Techno-Tyranny of Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ is ‘1984’ for 2024

When I first saw the film Brazil (1985) a decade after its release, I was decidedly underwhelmed. The pacing was slow, the symbolism convoluted, and the humor too British for my twenty-eight-year-old American tastes. But after a recent viewing, this movie that routinely appears on ‘best British film’ lists impressed me with its entertainment value, but even more with how relevant its message has become in 2024.

The plot begins with a literal bang, as a terrorist bomb explodes during a television commercial put out by Central Services, an arm of the government bureaucracy that, along with the Ministry of Information (MOI), represents state control bloated beyond all reason. On a wall behind one bureaucrat’s desk is a poster depicting a padlock shackling a woman’s lips. “Loose talk is noose talk,” the poster’s caption reads. Getting canceled in this dystopia is serious business, as the film’s protagonist Sam Lowry discovers.

A young functionary in the MOI’s Records Department, at night he dreams of a different life, one in which he soars through the sky with wings as the song Brazil (the sole basis of the film’s title) plays in the background. Sam’s wings are an effective symbol of God-given individual rights, as enshrined in the United States’ founding documents. Exercising such rights in a society bent on suppressing them can require struggle, and in Sam’s dreams he sometimes must battle robotic monsters.

Waking life for Sam is less glorified. It involves seeking morsels of happiness in a narrow space between terrorist bombings and the sort of tyrants — small and large — that an authoritarian regime naturally breeds. A pair of surly HVAC workers, angered over paperwork and an unofficial repair to Sam’s air conditioning, appropriate and wreck his flat. And Mr. Helpmann — a deputy minister who promotes Sam to the Information Retrieval department — later directs his torture for fiddling with government records. Absurd humor is woven throughout. As Sam is shackled into a chair for torture, an officer earnestly implores him to confess. “If you hold out too long, you could jeopardize your credit rating.”

Parallels to the United States in 2024 are easy to draw. One of the film’s ubiquitous government posters shows a smiling family on a car trip with the caption, “Happiness, we’re all in it together.” Remove the first word and put surgical masks on the family and it could be a CDC-issued public service announcement from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brazil was heavily influenced by George Orwell’s novel 1984, and was filmed with a composite future-past look that illustrates the timeless threat of collective tyranny. Since the setting of the film is never specified, it might happen anywhere. The song that gives the film its name combines dreamy lyrics with a sensuous samba rhythm to impart a sense of tropical freedom. Today’s nation of Brazil, however, does not inspire the same feeling, with its supreme court now heavily policing online speech. As both the nation and the movie illustrate, control of information is the ultimate power.

Things are not much better for South America as a whole. The Economist reports that the region has experienced the biggest recession of democracy “of any region over the past 20 years,” with only Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay being classified as “Full Democracies.” Our southern neighbor Mexico comes in as a “hybrid regime.” And four nations — Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — rank as “authoritarian regimes.”

We should take that trend, and the film, as warnings against complacency. Peaceful, institutionalized respect for inalienable rights, the wings Sam dreams of flying with in Brazil, has only held sway in a minority of the world, and there only for a narrow slice of human history. Any reversion of individual freedom to the historical mean would be extraordinarily unfortunate, and we could find ourselves in a reality that looks disturbingly similar to Brazil.