“What have you done with his body?” the bereft widow demands of a man from the government, asking after her husband was hauled away because of a bureaucratic error and died in custody. “He hadn’t done anything! He was good! What have you done with his body!”
“Not my department, of course,” he replies, haplessly. “I’m only Records.”
That’s a linchpin scene from Terry Gilliam’s visionary 1985 masterpiece “Brazil,” a prophetic and bleakly satirical depiction of a society entombed in fascism. What’s amazing about “Brazil,” even after 40 years, is how prophetic it was about the manipulation of public mores and knowledge by a totalitarian regime.
Much of this owes its coloration to George Orwell — indeed, among Gilliam’s early ideas for his project’s title was “1984 1/2” — and some to Tom Stoppard, whose specific contributions to the script are hard to pinpoint but whose comic sensibility pervades it from start to finish.
Stoppard, when asked in a documentary what “Brazil” signifies as the title of the film, beyond the presence of the Ary Barroso song on its soundtrack in many varied arrangements as a leitmotif, said its theme was “the myth of a free man in an unfree society.”
As premonitory cinema goes, “Brazil” is perhaps matched only by Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 “Network.” I disdained that film upon first viewing as hopelessly over-the-top; today it plays like a documentary, depicting the takeover of a network’s news operation by its entertainment division, which fills the news slot with a psychic, an opinion poll, scandal-mongering, a regularly scheduled terrorist attack for the cameras and, of course, an unhinged messianic anchorman.
(The last is set up to be assassinated on camera when his ratings fall, perhaps an overdetermined prefigurement of CBS insisting that its cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” is due to failing ratings, and not to the determination to bow to Donald Trump’s amour propre.)
The atmosphere of “Brazil” is entirely different from “Network’s.” Chayefsky’s screenplay was a take on the contemporary real world, “Brazil’s” (credited to Gilliam, Stoppard and Charles McKeown) within a dystopian fantasy world.
But so much of “Brazil” is recognizable as features of our world: its malfunctioning robotic technologies —alarm clocks that don’t keep time, automated coffee brewers that soak breakfast toast into mush, elevators that stop between floors, tram doors that close on people trying to exit, etc., etc. Diners order their meals from an electronic tablet. Nosy surveillance bots peer over people’s shoulders. Highways are hemmed in by billboards. Women are obsessed with plastic surgery, up to and including procedures that land their subjects in coffins. (“My complication had a little complication,” says a patient swathed in bandages.)
And terrorist attacks are part and parcel of daily life; when a bomb explodes in an expensive restaurant, the jaded patrons don’t stop eating for a moment as the staff block their views of the carnage with Japanese screens.
Then there’s the fascist weaponization of information and fear, the film’s Orwellian backdrop. The hero and Gilliam’s everyman, Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is an unambitious functionary of the Ministry of Information. A troupe of schoolchildren visiting its lobby masses in front of a statue with the legend “The Truth Shall Make you Free” and an office placard announces “Suspicion Breeds Confidence.”
A wallboard at an apartment complex advertises “Mellowfields Top Security Holiday Camps — Luxury without Fear/Fun Without Suspicion/Relax in a Panic-Free Atmosphere.”
Paperwork is another weapon in this society. A character trying to get to the bottom of her neighbor’s disappearance at the Ministry’s records office is instructed to obtain a form from Information Adjustments and bring it to Information Retrieval, which subject her to an endless runaround.
Modern America has taken heed; the work requirement for Medicaid enrollees imposed by the last Trump administration and revived in the Republican budget bill enacted in July threw 18,000 adults off Medicaid rolls in the four months of 2018 it was in effect in Arkansas, the only state that implemented the rule before it was blocked by a federal judge — not necessarily because the enrollees couldn’t meet the work standard (more than 90% of them were already working or had exemptions written into the rule), but because they couldn’t navigate the administrative reporting system. The Biden White House rescinded the rule.
That brings us to the subplot of “Brazil” that resonates the loudest for today’s America: the arrest of an innocent man due to bureaucratic carelessness. It begins when a fly falls into and short-circuits an office machine at the Ministry (literally a “bug”) resulting in an arrest warrant for a man named Buttle, a “shoe repair operative,” instead of Tuttle, a renegade heating repairman played by Robert De Niro.
A squadron of masked, anonymous officers promptly storms the Buttle family home through the windows, door and ceiling, elbows the children aside, swaths Buttle in a straitjacket and hauls him away without explanation, leaving his terrified wife with a receipt for her husband (paperwork, of course). He is never seen again.
The very scene is a chilling pre-enactment of the ICE raids across California and in other states, in which masked and unidentified patrols have rounded up people who look Hispanic, are overheard speaking Spanish, and who are detained at car washes and Home Depots — detaining legal residents and American citizens alike.
As my colleagues report, the latest such foray took place Wednesday at a Westlake Home Depot, notwithstanding federal court rulings prohibiting the use of roving patrols to target immigrants. The departments of Justice and Homeland Security have admitted to federal judges that some detentions are the result of errors, but as judges have complained, their efforts to rectify the mistakes have been irregular at best.
“Brazil” had a difficult birth. Gilliam’s original cut was massacred by its U.S. distributor, Universal, which reedited the firm to give it, absurdly, a happy ending — Gilliam’s version ends with Lowry reduced to a happy catatonia, defeated (or perhaps not) by his totalitarian bureaucracy. Gilliam ultimately placed a full-page ad in Variety addressed to Universal boss Sidney Sheinberg, demanding that the studio release his film to theaters. Gilliam’s final recut is widely available as the canonical version. It becomes more relevant with every passing day.
An ancient philosophical concept holds that art should imitate life. “Brazil” is a counterargument all on its own. It’s not an example of art imitating life so much as art painting the future.
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