The Secret Agent does not portray corruption as an anomaly. It portrays it as infrastructure.

1. Corruption Is Not a Moral Failure — It’s a Method

Brazilians did not invent corruption.
But as good students, we majored in it.

Kleber Mendonça Filho understands this deeply. From the very beginning, The Secret Agent shows corruption not as spectacle, but as routine. No dramatic music. No outrage. Just process.

The first form is the most classical one:
the police stop.

The police are not there to enforce the law.
They are there to evaluate the opportunity.

2. The Police Stop: Calculating the Percentage

The police represent the State — power, authority, legitimacy.
And in a patrimonialist country, the State is not something separate from society. It is something to partner with.

The officers don’t immediately give a ticket.
They search.

They look for something wrong with the car.
Something wrong with the documents.
Anything that can be converted into value.

Once the fault is found, the math begins.

How much is the ticket worth?
And how much of that ticket can become their share?

This is not extortion in the dramatic sense.
It is negotiation.

As simple as that.

3. Carnival, Money, and Timing

Carnival is not just a party.
It is an economy.

People need money — for drinks, costumes, parties, movement.
The police know this. Everyone knows this.

Corruption here is not hidden.
It is synchronized with the calendar.

This is how The Secret Agent reveals something cruel but accurate:
corruption adapts to social rhythm.
It knows when people are vulnerable.

4. Information Has a Price

The film then moves to another layer of corruption — smaller, quieter, but just as telling.

Someone works close to a person of interest.
They need something simple.
An address.

No threats.
No violence.

Just money.

And the information appears.

This is not exceptional behavior.
This is how information circulates in unequal systems.

5. Making Evidence Disappear

Then comes the most serious version.

A police officer wants to make evidence disappear.

Again, the solution is not power.
Not authority.
Not ideology.

It is money.

Money doesn’t just open doors —
it erases facts.

And the film shows this without moral speeches.
Because it doesn’t need them.

6. Cinema Knows This Structure Well

In detective films around the world, this structure is familiar.

The detective needs information.
The doorman sees nothing.
The hotel clerk remembers nothing.

Until the bill appears.

Then suddenly, memory returns.

The Secret Agent is honest enough to say:
this isn’t just Brazilian.
It’s systemic.

What Brazil adds is scale, repetition, and normalization.

Closing Thought

The cruelty of The Secret Agent is not that it shows corruption.
It’s that it shows how functional it is.

Money doesn’t break the system.
It is the system’s lubricant.

And that may be the most uncomfortable truth the film tells us:

Corruption survives not because people are evil —
but because it works.