrified he was just at the idea of Jaws. Obsessed with the violence and the fear of the shark, one day he remembers his grandfather, for no reason at all, taking him to the cinema to see Jaws. Once he saw it and confronted his fear, the nightmares ended. The only way to exorcise our nightmares is to face the horror, to see the blood and the violence with eyes wide open.
Jenna Anderson lives in Paris, France. She talks about movie online as Jenna Sais Quoi. Follower her on Instagram @jenna.sais.quoi.paris or TikTok @jenna_sais.quoi
