Escape to Brazil

Terry Gillman’s dystopic, retro-future film Brazil (1985) defies easy categorization as a satire armed to the teeth with tragic qualities.  To further complicate the search for the film’s equipment for living, its ideological or symptomatic meanings appear to be equally evasive.  The film seems to prove its usefulness in its hyperbolic visions of the future: these visions only contrast with the information age in the sense that their primary symbol of articulation is paper, while today the age has become increasingly paperless.  Brazil depicts a time where a big brother bureaucracy reins supreme,  doing so incompetently and through the control of information: those who are deemed a threat to national security are dealt with by Information Retrieval (my personal favorite propaganda tagline in the film is featured in the opening scene with the fly, on a poster that reads “loose talk is noose talk”).  In a world where the arms of society and government, however incompetent, are increasingly inescapable, the film offers an extremely dark proverb of human perseverance: when all else fails in reality, one can find comfort and consolation in fantasy.  As Archibald “Harry” Tuttle states in a conversation with Sam Lowry whilst performing maintenance on his air conditioning:

                       

                        “Found it.  There’s your problem.”

                        “Can you fix it?”

                        “No, I can’t…but I can bypass it.”

One of the film’s primary means of depicting Lowry’s gradual retreat from reality and into internal solidarity is through the soundtrack.  The eponymous song occurs immediately at the film’s opening, backing our first brief glimpse of Lowry’s dream world sequence.  It is non-diegetic and the song itself feeds Gilliam’s escapist philosophy within the film.  He describes the image that inspired the entirety of the film without actually being featured in it:

                        “I had an image of somebody sitting on a beach, a beach blackened by coal dust,    

                        somebody just sitting there in the evening with a radio and that haunting song

                        coming over the air waves – escapist, romantic sounds suggesting that somewhere

            out there, far from the conveyor belts and ugly steel towers, is a green and

            wonderful world.”

While Brazil, the actual country, has nothing to do with film, the idea of escaping to another world outside of Sam’s immediate dystopic surroundings becomes more and more prominent in the film and transitions from non-diegetic to diegetic.  Not only does much of the soundtrack contain variations of the melody in Kate Bush’s rendition of “Brazil,” but the song starts to be used in television commercials and is hummed by characters.  The song, resembling escape from reality, becomes more and more part of Lowry’s diegetic reality until the film’s iconic and depressing cadence.  Following the reveal that Sam has completely immersed himself in his fantasy, the last image of Lowry depicts him strapped in a chair in Information Retrieval’s torture chamber.  This is accompanied, not only by the closing credits, but also by Sam’s eerie humming of “Brazil.”  At this moment of the film, the human spirit has persevered and fantasy has eclipsed reality, but we are left wondering whether or not this idea is uplifting or depressing.