Dystopias had already played a part in my life at that time, since I had read a child's book in 1982 about an intelligent rooster who ate "Brave New World" ("O Galo Superdotado", by Maria Dinorah), causing this to be the first serious book I ever read. I had also read "1984" before I was ten (and this may well become a Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction-meets-Voodoo-Child sort of rewriting on "Born under a Bad Sign" eventually).
As a matter of fact these paranoid "something's wrong" readings of my early life may account to my coming to understand the concept of "samsara". It doesn't matter if it is Terry Gilliam's grim-satirical outlook or others more or less colorful or detailed, like the Wheel of Life. There is a more subtle principle at work when the horror is not immediate, but comes from bits and pieces that must be intellectually construed and seen from a wider perspective that is very appealing to me. Of course I fear stuff such as "Alien" or "Mulholland Dr", but it is much more irrational and it's somewhat easy to distance oneself, separate fiction from reality.
In the case of Brazil, bureaucracy is the mighty Samurai we stand against. There is nothing more absurd and fearful than institutions having chaotic influences over individuals, and that has been the case since the idea of Political Science has been invented. In Brazil, people being tortured by Information Retrieval are called "costumers", and are actually charged if they don't deliver the goods. When we work nowadays, it is rarely understood if we are clients or employees in a giant machinery of information.
We also don't know if the terrorist attacks, which have acquired the same status the misery of social inequality plays in Brasil (where we no longer even bother to panic when we see a child using hard drugs on the street), are actually carried by terrorists, or are accidents of bureaucracy itself. In fact, as in the real world, we don't even know if nature really is in command at all, and stuff like tsunamis and airplane crashes may well be driven by some buggy corporation meme that wasn't able to take global warming or muslin sensibilities in consideration.
The name of the movie and the fact that "Aquarela do Brasil" plays through the whole thing with a lyrical irony that nowhere else I have come upon of course have played a part in my private musings about fact and fiction. Of course, I live in Brazil, and wasn't sure why this movie was called by the same name. The retro-futuristic bureaucracy, as well as the social inequalities and most of the violence seemed very fit for Brazil, but I didn't thought possible for Gilliam to know that, or to be meaningful for an American to make such a statement about such an overly unimportant country. I thought about the Irish mythology of Hi-Brazil, which "Eric, the Viking" used, but still, why? It seems it mostly fits anywhere the corporate-state has plunged its claws — that is, everywhere.
Brazil was first to be named "1984½", but a movie about the novel was going to be released, and they decided it was not so right. In a Butterfly-effect ironic expiation, the insect that, dead, changed Tuttle into Buttle had, as it was showed in a cut scene, came from ecologically incorrect wood extracted from Brazil! And if this doesn't spell samsara and karma for you, you have no choice but become a nihilist.
Anyway, nihilist or not, shit happens. And that's what happens to Buttle, Tuttle, K., and Sam. But we are not sure if their innocence isn't itself their guilt. Their sense of naïve heroism coupled with unrealistic expectations may well be their hubris. As in the Buddhist teachings, samsara cannot be overcome through evolution or intelligent design, through effort and even ethics. Wisdom is required, and this means understanding the whole charade is nothing else than a bad dream. If we try to shape reality on the arrangement of bits of information we receive daily, it surely will become rather claustrophobic. The trick is not to ascribe definitive meaning to any formulation which may arise. In this way we may understand very fast that hope and fear are creations of the mind, nothing else. Dystopia descriptions provide a very engaging path, if nihilism can be avoided through vajra skepticism.
Tuttle himself is the greatest of all the heroes I have ever seen. Superman helps when big pieces of rock are falling on our heads, but Tuttle engineers against bureaucracy! He is a hacker of state-corporations, a Robin Hood of the wired age — none other than Robert De Niro himself in a most memorable, even if almost faceless, contribution. His poetic ending, vanishing amongst paper formularies in the hallucinations during Sam's torture, is one of the saddest moments in movie history. That is the point of no return, where Sam discovers himself without friends in a waste land of state-corporation. Being rather spoiled by his rich and influential family, he seems not to understand why the state does not respect his personal dreams. Of course, he is not dealing with persons, he is dealing with a deterministic algorithm1 a of the same kind that drive the contracts and papers of actual corporations in the real world. The people involved are no less relevant than the "executive's toy", a gift Sam receives repeatedly and is basically just a neat flip-coin replacement.
Was Jill's sudden change of mood over Sam just a way of getting favors from the government through snitching on him? We'll never know, but we know that if it was the case, it didn't work for Jill either. All the mistakes he made were based on the assumption the bureaucracy was so lame he wasn't going to be in problem after all. But when the tubes are connected randomly, we cannot base our faith in chaos. That's the essence of superstition.
The difficulty of making the final director's cut released is yet another chapter, a book actually: "The Battle of Brazil". Terry Gilliam stands in real life for the Parsifal archetype he indulges in many of his characters, since his movies often find themselves trapped in difficulties created by struggles between vision and real possibility, mainly money. In the case of Brazil, there must have been a crack on the space-time continuum for a film such as this to be made with such quality and genius in the US of A of 1985. A crack exploited with great hardship by Gilliam, who fought especially hard for the right on the final cut. He himself faced the censorship of corporations and the age old "sell-out-artists" conundrum. It seems some executive wanted a happy ending (the cut actually showed on TV, it is called the "Love Conquers All" version) because of poor test screenings of the long director cut. In a television interview Gilliam was asked if the studios were making it hard for him and he answered, "Not the studios, just this guy", and showed on national TV a picture of the actual person representing the corporation. He also paid a expensive full page add on a magazine, asking why his movie wasn't being released. Oh no, and this is not viral publicity, although the corporations may now steal the idea.
1. ^ Yep, that's redundant.