Month: November 2025

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 8

[The following is the twenty-eighth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, here is the twenty-sixth, and here is the twenty-seventh–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The basic principle underlying the avoidance of all sins, put in another way from that of the preceding chapter, can be summed up in this final law:

Magic should never be used in aid of treating other people unfairly.

The basis of fairness is found in what was discussed in the first chapter of Beginnings–the principle of Cao, a never-ending ocean that is the entire world. The waves of Cao make everything equal–the Unity of Action.

That equality, however, is not rigid and unchanging, like a straight line. All things in Cao are fluid and moving, and therefore fairness is also dynamic.

To ensure a fluid fairness, one must look where the crests of good fortune, and the troughs of ill fortune, are, then reverse them. After such a reversal, reverse them again, and again, and again.

So if those in the crests of good fortune have plenty, while those in the troughs of ill fortune have little, that plenty must be moved to those with little; then when those formerly lacking are sated with much, their abundance must be moved to those newly lacking.

The waves of good and ill fortune must be always moving to share the abundance with those who lack. The good and wise will always be vigilant in seeking out who has little, and therefore who needs to have crests move to new troughs. The wicked, however, refuse to do this sharing of crests.

The wicked will try to justify keeping the crests of wealth to themselves, imagining their fortune to be the natural way of things, when it most certainly is not! Thus, they will leave those in troughs of poverty to remain in a state of want. In this way, the wicked would have the waves of Cao freeze, with their own crests a permanent advantage, and the troughs of the poor a permanent disadvantage. The wicked will also use magic in aid of their greed.

Depriving the poor of food, drink, housing, medicine, or clothing is already wicked. Using magic to aid in this deprivation is far worse. Refusing to aid the vagrant foreigner entering one’s nation is already wicked. Using magic to worsen his plight is a far greater sin.

Trying to freeze the flow of the waves of Cao is as impossible as it is to stop the alternating of day and night, of halting the light of Dis and the darkness of Noct. The heat of Nevil’s fire, the heat and desire of Hador, must not be used to cause the coldness of Calt to deny the poor of warmth.

When the rich and powerful try to keep their crests of wealth to themselves, using magic to aid them in their greed, they can be assured that the Echo Effect, the law of sow and reap, will keep the waves of Cao moving, to bring a deep trough of sorrow to punish them for their sin!

When the fortunate try to keep the light of Dis, and the heat of Hador’s desire, to themselves, they can be assured that the Echo Effect will bring them Calt’s coldness and Noct’s darkness!

[The text breaks off here.]

Analysis of ‘Peeping Tom’

Peeping Tom is a 1960 horror film directed by Michael Powell and written by Leo Marks. It stars Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, and Maxine Audley, with Esmond Knight, Pamela Green, and Miles Malleson. With Psycho, Peeping Tom is considered to be one of the very first slasher films, both films having been released within months of each other.

The film’s lurid content made it controversial on releasee, and the negative critical reaction to it caused severe harm to Powell’s career as a director. Peeping Tom, however, has been reappraised over the years, and it is now considered not only a cult film, but also a masterpiece by many, with its psychological themes of voyeurism and the link between sexuality and violence. The British Film Institute named it the 78th greatest British film of all time, and a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers, and critics for Time Out magazine ranked it the 29th best British film ever.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie.

Since voyeurism as a paraphilia involves being sexually aroused by covertly and non-consensually watching people undress or engage in sex, to call Mark Lewis (Boehm) a “peeping Tom” seems to be a misnomer. When he murders women with the concealed blade on a leg of the tripod of his camera, they are generally neither undressing, nor nude, nor having sex without knowing or consenting of his watching. Nor does he seem aroused. It isn’t about gaining sexual satisfaction: it’s about seeing the terror on the women’s faces as they see themselves in a mirror attached to the camera, knowing they’re about to be stabbed in the neck with the blade. He isn’t a ‘sex pervert’; he’s a psycho killer.

Indeed, his scoptophilia isn’t of a sexual nature, even though his victims are generally sexualized women: a prostitute (Dora, played by Brenda Bruce), a dancer (Vivian, played by Shearer), and a soft-porn pin-up model (Milly, played by Green). He is fixated on capturing the women’s fear on camera, then watching his freshly-made ‘snuff films’ in the darkroom in his apartment.

Any kind of sexuality in all of this is secondary, at best, to the idea of seeing others in general, in seeing their fear. Now, we could use another word for this fear, anxiety, which leads to my next point.

Jacques Lacan spoke of anxiety as being a kind of expectant dread, the “sensation of the desire of the other.” We feel anxiety when we face another person and cannot know how the other views us or know what he or she expects of us. Such a fear that Mark’s victims feel can be seen to represent Lacan’s concept of anxiety.

To illustrate his concept, Lacan used the example of two praying mantises confronting each other. After mating and copulating, the female praying mantis is known, in most cases, to bite off the head of her male partner. In Lacan’s example, one may imagine oneself facing a female praying mantis while, being the same size as her, wearing the mask of a male or a female praying mantis. One doesn’t know what sex the mask is that one is wearing. Will she, or will she not, bite the mask-wearer’s head off? This is how Lacan’s notion of anxiety works: we do not know what she wants of us, or how she sees us, and that is what frightens us so much.

With the sexes reversed, Mark and his victims can be seen to be in essentially the same situation. What’s with that blade on his tripod leg (which is obviously phallic)? Why does he keep getting closer and closer to her with it? Why that maniacal look on his face? Oh, my God! He’s going to kill her! As with the mating and sexual cannibalism of the praying mantises, we can see the link between sexuality and violence in Peeping Tom.

Since Mark’s fixation is on seeing the fear in the women’s faces, rather than on surreptitiously seeing the secrets of their naked anatomy, we need to know what has caused him to have this fixation.

Mark meets Helen Stephens (Massey), a young woman who is clearly the sweet and innocent opposite of those ‘bad girls’ he keeps killing (a contrast that feminists would have a field day analyzing in terms of the old Madonna/whore dichotomy), during her birthday party, and she would love to watch one of the films he’s made. Naturally, he won’t show her one of his snuff films, so instead he shows her films of him as a boy, filmed by his father.

In these films, we and Helen see the root cause of Mark’s psychopathy. As his father filmed him, he would agitate the boy in bed by flashing a flashlight in the sleeping boy’s face or throw a lizard on the bed (the father, a psychologist, wanted to study fear). These agitations are, of course, the diametrical opposite of how a parent should soothe a child, which brings me to my next point.

In the psychoanalysis of Wilfred Bion, we learn of how infants need their parents to process agitations for them before they can learn to do it themselves. The sensory agitations, or beta elements (as Bion called them), are processed through alpha function and turned into alpha elements, or stimuli that can be tolerated. A primary caregiver, traditionally the mother, of course, does this soothing and processing of the agitations in what Bion called maternal reverie. Go here to learn more about Bion’s and other psychoanalytic concepts.

Bion also called the parent, as the soother and processor of these agitations, the container of them, which are the contained. He used feminine and masculine symbols, respectively, for these two concepts, which in turn can be respectively represented as yonic and phallic. So the containing, soothing, and processing of agitations, turning them into tolerable alpha elements, results in what Bion called K, for knowledge, and learning from experience, resulting in a mature, emotionally healthy individual.

The opposite, of course, is what happened to little Mark.

Those agitations he was subjected to–the flashlight, the lizard, and even the premature exposure to the man and woman kissing on the park bench–would have resulted in -K, or the rejection of knowledge and learning from experience. It was negative containment, as represented in Bion’s symbols as -♀︎/♂︎: here, instead of, for example, an infant’s fears of dying being soothed, they turn into a nameless dread (Bion, page 96), resulting in Mark’s psychopathology.

Making matters worse for the boy, his mother died, she being presumably the one who, through maternal reverie as mentioned above, would have soothed him in his fears, turning the beta element agitations (e.g., the flashlight and the lizard) into tolerable, processed alpha elements. Even worse than her death is how her bed hadn’t even turned cold before she was replaced with “her successor,” whom his father married a mere six weeks after his mother’s funeral, strongly implying that this woman had already been his father’s mistress for quite some time (we first see her in a bikini on the beach).

The boy must have hated his mother’s “successor” from the very beginning. He would surely have idealized his mother as a Madonna-like figure, and abominated her “successor” as a whore. That we see him in his old film as a child reluctantly holding the hand of the “successor,” and receiving his camera as a gift in the same scene of the old film, is significant, for his killing of the “whores” while filming them suggests a wish-fulfillment of killing and filming the “successor.” She films him getting the camera in that scene.

Now, when one has an accumulation of unprocessed agitations as Mark has, one has to have a way of splitting them off and expelling them. In Mark’s case, it’s the Lacanian anxiety of his father’s agitating him with the flashlight, the lizard, and the camera always eyeing him, and whatever else his father may have bothered him with that we haven’t seen on any of Mark’s old films.

With all of this childhood trauma, Mark must split off and expel it, through projective identification, by forcing his victims to experience that fear of dying. This is why he kills those “whores” in the exact way that he does: they are stabbed in the ‘container’ neck with a ‘contained’ phallic blade (implying a “slut” performing fellatio on him); he sees the terror on their faces just before they die, thus projecting his own fear and anxiety onto them; and in having them see their own terrified faces in the mirror attached to the camera, he ensures that the transfer, the projection, of his trauma onto them is complete.

When his father was provoking his anxiety by agitating him with the flashlight, the lizard, and the intruding, voyeuristic camera, little Mark must have been wondering, Why, Father, are you doing this to me? What do you want from me? Idealizing his father as he did his mother, Mark forbade himself from hating him, so he displaced his hate onto the “successor,” then transferring that hate onto his “whore” victims, he made them similarly wonder, in the anxiety he provoked from them, what he wanted from them.

The taboo against hating his father is so great that he must repress it. Any repression, nonetheless, must return to consciousness, though in an unrecognized form. In Mark’s case, it will come back in his identifying with his father, since now Mark is the cameraman who terrifies others. Thus, he hates himself instead of his father.

His Madonna/whore complex is problematic, as is his choice of only female victims, but he isn’t a woman-hater per se, for he won’t kill any woman just because she is a woman. He sincerely comes to love sweet Helen, for in her he has a mother transference. When he and Helen watch the film of his mother on her deathbed, we see him as a boy touching her, and at the same time adult Mark touches Helen on the shoulder and says the woman in the film is his mother; he’s obviously indicating a link in his mind between Helen and his mother. He also knows that Helen lives in the room his mother once occupied (Mark rents out rooms of his father’s house, now his, to tenants like Helen); he tells Helen this immediately after looking at the bed there.

Because of his love for Helen, he cannot bring himself to kill her…or her blind mother, Mrs. Stephens (Audley), who is full of suspicions about him. Indeed, the mother’s blindness is a kind of superpower, for Mark cannot use visuals to terrify her, then kill her in her terror. In fact, Mrs. Stephens even has, on her walking stick, a sharp end for stabbing anyone who might try to take advantage of her blindness and attack her. The sight of the sharp end of her cane arouses Mark’s guilt, as does her snooping around in his room to figure out what kind of a man he is. As the mother of his Oedipal transference, Mrs. Stephens is Mark’s bad conscience.

This guilt of Mark’s ties in with a larger theme in Peeping Tom: the link between men’s lustful gazing at sexually desirable women and doing violence to such women. While, as I said above, Mark himself is neither a misogynist nor a lecherous watcher of pornography (there’s nothing inherently sexual about his snuff films–the women are dressed), his actions, as the film’s title implies, certainly are representative of those of a violent male lecher, as well as the guilt feelings and shame such a man must have.

We can see another manifestation of this theme early on in the film, when an elderly customer (Malleson) goes into the newspaper store (on the second floor of which Mark takes pictures of the softcore porn pinup girls) to buy pornographic photos (“views”) from Mark’s boss; the man is unavoidably sheepish about it, especially when a girl walks into the store.

Another example of this theme is when, on the second floor with Milly, Mark is about to have another girl model for him. She’s scantily-clad, but won’t let us see the right side of her face until much later, when we see why: she has a horrible bruise and swelling on her right upper lip; presumably, a man slugged her hard there–I don’t think it’s a deformity.

What’s interesting is that Mark is not repulsed by her disfigurement. Does he see an unconventional kind of beauty in it…or is he fascinated by the fear he sees in her eyes, an anxiety that he’ll be repulsed by it? I assume it’s the latter. In any case, his interest in filming these ‘bad girls’ is not particularly erotic. He likes to see their vulnerability, their fear, just as his father liked to film his when he was a child, so now he wants to project that fear and vulnerability onto women he associates with his mother’s “successor.”

A striking parallel between Mark’s obsession with seeing fear in a woman’s eyes and filming it is with that of a movie director, Arthur Baden (Knight), with whom Mark is working as a focus puller. Baden is a Stanley Kubrick type in that he is a perfectionist who is frustrated with a beautiful but not-so-talented actress (Baden’s ‘Shelley Duvall,’ if you will) named Pauline (played by Shirley Alice Field), for never being able to do a believable faint. She only faints for real after exhaustion from the interminable reshoots, and then showing real terror upon discovering Vivian’s body in a prop trunk.

Though Baden, in his frustration with Pauline for having fainted in the wrong scene (her terror caught on film surreptitiously on Mark’s camera, while Baden doesn’t yet know of Vivian’s murder), calls her a “silly bitch” (I’m curious how they got that past the censors back in 1960), he’s also kind enough later to provide a psychiatrist to counsel Pauline and soothe her trauma. This psychiatrist (played by Martin Miller) will have a chat with Mark about Mark’s father’s work and about scoptophilia. He notes, significantly, while talking to the police that Mark has “his father’s eyes.” The police will thus begin to suspect Mark in their investigation of the murders of Vivian and the other women.

They’re disturbed and fascinated with the aggravated terror they see in the eyes of these victims…a far greater terror than just that of seeing a madman coming at them with a sharp instrument to kill them with. As we know, it’s the terror of seeing themselves in Mark’s camera-mounted mirror, seeing themselves about to die and seeing this terror.

That the (all-male) police, Chief Inspector Gregg in particular (played by Jack Watson), are so concerned with this look of terror on the women’s faces just before being stabbed in the neck (a symbolic rape, just like Marion Crane‘s in the shower scene in Psycho) should make it clear that it is the film’s attitude that, while there are certainly many men who are pathologically fascinated with seeing women in a state of vulnerability (naked, scared, etc.) and who enjoy harming them out of some quest to feel powerful, other men aren’t like this. Other men are decent people.

Peeping Tom is a social critique of the former kind of men. With the film’s title as an expression of the shame associated with the male voyeur, it is clear that screenwriter Leo Marks was not telling a story to celebrate psychopaths like Mark. The point would not need to be made except for the fact that some people, some among those preoccupied with idpol, imagine all men to be utterly bereft of empathy for women.

Another striking feature of the film is its music (composed by Brian Easdale). Instead of the more usual orchestral score, we hear tense, dissonant piano playing (by Gordon Watson), like something Bartók would have composed. This music is heard especially during the moments leading up to a murder. A solo musician playing, as opposed to a group of musicians in an ensemble, suggests the loneliness and isolation that Mark suffers, a conflict raging in his mind.

His growing relationship with Helen is a ray of hope for him, a chance to escape his loneliness and alienation. The mother transference he gets from Helen is certainly in aid of this cure. Her wish that he not take his ever-present camera with him on their dinner date is also in aid of that, for it means that–just for a moment–he won’t be in the persona of his cruel father.

Furthermore, while his mode of artistic expression is visuals and images, hers is writing. He is stuck in the narcissistic world of Lacan’s Imaginary Order, with his victims mirroring back to him the fear he projects onto them, and then in turn seeing their fear mirrored back to themselves from that camera-mounted mirror. He has formed his ego through this mirroring, projection, and identification with his father. The horror of the killings, so impossible to verbalize and so traumatic, are of Lacan’s Real Order.

Helen’s writing of short stories for children, on the other hand, reflects her engagement with language and therefore with the linguistic, sociocultural world of Lacan’s Symbolic Order, that of interacting with other people, as opposed to Mark’s lonely world of seeing the other as only a reflection of himself. In this sense, she is also a potential cure for him. She’d accordingly have had him join her and her friends in her birthday party, but of course the loner wouldn’t have it.

In the end, though–in his addiction to seeing women’s terror and killing them in that state–he aims his camera blade at her throat and has the camera-mounted mirror there for her to see her terror. She won’t look at it, though, and for the brief moment that she does, she sees a distorted image of herself in it, so he doesn’t kill her. She isn’t pulled into the trap of the Imaginary, of seeing the other-as-oneself. Instead, with the police arriving to arrest him, Mark stabs himself with the blade. He’s done what, deep down, he always wanted to do: kill his father, by killing the film-making father inside himself.

Mark has always taken around with him his father’s gift of a camera, because he’s never been freed from being filmed. Throughout his life, from his childhood to his present adulthood, his father’s house has been wired for sound. His father had 24/7 surveillance of the house in this sense; Mark never had privacy. Big Father was watching him…and listening to him. Mark projects that surveillance onto his female victims because doing so is the closest he can come to freeing himself from that very surveillance. His suicide, however, frees him in a way that his projected surveillance never can.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 7

[The following is the twenty-seventh of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, here is the twenty-fifth, and here is the twenty-sixth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The basic principle underlying the avoidance of all of the sins previously discussed is one that can sum them all up in one law.

Magic should never be used in aid of only oneself.

Use of magic with oneself as the one and only concern is what leads to all of the other sins. This is why the teaching of the Three Unities, as passed down to us from Rawmios, is so important. These unities of space, time, and action teach us our place in the world, as well as how to live well in it.

As for avoiding selfish purposes in using magic, one must focus on the unity of space, for it teaches us that we are not separate from each other, as our sense perception deludes us into believing. We are all one: everywhere is here. The suffering of one causes suffering for others, and the joy of one causes joy for others. When we can fully understand how the self is in the other, and the other is in the self, we will know the unity of space, we will have compassion for each other, and be selfless in our use of magic.

The selfish use of magic, though, leads to the Ten Errors, which deny the unity of all things. Selfishness leads to mad thinking, being dazed by images, the scurrilous use of language, all work and no rest, family fighting, murder, adultery, theft, lying, and greed.

Selfish uses of magic, as noted above, also lead to the sins warned against in the previous chapters.

Using magic in aid of all the forms of fornication makes a mockery of the unity of humanity. We are to be unified in spirit, not in body (except through marriage).

Using magic to be cruel to other people, or to animals, denies the unity connecting all of life. Kindness to each other, and to animals, restores and strengthens that unity.

Using magic to control others denies our unity with others and reinforces our illusion of separateness. Relinquishing control of others allows for the full freedom of everyone.

Using magic to start wars, or to take the land of other peoples, denies the unity of all of humanity. We must always be mindful of our common humanity, all around the world, and never regard one nation as greater than any other.

Using magic to gain excessive wealth, or to steal, denies the unity maintained between honest livelihoods and obtaining our necessities with the use of money, as elucidated among the Ten Errors. It also denies the unity of humanity between the rich and the poor, creating even greater division between men by making the rich overly luxurious and the poor wretched.

These abuses of magic, only for one’s own gain and at the expense of all other people, not only cause pain and suffering for many, but also ensure division between men, egoism, and isolation. The Echo Effect, moreover, will ensure that the pain, division, and isolation will come back to punish the sinner. Do not think they won’t come back to plague the guilty!

Analysis of ‘Islands’

I: Introduction

Islands is the fourth album by King Crimson, released in 1971. Leader/guitarist Robert Fripp replaced two musicians from the previous album, Lizard, for this one: bassist/singer Gordon Haskell for Boz Burrell, whom Fripp had taught to play bass (Boz had a little guitar-playing experience prior to his joining Crimson), and drummer Andy McCulloch with Ian Wallace. Like Lizard, though, Islands continued with the jazz influence.

Though this lineup of musicians (later without lyricist/light-show man Peter Sinfield) continued long enough to do gigs (something the lineups of Lizard and In the Wake of Poseidon were not able to do), it was still part of that period in King Crimson’s history when there was great instability. For at the end of the touring to promote Islands, Fripp ended up replacing all of the musicians, with bassist/singer John Wetton, drummer Bill Bruford, (who’d left the far more successful Yes to join), violinist David Cross, and percussionist Jamie Muir to record Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (they even found a new lyricist in Richard Palmer-James).

The instability of this period had left King Crimson at its weakest. Fripp and saxophonist/flautist Mel Collins play as well as ever. Boz had a good, expressive singing voice (better than Haskell’s, and almost as good as that of original bassist/singer Greg Lake), but Fripp’s having had to teach Boz how to play bass from scratch meant that he lacked the necessary precision. Similarly, Wallace was a capable, aggressive drummer, but he was no Michael Giles, Bruford, McCulloch, or even Pat Mastelotto. As a result, the music of Islands is simpler and, to be perfectly blunt, mostly rather dull, except for the excellent “Sailor’s Tale,” “The Letters,” with its dark themes of jealousy and violence, and the naughty “Ladies of the Road.”

Tensions had been building between Fripp and Sinfield, the two having increasingly divergent views of the direction that the band should have gone in. Sinfield said he “musically wanted to find a softer, Miles Davis-with-vocals sexy package.” In the end, of course, Fripp’s vision won out, and after Islands was made, Sinfield was out. That “package” that Sinfield wanted, however, seems to be what ended up on the album, and accordingly, he has called the album his Islands; Fripp denies this with some justification, though, since he–and not Sinfield–is credited with writing all of the music, and of course, Sinfield didn’t sing or play any instruments on the album…apart from some tinkering with the VCS3 on “Sailor’s Tale” and “The Letters.”

Here is a link to all the music on the album (with bonus tracks), and here is a link to the lyrics.

The cover shows a depiction of the Trifid Nebula in Sagittarius. Why an album with the title Islands (showing neither the name of the band nor that of the album on the original cover used in the UK and most other countries) would have a cover picture of stars in space seems highly odd. Perhaps the point is that the stars are rather like islands in how ‘lonely’ they seem out there.

I make this interpretation because I can see loneliness, alienation, and isolation as major themes in Sinfield’s lyrics, as well as there being a dialectical tension between being alone and being with other people. Note, in this connection, how isolate is etymologically linked with island.

II: Formentera Lady

Formentera is, fittingly for the album, part of the Balearic Island chain off the southern coast of Spain in the Mediterranean Sea. So, the “lady” of Formentera could be an actual lover Sinfield had there, or she could be a personification of the island itself. I’ll accept both interpretations, while leaning more towards the former of the two.

The song begins with a double bass, played by South African jazz musician Harry Miller, playing what will be the melody of the verses sung by Boz. This melody, in E minor, starts with a double descension of four notes, the second descension starting a whole tone lower and ending a major third lower. The first time Miller plays it, it’s with parallel perfect fifths below the melody; the second time, he plays single notes sul ponticello. The third time, he goes back to the fifths.

Then, Collins comes in with flute trills, and flurries of piano notes by Keith Tippett (whose jazzy playing was previously heard on Lizard and ITWOP) follow. We also hear chimes from Wallace.

Finally, Boz comes in singing the first verse, in which Sinfield describes what he sees on the island of Formentera: houses, the shore-line, and the vegetation there, as well as a “stony road.” Sinfield seems to be reminiscing about a time when he visited the island while on vacation, remembering the woman he loved while there.

The first two lines of the verses are in E minor, while the second two lines of each are in A minor, and the choruses will be in A major. In his solitude, Sinfield is “musing over man.”

When we hear the choruses, Boz plays a simple motif of two A notes again an again on the bass as he sings of Sinfield’s happiness with his lover. Wallace’s hi-hat and bass drum are heard in the background, with Collins on the flute playing the vocal melody before Boz sings it.

In the third verse, after more descriptions of life on Formentera (the activity of some of the people in particular), Sinfield makes an allusion to Homer‘s Odyssey. He compares himself to Odysseus and his lover to Circe, on whose island he and his men were lured, and many of them were turned into pigs by her magic.

The implication of this classical allusion is that his lady is rather like those ladies of the road, those groupies who tempted the lust of the musicians in King Crimson, turning them into the pigs who oink their lewd thoughts about the groupies on the first track of Side Two–in this sense a parallel of this first track on Side One. Now, however, Sinfield’s Circe is gone, but “still her perfume lingers, still her spell.”

He cannot forget how lovely she was. Without her now, he feels lonely, isolated, and alienated from her. Perhaps this is because when he’d had her, he’d been similarly porcine with her in his lust, making her no longer like him. Now he regrets his lewd acts with her.

Note that in the second chorus, the Formentera lady is a “dark lover,” like “dark Circe,” thus confirming my identification of the one with the other. The sexual union between her and Sinfield/Odysseus, followed by the separation of the two, is an example of the theme I mentioned earlier of the dialectical tension between being alone, like an island, and being with others.

After this second chorus is an instrumental outro that takes up just about all of the second half of the song. Wallace adds more percussion instruments, such as claves and a triangle. Collins solos on the flute, and soon after, on the sax. Fripp plays an acoustic guitar. Miller plucks the strings on his double bass.

Soprano Paulina Lucas vocalizes through most of this, representing the Formentera lady “sing[ing her] song for [us].” Her voice tends to hover from a high A or A-sharp, then descends chromatically to E or thereabouts; this descension is the near-reverse of Fripp’s guitar solo on “Ladies of the Road,” in which a more-or-less chromatic ascent of notes suggests a woman’s sighs during sex leading to orgasm. Perhaps the Formentera lady’s descending sighs are meant to suggest her gradual disappointment with her Odysseus.

We also hear strings play a melody of E, G-G, then E, G-A. We’ll hear this theme again early on in “Sailor’s Tale,” but on electric guitar and sax. The repeating of this theme suggests that the upcoming instrumental is a sequel to “Formentera Lady,” a continuation of the story of Sinfield/Odysseus wandering on the sea after leaving his Circe.

III: Sailor’s Tale

The instrumental begins, as Lucas’s voice fades out, with Wallace tapping the ride cymbal. The rhythm is a horizontal hemiola of alternating 6/8 and 3/4. Since such a rhythm is something of a cliché in Spanish and Latin American music, it is also a fitting way to continue the musical story of “Formentera Lady,” as is the aforementioned theme on the strings from then, and now played by Fripp and Collins. Also, the key of A in the chorus and instrumental outro of the previous track is kept in this one, though it’s in A minor now.

Wallace adds the bass drum and snare to the rhythm on the ride cymbal, and Boz plays A, C, A (an octave higher)-G-E in the upper-middle register of the bass, the up-and-down melodic contour suggesting the movement of the waves at sea. Then Fripp and Collins come in with that theme from the previous track. The switch from A major in “Formentera Lady” to A minor in “Sailor’s Tale” (with a brief change to A major before Collins’s frantic soprano sax solo) suggests the shift in Sinfield’s fortunes of being happy with his lover to being sad and alone without her (the notion of ‘happy’ major and ‘sad’ minor is of course an oversimplification, but the association is fitting given the themes of this album). Fripp is playing sustained electric guitar leads behind Collins’s solo.

In this music, one can visualize the change in Sinfield’s fortunes, from happy to sad, as represented by Odysseus the sailor and his crew being tossed about on the waves of the sea after leaving Circe’s island, ever thwarted by Poseidon. One can imagine the ultimate, horrific fate of the crew when they encounter Scylla, and soon after the giant whirlpool, Charybdis, killing a number of Odysseus’ men.

The middle section of the instrumental has the time signature changed to 4/4, with a slower and less frenetic pace, but a nonetheless ominous one. Boz plays A, C, D-E, G (and variations thereon) on the bass. The passage features Fripp playing splintery, angular, dissonant, and screaming chords on his Gibson, whose tone reminds us of that of a banjo. This would seem apt given the fact that Fripp’s trademark cross-picking technique shares a lot in common with banjo players’.

Pretty soon, we’ll hear Fripp’s Mellotron (string tapes) playing the sustained notes of an A minor 7th chord in the background, behind his relentless screaming phrases on the guitar. Collins will play a flute theme in dissonant counterpoint to the already tense atmosphere. One senses that the sailor (be he Odysseus, or whoever else) is not long for this world. He’ll die alone.

The music returns to that of the original, horizontal hemiola rhythm, with Fripp strumming a high-pitched, screaming A minor chord. The Mellotron comes in full force here, with string tapes and a low A note from the brass tapes. There’s a brief change to D minor, then back to A minor, and back to D minor, but this time much more dissonant and chaotic.

Finally, we hear only Fripp’s splintery, dissonant chords being strummed from up high, then descending until they reach a D minor chord, and a D major one. We sense that the sailor has perhaps fallen into the gaping mouth of Charybdis. The music ends with an eerie shift back and forth in parallel fourths in low A and D to A-sharp and D-sharp on the Mellotron (brass tapes).

IV: The Letters

The melody for the verses that Boz sings is derived from the vocal part for the Giles, Giles, and Fripp song “Why Don’t You Just Drop In,” from The Brondesbury Tapes compilation. The original lineup of King Crimson performed the G, G, and F song live, titled simply “Drop In“; it can be heard on the live album, Epitaph.

This second version sounds even more similar to “The Letters” in how the verses are sung with less consistent instrumental backing than on the first version (Ian McDonald‘s sax, with Giles’s drums later, in “Drop In”; and just Fripp playing soft electric guitar in the background in “The Letters“), and with a similar middle section with sax playing low pairs of notes. The G, G, and F version, in contrast, has a full, conventional instrumental background of guitar, bass, and drums, with harmonized vocals by both Peter Giles (also on bass) and his brother, drummer Michael.

“The Letters” begins softly and sadly, unlike the pop-oriented G, G, and F version, and unlike the jazzy King Crimson “Drop In.” As I said above, Fripp plays softly, in F-sharp minor. When Boz sings, it’s as though there’s no accompaniment at all; he seems all alone, alienated, and stranded on an island after his boat crashed from the sea storm in “Sailor’s Tale.”

Boz doesn’t sing about the pain of sailor Sinfield/Odysseus, though. Rather, “The Letters” is about a man’s wife and his mistress. The latter writes to the former, gloating about how she seduced him and made him cheat on his wife, who’s now insane with jealousy, of course.

Neither of Odysseus’ mistresses, Circe or Calypso, ever wrote letters to Penelope, boasting of having taken her husband to bed; but given her determination to be faithful to him after so many suitors tried to replace him as king of Ithaca, one could imagine Penelope’s rage had Circe or Calypso ever sent her such letters. Comparing the lyric of “The Letters” to such a possible mythical scenario can be evocative of how hot the rage of the betrayed wife must be.

We see in this adultery the dialectical tension between human connection and alienation, how the liaison between man and mistress alienates husband from wife, making her feel as stranded on an island as Odysseus would be after enduring a storm at sea. Could Sinfield have found himself in a jealous conflict between a wife or girlfriend on the one hand, and a groupie/Formentera lady on the other? Is such a conflict the basis of having the first track, “The Letters,” and “Ladies of the Road” on Islands?

The middle, instrumental section is, as I said above, similar to that of “Drop In,” with baritone and tenor saxes playing pairs of low notes in F-sharp. Fripp is playing sustained guitar leads over the saxes. In addition to the F-sharp pairs of notes, we also hear the saxes play a similar motif to that one on the strings in “Formentera Lady” and on the guitar and sax early on in “Sailor’s Tale.” The motif is F-sharp, A, and B, similar to the E, G, and A of the previous two tracks.

The music dies down, and we hear some soft (tenor?) sax playing, building up to a louder climax before the next verse. There’s brief silence before Boz belts out, “Impaled on nails of ice!” The jealous wife writes a reply letter to her husband’s mistress, telling her she’s murdered him and is about to kill herself. While Boz is singing this verse, we can hear Wallace banging about on the drums and cymbals, Collins on the flute, and Fripp’s guitar and Boz’s bass.

For the last four lines, in which Boz sings of the murder/suicide, they start with Wallace tapping on the ride cymbal a bit, then Boz’s voice is all alone. Adultery, jealousy, and killing lead to loneliness.

V: Ladies of the Road

So many rock bands out there have at least one or two naughty songs, celebrations of male lust and objectification of women. One can think of Led Zeppelin’s “Sick Again,” “Motherly Love,” by the Mothers of Invention, or Ted Nugent’s “Jailbait” as noteworthy examples. Even a band as ordinarily intellectual as King Crimson are no exception, as Sinfield’s lecherous lyric here demonstrates.

Yes, this song is naughtier than that second verse of “Easy Money,” the version usually played live. The title of this song makes it pretty obvious what it’s about. “Ladies of the Road” is the kind of song that may limit the number of female fans a band may have. As I myself have been guilty of, we men have to remember that women don’t exactly appreciate it when we write of our sexual feelings for them.

Still, as alienating to women as this song surely is, it is for this very reason that the song fits thematically with the others on Islands. In “Ladies of the Road,” we have another example of the dialectical tension between human connection (sex, in this case) and alienation (the result of treating women in the scurrilous way the song does).

The verses describe sexual encounters with various groupies in increasingly explicit terms. These girls include a hippie, an Asian (stereotypically presumed to be Chinese, and whose ungrammatical English is mocked: “Please, me no surrender”), and a stoner from San Francisco. The last verse frankly describes acts of fellatio and cunnilingus.

The chorus compares the girls to stolen apples, implying the rough, possessive, and sexualizing treatment they’ve been subjected to by the rockers. Nonetheless, these girls “are versed in the truth,” that is, they know what they’re getting into. They have sexual agency: they aren’t wide-eyed, innocent virgins merely being ruined by these lascivious men, and they know the men’s true nature far better than the men know the girls. Perhaps this admission mitigates the song’s sexism, if only a little bit.

The song is in E, with a blues-like feel, though without the standard 12-bar chord progression. Instead, the chords are seventh-chord oriented, in E, A, C, and B for the verses; during the guitar and sax solos, it’s generally in E, and for the twice-heard chorus, there’s a chromatic descension of C-sharp minor, C augmented, E major 2nd inversion, B-flat half-diminished, and A major 7th to G sharp to A major 7th.

At first, Boz sings it with just Fripp’s chordal backing and blues licks on the guitar, and with Wallace shaking a tambourine. In the middle of the second verse, Wallace starts stomping on the bass drum, and Boz starts playing the bass.

Collins does a deliberately grating tenor sax solo after the second verse. I remember hating the harshness of the solo when I first heard it (on The Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson double LP compilation, back in my teens); it didn’t take me long, though, to understand the meaning of the grating sound. I recall a quote from Frank Zappa: “On a saxophone you can play sleaze.” That’s exactly what Collins is doing here. Like Fripp’s guitar solo to come (pardon the expression), Collins’s sax sounds like the squealing voice of a groupie approaching orgasm, which in turn is represented by Fripp’s distorted guitar immediately following Collins’s solo.

During the sax solo, we fortuitously also hear that motif of the fifth, flat seventh, and upper root note, the motif heard in all three songs on Side One that I mentioned before, though here it’s B (6 times, like the sax in the middle section of “The Letters,” though 8 times there), D (flattened a bit), and E. The motif is later buried during the verses in Boz’s bass line, just where the chord goes up from E to A, hence E, G, and A.

During the second playing of the chorus, the flute sound we hear isn’t played by Collins: as it says on the credits for this track on the inner sleeve of The Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson, Fripp plays a Mellotron (flute tapes), while Collins only plays sax, and he and Wallace sing backing vocals. Note also how the music during the verses and solos is all the masculine stereotype of sexual aggression, while the music of the two choruses is all gentle and pretty, the feminine stereotype. Would it be any other way?

VI: Prelude: Song of the Gulls

The harmonic progression at the beginning of this classical-music-oriented instrumental is derived from another, of the same musical style, from The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp–namely, the slow middle section of Fripp’s “Suite No. 1.” The progression is one of tonic major, mediant, sub-dominant, and back to tonic: E major, G-sharp minor, A major, and back to E major.

The first three chords of this progression, incidentally, are also a slight variation on that E, G, A motif I keep bringing up, the only difference being the sharpening of the G. There is a group of session string players (also heard playing the E, G, G and E, G, A motif toward the end of “Formentera Lady”) who are playing arpeggiated pizzicato notes of the backing chords, while strings also play the E, G-sharp, A, F-sharp, and E melody arco, with Robin Miller‘s oboe playing a harmony line in thirds above it–G-sharp, B, C-sharp, A, and G-sharp. Note how the intervals of the first three notes in the oboe line parallel those of the E, G, A motif.

Rhythmically, the music is in a slow, waltz-like 3/4 time. There is a melancholy to this music, especially when it shifts to the relative minor, in C-sharp, and those pizzicato arpeggiated notes are now played arco.

This melancholy will become clearer when we come to the final, title track of the album, on which we hear Boz singing, “Gaunt granite climbs where gulls wheel and glide/Mourfully cry o’er my island.” The sadness of the song of the gulls is an expression of the loneliness one feels when left alienated and isolated, as if left on an island, for alienation and isolation are the central themes of Islands.

VII: Islands

The song begins with a soft piano chord by Tippett in C-sharp minor. Boz sings of Sinfield being “encircled by sea” on his island, where “waves sweep the sand” (i.e., pull the sand off the land and into the sea), implying a slow eating away of himself in his loneliness and isolation. Remember that this C-sharp minor is the same key as the shift to the melancholy relative minor in the previous track.

His “sunsets fade,” and he’ll “wait only for rain.” “Love erodes [his] high-weathered walls/Which fend off the tide…[on his] island.” Love and heartbreak are eating his heart away. The next verse includes the reference to the gulls that “mournfully cry o’er [his] islands.” The piano continues to back Boz’s voice, as does a bass flute played by Collins.

The melodic contour of Boz’s vocal part is to an extent the inverse of his vocal line for the verses of “Formentera Lady.” On that track, his voice did two descensions of four notes, recall, the second of these a whole tone lower; in “Islands,” it’s two ascensions of three notes, the second of these also a whole tone lower. It’s as though “Islands” is the opposite in mood to “Formentera Lady,” which happily reminisces about Sinfield’s lover. In “Islands,” he is just sad and alone without her on his island, like Odysseus on Calypso’s island of Ogygia, missing his Penelope.

The chord progression for the verses is C-sharp minor, G-sharp minor, F-sharp minor, and G-sharp minor. The chorus has a chord progression of E major to A major, going back and forth three times.

Above, I mentioned a pair of three-note vocal ascensions. These occur during the verses, on the G-sharp minor and F-sharp minor chords, and they can be heard as variations on the E, G, A motif, though here the notes are G-sharp, A, and B, then F-sharp, G-sharp, and A…or root, minor second, and minor third, rather than root, minor third, and perfect fourth.

So, what can this motif be said to represent? I’d say it represents a stepping up from the water onto the shore of an island, which in turn represents a moving away from human connection to loneliness, alienation, and isolation.

To go back to the lyric, Sinfield’s “dawn bride’s veil…dissolves in the sun, love’s web is spun.” Is the bride his Formentera lady, who left him, thus dissolving in the sun, or was she his wife or girlfriend, having left him after learning of his affair with the Formentera lady? In any case, “love’s web” drew him in like a fly and caught him, and now he’s alone. In this connection, who are the prowling cats, and who are the running mice–the rock band and groupies, respectively, or vice versa?

The chorus seems to give us a happy resolution for the lonely islander. Boz sings of “infinite peace” under the water, where “islands join hands ‘neath heaven’s sea.” I’d say this is his wish-fulfillment, a fantasy of rejoining the social world as a hallucinatory cure to his loneliness. “Heaven’s sea” is that infinite ocean of all-unifying Brahman, to link his Atman with the pantheistic Absolute (it can also represent human connection). To attain this state of nirvana, though, one mustn’t go around lusting after groupies. In any case, “islands join[ing] hands” is yet another example of the dialectical tension in this album between human connection and isolation.

After the first chorus and some soft piano, we hear Mark Charig‘s cornet over a pedal harmonium played by Fripp. After Boz sings the chorus again, the piano comes back with Miller’s oboe, then Boz sings the next verse.

The melancholy of lonely Sinfield comes back in this third verse, with such imagery as “Dark harbour quays like fingers of stone/Hungrily reach from my island.” He’d hungrily reach for and clutch at the “words, pearls, and gourds” of sailors (i.e., the love of human company), items of love “strewn on [his] shore,” if only they were real and not a product of his imagination. Instead, all that he has on his island will just “return to the sea.” He’ll even lose what little he has there, in his desolation.

That wish-fulfilling chorus is repeated, then the cornet returns with the pedal harmonium and piano accompaniment. Fripp will add Mellotron (strings tapes), while Wallace softly hits the cymbals. The song ends with a slow fade-out on the pedal harmonium.

VII: Once With the Oboe, Once Without It, and Then, We’ve Finished

I’ll bet Fripp had fun pretending to be a conductor, counting out the time and waving an imaginary baton for the orchestra to start playing.

People speak of an epidemic of male loneliness these days. It shouldn’t be trivialized, but what a lot of men need to understand (as I wish I had, during my own lonely and embittered youth), is that a reactionary, disrespectful attitude towards women and everyone/everything else won’t cure that loneliness. In our alienated world, a lot of women are lonely, too. One should punch up at the ruling class responsible for that loneliness, divisiveness, and alienation, not down at the “girls of the road.”

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 6

[The following is the twenty-sixth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, here is the twenty-fourth, and here is the twenty-fifth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

One of the purposes of war, usually the main one, if not the exclusive one, is to steal the land from those invaded and to enrich one’s own nation at the expense of the invaded. Such a truism leads us to a discussion of the next sin.

Magic should never be used in aid of stealing, or to gain excessive wealth at the expense of others.

There are so many different ways to steal, apart from the obvious, direct forms of thievery that we usually punish the poor for committing. Yet it is the less obvious forms of thievery that are so rarely punished by lawmakers, since it is often those very lawmakers who are guilty of those indirect forms of stealing!

Even without the punishments of the state for those less-known thieves, there will be a way that those thieves will one day be punished. That punishment will come from the law of sow and reap that is the Echo Effect.

There is thievery through grand or petty larceny, there is thievery through the spoils of war, and there is thievery through the accumulation of wealth by making poor workers produce that wealth and not remunerating them in proportion to the value that they create. Not paying them enough is stealing.

The effects of this subtle kind of stealing are obvious. One need only see the stark contrast between the thieves, who live in opulence and luxury, and those stolen from, who live in filth, want, and wretchedness. A day is no longer for the wealthy than it is for the poor. The wealthy cannot be working much harder than the poor are to deserve such wealth…if the wealthy are even working as hard as the poor, or if they are even working at all.

Using magic spells that take the energy and effort of the working poor to multiply the wealth of these thieves is an especially grievous sin, making not only rich and poor individuals, but making also rich and poor families, who pass on their excess or lack from the parents’ generations to their children’s. This inheritance of abundance or want is never earned through proportionate work.

The inheritance of abundance or want is also spread throughout the world like an infectious disease. We Luminosians, enslaved by the Zoyans and yearning for liberation, must heed the warning never to take what is not ours, especially not with the aid of magic. The eighth of the Ten Errors is clear on this point. The temptation to commit this sin must be resisted. In our enslavement by the Zoyans, we have felt the sting of being punished for committing the sin. When liberated one day, we must not let ourselves be tempted to steal again, be it through direct acts of larceny, through stealing from workers, or through stealing others’ lands.

If after our liberation, we don’t heed these warnings, the Echo Effect will bring us the misfortune of being stolen from and made poor. We must not think we will be safe from such misfortunes if we ever sin again!

Analysis of ‘Brazil’

Brazil is a 1985 satirical dystopian film directed by Terry Gilliam, and written by him, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown. It stars Jonathan Pryce, with Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Katherine Helmond, Kim Greist, Bob Hoskins, Robert De Niro, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, and Jim Broadbent.

The film was successful in Europe, but not in its initial North American release. It has since become a cult film, though, and in 1999, it was voted to be the 54th greatest British film of all time by the British Film Institute, and in 2017, 150 actors, directors, writers, producers, and critics in a poll for Time Out magazine ranked Brazil as the 24th best British film ever.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie.

The title of the film is an odd choice, since the story is neither about nor set in Brazil; music from an English translation of the Ary Barroso song, “Aquarela do Brasil,” or simply “Brazil” to British audiences, is heard recurrently throughout the film. The English version of the song is sung by Geoff Muldaur.

Gilliam was originally going to name his film 1984 ½, since the story is about a technocratic, bureaucratic, state capitalist, totalitarian future. There was also, in the original title, the influence of Federico Fellini‘s 8½, since that director had a defining influence on Gilliam’s visual style. Michael Radford‘s film adaptation of George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-four (which Gilliam hadn’t read) had just been released, though, so a different title for Gilliam’s film would be needed. Other working titles included The Ministry, The Ministry of Torture, How I learned to Live with the System–So Far, and So That’s Why the Bourgeoisie Sucks, before finally deciding on Brazil, an ironic reference to romantic escapism from the miserable world of the film’s story.

There are other meanings that can be gleaned from the title Brazil, as regards the dystopian society depicted in the film. Consider how Brazil’s government had been a right-wing dictatorship from 1964-1985, this last year being the same as that of the release of the film. Brazil was also one of the South American countries victimized by Operation Condor, which involved the kidnapping and disappearing of anyone the right-wing authorities deemed a leftist, Marxist, terrorist, or communist. Note in this connection how, in the film, people suspected rightly or wrongly of terrorism are rounded up and disappeared by the film’s equivalent of Orwell’s Thought Police.

The setting of the dystopia is left unclear (“somewhere in the 20th century”), though our hearing of English accents among almost all of the cast (except for Americans De Niro and Greist) makes us assume it’s probably somewhere in the UK. The time of the story seems a mishmash of the past and future, with desktop computers that have keyboards like those of old-style typewriters, and with 1940s fashions (i.e., men in suits, overcoats, and hats). The result is a kind of fantasy world, which is fitting, given Brazil is the second of Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination” films (the others being 1981’s Time Bandits and 1988’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). Brazil thus might as well be set in an Anglophone version of the country it’s named after. In any case, this mishmash of times and places suggests that the story is one of all times, since the oppression in it is quite universal.

After hearing a bit of the “Brazil” song, we see a TV ad from “Central Services” about…ducts. Ducts will appear in the background in interiors here and there throughout the film as a motif. In this ad, they appear as an exchange-value commodity, sold in various pleasing colours. Towards the end of the film, we’ll see the protagonist, Sam Lowry (Pryce), climb up a pile of ducts to escape the government agents chasing him–he’s using ducts as a use-value.

An important point should be noted in this contrast of commodities. While Brazil is presented as a kind of comic version of the Orwellian totalitarian state, it should be emphasized that Gilliam’s dystopia is a capitalist one, not a “Stalinist” one. The consumerism satirized in an ad for..aesthetically pleasing…ducts as exchange-values for money (and therefore for profit)–as opposed to ducts as use values, to help Lowry escape to freedom (or so he imagines) from that very totalitarian state–is one of many examples of such consumerism (including botched cosmetic surgery) that show that this dystopia is the diametric opposite of socialism.

So many on the political right suffer from a delusion that the left has a monopoly on totalitarian, tyrannical governments (while we on the left insist that socialist states, apart from the anarchists and Trotskyists, are nothing of the sort), so much so that they turn a blind eye to how the “free market” has led to billionaires buying governments and political parties, leading in turn to the very “corporatism” they say they oppose…and I haven’t even gotten into MAGA-style fascism!

The TV ad is shown on a number of TV sets put in a shop display window; we see window shoppers walking by as the ad comes to an end. As soon as it does, there’s a huge explosion, destroying the TVs and the whole shop. It is understood to be an act of terrorism, aptly happening immediately after the commercial, a demonstration of capitalist consumerism. Other terrorist explosions will occur later, also juxtaposed with consumerist scenes such as dining in a fancy restaurant, and shopping in a department store. In the mid-1980s, one would have been reminded of the IRA.

After this first terrorist bombing, we see a TV news interview with Mr. Eugene Helpmann (Vaughan), the Deputy Minister of Information, who says that these acts of terrorism are motivated by resentment over “seeing the other fellow win,” because they don’t want to “play the game,” which is conforming with the capitalist system. And as we know, this capitalist system makes “the other fellow win” by exploiting the rest of us.

It’s understood that a man named Archibald Tuttle (De Niro) is responsible for the terrorist acts, and so an arrest warrant is printed out for him; but an insect gets jammed in the teleprinter making a copy of the warrant, causing a misprint of his name, changing it to that of cobbler Archibald Buttle (played by Brian Miller), who will be wrongfully arrested and killed instead.

At Buttle’s home just before his arrest, which is also just before Christmas, his wife (played by Sheila Reid) is reading the ending of Charles Dickens‘s A Christmas Carol to their daughter, in which we learn of how Scrooge has proven himself to be a fully redeemed, good man. If you’ll recall my analysis of Dickens’s novella, I noted that the author’s proposed solution to the problem of poverty–the rich being generously charitable, as opposed to a transformation of society into one that produces commodities to provide for everyone’s needs, not for profit–is “peak liberalism.”

The problem with a social-democratic way of dealing with poverty is that when the tendency of the rate of profit to fall puts pressure on capitalists to replace welfare capitalism with neoliberalism, as happened in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, this in turn leads to a fascist tightening of control on things to protect the interests of the ruling class, as we’ve seen in the 2020s, and as we see in the bureaucratic dystopia of Brazil.

Indeed, a mere bureaucratic error is what leads to the ruin of the Buttle family, whose flat is barged into by government agents, who cut a circular hole into the floor of the flat of Jill Layton (Greist) and ceiling of the Buttle family’s flat (i.e., Jill lives in the flat above the Buttles’). These agents surprise and terrorize the family as they slide down poles like firemen through the circular hole, then arrest Mr. Buttle. Other agents break through his flat’s window and door; he’s put in a bag-like jacket, as if he were a commodity sold and packaged, and his wife and children are traumatized by the experience. Today, we’d be reminded of immigration raids on apartments in Chicago.

To add insult to injury, Mrs. Buttle is made to sign the paperwork for her husband’s arrest, and those found guilty of breaking any laws will have to pay for their periods of detention, as will be the case with Buttle. The next scene starts with shots of the office where Lowry works: an endless maze of desks, paperwork, and bureaucrats–the Ministry of Information, with his boss, Mr. Kurtzmann (Holm). Buttle is just one of possibly many whose lives have been ruined…and all we see is the paperwork being pushed around.

Another reason to emphasize that the totalitarian dystopia in Brazil is anything but socialist is that it has a capitalist government mired in bureaucracy. If there’s one thing that anti-communists and Trotskyists love to condemn about socialist states like the USSR, it’s the bureaucracy in them, as if such a problem has never existed under other political systems. In Lenin’s later writings, as well as in some of Stalin’s, there is a vehement complaint about the Russian bureaucracy that the Bolsheviks inherited after the Revolution, and that something had to be done about it. The problem with bureaucracy is that it’s so difficult to get rid of, and it’s so easy for it to creep back into political life so soon after being rid of it. It doesn’t exist merely because power-hungry people want it there to help keep them in power.

Anyway, as soon as Kurtzmann stops watching his workers and returns to his office, they stop their pretense of diligence and switch their computer screens to watch a movie. Kurtzmann sees the paperwork on Buttle, realizes it’s an error, and calls on Lowry to come to his office…though Lowry isn’t at work. Kurtzmann can also hear the music of the movie his staff is watching, though as soon as he opens his office door and looks out, he sees no watchers of movies, but just diligent workers again.

He calls out to the workers to find Lowry, but no one replies. Lowry is actually at home in bed, dreaming about being a winged hero in armour flying among the clouds and seeking out a beautiful maiden, often appearing in his dreams as a damsel in distress, and always with the face of Jill Layton. His dream, of course, is a classic case of Freudian wish-fulfillment.

Just as the staff in the office use movies as a form of escapism from the same mind-numbing job that Lowry has, so does he use his dreams as escapism. He’s no dashing hero: he’s a dork doing a relatively pointless job. He isn’t particularly desirable to even the real Jill (at least not at first…apparently); how much less desirable would he be to some idealized beauty!

As we go through the dream with him, we hear a lush orchestral arrangement of the “Brazil” song, reinforcing the contrast between the ideal world that the song represents and the dull reality that Lowry and the other bureaucrats have to live in. He sees her, resplendent in the light among the clouds, and they kiss, though her veil is between their lips, symbolic of how there will always be something between him and her.

The Jill of his dreams is properly understood as a projection of himself; she is symbolically a mirror reflection of his own narcissism. In this state, Lowry is in the world of what Jacques Lacan called the Imaginary, the dyadic experience of the other as an extension of oneself. Lowry isn’t fully, properly invested in the sociocultural world of the Symbolic; this is why he doesn’t want the promotion to Information Retrieval that his mother, Ida Lowry (Helmond), has pulled strings for to get for him, because such a promotion would mean more responsibility and social involvement for him. He wants to keep his low-level job so he can stay minimally involved with the real world and be more involved with his Imaginary world…his dreams.

He’s late for work because his alarm clock didn’t wake him, just as his coffee maker doesn’t work, spilling coffee on his toast, and later, his air-conditioning won’t work. Machinery frequently doesn’t work in Brazil; it’s as inefficient as the bureaucracy.

In the main lobby of the Ministry of Information building, we see a huge, Art Deco statue of a winged man and a woman under him, indicating the obvious inspiration of Lowry’s dreams. This statue, along with the cityscapes in the movie, is influenced by the visual style of Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, thus reinforcing the retro-futuristic dystopia we see in Brazil.

Lowry finally shows up at work there in that lobby, where he sees, for the first time in a while, Jack Lint (Palin), who in his success in and conformity with the system is the diametric opposite of Lowry. Indeed, Lowry, in his reluctance to be promoted to Information Retrieval and thus “play the game,” is a case of Lacan’s notion that “les non-dupes errent.” Lint, however, is ‘duped’ enough to think that bureaucratic errors aren’t errors (at 1:19 here), and so he ‘never errs’ in his upwardly-mobile life.

As Lowry is chatting with Lint, though, he sees Jill on the surveillance camera screens behind Lint. For the first time in Lowry’s life, the girl of his dreams has been manifested in the real world. She’s no longer the little-o-other as a mirrored extension of his narcissistic self: she is the big-O-Other of radical alterity, an individual in her own right, separate from him. Accordingly, she’s no damsel in distress needing a man to save her; in fact, she’s in the lobby trying to rescue a man, Mr. Buttle, from the clutches of the fascist government, though the bureaucratic red tape is proving to be a real source of frustration for her.

Visually corresponding to this contrast between the fantasy Jill and the real, independent, go-getter Jill is how the former is a long-haired beauty queen, while the latter has short hair in a 1980s style (somewhat similar to this, but shorter), differing sharply from the traditional lady look of the 1940s fashions that all the other women have. Further adding to her tough look is the fact that Jill is a truck driver wearing a kind of jumpsuit rather than a dress. She thus adds a touch of realism to the film’s fantasy world.

When Lowry is in Kurtzmann’s office and is using the computer there, he realizes the error of having arrested Buttle instead of Tuttle. Kurtzmann is relieved to know the error isn’t the fault of his department, but of Information Retrieval. Kurtzmann would feel helpless without Lowry’s help if he’d lost Lowry through a promotion to Information Retrieval, which Lowry of course doesn’t want…yet.

Lowry later meets with his mother, Ida, who is with her plastic surgeon, Dr. Louis Jaffe (Broadbent). He wraps a sheet of plastic around her face so tightly that her looks are grotesquely distorted, yet he says “she’s twice as beautiful as before.” The scene satirizes the disappointment one often has upon receiving plastic surgery (more because of psychological issues like body dysmorphia and unrealistically high expectations than of complications or incompetence on the part of the doctor), as well as the fact that it reflects Ida’s preoccupation with social status and that she’s rich enough to afford the surgery.

As she and Lowry go to a high-class French restaurant to meet with some of her friends, he tries to tell her he doesn’t want the promotion to Information Retrieval that she’s pulling strings to get for him. She wants him promoted to improve her social status by association with him, not to improve the quality of his life. His narcissistic dreams about Jill stem from Ida’s own narcissism, a point made clear near the end of the film, when he sees Jill’s face on his mother’s body, an obvious Oedipal transference.

At a table in the restaurant, Lowry, Ida, and her two friends are served dishes that, though the photos set over the food are of normal and appetizing food, are actually just scoops of monochromatic…rice? Though this is supposed to be a fancy restaurant, the presentation of the dishes in this way seems to be a satirical comment on the uniform-looking, processed food found in fast-food restaurants, a vulgarization of commodities that we see in a hyper-consumerist society.

The satire on the futility of expecting plastic surgery to turn an aged woman into an Aphrodite continues when one of Ida’s lady friends, Mrs. Terrain (played by Barbara Hicks) prefers another plastic surgeon over Dr. Jaffe, only to discover, over the course of the film, that increasing complications with her surgery will result in her being covered in bandages, and even dying towards the end of the movie.

As the four eat and discuss plastic surgery (and Lowry continues in all futility to dissuade his mother from pushing for his promotion), there’s another terrorist attack, an explosion off in the corner of the dining area. Apart from the initial scare, everyone carries on as normal, as if the bombing were a mere annoyance. The string quartet, for example, promptly resumes playing their music. Such an upper-class world is so insulated from the horrors of reality that they can regard the horrors as mere inconveniences.

When asked if he’ll do anything about the terrorists, Lowry says it’s his lunch hour; furthermore, dealing with terrorism is not his department. This is why he likes his low-level job: in it, he doesn’t have to get too involved with the social world, as I described above in Lacanian terms. When he meets Jill and gets emotionally involved with her life, he’ll be thrown into the social world of the Symbolic, and he’ll find himself caring about someone other than himself. Unlike his current, complacent self, he’ll be overwhelmed with anxiety over what could happen to Jill when the government associates her with Tuttle and terrorism via her probing into what has happened to Buttle.

He has another of his dreams as the winged hero about to meet with long-haired, veiled Jill, but their meeting is interrupted by skyscrapers ripping up from the grassy ground in a rural area and shooting up into the sky. The ideal, wish-fulfillment of his dream is being invaded by the harsh, urban reality of his waking life. These sprouting skyscrapers come between him and his love, and he soon wakes up in bed in his flat, realizing that his air conditioner isn’t working, and ducts are spewing smoke all over one of his rooms. He has to call Central Services for urgent help, but they won’t come any time soon.

He has to keep cool by sitting with his head in the fridge. Tuttle, of all people, arrives in his flat to fix the air conditioning as a freelancer, which is illegal. In his kindness in helping Lowry, Tuttle is demonstrating that “terrorists” aren’t necessarily bad people, something a lot of people today still don’t know about such Palestinian resistance as Hamas, for example.

Nelson Mandela is today honored as a hero in the fight against South African apartheid. It isn’t all that well remembered, though, that he was once called a terrorist (by such charming people as Reagan and Thatcher back in the 1980s) and imprisoned for having resorted to violence as a necessary tactic in the struggle against apartheid. Revolution is not a dinner party. Tuttle should be understood in this context.

Two employees of Central Services at long last arrive at Lowry’s flat to repair his air conditioning (they’re played by Hoskins [Spoor] and Derrick O’Connor [Dowser]), but being grateful to Tuttle and recognizing he’s a good man, Lowry stalls Spoor and Dowser so Tuttle can escape. Lowry mentions the need to have the proper paperwork–a 27B stroke 6–to make Spoor and Dowser leave to get it. For once, the bureaucracy has been of good use.

Tuttle leaves Lowry’s flat by going outside and hooking himself to a cable, sliding down off the building and disappearing into the night darkness of the city, as if he were Batman or Spiderman. Tuttle is an actual hero, unlike the fantasy hero Lowry imagines himself to be in his dreams.

In Tuttle’s freelance repairing of Lowry’s air conditioning, he exposes the ducts behind the wall in the room; ducts can be seen to represent breathing, the circulation of air to remove carbon dioxide (symbolized by the smoke that filled Lowry’s room) and supply oxygen (as represented by the desired air conditioning). This breathing, in turn, represents the ability to express oneself and to give and receive communication freely, as opposed to a bureaucratic, dystopian society that stifles real communication. Tuttle’s repairs–in conjunction with his role as “terrorist”–show him to be a true hero, restoring free communication.

Later, Lowry discovers more problems with the Tuttle/Buttle mistake when he finds that the wrong bank account has been debited for the arrest. He offers to go to the Buttle residence in person and give Buttle’s widow a refund cheque for the debit. On his way there, in an absurdly tiny car, he’s listening to the “Brazil” song (which Tuttle in the repairs scene was humming) on the car radio. The music is interrupted by a news report about another terrorist bombing, but he switches the radio back to the song. He’d still rather continue living in the escapist world of his dreams, as represented by the song, than face the problems of the real world.

This avoidance of the real world is about to end, though: he’s already seen Jill’s face on the surveillance monitor screens in the Ministry of Information lobby, and he’s about to see her in the flesh above the Buttle flat (through that circular hole). He’s met Tuttle and seen that the “terrorist” isn’t as he seems. A convergence between his fantasy life and his real life is about to arrive…like those skyscrapers sprouting up from the grassy ground in his dream. This inciting incident–of seeing Jill–will pull Lowry from the Imaginary and into the Symbolic, making him care, for the first time in his life, about the real world and its problems.

His seeing her–through a reflection in a broken-off piece of mirror, then seeing his own face in it, thus indicating the Lacanian mirror showing her as a narcissistic extension of himself–is in ironic juxtaposition to the anguish felt by Mrs. Buttle and her little boy over Mr. Buttle’s death, which should be pushing Lowry to care about those other than himself…when all he wants to do is deliver the cheque and find Jill. He’s being thrown into society, however reluctantly.

His sense of the horror of the totalitarian society he’s in is awakening, along with his soon-to-come decision to accept the promotion to Information Retrieval (so he can gain access to Jill’s classified records), but this awakening is only with the motive to get to her and protect her, not to be of any help to the broader society (i.e., people like the Buttles) and protect them from the fascist government. He has one foot in the Symbolic and the other firmly rooted in the Imaginary. In his narcissistic wish only to have what’s good for himself, we see one of the ways that the common man contributes to the oppression of all of us in a dystopian world.

On the bus and contemplating acceptance of the promotion while looking at printout images of Jill, Lowry has another of his escapist reveries about her. Instead of flying among the clouds or over a grassy rural area, our winged hero is flying between skyscrapers in a surreal version of the city he lives in. Since there’s the fear of her being arrested and charged with terrorism for having asked too many questions about Buttle, in the dream we see her caught in a cage in the air, dragged on ropes by baby-masked grotesques on the ground. He lands and draws a sword to confront them.

Then he snaps out of his reverie, and we see him back on the bus. He arrives at his flat to find the ducts all pulled out from the ceiling and walls, making his home a mess. Spoor and Dowser are doing an “emergency procedure” in response to Lowry’s telephone call to Central Services earlier, having complained about “an emergency” about his air conditioning before Tuttle repaired it. Spoor wants Lowry to sign the 27-B stroke six. When Spoor and Dowser realize someone else fixed the air conditioning…illegally, they leave his flat in a mess. Bureaucracy has failed, again.

He falls asleep, and his dream resumes, with him confronting a giant, armored samurai reminding me of Spoor, and after trying to cut Jill free of the ropes holding her cage, he sees that one of those who were dragging the ropes is Mrs. Buttle, who–as she did in her flat when he gave her the cheque–asks of what’s been done with her dead husband’s body. It’s clear that his dreams are being increasingly disrupted by the dystopian reality of his waking life–they’re getting less and less escapist. He’s also feeling a tinge of guilt over having not done enough for the common people in his bureaucratic job.

He has to fight the giant Spoor-samurai personifying the totalitarian government, but his adversary is too big and strong for him, being able to appear and disappear at will, before Lowry can get a chance to slash hm with his sword. The Spoor-samurai fights with a huge spear, which Lowry manages to get from him and stab him in the torso, with flames instead of blood coming out of the wound. When he removes the dead samurai’s metal mask, though, he sees not Spoor’s face, but his own. Lowry has been as much a part of the evil state-capitalist system as Spoor could ever be.

Lowry is woken up by the doorbell. A singing telegram lady is inviting Lowry to his mother’s party, where he can meet Mr. Helpmann and ask for the promotion to Information Retrieval. Since I’ve maintained that Lowry’s promotion is representative of his entering the Symbolic Order (the world of society, culture, and language, one of many Others, not just the dyadic other of the Oedipal mother/son relationship), and since it’s Mr. Helpmann who is…helping…Lowry get the promotion, then Helpmann–old enough to be Lowry’s father, by the way–is representative of the father who brings an end to a boy’s Oedipal relationship with his mother and, through the Name of the Father, gets the boy into society.

Indeed, Lowry meets Helpmann at a social gathering, his mother’s party, and he helps the crippled old man use the bathroom–like a dutiful son. Towards the end of the film, after he and Jill have been arrested, he is told by Helpmann–dressed as Father Christmas, as the British would call him–that Jill was killed during their arrest. Since Jill, as Lowry’s objet petit a, his unattainable object of desire, his little-o-other (autre in French) that is the remnant of his Oedipal desire for Ida (on whose face he sees Jill’s, in his hallucinatory sequence before the film’s end, recall), Father-Christmas-Helpmann is telling Lowry he can’t have her…this is the Non! du Père.

Another interesting point to keep in mind is that we never know of Lowry’s actual father in the film. Since Lowry loses his mind at the end of the film, we can relate Lacanian psychoanalysis to him further, in how the exclusion of the father from the family structure, the absence of the Symbolic father, via foreclosure, is linked to psychosis. There’s just Lowry and Ida/Jill in a dyadic relationship with him…not one with society.

To get back to the story, when Lowry is to begin work in Information Retrieval, he finds his new boss, Mr. Warrenn (Richardson), going hurriedly up and down the halls with a group of his employees discussing work. Such busy chit-chat among a crowd of hurrying people symbolizes the essence of society, what Lowry has been thrown into, just so he can find Jill.

Mr. Warrenn shows Lowry his new office. Lowry goes into the small, confining room, only to realize he has to share a desk that slides in and out of his office through a wall into the neighbouring office, where Harvey Lime (played by co-screenwriter McKeown) works. Lowry would like to use Lime’s computer to find the information he needs on Jill, but Lime insists on only using his computer himself. Lowry’s wish not to have anyone help him find out about Jill reflects his preference not to engage with society.

Still, Lime insists not only on using his computer himself, but also on being left alone in his office to do it, so Lowry reluctantly returns to his office. Bored and waiting at his desk for Lime, Lowry goes back into his reverie as the hero. Jill is in the cage floating up into the air, now that he’s cut the ropes holding it down; he’s lost his wings after the fight with the samurai, so he can’t fly up to her. He has to grab onto a dangling rope and climb up to her. As he starts to, a huge pair of brick hands reach up from the ground, grab his legs, and prevent him from climbing. The face of the brick ground monster is Kurtzmann’s, asking him not to leave for Information Retrieval. Lowry wakes up.

The notion of Kurtzmann holding Lowry back as he does in the dream just represents Lowry’s lack of commitment in leaving the dyadic narcissism of the Imaginary to enter the larger society of the big-O-Other in the Symbolic. It’s this lack of commitment that will be his ultimate downfall. He only cares about Jill as a mirrored extension of himself.

Lime has found information on her from his computer, and Lowry has a look at a printout. It’s only basic information, though, a mere physical description, so Lowry wants to use Lime’s computer himself to get more information, which he’ll get from a room the computer refers him to. He leaves.

The room he goes to is where Lint is, as well as Lint’s little daughter, Holly (whom he confuses with ‘Amy,’ indicating how, in spite of–or because of–his success at work, Lint is alienated from even his own family). When Lint sees the printout on Jill, and hears that the government got the wrong man (Buttle), he denies making any mistake as mentioned above. Lowry also learns that Buttle died in Lint’s custody as his torturer (Lint has blood on his white jacket from having finished torturing someone), for which Lint feels no pangs of conscience whatsoever.

And because Jill has been asking too many questions about Buttle, she is being associated all too closely with the Tuttle affair, and therefore she is in danger of being arrested herself–so Lowry is worried. He gets her file from Lint, claiming he’ll take care of her, when really he’s trying to protect her from the government.

On the way down the elevator and looking in her complete files, Lowry sees Jill at the lobby desk again, still complaining about how the bureaucracy is of no help in finding out what happened to Buttle. She is doing what Lowry should be doing, though: helping others for their sake, not just helping one’s own dyadic other for one’s own sake.

Descending from on high in that elevator, he is like the winged hero of his dreams, yet he’s hardly capable of rescuing her, for the malfunctioning elevator takes him down to the basement instead of the ground floor, where she is. We hear the romantic orchestration of the “Brazil” song again, yet he is in the sobering real world, the Symbolic, not that of his dreams, the Imaginary.

He manages to get up to the ground floor, where guards are about to arrest her, but he uses his authority as an employee of Information Retrieval to get her away from them, out of the building, and into her truck. She’s gotten into the truck by her own agency, though–she’s no damsel in distress. He isn’t the hero of his dreams, either, in spite of his frantic efforts to save her. He’s just a bumbling fool, which is obvious to her.

In meeting her for the first time, he’s encountering her not as a narcissistic mirror of himself, but as a separate individual in her own right–the big-O-Other, not the little-o-other. He isn’t adjusting well to his transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic. She just finds him a nuisance, and so she kicks him out of her truck.

He won’t give up in his attempts to win her love, though–indeed, he hangs on to the truck as she’s driving off–and over time, she warms up to him…or so it seems. Since some of the images we see in the film seem to be getting more and more surreal, and since we’ve already seen so many of Lowry’s dreams and reveries, we may start to wonder how much of what is happening to him is real, and how much of it is his own imagination, including if she’s really beginning to like him, or if it’s just more wish-fulfillment on his part.

An example of a somewhat surreal moment, just after the beginning of the warming-up to him, is the sight of a charming orange house, complete with a surrounding white picket fence, that is pulled up off the ground by a crane, to reveal behind it an ugly, fiery, smoky factory. This is seen while that orchestration of the “Brazil” song is heard: beauty, love, and happiness are illusory escapism in the dystopian nightmare of Brazil.

When she stops to pick up a package and he is paranoid about the government agents arresting her, she says he has “no sense of reality.” This is not only true, but a foreshadowing of the film’s ending, in which we realize he’s been fantasizing about having escaped with her from the government agents to a rural, grassy, Edenic world, all the while as he’s really still in the torture room with Lint, strapped to a chair and having fully lost his mind.

He tells Jill they should drive the truck far away, to somewhere safe, but she knows there isn’t any such safe place. She has the grip on reality that he lacks.

She tells him that the package she has picked up is a Christmas present, but he suspects it’s a bomb, and that she is thus associated with the likes of Tuttle. Annoyed both at his working for Information Retrieval and his disdain for the needed revolutionary resistance of the “terrorists,” she asks if he’s ever met any actual terrorists, if he knows any of them, i.e., as opposed to having only prejudicial, preconceived notions of “terrorists” as a result of government propaganda.

They arrive at a shopping mall, where a Santa (or Father Christmas, whichever) is asking kids what they want for Christmas. A girl answers that she’d like her own credit card. Indeed, this is the consumerist reality that a once religious holiday has been degraded into…and forty years since the release of Brazil (as of the publication of this analysis), the consumerism has only gotten worse.

In the mall, Lowry and Jill openly admit that neither of them trusts the other, and he tries to get the package from her. She has it behind a mirror, where she can’t be seen, and on the other side he meets and chats with the ever-more bandaged Mrs. Terrain while his hidden hand is still holding onto the package. Another terrorist bombing interrupts their brief chat. Lowry rushes off to find Jill, whose package he so judgementally assumes caused the explosion, yet she proves it really was just a gift, a bribe for the bureaucrats. Jill’s helping of the injured people shows the difference between his fake morality and her real morality.

Further proof of Lowry’s mental drifting away from reality is his hallucination of the giant samurai among the police who enter the mall just after the explosion. He briefly fantasizes that he’s in the role of the dashing hero about to confront the samurai, but after Jill warns him not to (in sharp contradistinction to her role as the damsel in distress of his dreams and reveries), he’s knocked out and temporarily taken into custody.

His hallucination demonstrates how he’d still rather stay in his escapist, narcissistic world of the Imaginary than be in the real, social world of the Symbolic and help those injured in the bombing. Other people are still just reflections of himself, rather than actual other people, and so in his narcissistic mental state, Lowry cannot be of any meaningful help in ridding his world of the bureaucratic, totalitarian nightmare that it’s in.

While taken away in the police truck, Lowry wants to find Jill among all those arrested in those bag-suits. He only cares about her-as-mirror-of-himself. None of the other ones arrested are of any concern to him, though they’ll surely suffer no less than Jill would. In any case, she isn’t even among them.

Back at his desk in Information Retrieval, Lowry is bawled out by Mr. Warrenn not only for having neglected the paperwork on his desk, but also for a number of bureaucratic misdeeds starting from back when he was introduced in the film, up to the present, misdeeds that will lead to his arrest. His negligence in Information Retrieval also symbolically indicates his lack of involvement in the greater society (even though his work in Information Retrieval isn’t anything more that the usual bureaucracy); this lack of involvement in the Symbolic Order, favouring instead the narcissism of the Imaginary, will lead to his eventual downfall.

Lowry hopes to get help from Lint about what’s happened to Jill, which of course is useless, since Lint is clearly on the side of the totalitarian system…after all, Lint is a torturer of those arrested. Recall the blood on Lint’s clothes during Lowry’s previous visit, when Lint was with his daughter, as well as his disregard for Buttle’s health condition when he died under Lint’s torture. When Lowry insists on Jill’s innocence of any involvement in terrorism, he’s only further endangering himself by his sympathetic association with her. Accordingly, Lint doesn’t want to be associated with Lowry anymore, in any way.

Lowry is so furious with the bureaucratic system that won’t help him save her that he tosses his backlog of desk paperwork all about his office, and he uses one of the ducts there to redirect any new paperwork back out from his office into the halls, where it makes a mess everywhere. The ducts can thus be seen also to symbolize intestines, so that the bureaucratic shit is sent in the opposite direction…an interesting point to be made when we see the soon-to-come scene of Tuttle filling up Spoor’s and Dowser’s environment suits with raw sewage back at Lowry’s flat.

Indeed, Lowry returns to his flat to find out that it isn’t his flat anymore. Spoor and Dowser, in those suits, show him the paperwork authorizing their repossession of his home; they’ve done this in revenge for his having allowed Tuttle, a “scab,” to do his illegal freelance repairs of Lowry’s air conditioning instead of letting Central Services do it.

Now, a right-wing libertarian might look at Tuttle’s illegal freelance repairs as a case of the superiority of the “free market” over the “corporatist” Central Services, which is an arm of the totalitarian government. Remember, though, that Gilliam is careful to emphasize the consumerism and class differences–that is, the capitalism–of the society Lowry lives in (remember also the poverty of the community Buttle lives in, as opposed to the opulence of plastic-surgery-seeking Ida and Mrs. Terrain). The totalitarian dystopia of Brazil is in no way socialist. It may be state-capitalist, but it’s capitalist all the same.

Those ducts, as I mentioned above, are as exchange-values a case of the capitalist profit motive, but also as connected with the government (via Central Services), the ducts represent the state’s intrusive tendrils, as it were, or as I also said above, the filthy intestines of the body of the state. So, fittingly, Tuttle appears outside Lowry’s flat and helps him exact revenge on Spoor and Dowser by making those duct intestines…so to speak…fill up the two men’s environment suits with shit until they explode. Tuttle’s heroism isn’t pro-laissez-faire, it’s anti-state-capitalism.

Jill appears by the flat, much to Lowry’s relief, and just as they’re about to kiss, Tuttle goes off on a cord, like Spiderman, away among the other city skyscrapers of the night, as he did the last time. Recall that he’s the true hero of the story, not Lowry…and Tuttle is only a “terrorist” insofar as he’s a headache to those in power. The “terrorist” explosions, for all we know, could really just be the result of the many machinery malfunctions that occur throughout the movie.

Lowry knows he and Jill have to hide from all the government agents, and without a flat anymore, he’ll have to hide with her in the home of his mother, who’s away for Christmas at the plastic surgeon’s, or so Lowry understands. Apart from the beautiful interior decor of Ida’s home, indicating further her upper-class status, we can see a number of ducts up by the ceiling. After a few awkward seconds, Lowry and Jill finally kiss, and we hear the “Brazil” music again.

Before they can make love, though, Lowry has to leave for the Information Retrieval building, for he’s thought of a way to save her: fabricate her death in the records. In doing so, of course, he’s putting himself in ever greater danger of being arrested. He hopes to find Mr. Helpmann (his father-figure, recall), yet he sees on Helpmann’s desk a photo of Ida, which may make us wonder with whom she’s really spending Christmas…or is Lowry just imagining seeing the photo?

Lowry returns to Ida’s home to tell Jill that he’s deleted her existence in the government records. By the bed, she looks like the Jill of his dreams: with flowing long blonde hair, and in a white dress. Once again, the line between his sense of reality and fantasy is being blurred. Since Jill is now “dead,” she says the famous line, “Care for a little necrophilia?” They make love.

It’s fitting that we should see the final fulfillment of Lowry’s fantasy here, complete with another reverie of him with her in his winged getup, preceding his imminent nightmarish descent into torture and madness. The next morning, they’re in bed, naked except for a gift bow tied around her chest, since she’d offer herself to him as a Christmas present. The scene still has this fantastic quality that makes us suspect that little, if any, of this moment is real. Lowry’s grip on reality is slipping further and further.

And just as they’re about to make love again, the Brazil equivalent of the Thought Police break into the room, just as they did in the Buttles’ flat. And since Lowry and Jill are naked after having just made love, this surprise arrest is just like that of Winston Smith and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-four (note also in this connection that Jill’s name is practically a pun on Julia).

Jill is shot and killed during this arrest (Lowry is no dashing hero to rescue her, recall), and his oddly-late realization of her death–from Mr. Helpmann, dressed as Father Christmas, telling him while in custody–means that he’s lost the one person who ever mattered to him. She mirrored back his grandiose self to him. Without engagement in either the Symbolic or the Imaginary, Lowry now has only the madness of Lacan’s Real Order–an undifferentiated, traumatic world.

In his psychotic break from reality, something he’s been lapsing into for some time now but has fully come into, Lowry no longer sees any differentiation between fantasy and reality. The trauma of having lost Jill is too great for him to bear. To use Lacanian language, Lowry’s madness is the traumatic non-differentiation of the Real.

To describe his madness in different psychoanalytic language, that of Heinz Kohut, both sides of Lowry’s bipolar self–the idealized parental imago, and the aforementioned grandiose self–have been compromised, which leads to psychological fragmentation and psychosis. The absence of a father in Lowry’s life–the foreclosure I referred to above, and now even Helpmann as father figure has proven to be of no compensation–means he has no parental ideal to hang onto, since Ida’s superficial beauty-seeking is hardly an ideal to admire. Jill’s death means he no longer has a metaphorical mirror for his grandiose self. His sense of psychological structure has thus been shattered, leaving only madness for him now.

Lowry’s refusal to “play the game,” as Helpmann would put it–that is, participate in the game of society, to be a “dupe” of society’s phony charades, and therefore not to “err”–means the Symbolic is out for Lowry, and the death of Jill means the Imaginary is out for him, too. He has only the Real now, and its accompanying madness.

He is taken into a huge, empty cylindrical room, reminding us of Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-four. Lowry even has a cage-like cap on his head to remind us of the cage with the rats on Winston Smith‘s head. Lint will be his torturer.

That Lowry will be tortured by his ‘friend’ is if anything a redundant horror, since his psychosis is already torture enough. Accordingly, now Lowry experiences a series of non-stop hallucinations: to begin, he imagines Tuttle and his band of “terrorists” breaking into the room, shooting Lint in the forehead, and helping Lowry to escape.

He even fantasizes that he’s become a fellow revolutionary and terrorist, being given a rifle to shoot the police with, and helping Tuttle blow up the Information Retrieval building. He can be the dashing hero after all…but not in reality or even daydreams now–in his endless hallucinations. Remember that he only imagines Tuttle to be a terrorist–we’ve never seen Tuttle blow anything up in the real world.

Elements of reality creep into Lowry’s hallucinatory world, if only symbolically so. Once escaped and among the regular citizens, Lowry sees Tuttle increasingly covered in scraps of paperwork from the blown-up building. The bureaucracy has devoured Tuttle. He later comes to Mrs. Terrain’s funeral (her having been killed by “complications” from her excessive plastic surgery), and as I mentioned above, he sees Jill’s face on Ida’s head.

Gilliam has apparently denied that this fusion of Jill and Ida represents Lowry’s Oedipus complex, that instead it’s one’s ultimate nightmare to see one’s own mother appearing as one’s lover. Frankly, I fail to see this latter idea as negating or contradicting the former. An unresolved Oedipus complex, properly understood as a universal, narcissistic trauma, is repressed precisely because consciously confronting it would seriously screw you up. Gilliam has also denied the totalitarian dystopia of Brazil, insisting only on the insanity and incompetence of government bureaucracy as the satirical target; yet the totalitarianism is way too obvious to ignore. In any case, I find it helpful to take a creator’s denials of this or that interpretation with a grain of salt.

The police barge into the funeral, blasting their guns away, and Lowry falls into Terrain’s coffin, falling into a black abyss. It’s his own symbolic death from having avoided reality, as Terrain died from avoiding the reality that plastic surgery would never have helped her attain the Aphrodite ideal of physical beauty.

The police keep chasing Lowry through the night darkness of the city. As described above, he climbs that pile of ducts, now no longer symbolic of the ubiquitous filthy intestines of government reach, but of wind pipes for breathing and freely expressing oneself, use-values rather than the exchange-values of state-owned Central Services. He ends up ultimately in Jill’s truck, which takes him to an idyllic, rural, grassy setting…a supposed happy ending.

Of course, it’s all just been a delusion: Lowry’s been in that torture chair the whole time. Lint and Helpmann look at the dazed expression on Lowry’s face and know the truth about his mental state. They leave him to dream on in his madness, him humming the “Brazil” tune.

Some say that Lowry’s escape into dreamland is a better fate than Winston’s utter mental defeat–loving Big Brother–but the point is that one doesn’t escape from oppression by dreaming it away. Way too many people today attempt such an escape by sharing memes on social media about rising up in revolution instead of really planning it. The whole message of Brazil, from the beginning, is that escapism into fantasy is self-defeating. Dystopia must be directly resisted.