lucius@tardis.UUCP (lucius) (03/11/86)
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I don't know why so many people think Brazil is so bad. It is the
only movie I have ever heard of that combines the humor of Woody Allen and
Monty Python (it even has some of the people) with the nightmare of Nineteen
Eighty Four. And it does it very successfully.
Why do people think it has no plot? It has one that is among the
clearest among movies, while being not in the least hackneyed:
A bureaucrat is in a repressive society, and a part of it;
when love strikes him, he discovers that he is dissatisfied with
the society, and that as only a part of it, he is hollow, so that
he must be something else. But when he tries to break away, the
society crushes him as an organism, with its immune system, crushes
a bacterium.
And the two themes that go along with the plot directly:
The society controls people by keeping them poor by sapping
their energy with paperwork, by deluging them with commercial
garbage (note all the television screens, "Consumers for Christ,"
the facelift racket, the indescribable falsehood of the restaurant,
and other things; furthermore, it controls the people with the
police and the fear of "terrorists."
The society is as an organism (the ducts are its various
arteries and nerves). People in it are reduced to little more than
insects in a hive (note the huge buildings), and anyone that does
not fit into it that way is a terrorist, and must be converted back
to a normal person or eliminated.
How much is it necessary to explain? Is our own society so
mind-numbed by our commercialism and television that we cannot appreciate
anything different?
--
-- Lucius Chiaraviglio { seismo!tardis!lucius | lucius@tardis.UUCP }
"Don't tug on that. You never know what that might be attached to."