Not About Me, Either (Brazil)

 All you who are to mirth inclined,

We hope our minor mode ye do not mynde.

Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

... Somehow this is the key, the only key we can have to the mystery of a great artist: that for reasons unknown to him—or to anybody else, for that matter—he will give away his life and his energies, just to make sure that one note follows another with complete inevitability. It seems rather an odd way to spend one’s life; but it isn’t so odd when we think that the composer, by doing this, leaves us at the finish with the feeling that something is right in the world, that checks throughout, something that follows its own law consistently, something we can trust, that will never let us down.

— Lenny, having discussed the first movement of the Beethoven c minor symphony

Last night, largely as a consequence of this post, I slipped Brazil into the tray. Hadn’t watched it in a while. When I watched Blade Runner the other night, I remembered how, when I saw it in the theater, that original release had explanatory voiceovers which Ridley Scott thankfully scrapped from the final cut. That recollection put me in mind also of Brazil since the studio added a happy ending resulting in what Terry Gilliam sarcastically referred to as the Love Conquers All version. Aggravated rather than caused by the world around us going haywire, I find that this visual fable gets more bitter with each viewing. I mean, I have always known that it ends badly for Sam Lowry, but the very first time I saw it, not only was I beguiled by the enormously inventive dream sequences but, for instance, one hopes, and is led on to hope, that Sam Lowry will somehow muddle through it all. Living with this brilliant movie over time becomes a matter, in part, of finding the point where it is clear that Sam’s rescue is raw delusion, and that therefore his “necrophilia” with Jill is his only moment of genuine happiness in the movie, but that Sam is not merely a victim of the machine, but something of an instrument of his own downfall. Was it Beauty that killed him? His need to pursue Jill which pries him out of the safe mediocrity of a mere functionary in a lower office of the Ministry of information, so that he begs Mr Helpmann to refresh the offer of a promotion? Yet, since he had been dreaming of Jill, how could he have done otherwise? But character is Destiny, and what with the young vandals’ destruction of the Personal Transport, Sam’s cocking up of the Buttle check, and his juvenile glee in running Jill’s truck through the gate and on: Sam sowed the seeds of his own immolation by bureaucracy. As to his friend Jack, the very fact that Michael Palin is so brilliant a comedian makes him chilling as Information Retrieval’s chief Retriever.