Bob Spit--We Do Not Like People

I was in my 20s in the mid-80s. I got a job with my dad’s company. He was an executive for the Western Geophysical Company, and pretty much all my male cousins at one point worked for Western. Western has been bought and sold several times over the years and now is a division of Schlumberger.  Because of my job with Western. I spent some time living and working in Brazil. This is the second post I’ve recently written that references that time in my life. This blog is turning into a nostalgia trip.

In this case, I saw a movie Bob Cuspe: Nós Não Gostamos de Gente, a Brazilian animated movie. The title is translated as Bob Spit: We Don’t Like People. It was played at the Museum of Fine Art as part of its Latin Wave film festival. Here is a trailer for it.

The main character is Angeli, a Brazilian cartoonist. Angeli is the pen-name for Arnaldo Angeli Filho. The movie presents itself as a documentary with a film crew interviewing Angeli in his apartment. Of course, it’s not a documentary—it is completely animated. It switches between these “documentary” parts and a completely fantastic story-line featuring one of his characters from Angeli’s youthful work, Bob Cuspe. Bob Cuspe is a big-nosed, mohawked punk rocker. Cuspe appeared in Angeli’s magazine, Chiclete com Banana (named after the 1959 song by Jackson do Pandeiro).

Bob Cuspe by Angeli

When I lived in Brazil, I was curious about the Brazilian comics scene. It seemed smaller and less robust than the one in Argentina, but there were some gifted, funny cartoonists like Adao Iturrusgarai, Angeli and Laerte. Their styles were very distorted and raw—what they were doing had more in common with European humor comics or American underground comics than with the more polite Argentine scene.

I think that Brazilians who see this movie probably went into it with more knowledge about Angeli than I have. He’s been drawing comics since 1973, when he was hired to draw a comic strip by Folha de São Paulo at the age of 17. In 2022, he quit comics because he was diagnosed with aphasia. The movie suggests that he became a recluse, never leaving his apartment. His wife Carol and his old colleague Laerte are concerned for him. Brazilians watching this movie are probably familiar with Angeli characters like Bob Cuspe and Rê Bordosa (a female junkie that Angeli killed off in 1987)—more familiar than me.

The issue of Chiclete Com Banana in which Angeli killed off Rê Bordosa

Not having this background made the movie a little confusing. There are two parallel plots in the movie. The scenes with Angeli are mostly situated in a realistic world of his apartment. Then there is a story action involving the Kowalski twins (who read pages of Chiclete Com Banana as holy scripture) and Bob Cuspe, an angry, dyspeptic punk, traveling through a blasted post-apocalyptic landscape. They are searching for Angeli—the Kowalskis because they see him as a semi-divine creator, Bob Cuspe because he is afraid that Angeli is going to kill him the way he killed Rê Bordosa. (Which is, in fact, Angeli’s plan.)

As they travel through this blasted landscape, occasionally picking up old pages of Chiclete Com Banana that are blowing through, they are continuously fighting diminutive mutant clones of Elton John. The Elton Johns represent “pop” music while Bob Cuspe represents “punk”—they have a great mutual animosity. The weird thing is that I don’t think this dichotomy really existed in Brazil, at least as far as I could  tell. There were certainly bands that were influenced by punk-- Legião Urbana, Camisa de Vênus (whose name literally translates as “shirt of Venus” which is a slang term for a condom), and Titãs. But looking at it from the outside, they just seemed part of the big rock music revival that happened in Brazil during the 80s. As for “pop”, Brazil has a genre called MPB (música popular brasileira), but it mostly seems to refer to any popular music after bossa nova. Perhaps I was too outside the scene when I was there, but the two styles didn’t seem at all opposed to one another. But Angeli depicts them as mortal enemies. Such musical antagonisms seem much more important when you are in your 20s, but perhaps less so for a man in his 60s, like Angeli.

Eventually the two worlds collide, and Angeli meets his departed character Rê Bordosa in a bathtub in Hell. He is using his relationship with his characters to tell us about himself—a classic postmodern ploy.  It is amazing that Angeli and his many, many collaborators made a full-length animated movie about his own depression.

All through the apartment scenes, Angeli is playing 45s on an old record player. He plays Jackson do Pandeiro’s “Chiclete Com Banana” and Titãs’ “Cabeça Dinossauro.” Two great songs in dramatically different musical styles.

When I lived in Brazil, I would pick up Chiclete Com Banana off the newsstands (and hear Titãs on the radio). My Portuguese was too primitive to successfully comprehend it—comics are harder to read than straight prose because they are so slangy and idiomatic. But I liked the artwork a lot. And am very pleased to finally know something about what happened to Angeli and Laerte, and extremely moved by to see them now, more than thirty years after I first encountered them.

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