Our engagement with Jose Padilha's 2007 film Tropa de elite is apropos to larger discussions of the role of desire and law in the formations of geographies of place. It is Tropa de elite's exploration of the transformative potentialities of law within the everyday and mundane world through its central character, Captain Roberto Nascimento (Wagner Moura), that evokes the film's true social and cultural significance. Contextualizing the Rio de Janeiro landscape as a particular economic order through which its characters have literally and metaphorically profited and lost uncovers Tropa de elite as a powerful example of what Deleuze) has described as landscapes as mental states, and mental states as cartographies, "both [of which are] crystallized in each other, geometrized, mineralized." Through the connections and folds between mental states, landscapes and cartographies, we can see how, through the transformation of the urban landscapes and spaces within Tropa de elite, Padilha accomplishes a qualitative task of exposing often marginalizing and exploitative forces bound up in space, social organization, the politics of place and capitalistic production and consumption.
capitalism; desire; landscape; law; Rio