BE AFRAID....BE VERY
AFRAIDBE AFRAID....BE VERY
AFRAID
As we perilously perch on the razor edge of unleashing the full horror of sophisticated American weaponry against Iraq, it is extremely difficult for me to NOT focus on the present political and social circumstances that have allowed America--erstwhile haven of democracy and beacon of freedom--to transmogrify itself into one of the most dangerously sanctimonious imperialist powers the world has ever seen.
By coincidence a few days ago, I happened to find myself in need of some pre-frontal stimulation and while scanning the video library, I rediscovered what I consider to be one of the most brilliant dark comedies about our possible future written in recent decades. I refer to Terry Gilliam's masterfully allegorical BRAZIL, a film that has been frequently characterised as a modern parable of the same insightful ilk as George Orwell's classic 1984.
Written and produced as a film in the mid-1980s, the film is one of several that Gilliam, arch-intellectual humorist and surrealist, produced (many will doubtless also be aware of TIME BANDITS, another of his film works). For those who need further prompting, Gilliam was a partner in the MONTY PYTHON group, and a principal creative source for much of its inspired madness. MONTY PYTHON, of course, carried the torch for surrealist humor forward from the days of the wonderfully zany BBC Radio produced GOON SHOW, of the 50s era. Giliam was an American, which is somewhat ironic in that MONTY PYTHON will forever be regarded as quintessentially British-flavored humor.
Gilliam's BRAZIL is a surrealistic tragi-comedy set in a future wherein most of the natural world has been reduced to industrial slag and grossly polluted waste residue in the relentless conversion of nartural resources into manufactured consumer goods, by highly advanced technology. Sam, the protagonist, is a minor bureaucrat in the powerful Ministry of Information. His mother is a very influential figure with many contacts in society who helps Sam obtain employment with the MOI as a minor office worker. The principal story line ostensibly concerns Sam's recurrent dreams about an idealised blonde beauty whom he finds irresistably attractive and to whom he is able to represent himself as a figurative winged-knight in shining armor--the classic Walter Mitty redux, at first glance. In due course, Sam runs across a woman who appears to be the identical real-life counterpart of his daydream fantasy woman, and therein lies the non-allegorical aspect of the story line.
Sam's future society is
a massively frusty bureaucratic system in which the population is subject to
strict control of the gothic Ministry of Information, a supremely
powerful governmental agency that is vested with total arbitrary discretion over
the lives of the civilian population. The extremely ironic and sardonic humor of
Gilliam's screen world portrays a future western (the inference is that it
closely follows an unconstrained American economic model into its
future nightmarish, worst-case scenario consumer form) society that is so
ravaged by the destructively rapacious exploitations of technologically advanced
corporations that country roads are fronted by seamless commercial advertising
boards showing bucolic scenes from nature to hide the endless, exhausted
wastelands that stretch infinitely to the horizon behind them. Gilliam's cities
are so toxically omni-polluted that individual living cubicles (apartments)
cannot sustain their human occupants without infinitely complex individual
heating, air purifying and conditioning systems. Energy to run and operate the
massive technological infrastructure of this future world is the ultimate and
overwhelming governmental concern. The sinister Ministry of Information
(for which Sam works) has its own paramilitary law enforcement personnel that
look like someone's worst nightmare of the Star
Wars Imperial Gallactic Storm Troopers and these
ruthless and heavily armed enforcers of MOI policy seize and arrest citizens
with frighteningly brutal impunity, carrying them off in full-body
strait-jackets for interogation by the MOI's 'Department of Information
Retrieval'. Needless to say, citizens whose information has been
thus 'retrieved' are never seen again. Against this chilling backdrop, Gilliam's
dark humor persistantly flashes forth as Sam ironically pursues his fantasy
lady-love to his own ultimate mental & physical
destruction.
What attracts me to return to this fascinating and portent-like film product of Terry Gilliam's gifted crafting is the fact that this future world that is found in 'BRAZIL' is plagued by terrorists. Throughout the movie powerful bombs explode in public places, killing innocent bystanders by the dozens and bloodily injuring scores more with a startling nonchalance that is strangely mirrored in the public's sheeplike acquiescence. These horrific bombs are the apparent work of individuals labeled 'terrorists' by the MOI, but the terrorists' motivations are not overtly explored in the film and merely exist as a sort of constant background leit-motif, as the screenplay continues.
All of this strikes a strongly
resonant chord in terms of predicting the course of our own present American
corporate culture in its possible future evolution (as depicted in Gilliam's
film). One has to stop and focus on the fact that the normal
reality of Gilliam's whole society has become so thoroughly and perversely
distorted, through corporate co-option as the defining processor of that
reality, that the 'terrorists' are actually 'normal' individuals who wish to
arrest the horribly altered reality of 'corporate society' by the only means
available.....by destroying it. This realisation in turn makes one re-evaluate
one's own personal definition of exactly what a 'terrorist' actually is. The
present conventional concept of a terrorist by most average, ordinary Americans
is "someone who (illogically) wishes to 'hurt' America by creating
terror" through wanton acts of random destruction. I don't think there can be
any disputation over the fact that America presently fears terrorists who
predominantly belong to specific radical Islamic sects, but what about
domestic terrorists such as Timothy
McVeigh, whose terrorism was allegedly the
personal response of an American citizen to his perception of gross social &
political injustice inflicted by the American government upon American
citizens? At this point, we instinctively refocus on Gilliam's future world
terrorists, who are also reacting against a corporation-dominated government
that has become intolerably oppressive to the very citizenry it ostensibly
represents! In this context, the conventional, simplistic concept of terrorists
as simply "those crazy sons of bitches who want to hurt us" begins to melt away
into an extremely uncomfortable morass of indistinctly defined values and
conflicting, equally confused social assumptions about just exactly what
'terrorism' actually is! The more answers one produces, thereupon, the more
questions present themselves.
The recent assumption of near God-like power to determine the fate of the entire American nation by George W. Bush and the present Republican Administration mirrors this possible future scenario sufficiently to send cold chills down one's back. As one thinks further along the lines of the aggregation of powerful corporate interests that have been skillfully integrated into the domestic and foreign policies and attitudes of today's Republican Party, one cannot but develop a strong sense of deja vue, after having seen Gilliam's BRAZIL. This sense of shared similarities between Gilliam's dark future world and the possible future of today's America is only furthered by the radically increasing encroachment of personal freedoms and American civil rights that has resulted in the creation of the American Department of Homeland Defense, the severely reduced restrictions on internal intelligence surveilance activities carried out against American citizens, and the inexorably continuing reshaping of the last vestiges of former social 'reality' into grotesque Disneyesque corporate commercial parodies.
With almost complete control of American socialisation processes now already in the hands of the corporate controlled and sponsored media, it is already far later than many think to turn this trend around. Any 'reality as it may have formerly existed'--that is, 'real' personal interactions between private individuals and the interplay of small communities with each other on a state or regional level--has now been supplanted almost entirely by commercial 'reality', largely thanks to the vehicular medium of television commercials and entertainment. Also in consequence, the mustering of sufficient intellectual resistance to this insufferable trending has now become more complicated by several orders of magnitude. The 'End of reality as you used to know it' truly is about to become fact and there is little the ordinary individual can do independently to turn things around. And what typically happens when the average individual feels powerless and intellectuals become desparate? They MAY resort to that ageless ultimate statement of 'back against the wall' resistance: terrorism!
Parallels in this concept exist and continue to be created all over the world, as America's increasingly perverted mainstream (read: corporate, commercial, materialistic) culture spreads sickeningly outward and over this planet like Ebola Virus running amok in a weakened immune system. In Palestine, the Palestinians have already existed in this 'last resort' end-state of hopelessness for decades. Their terrorist bombs they deliver with their own bodies are the sole remaining means with which they may resist against a highly technologized oppressor such as the State of Israel (especially one that has the entire weight of the USA behind it). After all, when the enemy has tactical nuclear weapons and you have only your own body as a weapon, what do you do if you believe in something strongly and passionately enough? You just might become a suicide bomber. You just might sacrifice your life to a greater principle than the mere continuance of biological human life. You just might........
Such subtleties, of course, are completely lost on an American Chief Executive who thinks that God is whispering in his right ear and whose administration continues to support Israel without qualification or concern, despite the continuing daily bloodbath in Palestine that Israelis characterise as 'simple retaliation against the terrorists'. Such subtleties are also lost on the president of a nation that in the 1980s actively helped supply Saddam Hussein with weapons, technology, documentation, and even provided NBC precursor chemicals & biologicals to use against Iran, but which now has decided that this same Iraqi dictator is a supremely bad guy that poses a dire threat to the 'free world' (a highly ironic oxymoronic phrase, if ever I heard one).
And so, as "America" (read George W. Bush and his Republican cronies) presses on with its self-determined and unalterable war mindset, I cannot help but reflect further on Terry Gilliam's masterful farce that is BRAZIL and upon the many highly disturbing, downright frightening parallels that exist as Amerika Incorporated continues to dominate the entire world with its environmentally cancerous, economically diseased corporate-culture imperatives. Might I suggest that you pull out a copy of BRAZIL and screen it? Aside from being a masterfully clever creation and grossly engaging in its implications, the symbolism and allegorical richness found within this film are simply stunning. It is one of those rare films that deserve to be rescreened every now and again, when the far more fanciful fare of (still admittedly wonderful) films like THE MATRIX seem to be still a bit too far-fetched and implausible to send that real-time chill down your back that we all need to feel, from time to time.......
April 2003
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PS: Chris Hodges'
recent book WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US
MEANING is a marvelously insightful book
about why war is such a recurrent, popular theme in human civilisation. Several
nights ago Bill Moyer interviewed author Chris Hodges, in which Hodges delivered
some of the more salient points made in his book. Hodges is a
correspondent/staff writer for the New York Times and in this examination of
what it is about war that is so endless alluring, yet simultaneously repugnant,
he made a good many worthy statements. Among them were these two (not verbatim,
but more or less so). When asked whether he believed that George Bush truly felt
that as a born-again Christian he was carrying out God's will in pressing for an
attack against Saddam Hussein, Hodges remarked "Whether he believes his
actions are inspired by God or not, anyone who claims to know the mind of God
and believes himself competent to carry out His Will is dangerous..... "
And somewhat later: "War is inevitably about betrayal: a government
always betrays its soldiers and the old always betray the young." This book
is one that everyone needs to read, in my opinion. It may be found at the
following URL, in the event you wish to acquire a copy: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=1AB50GKPCI&sourceid=00000259090079471630&isbn=1586480499&itm=1
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