But this year’s hand-wringer award goes to Unidos do Viradouro, a 5,000-strong Rio ensemble that paid tribute to everything under the moon that makes the flesh crawl, ranging from Hollywood horror flicks to genocide. The planned centerpiece: a three-story-tall Holocaust float, piled high with sculptured bodies representing Nazi concentration-camp victims, and dancing Hitlers in tow. “My love, look who’s coming/It’s so cold, you get goose bumps,” the revelers sang.
Not everyone appreciated the image. “A musical parade with joyfully dancing semi-nude women and men … is an abominable spectacle for the [Holocaust] survivors and their families,” the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote in an open letter to Viradouro. The Israelite Federation of São Paulo took the complaint to court, and on Jan. 31, less than 48 hours before the pageant’s start, a judge banned the float from the parade grounds, prompting cries of censorship.
The controversy had mostly blown over by the time the tambourines went silent on Ash Wednesday, but the revelers could be forgiven for wondering: is this the dawn of the anti-Carnival? To be sure, Brazilians are masters at parlaying life’s misery into merriment. “Sadness never ends/Happiness does,” goes a bossa nova classic. The cleverest samba maestros have always used the streetfest as a stage for sly political parody and droll social comment. But this year’s boosterism rose to new heights.
As it turns out, the high-mindedness is not necessarily born of a sincere commitment to set the world right. Mostly it’s a way to pay the bills. In the old days, Brazil’s Carnival was a cozy, community affair, more whimsical than splendorous, and raising dust was far preferable to raising placards. Along came satellite television, silicone implants and 10-ton computerized floats, and the onetime pre-Lenten celebration morphed into, as the Brazilians sing it, “the greatest popular festival on earth.”
Today it takes the better part of a year and $3 million or more to field a single samba school for a parade that lasts 80 minutes. Now that the pageant is broadcast to tens of millions of spectators, corporate sponsors from banks to beermakers line up for the right to plaster their brands over the Sambadrome. Some schools have even become veritable billboards, spinning sambas to order. Airlines, snacks, beverages, carmakers and steelworks have all been immortalized in Carnival libretti.
And it is these sponsors who are pushing float design over the top. Once Carnival was bankrolled by the underworld: dons who used the pageant to launder their reputations. Now the bureaucrats have caught on and are lavishing money on the parade in exchange for photo ops and a captive audience. And as officials enter the fray for audience share, causes—whether combating poverty or plugging a forgotten hero—have become the new commodities. Subsidized by the Rio government, four local schools heralded the 200th anniversary of the Portuguese monarchy’s arrival in Brazil’s signature city. (The quid pro quo: no one makes fun of the emperor.) Likewise, a big trade union underwrote the parade of Unidos de Vila Isabel—which obligingly sung the praises of organized labor.
Even foreign governments are betting on product placement. In 2006 Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez decanted some of his oil bounty into Vila Isabel, which returned the favor with a samba made to order for the Comandante’s would-be Bolivarian revolution in Latin America: “Soy Loco Por Tí, América” (“I’m Mad for You, America”). The investment paid off; Vila Isabel won the title that year.
Not everyone is enchanted by this revelry with a cause. “The search for money for money’s sake is ruining the joy of the festival,” lamented the critic Eugênio Leal in a recent Carnival blog. Fortunately for Brazil, most merrymakers still see the few fleeting days of Carnival as a holiday and not a soapbox. The soap makers, however, have another view altogether.
