The king and the court jester: scenography, ethos and archetypes in the presidential speech

Abstract

This paper examines the scenography and ethos in speeches by Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro in articulation with two archetypes of Jungian psychology. On March 3, 2020, while participating in a press conference about the poor performance of the Brazilian GDP in the previous year, Brazilian President Jair Messias Bolsonaro turned to a comedian dressed as himself to answer journalists’ questions. The scene straight out of vaudeville took place just two weeks before Brazil entered frank social isolation due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which would demand not only an effective leader, but a model of leader whose behavior is emulated by his followers. The theoretical framework is located at the interface between the psychology of archetypal narratives in Jung (1991, 2011a, 2011b) and the scenography and construction of the discursive ethos in Maingueneau (2008, 2018, 2020). The aim is to analyze a scenography that makes up the President’s statements and his performances in front of the press, in addition to the archetypal function and subsequent stereotypes that his ethos mobilizes in the collective imagination of the country during a pandemic, in contrast to the pre-election period of 2018. The research is exploratory and bibliographical with a qualitative approach. We conclude that the president reverses his archetypal role from the hero (at the time of the 2018 review campaign) to the trickster (court jester, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic) by undertaking a scenography in which an ethos of a jocular and cartoonish leader is configured to shirk responsibility and alleviate the magnitude of the crisis.