The film
“The Elite Squad” (2007), by José Padilha, is notable mainly (1) for the tme
construction non-linear of its climax (the beginning of the film, about the
slum operation that is retaken and gets a new meaning in the secound part of
the film) and (2) for the coherency with the struturalist presupposition
(represented above all by the Foucault ideas “Watch and Punish, interpreted by
many as post-struturalist) that the structure, or the circumstances (in a
meaning no strict), determines the individuals. By the way, one of the
“pirates” version of the film do not begins with a quotation a social
Psychologist, that Strengthen that presupposition, and ends with the
declamation of a poetry that is not present in the official version. The
building of characters, mainly the Capitão Nascimento´s one, and Neto´s and
Matias´, is very coherent with that struturalist thesis. Thay are people that
die as subject because that wich they are is what the social structure
determines thay are. From this interpretation, the polemics about the film gets
non-sense. Polices, thieves and middle-class youngs are equally alienated by
the perverses institutions and the power interests