Tomorrow was Another Day: 40 Years of Brazil

Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil is my favorite movie of all time. In fact, I knew it was my favorite movie of all time before I even watched it. I can clearly remember watching CNN’s The Movies docuseries and becoming mesmerized by the brief segment where they talked about Brazil. There was something about the imagery the show presented with no real context: a man in some kind of excessively massive torture chamber and a tormentor wearing a baby mask. It was only a fleeting glimpse of the movie, but it was so purposeful in its strangeness and style that I just needed to know more. Before I purchased the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray from a Barnes & Noble sale and viewed it for the first time, I was in love with the idea of Brazil.

Which is funny, because Brazil is very much about the idea of things rather than the reality of them, and that’s something which is reflected in its conception. Gilliam has stated that he was heavily inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, but he’s also said that he never actually read the novel. Brazil isn’t an adaptation of 1984 itself, but rather it’s the idea of 1984: the story as told by cultural osmosis and vibes. 

Brazil takes place in the vague suggestion of a time and place rather than anywhere specific, opening with a cryptic “8:49 P.M. Somewhere in the 20th Century”. It’s a world that evokes both yesterday and tomorrow, where culture and style seem rooted in the 1940s, but there’s a level of automation to everything that’s just slightly beyond the 1980s. This juxtaposition of vintage and modern can best be seen in the computers that appear in Brazil, which have typewriter-style keyboards and tiny screens that require a gigantic magnifying lens to read properly. Every last detail in this movie is purposely designed to make you ask questions that it has no intention of answering, and I love that.

The result of all this mixing and matching is a movie that captures the general anxieties of “civilization” and “moderness” in a way that’s both universal and timeless. Brazil is a movie that ages spectacularly, as there will always be jungles of red tape teeming with spineless bureaucrats. Technology is always going to surround us, and it will just continue to become increasingly useless for no reason beyond making some rich asshole richer. I can’t think of a better metaphor for the enshittification of the internet than main character Sam Lowery’s automated “flat of the future” waking him up seven hours late and dousing his toast with tea. Gilliam presents a world where machine errors can lead to accidental state executions, and in a world where AI makes up headlines about living people being dead, it all hits very, very close to home.

There’s no real indication of where the endless cityscape of Brazil is located. It can only be confidently said that Brazil isn’t set in Brazil, as the title is a reference to the song “Aquarela do Brasil”, which Michael Kamen uses as a leitmotif in the movie’s score. It’s an exotic-sounding tune that beautifully contrasts against the industrial hell Sam lives in. In short, it’s an anthem of escape and liberation.

This movie’s setting is a riddle that’s designed to be unsolvable. Early in the film, we learn that these people go back and forth on using the metric system, and whether characters speak in a British or American accent seems to be determined by vibes rather than where they’re from. It’s something that I haven’t really seen outside of Star Wars, with the majority of the cast having British accents while Jill Layton and Harry Tuttle– the two figures who inspire Sam to escape his monotonous life– speak like Americans. There’s a geographic ambiguity to it all that feels very personal to Gilliam, who was born in Minnesota but has been a British citizen since 1968.

I feel like the sheer amount of cynicism in Brazil proves Gilliam’s “Britishness”, because few Americans are capable of the kind of self-loathing on display here. You can tell that he relates to Sam almost as much as he hates him. Sam is a protagonist who is clever and imaginative, but he’s also very pathetic and self-serving. Brazil doesn’t shy away from emphasizing how Sam is complicit in the oppression of other people, and he only ever rebels against the system to make himself feel better. This is most clearly seen when he impulsively forces Jill to drive her truck through a roadblock and get into a police chase, effectively ruining her life. It’s a moment where it becomes abundantly clear that he doesn’t love this woman: he just loves the idea of her.

Any other filmmaker who values creativity as much as Gilliam does would reward their hero for being a dreamer and a disrupter, but Gilliam chooses to drag Sam through hell because of his inability to think of anyone outside of himself. In a way, Brazil is a cautionary tale about how you have a responsibility to make reality a better place. No matter how much you try to retreat into a personal fantasy– no matter how lost you get in that tropical song as everything goes to shit– the world will catch up with you. It’s a message that seems to come from some place of regret and reflection, though I couldn’t tell you if there was an actual incident in Gilliam’s life that caused him to feel this way. Perhaps it just came to him in some kind of hypothetical scenario– a half-truth like Gilliam’s understanding of 1984 or Sam’s desire for a woman he doesn’t actually know. It’s funny how neatly all of this vagueness ties back to Brazil’s tagline:

“It’s only a state of mind.”