Now that I've taken up residence in Cole Valley I wasted no time at all in heading to the Red Vic to watch a movie. Yesterday afternoon I sat down in a creaky chair to watch Brazil, the 1985 film by Monty Python's Terry Gilliam that frequently calls forth the word"dystopian."
Most of it was somewhat over my head, to be honest. Thank goodness for our old, dear friend Wikipedia, which offers this excellent plot summary. Go ahead, take a few minutes to read it....
....Now that you're back, some brief observations. As a librarian, I was struck by the dynamics between the Departments of "Information Retrieval" and "Information Dispersal." (One of the funniest moments in the film occurs when a request of IR is rudely routed over to ID.) The chilling thing about Brazil is its evocation of just easy totalitarianism can come about, as long as critical information is controlled.
The late but not great Bush administration never really became totalitarian--despite what you might read in the liberal blogosphere. But George Bush did aggressively try to manage the flow of government information, to a far greater extent than presidents before him. So there were some totalitarian tendrils to his era; fortunately the US constitutional system is stronger than he was.
Back to Brazil. There's a certain madcap quality to the whole thing, so that one can almost forget just how stark this dystopian universe really is. But all illusions and rationalizations have to fade away during the final, terrible scene.
Yikes.
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