Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985)

The hiatus was not completely unwarranted; it is (fingers crossed) my last semester at university and loose ends galore. Thankfully, the mad rush for essay deadlines, short assignments and presentations officially saw its end a little over a few hours ago. Fueled by a can of well deserved beer, I wax lyrical about a brilliant film I've just only seen: Brazil.

When asked 'What is Brazil?', Tom Stoppard, one of its writers, said it was about "the myth of the free man in an unfree society". Terry Gilliam said it was more than anything about "the impossibility of escaping from reality". Deeply allegorical and brilliantly told, Brazil (1985) is a story about a nightmarish, dystopian past/present/(imagined) "future" where Franz Kafka's The Trial meets David Lynch's Dune (1984) or, more famously, George Orwell's 1984 meets A Clockwork Orange. At the crux of the matter is a man, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), whose adventures in an unknown place and an unknown time ("Somewhere in the 20th Century", is all we are told) reveal the workings of a society unnaturally dependent on redundant technology and bureaucratic red tapes and headed by an absurd government that describes a 13-year-old campaign against terrorism as a "sporting game" and flippantly dismisses terrorist bombings as "bad sportsmanship". Nightmarish yet impressive images - think Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (a good write-up about dystopian cities in film here), only all the dirt and grime in Scott's urban city is hidden underneath a clean, polished surface in Gilliam's; a verisimilitude a truth and the world of filth it hides.

The perfect symmetry is part of why this movie works so well: the film opens with the subtitle "Somewhere in the 20th Century" and ends with "Someday soon...". Within this arched perimeter, confusion emerges. For several reasons, it becomes impossible to differentiate between Brazil-location and Brazil-time, leaving us with little or no frame of reference. Of course, we know it is somewhere in the 20th century, but when exactly? There seems to be a conflation of past and "future". The architectural look of the film is simultaneously 80's noir and futuristic mixed with the desperation for bigger-and-better associated with an insecure past. Technology is messy, infantile and ineffective but also wildly extravagant, even dramatic. Massive buildings, commanding architecture and long, imposing corridors house malfunctioning lifts and tiny cubicles separated by thin walls (the Ministry of Information Retrieval). Architecture evokes neither past nor present. Because the world looks as though the entire 20th century were condensed into a single, continuous moment, a new sort of aesthetics is created by the superimposition of one atop the other making it simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. (As a side note, I think a Freudian reading with regards to his ideas in 'The Uncanny' might make an interesting analysis of Gilliam's surreal artistic vision in this film.)

Technology in Brazil doesn't appear to move in a logical forward-looking direction; its application is haphazard but that hardly bothers anyone. And even if they realize it, no one says anything. The microcosmic world of the film holds a mirror up to the macrocosm of thiz world - incidentally, the 'real' reality - and reminds us of its inherent existential crisis, as if saying, "Now, so what?" Now that we've got bazookas and batteries and bombs that go BOOM, which are some indications of progress - what's next? Brazil's answer to this is 'more'. Pessimistic modernity does not stop to reflect and ruminate upon its progress or think of its end. Like Sisyphus, we push that rock of an idea up the hill, down, and back up again. In an effort to keep moving, concepts like 'progression', 'regression', 'restrategize' or 'Plan B' lose meaning. The end is no longer a point in the horizon: the purpose, it seems, is to keep chugging on - it is useless to think whether one is heading forward or backward or for what purpose as long as there is constant movement towards an idea of progress, and, by extension, an idea of a "future". Perhaps it is because of this self-reflexive quality that in the end, due to the the indistinguishable past-future-present conflation, that "Somewhere" becomes "Everywhere" and "Someday soon" becomes "never". An ominous warning? Gilliam did say Brazil was his "message in a bottle" to America.

Occupying a position irreconcilable with the philosophy of corporate fascism, Sam Lowry's dreams take him far above and away from endless paper trails into the clouds. Totalitarianism, terrorists and death on one hand, fantasy, love and hope on the other. I thought it pertinent that Gilliam chose to employ elements of fantasy in Lowry's dream sequences to forward the film's inescapable critique of modernity. It is significant and ironic in equal parts given that it is within the innerspace of fantasy that places very opposite from reality can be reached and yet, with regard to Brazil, it is also within the realm of fantasy that fantasy is thwarted and reality (or modernity) re-exerted.

Sam Lowry is a deeply unhappy man who escapes from his garish reality into a world of flight where he is a winged hero flying towards a blond haired angelic heroine. His dreams are simple wish fulfillments, directly reflecting his desire to break free from the tiresome and tedious world he comes from. His dreams are in open, free environments but soon enough become virtually indistinguishable from his waking reality where everything is a nightmare. In one scene, a ringing sound in his dream which gradually increases in frequency turns out to be someone's phone call from work informing him that he is late. Reality and fantasy, in Brazil - or at least in Lowry's psychology - feed off of each other, mutually informing and influencing the other's "reality". The system - that is, the bureaucracy - extends its omnipresence into every aspect of life. Gilliam's mise-en-scene is quite brilliant at communicating volumes of information within a single frame: next to the telephone is an oversized, highly complicated alarm clock with wires running this way and that, looking quite important and large - incidentally, it failed to work.

To escape reality and the grinding down of oppressive, official forces taking the form of evil creatures such as the Steel Samurai (fully comprised of computer parts), Lowry dreamily takes flight from technology into the arms of his lady love. But these flights are, in reality (if you'd pardon the pun), doomed. A condition that Brazil analyzes through architecture - and by extension, technology - as a form of oppressive authority is that of imprisonment and entrapment. The film is saturated with references to this but it is particularly interesting that they infiltrate the realm of fantasy as well. Lowry's dreams are constantly interrupted by manifestations of malevolent, imposing architecture. In one dream, he is cut off from Jill by a cluster of brick monoliths that appear to emerge out of the ground. In another, Jill is trapped in a cage and pulled though a dark city. As soon as Sam remembers his heroic duty, a brick figure rises out of the ground and grabs him around the ankles. If I were to go on a psychoanalytic bend here, I'd think this becomes especially relevant when we remember Sam's character in his waking life is a rather hesitant, nervous sort who wins Jill over much later and only after he is forced to question and prioritize what he values most. That his attempts to assert his self, even his masculinity, are thwarted by that very thing that keeps him from Jill in reality is symbolic not only of an oppressive authority but the innate inability to break the bonds of the mundane and transcend to a loftier, freer existence.

This is the no-escape clause that Gilliam and Stoppard talked about, that maddening march of modernity to nowhere, ending no time soon. It is an existential cry, a chillingly accurate reflection of the absurd modern obsession with technology, an allegorical tale, a nightmare, a truth in genius proportions and a movie I am going to watch again after I fetch the other can of beer sitting in the fridge.