These ducts are made for spying: Brazil

After several views of Brazil, I still had only one question in mind; how many movies did I just watch? The film has so many different things going on that it’s hard to tell what it all means as a whole. Additionally, I’m not going to lie and say that I enjoyed the movie because I honestly didn’t care for it and I still am very fuzzy on the actual purpose of the whole film.

For starters, why on earth is the movie even titled “Brazil”? There isn’t one ounce of information that indicated a connection between the content of the film and the country of Brazil. Perhaps the title, like the film, is just random and a further piece of information (or lack there of) to confuse the audience. I know that when I sat down to watch the movie entitled “Brazil,” I expected to see a South American country, or at least a reference to it. But instead, I found myself on edge the for the entirety of my first viewing in hopes of the them ending up in Brazil some how, and unfortunately that hope never became reality for me.

Speaking of reality, lets talk for a minute about how big of a cliché is it that half of the movie turned out to be a dream. I mean, here I am rooting for this guy and the woman he’s repeatedly fantasized over, thinking that they’re going to escape…and then BAM! It’s all just a dream and he’s still in that creepy room pending possible torture? Come on Terry Gilliam, I’m sure you can do better than that.

Surprisingly, one of the things that I actually did end up enjoying in the film (there weren’t many) was the portrayal of the communist/totalitarian government which controlled all aspects of the citizens lives. In one of my previous International Politics Classes, we focused a lot on the governing style of North Korea and the daily lives of their citizens which is eerily similar to many aspects of the movie Brazil. Just like in the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), the characters in Brazil are constantly exposed to disgusting governmental propaganda which is supposed to make them feel like they actually are lucky to live in the conditions that they do. The propaganda brain washes the people to think that they have it better than everyone and that following the governmental rules and the Ministry of Information is the only way to be happy and successful. I found it sort of humorous how there were actually commercials for ducts that come in several hundred different colors which is supposed to make the citizens feel like they have some kind of control over their lives. To me it sounded kind of like “Hey, we’re probably going to spy on you through these ducts and violate any personal privacy, but you can choose to color of the duct we do it with!” So in that respect, the political portion of the movie was very skillfully done, but the rest of the move is just up in the air with me.