Fathers, Masculinity, and Authoritarianism in Latin American Cinema, Irina Dzero, 2025, University of Florida Press
Debates over linguistics have set parameters for the understanding of cognition, and evidence of that is the role language models play in the emergence of that fashionable misnomer “artificial intelligence”.
In one influential linguistic school, conceptualisation is considered to be based on the “embodiment” of knowledge—knowledge shaped by our bodily state and capacities—thereby building on physical experience of vision and motion.
This “embodied cognitive linguistics” has been highly influential, if contested, but has also come to the attention of Marxists for what—according to its most prominent proponents such as George Lakoff—it can tell us about socio-political activity.
Cognitive linguistics emphasises how language emerges from the interaction between mind, body and the environment and its use in a real-world context in which it is learned and employed in social and cultural interactions. This has enabled this school of thought to act as a bridge between linguistics, psychology and philosophy.
Lakoff’s work has concentrated on metaphors, which he has argued are not just linguistic constructions—figures of speech, in simpler parlance—but conceptual mechanisms that enable us to represent spatial relations.
Metaphors enable us to explore how language does not just comprise an independent cognitive function but relies upon other skills such as perception, attention, motor skills and visual and spatial processing; even how we sense time.
This has been of interest to Marxists, who have suggested that cognitive linguistics could be of value to understanding both social relations and ideology, because it is considers language to be shaped by human interaction and perception.
It must be stated that Lakoff is by no means a Marxist and during his career was more closely associated (like his revolutionary peer in the field of linguistics, Noam Chomsky) with the liberal and progressive democratic US left.
Moreover, caveats of Marxian enthusiasm for this school of linguistics are that it places insufficient emphasis on the influence of socio-material conditions in shaping cognitive function, and that Lakoff’s work lacks a theory of ideology.
Nonetheless, some Marxists have seen in the effort to account for language as a capacity embedded in both material and social realities a natural synergy with dialectical materialism.
They have suggested that shortcomings in contemporary cognitive linguistics can be addressed by incorporating elements of dialectical materialism and social practice theory.
Such an innovative approach views language not merely as a cognitive phenomenon but also as a product of human social interactions and economic conditions.
This is a fertile line of reasoning if we consider the traditional Marxist notion of ideology, by which exploitative material conditions painted by the dominant ideology as the natural order of things—“ways of thinking in which historically transient exploitative forms of social organisation are represented as eternal, natural, inevitable, or ‘rational’”—clash with our material reality and force us to struggle at a practical level against alienating, oppressive social relations.
We are forced to think outside the bourgeois box, and thus dawns a new consciousness.
Why does any of this matter? It does so because metaphor can provide a valuable instrument of analysis by which to link the portrayal of subjects to the changing dynamics of an underlying sociocultural reality, something attempted by Irina Dzero in her book Fathers, Masculinity, and Authoritarianism in Latin American Cinema.
Dzero examines structures of consensual domination embodied by the figure of the predatory father in post-2000 Latin American films which, she argues, contributed to anti-government protests by activating metaphors of the nation as a family and the father as a leader.
This is, in essence, a study of ideology in its original Marxist sense—not simply any system of beliefs, but ways of thinking in which exploitative social relations are represented by the dominant classes as inevitable or rational.
As Peter Jones, now Emeritus Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, writes: “The relevance of Marxist theory to cognitive linguistics’ discussion of ideology lies in its offering a specific system of concepts and an accompanying methodology for uncovering and studying the interconnections between ideas and social practice with a view to theoretical and practical intervention in struggles against exploitation and oppression, a necessary part of which is the struggle against ideology.”
The nation as a family is an automatic, unconscious metaphor, Dzero suggests in her book, in which the government represents the parent and the citizens represent the children. People who believe that parents should set strict rules and punish the children who break them will support the authoritarian “strict father” metaphoric model.
Fathers, Masculinity, and Authoritarianism in Latin American Cinema examines post-2000 films from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Chile in which the father became a metaphor of predatory leadership.
It was a new trend in cinema that identified the father figure as an “urgent problem”, the author argues, in which the filmmakers reframed this leadership model as repulsive and lethal for the family and the nation.
Dzero writes: “Many of these plays, novels, and memoirs were written in the 1970s, an era of oppressive dictatorships in Latin America. Unsurprisingly, in these stories the children perceive bad fathers as fate and languish under their dominion. But in the recent, post-2000 cinematic retellings of these stories, the children confront and even defeat their bad fathers.
“Unquestioning deference to authority diminished in the new millennium, and the films contribute to and shape this trend. These recent cinematic retellings of old stories compel viewers to look at their real-life rulers with a critical eye and hold them accountable.”
More importantly, the author sets the analysis of these films in a concrete socio-material context, one in which increased public scrutiny of authority figures generated a wave of protests in Latin America in the 2010s.
She examines the different structures of domination contested in these demonstrations to argue that the films in question explain these through the figure of the father.
Dzero writes: “The fathers we see in these films embody colonial, patriarchal, and racial domination. They are caudillos, caciques, and dictators who derive a deep pleasure from dominating others.”
Each chapter of the book examines a different face of predatory leadership: the reluctant rapist, the carceral disciplinarian, the backslapping charmer, the histrion, the scold, and the profiteer.
Many of the 36 films the author examines provoked significant controversy and even death threats against the filmmakers, set the political agenda, or beat US blockbusters at the box office (for example, Herod’s Law, The Crime of Father Amaro, Machuca, City of God, History of a Clan).
We are treated to an eloquent and grounded analysis of a large body of cultural production that is, moreover, considered in its real-world context, making a valuable contribution to scholastic debate.
From this innovative analysis we can consider that these post-2000 adaptations of stories written during the dictatorships or earlier represent classic products of consciousness, by which an exploitative ideology once regarded as inevitable dialectically generates an awakening through practical struggle that then devours it.
Dzero writes: “The cinematic retellings transform these old stories entirely. It is not about removing a storyline or a character to make the story fit in a shorter time frame. It is about transforming the protagonists into the opposites of their literary counterparts and sending them on an entirely different trajectory—one of rebellion rather than resignation.
“The result is that the original story’s moral message is changed. The filmmakers could not do it differently. Now they know with certainty that the dictatorship ‘saviours’ actually engaged in kidnappings, torture, and clandestine murders, and that the money they borrowed promising spiritual rebirth and economic recovery was spent on the military or moved offshore.
“The filmmakers also lived through hopes of true democratisation after the fall of these dictatorships, which for many people remained just that—hopes. In the films, the fathers are brought to justice by their emboldened children. Such retellings show that both filmmakers and audiences want to see predatory leaders fall.”
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Categories: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, South America, Uruguay, Venezuela