Brazil

Return I will To old Brazil

Hello,

Let’s talk about Brazil. Not the country, but the 1985 film by Terry Gilliam. It’s one of the great ones, so if you haven’t watched it, I really recommend it. It is also weird, uncomfortable, often creepy, and overall visually brilliant. I will spoil the film pretty heavily, including its final twist, so keep that in mind. I think I have found a new interesting connection here, hence this post.

In Brazil, we are plunged into a dystopian society that somehow combines Kafka, Orwell, and Huxley in a whirlwind of awful. The protagonist, Sam Lowry, played by Jonathan Pryce, is a lowly (sic!) clerk who dreams of bigger things. He is squashed by the meaninglessness of his job, the awkwardness of his living conditions, and the overall horribleness of his surroundings, which very few around him notice or mind.

During the course of the film, Lowry meets Harry Tuttle, a quircky leader of the Resistance, played by Robert De Niro, and the literal girl of his dreams, Jill, a truck driver, played by Kim Greist. These meetings inspire him to rebel; in the end, he is arrested and tortured. His friends save him, and he and Jill escape on her truck, leaving the rest of this bizarre world to eat their dust.

But in a cruel twist, it is revealed to us that the last sentence was a dying man’s dream, and we are left in the torture room with Sam’s mindless body strapped to a horrible contraption. Escape was fiction, a faerie mist, and what we’re left with is the harsh, metallic reality of our dystopian future.

Why is the movie called Brazil?

Well, the official version is that it is the name of the song that is very prominent of the film. The song, whose original name is Aquarela do Brasil, is one of the most well-known, well, Brazilian songs. For the movie, it was recorded by Kate Bush. The song symbolizes the dream of Sam Lowry, his escape from reality, and it is played as the happy lovers drive into the sunset, hinting to the viewer that this, in fact, is not real.

The words in the English version of the song go like this:

Brazil ...

The Brazil that I knew
Where I wandered with you
Lives in my imagination

[...]

Now
When twilight dims the sky above
Recalling thrills of our love
There's one thing I'm certain of

Return I will
To old Brazil

You can hear it here and enjoy the visuals (and, largely, the plot) of the movie. Again, major spoilers below:

Interestingly, that was not the original name of the script. Terry Gilliam himself talked about it in an interview with Salman Rushdie:

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Years ago I wrote an essay about Brazil. It was called “The Location of Brazil”—and what it suggested was that clearly Brazil was not in South America. The Brazil in the movie is more obviously located in a song, you know, than in a place. It’s in song-Brazil rather than anywhere else. [...]

TERRY GILLIAM: [...] Brazil came specifically from the time, from the approaching of 1984. It was looming. In fact, the original title of Brazil was 1984 1/2. Fellini was one of my great gods and it was 1984, so let’s put them together. Unfortunately, that bastard Michael Radford did a version of 1984 and he called it 1984, so I was blown. And so Brazil became the title—because of the song.

Brazil started when I was sitting out on a beach in Wales—Port Talbot, which is a steel town. They bring the coal in from the ships on these great conveyor belts. So the beach is pitch black. It’s covered with coal dust. It was a miserable, awful day, and I just had this image of some lonely guy sitting on that beach and tuning in a radio and suddenly [Hums the tune to “Brazil”] this music he’s never heard before—there was no music like that in his world—was there. And that would trigger him to believe there is another world out there, a better world. And that was America in the Forties. We were always going south to Rio, and I grew up in that dream time. And it seems like the dream world was somewhere in South America, where everything would be perfect.

Read the whole interview; it’s great.

So, here is my little contribution to this story.

As it turns out, there is an Irish myth of an island called Brasil, or, in some sources, Hy-Brasil. In fact, it appears on many maps of Ireland from the XIV to the XIX centuries, despite never actually being discovered. Here it is on the map by Abraham Ortelius (1572):

It is described as completely cloaked in mist, except for one day of the year, when you can see it but still never reach it. The name of the island, Brasil, supposedly comes from the Irish clan of Bresail and has nothing to do with the country.

But, you see, it fits! You can see it but still can never reach it, just like… a dream.

It might, of course, be an easter egg; after all, Brazil’s scriptwriters are Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard—all extremely smart writers with a clear interest in mythology and folk tales. And this is exactly the type of inside joke some of them would put into a script. If it is, I think I am among the first to notice, at least publicly.

But if it is a coincidence, it’s maybe an even more brilliant one. And I will leave you with that.

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I found another example of such a coincidence/easter egg here: The Most Famous Blue Raincoat.

Best,

K.