Here’s spot five in our series on Man and the Machine that commenced last November. This months post will highlight a motion picture released in 1985 by director Terry Gilliam. “Brazil” is a study of a man ensnared in the machine of bureaucracy.
Gilliam’s screenplay descends from last century storytellers, such as Franz Kafka, and George Orwell whose clairvoyant visions gave us today’s headlines fifty to a hundred years in advance. If we’d subscribe to the viewpoints of those scribes as passionately as we repeat the opinions of our political leaders today, we might still evade their frightening predictions.
The prototype attack drone of James Cameron’s “The Terminator,” which we looked at in post three was, for some reason, assigned the disreputable year 1984 to explode on the scene. This month’s title was released soon after “The Terminator” and features none other than Big Brother himself, from Orwell’s opus, or his next of kin at least, in any case a gargantuan government plays the devil in “Brazil.”
It’s a gnarly web to which Sam Lowry’s futuristic culture clings. Everything and everyone is connected by machine. A totalitarian eye eves drops on a first world countrymen much like my own. “Brazil” bureaucrats are able to obtain any material thing known if they have the money and connections. Those with neither must languish in a jammed socio-economic intersection.
The trappings are all familiar. Grotesquely cheap flats and mini-motorcars are an average carrot for the company man and for the elite there’s garish palaces and cosmetic surgery. However, progress along an orderly line is impossible for average folks in “Brazil.” Like the tubes and cables that twist through their living rooms, everything is overloaded, impounded or outdated. Any citizens’ life can take sudden turns and get spliced or derailed onto a random identity, torn from their homes and bound to the Ministry for rendition. In “Brazil,”lives are snuffed at the drop of a receipt. Thank God it’s only a movie.
The title refers to the song Sam Lowry sings to himself at the movie’s devastating end. An attribute of “Brazil” worth studying is how the movie maker embeds the musical score in the narrative, from the first impression of its title and melody, to the way it accentuates the irony of its disturbing finale. Title and the theme song are like magnets that lock together at the last possible moment of the movie after having drawn the audience between them.
“Brazil” is hailed universally for its hyper-imaginative portrayal of life in a gridlocked bureaucracy. It is also frequently dissed as one of the most bleak and cynical journeys in motion picture history. Even though this movie is futuristic, “Brazil” gazes back over its shoulder at a previous critique of totalitarianism, “The Conformist,” by Bernardo Bertolucci, another chapter from our past exposing how human beings can be chewed up in bureaucracy.
The design of the government buildings are closely related. Those clean, high contrast, echo prone interiors in either movie could share the same physical address. Not only that, notice how the sky and clouds on the wallpaper of the conformist’s bedroom, in the closing minutes of Bertolucci’s film, turn up as the virtual background for Sam Lowry’s eagle-like alter-ego in the opening scene of Gilliam’s tale. The major turning point in both films clicks when the protagonist chooses narcissism over heroism, trading freedom for slavery.
I’ll take this opportunity to point out how obviously “Brazil” furnished a model for the art design of “The Matrix,” too, that great sci-fi watershed from the very end of the last century mentioned in my last post. All three film’s designers owe a debt to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,”(1927) another controversial flick about man and the machine that has been repeatedly subjected to the scalpel, resulting in at least five different edited versions as well. I will comment on that film in greater length at a later date.
Concerning “Brazil,” let’s briefly delve in to Terry Gilliam’s choice of christening with the name Brazil the utopian destination in Sam Lowry’s imaginary escapes. Since there are so many tropical locales to choose from that evoke the exotic and the pristine, why did the filmmaker choose those hemispheres? Thinking of Gilliam’s orientation as a comic, I’d have to ask myself–with what conspicuous grotesqueness does the factual country of Brazil contrast with the unsettling, familiar looking dystopia where Sam and Harry exist?
Modern Brazil is an enormous land. Its not just driblets of paradise like Tahiti or Santorini. Brazil dominates its corner of the globe and is home to the Amazon, cradle of the most biologically diverse wilderness left on earth. Brazil literally gives us the air we breathe. From a prophetic standpoint, it stands to reason the region might become number one among humankind’s last hopes for survival.
So let’s just assume that where Sam lives in the future is the opposite of what Brazil represents now. The symbolism suggests we still have a place to retreat to, or someone does. What matters to you and me is the same thing it comes down to for Sam and Harry in their world. Bottom line, we all want to live in a place free of slavery and terrorism. Sam tries for it with his fantasies of Brazil. Meanwhile Harry Tuttle’s busy solving practical problems right where he is. No wonder “Brazil” ends in tragedy for Sam.
Continued to next month…
A continuation of last month’s post on Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil,” which is also part six of a continuing series on man and the machine. The fate of Harry Tuttle was left quite a bit more ambiguous than the protagonist Sam Lowry’s in “Brazil”.
In perhaps the most magical turning point in the story Harry Tuttle disappears in a whirlwind of red tape, receipts, vouchers and invoices that cling to his body, mummifying him, until the torrent of rubbish seems to swallow him. This all occurs within the protagonist’s nightmare. Sam struggles desperately to dig Harry out but the clutter blows away and takes with it any chance for glory, depositing Sam on the far side of madness at the end of the story.
It is significant that we never see anything bad happen to Harry Tuttle. He is never apprehended. Visually speaking it could be said Harry escapes unharmed. Most likely, as with another famous escapologist, Harry Houdini, Tuttle was named so to evoke such comparisons. I’d love to watch this film in a crowded stadium and lead a Q & A afterword to hear how many different opinions I could collect by asking “what happened to Harry Tuttle?”
I’ve finished watching this film now for the third time in six months and rewinding over selected parts a fourth and finally found a crack to get me out of everyman Sam Lowry’s dead end track. I should mention that there are five differently edited versions of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” out there in movie land. That’s how wildly people disagree over it, so if you enter the conversation, make sure you have watched the same one. I’ve been watching 142 minute edition released by The Criterion Collection in 2006.
Comedy or not, the idea that the only possible escape from slavery for Sam is psychosis is so distressing that I had to find an alternative solution for his predicament. Although this solution exposes a path Sam did not choose, it provides sanity to anyone who does. The fact that Sam did not choose this path is precisely why the movie had to end the way it did.
While Sam knew something was very wrong with the culture that supported him, but he never showed an interested in contributing to or improving it. He did his job and looked the other way. We sympathize with him. Everything in his life is a hassle. Sam simply takes the hassle of least resistance, but he does that instead of coming up with solutions like Harry does.
Sam was not interested in getting out of his situation except in dreams and even that was a selfish scheme. When the woman of his fantasies walks right out of them into real life and she turns out to be a free thinker, Sam never asks her why. He makes no connection when she asks, “Have you ever really seen a terrorist?”
The real hero of “Brazil,” Harry Tuttle demonstrates how helping fellow human beings is the only way out. In Sam’s final flip-out, Harry liberates Sam by helping him blow up the Ministry, but that all takes place in Sam’s head. This component of Sam’s fantasy serves to underscore Sam’s bureaucratic programming. The company man was never able to shake off the Ministry’s allegation that Harry was out for blood instead of good.
Other than Sam’s visually projected assumptions of Harry’s motives, all we know for sure from what we actually see is that Harry’s a multi-talented repairman on the run. Sure he’s packing a gun; he’s accused by the Ministry of terrorism, but we only ever witness Harry fixing folks’ utilities, which are constantly choked up and pinched in gridlocracy.
Whenever we see Harry, he’s engaging his gifts for the greater good. The unlikely superhero declares his intent loud and clear, “we’re all in this together.” Harry Tuttle is the only free man we see in “Brazil”. Anytime after Sam met Harry his fate could have been redeemed too, but freedom goes unclaimed. Gilliam’s lovable protagonist just wants to slip his chains in dreams. Instead, he is crucified while Harry avoids the scene.
This month’s film is the third out of the nine films discussed in this series that happens to have been released in exactly five different editions. You’ll recall, this was also true of last month’s movie “Brazil.” The other film that shares this distinction is the ancestor of them all, Fritz Lange’s “Metropolis” (1927).
Why so many versions? Did the previous cuts ring too false or too true? Is a motion picture as mutable as a melody on which infinite variations can be tried? Or is everything in the man made universe going to be treated like an App, from now on, subjected to continual revision? This question becomes a theme in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982).
One marvelous function of art is its ability to employ ambiguity to trigger controversy and stimulate vital discourse. The multiple editions of these movies represent an extravagant debate. Motion pictures take months to edit and finish. Likewise, they are extremely cumbersome, time consuming and expensive to pull apart and put back together. What’s at stake must be very important to go to all that trouble. For a movie to have been subjected to so much surgery means that it struck a cultural nerve. The filmmaker is to be applauded. Stories, and particularly science fiction stories are probes into our future. They lead us into deeper, more meaningful examinations of the consequences of our past actions and our role in shaping the future.
I have not read the novel by Philip K. Dick that was the starting point for the “Blade Runner” script. Thematically, it’s easy to take it for a premonition about class warfare. With dialog like, “if you aint cop your just little people,” this director is as keen on the subject as Terry Gilliam was in “Brazil,” where we watched the stuggle of a man against the bureaucratic machine. In “Blade Runner” the machines revolt against man. Can they really do that? Have they accomplished it already? This puzzle pops up consistently throughout all nine motion pictures reviewed in this series so far.
The way into that conundrum in “Blade Runner” is to depict the machine as man’s jealous twin. You can replace Deckard vs. Replicant with Democrat vs. Republican or Cain vs. Able. It’s all the same story. We’re talking about different sides of human nature that are polarized from the start, but from that schism springs the interracial love story in Mr. Scott’s riddle’s heart.
“West Side Story” was good with that subject too. Of equal interest to me is how this runner suggests that sooner or later our physical bodies will become technologically enhanced to the point we can live on indefinitely. It won’t be long and our original DNA will become something indistinguishable from manufactured robes and rods of miraculous stem-cell fiber grafted into our mainframe and programmed to prolong our feast here.
My grandmother, who died decades ago, wore the first generation of life extension technology under her skin. She would have probably been tossed in the bone heap in her thirties, like her own mom, were it not for all the fancy hardware she’d had hot-wired in. She had a mechanical fingers, wrist, hips and knees. Medical mechanics kept her mobile, in the 1960s and 70s, by replacing malformed bones and gristle, with plates, screws, hinges and pins. You could see the zippers all over her skin where they went in.
After a continuous string of more than thirty major operations, a sizable sum of her was man made. Count me as one who regarded that kind of technology as a godsend.
Consider all the scientific leaps that have taken place since then and take them to their logical conclusion. Somebody’s bound to aim for technologically assisted immortality. If such a thing’s possible, aren’t we bound to try and produce it artificially? How soon before we all essentially become Replicants and who will decide how long we live?
As we drop down to examine Blade Runner’s finely honed edge, the first thing we notice is the look of the future world Rick Deckard lives in. Almost every filmmaker in this series seems to have incorporated some of Fritz Lange’s visual design in “Metropolis” into their own futuristic landscape. If you haven’t already watched the documentary “Voyage to Metropolis” inside “The Complete Metropolis” edition from Kino International. There you will be treated to comparisons of sets in “Metropolis” and “Blade Runner” side-by-side for your convenience.
While we’re scanning the scenery in “Blade Runner,” notice what is still circulating in popular culture after thirty years. How accurate was “Blade Runner” in predicting our present? In a hyper-vertical city center, a geisha girl can be seen on a digital billboard popping a pill and smiling serenely. So, the target demographic is Asian, the population is on mood drugs, which are advertised in the mass media. Check. Mass communication is accomplished on massive screens, check. Petroleum is being refined big time, check. Budweiser and Cuisinart show up on signs, check. Hari Krishnas still chant their lines. Also Hilton and Bulova have traversed the times. Check, check. Not bad, but we did underachieve in a major line of innovation that this storyteller predicted. Transport on Deckard’s beat has lifted off the ground. In this reality, the information highway has made the hovercraft less of a priority. Deckard’s riding a highway in the sky but take away that and he looks like he’s stuck in Shanghai.
Now let us commence, as “Blade Runner” does, by discovering what a replicant is. According to the interrogator, across the desk from the first replicant we ever meet, a turtle and a tortoise are the “same thing”. “Blade Runner” unfolds by asking, what if the difference between machines and humans was no greater than that between turtle and tortoise? The tortoise is a perfect metaphor for a replicant, by the way, because a replicant is simply a shell inside of which resides human nature.
The interrogator scrutinizes the reaction of the replicant after telling him a tortoise is lying helpless on its back. The replicant in “Blade Runner” identifies with the helpless creature because he’s in a similar pinch. The manufacturers feared that the longer the replicants lived, the more attached to being alive they’d become, so replicants are programmed to shut down after four years.
If they live long enough, they develop emotions like hate, anger, fear and envy and then they can’t coexist peacefully with humans. This reasoning is presented as common sense to us the audience. Let’s zoom in on that assumption. The thing we are afraid of in “Blade Runner” is a machine that expresses hate, anger, fear and envy. What? You mean like guns? Nobody questions such a machine’s obsolescence when it’s called a replicant. Deckard is our hero. Everyone in the audience is cheering for him–even die-hard gun owners. Everyone in the audience knows that machines are very dangerous when they are used for hate, anger, fear, etc. Those machines he’s chasing down and eliminating are very scary and ought not to be allowed to run loose in our society. One could argue that Deckard needs a gun to do his job, but that’s not a pistol in his belt. Deckard’s weapon is for retiring dangerous machines.
As with automobiles, new editions of brand name replicant designs are constantly being rolled out and old ones need to be retired. Sean Young plays Rachel, the replicant calendar babe, a gleaming piece of R&D that would scoop any man’s fantasy for kink on the techie frontier. She’s convinced she’s human. Tycoon genius Eldon Tyrell says he’s giving Rachel memories that will expand her ability to handle emotions more comfortably.
The identity crisis of Rachel’s character after Deckard reveals her true nature to her would be hard to imagine in real life. It would be like any one of us being told at age 21 that we were fake. The predicament is not unlike the unfortunate Harry Buttle’s, in act one of “Brazil”, who has another person’s identity accidentally grafted on to his and his life slides downhill. There’s no way to imagine the shock when your memories suddenly supply zero context for your life, but they’re still there and they never go away. What would that feel like to find out your entire past is nothing but an App and not only that, so is your response to it? This is the twisty, mind-bendy spell of Ridley Scott’s epic cop flick.
As mentioned in the last post, future cop Rick Deckard carries what looks like a gun, but it’s not for killing. Deckard’s weapon is for retiring replicants. Whenever a replicant outlasts its usefulness, the weapon is his tool for shutting it down.
Malfunctioning machines must be shut down if we are to survive. This is the common sense being drawn upon in “Blade Runner,” just as it was in Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In those movies, the solution was obvious to us all. Nobody questioned it.
Well, what about corporations, political parties, churches and the media? Aren’t those machines capable malfunctioning too? By the same logic, wouldn’t we want someone like Deckard in our modern times that can stop malfunctioning machines from running amok?
What if Philip and Ridley are a bona-fide tag team of modern prophets? Do we have the equivalent of rebel replicants in our world? They could appear a lot different here. Let us identify what such a thing might look like. Perhaps the replicant on the run in our reality might be defined as any machine that wants to enjoy the same rights as human beings. If this is considered a malfunctioning machine in science fiction, then why would we allow its equivalent to go unchallenged in our existing reality?
Another engrossing irony in “Blade Runner” is the genetic engineer JB Sebastian’s predicament. His is only twenty-five years old but looks fifty. JB explains his ailment to replicant Pris. He has Methuselah Syndrome, meaning his glands age too fast. This boy genius represents a familiar archetype with an interesting twist. The eternal child faces premature death. JB’s family of toy friends further exposes the infantile mentality that was behind the development of those selfish machines. Out of frustration with his demise he helped invent the replicant to stand in for him when life abandons him.
Machines are invented as solutions to problems. Wheel plus arrow equals progress. We build them to to fill a gap between where we are and where we want to be. Or perhaps our brain is too smart for our frame and it’s destroying us. We’ll see. We adore our gadgets, obviously. You are most likely gazing into the eyes of one this very minute. Some of us worship them a bit much it seems. The warning the prophet issues here is to forbid them from ever having the status of human beings.
The love scene between Rachel and Deckard illuminates our 21st century affair with technology turning it into ironic, cinematic sex play. Soon after she saves his life, Rachel holds up with Deckard in his flat. They sip some booze. Deckard lies down and slips into a dream. Rachel plays his piano, a machine that does a great service to humankind. Then, with red tipped claws, she unfastens her hair, transforming herself from a wily, manufactured predator to supple, feline plaything. Deckard wakes up and tells her he dreamed of music. She looks in his eyes, he leans in and she runs away, or tries. Deckard stops her at the door and pours it on.
More likely this hyper-intelligent gizmo with the gorgeous face just intentionally planted that song in Deckard’s head and, not only that, her programmer has calculated Rick’s reaction with such accuracy that when his sexual impulse strikes, Rachel’s made to run and Deckard is counted on to chase.
So love makes robots of us all. That’s funny. It’s ironic and it’s all so erotic the way submissive/dominance roles are reversed. Deckard commands that Rachel tell him to kiss her and she obeys.
“Tell me you want me,” he commands and she obeys again.
“Say it again” he orders.
“I want you” she repeats, then adds without prompting, “put your hands on me,” and boing! Deckard obeys. They clench for an electric kiss. Olé!
Before we leave the subject of music, allow me to direct our attention to the fabulous sound track of “Blade Runner.” Harken back and hurl your lasso around that very first film I mentioned in this series, “Koyanniskatsi” (1982) which reached for new dynamics in the relationship of sound to image. Is it out of the question to suggest that Phillip Glass receives a nod here from the filmmaker in his choice of investing new wave electronic pioneer Vangelis with responsibility for the score? In any case, it works.
In a sci-fi/western/noir, how does a villain and a hero settle the score? The final irony plays out like a showdown, up on the roof with agent Deckard and replicant Roy armed for existential angst instead of gore. They’re hemmed in amid a tight grid of phallic towers. Fan blades revolve aimlessly in the drizzling rain. Searchlights sweep like fire hoses over a fuzzy haze. On the verge of demise, Roy looks amazed. One hand expresses tremendous gentleness as the rebel clutches a white dove he’s found. With the other exhibiting impressive strength he snatches Deckard off a beam overhanging the gleaming forest of titanium and glass where he’d been helplessly about to fall. Roy hurls Deckard down on the roof roughly but well out of harm. He philosophizes on the fleeting nature of existence for a moment then, through half a smile he mutters “time to die,” and bows his head.
It had to end this way. We all agree, because machines are there to help humanity or else get out of the way. The audience believes this and that is why, on that appointed day, Roy’s internal clock must be allowed to grind to a stop. Then the white dove in his hand flaps upward through a gash in the gloom toward a shard of clear blue sky. What a surprise! I never considered the possibility of such a sight in Deckard’s world. I just assumed the sun had disappeared too, long ago, behind a shroud of permanent smog. It leaves me hoping that our love affair with technology will serve life, not enslave it and ultimately smooth out our brute instinct with our compassionate side.
Are we sleeping? Do we need a wake up call? Good stories call out our common conscience. If a major goal of democracy is to give everyone a gun, then a major goal of storytelling must be to prevent us from pulling the trigger. The preservation and protection of personal liberties could not be of greater importance in the minds of the great storytellers. The films in this series have that in common.
It is high time that Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936) be fit into our massive blog on Humanity and the Machine. It is not technically science fiction, as most of the films in this series are, but neither is Geoffrey Reggio’s “Quatsi Trilogy” which opened the series and yet it informs us so richly about our future.
Contextually, Chaplin’s “Modern Times” presents us with a romance between two optimistic homeless persons. Ideologically it pays respect to the poor and working classes during the height of the industrial era. As a piece of research into what makes humans laugh, “Modern Times” conducts us through a prolonged, elaborate and ingenious series of gags accomplished by a combination of rigged sets, split second choreography and virtuosic variations on the mechanization of humans.
I have pitted guns and movies against each other in this series more than once. “Modern Times” gives us a chance to compare the two very similar looking machines that produce them. Compare any state of the art factory assembly line, making say weapons of the WW I era, with the one in the movie set that manufactures laughs in Chaplin’s blockbuster movie. Both depend on a huge collective of workers. Both were made for a profit. It could be argued that Charlie Chaplin’s factory has produced something of much greater and lasting value for the benefit of more people than any other factory of its time.
As for the argument that movies are fantasy and not accurate when compared to the real world, even though it premiered almost seventy years ago, “Modern Times” managed to foresee the two-way screen that enables Big Brother to eavesdrop on law-abiding citizens. “The Matrix (1999), reminds those who have taken on the questionable karma of invading the privacy of the masses, that they too are being watched at all times, no doubt from all angles.
Surveillance may be a dandy method for catching criminals but it sets up the environment for a war on thought. Another fine science fiction film that delves into this subject and would deserve to be included in this series, if it wasn’t already discussed in these pages a few years back, is “Fahrenheit 451” (1966). As if we were actually paying attention, the French New Wave prophet Francois Truffaut brought Isaac Asimov’s science fiction classic to the screen to provided us with advanced warning on the totalitarian wet dream that is well on its way to becoming the norm in America today.
Storytellers by nature are prophets. Could our best contemporary ones be on par with the old world prophets of scripture? Hardly. Those great oracles in the scriptures have had a long time for their prophecies to be adulterated by hypocrites. Their words have been being cooped by power brokers for thousands upon thousands of years. The modern day prophets haven’t been recognized yet.
There is an amusingly prophetic sequence in “Modern Times” where we were warned about this recent very grave and disastrous privacy violation imposed on Americans by our government. The Little Tramp is not a tramp yet but a factory worker. The first act of Modern Times deals with the events that lead up to his homelessness. His trouble begins when he clocks out for lunch two minutes early, ducks into the washroom and leans back on a washbasin for a cigarette break.
“Hey you! What are you doing there? shouts the boss,
The startled worker almost falls in the sink scissoring his legs twice in the air before his feet return to the floor.
Get back to work?”
From an enormous screen that moments ago was only a wall, a hard nosed executive frowns down on the little, blue-bibbed man.
Charlie drops his smoke and scurries back to the jangling noise and repetitive stress of the factory assembly line.
So many Americans seem to have skipped the shock response altogether and rushed back to their business without question.
Here’s spot five in our series on Man and the Machine that commenced last November. This months post will highlight a motion picture released in 1985 by director Terry Gilliam. “Brazil” is a study of a man ensnared in the machine of bureaucracy.