Brazil (1985): the texture of our dream-world

In Terry Gillian's Brazil (1985), I think it's tempting to find the easy distinction between dreams and reality. Lowery falls into his fantasies — in which he fights to save a trapped damsel — then emerges into the Kafkaesque hellscape that Gilliam crafts with his eccentric use of fish-eye and the stagy noir-parody tone. Yet, these seemingly distinct worlds so often transgress the other: Lowery's reality is motivated entirely by his fantasy, as the images of reality crystallize in his dreams, and his dreams become part of reality. While it's tempting to cleanly separate the two worlds, I think the film remains just as fascinating when we find the moments which blur the two worlds together into one, the moments when reality takes on the texture of the fantasy and the dream takes and enhances the perceived objects of reality.  

The final dream sequence is clearly the best example of the collapsing wall between real and fantasy. As Tuttle is devoured by the paper work he so despised, as Lowery's lover replaces his mother, as he ascends the pile of ideological garbage that clutters his subconscious, as Lowery escapes with Jill to live happily in the idealized nature — the nature so violently transgressed by nameless brick structures... reality and dream become one and the same. Importantly, for all the audience knows, the events of the final sequence are happening in "reality": the absurdity of the final dream sequence is on par with the chaos presented in the early scenes. In this sense, the final sequence of the film works to reveal the absurdity of a reality so intimately interrelated with dreams: in a world literally overflowing with ideological and dream images, of course reality takes on this perverse eccentric look. Ultimately, the final sequence shows that the whole film has, to some extent been structured by dreams, that the whole film works as a metaphor for an ideological un-reality, a paradoxical dream-reality.

In other words, our fantasies — the ones that we perceive as "outside" our "real" life — seem to actually be far more at one with the world. For instance, we never actually see any terrorists in the film, yet their effects are clearly preformed throughout the city. The dream of the ideological Ministry of Information is that they are needed to combat — much like in Lowery’s dream — the terrorist to protect society. This simple dream manifests far less simply: because of the stunning lack of actual terrorists, the systems seems to sustain itself on its own manic energy, the creation of the narrative itself that it furthers through its own action. Lowery’s character development seems too follow a similar trajectory: his dream compels him to create the conditions under which Jill needs his protection. The ideological dream becomes wrapped up in his identity and action; in other words, the dream is always already at one with reality through a sort of cooperative interactive motion.

Thus, the reveal at the end — that Lowery’s tortured mind produced the last sequence of the film — does not finalize a separation between the dream world and real world but rather solidifies their interrelation. Lowery escapes the hallucinatory bureaucratic structures and the social dream-idiocy of “reality” by conjuring an elaborate fantasy for himself and dream-Jill: is this not precisely what is done in the “real” world? All of the posters scattered throughout the film call for everyone to accept the horror of today while dreaming of different better future; the diners at the restaurant ignore the terrorist bombing and continue eating, having convinced themselves that piles of slop are the food pictured on the card. In the end, Lowery is no different: he accepts the fantasy, because that is all that he can do to make anything seem real; he has fully integrated dreams into his perceptions of reality.

In both separating the dream and reality, while also blurring their edges, Gilliam essentially leaves it open: can we really find anything fully real? Is reality even separate from the dreams we create to understand our place within it? In creating a hard line between fantasy and reality, we do a disservice to the ways in which “reality” or what we perceive as the “real” actively works to feed our dreams, just like our dreams make us active, make us seek. We also ignore the hallucinatory, often comedic way in which governmental systems seem invested in the profoundly un-real, the way that systemic dreams work against reality in bizarre contradictory ways. Ultimately, Brazil shows that neither our individual perceptions, nor our societal consciousness, can ever escape the strange complex (inter)relationship between dreams and reality.