I know there are a few Brazil fans in the audience, so for their benefit here's the short essay we're using in our classroom discussion on the movie this Wednesday in Introduction to Film. Did anyone out there ever wind up seeing Tideland? I've been meaning to, but I've been so disappointed by Gilliam lately I haven't pulled the trigger.
It is also possible to see Brazil’s simultaneous past/future makeup in the images and music Gilliam selects (as opposed to just the words). While the above discussion basically deals with the philosophical tenets of postmodernism, the movie’s visual dimension is more concerned with style. As a style, "[postmodernism] emphasizes diversity, displays a penchant for pastiche, and advocates eclectic use of elements from the past." Although Brazil is meant to be futuristic in some sense, it incorporates several cultural artifacts, in particular elements from the late ‘30s and early ‘40s. The workers watch Casablanca (1942) and B westerns on their mini-TV/computer screens; the costumes are vintage Hollywood fashions from the ‘30s and ‘40s; the large eagle statue at the entrance of the Ministry of Information symbolically recalls the Nazi domination of the late ‘30s/early ‘40s, as do the scenes in which armor-clad police burst into apartments (Buttle’s and later Sam’s mother’s) like SS troops; the various posters in the film ("Don’t Suspect a Friend – Report Him!") copy the style of those World War II posters designed by the Englishman Abram Games; and finally, even the title song "Brazil" by Xavier Cugat comes from 1939.
To the idle viewer, all of this may seem like mere coincidences, but Gilliam strategically designs his film to recall the writing of Arnold Toynbee. According to Toynbee, the "second act" of the "first postmodern general war in AD 1914, brought into focus a series of problems with the rapidity of technological change…in so far as [it] threatened prevailing forms of life…" Put another way, "World War II, with its unprecedented savageness and destruction, with its revelation of the brutality at the core of a high-technological civilization, could appear as the culmination of demonic modernity, a modernity that has finally been overcome." Overcome, quite simply, by the advent of postmodernism. Thus, is it any wonder that Gilliam created Brazil to look like that moment in history that best exemplifies the evils of modernity and the beginning of those styles associated with postmodernism?
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