Brazil - Guest Post

Featuring Taylor Holmes

Last week I wrote about Columbus on Taylor Holmes website and this week he’s writing about Brazil on the Logbook. Brazil is one of my personal favorites and I’m glad to have his take on it. Taylor has been kind enough to shout out The Logbook and let me write on his site, so please check his stuff out and enjoy the post below.

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Greetings - fantastic to join all of you over here. I’ve been loving the conversations and collaborations that are happening between Matt and myself over on THiNC. So it’s really great to find myself over here, with the gauntlet of doing a movie write up on one of the most formidable science-fiction movies of all time. I’m realizing that I should have given Matt harder homework than just some sweet dialogue driven movie about architecture! Hahaha.

First off, I’m an enormous Monty Python fan. Have been since a young teen and I first encountered The Holy Grail. So, to attempt to delve into some of the minds behind that kind of insanity is more than a little overwhelming. But, it’s worse in that Terry Gilliam (one of the core members of Monty Python) isn’t just a member of a British Comedy troop, but he’s also a mind blowing savant in his own right (tis only a model!) Maybe you weren’t aware, but Gilliam is the genius behind, 12 Monkeys, Time Bandits, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and my personal favorite - The Fisher King (plus many more). But Brazil is his most elusive, and difficult to understand of his movies. (Thanks Matt!)

Brazil is set in a dystopian bureaucratically oppressive nightmare society that is so riddled with paperwork that it makes British queueing look pleasant. The film features Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Robert De Niro, Michael Palin, Katherine Helmond, etc etc. Brazil is a movie that is so dark, and so riddled with the fantastic, that it is difficult to understand what is “real” and what is merely “fantastical”. When Brazil was released in 1985 the movie was received with wide critical acclaim, but little box office fanfare, making $9.9 million ($28 million adjusted). But to say that Brazil is one of the most widely acclaimed sci-fi films of all time would actually be an understatement.

Brazil Movie Walkthrough

The movie opens with Sam Lowry - a fairly competently unmotivated bureaucrat with important connections within the government. One day, as a paper pusher attempts to kill a fly in his office, he accidentally sends the belligerent societal wheels of justice well off the tracks and into a ditch. With the switching of a name from Tuttle to Buttle, we watch as an innocent father is scooped up, and interrogated to death. His family, distraught and mourning, and was asked to pay for his interrogation, has zero recourse to rectify this miscarriage of justice for their family.

Lowry, who pines for a more fantastic life that would take him beyond the horrors of paperwork, validations and stampings of triplicates and goldenrod copies, dreams of flying through the clouds in order to release a glorious beauty from a chained up cage. But during the day in and day out of his life he finds that this clerical error begins to wrap its tentacles physically and drag him down inch by absurd inch. Eventually, while attempting to deliver a refund on Tuttle’s overpaid interrogation discovers that the woman of his dreams is actually a real person - Jill Layton. But he’s only seen her once, and can’t figure out how to find her again. Initially, Lowry worked in the Records Department, and therefore didn’t have access in order to find Jill again. So he decides it would be better to take a promotion over to the more advantageous Information Retrieval organization. Retrieval is actually tasked with investigating subversives throughout society. Sort of reminds me of the Thought Police housed within the “Ministry of Love” within Orwell’s 1984.

Eventually, Lowry accidentally meets the dissident Tuttle that was accidentally not captured when Buttle was murdered in his place. Tuttle was something of a heating repairman revolutionary and bypassed Lowry’s heating issue with an unapproved technical bypass. This illegal bypass leads to the destruction of his apartment and the continuing growth of Lowry as a renegade of the state. Who knew that HVAC rights could be such a cause celebre of the dissident elite? Eventually, Lowry gets connected with Jill as he tries to convince her that he has loved her in his dreams, and that he wants nothing more than to protect her.

Let’s pause for a second here and consider Jill’s plight. It was actually Buttle and Lowry that were in real jeopardy. Lowry was on the hook for incorrect refunds for Buttle’s interrogations and a car that was properly receipted after it was destroyed when he attempted to deliver the refund. Lowry is the one that is spiraling down the proverbial drain of the chaos of this litigiously procedural fever dream of a society, not Jill. Jill was doing just fine paying bribes, and doing her thing by circumnavigating the chaos of this society without anyone paying her any mind at all. But Lowry, hellbent on his “love” for this innocent woman, actually is what endangers her. I think there is an enormous lesson in here somewhere…

Regardless, after initially resisting Lowry’s declarations of love, she eventually realizes that this is her knight in white armor and they work together to flee the authorities. And Tuttle to makes a couple of appearances just in time to save the duo from entrapment and an obvious coming death at the hands of the ever upbeat torturer Jack. The trio continues to attempt to expose the corruption inherent in the system. (Reminds me of a quote from Monty Python’s Holy Grail - “Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Help help! I’m being REPRESSED!” But I digress.) And Lowry is actual able to kill Jill in the government’s systems in remove her from their dragnet. But he doesn’t realize that he was the one they were searching for all along. And soon they are both captured and tortured. One of the agents even tells him that she was killed… a second time. (Is she really dead??!?)

There in an amazing Interrogation chamber (which was actually shot in an derelict water tower I believe.) Jack begins to work on Lowry, but is saved by Tuttle and his band of revolutionaries. But Lowry’s freedom is short-lived… I actually don’t think he was freed at all… but we’ll get to that… as he is recaptured and tortured. Flipping back and forth between torture and beautiful scenes of him and Jill heading off into the bucolic country side and the horribleness of his capture, we start to realize that Jill really is dead, and Lowry has never been freed. And we watch as Jack wheels Lowry away from his torture chamber and the movie ends.

Personal Thoughts on Brazil

I wonder if any of the chaos of Brazil actually happened? It wouldn’t be a stretch that all of the movie is Lowry’s fantastical meanderings. Even if I give you that the dark city hell scape sections are real, you’d be hard pressed to tell me where his dreams began and his dreams ended. You think honestly that a man dreamed about a woman, night after night, and suddenly, there she was, standing in front of him? It seems more like Lowry was just so mortified by his experiences in this terrible life that he lived in a near perpetual mental escape.

Which, might be an analogy for our lives today? The political and social commentary dumpster fires of our normal daily lives are escape worthy experiences. Debt is at all time heights, college loans, terrible work experiences, and we now have the meta verse, virtual realities, you get the idea. Gilliam’s cityscape is a horrible fantasy scape, but we aren’t too far from that reality if you take one look at how hard it is here in America for people to get real healthcare without filling out forms in quadruplicate etc etc. So yes, Gilliam’s world is a myth, but he was night on prescient in his envisionings.

Political Philosophical Thoughts on the movie Brazil

Seems obvious to me, but it feels as though Gilliam was inspired primarily by Kafka, Camus and Orwell. The two books by Kafka that seemed most directly connected to Brazil would be The Metamorphosis, and The Trial. Both books grapple with the insanities of modern life. The Trial tells the story of a man that is captured by the police, put on trial, and convicted for a crime. The twist? The convicted felon is never told what he’d done wrong. “Look, are you really going to stand here and tell us you did NOTHING? We’ve all done something!” And Gilliam’s Brazil tells a similar story about this dark, noir, dystopian society, taken to its most enormously illogical conclusions… paperwork, forms, queues, and such enormous upside down logic of what “freedom” looks like. But if we look to Kafka, Camus, and Orwell as sort of the philosophical giants in this space I think they might point the way as to what we can learn from Mr. Gilliam and this amazing think piece of a movie.

The Dangers of Totalitarianism Surveillance Societies: Brazil is at its loudest when it is commenting on the dangers of the government being in control of a surveillance state. You should be free to move and act without the terror of Big Brother looking over your shoulder and monitoring absolutely everything that you do and say. The erosion of personal privacy leads in scary Brazilian-esque directions as the Retrieval Organization hunts for “divisives”.

The Dangers of Bureaucratic Dehumanization: You are you… and you are inherently valuable and important. The moment the process, the queue, or the paperwork is more important than the person, we have tipped the scales towards this horrible dehumanization effect. Already, with large cities, and the anonymization of the individual we have slipped dangerous far on the scales of this topic. We could easily go completely overboard without much effort if we aren’t careful as a society, a government, or as a people.

The Dangers of Consumerism and Materialism: Did you notice the banner in the film that said something to the effect of Christians for Consumerism?? I literally paused the movie and thought, and thought and thought. Such a poignant comment and ahead of its time critique. But the movie does a good job of pointing out how runaway capitalism can endanger people and abandon them to vices and stupidities that are being actually realized now. Our chasing after eternal youth through the Barbary of perpetual plastic surgery? Anyway, this is an interesting sub current that appears regularly throughout the film. Did you also notice that people at dinner, and at the mall, etc. when the bombs went off? They quickly cordoned the dead off, in order to allow the living to not be impacted? To not slow the eating, the shopping, the spending? I found that just so on point. Soon we will be there after mass shootings. Instead of closing the school down at all, we’ll be open the next day… or worse, later that day.

The Dangers Escapism and Fantasy: Maybe this is just me, but I think Gilliam was commenting on our society’s penchant for avoidance and escapism through fantasy. He never showed a specific gaming system, or a VR solution, instead Lowry used his dreams, and his imagination as a way to avoid the enormous problems of our culture and our society. I think he was pointing out how we yield control to the powers that be by avoiding the chaos and instead disengaging with the real and instead grasping on to the fantastical.

Brazil is Perfect

It’s pretty unbelievable just how perfect Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is. The story is absurd. But it’s only one or two degrees off of center. It’s not a full 180 degrees off. But the most amazing realization of Brazil is his set design and cinematography. What Gilliam was able to do with models, and with practical effects is just unbelievable. His skill in the world of set scouting is unbelievable. The torture chamber he found in the water tower is up there with the single most perfect set locations of all time. Ever. And while a massive downer, it’s actually quite funny at times. De Niro actually made me laugh out loud a couple different times. And Jill’s necrophilia line? Pretty fantastic.

I took notes on what I remember about Brazil before watching the film, and I gotta say, post watch, I blended together about 3 other Gilliam films… most specifically 12 Monkeys. The tarps, the dark tunnels, the swinging cages in Time Bandits. But I did remember the vague outlines of the story, the chaos of the paperwork and the brilliance of the computer screens. The smear of the memory of his designs, and the darkness were pretty spot on. The details were so very vague. So I’m so very glad I took another pass at this fantastic film. But I most loved the prescience of the societal crash that occurred in such a logical and orderly way. We are almost realizing the darkest truths espoused here, and we don’t even realize it. Golf Clap Mr. Gilliam… golf clap. Well done sir. Well done.