I rewatched the 1985 Terry Gilliam film Brazil. It’s one of many movies I’d already seen but in the time I was drinking so it was like seeing it for the first time. I knew it was dystopic and probably upsetting but I was alone on a Friday night and thinking about authoritarianism.

The book 1984 is one of my favorites and right off you see Brazil is riffing off Orwell’s classic. In fact Gilliam intended to call his film 1984 ½. But he takes a different angle, setting up imagined scenes through the eyes of the story’s main character, Sam. These dream sequences become more elaborate and commingled with the film’s real story until they merge in the climax. The point is that for Sam to cope with his dismal, pointless life he needs an imagined other-life to keep sane.

Forty years later and how much these themes still resonate. But they extend from a story much older even, written just after World War II. I read in a review for Brazil that this imagined-scenes technique became the blueprint for other films like Fight Club and American Psycho. So on Saturday night I rewatched Fight Club, another film I’d already seen but remembered basically nothing. Another world steeped in hollow consumerism, this one targeting a generation of young men disenfranchised with the American dream. The only way they can feel anything is by beating each other up or causing mayhem.

I don’t feel good watching films like this but they make me think. It’s dystopic in a sense that I’d seen them both but recalled nothing from either because I’d been drinking. A kind of non-reality that way, spread across 20 years. Almost like the way you experience a dream while it’s happening but then lose it in the morning.

But also this idea of living a parallel, imagined life, Walter Mitty style. And how much I flicker in and out of that myself through my writing, on my walks and right here on my blog. And Gilliam’s take on that is nonjudgmental, it’s for us to decide at the end of the film.

Brazil’s protagonist Sam goes against the authoritarian system he’s a part of and gets captured, then led into an elaborate torture chamber, just like the book 1984. But unlike Orwell’s story, Sam gets rescued: mercenaries drop in out of nowhere, kill his captors, and Sam escapes through a dream/nightmare sequence where he’s reunited with the woman he loves and retires to a cottage in the country with her at the end. Or at least you think it’s the end. The film then cuts back to the torture scene and Sam’s still alive, but gone mad.

Gilliam insists this isn’t a bad ending necessarily given the options; Sam still has his imagined, happy place. But it is a disturbing way to reflect on how we embrace our realities and use other worlds to cope. There are three versions of the end, and for the American version they asked Gilliam to cut the last torture scene and keep the happy ending with the cottage. Do what you will with that. I guess that’s entertainment.

Categories: Addiction, Errata

Tags: 1984, Brazil, dystopian, Fight Club