Still from Brazil
Ben van Welzen explains how genre tropes, the tension between banality and absurdity, overwhelming production design, and more make Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterwork so effective.
It’s sure that the world is heading towards dystopia, the only question is when. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four presumed it would be, well, in 1984. However, as that deadline approached to no avail, Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner pushed it back to 2019. Luckily, before all of this, Aldous Huxley had the foresight to make his Brave New World all the way in 2540. So, in 1985 when Terry Gilliam entered the ring to make his own dystopian adventure film that drew upon Orwell, Scott, and Huxley, he had to make up yet another temporal guess. As we learn in the opening seconds of Brazil, we only know that the oppressive hand of bureaucracy and government surveillance will arrive somewhere in the 20th century. But whenever that is, it’ll be at 8:49 PM.
Herein lies the ultimate contradiction at hand in Gilliam’s expertly constructed film: in its obsession with the minutiae and ignorance towards the big picture, Brazil leaves only the illusion of precision to prevent the characters and the viewers from understanding the larger forces at play. The film follows Sam Lowry, a burnt-out bureaucrat working for the records department in the overbearing government that surveilles a hyper-mechanized and hyper-consumerist urban landscape. After seeing a woman that often appears in his fantastical dreams, Sam breaks away from his usual mundanity and navigates his absurdly interconnected surroundings to find and run away with her. Comparisons to several great 20th-century artists are inescapable; Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, and Kafka are the obvious influences for the film’s dystopian side, but Gilliam — as a Monty Python alum — draws equally upon Tati, Chaplin, and Keaton for the film’s carefully choreographed slapstick silliness. Brazil is a film of contradictions, a film that finds humor in the horror and horror in the humor, a film that draws upon so many genre tropes and preceding works but never becomes derivative, and a film that uses its uneasy classification to become more prescient and unsettling than its predecessors.
Still from Brazil
The tyrannical governments in classic dystopian stories often have a central approach to their control. For instance, the cameras and video screens of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Big Brother control via constant surveillance and the anxiety that follows while the World State of Brave New World numbs its constituents with the constant pleasure from the drug Soma. However, Brazil doesn’t have overbearing surveillance or institutional anesthetization, but instead it subdues the public into apathy in a way that undoubtedly hits close to home for anyone: paperwork. Indeed, even the viewer loses sight of the sinister doings of the film’s government through all its paperwork; after three viewings of the film, I still know nothing about the structures and motivations of its systems, but I can tell you that one must fill out a 27B/6 form to operate on residential air ducts, or that you must get an arrest receipt stamped from the information adjustments department before taking it to the information retrieval department to get it reviewed for a wrongful arrest. In its convolution, Brazil more accurately reflects the everyday conflict of the present-day. When the system gets too complicated, when it takes multiple services and departments to file your taxes or renew your driver’s license, it’s all too easy to recede into a residual state of apathy and never look too closely at anything.
Still from Brazil
Consider the equally devastating and hilarious scene at the beginning of the film depicting this wrongful arrest. Right out of the gate, the entire scene is based in absurdity since the Ministry of Information means to arrest a Mr. Tuttle but a fly in the typewriter that printed the warrant changed it to a Mr. Buttle, who ends up actually getting arrested. Then, after the police break into the innocent man’s apartment and wheel him away in a straitjacket, a government worker goes to his wife to get signatures for the arrest. Of course, in the midst of her crying devastation, she mindlessly signs every form the moment the pen reaches her hand, to which the worker responds, “That is your receipt for your husband, thank you, and this is my receipt for your receipt.” Before Mrs. Buttle can comprehend the tragedy that has taken place, forms have been signed, receipts have been made, and everyone has left. If she tried to save her husband, it would take longer to fill out the paperwork than it would for the government to kill him.
However, Gilliam is playing an even deeper game; over the course of the film, the constant distractions and conventions extend beyond its diegesis and overtake the viewers. Perhaps the biggest instance of these distractions in the narrative of the film is the supposed terrorist organization. The explosive start to the main plot suggests that Brazil will follow the familiar structure in dystopian stories of an underground terrorist organization into which our protagonist folds after falling in love with one of its members. Indeed, Jill — the woman Sam seeks — has the telltale classified government records, bomber jacket, and action hero haircut of an ’80s movie terrorist fugitive. Nevertheless, she’s just a truck driver trying to bail out her wrongly arrested neighbor, and it’s only the faceless bureaucrats that have labeled her a terrorist. We never see an actual terrorist for the whole film, only their bombings that could more easily be explained by the government’s absurd ineptitude. By the end, Brazil succeeds in luring us into a conventional terrorist conspiracy plot, only to pull the rug out in the final 20 minutes to reveal the true conspiracy: the sinister torture within the government that has been hidden beneath the veneer of incompetence.
Still from Brazil
Outside the narrative, Gilliam’s signature cinematographic style and luscious set design further enhance the numbness that Brazil instills in its viewer through overstimulation. Fish-eye lenses, massive bleak structures, sharp expressionist shadows, stretchy rubber skin, and carefully choreographed camera movements draw us into a dance of whimsy and delight, obscuring the carefully placed breadcrumbs that lead to the truth. For instance, midway through the film, Sam visits his friend and government superior Jack to learn more about the woman in his dreams. The scene is full of the silly close-ups and Christmas toys that we’ve grown accustomed to, but hidden at the top of the frame is the baby mask that haunts Sam’s dreams, thus secretly foreshadowing the film’s bleak conclusion in which Jack dons this mask to torture Sam. After knowing Sam’s fate, the appearance of the baby mask is obvious, but at first it blends in with the idiosyncratic mise en scène eternally present in the film. Brazil is full of these hints hidden in the frame; from pictures of Sam’s mom in the lobby of the government leader to the propagandistic slogans plastered on the walls, Gilliam hides the truth in plain sight, but entertains us too much to see it.
Still from Brazil
In fact, in an all-too-ironic epilogue to the production of the film, it seems that Gilliam also managed to rope the studios into his game. Before Brazil released in the United States, Universal Studios found the film too bleak and convoluted, thus leading to what’s been cheekily deemed the “Love Conquers All” cut. This studio re-edit chops off 48 minutes of detail, mystery, confusion, and intrigue to leave a straightforward and boring love story set against the backdrop of a drab, uninspired world. It’s difficult to shake the feeling of propaganda when watching this re-edit; the neat and tidy conclusion reinforces the trite messages of a usual hero’s journey and keeps the viewer from spiraling into a frenzy of confusion and disorientation. Skepticism and cynicism are replaced by ease and comfort, making us — like the inhabitants of Brazil — all too easy to subdue.
Brazil will be playing at IU Cinema on June 5 at 7pm as part of the Granfalloon film series.
Ben van Welzen is a lover of cinema and mathematics. After studying both subjects in his undergraduate education, Ben is a PhD student in math at Indiana University, using what’s left of his time to attend IU Cinema screenings, rent movies from local video stores, and attempt to read more literature.