‘Apocalypse in the Tropics’ Is A Can’t-Miss Account of the Fall of Liberal Democracy
At the risk of repeating myself, there is, I think, an argument to be made in favour of streaming services being the most viable delivery system for searingly relevant documentary filmmaking. This isn’t a new idea, of course. One of the key turning points in Netflix’s campaign of home entertainment domination was the cultural resonance of Making A Murderer, a landmark true-crime series not in terms of its quality but in how it turned millions of armchair critics into amateur sleuths, lawyers, and advocates. If you want to make a point about something important, your best bet is to sneak it into the homes of streaming subscribers and let them do their thing.
It remains to be seen what these people will think about the state of liberal democracy after watching Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics, a grim but vital recounting of how fire-and-brimstone evangelism paved the way for a minority-rule theocracy in Brazil through the rise of right-wing Trumpian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro. The similarities to contemporary U.S. politics are obvious and unavoidable, but also telling; the weaponisation of faith and dogmatic opposition to gays, communists, abortions, drugs, and gender-neutral bathrooms is happening everywhere, all at once.
Netflix has been dealing with this kind of thing a lot lately, “this kind of thing” being documentaries with cogent points, cultural relevance, earnest anger, and an engaging degree of craft. Even a typically throwaway offering like Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem sketched the familiar portrait of a self-satisfied, performative public official whose deft manipulation of the media inured him from appropriate blowback. Bolsonaro is in the same mould, but a more sinister version of it, this one propped up by claims of holy authority, Christian supremacy, and a biblical intolerance for political opposition.
Bolsonaro, after all, hitched his wagon to Silas Malafaia, a Jerry Falwell-style pastor and televangelist who built a capitalist empire on aggressive fundamentalism and anointed Bolsonaro as the chosen one of Brazil’s religious right. The evangelical vote won Bolsonaro the highest office in the land in 2018, just in time for his incompetence to be brought into stark relief by a woefully mishandled response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It should not be surprising at this point that posturing populist politicians tend to be very bad at their jobs.
Not that they’d ever admit it. Like Trump, Bolsonaro refused to concede defeat when he was ousted in 2023 by Workers’ Party ex-president Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva, incensing his most ardent supporters to storm the Supreme Court of Brazil, the National Congress of Brazil, and the Planalto Presidential Palace in the hopes of a coup. The comparisons make themselves. None of this is a coincidence.
It is, though, a process, and charting the trajectory of this process is a key element of Apocalypse in the Tropics. Costa identifies the rise of evangelicalism through interviews with congressmen and pastors, with Bolsonaro, Lula, and Malafaia, and with everyday folks who bought the apocalyptic rhetoric (or didn’t). Footage of protests, rallies, and attempted insurrections highlight how that amplified piety permeated the general public, positioning evangelicals as heralds of a second coming – if not, in Bolsonaro’s case, a second term – and potential saviours of mankind from an Old Testament-style clear-out of malefactors.
This is straight from the Billy Graham playbook, the convincing of a society’s most downtrodden people that their problem is sin and not lacklustre, self-serving governance. If sin is the problem, sinners are the enemy, and erasure of the enemy, through violence where politics fails, becomes the solution. If you can convince a family living in poverty that their misfortunes are God’s punishment for same-sex marriage, mobilising those people against the established system is a comparatively small affair. Thus, the vital separation of church and state erodes, a theocracy is installed by force, and bigotry, corruption, and violence become divinely mandated.
People believe this – in the case of Brazil, more than thirty percent of the population believes it. And it’s a terrifying belief, since by its very nature it justifies all manner of pious extremism – such as the small matter of attempting to overthrow the government – as vital resistance against heresy. The only upside of Apocalypse in the Tropics is that it believes in democracy as an ideal, and has a faith of its own in the majority of Brazil’s people rising up against tyranny as a moral obligation. This is how Bolsonaro was ultimately ousted, and why he is ineligible to run again until at least 2030, by which time criminal charges will likely have stuck. But the threat remains. And we must resist it while we can.