O Mecanismo da Teledramaturgia: Espetáculo e Mitologias Políticas numa Série Baseada na Operação Lava Jato

Abstract

The Mechanism, a television series created by Padilha and Elena Soárez, distributed by the streaming platform Netflix, is freely inspired by real events, and its television drama is based on the book entitled Car wash: Judge Sergio Moro and the Behind-The-Scenes Story of the Operation That Shook Brazil (2016). Considering that such television drama is virtually produced simultaneous to historical factual events reported in this book, the present paper seeks to examine the hypothesis that The Mechanism shined through an imaginary of political myths and mythologies, operating in the Car wash spectacularity. In order to examine such an assumption, a structural analysis of this television series is carried out, using as a methodology the decoupage of the dramatic lines of the different episodes of the series and reviewing transdisciplinary concepts to the performing arts, in this case, spectacle and political mythology. Consequently, a study of fictional dramatizations is conducted along with the factual events of the operation Car-Wash. This thesis is divided into four moments: in the first one, a presentation was made on the used devices in television dramas mainly from the perspective of the authors Pallotini (1988, 2012) and Comparato (2018), in addition to a theoretical review of the concepts of roman à thèse de Suleiman (1993), the narrative genre of The Mechanism. In the second moment, reviewing several thinkers such as Schwartzenberg (1977), Debord (1997), Rubin (2004), Marfuz (2017), among others, a reading of the possibility of dramatizations of the political spectacle is made, primarily concerning the main inspiration of the referred series: the book by Vladimir Netto and the Car-Wash operation itself. In the third moment, the concept of political mythology is examined, focusing, among other authors, on the categorization used by Raoul Girardet (1987): the Conspiracy, the Golden Age, the Unity, and the Savior, displaying the mythological image of the legislator Solon as the basis of the referred television series. At last, an analysis of the central arc of the dramaturgy, its subplots, and the climax of the first season is developed, showing that the main mythological image used in The Mechanism is the Conspiracy. It also appears in the political manifestation of its creators in the learning journey of the main character Ruffo, in addition to expressing a complex relation of the work in the transposition from the fictional events to the factual universe of the operation Car-Wash.