In February 1985, when Terry Gilliam’s Brazil first hit the big screen in the UK, it was an obvious, albeit messy, homage to George Orwell’s then almost 40-year-old novel, 1984.
Now, after another 40 years have passed, the Orwell link is still clear. But in our current dystopian moment, Gilliam seems in some ways more prescient, and more insightful, than his most obvious influence. Orwell’s vision of authoritarianism, like his prose, was clean, regimented, organized. Authoritarianism in real life, though, it turns out, is, like Gilliam, a good bit more chaotic.
Brazil (like 1984) is set sometime in the 20th century, in a retro-drab, maybe near-future England. The protagonist is Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a minor bureaucratic functionary who has fantastical dreams in which he flies on magical metal wings and rushes to save a mysterious beautiful blonde woman from a range of monstrous antagonists. When Sam stumbles on the woman of his dreams in the person of truck driver Jill Layton (Kim Greist), his modest life unravels, and soon he and she are on the run from the jackbooted agents of the state.
The theme and plot here is, as established, very 1984. As in Orwell’s novel, love and romance function as a human contrast to the grey rigidity of authoritarian strictures and authoritarian violence.
In Orwell, though, Big Brother is nearly omniscient, and therefore nearly omnipotent. The whole novel is a meticulous conspiracy against our hero, Winston Smith, and his significant other Julia, both of whom are maneuvered into loving one another and then into betraying each other by the well-oiled, sadistic machine of totalitarianism. The horror of the book is that Nazism, or Stalinism, has been perfected. There is no space for human feeling, or human thought, or human resistance, because the fascists have ruthlessly, and deliberately, stomped it out.
In contrast, in Brazil there is no plot against Sam. On the contrary, he’s a well-connected man from a wealthy family; people in authority go out of their way to help him. The regime ends up targeting him because of a series of completely random mix-ups, starting with a fly getting caught in a typewriter and changing the subject of an arrest warrant from a “Mr. Tuttle” to a “Mr. Buttle.” Buttle gets tortured to death, Sam has to take his widow a check as an apology, at which point he runs into Jill—and things spiral from there.
You might think that a less efficient authoritarian state would be a less oppressive authoritarian state. And to some degree that’s the case in Brazil. The government in the film does not regiment every aspect of life. People still buy each other Christmas presents; they still watch Marx Brothers films; they still slack off at work. There are those who resist the regime—like Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a rogue duct repairperson, who fixes heating and air conditioning units off the grid, defying the system and its grindingly slow paperwork.
But the confusion and chaos of the bureaucracy is also, as poor Mr. Buttle learns, its own kind of Kafka-esque nightmare. Sam needs Harry Tuttle’s help because his air conditioning is busted and he can’t get anyone to fix it. More catastrophically, when the system decides you’re a criminal or a terrorist, there’s no way to convince it otherwise. Orwell’s Big Brother polices everyone with equal efficiency and ruthlessness. In Brazil, people are policed sporadically, without logic or reason. The state violence is more random, and the absurdity is more conducive to Gilliam’s brand of black humor. But the victims are just as dead.
Chaos and incompetence lead security forces in Brazil to kill and terrorize innocent people. They also mean that the security forces are completely ineffectual when it comes to stopping actual threats. Irish nationalists conducted intermittent bombing attacks in Britain during the ‘80s, and Gilliam extrapolates from that to present a society wracked by constant, daily, horrifying explosions. The Deputy Minister of Information, Mr. Helpmann (Peter Vaughan) sneers and chortles on television that the terrorists are poor sports and won’t admit when they’ve lost, but beyond these platitudes the government’s spies and torturers seem to have no ability, and little interest, in ending the carnage. Again, all the effort we see from the security services goes towards stopping an unlicensed air conditioner repairman.
What Gilliam took from Kafka, and what Orwell missed, is the insight that totalitarian dystopia can be extremely dystopian even when it’s not especially total. In some ways, the incompetence of the regime can even make things worse. Big Brother was at least predictable; he made it clear what he wanted from you—total obedience, total submission, your face crushed under the heel of a boot forever. That’s miserable. But at least you know what’s coming.
In Brazil, though, the regime’s intentions and desires are largely opaque. It barely seems to notice the people it grinds up. Elon Musk cut funds for cancer research without realizing he cut funds for cancer research. Donald Trump wants to conquer Greenland because the Mercator projection makes it look big on the map. The bureaucracy in Brazil tortures some guy to death because they spelled his name wrong. Your face is crushed under the heel of a nonsense screw up forever.
For Gilliam, totalitarianism isn’t (just) evil because it wants to torture and crush people. It’s evil because it has no mechanism for accountability. There is no way for Mr. Buttle’s widow to object to her husband’s arrest, or to protest his death, or even to find out who ordered him killed or where his body has been disposed of. Sam’s mother (Katherine Helmond) can pull strings and get her son a sinecure; there’s no one to appeal to who will stop that corruption, or even to alert people that it’s occurring. Without democracy, without a way for people to express dissent, the bureaucracy just bumbles along, immiserating here, torturing there, murdering there, and then shrugging at the chaos in its wake.
Brazil isn’t a perfect fit for our current fascist turn. Like Orwell (and for that matter like Kafka), Gilliam doesn’t think about, or show, the way that authoritarian regimes tend to target particular identities for violence. The affluent white guy protagonist is the default victim, even though, in real fascist societies, the first (and last, and middle) targets tend to be Black people, trans people, immigrants, Jews, and other marginalized people. Despite such lapses, though, it’s impressive that 40 years on, Brazil’s bleak, surreal, chaos feels in many ways like the miserable future we’re living.
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