Mirrors of Society: Audiovisual Narrative as Anti-Destiny — Pensaduras

“Art, generally speaking, is an anti-destiny.” — Francisco Brennand, in Uma Vida Só, by Rappa

Introduction

Cinema and television have never been mere entertainment. From their earliest days, moving images served as mirrors — sometimes flattering, sometimes distorted, but always revealing — of the societies that produce them. As the great Brazilian artist Francisco Brennand reflected, art is fundamentally an act of resistance against destiny — an “anti-destiny” — a way of affirming life in a world marked by uncertainty and transience. Art is a refuge where we can explore our deepest emotions, a celebration of the human capacity to transform the ordinary into something sublime.

If art is this kind of expression, then cinema and television are among its most powerful contemporary forms: collective dreams projected onto screens, encoding the fears, desires, contradictions, and aspirations of the cultures that produce them. But screens are also instruments of control. From the earliest days of cinema, governments and corporations understood that whoever controls the narrative controls the public imagination. The history of audiovisual narrative is therefore also a history of the struggle between authentic expression and manufactured consent — between art as anti-destiny and art as instrument of power.

Part I: The American Mirror — From the Dream to Its Dark Side

The Screen as Instrument of Power

Before examining what American cinema reveals, we must acknowledge what it conceals. From its earliest decades, Hollywood operated in a complex relationship with state power. During World War II, the U.S. government created the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Bureau of Motion Pictures, which worked directly with studios to shape narratives, revise scripts, and suggest plot points. The question studios were expected to consider for every production was simple and frightening: “Will this film help win the war?”

That relationship did not end with the war. According to Matthew Alford and Tom Secker’s research in National Security Cinema, the Pentagon and the CIA worked on more than 800 Hollywood films and more than 1,000 television programs, making specific script alterations for political reasons in franchises ranging from Avatar to The Terminator. The CIA secretly purchased the film rights to George Orwell’s Animal Farm and rewrote the ending to serve anti-communist propaganda. John Wayne personally wrote to President Lyndon Johnson asking for government help making a propaganda film about Vietnam; the Pentagon provided props, military bases, and kept final script approval over The Green Berets. Whoever controls the narrative controls what the public believes is possible — and what it believes is inevitable.

Chaplin: The Original Dissident Voice

Even within this system of managed narrative, dissident voices emerged. Charlie Chaplin used comedy as social commentary from the earliest days of cinema. Modern Times (1936) depicted workers crushed by industrial automation during the Great Depression — its opening juxtaposition of sheep being herded with workers leaving a factory remains one of cinema’s most devastating visual metaphors. The Great Dictator (1940) satirized Hitler directly while the U.S. was still at peace with Nazi Germany. Born four days apart, both having risen from poverty to global prominence, Chaplin turned his physical resemblance to Hitler into a weapon to strip the dictator of his manufactured gravity. Chaplin was eventually exiled from the United States during McCarthyism — proof that the system punishes those who challenge the official narrative.

Horror cinema has consistently functioned as a barometer of collective anxiety. During the Great Depression, 80 million Americans attended cinemas weekly — 65% of the total population — and Universal Studios’ monsters became unlikely mirrors of their desperation. Dracula (1931) was seen as the Depression itself, draining the life force from the people. The Frankenstein monster, dressed in proletarian work clothes and ill-fitting boots, was the marginalized working class — misunderstood, abandoned by his creator, hunted by torch-bearing mobs. As horror historian David Skal observed, the image of Frankenstein’s monster is fundamentally a proletarian image: a mute symbol of a working class abandoned by the people who should have cared for it.

In the 1950s, atomic-era anxiety spawned a new wave of monsters. Japan’s Godzilla (1954) emerged as a direct response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki — nuclear devastation made flesh. In the U.S., films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Thing from Another World (1951) became allegories for McCarthyism and the Red Scare: alien invaders identical to your neighbors, who could be anyone, who replaced individuality with conformity. The pattern repeated in every era of crisis: horror films increase during recessions, wars, and periods of social upheaval. The genre externalizes fears hard to articulate, offering audiences a way to confront chaos in a controlled environment.

Biblical Epics: Cinema as Cold War Pulpit

The biblical epics of the 1950s represent the opposite pole of American audiovisual narrative — not dissent, but consecration. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) turned Moses into a Cold War American patriot, opening with a direct address declaring the film a story about “the birth of freedom.” Seen by 98.5 million people by 1959, the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time in inflation-adjusted dollars, it positioned America’s “divine purpose” against “atheist communism.” DeMille went so far as to fund more than 4,000 granite monuments of the Ten Commandments in public squares — a publicity stunt that decades later became the basis for Supreme Court cases. These were films in which cinema and national mythology became inseparable: screen as pulpit, cinema as temple.

The Mafia Genre: America’s Dark Mirror

The mafia film turned Hollywood mythology against itself. The opening line of The Godfather (1972) — “I believe in America” — became an ironic epitaph for the Dream. Coppola’s trilogy drew parallels between the Mafia and corporate capitalism, American politics and the Catholic Church, until the line between “legitimate” society and “criminal” enterprise disappeared entirely.

David Chase and The Sopranos (1999–2007) took that project to a new dimension, placing a mob boss on the therapist’s couch. HBO’s marketing captured it perfectly: “Tony Soprano is a regular guy like you… he just has one thing different. He’s in the mafia.” The therapy sessions functioned as America’s national psychoanalysis. Tony’s panic attacks, depression, and Prozac prescription mirrored a nation where one-fifth of the population was on psychiatric medication. The show helped normalize conversations about men seeking therapy at a moment when the stigma was immense — and simultaneously suggested that the entire American project might itself need to lie down on the couch. The series ends with a black screen. Nothing more to say. Nothing more to dream.

The Boys and the Satirical Present

Amazon’s The Boys brings that arc into the present. Creator Eric Kripke described the series as a critique of corporate America and authoritarian fascination. The fourth season’s slogan, “Make America Super Again,” barely disguises its real target. Critics gave it 95% on Rotten Tomatoes; audiences dropped to 49% — the gap itself a mirror of a divided society. Meanwhile, Peak TV premieres fell from 1,695 in 2022 to 1,122 in 2025. Domestic box office totaled $8.7 billion in 2025, down 20% from 2019. Franchise fatigue, 17,000 jobs lost, and an industry in free-fall: the dream factory is dreaming of its own decline.

Part II: The European Approach — From Expressionism to Monty Python

German Expressionism: The Distorted Mirror

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) externalized the inner experience of a society driven mad through hand-painted, distorted sets. As Siegfried Kracauer argued in From Caligari to Hitler, these films expressed a collective psyche caught between authoritarian terror and ungoverned chaos. The influence shaped film noir, Hitchcock, Tim Burton, Blade Runner, and Batman’s Gotham City — proving that cinema’s power as social mirror does not depend on realistic representation.

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) represents a uniquely British contribution to cinema as social mirror: the use of irreverent comedy to dismantle institutional authority. Terry Jones called it “not blasphemy, but heresy” — it challenged the authority of the Church, not belief itself. John Cleese argued that it attacked “closed systems of thought.” The film was banned in Norway, Ireland, and several English cities. Its original financier, EMI, pulled out over the controversial subject; former Beatle George Harrison personally financed it through HandMade Films. It became the highest-grossing British film in North America that year.

Where DeMille’s Ten Commandments used biblical narrative to reinforce authority, Monty Python used it to dismantle authority. The famous ending — singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” while being crucified — is itself a kind of anti-destiny: art refusing to surrender even in the face of death. The British satirical tradition, from Life of Brian through Blackadder, The Office, and Fleabag, has consistently used comedy to dissect class, religion, and institutional hypocrisy with a precision that makes audiences laugh and then flinch.

Adolescence (2025) won eight Emmys and four Golden Globes. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer watched it with his teenage children and supported its free distribution across all UK secondary schools. It was discussed in Parliament. By setting the story in an ordinary family, it forced lawmakers to see online radicalization as a universal social threat. From Expressionism’s distorted sets to Python’s irreverent satire to Adolescence’s realistic long takes, the European tradition treats the screen as an instrument of democratic deliberation.

Part III: The Brazilian Pornochanchada — Subversion Under Dictatorship

Produced during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985) in São Paulo’s Boca do Lixo, the pornochanchada was a genre of erotic comedies that contained no explicit sex but embedded social criticism within the humor. Behind the innuendo was an affirmation of bodily autonomy in a society where political autonomy had been suspended. A Dama da Lotação (1978) drew 6.5 million viewers. The regime simultaneously censored hundreds of films and provided the institutional infrastructure — Embrafilme, CONCINE, exhibition quotas — that sustained the genre.

The decline came with the 1980s economic crisis and the import of American hardcore pornography. In 1984, 69 of the 105 Brazilian films shown in São Paulo were explicit-sex productions. Under President Collor, Embrafilme was dissolved. In 1992, only three Brazilian films were released. The near-death of Brazilian cinema is a warning about what happens when cultural infrastructure is treated as disposable. Recovery came with the 1990s retomada and, eventually, with City of God (2002).

Part III-B: Italian Cinema — From Neorealism to the Invention of Celebrity Culture

Italian cinema’s contribution to audiovisual narrative as social mirror is among the richest in world history — and it begins with perhaps the most direct example of cinema reflecting society ever produced. Italian neorealism, born from the rubble of World War II, used non-professional actors and bombed-out locations to depict a nation in ruins. Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) set the template that European social realism would follow for decades.

But it was Federico Fellini who produced Italian cinema’s most durable contribution to global culture — and, in doing so, literally invented a word. La Dolce Vita (1960) followed a tabloid journalist through Rome’s decadent nightlife, painting what Fellini called “a broad panel of the collapse of modern society and the rise of celebrity culture.” The character Paparazzo — an intrusive news photographer inspired by the real-life Tazio Secchiaroli — gave the world the word “paparazzi.” The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was condemned by the Vatican. Its opening image — a helicopter carrying a statue of Christ over Rome, juxtaposed with bikini-clad women sunbathing on terraces — remains one of cinema’s most devastating visual metaphors for the collision between the sacred and the superficial.

Six decades later, Fellini’s prophecy has fulfilled itself beyond anything he could have imagined: social media has turned every one of us into our own Paparazzo. The celebrity culture he diagnosed as a symptom of spiritual emptiness has become the dominant mode of public life worldwide.

At the opposite end of Italian cinema’s emotional spectrum stands Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1997) — a film that dared use comedy to confront the Holocaust. Benigni plays an Italian-Jewish father who shields his young son from the horrors of a concentration camp by convincing him the imprisonment is an elaborate game. The film won three Oscars, including Best Actor for Benigni and Best Foreign Film. As Benigni himself said, “Sometimes only clowns can reach the summit of tragedy.” Nobel laureate Imre Kertész defended the film against critics who called it trivializing, arguing that whoever sees it as comedy rather than tragedy has missed the point entirely. Life Is Beautiful is perhaps the purest cinematic expression of Brennand’s anti-destiny: the insistence on imagination, love, and beauty even in the darkest place on Earth.

Part IV: Argentine Cinema — Crisis as Creative Fuel

Argentina was the first Latin American country to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film — and it won it twice. During World War II, the U.S. restricted raw-film exports to Argentina while investing in the Mexican industry, collapsing Argentine production from 56 films (1942) to 36 (1943). After the Dirty War, The Official Story (1985) won Argentina’s first Oscar. From the 2001 economic collapse emerged the New Argentine Cinema: Martel, Trapero, Caetano — filming with non-professional actors, documentary intimacy, relentless social realism.

Szifron’s Wild Tales (2014) — six stories of fury against an unjust system — sold 3.9 million tickets, was nominated for the Palme d’Or and the Oscar, and won a BAFTA. The character “Bombita” became street slang for justified rage. Argentina’s eighteen Goya Awards prove that artistic excellence does not require Hollywood budgets, but what Brennand called anti-destiny — the refusal to accept that the present is permanent.

Part IV-B: Indian Cinema — Bollywood, the World’s Largest Dream Factory

No global survey of cinema as social mirror is complete without India — home to the world’s largest film industry by volume, producing more than 1,500 films annually in over 20 languages. Bollywood, the Hindi-language industry based in Mumbai, has kept more than a billion people enchanted for decades with its distinctive masala formula: melodrama, music, dance, romance, and moral clarity. Yet beneath the spectacle lies a cinema deeply engaged with India’s social contradictions — caste, class, gender, religious tension, and the vast chasm between aspiration and reality.

Indian cinema’s relationship with poverty is particularly complex. Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy (1955–1959) and Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988) offered relentless portraits of Indian poverty that won global recognition. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) — which won eight Oscars, including Best Picture — brought that tradition to the widest possible audience, though it also provoked heated debate. Hindustan Times called it “an assault on Indian self-esteem.” Indian critics argued that their own filmmakers had already made better, more authentic films about poverty. The controversy itself reveals a fundamental tension in global cinema: who has the right to tell a society’s story, and for whose gaze?

What makes Bollywood significant for this essay is its function as what scholar Radha Chadha called “the fascinating soft power” that has kept a billion Indians enchanted — a dream factory parallel to Hollywood, but rooted in different values. Where Hollywood celebrates individual triumph, Bollywood celebrates family, devotion, and the restoration of moral order. Where Hollywood heroes are often solitary, Bollywood heroes are embedded in communities. The contrast illuminates how different societies use cinema to process the same fundamental human needs — for meaning, connection, and the certainty that justice will prevail — through radically different cultural lenses.

Part V: The Japanese Tradition — Philosophical Depth

Japanese cinema prioritizes character, atmosphere, and philosophical inquiry. Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) introduced subjective truth. Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) came third on Sight and Sound’s greatest-films list. Average shot length in Japanese drama is 20 seconds — three to four times longer than Hollywood’s 3 to 6 seconds. This invites contemplation rather than stimulation.

Japan’s Godzilla (1954) also belongs to the horror-as-social-mirror tradition — the monster born directly from the trauma of Hiroshima, nuclear devastation made literal and monstrous. Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (2018) explored poverty and social marginality with a delicacy that defies global spectacle. Japan has won five Oscars for Best International Feature. Budget constraints ($700K to $3.5M versus Hollywood’s $100M+) paradoxically reinforced emotional richness at the expense of visual spectacle.

The Korean Wave: A New Tradition Emerges

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) became the first non-English-language film to win the Best Picture Oscar — a cutting satire of social class involving two families whose lives lethally intertwine. Squid Game (2021) became Netflix’s most-watched series globally, depicting capitalism as a literal deadly game. These works suggest that a new cinematic tradition is asserting itself on the global stage, combining Hollywood’s narrative drive with European social consciousness and a distinctly Asian perspective on economic inequality.

Part VI: Convergence — The Global Mirror and the Fight for the Narrative

What becomes clear when these traditions are placed side by side is that every society gets the audiovisual narrative it needs — and perhaps deserves. But the story is not only about reflection; it is about control. Every era produces both authentic mirrors and managed narratives. The Office of War Information shaped WWII cinema. The CIA rewrote Orwell. DeMille erected monuments. The Pentagon still revises scripts today. Against this machinery of consent, every genuine work of art — from Chaplin’s Tramp to Monty Python’s Brian, from Kore-eda’s shoplifters to Fellini’s characters — represents an act of resistance.

Horror functions as cinema’s own unconscious: the genre that surfaces what official narratives suppress. Depression-era monsters embodied the abandoned working class. Atomic-era creatures externalized nuclear terror. Cold War invasion films dramatized McCarthyite paranoia. In every era, what a society most fears appears first in its horror films — because horror is the genre least subject to institutional control, the one where a culture’s id speaks most freely.

The Sopranos’ therapy couch may be the most powerful metaphor in this entire essay: a society that built the most sophisticated entertainment machinery in human history, only to discover it needs to lie down on the couch and ask itself what it has become. Tony Soprano’s panic attacks are America’s panic attacks. The black screen at the end is the question that still awaits an answer.

Conclusion

The screens we watch are never neutral. They encode assumptions about power, identity, morality, and the social contract. From the managed mythologies of Cold War biblical epics to the savage self-critique of The Boys; from the Depression-era monsters that embodied working-class abandonment to Adolescence’s long-take confrontation with digital-age radicalization; from Chaplin’s Tramp walking toward the horizon to Monty Python singing on the cross; from pornochanchada’s subversive laughter to Wild Tales’ explosive fury; from Fellini’s invention of the paparazzi to Benigni’s clown reaching the summit of tragedy; from Godzilla’s nuclear trauma to Shoplifters’ quiet grace — these traditions form an indispensable global mirror.

As Francisco Brennand understood, art is an anti-destiny — the refusal to accept that the world must remain as it is. A relentless search for meaning, beauty, and connection. A journey that transcends time and space. The quality of our screens — their honesty, their craft, their willingness to show us what we would rather not see — is ultimately a measure not only of the health of the cultures that produce them, but of our collective determination to keep imagining otherwise.

Full PDF version (in Portuguese): Espelhos da Sociedade — A Narrativa Audiovisual como Antidestino

Roberto Santacroce Martins — April 2026