Have you seen "Brazil"!

I just stumbled across Brazil, a kind of playful reworking of the Orwellian nightmare. Somewhere between Blue Velvet and Willy Wonka, it tickles the absurdity drive and anxiety drive equally. What I enjoyed about Brazil--other than its simulations of the visual rhetoric of a control society, the euphemisms of the age of universal terrorism, its self-cinematizing lack of emotional manipulation--was that it did not allow itself to fantasize about an actual "outside" of the system. The total bureacracy that the protagonist finds himself within is not a Megatronic evil entity one can front, fight, or flee from. It is society itself.

Furthermore, the bureaucracy is not apart from the protagonist. He is not the messianic possessor of truth and light in a world benighted by paper work. Rather, the absolute bureaucracy is a fantasy of the will to artistic resistance. We see him as the figure of light, quite literally, in his fantasy world. By splitting between the protagonist's objective experience with his bosses, mother, desk, and papers, and his subjective myth-fantasy of flight, dueling, salvation, self-knowledge, the film shows that the revolutionary interpretation of narratives about this kind of world is precisely the means by which one fails to cognize that world as itself.

Weber gives a theorist's account of this beautiful monstrosity (if we use Kant's terms the perfect bureaucracy is both beautiful and sublime). Kafka is sainted for it, then Orwell. Brazil gives a generic reading of this fantasy: the image of the perfect bureaucracy arises from the desire for aesthetic resistance. Only as opposed to bureaucracy can the modern artist conceive of himself in Icarian terms (Lowry's fantasy begins as Icarus, flying toward the light above the clouds). Once at a show in Gainesville a pamphlet was distributed that appeared to be an insurance form. The text, however, explained that by typing within that format the author was able to escape detection at work and spend his or her time writing the manifesto that followed. The formalism of bureaucracy, the contentless gray race it engages, is what allows content--dreams, revolutions, individuals, objects--to appear by contrast.

Brazil's plot is above all about a state of terrorism. "Have you ever seen an actual terrorist?" Lowry is asked. He has not, and the only "terrorist" we have seen is a rogue repairman (played by Robert Deniro, even though he appears for maybe 10 minutes out of 140). But we have seen terrorism: explosions in restaurants and shopping malls that affect mostly the upper class, and the (counter-)terrorist raids that leave the tenements of the poor in ever worse repair (not to mention dragging them away for "information retrieval," ie, torture). Terrorism, like the liberation Lowry inchoately longs for, is a milieu, the in-between; it vanishes in the graspable. The mit, not the Sein. Lowry's demise seems to reinforce the nihilistic reading. Deniro's anarchistic repairman, however, is another version of rebellion. He has a specific goal: making stuff work. He operates anarchistically because it is more functional. "Why don't you work for central services?" Lowry asks. "I became a heating engineer for the action, not the paperwork," he replies. Deniro's repairmen, however, does not get a macronarrative. There is no end in sight of a time when everything is fixed. That sounds about right.