Brazil - OMSI

Brazil (1985) Official Trailer - Jonathan Pryce, Terry Gilliam Movie HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Ross and I went to see Brazil at OMSI's super-duper theater Wednesday evening. When I saw it the first time it was science fiction, a bit of a horror story, but fiction, so not to worry. Now it seems more like real life and pretty awful. 

Sam Lowry, our hero, is a drone in the Ministry of Information and he is perfectly happy droning along amidst a slew of similar drones. He seems to be one of the few who is able to get the antique-e mechanical-istic computer systems to deliver useful results, so he is frequently called upon by his incompetent boss for help. While he is more than competent enough at his job, he doesn't seem to have a good understanding of life out in the real world, which exacerbates the problems he is shortly going to start encountering. Meanwhile he is having these fanciful dreams of flying through the air and rescuing a beautiful girl from . . . something.

Then a seemingly minor incident occurs - the air conditioning system in his apartment breaks down - and things quickly spiral out of control. As the movie goes along, the scenes in his apartment go from fine but quickly escalate into an insane jungle of pipes and hoses and ductwork. The first time I saw this, I thought, ha ha, very funny, but now I see it as a metaphor for all the technical systems that support our civilized lifestyle. Some people, like me, have a theoretical understanding of how these systems work, but it is only a small minority of people who understand how a single system works well enough to actually repair it when it breaks down. I suspect that for a large segment of our population, the systems that support our civilized life style may as well be as incomprehensible as the nightmare of pipes and hoses unleashed in Sam's apartment.

Much of the machinery that Sam deals with personally seems unnecessarily complicated, which makes me wonder how much of the machinery we use in our daily lives is likewise unnecessarily complicated. Then I realized that a whole industry has evolved to address these kinds of issues. Sometimes they make things easier to use, and sometimes they are abominations that were created, not to make them easier to use, but to save the company that has deployed them a fraction of a cent for every transaction.

Back in the offices of the Ministry of Information, the scenes with the army of office drones being busy were amazing. I imagine this might be what a busy office might have looked like a hundred years ago. Everyone is going about their specific duties, weaving in and out around all the other guys doing their jobs, which are all different. Somebody put a lot of effort into crafting these scenes.

I remembered several scenes from the first time I saw it:

• the big office full of guys watching old TV shows on these mechanical contraption televisions until the boss sticks his head out the door and then they are all magically busy carrying papers hither and yon until the boss goes back in his office and they all go back to watching their TVs.
• the girl with the giant frigging truck, and especially the moment when she kicks our hero out the door. I did not remember his extensive antics crawling around the outside of the cab of the truck trying to convince her that he is actually a good guy.
• the torture chair in the middle of the giant nuclear cooling tower. That's what it looked like to me anyway.

I didn't remember:

• any of the dream sequences 
• him getting together with the girl
• the terrorist bombing of the restaurant / department store
• his mother or her friend or the whole bit about plastic surgery

The portrayal of the police and bureaucracy looked like a clown show when the movie came out, but now it looks like current events. Given that we have real people enforcing the law and not some super humans, some of them are going to screw up and bad things will happen. Hopefully we are getting better, but maybe we don't want to get too good because we do need a constant supply of bad examples to remind us to keep an eye on the minders. And don't forget, we have social media to amplify every screw up that makes the news, so even with a small number of horrific incidents we will have plenty of material to keep social media fully stocked with bullshit.

We aren't going to talk about when politics comes into play. Corruption appears to be running rampant at the higher levels, so if you are operating in that arena you need to be well armed for that kind of combat. For most of the people in this country, if you stay out of politics and manage to avoid the police, you shouldn't have any trouble. At least I hope that's the way it is. Remember that if you go looking for trouble you are certainly going to find it.