“Happiness: we’re all in it together” - Brazil
Terry Gilliam’s twisted dystopian movie Brazil began life under the working title of 1984½, and like so many of the great films of the 1980s, it was a box office failure. It did earn some recognition via the Oscars, with a nomination for Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown’s screenplay, and also for the art direction and set decoration by Norman Garwood and Maggie Gray. Its blend of dark humour and crushing tragedy is as bizarrely unique as it is wildly absurd. This is not so much a vision of a dystopian future as it is an encapsulation of the dystopian present through the visual imagery of a dystopian past, and as such it remains timeless - as hilarious and disturbing today as the year that it was originally released.
The screenplay is shot through with all the mind-numbing obfuscations and pig-headed stubbornness of contemporary bureaucracy. A major plot point involves a flamboyant duct engineer who is wanted as a terrorist since he fixes the broken machinery of this dysfunctional world without the proper paperwork. When a case of mistaken identity results in the killing of an innocent man with a similar name to the fugitive, the Ministry of Information has no end of euphemisms for what happened. The person in question is listed as ‘inoperative’, ‘excised’, and even ‘completed’ - to which Jonathan Pryce (in perhaps his finest ever performance) responds with an outrage borne of frustration “He’s dead.”
Our fear of bureaucracy is perfectly captured in Brazil, nesting in its sheer intractability. This is not Orwell’s IngSoc, where an ideological system has captured political power - it is simply a dysfunctional society where nobody is in control, and everyone keeps their head down for fear of being noticed. The film is indebted to 1984, certainly, but it is sometimes scarier in drawing attention to the absurd inhumanity that even a rather neutral bureaucratic administration can unleash upon those who are forced to co-operate with it. Orwell, we realise, was writing his fears so that we might avoid falling into these traps (although we are doing an appalling job in this regard). Gilliam and his collaborators were writing their fears in the knowledge that it is already far, far too late.
One of the striking aspects of the Oscar-winning production design is Norman Garwood’s raiding of the 1930s. The poster from which the opening quote is taken was directly inspired by propaganda from the United States, which can also be seen above. It lurks behind a queue of black folk in Louisville, Kentucky, waiting for emergency supplies during the 1937 Ohio river flood, while the caption praises the high standard of living in the United States. In Garwood’s impish reworking, the title becomes ‘Happiness: we’re all in it together’. Anyone who has actually attempted a road trip with 2.4 kids and a dog knows full well the absurdity of associating any kind of joyous state with being trapped in a car for miles upon miles of featureless road. The ‘it’ we are in is certainly not described by ‘happiness’.
These posters perfectly capture the essential skill for making terrible bureaucracy feel palatable, what might be called sleight of mind. We are offered a treasure (‘happiness’) and a map to find it (‘we’re all in it together’), which in fact is always instead a mirage and a desert. Sometimes these slogans entail Sisyphean rewards forever out of reach, as with ‘Nobody is safe until everyone is safe’, which grimly exposes the futility of making ‘safety’ an overarching goal. Sometimes these mottos set off upon a foundation of principle that only later retreats into mirage, as with ‘My body, my choice’, which now apparently applies solely to one very specific kind of medical procedure and no longer entails any principled defence of bodily autonomy.
As this latter example exposes, sleight of mind is not merely a tool for sanitising bureaucracy, it has become our preferred alternative to thinking. We have leapt far beyond the macabre elisions of a stifling and heartless bureaucracy that would call the dead ‘completed’. These self-twisting slogans serve as conceptual substitutes for the substantive principles that would form the basis for any society worth defending. In trying to compel us towards mirages of purportedly better worlds, sleight of mind successfully places any last traces of utopia firmly beyond our reach.
Great piece, Chris! Thanks for this. I'm a Terry Gilliam fan, and a fan too of Tom Stoppard. I used to teach The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. I very much admire that film. So much there that relates to our situation as well. It's also known in the film world as a textbook bomb since it did poorly at the box office but cost a fortune to make. Often seems like anything worth doing in a real sense has no value in our present society, and that's a clear sign that our culture has gone tits up... which is another fun euphemism for "completed". . . uh, I mean, "dead."