Brazil. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Perf. Jonathan Price, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm. MCA, 1985. DVD.
Brazil was very Gilliam. He has a distinct style that comes through everything from Monty Python on. Strange machines. Creepy doubles. The abject. Absurdity abounding. He’s a strange and brilliant man. I don't know how I've gone all these years without having seen it!
On a further stylistic note, I definitely see this film working in the same kind of absurdist and slapstick tradition as Waiting for Godot. One of its co-writers is Tom Stoppard, whose play Rozencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead (which I was lucky enough to see on stage last year!) explicitly invokes Waiting for Godot. The nod to the slapstick tradition comes out explicitly, too, in the clip of a Marx bros. movie playing on TV in one of the scenes. These dramatists all seem to be working to parody the madness and excesses of the late 20th-century.
I think this would be a great film to show to undergrads (um, with a warning about some of the more graphic content) to explain to them the way in which biopolitics and disciplinarity work in tandem (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 242) to bolster neoliberalism. The surveillance part of disciplinarily is particularly obvious in the film, through both the mechanical eyeballs watching and nuzzling people all over the place, and the references to Santa Claus (Mr. Helpman, the “big brother” head of Central Services dressed up as Santa at the end, and the Buttle children asking how Santa will get in just before the Central Services Gestapo burst in through the ceiling). Santa, of course, “sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake” as the song goes.
Brazil is all about how people get categorized, how bureaucracy works as an apparatus of surveillance, one which has sort of exceeded the state, become a state of its own which can make live and let die (so, I guess, in Foucauldian terms, I'm talking about governmentality, social institutions being used by the state to produce and organize subjects). (Wendy Brown has a clear explanation of governmentality in her book Regulating Aversion, which I must return to when I can find it...) Central Services in Brazil seems to occupy this space, to be both of and not of the state. It’s not really clear if it’s (part of) the government itself, or if it’s a privatized institution attached to the government. The lines between private/commercial institution and public instution/government are decidedly blurred in the film (think of the Central Services add for colourful ducts on the soon-to-be blown up TVs in the shop window at the start of the film). Appropriate to all the privatization going on in the Thatcher era, for sure. The links between Christmas (a family holiday but also a commercial one) and Santa Surveillance also make clear the links between disciplinarily, biopolitics and consumerism in the film.
In Brazil’s 20th century, absolutely everything is commercialized and done according to numbers. The government even charges for its own arrest and interrogation services (after he is arrested, a guard tells Sam “Don’t fight it son, confess, quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit rating”) and the motto of the Ministry of Information is “Information: the Key to Prosperity.” Even Tuttle, who is a rogue repairman, and who points out that Central Services is inefficient because they “can’t make a move without a form,” refers to his Robin-hood like mission in terms of money-making as “freelance subversion.” Even death has been brought down to a system of technicalities, some numbers to be juggled. Instead of dead, Buttle is referred to as “inoperative” or “completed,” completely dehumanizing the experience of death. This is biopolitics at its worst - the Nazis did this, too, and Nazism is certainly invoked in this film.
Sam, of course, is first confronted with the dehumanization of people through bureaucracy/biopolitics when he attempts to give Mrs. Buttle a refund for her now-dead husband’s arrest and interrogation. Mrs. Buttle, her children, and her cries of “what did you do with his body” then haunt Sam’s ongoing fantasies, in which he is fighting against the bureaucratic machine, of which he turns out to be a part. (Even from the beginning, his very mechanical angel’s suit reveals that he is inextricably part of the system; however, I don’t think Sam realizes his own complicity until he topples the giant mechanical baby thing and pulls off its mask to revel his own face).
Sam’s fantasies are especially interesting in that as the film goes on, they increasingly mix with reality. He meets Jill, the woman of his dreams, appears in reality, and he becomes fixated on finding and rescuing her as he does in his dreams. His old friend Jack, now his torturer, wears a mask like the creepy baby doll faces in his fantasies. This is in line with some of Gilliam’s other work - I’m thinking of 12 Monkeys especially - where the lines between fantasy and reality, madness and sanity become blurred. When you live in a mad world, sometimes your fantasy life is the saner option, as Sam reveals at the film’s close, as he dreams of returning to his “Brazil,” a kind of pastoral anarchist hide-away, a base from which he can work among other freedom-fighters. Medicalization, furthermore, is also in Brazil to an extent, in the Central Services Getstapo’s use of full-body straight jackets on their captives and in their use electric shock as an interrogation method (Guantanamo, anyone? Kinda prophetic, Mr. Gilliam). Not to mention, of course, the parody of the medicalization of beauty/gender norms/fashion (also biopolitical) though Mrs. Lowry and Mrs. Terrain’s plastic surgery treatments.
Though race and class are not explicitly part of Central Service’s biopolitics, they are subtly put forth. The Buttles, who are working class (Mr. Buttle repairs shoes, and they live in what looks to be pretty slummy housing) and Jill, a postal worker, are not given the benefit of the doubt the way that Sam is, at least initially, when he breaks protocol. The Buttles and Jill, as working-class people, are already disposable people, already criminal, like Harry Tuttle, who - tellingly - becomes engulfed in garbage and disappears.
The terrorist(s), furthermore, though we never get to see them close up, or really find out who they are, are radicalized. When Sam chases Jill out of the Ministry of Information office, trailing papers from her file behind him, he is stopped by an elderly woman who chastises him for littering, calling him a foreigner, who can’t follow the rules of “civilized” society. At the start of the film, the Deputy Minister also describes the supposed-terrorists as “minorities” who won’t “play the game” by the rules, echoing the sentiment in My Beautiful Laundrette that immigrants have to tow the line, to work within the system in order to succeed. This, to me, served as a critique of anti-immigrant discourse (the film did come out in the Thatcher era, notably) as well as other types of biopolitical sanctions.
No comments:
Post a Comment