I tend to lean toward the theory of him dreaming the whole thing. The movie establishes that he is a man who dreams vividly, often as an escape from what’s going on around him. As the movie progresses, reality begins to invade his dreams, until the very end when he attempts to hide from his tormentors in his dream world; unfortunately, he is eventually overrun and swallowed by reality, and he ends up in that vegetative state. You can’t beat the government, no matter how hard you try, and how hard you dream.
That’s just how I see it, though your view isn’t bad.
I think everything happened untill the point where he got locked up. The film is full of hoplessness. It a world where everone that just does there job, no matter what it is, and not think at all for them selves.. He starts pushing against the system. When he get’s locked up thats when he breaks out in his head. The only place he can be free. The meaning I think Oliver is right, no single person and beat the system. It would have to be a large group effort.
I think everything happened untill the point where he got locked up. The film is full of hoplessness. It a world where everone that just does there job, no matter what it is, and not think at all for them selves.. He starts pushing against the system. When he get’s locked up thats when he breaks out in his head. The only place he can be free. The meaning I think Oliver is right, no single person and beat the system. It would have to be a large group effort.
I believe that Sam’s sanity has always been in question, and his trip to the funny farm at the end of the movie is the culmination of a life’s worth of escapism and dreaming.
It’s pretty clear to me that he cracks when he’s arrested – when he hears that the girl (can’t remember her name, it’s been years) seems to have been killed resisting arrest twice. After that, it’s all fantasy.
i believe that the third act is all a dream, a climx of sorts that has been hinted/building throughout the film with the earlier fantasy sequences.
But doesn’t that make it a happy ending in a sense? Even though in the “real” world Sam is broken, but in his mind, he is perfectly happy. If you read the book The Giver, the ending of that film is similar to the end of Brazil.
Sam’s final escape is yet another fantasy/dream that lasts beyond the end of the film. I believe that Sam finally escapes the torments of his life through insanity. It keeps him from becoming a drone like the rest and yet his goal of saving the woman he loves and having a happy life is not accomplished in reality. Lowry sort of wins in that insanity but in a hauntingly tragic way.
I wouldn’t say that Sam won in any sense of the word – Jill is dead, and what few shreds of sanity he had (and let’s face it, Sam was on the edge to begin with) are completely gone. It’s the classic “sane mane in an insane world” but like no other version seen before. Lowry knows how ridiculous it all is; a world where Buttle can be arrested instead of Tuttle because of a literal “bug” in the computer, and his friend Jack gains advancement through torture – how long could Sam have lasted in a world like that? Brazil is more 1984 than The Giver, or so it seems to me.
I agree with D. 2 and Phil. I thought that everything occured up until the point that he went insane and he finds freedom there. Perception is the ultimate reality, right? So, if he could totally absorb himself in the fantasy, trick his mind into happiness (which is really just endorphins triggered by the brain), then in a way he’s found the only escape available. You make me want to watch it again. I’ve seen it just once a while back and I may have a different perspective after another viewing.
People who’ve commented that Sam escapes (or, “escapes”) by going into his dream-world are right in line with what Gilliam says about the film. On the commentary track (from the Criterion Director’s Cut disc), Gilliam even says that he wanted to make a film wherein the main character “goes insane, but it’s a good thing”; where the escape into madness/dream is a “happy ending.” He qualifies this by saying that he’s not sure if that’s what happens in the film, but it’s what he was going for.
My two cents, anyway, on the moment at which he (and we, as viewers) enter the dream world: I think it happens just as Jack is about to poke him with the torture instrument. The screen sort of flashes, I think (or maybe I’m imagining it), right before we hear the gunshot that kills Jack. I suppose one could even argue that the dream was triggered by the intense pain (physical, from the instrument, and psychic/social, from the betrayal of his best friend, etc.).
It was one hell of a hallucination though, wasn’t it? Despite being grounded in a fantasy world, Sam’s end-dream was somehow much stranger, scarier and (if the word can be used) real than anything from Fear and Loathing. Anybody agree?
I agree. Having just watched Brazil again, it is very apparent that Sam retreats into his imagination at the moment Jack Lint begins to torture him. If you examine the film up until that moment, there is no hard evidence of terrorist activity or any indication that Harry Tuttle is an anti-government revolutionary. Sam infers that Tuttle might be a terrorist only because he is wanted by the Ministry of Information.
What about the explosions? Well, it’s more than likely that they are caused by malfunctioning ducts, those ubiquitous features of every set in the movie. The danger that Tuttle presents to the system is his ability to prevent these catastrophic malfunctions and thus make the entire Ministry of Information redundant. The M.O.I. exists for the sole purpose of preventing “terrorism” and takes up a sizeable portion of the GNP in Brazil’s distopia. If a maverick heating engineer like Harry Tuttle could prove that there was no terrorist threat, the M.O.I. and its enormous bureaucracy might collapse.
This film owes a lot to Max Weber’s views on the inexorable march of bureaucracy and instrumental rationalism in the modern age, where individuals are compartmentalized into their assigned roles. Bureaucratic rationality and a work ethic divorced from a moral base is referred to as an “iron cage” in Weber’s analysis. For Gilliam, the only escape from this cage is through insanity, a bleak view inspired by Thatcherite bureaucracy in the 1980s. If one views Brazil’s bureaucracy as essentially meaningless, I think it heightens the tragedy of the entire film and gives it greater political impact as a commentary on modernity. My two cents.
Alex K: I just watched Brazil for the first time a few days ago, and your explanation of De Niro’s character is excellent. Thanks for the insight.
Thanks, Ferrell. Brazil is one of those films that just demands to be seen and unpacked multiple times. I’m glad you enjoyed your first go-’round.
It came out the year after 1984, and it seems more relevant than ever, with the big brother society, so many millions of cameras in Britain now, the state clamping down on dissent, subversion, the bureaucracy, media propaganda, brainwashing, and torture in the war on “terrorism”- yes it seems there’s nowhere left for Sam to go once Palin (yes, nice affable Michael Palin of all people) has him in his wicked clutches. Now if it was all in Sam’s head then Caligari-like that would change everything, and it would become a pro-establishment film where the dark intrusive power of the state is merely the paranoid imagining of a lunatic fringe.
As a dystopia I’ve alsways looked at the film as the flip side of “Robocop”, pick your poison.
Right, Kenji. And I think we can all agree that Terry Gilliam is resolutely anti-establishment, especially after the experience of getting his vision of Brazil shown in theaters. Also, on the point of Michael Palin’s character in the film, the most disturbing thing about Jack Lint is the way in which his occupation inhabits a position of prestige in his world, rather than being something “dirty.” Interesting parallels to today’s “war on terror,” where interrogation has often been subcontracted out as a “for profit” venture. Jack is held up by Sam’s mother as someone with ambition, even though he doesn’t have Sam’s “brains.”
I kind of disagree with your assessment that Sam ends up in Jack’s “wicked clutches.” For me, Jack Lint remains a likable, if dim-witted character throughout the film. Right before he tortures Sam, he is obviously terrified that he might lose his job and thus his station in life. Jack strives only to be a cog in the machine, a faceless bureaucrat who doesn’t cause trouble for his masters. There is very little “wickedness” in his words or deeds toward Sam; he is merely doing his job. And that is what really creeps me out about Michael Palin’s performance; he manages to create an “affable Eichmann” out of the Jack Lint character.
As a side note, I remember reading something about how Robert DeNiro originally wanted to play Jack Lint, but the role had already been promised to Palin . . . I have a tough time picturing that.
De Niro is great as he is in the film, and i especially love the comeuppance by drowning he gives to, jeez, what’s his name? gone clean out of my head, ah yes, Bob Hoskins of course. As for Palin, the affability, that is telling, it’s not just the obvious monsters that create a monstrous society
I love this film (I’m sure I’ve gushed about it on a myriad of threads by now). I think it’s pretty obvious that (going by the European ending – Gilliam’s original ending I believe) Sam has been ‘brainwashed’ (more like lobotomized) by the establishment and that the rescue sequence near the end was an Ambrose Bierce-esque (referencing Incident at Owl Creek Bridge) detour. There are of course similarities to Orwell, but I don’t think that Sam is some kind of hallucinating lunatic. There’s really no indication of that in the film at all. The dream sequences seem to merely be his fantasies of freedom (and, narratively speaking, a lead-in to the final ‘dream’ at the film’s end).
I agree somewhat with Alex K’s view of Jack Lint, but I find his character even more disturbing because he is so determined to keep his job and be a “cog in the machine” that he is purely a pawn of the establishment. The character is probably the most villainous out of them all because he is the typical everyman that is lost within the empty promises of the establishment. Palin was the perfect casting choice for this character too, such a great actor.
There’s also a lot of great (perhaps obvious) Philip K. Dick references throughout the film, but in theme and tone first and foremost (Dick always was more anti-corporation than anti-government), and I think Gilliam once said in an interview that if he was given the opportunity to make a film based on a Dick novel (he’s a big fan apparently), that he’d be very true to it.
I always assumed that he degenerated into total insanity around the time he was locked up, and his mind gave up on reality as a whole during the beginning of his torture, giving him the ability to happily escape into his own fantasies after beating all his own nightmares. In a way, it’s sort of a happy ending. he escapes the system into a carefree state of mind with (what he thinks is) the woman he loves, and will remain there with no threat of the world at large till the day he dies. (Which will be soon, because i doubt the economy obsessed government cares about keeping a vegetable alive.)
“This film owes a lot to Max Weber’s views on the inexorable march of bureaucracy and instrumental rationalism in the modern age, where individuals are compartmentalized into their assigned roles. Bureaucratic rationality and a work ethic divorced from a moral base is referred to as an “iron cage” in Weber’s analysis. For Gilliam, the only escape from this cage is through insanity, a bleak view inspired by Thatcherite bureaucracy in the 1980s.”
Not sure if it owes a lot to Weber, but there are traces of his ideas in stories like Brazil and 1984. Weber did conceptualise the idea of bureaucracy, and understood its dehumanising effects better than most. Imagine if he were alive today? It’s his worst nightmare materialised.
A Dark Light
I speak often with people who believe the final shot speaks to the fact that all the action and language previously has all been in Sam’s head. While the notion is favorable, I disagree… I believe that Jack has broken Sam of his desires to dream and soar by way of torture under the direction of Helpmann to become the android like worker they all wanted him to be from the beginning… It’s all about the promotion and Sam’s reluctance to advance until it suits his personal needs, his private needs… his own “thoughts” and “dreams”. He sees an opportunity to meet the one desire he has in his dystopian world, goes thru unorthodox channels and gets caught. But all the while a Big Brother type entity known as M.O.I. has his fate sealed and is waiting to spring at the first sign of insubordination… In the world of BRAZIL, the sinister undercurrent is the oppressive 1984esq atmosphere supported by Gilliams’ brilliant sense of humor.