Brazil

The society of Brazil (I hesitate to identify it as a "futuristic" society, since the opening credits merely tell us the story is located "somewhere in the 20th century") is completely entangled in a web of information. The first image we see is that of a television in a shop window. The television is playing an advertisement with a cheery jingle for Central Services, the ubiquitous public works company of the film (and one of Lowry's major adversaries). Immediately after the opening jingle and duct advertisement the shop window explodes, over which the title of the film is superimposed in bright, stylized neon. Despite the explosion, the television continues to function, ironically broadcasting an interview with a government official regrading recent terrorist bombings. This kind of irony is essential to understanding the society macrocosm of Brazil. As later events reveal, the government has complicity in these terrorist bombings, perhaps even planning them itself as a means of controlling the public. The bombings do not stop the government from functioning, but have instead become an accepted part of the "process" of government. When a bomb goes off in the middle of the restaurant, the string quartet resumes after a second or two and a squad of waiters arrive at Sam's table to place shades in front of the chaotic aftermath, so the unsightly victims do not disturb their meal.

What is even more interesting is the way the bombings are integrated, with the aid of the Ministry of Information, into a kind of self-fulfilling economic cycle thanks to a process called "Information Retrieval Charging." Terrorist suspects (or "clients," as they are euphemistically called by the Ministry) are brought into Information Retrieval (the Ministry's torture division) and are then charged against their bank accounts for the procedures used in their interrogation. Viewed as little more than commerical drones by their government, citizens begin to view each other the same way. We know that the events of the film take place during Christmas, but due to the vague suppositions of time and place that are made, we might as well assume that it is always Christmastime in the world of Brazil. People, upon greeting each other, exchange meaningless gifts with one another, merely for the sake of performing the act of gift-giving. Similarly, the guests at the restaurant are content eating multi-colored, ersatz pigslop because the color pictures accompanying their meal assure them that they are eating quality food.

This is a society saturated entirely by information, to the point where information takes on a kind of sentience absolving everyone of all personal responsibility. The words to the jingle ("Central Services, we do the work, you do the pleasure") suggest the caretaker posture of the government. We see further evidence of this in the Ministry of Information propaganda posters, with slogans such as "Help the M.O.I. Help You" and the paradoxical "Suspicion Breeds Confidence." The film's crucial plot point, the wrongful arrest and interrogation of Buttle the shoe-repair operative, exemplifies this notion. When Sam accuses Jack Lint of unjustly interrogating and killing Buttle, he explains that since the name Buttle was given to him as Tuttle, he unquestionably was justified in interrogating Buttle. The information must be infallible, he rations, so the error in collecting the information must lie with someone else. He merely expected, as would any other person in his position, that his information was absolutely correct because this society has bred him to believe that information (and those who manipulate it) are infallible. And so the chain of accusations continues until no responsible party can be found.

Viewed on the individual level, then, the society of Brazil is incomprehensible. Despite his repeated attempts to navigate the bureaucracy, to manipulate it to his own ends, Sam ultimately fails, and is forced into the ultimate retreat of schizophrenia. Sam's attempts to fight the system take two different forms. First, he attempts to advance his own goals (finding the identity of Jill Leyton and then trying to save her life) with his own cunning, mostly unsuccessfully. In the end, Sam cannot hope to win on their court; the infinite twists and turns of the Ministry's power structure are an impregnable barrier to any individual. So he takes the battle to his own mind in an oversimplified, allegorical contest between himself as a winged superhero and the technocracy as a gigantic metallic samurai. Here, and only here, is the conflict a tangible one. Events in the real world spur his fantasies; Archibald "Harry" Tuttle, the renegade heating repairman who subverts the Central Services bureaucracy, inspires him to act on his revolutionary instincts. He is the one of the few true "friends" that Sam develops in the film, one with whom he shares complicity in his fantastic rebellion against the technocracy.

Though Sam's dream sequences, we gain insight into his essentially childlike character, one that tends toward regression and romantic simplification. One need not mention Sam's embittered relationship with his manipulative mother, and how it limits his freedom to do as he likes. Here we have uncovered one of the major motifs of the film, the one that connects the discontinuous dream sequences with the action surrounding the film: the struggle to make sense of one's absurd environment. Another irony: the fantastic worlds conjured by Sam in his struggle against the technocracy are more ordered and less absurd than his reality. The conflict in these allegorical scenes is always clear. In contrast, the technology-dominated world depicted in the "real" world of Brazil is one of perpetual abstraction. The infinite tangle of interrelated mechanisms, both bureaucratic and mechanical, insures that no one has the slightest idea how anything works. Also, despite the predominance of invisible information in this society, the technology employed seems to be of a decidedly backward nature. Images that harken back to the Industrial Revolution figure prominently in the films visuals, from the complicated heating ducts to the huge, pollution-belching factories to the mail tubes that criss-cross the floors of Information Retrieval. The computers that are depicted appear little more than glorified typewriters with large glass screens attached. These machines, and others, are loud and capricious; Sam's phone emits a particularly gruesome ring. In interviews, Gilliam has noted his fondness for the Industrial Revolution because its components are easier to understand.{2} Here again, we notice a kind of irony in these great machines. Though they are ostensibly top-of-the-line technology (or so we are led to believe) we are simultaneously aware of their bizarre appearance; surely, we think to ourselves, such strange devices could have no practical purpose, let alone function. And in most cases, they don't. Hence the privileged irony we perceive when viewing Brazil. Gilliam's visual choice has permitted us insight into this peculiar universe, telling us that despite all the technological pretenses of the technocracy, it still can't invent a better way to make toast.

In a sense, Brazil might even be called a "coming of age" movie of sorts, in the respect that Sam spends the greater part of the film learning to interact with his environment. Except in this case, the protagonist does not grow up or mature, but ends up a vegetable in an interrogation chamber. So the film ends with Sam in his chair, oblivious to physical reality, having retreated to the safety of his own mind. We see the walls of the dome-shaped interrogation chamber fade away as they are replaced by a bright blue cloud-filled sky, mirroring the cloud-filled opening of the film. A reprise follows of Brazil, the film's theme song, this time set to a happy samba beat. Has Sam achieved final victory? In the context of the film and the struggles of his characters, he has. For not only is the major conflict of Brazil one of understanding, but of an attempt to escape the limits of the corporeal. Kathleen Woodward makes note of this in her essay "From Virtual Cyborgs to Biological Time Bombs: Technocriticism and the Material Body" and expands upon it to include Mrs. Lowry: "In Brazil both the son and the mother want to escape the limits of the body. Both hope that technology will enable them to do so."{3} Sam's attempt to escape from his captors is an imaginary one. Just as Jack Lint prepares to lobotomize Sam, Harry Tuttle shoots Lint in the head and drops into the room (with shades of the Odessa sequence in Eisenstein's Potemkin) with his fellow renegade heating repairmen. What follows is a fantastically daring rescue attempt, one that seems too good to be true--and it is, as we discover when the bodies of Lint and Mr. Helpmann appear in front of the idyllic countryside to which Sam has escaped, destroying the fantasy and returning us to the real. Sam, however, remains undaunted--his escape from his body complete through dreams. By contrast, Sam's mother Ida seeks escape from her body through technology--or more precisely, plastic surgery. Though her looks improve greatly, her friend Mrs. Terrain is not so lucky: her complications multiply until her body is nothing more than a revolting, gelatinous mass of pink flesh and bone. In this society, the relief afforded by technology is at best only temporary (another plastic surgeon warns that in six months, Ida will "look like Grandma Moses") and at worst, lethal.

Tangential to this mode of escapism is the idea of love. Both Sam and Ida Lowry are fundamentally dissatisfied with where they are, and both pursue love in some form or another to relieve themselves--Ida, who is getting on in years, seeks attention, and Sam merely seeks the fulfillment of his fantasies. When Sam finally discovers the woman (literally) of his dreams, Jill Leyton, an interesting convergence occurs. Jill represents the point at which the fantasy life and real life of Sam Lowry intersect. Even when she does appear, it seems that she is in another realm; when Sam seeks her for the first time at the metal detector, Jack says to Sam, "You look like you've seen a ghost." From the moment Jill enters Sam's life, his attitude changes. Suddenly he becomes intent on making his dreams come to life. Of course, dreams are meant to remain dreams, and Sam soon finds the technocracy turning against him, in the same way it turned against Mrs. Terrain. In Brazil, there is no true escape, and no wishes are ever fulfilled--at least, not without consequences. The purest way to go is through your own mind--but even that has its drawbacks, depending upon your point of view.

Another facet of the film not to be ignored, one that contributes to both aspects previously mentioned, is its rampant consumerism. Consumption is the rule in Brazil society, even integral and perhaps even indistinguishable from the state itself. Even such mundane items as ducts are glorified in Central Services advertisements. Televisions are omnipresent; whenever the supervisor at the Bureau of Records turns away, the workers stop their work and tune in. It is no accident that the story takes place at "Christmastime", the most commercial time of year. Gift-giving thus becomes a dry performative act, a mere social convention devoid of real meaning. Even religion melds neatly with consumerism, as exemplified by the "Consumers for Christ" who march by in one scene. In this media-saturated world of neon Santa Clauses and children with credit cards, where is the sincerity? Where is the real? Gilliam plays a number of visual tricks to play with this notion. As Jill and Sam drive away in the truck, the camera zooms out from a highway walled in with billboards to reveal a barren, pockmarked, lifeless landscape. The means of communication have taken over, there is nothing to see but the message. In another humorous sequence, we see an idyllic red house with a white fence. A man in a radiation suit opens the front door and waves to the camera. Then a crane lifts up the house, revealing a hideous dark factory. In yet another sequence, while Sam is driving to the widowed Mrs. Buttle's house to deliver the reimbursement check, the camera tracks forward into a futuristic looking city lined with what appear to be green cooling towers. Then a huge bum appears over the horizon, shouting and cursing. Then the camera cuts to the city in miniature with the bum standing beside it, telling us that the bum was normal-sized all along. In this way Gilliam plays with the visual impressions that dominate the world of Brazil, exposing them for the superficialities that they are.

Such a vision might be considered the extreme condition of the modern society which Jean Baudrillard called "obscene". In his essay "Rituals of Transparency," Baudrillard writes: "Obscenity lies in the fact that there is nothing to see. It is not a sexual obscenity, but the obscenity of the real. ... Perhaps our true sexual act consists in this: in verifying to the point of giddiness the useless objectivity of things."{4} In a sexual sense, we declare "obscene" that which is essentially revealing. In a society in which all is revealed, when information is omnipresent, the end result is that there is nothing really to see. That is to say, when all things are present, it is useless to look, because there is no possibility of seeing something new. Thus, we arrive at ultimate banality. The ruling technocracy of Brazil objectifies its citizens, turning them into exchangeable drones, mere cogs in the self-perpetuating capitalist wheel. When an individually minded citizen such as Sam Lowry comes into contact with this barren society, he is left to invent his own sensations. The propagandist mantra "we're all in this together" becomes a heavy, inescapable yoke around Sam's shoulders, holding him under the reins of the bureaucracy.

{1}There are three cuts of the film in existence: the "original" 142-minute cut released in European theaters, a shorter cut prepared for U.S. release, and a third cut ordered without the approval of Gilliam by then-Universal executive Sid Sheinberg. This essay will refer to the 132-minute U.S. version. References to the other cuts will be made where appropriate, and will be noted as such.

{2} In an interview for the film 12 Monkeys Gilliam explained: "I love things from the industrial revolution because I can understand gears and pulleys, cars and wheels. I don't get the electronic revolution because I can't get my hands on it. I'm impotent." (Interview by Nick James, Sight and Sound, April 1996)

{3} Woodward, Kathleen. "From Virtual Cyborgs to Biological Time Bombs: Technocriticism and the Material Body." Culture on the Brink, Bender, Gretchen, and Timothy Druckrey ed. Seattle: Bay Press,1994, p. 59.

{4} Baudrillard, Jean (Schutze, Bernard and Caroline trans.) The Ecstasy of Communication. New York: Semiotexte, 1988, pp. 31-32.