Why Terry Gilliam's timeless Brazil beats both Aldous Huxley's and George Orwell's visions of a dystopian future
Among the reading circles, there is one passionate debate that has lasted for decades and generations. It is between those who found George Orwell's solemn 1984 to be prophetic and prescient in depicting a society beaten and subdued by a tyrannical, truth-manipulating dictatorship and those who found Aldous Huxley's subtly satirical Brave New World to be the most astute portrait of how mankind fell prey to cheap promiscuity, consumerism and apathetic triviality while our rulers divided us merely into classes and brainwashed us with loathing of culture and high art and ensured that everybody was happy.
There is, then, one cult of bibliophiles who hold up Orwell's book, mostly a sobering story of a future Britain ruled by the seemingly omnipresent Big Brother, a formidable mythical state leader, and where art and literature have been incinerated withal human decency and freedom, as the final word on just what could go wrong in future. There is another, one clearly to which I subscribe, which hails Huxley's book for predicting, so accurately, a future society in which mediocrity, snobbery and materialism were worshipped as virtues while the state simply sat back and watched in glee.
Yet, both groups of bookworms are a bit misguided into assuming that their favourite book is the definitive vision of dystopia. While 1984 does, indeed, probe incisively into the inherently corruptible nature of faux socialism, as it had flourished in the 1930s-40s (the reference point for Orwell was unmistakably Stalinist Russia), its relevance today is limited to its still-unnerving portrait of how can a government have complete and reckless control over the truth and how the latter can be manipulated, falsified and exaggerated for misleading the helplessly captive masses.
Huxley's extremely cynical portrait strikes harder, admittedly; the writer and thinker was commenting sardonically on how American capitalism, spearheaded by Henry Ford (given the equivalent stature of God in the narrative), had started erasing tradition, comfortable convention and even culture. Today, we are being lied to and spied upon by our leaders but we are also sinking, at a greater rate, in a pool of comfortable nonsense, surrounded as we are with 3D movies, online streaming entertainment services and a burgeoning social network, all of which refuse to satiate our inner pathos and inadequacy. The passage of time has favoured, obviously, Huxley's vision while an Orwellian concept of a total collapse of democracy feels a bit dated even if possible.
But there is, rather unexpectedly, a film that turns out to be more timely and timeless, on both a personal and political level, than these two indisputably great works of modern literature. And that is because Terry Gilliam's Brazil fuses, ingeniously, both these perspectives into a subversive whole that takes the ideas into a completely new level.
The future world of Brazil feels nothing like the typical techno-noir world that we would see in subsequent films like Blade Runner or any other Phillip K.Dick adaptation. Those stories and films were distinctly American in milieu and perspective and focused on how even seamless efficiency of technology could not endow human society with progress. Gilliam's film, drawing its influences prominently from Orwell's bleaker vision and Franz Kafka's heightened surrealism, shows us a cityscape that is not only crippled on every level by bureaucracy and mechanical inefficiency but most crucially feels like a retro-noir steampunk London, with creaking machines, elephantine ducts, pipe-smoking moustachioed men and dolled-up dames.
There are also stiff-lipped clerks and secretaries, nosy co-workers, sneering plumbers and grumbling old-timers. In short, this is like the London of Orwell and Huxley with the hilarious goofball touch of Monty Python, of which, unsurprisingly, the director and co-writer was one of the most pivotal members.
Brazil is, at its crux, about the meek and mild-mannered Sam Lowry, a perennially non-plussed worker at Records with a cantankerous boss, an overbearing mother, a faulty cooling system and with only a vivid, elaborate fantasy of him as a dashing, soaring knight who chases a blonde damsel in distress. Ironically, it is this dream that plunges him further into a labyrinth of suicidal despair. As he becomes berserk and foolhardy, chasing the living counterpart of his dreams, a shifty woman named Jill Layton, he only paves the way, inevitably, for his own doom.
At one level, Brazil is, as I said before, a dazzling fusion of the conflicting points of view put forth by the aforementioned writers, humorists and thinkers of that era. There is a similar totalitarianism at play in the film as the one that Orwell chose to attack, except that the state is the subject of biting satire rather than a full-fledged and scathing attack. There are random bomb blasts that are implicitly staged by the state itself to provide licence for abuse of power, there are equally senseless arrests made on the flimsy evidence of fudged-up paperwork and there are dotty typists who jot down transcripts of torture sessions for future records. On the other hand, in a touch of Huxley and even a faint whiff of Oscar Wilde, there are old dowagers choosing problematic transformative surgery, there are pompous buffoons of French waiters and there are sloppy meals which only have alluring names. All of this is served with a palette of junk decor and visual kitsch, shot brilliantly by Roger Pratt, that are the trademark elements of Gilliam's oeuvre.
But more than just the humour or the film's quirky craft, it is in how the director tweaks on the template of his believably hapless protagonist. Unlike Winston Smith of 1984, Lowry is not necessarily a disillusioned, lonely worker who nurses secret hopes of revolution but rather a diminutive, easily embarrassed simpleton who leaps before he thinks in his bid to make his fondest dream come true. In that sense, he is more similar to the misunderstood Bernard Marx of Brave New World, in all his predicament and self-doubting.
Lowry, however, is a more rousingly believable hero than Marx, because his troubling confusion feels more real and emotionally wrenching while the latter is more of a slyly shifty person who simply seizes every available chance at social approval. With Jonathan Pryce' wonderfully whimsical performance, and Gilliam and co-writers Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown sticking to Lowry's beguiled perspective of the everyday chaos that soon becomes increasingly nightmarish in both big and small ways, the film becomes more heartfelt than expected, even with the distinctly sardonic tone.
Fantasy, of an idyllic alternate reality of happiness, love and freedom, is not just an important theme of Brazil alone. It is a theme that is also found in all major dystopian novels. Lowry's recurring dreams, of being a dashing knight, fighting off gigantic monsters and rescuing the woman of his dreams, are symbolic of his regular and routine struggle against inefficiency and bureaucracy that stand in his way to real happiness. The climax of that fantasy comes later, when the relentless helplessness has already escalated to new levels but I come to that later. It could be said safely that even in 1984, Smith and his lover Julia fantasise dearly and desperately about an alternate reality of a pastoral English bliss in stark contrast with the cold and claustrophobic reality. And in Brave New World, John The Savage imagines the modern world to be a dazzling utopia, compelling him to quote the eponymous line from Shakespeare's The Tempest in a burst of inspired fervour.
Similarly, fervent imagination, and the undeniable power of flights of fancy to destroy tedium and harsh reality, are the frequent elements of Gilliam's work. But more than any other film before or after Brazil, it is here that his inner yearning for creative freedom for his wild, unbridled wealth of imagination feels most believably since it is mirrored in the nightmarishly hilarious shenanigans that his protagonist goes through.
Lowry's constant attempts to make his most fervent reveries come true take him through a maze of which every level holds an uncomfortably dire convolution that piles on the frustration that one may feel when negotiating the endlessly tedious world of paperwork and permissions. Gilliam himself had been struggling against the film's producers, who were insisting on a happier ending, while he lobbied instead for the devastating climax that stayed eventually intact to our good fortune.
That brings me to that climax and just what the title of the film alludes to.
The final half hour of Brazil plunges headfirst into the realm of fantasy and terror with reckless, almost nihilistic glee. We see Lowry being arrested, then interrogated by stuffy bureaucrats and eventually facing inevitable lobotomy at the hands of none other than his only friend at work, the dapper and devilish Jack Lint, played with flawlessly suave menace by ex-Python Michael Palin. And then, all hell breaks loose, giving this hopelessly trapped soul a new chance at escaping this hellish present with the wacky-witted renegade plumber Archibald 'Harry' Tuttle, played with cocky charm by Robert De Niro. It is here that the film reaches its emotional apex, taking Lowry and us into a crazed whirlwind where nothing, not even freedom, does not last long. Except, maybe, for love.
Or rather, except for imagination. The theme of Aquarela do Brasil plays frequently throughout the film but we realise it soon enough that it stems from Lowry's dreams itself. In the end, Lowry is left alone, broken and rendered incapable of a normal existence but his only reaction to the same is not submission but rather blissful ignorance. That ignorance comes from Lowry indulging his dearest fantasy till its wonderfully utopian climax, one of idyllic love and a permanent escape from the stifling world of the present. And the only sound that we can hear is him humming that song, lost forever in that reverie which is more enlightening than reality.
Is it any coincidence that Brazil came around the same time when actual England, and particularly London, itself was being reigned by a subtler but spikier form of totalitarianism by the irascible Margaret Thatcher and her brutal crackdown on race and gender minorities that were thriving in the country? Simultaneously, Alan Moore and David Lloyd were writing and illustrating the powerfully allegorical vigilante series V For Vendetta and Salman Rushdie's controversial The Satanic Verses had also lamented, in its subplot concerning the woes of the Anglophile Saladin Chamcha, the similarly hostile realities for immigrants in London.
But more than these iconoclast works, Brazil lasts forever, like Lowry's mesmerising dream of love conquering all odds. And this is because, much to our detriment, we are still suffocated and rendered as trivial as nonsensical numbers by a sophisticated system of paperwork and we still pray for respite, of being transported by the will of our imagination into freedom, frolic and sunshine.
