Torture and electricity in the military dictatorship: an environmental perspective

Abstract

Since torture started being systematically used against political dissidents by the military dictatorship that ru- led Brazil from 1964 to 1985, its depiction in films and literary works has underscored one of the most common modalities of torture in the period: electroshock. I argue that, even though torture by electroshock demands a relatively small amount of energy, whether from electrical appliances or manually generated by cranks, the representation of electricity as always and necessarily excessive constitutes one of the most paradigmatic forms through which its presence becomes symbolically visible in the cultural production of the Anthropocene in the second half of the twentieth century. This paper reads scenes of torture by electroshock as typical of the Great Acceleration, which relies on a steady supply of electrical energy, in order to investigate how narra- tives of torture by electroshock allow for a renewed reading of this corpus from an environmental standpoint. I focus on two works from the late 1960s and early 1970s in which torture breaks into narratives in an abrupt fashion: Lygia Fagundes Telles’s novel Girl in the Photograph (1973) and Júlio Bressane’s film Killed his Family and Went to the Movies (1969).