Dennis Biba

Someone must have slandered Mr. Buttle, for one day, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. The story could be told from the perspective of the innocent family man who, due to a printing error, is mistaken for a terrorist named Tuttle, captured, tortured and killed. A bureaucratic error for which the inconspicuous Sam Lowry, an employee of the Ministry of Information, has to take responsibility and which arouses scruples in him. But he is not a hero. No modern Robin Hood, like the wanted criminal Archibald Tuttle, who secretly repairs heaters, no rebel like the truck driver Jill Layton, in whom he recognizes the woman of his dreams. Lowry is employed to follow, so he follows. So how can you rebel against a system, you are part of?

The world that Terry Gilliam paints in Brazil is Kafkaesque and, by the way, has nothing to do with the country of Brazil, but refers to the inappropriately nostalgic film music. Ary Barroso’s 1939 samba hit Aquarela do Brasil, which forms the musical leitmotif of the film, set to music the longing of many North Americans for the dreamy south in the 1940s – a utopia that must have seemed ironic given the political situation there. In the dystopian world of Brazil, too, escapism seems to be the only way out. A terrifying metropolis, cyberpunk without cyber, but with lots of paperwork and even more pipes, a grotesque infrastructure that connects even the most private little room with the (heating) system controlled by a mafia-like authority. Added to this is the absurd meticulousness of the Ministry of Information, which forces the wife of the innocently murdered Mr. Buttle to sign several documents, for the files.

But Brazil, like Kafka’s The Trial, is not just an everyday critique of an overly cumbersome organizational system that is actually intended to reduce complexity. Both Kafka and Gilliam see in bureaucracy what the sociologist and philosopher Michel Foucault calls a dispositif: a means of enforcing power. The dystopian control society is based on this strictly hierarchical „rule of administration“ (French bureau + ancient Greek κράτεια), which, as in most cases, is not entirely utopian but merely a fictional exaggeration of real conditions. Similar to the court in the trial, the Ministry of Information constantly produces contradictions that, however, are impossible to dissect due to the small-scale nature of the procedures. The bureaucratic apparatus conceals its own dysfunctionality, replacing complexity with complicatedness. Bureaucracy isolates and at the same time stands in the way of individual self-development.

Consequently, no character is more boring than the protagonist Sam Lowry. Much more interesting is his beloved Jill Layton, whom we only see through the male gaze of the protagonist, who in his dreams wants to be a hero. But maybe the blonde innocence, who seems more like Furiosa’s predecessor, doesn’t want to be saved by a mad office worker? Then of course there is Archibald Tuttle, played by Robert de Niro, a textbook anarchist. You have to be an anarchist to stand up against bureaucracy. Kafka knew that too; he read Kropotkin’s Speeches of a Rebel, attended meetings of Czech anarchists and, together with his friend Otto Gross, planned to publish a magazine called Blätter gegen den Machtwillen (= papers against the will of power). But Kafka’s texts always end in resignation. The individual is too weak in the fight against the (warning: left-wing fighting term) system.

Brazil is also a flickering exchange of illusion and disillusionment (and a lot of plot twists, which are often accompanied by effective explosions). Hope and disappointment go hand in hand, and depending on which version of the film you choose (the original version was supposedly too dark for American audiences, which is why the film was shortened by almost an hour, against the director’s will), the story takes a different course. The film’s release story is in itself a battle between the director and the film distributor, which culminated in an angry newspaper ad, in which Gilliam asked the head of Universal Studios when he planned to release his film Brazil. A guerrilla action that was crowned with success.

Despite its obvious (not only temporal) similarity to dystopias such as 1984, Brazil is by no means lacking in humor. Just as Kafka exposes the absurdity of the system with a mixture of situational comedy, exaggeration and precise observations, Terry Gilliam, co-founder of the Monty Python group and director of great comedies such as The Holy Grail (1975), also has a sense of the grotesque. Laughter has a dual function here: on the one hand, it is compensatory: you laugh to avoid having to cry. But in its uncontrollability – connoisseurs of the film Life of Brian (1979) will remember Pontius Pilate and his friend – it is also an expression of resistance, an anarchic moment, the performative reversal of hierarchy. For those who seek refuge in escapist reveries in the face of injustice and oppression, Brazil has nothing but madness in store. However, Archibald Tuttle, whose Old High German first name probably not coincidentally alludes to boldness, does not close his eyes to the injustice and responds to the isolation of bureaucracy with class consciousness: „We’re all in this together!“ However, even Tuttle cannot escape the paperwork all the time and is ultimately literally swallowed up by it. Or are we once again in the head of a mad bureaucrat? Whatever the case, the director at least survived the paper war and continued his fight for artistic freedom and against the deliberate dumbing down of the mass public. We could take him as a role model.