This crazy movie summed up all that we have learned about the schools of writing since Romanticism. Romanticism is the fairy-tale of life. Realism is the anti-fairy-tailing of life; it is life as it is without any biased thought process of one person’s perspective. Modernism is this depiction of life through thoughts, imaginations and experiences- life as seen by the brain, not the eyes. Postmodernism is this quirky, rebellious teenager of literature. It takes all of the three and squishes them together with dull scissors and Elmer’s glue.
Postmodernism takes the actuality of life as seen in Realism. It addresses society as this reality that is too real and too simple. It combines the modernist perspective of thoughts and imagination and the happy ending and idealism of Romanticism as an escape from the realist society. Brazil is postmodernism. I can understand why people would watch it and be confused, but I think that the point of Brazil is to confuse us. Not confuse our thoughts, but rather turn upside down the way that we have viewed the world by placing things that generally are not even associated with each other right next to each other. We see Sam’s mother’s fancy house with super nice furniture and then these huge pipes that drape down from the ceiling. There are commercials for dressing up these ugly pipes with pretty covering, which reminds me of Sam’s dreams that are merely an attempt to cover up the ugliness of the life that he is living. Like the opposite of a simile, the movie shows us the meaning of something by comparing it with its complete opposite. There is society, and then there is its antithesis. Order, minute tasks, dullness, organization, status quo; then there is a dream world of beauty, love, chance, and happiness. The way that you jump over one side of the wall to the other is to go against the system-anarchy. We are showed two instances when the perfect order of the system are upset. When Mr. Buttle is taken instead of Mr. Tuttle and when the system is about to wrongly accuse Sam’s dream woman. These lapses are like our dreams. If we could just dull our minds down, we would make perfect machines. But when we start to think, to imagine, when we submit ourselves to this anarchism, then we cannot be happy with the work of the drones. This is Sam.
He starts off as a machine, and then he turns into a glitch, but from there he just decides to continue to be a glitch. When there are thousands of people doing the same thing, does it really matter if he just quits. Like a line of ants working in an anthill, all looking the same, does it make a difference when one decides to wander over to a picnic and himself under the magnifying glass of a sadistic boy? Sam is this curious ant. He disrupts the system, and finds ultimate happiness in his fanatical dreams. The ending of Brazil is much like the end of Flaubert’s Parrot, indeterminate, unsatisfying, and gratifying all at the same time. We are happy that he imagined that he was happy, we are sad that he is dead, but in a way his death is an escape. It is ironic that Sam has to go insane to be happy. Maybe we are the same way. I think that being insane is better than just going along with the drone army of society. Our brain is an escape from the restrictions of life. We can always retreat into the mushy couch of our cerebellum and enjoy the pleasures of creating our own life.