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A Psychoanalytic Analysis: City Of God

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City of God: A Psychoanalytic Analysis In his critically acclaimed motion picture, “City of God” director Fernando Meirelles depicts the growth of organized crime throughout the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s in the Cidade de Deus favela of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil via the lens of a young boy named Rocket. The film culminates in the death of the two rival gang leaders in the aftermath of a shootout between police and conflicting locals, we as the audience only experience through Rocket’s untimely habit of seeing too much. Applying the modern Psychoanalytical approach to literary analysis, understanding the City of God hinges upon both an audience's knowledge of Meirelles’ biography; which serves to explain the idiosyncrasies and nuances expressed within …show more content…

Despite much of the doctor’s conclusions are considered bunk by modern science, Freud's structural model in which the personality of any individual can be broken down into the id, ego, and superego remain inextricable links between a person’s behavior and the experiences which define them. This information comprises the psychobiography of Meirelles. To Freud, “an author’s chief motivation for writing is to gratify some secret desire, some forbidden wish that probably developed during the author’s infancy and was immediately suppressed and dumped in the unconscious.” (Bressler 137). When the director was only four years old, he witnessed the murder of his older brother outside of his family home. In interviews, he expresses how this severe trauma forever molded his psyche. Freud would argue upon witnessing his brother's death, Meirelles would be compelled by his Id to satisfy primal instincts such as revenge or inebriation. Instead, from his future success as an artist, we may assume that Meirelles channelled the dark complexities of his unconscious through directing a film which sought to provide light on a disenfranchised portion of the brazilian population. As the ego would never truly allow Meirelles to depict his own memories, the latent content of his dreams manifest in the dangerous favela known as the City of God. The character’s depicted in Meirelles personify the cumulative experience of both the author's conscious and the author’s unconscious. Fernando Meirelles constant struggle to balance these three competing psyches manifests through the characters of the film such as Rocket and especially Lil Zé. Upon the first heist of the noble trio of thieves, the future Lil Ze murders in cold blood the staff of the hotel which he was supposed to post lookout for. His character arc thus continues dangerously along

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