Brazil (dir. Terry Gilliam, 1985)
The problem with the fictional dystopia is that we seem to invariably live in them. Most writers are drawing upon something they see in the real world as inspiration to begin with. Stalinist Russia with Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Eugenics, class structures, and narcotizing mass media with Huxley and Brave New World. The nightmare worlds of Kafka come from his own personal anxiety and the disruption of the modern world. Margaret Atwood once claimed that she wasn’t writing science fiction with The Handmaid’s Tale because nothing in the book hadn’t already happened somewhere in the world. More recently there’s the spate of young adult novels out of America that reflect the violence, desperation, and uncertainty of this century.
I thought about that while watching Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. It’s a little difficult not to when the opening text describes it as taking place ‘sometime in the twentieth century’, which may as well mean ‘any and all times in the twentieth century.’ The world depicted in the film feels like a montage of misery and malaise. Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Technology run amok. A police state that engages in violence and torture. Capitalism and consumerism reigning supreme. The visual style references film noir and Fritz Lang and brutalism. Worst of all, nearly everyone’s English.
We spend the Christmas season with our protagonist Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), who has the misfortune of being a bureaucrat in a society overrun with it. He has an overbearing mother, Ida (Katherine Helmond), who is addicted to cosmetic surgery. His closest thing to a friend is an upbeat torture technician named Jack Lint (Michael Palin). His only relief in life is in his fantasies of adventure, romance, and literal flight. An error in paperwork cascades outward, leading to the death of an innocent man, an association with cinema’s greatest HVAC technician Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), and meeting the woman of his dreams, Jill Layton (Kim Greist). This being a spin on Orwell, however, means that there is only one way for all this to end–not that the executives at Universal didn’t try to change fate.
Brazil succeeds as both an anti-authoritarian satire and as a character drama for Sam Lowry, but there’s an openness to the film that allows the audience to overlay their own politics on it. It’s easy to see why people opposed to communism or socialism find it a critique of those systems, just like democratic socialist George Orwell became championed by some on the right. The Soviet style iconography on display doesn’t help that mostly wrong interpretation from having staying power. Similarly, it works as an anti-consumerist piece even if that figures largely in the background. Watching it in 2019, too, causes issues as Terry Gilliam, like ninety percent of people associated with British comedy, has grown increasingly bitter and reactionary with age. That said, I think his interpretation of his own film is worth mentioning. In a long interview published in Sense of Cinema in 2009, Gilliam has this to say:
[Lowry] is the dreamer, and he is the fool. But he is not the holy fool, unfortunately. He’s just a fool.
The film is about responsibility and he’s not taking responsibility for the job he does. He’s right at the heart of the ministry and the ministry is this monstrous thing and he’s busy daydreaming. So, that was just my comment about all people.
To Gilliam, Brazil, beyond being a comment on authoritarian systems, is also a critique of people retreating into fantasy rather than engaging with systems in which they are complicit. That strikes me as more valuable an observation than anything related to bureaucracy. The paperwork isn’t itself the problem, it’s that Lowry lives in a violent and totalitarian society and doesn’t do much of anything to fight back unlike Tuttle and Jill. The ending of the film is the only way it could end for Sam Lowry because it is the ultimate retreat from responsibility—a retreat from material and moral reality.
oliveresque 