THE LOCATION OF BRAZIL

In N. F. Simpsons play One Way Pendulum, one of the very few competent British contributions
to the Theatre of the Absurd, a man receives, by mail order, a full-sized replica of an Old Bailey
courtroom in kit form. He assembles it in his living room and shortly afterwards finds himself on
trial in it. A clerk announces that on the day in question, the defendant, our hero, was not in this
world. The judge, frowning, inquires, Which world was he in, then? And the clerk explains: It
seems he has one of his own.

It is not easy, you see, to be precise about the location of the world of the imagination. Even the legal system (especially the
legal system) is unaware of its whereabouts. The French, these days, would have us believe that this world, which they call the
text, is quite unconnected to the real world, which they call the world. But if I believe (and I do) that the imagined world is,
must be, connected to the observable one, then I should be able, should I not, to locate it; to say how you get there from here. And
it is not easy, you see, to be precise
These reflections have been prompted by Terry Gilliams magnificent film of future totalitarianism, Brazil. Because the more
highly imagined a piece of work, the more ticklish this problem of location becomes. Let me put it this way: we can all agree,
without too much argument, that the climax of North by Northwest takes place on Mount Rushmore, or that All the Presidents
Men was set in Washington, DC. Progressing beyond such reassuring clarities, we arrive in a murky zone about which we could
argue until the small hours: was Apocalypse Now really set in Vietnam, or in some fictional heart of darkness? Is Amadeus
history or bunk? And, still further down this road, the surface turns to yellow brick, white rabbits scurry past, Lemmy Caution
chews a Gauloise. My point is: where have we come to? What kind of place is Oz, or Wonderland? By what route, with or without
a Ford Galaxy, may one arrive at Alphaville? Specificallyfor the purposes of this essaywhere is Brazil?
Where it is not, is in South America. (Although that Brazil, like this one, has in the past been known for attaching high-voltage
electrodes to the anatomies of its dissident citizens.) The film takes its title from an old Xavier Cugat melody.
Brazil, where hearts were entertained in June,
We stood beneath an amber moon
And softly murmured: Someday soon.

So are we to say that this is a film that is somehow located in a song? Well, theres an ironic sense in which that might be true. The
lush innocence of the old tune, when set against Gilliams tale of State terror, does indeed embody much of the films spirit, a
combination, as Gilliam has said, of Franz Kafka and Frank Capra.
Someday soon, softly murmurs the song, and in the light of Gilliams story, it sounds like a threat. Which leads us to a second
way of locating the film, that is, in time. George Lucass Star Wars cycle begins with a coy paradox, a subtitle informing us that
what we are about to see happened not only far away but also long ago. However, Lucass past looks so much like a conventional
space-opera future that we quickly disregard his little opening joke. A much more interesting time-location is to be found in
Michael Radfords recent film ofNineteen Eighty-Four. If Lucas makes the past look like the future, Radford chooses to make his
future (an odd term to use about a film released in the year after which it was named, and which is already past) look consciously
old-fashioned; such a future as might have been envisioned by a designer from 1948, the year in which Orwell wrote his book. Its
an effective, if somewhat literal idea. The future in Brazil is a far more ambiguous and disturbing place.
Here elements of past and future combine to disorient us. The TV sets look oddly quaint. Messages are sent (as they are in the
Radford movie) in those little metal canisters one pops into suction tubes, the kind they used to have in department stores. In other
ways, though, the film looks marvellously futuristic, sometimes very comically so, as in the scene set in the restaurant festooned
with great intestinal metallic pipework, where the food depicted so lavishly on photographic menus turns out to be coloured mush.
The conflation of past and future is unsettling; it creates, instead of Radfords archaic future, an air of something very like
nostalgia. (Once again, the title music is apposite.)
It feels as though, in these days when, as at the last millennium and with better reason, we fear we may be near the end of time,
our dreams of the futureeven of such a dark future as this onemust necessarily be tinged with nostalgia and regret. It may not
be too fanciful to suggest that the other Star Wars programme, the one that isnt at all far away or long ago, has turned the future
into a fiction, or rather, heightened its fictionality. Nowadays tomorrow is not only a place that hasnt arrived yet, but one that may
never arrive at all. Like the clothes Jonathan Pryce (who plays Sam, the anti-hero of Brazil) wears in the movie, the idea of the
future is somewhat out of date. And if this cancelled future is the location of Gilliams movie, then we see that that location is an
even more elusive place than we previously suspected.

At the most obvious level, the film is set in Dystopia, Utopias dark opposite, the worst of all possible worlds. Unseen terrorist
 At the most obvious level, the film is set in Dystopia, Utopias dark opposite, the worst of all possible worlds. Unseen terrorist
bombers oppose the violence of the police state. Ordinary citizens get killed in large quantities by both parties, but thats life.
Amid the mayhem, two stories intertwine. One is the sad tale of Mr Buttle and Mr Tuttle, which begins deep in the bowels of the
State, when a thought-policeman swats a fly, which falls into a computer printer and induces a spelling mistake. In place of the
dangerous subversive and freelance air-conditioning engineer, Harry Tuttle (Robert de Niro, dressed like a cigar-smoking version
of the old cartoon character The Phantom), the machine fingers the innocent family man Mr Buttle, and the cops accordingly carve
a hole in his ceiling and haul him off, to be slowly carved into pieces with blunt scissors, or something like that. As flies to wanton
boys are we to the gods. Meanwhile, as they say, a Winston Smith-ish clerk named Sam dreams of being winged and soaring free
above the earth amid fleecy clouds, pursuing a blonde vision wrapped, like Renaissance Virgins, in floating folds of shimmering
fabric. This turns out to be Jill (Kim Greist), who drives a monster truck and with whom, eventually, Sam revolts against the State,
with predictable and nasty results.
It might seem, then, that the film can be placed as a visually brilliant reworking of Orwellian themes. The ending of the
version I sawwhen Sams escape from the torture chamber, with the help of Harry Tuttle, turns out to have been the wish-
fulfilment dream of his maddened brain (he ends up back in the torture chair, gazing inwardly upon green fields, while his
tormentors grin ironically: Looks like hes got away from us)emphasized this Orwellian connection, and made me want to
raise against Brazil the same criticism I would make of Orwell: that it is too easy, too pat, to create a Dystopia in which resistance
is useless; that by offering only token individual resistance to the might of the State one falls into a sort of romantic trap; that there
has never in the history of the world been a dictatorship so overpowering that it became impossible to fight, against. But, for a
number of reasons, it seems to me that to locate Brazil too close to Orwells Airstrip One would not be quite cartographically
accurate.
For one thing, audiences in the United States will see a rather different ending. Sam is still, at the last, in the grip of the
torturers; but now, in the last scene, they do not have the last, leering words. Now the torture chamber slowly fills up with clouds,
the same fleecy white clouds amongst which, in his winged dreams, he used to fly (and with which the American cut of the film,
again unlike the British, also opens). This rather changes the meaning of the ending. It becomes a scene about the triumph of the
imagination, the dream, over the shackles of actuality. It becomes clear that this, rather than the political allegory, may in fact be
what the film has been about. It seems, at last, that we are getting closer to where, and what, the film is at.
Other elements in the film also suggest a vision more complex than the bleak simplicities of Nineteen Eighty-Four, notably the
role of Robert de Niro as Tuttle the Phantom-handyman. Sam may be destroyed, but Tuttle swings on, like an urban Tarzan, from
skyscraper to skyscraper, munching his cheery cigar. Because he, too, flies, if only with the aid of ropes, he can be seen as a
street-wise version of Sams dream of himself as an angel. In Brazil, flight represents the imagining spirit; so it turns out that we
are being told something very strange about the world of the imaginationthat it is, in fact, at warwith the real world, the world
in which things inevitably get worse and in which centres cannot hold. Angelic Sam and devilish Mr Tuttle represent the power of
dream-worlds to oppose this dark reality. In an age in which it seems impossible to create happy endings; in which we seem to
make Dystopias the way earlier ages made Utopias; in which we appear to have lost confidence in our ability to improve the
world, Gilliam brings heartening news. As N. F. Simpson revealed in One Way Pendulum, the world of the imagination is a place
into which the long arm of the law is unable to reach.
This ideathe opposition of imagination to reality, which is also of course the opposition of art to politicsis of great
importance, because it reminds us that we are not helpless; that to dream is to have power. And I suggest that the true location of
Brazil is the other great tradition in art, the one in which techniques of comedy, metaphor, heightened imagery, fantasy and so on
are used to break down our conventional, habit-dulled certainties about what the world is and has to be. Unreality is the only
weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it may subsequently be reconstructed. (I once worked in an office building in
which some troubled anonymous soul took to destroying the lavatories. It seemed like motiveless, insane destruction, until one
day, on a wall next to a wrecked water-closet, we read these scribbled words: If the cistern cannot be changed, it must be
destroyed. Brazils radical repairman, Harry Tuttle, would have been proud of him.)
Play. Invent the world. The power of the playful imagination to change for ever our perceptions of how things are has been
demonstrated by everyone from Laurence Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, to a certain Monty Python in his Flying Circus. Our sense of
the modern world is as much the creation of Kafka, with his unexplained trials and unapproachable castles and giant bugs, as it is
of Freud, Marx or Einstein. But there lies, in this approach, a terrible danger which is not faced by the realist artist. This danger is
whimsy. When there are no rules except the ones you make up, dont things get too easy? When pigs can fly, do they remain pigs,
and if not, why should we care about them? Can a work of art grow into anything of value if it has no roots in observable reality?
One answer to such questions is Lewis Carroll. (We recall that Terry Gilliam is the director of Jabberwocky.) There are artists
whose gift is to put down roots within the world of dreams, the logic of whose work is the logic of the dreaming and not the
waking mind. James Joyce did it in Finnegans Wake. Terry Gilliam, I believe, does something very like it in Brazil.
And there is a second answer. It has been said that the basic difference between the American and the British approach to
comedy is that American comedy begins with the question, Isnt it funny that ? (that MASH doctors existed to mend soldiers
so that the army could damage them again; that New Yorkers, as embodied by Woody Allen, are driven by anxiety and guilt; or
that the poorChaplin eating his bootsare poor) whereas British comedys starting-point is the question, Wouldnt it be
funny if ? (if a pet shop sold dead parrots; if brain surgeons were mentally defective; if men in pinstriped suits did silly walks).
Terry Gilliam, an American living in Britain and looking back at Americabecause he says clearly that Brazil is about America,
and while were trying to locate the film we really ought to pay a little attention to what its maker saysmanages to make a
synthesis of both approaches.
One of the keys to his method is Kafka. A story like Metamorphosis appears, at first glance, to fall into the British camp:
 One of the keys to his method is Kafka. A story like Metamorphosis appears, at first glance, to fall into the British camp:
wouldnt it be funny if Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to find himself metamorphosed into a giant insect? But in fact it
derives its (very black) humour from a rather more serious question: Isnt it funny that a mans family reacts with fear,
embarrassment, shame, love, boredom and relief when the son of the house becomes something they do not understand, suffers
terribly and finally dies? The humour inBrazil is similarly blackisnt it funny that bourgeois women have face-lifts that go
horribly wrong? Isnt it funny that people about to be killed look so ridiculous with their heads hidden inside bags? And like
Kafka, it uses surface techniques of the Absurdist/Python type: giant Samurai warriors; typists, writing down a condemned mans
confession while hes being tortured, and including every aargh and sob. By darkening his humour, Gilliam avoids the trap of
whimsy. Monty Python goes to Metropolis and the result is that rarity, a seriously funny movie.
It is also relevant that Terry Gilliam is a migrant. America bombards you with dreams and deprives you of your own, he says,
andBrazil is about that, too: the struggle between private, personal dreams (flying, love) and the great mass-produced fantasies,
eternal youth, material wealth, power. But Gilliams migrant status is not important just because of his alienation from the
American consumer society.Brazil is the product of that odd thing, the migrant sensibility, whose development I believe to be one
of the central themes of this century of displaced persons. To be a migrant is, perhaps, to be the only species of human being free
of the shackles of nationalism (to say nothing of its ugly sister, patriotism). It is a burdensome freedom.
The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in
ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselvesbecause
they are so defined by othersby their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions
between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being,
he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier.
The controlling imagination of Brazil is born of a fusion between the type of Britishness exemplified by Lewis Carroll, Sterne
or Swift, and an Americanness that understands intuitively how to avoid parochialism, how to pace an epic, how to use a
superstars persona to surprising effect. De Niro has rarely been so eccentrically, but confidently, employed. Through the film, we
find images with roots on both sides of the Atlantic. The end, for example, when Sams fantasy of escape fizzles out, leaving him
back in the hot seat (with or without clouds) is reminiscent of Pincher Martin, in which a drowning sailor fantasizes an island on
which he imagines himself to be washed up; but, equally, it is an echo of Incident at Owl Creek, the film based on an Ambrose
Bierce story, in which a man about to be hanged fantasizes his escape into a deliriously happy future, only to end up dangling from
his rope.
Migrants must, of necessity, make a new imaginative relationship with the world, because of the loss of familiar habitats. And
for the plural, hybrid, metropolitan result of such imaginings, the cinema, in which peculiar fusions have always been legitimate
in which, for example, casting directors have taught us to accept Peter Sellers as a French detective, and a French actor as Lord
Greystoke, Tarzan of the apesmay well be the ideal location. And if I am to conclude with the simple (but also, perhaps, not so
simple) observation that the location ofBrazil is the cinema itself, because in the cinema the dream is the norm, then I should add
that this cinematic Brazil is a land of make-believe of which all of us who have, for whatever reason, lost a country and ended up
elsewhere, are the true citizens. Like Terry Gilliam, I am a Brazilian.

Salman Rushdie, 1985