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.