An Essay On “Brazil”

Hey everyone this is Josh Rosebrough and today we will be delving into the maniacal Orwellian nightmare that is also my all time favorite film… Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. The story revolves around a seemingly ordinary and unambitious man named Sam Lowry who gets his life thrown into chaos and ruin all because of the butterfly effect. I didn’t say the butterfly was pretty. This small event starts a domino chain reaction that results in a man being improperly imprisoned, Sam’s apartment being destroyed, his car being blown up, his unlikely promotion, his attempts to run from the law, the government fighting back, Sam retaliating with subterfuge, his arrest, and eventual plummet into eternal madness. It’s a beautiful story of love, loss, dreams, and enough bureaucratic red tape and paperwork to make anyone go insane.

The narrative of Brazil is never clear about how long of a time it spans. We are however given the impression that the major events happen within a relatively short period due to the fact that the film surrounds the Christmas season both before and afterward. The actual frequency win which events transpire is mysterious because both time and space seem to make illogical leaps and bounds. Which makes complete sense since the main character’s perception of reality is deteriorating with each passing scene. The dream sequences alone make up a good portion of the film. However it’s not until the second act that the dreams start to bleed over into reality and really start messing with your head. To boil it all down, Brazil is Terry Gilliam’s reimagining of George Orwell’s 1984 and it follows the same narrative structure so closely that if you’ve read the book you’ll be able to guess the less than conventional ending pretty quickly. The strangest element of this particular film is it’s utilization of black humor. It comes at such odd times and in such odd ways that there’s no real way to be prepared for it. Of course, this movie is coming to us from the twisted mind of one of the infamous Monty Python troop who gave us all of those wonderfully bizarre animations.

Now down to brass tax. Let’s talk about the mise-en-scene of this cinematic masterpiece. What I’ve always loved about Terry Gilliam is that his films always gives us some semblance of when and where we are by possibly the oddest and most comical means possible. Here we’re simply told the time and the century, while in The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen were given the century, the age, and the day. It’s just one of his trademarks. But the way he does it in Brazil actually is meant to signify the fact that this story could literally take place ANYWHERE. No group of people are immune to the destructive influences of bureaucratic bovine scatology. Something that Gilliam has always done brilliantly is setting up the predominant motifs of his pictures. In the world of Brazil it’s obviously air ducts and other pieces of wacky mechanized eyesores. In Time Bandits the character of Evil has the motif of having things wrapped in plastic.

Gilliam has never shied away from letting the visuals tell the story. On that same note I want to talk about how literally everything in this movie is meant to unease you. Other movies that depict a semi-futuristic dystopia, like Equilibrium, The Matrix, iRobot, They Live, In Time, Blade Runner, Soylent Green and other such films all fail where Gilliam excels into visual genius. There is not a single frame of Brazil where we as the audience can feel comfortable. Yet as you watch this movie more and more you begin to realize just how messed up the society is living within the confines of this city are. When a bomb goes off in the middle of a restaurant what does everybody do? They just go about their business as usual as if this was an everyday occurrence. From the oppressively symmetrical and sterile hallways of the ministry of Information Retrieval, children’s demented playtime, extremely small computers with huge fresnel lens monitors, realizing that the only person standing on L train is a lady with one leg, down to a dog with tape over it’s rear end.

Everything in this world is off by 25 degrees and it’s beautifully unsettling. One amazing thing that Gilliam uses these visuals for is to show us how much Sam’s look at life changes when he encounters yet another explosion, this time in a lingerie store. Rather than shrugging it off like he did before he’s convicted and does everything he can to help those others in need. There isn’t even any dialogue that points us to this fact which is why when people notice it, it has far more impact than spoon-feeding the audience information.

There are so many explicit and implicit meanings buried within this film that to name them all, I’d need to do an entirely separate video essay. However, the mise-en-scene of Brazil goes to astronomical lengths to convey the sheer brokenness of this world. Very much like 1984, Brazil’s message is that big government is simply not good for anyone. A society driven by the ideals of a single human individual will lead to disaster and destruction for everyone. Yet, the one thing that a government can never break is the human imagination. No matter how hard they squeeze, the human mind can find ways to elude their grasp even if it means incapacitating the body in the process. A government may take our lives, take our lands, take our freedoms and self defenses but they will never be able to control everyone’s mind.