Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) - Under the Radar

[E Black]

It’s pretty easy to say that by the end of the film, Sam Lowry has not stayed “under the radar”—he’s hooked up to what looks like a torture machine, he’s in a psychotic delirium dreaming that he is safely away in some foreign countryside, and all traces of his dull, and seemingly meaningless, old life are erased. But one thing remains to be said about his happiness in both the beginning and the end of the film, that perhaps he is happier by the end. Let’s start from the beginning: Sam Lowry is content in his job, one in which he cannot hope for true promotion (merely the kind that is given to him through his mother’s wide array of relationships), and yet, for reasons unbeknownst to everyone around him, including his boss, he has no aspiration to move higher up the career ladder. If one were to make an honest judgment concerning Sam Lowry’s life at this point, they would say he was “happy.” But, at night he has strange dreams in which he has wings, flies the open skies that are incredibly detached from the everyday life of humans, and is enchanted by a woman, later revealed as Jill, who calls out his name. He doesn’t know who she is, which leaves a gap in this so-called happiness. While he is content with his career, he still has a deep seeded yearning for this unknown woman. Jill is the catalyst for every event that happens in the movie, despite the real domino effect stemming from the opening scene incident, without Jill, the case would hold no weight for Sam after he delivers the reimbursement check.

And while Jill is a catalyst for him discovering what may be absent in his seemingly boring life, she is also the catalyst for what will in turn destroy his sanity and livelihood. He gets by living under the radar—he has a socially accepted career, one he is content with, one that makes him money (we assume he lives comfortably, but not lavishly like his mother perhaps). He gets by, which is to say that he could continue living his life, assuming he never meets Jill, and probably he would end up marginally content with his life as a whole. But as soon as Jill comes into the picture, once he sees her, finds out her name, his determination to get involved in the downward spiral that is her life leads unavoidably into his destruction. His happiness at his boring job is left behind when he needs to have a higher clearance to access her information, and he also leaves behind his ability to live under the radar.

Once he takes the higher responsibility, his uneventful life ceases to exist—every moment a new problem complicates the matter (his desk shrinks into the wall, he gets caught in the basement without his ID, files stack up in his office, etc.). And twice, when we think that he has escaped the system to live with Jill, we are proven otherwise.

But this is not to say that he is not happy at the end, just as he is in the beginning. He is no longer haunted by his dreams; he has found Jill. While he is in a delirium to us, to him, he is in a scenic location with his dream love, where he can live in privacy from the system forever. Even though he is locked up inside Information Retrieval’s barricades, Jill is probably dead, and his mother is doomed to the same fate, he is completely unaware of it all. Ignorance is bliss.

[lbourgeois]

I found this review interesting because like our class discussion it raised the question of what exactly is happiness. And this question is so profound because it is one we as humans struggle with our whole lives. What is really worthwhile? What kind of lifestyle can not only gratify us in the short term but make us feel whole and complete after the years have gone by. I think it is an easy mistake to conflate happiness with mere fleeting pleasure - or even in the case of Brazil - contentment with complacency. I disagree that Sam was contented in the beginning of the film, (meaning that he was satisfied with his life and its habitual processes). Instead, I think Gilliam showed us a man who could only fantasize in his dreams about all the things he desired in life (the freedom of flying, strength/power, and love). He had become so closely tied to the deafening social structure that he is helpless to divine a means of achieving his goals on a conscious level. This is why Sam’s pursuit of Jill is not the plan of an intelligent man, but instead his possessed and clueless chase of a princess he hardly knows or understands. Society, the film tells us, has reduced an ordinary man into a blind buffoon who has only an illusion of freedom and a fantasy of love. This is seen acutely in the scene where Jill asks Sam if he has ever even met a real terrorist. His response that it is only his first day on the job is underscored even more profoundly by the look of utter bafflement on his face of having been asked the question at all. Sam like so many others in the hyper-techno-bureaucracy had lived his life like a clockwork orange with little supplement of an alternative worldview. Like Kubrick’s protagonist he had transmogrified into a model citizen at the cost, it seems, of his withering humanity. If we want to appropriate the movie as a quest for happiness, I think we may see it as a fundamental exploration of what it means to be human, to be complete. For Sam’s part he can only get there in his mind, but his journey shows us how far we all have to go.

[SSilverst]

The world of Brazil is not a bleak vision of the future as it appears to the audience, but rather paints an exaggerated picture of what the 1980’s were like for 1st world citizens. Ever-present plastic surgery, malfunctioning technology, overwhelming amounts of advertisements; these are not the wild imaginings of dystopian sci-fi flicks, but the issues that are plaguing us more and more as we “progress” in our own society.

The ducts are in nearly every set piece of the film. Their presence indicates that the city is in dismal shape. The ducts are a convenient fix for the atmospheric complications associated with industrial “progress.” They work to skirt around the problem rather than address the real issue that is a lack of responsibility for the environment. Outside of the city is a barren wasteland, and even further out is a fiery, fume propagating industrial area. The citizens of Brazil do not want more aesthetically pleasing ducts, but they are not given much of a choice.

Gilliam is obviously hinting that consumerism is destroying our humanity. It certainly has destroyed Sam Lowry’s. His mother has fallen victim to countless plastic surgeries, his amenities such as automatic waterspouts, automatic toasters, automatic coffee makers, and the like do not work in any sense of the word, and all he dreams about is being a hero for the girl of his dreams. Sam is a representation of all of the anonymous citizens of Brazil, and he has no influence because nothing drives him. There is nothing to drive him after all. All that is available to him are products that allow him to do less.

This all comes back to the issue of whether or not Sam Lowry is ever truly happy in his situation. The answer is no. Sam was content, not happy, with his life in the beginning of the movie, hence the dreams he has of breaking free of the dregs of his existence by flying through the clouds to save a damsel in distress. The only instance where we see that he appears happy is in a delusional state of insanity, when he invisions himself in a rural countryside with his true love. This sense of happiness is no more real than Sam’s closing sense of reality.

[bcarpenter]

Yes. It does seem as of Sam is content with his job. As a matter of fact he is better at running it than his boss Mr. Kurzman, and the impression is made that he enjoys this aspect of his life, which is most of it. He does seem to hate how everything is run, however, nothing works right and is usually more work than it’s worth. The strange thing is that he seems to be the only sane person in a world of idiots, the man in the other half of his office doesn’t know how to work his computer, while Sam is a whiz at it, but is Sam really the sane one? It’s difficult to think so when he risks everything to chase after a girl he knows nothing about, he has these very strange dreams in which he is personified as a superhero fighting a giant stone samurai whose insides are fire, and especially at the end it seems that something is very wrong with his head, because he imagines a sequence of events.

If Sam really is insane there is no doubt to where it came from. The world that he belongs doesn’t make sense, so he finds ways to break free even if it is only in his head, and it’s only in the end that he truly achieves freedom.

Sam and Peter from Office Space are very similar in that the only thing they want is unattainable in their world, and so they want to break out of it, but the realization in the end is that they can’t. A very depressing outlook on the world, but it holds truth. Humans made these systems and so they won’t change them because of greed and the hope for advancement, which just made them fall behind more.

[nlipton]

I felt as though Sam Lowry had much in common with Office Space’s Peter Gibbons. Between the way they share the idea of happiness, and how their lives, the two characters are similar. Both found themselves content being under the radar, and both found that a woman could trigger happiness. More importantly when finding happiness both acted out against the system that they had tried to hide from for so long. This being said Sam’s idea of happiness would have made him a happier person at the end of the film than in the beginning. While Sam seemed fine in the beginning of the film he seemed only that, fine. His dream sequence brought him happiness, the wings, women, and freedom of it all seemed to be his escape. Upon waking up life (or reality) sunk in and things began a long slow swirl to the bottom of the toilet. There was no happiness in Sam while he was awake. The only spark of life was when he applied his knowledge at work to fix the errors of others. It wasn’t until he began his journey with his dream woman and begun breaking the rules that you saw any true happiness out of the man. That happiness only doubled upon falling into a deep mental break of sorts. So I agree with the author of this post.

Sam was happiest when he reached his personal nirvana. For Sam that was in a little house, in nature, with his woman. Sure, he was comatose, lost deep in his own mind, but when reality is so miserable and your surroundings are so bleak, who is to argue that hiding in your mind isn’t bliss? No longer would Sam wake up to faulty machinery. His mundane job in a world full of sadness would no longer be an issue. The life of paste like food, obviously tyrannical rules and regulation, and an upper-society so lost in a fantasy world does not sound pleasurable to me. A constant fantasy, never ending for Sam, due to a broken mental state, does however seem like bliss, but it’s not ignorance. The fact of the matter is Sam’s world is not worth living in. Life in Sam’s world has no value, no meaning, no future, no cause. But in Sam’s mind life has purpose, life has pleasure. So I agree that he was happier in the end of the film, but I don’t believe he was living ignorantly, after all, he was living in the deepest pocket of his mind, unaware that his physical body was strapped to a chair.

[cvranizan]

Many people are forced to be content with their situation in life even when it is not at all favorable. Just like Peter Gibbons in “Office Space,” Sam Lowry is in a monotonous, boring job with no immediate ambitions. Sam is not like Peter however, they may both say they want nothing but Sam has dreams, he just cannot interpret them. It takes his recognition of the woman from his dreams to get him to act and finally do something with his life.

It may seem that Sam completely ruined his life by pursuing Jill but when comparing his state of being in the beginning and end of the movie, he is much happier in the end. He never showed any sign of happiness throughout the movie up until the point of first seeing her. His dreams were the only time he ever truly smiled and she was the connection he needed to bring that dream world into reality. It drove him to insanity but I believe happiness is almost entirely mental. He followed his dreams and it led him to his perfect world that only he can experience.

Everyone needs to follow their dreams and not just settle for a mediocre life. Sam could have lived comfortably alone in his lifeless job but he would have been haunted by his dreams forever. I do not believe the movie is portraying the need for love or companionship but more simply the need to break free from social norms and restrictions. Sam was frustrated with his malfunctioning home, working at a dull job, annoyed with the people around him and having to ignore the dreams he had consistently. He had to completely embrace his dreams and abandon the reality he disliked in order to truly live and be happy.