Brazil: The Dystopia That Laughs

Most film dystopias want you to be afraid. Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, from 1985, wants you to laugh until you notice you have stopped, and by then the trap has closed. It is the funniest totalitarian nightmare ever committed to film, a world of clanking ductwork and misfiled paperwork and cosmetic surgery gone septic, and its comedy is precisely what makes it unbearable. A grim dystopia lets you keep your distance by scaring you. A ridiculous one pulls you in giggling and then reveals that the joke is a machine for grinding people to nothing, and that you have been enjoying it.

The premise begins with a literal bug. Somewhere in the Ministry of Information, a fly falls into a printing mechanism and turns a “T” into a “B”, so an arrest warrant for a terrorist named Tuttle is issued instead for an innocent cobbler named Buttle, who is bagged, processed and killed by the state, all of it correctly stamped and filed. Sam Lowry, a low-level records clerk played by Jonathan Pryce, is sent to tidy up the clerical error, and in doing so he glimpses Jill Layton, the woman who lives upstairs from the dead man and who happens to be the exact face from his recurring dreams of flying. His pursuit of her, and of the truth about Buttle, drops him into the gears of the very apparatus he serves.

A future built entirely from the past

The look of Brazil is its first great idea. Gilliam refused the clean chrome of most 1980s science fiction and built instead a “retro-future”, a twentieth century that never stopped, where computers have tiny magnifying screens bolted to typewriter guts and every wall sprouts a tangle of heating ducts like exposed intestines. The set design, by Norman Garwood, imagines a totalitarian state that is simultaneously ultramodern and falling apart, all its technology one gasket away from failure. This is the aesthetic that a thousand later films borrowed, and Gilliam refined it further a decade on in 12 Monkeys, where the same wire-and-tube machinery reappears in the underground of a plague-emptied world.

The design is thematic argument as much as spectacle. In Brazil the state is not a sleek, all-seeing panopticon but a vast, clanking, incompetent bureaucracy that kills people by accident and then bills their families for the interrogation. That is the darkest joke in the film and its most durable political observation: the horror of the modern state is administrative rather than dramatic, a matter of the wrong form and the indifferent clerk. Compare the antiseptic, genetically stratified control room of Gattaca, where the future oppresses through smooth efficiency; Gilliam’s tyranny oppresses through malfunction and red tape, and the difference is the whole reason Brazil still stings. One imagines a world that works too well. Gilliam imagines one that barely works at all and murders you anyway.

Comedy as the vehicle for despair

The cast plays it as farce, which is the correct and most disturbing choice. Michael Palin, Gilliam’s old Python colleague, gives the film’s most chilling performance as Jack Lint, a friendly family man who happens to torture people for the Ministry and treats it as a slightly tiresome job that keeps him from his kids. Robert De Niro turns up in a delicious cameo as Harry Tuttle, a renegade heating engineer who fixes ducts off the books, a guerrilla plumber whose crime against the state is unauthorised competence. Katherine Helmond plays Sam’s mother, endlessly remaking her own face through plastic surgery while a friend rots from a botched procedure in the background of scene after scene. Every performance is pitched for laughs, and every laugh has a corpse under it.

This is the mechanism worth understanding, the reason the film works where a straight-faced version would merely depress. By keeping the tone antic and absurd, Gilliam disarms the reflexive distance an audience puts up against grim material. You relax; you find the world delightful and silly; and because you have relaxed, the cruelty lands without a shield in the way. Paul Verhoeven ran the same play from the opposite direction in RoboCop, using ultraviolence and mock adverts to smuggle a corporate satire past the summer crowd. Gilliam uses whimsy instead of gore, and the target is the same: an audience that has lowered its guard because it thinks it is being entertained rather than indicted.

The Battle of Brazil

No revisit of this film is complete without the war behind it, because the war became part of the text. Universal’s American distribution head, Sid Sheinberg, saw Gilliam’s cut and recoiled from the ending, demanding a shorter, more upbeat version. Gilliam refused, and the standoff turned into one of the most famous director-versus-studio fights in Hollywood history. He arranged private screenings for critics behind the studio’s back, and took out a full-page advertisement in Variety consisting of a plain message asking Sheinberg when he was going to release the film. The Los Angeles critics then voted it best picture of the year before it had officially opened, which forced the studio’s hand.

The studio did produce its own cut, a version fans call the “Love Conquers All” edit, which reorders scenes, drops the darkness and manufactures a happy ending out of the same footage. It survives, and it is a fascinating artefact, a demonstration that the exact same images can be assembled into a hopeful lie or a hopeless truth depending purely on where you stop the film. The existence of both versions is itself a small essay on how endings make meaning, a theme I chased through the mechanics of adaptation in why the sequel is where genres mutate. Watch the two cuts of Brazil back to back and you learn more about editing than most film schools teach in a term.

Where it sits now

Brazil has outlasted nearly every glossy 1980s vision of the future because its target was never technology. It was paperwork, and paperwork is immortal. The film’s prophecy, that a benign-seeming administrative state can kill you by clerical error and charge you for the privilege, reads more sharply every year the automated systems around us grow more powerful and less accountable. Gilliam made a comedy about a fly in a machine, and it turned out to be a documentary about every institution that has ever mislaid a human being inside its own procedures.

That is the verdict. This is the peak of Gilliam’s imagination and the most complete statement of his lifelong theme, the dreamer crushed by the institution, delivered with a lightness of touch that makes the crushing land twice as hard. It works fully as an absurdist comedy of errors, laugh by laugh, and it works again as the bleakest political film of its decade, and the miracle is that it is both at once and never chooses.

Watch the Gilliam cut, not the studio’s, and if you can find the “Love Conquers All” version afterwards, watch it too as an object lesson. Then chase 12 Monkeys for the same director tightening the screws, or Gattaca for the future imagined as a smoother prison. The three together map the whole spectrum of how cinema pictures the state, from clanking incompetence to seamless control.

Spoilers below

Everything above is safe. The ending is the reason for the war, so here it is.

Sam Lowry’s story ends with what looks, for about ninety seconds, like triumph. Captured by the Ministry and strapped into the torture chair by his friend Jack Lint, Sam is suddenly rescued: Harry Tuttle and a band of resistance fighters storm the building, blow up the Ministry of Information, gun down the guards, and spirit Sam away. He and Jill escape the city, leave the grey concrete behind, and arrive at a green valley where they can finally live. Gilliam holds the pastoral image just long enough for hope to rise.

Then the camera pulls back to reveal Sam still in the torture chair, Lint leaning over him, the escape a hallucination generated by a mind that has broken under interrogation. Sam has retreated permanently into the flying dream that opened the film, and the last we see of his face is a vacant, contented smile as he hums the tune “Brazil” to himself, gone somewhere the state can no longer reach because there is no one left inside to reach. Lint and his superior look down and pronounce him lost to them. The rescue was the sound of a man’s sanity leaving the building.

That is the ending Sheinberg tried to cut, and the studio’s version is instructive precisely because it uses the identical rescue footage and simply stops before the pull-back, so the escape reads as real and Sam and Jill drive off into the valley for keeps. Same frames, opposite films. Gilliam’s insistence on the reveal is the difference between a fairy tale and one of cinema’s great acts of despair, and the fact that “love conquers all” is achievable from the same reel, by cutting ninety seconds, is the most eloquent argument imaginable for why the final edit belongs to the person who made the film.