In 1983 a short Terry Gilliam film was released as a B-feature to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, but The Crimson Permanent Assurance could also be seen as the companion text to Brazil (1985), Gilliam’s next full-scale project. A group of slavishly downtrodden office lackeys (old guard refugees from a world when commerce was more gentlemanly) rise up and mutiny, overthrowing their free-market corporate oppressors, an act so miraculous that it transforms their building into a galleon, which sets sail on the Gilliamesque ‘wide accountant-sea’. The complete defeat of the parent company, The Very Big Corporation of America, is next on their list. Opening, as the voice-over puts it, ‘in the bleak days of 1983, as England languished in the doldrums of a ruinous monetarist policy’, the fantasy of ‘reasonably violent’ office-pirates successfully trashing their erstwhile employers is hardly subtle. A utopian daydream of collective action, which, in the time-honoured tradition of using the bosses’ ropes to hang them with, turns filing cabinets into cannons, coat-hooks into cutlasses and office minions into vigilante heroes. Unlike other filmic utopias, which focus on personal gain or map out brave new future-worlds, the mission of Gilliam’s men is to overthrow corporate dominance. Part-way between an Ealingesque revenge-of-the-little-man and Battleship Potemkin (1925). (Gilliam also parodies the Odessa steps sequence in Brazil), The Crimson Permanent Assurance replaces proletarian sweat with bureaucratic drudgery, but the defeated enemy is still the same: ‘A financial district swollen with multinationals, conglomerates and fat, bloated merchant banks.’ Nothing can stop the victorious ship – except the fact that this is utopia (ou-topia – no-place) not Thatcher’s Britain, and it happens to be cartoon-flat. The ship drops off the edge of the earth.
Then in 1985 came Brazil (one working title of which was 1984½), a dark, surrealistically-witty dystopian vision of an unlocatable time in which bureaucracy manipulates people rather than the other way around, and the compliant hero/cog-in-the-wheel (Sam Lowry, played by Jonathan Pryce) is finally punished for his conformist complicity. Brazil is quintessentially Gilliamesque, in blurring the distinction between real and dream-states, sane and mad, inside and outside; in its fascination with the machine as body and the body in the machine; and in its obsession with systems. It is uneasily pitched somewhere between past and future, generally identifiable yet also quite specific: the opening text reads ‘8.49 pm: Somewhere in the twentieth century’.
Quite a different film was the previous year’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Directed by Michael Radford, this was the second cinematic reworking of George Orwell’s 1949 novel (the first was Michael Anderson’s rather dutiful 1956 version). Winston Smith (played by John Hurt) might be Sam Lowry’s depressed brother, positioned against a canvas of a totalitarian but visibly mid-twentieth-century Britain (despite its renaming as Airstrip One, the centre of Oceana, now one of the world’s three superpowers). Oceana is engaged in an ongoing war with Eurasia, and news reports give constant updates, broadcast incessantly, along with messages from Party leader Big Brother, through the omnipresent two-way telecast screens which are fixed into every room, breaking down the distinction between the public and the private. Propaganda infuses every scene; indeed, it is Winston’s job at the Ministry of Truth to rewrite history according to the purposes of the Party, inscribed in Newspeak. Truth is a commodity, manipulable and entirely subject to power. As the film proceeds, and as Winston’s distance from these ‘truths’ becomes more marked, the question of whether the war – and indeed Big Brother – are real, or just a fabrication used to manipulate the populace into compliance, is raised. The ultimate rule-breaking comes when Winston meets the free-spirited Julia. In a society which has outlawed not just private life but the orgasm itself, the pair become erotic dissidents by embarking on a sexual relationship. They are punished for it: arrested, tortured (Winston is taken to the dreaded Room 101 to confront his worst fears), brainwashed into compliance and mutual betrayal, the pair finally submit individual identity and will to the overarching vision of the Party and the world of ‘doublethink’.
Brazil’s strange future-past is altogether different, although the films have some uncanny similarities. Nineteen Eighty-Four fits quite neatly into a long tradition of filmically imaged worlds both better and worse, and Brazil too might be read alongside other black-humorous, parodic-postmodern dystopias of the 1980s and 1990s – Delicatessen (1990), Prayer of the Rollerboys (1991), even Mad Max (1979) – although it owes far more to Kafka or Lewis Carroll than to the visual stylistics of the pop video, and is infused with a dark eco-horror which echoes Blade Runner (1982) and looks towards The Fifth Element (1997). Brazil is a vertiginous urban nightmare – it is also very funny.
Bureaucracies are Gilliam’s particular bête noire, and machines themselves, more than how they are used, become his prime signifiers. Gilliam’s ‘tech noir’ is never ‘high tech’ – the grungy, Heath-Robinsonesque machines which are the externalisation of baroque bureaucracies and psyches are the most striking element of his mise-en-scène – think of the devil’s machines in Time Bandits (1981), the time machines in Twelve Monkeys (1996). As Gilliam said with a shrug in a recent interview, ‘It just seems that I have this German-Expressionistic-Destructivist-Russian-Constructivist view of the future’ (Morgan 1996: 20). Brazil is set in an enclosed world when even outdoors feels like indoors, when social stratification is keen, but success is particularly marked both by the pleasures of conspicuous consumption and by the power to manipulate bureaucratic processes. But all inhabitants seem to be equal prisoners of their disastrous world: this is not Metropolis (1926), the golden palace built on the slavery of workers doomed to pay for others’ excesses which benefits an elite strata. Here there are no winners.
Like Winston Smith, Sam Lowry is a lowly government pen-pusher, existing in a Hades of office procedure at the Ministry of Information. If Winston Smith collapses or subsumes his private, dissenting self into a flat faith in public ‘truths’, Sam retains a private self as a space of escape: his ‘real’ life exists in his dreams of a blonde damsel in distress, who gives him the chance to be a hero (the inane 1930s song ‘Brazil’, which gives the film its title, is about escape or return to a lost romantic idyll). Retreat into fantasy as interior dream-state or as mass romance is crucial to the film’s sense of darkness. The images of Hollywood icons which cram the walls of Sam’s flat are little glimmers of light; his nocturnal heroics set the futile drudgery of daytime into relief. The sinister surveillance systems which, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, bear out the phrase ‘Big Brother is Watching You’, are subverted into a bizarre facility for fantasy-escape in Brazil: the ‘surveyors’ use their telescreens not to look out for illegalities but to hack into old movies.
However, Sam has connections in higher places. He is persuaded to take up a job at the leaner, meaner department of Information Retrieval, and so is able to trace this dream-girl, whom he has stumbled upon in real life. Jill (Kim Griest) is a suspected terrorist, and after Sam gets involved with her, he is arrested and tortured (by his best friend Jack Lint [Michael Palin], who is only doing his job). The film ends twice: first, in the ‘happy’ ending preferred by Universal Studios in America (who insisted on a more cheerful, shorter edit for US audiences), with the couple’s heroic escape to an idyllic rural location; second, when this is revealed as a false ending, and we cut back to Sam’s blank face in the torture chamber. Rural escape is then just Sam’s mental act, a hallucination dreamed up to negate the horror of torture.
Brazil is infused with a machine-age panic, the keynote of its dystopianism, reminiscent of Chaplin’s famous factory-floor pantomime in Modern Times (1936): the motors – actual or procedural – just keep running, sometimes to excess and always regardless of the bodies that are in the way. Flailing around the edges of the process are human beings – worried conformists (like Sam), exuberant vigilantes (like Robert De Niro’s Tuttle), real victims (like Buttle’s family), frustrated punters passed from desk to desk (like Jill, before she gets into her truck and takes action). Gilliam’s machines act like fleshly and extrapolated bureaucratic systems. When Sam’s air-conditioning system goes wrong it invades his flat and forces him to retreat into the fridge: the very fabric of the building revolts. He can do nothing without Form 27B/6 which jobsworth Central Services engineer Spoor (Bob Hoskins) demands before he will make Sam’s life livable again. The film thus partly investigates the success of the totalitarian personality: how or whether Sam can become worker DZ/015 when he finally takes up the job at Information Retrieval. If Nineteen Eighty-Four shows the success a brutal system has in slotting its minions into their allotted roles given enough acts of ‘persuasion’, Brazil shows how hard it is to enforce absolute compliance. If its characters conform, it is only with great resistance and difficulty. Even Spoor’s procedural arch-perfectionism is not an act of selfless submission, as it might be in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but a sadistic strategy: Hoskins’s performance is more that of a cowboy builder who’s taking you for a ride than a by-the-book drone. The stupidity of a baroque rule-system has become a way of inflicting psychological pain or flaunting petty power-gains.
The grotesque is also more interesting to Gilliam than the normal or the natural. In Brazil standardisation breeds weirdness; there are cracks and we get to glimpse what oozes out of them – even the storm-troopers are caught practising Christmas carols in the basement. In one of the film’s most impressive performances, Kathryn Pogson plays repressed spinster Shirley as a twitchy, gauche bundle of neurosis, the animated sign of familial and social ill-health. Clearer walking examples of the system’s failure to guarantee completely the response of its people are Gilliam’s maverick heroes, who can’t be bothered with form-filling and cannot be identified by Information Retrieval (these wild men are everywhere – De Niro here is echoed in Robin Williams’s fallen yuppie in The Fisher King (1991); a darker escapee is Bruce Willis’s character in Twelve Monkeys, split between two time zones and belonging in neither). But in actual fact it is hard to find any images of a fully and successfully mechanised self in Brazil, despite the film’s obsession with processes of control. One exception might be the audio-typist who works for torturer Lint, cheerfully typing the screams and pleas she’s hearing through her headphones, her powers of comprehension bypassed by a skill developed so perfectly that information can come in (through the ears) and go out (onto paper) without ever pausing in her conscience.
A dialogue of difference and similarity animates comparison between Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brazil, yet the closer they are scrutinised the more different they become. It is hard to find a contemporary review which doesn’t mention the Orwellian nature of Gilliam’s film, which he himself had tagged ‘a post-Orwellian view of a pre-Orwellian world’ (Johnson 1993: 204). Philip French called Brazil ‘pop-Orwell played for laughs’ (Observer 24 February 1985), whilst Mat Snow saw it as a ‘Pythonised’ Nineteen Eighty-Four (New Musical Express 23 February 1985). Keith Nurse wrote that ‘if [Brazil] is Orwellian in tone, it is also positively Pythonesque in form’ (Daily Telegraph 22 February 1985), whilst George Perry’s Sunday Times headline was ‘Big Brother and the Python’ (Sunday Times 27 January 1985). Both films are haunted by the spectre of 1984 as a real year as well as an Orwellian horror. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not just any 1980s film (it would have been perverse to have released it, say, in 1982 or 1985); it hangs on to the legend not just of its text but of its year. As the closing credits roll at the film’s conclusion its claim to authenticity is sealed by the message, ‘This film was photographed in and around London during the period April-June 1984, the exact time and setting imagined by the author.’ Though it went into production later than Brazil, its producers ensured that it would nevertheless appear in its eponymous year. After Gilliam’s protracted battle with Universal, his film finally premiered in the US in 1985. Although Brazil was backed by American finance and directed by a born-American, it was shot mostly in Britain (except for a couple of scenes shot in France) using a largely British cast and crew; Gilliam had lived and worked in Britain for close to twenty years prior to its release; and it was received as the product and representation of a very British sensibility. That both films work through peculiarly British dystopian visions is crucial to their tone, cult status and relationship to their moment.
But that both films retain traces of utopianism is also crucial to the tone of their darkness. It is hard to discuss dystopias without addressing their imaginative Other; utopia is implied by dystopia, in these films and in wider thought. Few theorists address one without reference to the other: study of dystopianism is sometimes understood as a sub-set of the much larger area of utopian studies, which has burgeoned since the 1960s. Indeed, the distinction between the two, the sense that dystopias and utopias are negative and positive definitions of each other, is further blurred by the frequent argument that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia. In her illuminating 1990 survey of utopian thought, Ruth Levitas discusses how both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948) ‘were received by some as utopias and by others as anti-utopias’ (Levitas 1990: 22). ‘[T]he optimism of utopia and the pessimism of dystopia,’ writes Levitas, ‘represent opposite sides of the same coin – the hope of what the future could be at best, the fear of what it may be at worst’ (Levitas 1990: 139, discussing Kumar 1987). In the films under discussion here, utopian moments are contained within a largely dystopian vision. True, almost every detail of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s mise-en-scène is discomforting and at times quite hard to watch, and the film’s morbid ‘message’ is viscerally clear. The ending of Brazil is one of the bleakest in 1980s cinema. Fredric Jameson argues that ‘anti-Utopianism constitutes a far more easily decodable and unambiguous political position’ than its utopian Other (Jameson 1988: 76); dystopian images, like Orwell’s, are for Jameson a version of utopian socialism rendered in negatives, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, film and novel, bears this out. However, I will argue here that at the heart of these bleak visions of totalitarian control lies a singular utopian image, the vision of a woman, the centre of both films’ dystopic contradictions. Woman functions in Brazil and Nineteen Eighty-Four as a spectacle of interruption, an escape from the dark dystopic terrain – a sublime ‘pause’ which opens up a set of crucial issues about the inextricability of dream and despair in 1980s cinematic culture.
‘The other side of now’: Nineteen Eighty-Four as topical allusion
If in the 1960s ‘the question of Utopia’ was reinvented (Jameson 1988: 75), the 1970s and 1980s also saw its dystopian Other explored afresh. H. Bruce Franklin begins his survey of ‘Visions of the future in science fiction films from 1970 to 1982’ with the crashing generalisation, ‘By the end of the 1960s, it seemed that we were experiencing the most profound crisis in human history … visions of decay and doom had become the normal Anglo-American cinematic view of our possible future’ (Franklin 1990: 19). It may also be that by the time Terry Gilliam and Michael Radford came to make Brazil and Nineteen Eighty-Four respectively in the mid-1980s, dystopianism was not primarily a means of articulating a feared future or of fending off an alternative (socialist) social structure (as was Orwell’s original novel), but a shrewd engagement with Britain’s present (Gilliam’s ‘bleak days of 1983’).
Fredric Jameson’s important 1977 discussion of cultural utopianism, ‘Of islands and trenches: neutralisation and the production of utopian discourse’ (in Jameson 1988), bears this out. Although Jameson is addressing how utopian thought functions as a critique of the conditions which bring it into being, much of what he has to say is relevant to this analysis. For Jameson, one of the ‘distinctive traits’ of the utopian text is contemporaneity: an element ‘of topical allusion,’ he writes, ‘is structurally indispensable in the constitution of the Utopian text’ (Jameson 1988: 82). Utopias operate dialectically by neutralising the (dy-stopian) world from which they sprung. This is in keeping with a wider tradition of utopian criticism, but dystopias function in a similar way. Ruth Levitas writes that dystopias have often been read ‘as apologetics for the status quo’, but she highlights Krishan Kumar’s view that dystopianism is ‘intimately connected to the utopian impulse itself and … may be deeply critical of the present’ (Levitas 1990: 176). Brazil’s Preliminary Production Notes situated the film in a ‘retro-future’ which is defined as ‘a way of looking at the future through the past, of revealing, so to speak, the other side of now’. If Orwell’s novel addressed his present, Radford’s and Gilliam’s films address theirs.
Critics have found it hard to discuss Nineteen Eighty-Four outside of a debate about adaptation and the film’s faithfulness to Orwell’s original text. A narrative if not visionary ancestor is also George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1970), featuring a story-line of illicit love dragged straight out of Orwell, but worked through visionary mise-en-scène which is Lucas’s own, focusing on star-crossed lovers who discover illicit desire in the shadow of a nebulous totalitarian regime. When read in terms of Anthony Burgess’s point that Nineteen Eighty-Four is not future but past, not dystopian prediction but nihilistic analysis of Orwell’s own 1948, the film’s timely appearance in 1984 itself seems perhaps irrelevant. Clearly its tone and design evoke the grim postwar austerity of Orwell’s anti-communist tract rather than conjuring up any dark scene of future shock – this is a future built from the past.
How, then, do we read the film through Jameson’s observation, that ‘The ultimate subject matter of Utopian discourse … [is] … its own conditions of possibility as discourse’ (Jameson 1988: 101)? Is it necessary to read Nineteen Eighty-Four as itself a reading of 1984, not 1948, suspended as it is – in mise-en-scène, in its identity as film-of-novel, in its peculiar faithfulness to a postwar vision – between two times, and two different cultural forms? Or – in Krishan Kumar’s words – ‘How much is 1984 like Nineteen Eighty-Four?’ (Kumar 1987: 292). Kumar (whose discussion is confined to analysis of Orwell’s text and does not touch on Radford’s film) is keen to retain the possibility that a novel ostensibly written about or for 1948 still addresses the real 1984 which Orwell did not live to see. For Kumar, its contemporaneity is bound up with its Englishness: ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four is about us,’ he writes, ‘it is about our own times. That, as Orwell points out, is one reason for the English setting of the novel: to show that it could happen here’ (Kumar 1987: 295). The film’s producer, however, preferred to see Nineteen Eighty-Four as a bizarre kind of feelgood film: Sheila Johnston quotes Simon Perry as saying ‘Orwell’s vision mercifully bears little resemblance to the real state of things in this year of 1984 … When you come out of the theatre, it will be a lift to find the world as it actually is’ (Monthly Film Bulletin December 1984). Some hope. Those who saw the whole of Thatcher’s reign as a trial of totalitarianism may be tempted to schematically map film events onto real events (and Kumar’s ‘here’ may even extend to 1997, when I noticed that a security and surveillance company employed by one Liverpool store was calling itself ‘Big Brother Inc’). However, this is an extension of critical practice adopted in relation to Orwell’s text itself. A whole area of Orwell studies is dominated by analysis of the novel as prophecy not fiction, with critics merrily ‘ticking off’ what Orwell got right and what he got wrong as history passes.
But given Nineteen Eighty-Four’s acute scrutiny of the problem of truth in the form of propaganda, reading its fictional history as an adjunct of real history seems strange. If anything, the film suggests that we can never know the truth of our moment behind the obfuscation of what ‘they’ would want us to know of it. It does, after all, begin with the lines:
Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.
This is a ‘truth’ which Radford, and maybe Orwell himself, would have us read across the film and back out to our own awareness of the conditions of our history and readings.
The film adds another layer to this quandary of the real and the fictive, of the fictive as a prophetic allegory of the real. In this it goes one visual stage better than its source-novel. One of its primary assaults on the senses is the incessant telescreen announcements which saturate all levels of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Wherever Winston goes there is a telescreen, showing documentary war footage or the still image of Big Brother, accompanied by a flat, triumphal, dogmatic Voice orating the latest Newspeak of the war with Eurasia. The images are often real (the film uses ‘found’ documentary footage rather in the manner of Oliver Stone in JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). Nineteen Eighty-Four thus in part takes in a history of real conflict which stands in, visually, for the perpetual war Oceana is fighting. Only three locations offer a brief escape from the Voice and the telescreen, which is obligatory in every room: the countryside visited on an illegal Sunday excursion, the bedroom which Winston and Julia rent for their liaisons, and – most significantly – O’Brien’s (Richard Burton’s) office. As a high-ranking Party official, O’Brien has the power to turn the Voice off (one of his privileges, he says – even though the telescreen is mouthing his truths), so turn it off he does.
But what the Voice speaks is lies; what the images tell us are both lies and truth: ‘These are our people’, says the announcement as we see soldiers going over the top, planes crashing, blitzed houses, tanks advancing, all apparently ‘found’ images from the major conflicts of the twentieth century, accompanied by the Voice telling us of Oceana’s glorious victories. A vague composite of Nazi rallies, holocaust victims, fleeing refugees, is montaged in sync with an Oceana-specific spoken text. Later in the film, as Winston sinks into ideological scepticism, the same footage is repeated, this time accompanied by Winston’s own gloss: ‘War is not real,’ he says ‘or when it is victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.’ Finally, in the film’s last sequence when Winston has conformed, the same images recur for a third time, with a voice-over which returns to its triumphal mode. What we see and what we hear are then two different things. What we see is recognisably ‘our’ history. The images reach, if not to the war beyond the image, then at least to a history of news and newsreel images we know (or thought we knew) were images of the real. Even in the half-seen flashes of moments of conflict, surrender, defeat and execution which pervade the film on the omnipresent telescreens, the awful roll-call of twentieth-century warfare is all too clear, its malleable truth-value even clearer. But what we hear accompanying this is a pastiche of propaganda, a controlling fiction masked as news. We see our history, we hear someone else’s fiction. Between real ‘found’ images and the Voice itself there is a gap which begs the question, if that is not an image of the defeat of Eurasia, which does not exist, what is it? Whose truth? The truth and not the truth: a sepia staccato history of war from the moment it could first be filmed, undermined, resignified, in its juxtaposition with words. The distrust of the visual is pervasive, even when what you see rightly ‘belongs to’ and speaks of a world outside of the film’s fiction.
However, perhaps more important than Nineteen Eighty-Four’s deployment of historical footage to signify its Otherness is the way it uses images which are far more familiar – grassy fields, glamorous women, sexual excess – to signify utopian escape, offering a confrontation of difference which Jameson calls the ‘utopian event’. I want to turn back to Jameson briefly to explain how this utopic Otherness is displayed rather than told.
The utopian event: spectacle and narrative
For Jameson, utopian texts are important not because of what they are but because of what they do, functioning as critique (like Thomas More’s ‘neutralisation’ of Tudor England as the negative referent in Utopia [1516]) and as a kind of imaginative provocation, encouraging a contemplation both of what is and of what could be. The post-1960s moment is for Jameson not Bruce Franklin’s dystopian backlash of decay and doom, but a space of positive reflection and theorising that is the logical follow-up to the action of May 1968, with the 1970s inaugurating ‘the maturation of a whole new generation of literary Utopias’: ‘The transition from the 1960s to the 1970s was a passage from spontaneous practice to renewed theoretical reflection … after the reawakening of the Utopian impulse of the previous decade’ (Jameson 1988: 76–7). For Jameson, cultural texts (and he is particularly interested in Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed [1974]) can enact that theoretical reflection, but they do so in a very specific way, privileging spectacle and exegesis rather than narrative explanation and dynamism. ‘[I]t is less revealing’, writes Jameson,
to consider Utopian discourse as a mode of narrative, comparable, say, with novel or epic, than it is to grasp it as an object of mediation, analogous to the riddles or koan of the various mystical traditions, or the aporias of classical philosophy, whose function is to provoke a fruitful bewilderment and to jar the mind into some heightened but unconceptualisable consciousness of its own powers, functions, aims and structural limits. (Jameson 1988: 87–8)
Utopias thus work by instigating ‘a concrete set of mental operations’, rather than setting out ‘someone’s ‘idea’ of a ‘perfect society’’ (Jameson 1988:81). The utopian moment is a kind of hesitation or hiatus, a shock or disjunctive interval when narrative action is subordinated in an act of showing.
Throughout ‘Of Islands and Trenches’ Jameson quotes (and heavily depends upon) Louis Marin’s Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces (1973). Developing the notion of utopia as a ‘break’ which neutralises the conditions from which it springs, he writes that, ‘the Utopian event itself’ is a ‘revolutionary fête [in which] … historical time was suspended’ (Marin quoted in Jameson 1988: 77). A moment outside of history – outside of narrative unfolding? – Jameson seems to edge closer to suggesting an almost deistic possibility of the suspension of time. But we might more positively see this as an activation of that etymological rendering of utopia as ‘no place’. Utopia in Jameson is a suspension of this place which enables something else to be imagined. Thus by definition utopia cannot be ordinarily ‘eventful’:
if things can really happen in Utopia, if real disorder, change, transgression, novelty, in brief if history is possible at all, then we begin to doubt whether it can really be a Utopia after all, its institutions … slowly begin to turn around into their opposite, a more properly dystopian repression of the unique existential experience of individual lives. (Jameson 1988: 95)
Jameson’s balancing act here is subtle. I am reminded of that David Byrne line, ‘Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens’ – and Earth is a place where everything does. It is so tempting to read this within a theological framework which would deem earthly action – movement or drive – as the agent, if not of the devil, then of the dystopic, with the stillness and stasis of utopia as a reinvented heavenly, if revolutionary, space. Jameson’s moment of fête is not empty, however, even if it is non-nar-rative. ‘In Utopian discourse,’ writes Jameson, ‘it is the narrative itself that tends to be effaced by and assimilated to sheer description, as anyone knows who has ever nodded over the more garrulous explanatory passages in the classical Utopias’ (Jameson 1988: 95). Utopia is spectacle more than story (or explanation); it is a kind of provocative showing. Although he is discussing literary texts, Jameson picks open a form of writing which might be likened to the cinematic spectacle, calling utopian writing a ‘timeless maplike extension of the nonplace’ (Jameson 1988: 95). There is, of course, a paradox here. With the suspension of history in that ‘revolutionary fête’ goes narrative too, particularly difficult since the texts Jameson is dealing with are utopian narratives. As the plethora of utopian titles indicates (William Morris’s News from Nowhere [1890], Samuel Butler’s Erewhon [1872], or Tom Moylan’s survey of feminist utopias, Demand the Imposs-ible [1896]), utopias are essentially impossible, and they address impossibility. This is what I think Jameson means when he writes,
Utopia’s deepest subject, and the source of all that is most vibrantly political about it is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that, as with fireworks dissolving back into the night sky, must once again leave us alone with this history. (Jameson 1988: 101)
Utopian narratives are then not only stories which enact a hesitation in the history from which they came, but narratives which ask to be read outside of the time they are formally and historically subject to, as fête, event, a literary form of showing. Utopian discourse is profoundly characterised by a tension, ‘between description and narrative, between the effort of the text to establish the co-ordinates of a stable geographical entity, and its other vocation as sheer movement and restless displacement, as itinerary and exploration and, ultimately, as event’ (Jameson 1988: 95). This tension, this crisis between ‘events’ and ‘display’, shows the utopian hiatus, in Jameson’s literary texts, to be remarkably like the kind of work in which our dystopian films are engaged. Dystopian as well as utopian texts are provocative rather than representational, important not because of what they are but because of what they do. The dystopias under discussion here are important not because of what they overtly say – their dark ‘content’, their narrative gloom and enveloping pessimism – but because of how they provoke the reflection and conceptual stimulus which Jameson identifies in the utopian. They also contain within them – bear out, as it were, in miniature – their own utopian moments, which ‘suspend’ the active sweep of the film. Though not classic examples of ‘action cinema’, both films expose a contradiction in its general aesthetic. For during the 1980s and 1990s the term ‘action’ came to mean not dynamic narrative movement but regular interruptions of the spectacular. Moments of spectacular interruption are, then, the action. ‘Action’ is thus, paradoxically, not narrative movement but visual event: shootouts, sex scenes, exploding helicopters. Such cinematically spectacular ‘moments’ do not necessarily ‘provoke fruitful bewilderment’, but there is still something particularly appropriate about Jameson’s uto-pian argument deployed as a politicised film theory. Both Brazil and Nineteen Eighty-Four are dystopian narratives ‘interrupted’ by utopian spectacles. But these films’ utopian images are arguably far more explicitly ‘suspending’ than conventional ‘action’ could be: they are dystopic visions which contain within them moments of explicitly utopian hesitation and contemplation – figured in each film as the spectacle of a woman’s body. If we take utopia to mean not just (literally and etymologically) ‘no place’ but also as provocative critical vision, then the dark dreams of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brazil must be read as uncomfortable forms of utopian cinema.
Utopia’s female face
Both dystopia and utopia in Nineteen Eighty-Four are rendered through the human face. The film’s blighted other-worldliness is pre-ented not through the motifs of the futuristic (weapons, vehicles, the architecture of the strange so beloved of science fiction design), but through its attitude to human skin as the limit of the self. As the film proceeds, any notion of human three-dimensionality – an illusion crucial to our identification, pleasure, recognition – gradually breaks down. Its narrative charts the progressive suturing of skin to self: self becomes what the skin displays. Despite Winston’s dreamscape flashbacks, briefly intruding into the linear ‘now’ of the film’s plot-time, character in Nineteen Eighty-Four is increasingly written blankly on the face, there is nothing beneath what we see. The politics of depersonalisation which Orwell feared and loathed has resulted in a blanking out of the concept of ‘inner self’, flattening difference so that all the fragments of contradictory subjectivity are gathered and synthesised into a singular, chanting, un-questioning mask-like retro-future-self. It is as if the Party’s attempt at eradicating all traces of private being – individual linguistic quirks, memory, desire itself – has resulted in the most cinematically simplistic human form – one in whom what you see is what you get, fusing surface and interior.
However, the film (as well as Orwell) judges this to be a bad thing. This synthesis of (democratic) difference into (totalitarian) sameness is rendered through a palette of grey and sepia, a ‘rubble film’ mise-en-scène of cluttered frames and mildewed walls. Escape brings a more expansive sense of space, more vibrant colours. Mentally releasing himself from the horrors of torture, Winston flashes back to the open downland location of his rendezvous with Julia: sunshine and an unbroken, undulating green hillside. Dystopia is quite characteristically viewed as urban containment and overpopulation, utopia as solitary rural escape. But this recognisable world is there only to make the mask-face of Winston as dystopic non-subject accepting his prison, all the more horrific in contrast. These flashbacks precede Winston’s total submission under torture, referring back to one of the film’s most significant moments, a utopic glimpse which is not only Winston’s fantasy, but the whole film’s. Jameson’s utopian moment was a flashpoint of ecstatic disturbance, but the ‘disturbance’ of dystopian images is not the same as this. Dystopias disturb as an effect of their displeasurable qualities, not because they interrupt. The Oxford English Dictionary defines disturbance as agitation, interruption, as a break or gap – displeasure only if what is being interrupted is equilibrium, calm or tranquillity. Developing Jameson’s argument, we need to get away from the value-led understanding of disturbance as negative. That which ‘disturbs’ the dystopic terrain of Nineteen Eight-Four and Brazil is an image which offers a break from the negative.
I have read Jameson’s ‘hesitant’ utopic mo-ment as the subordination of narrative to still spectacle, when action, events or even history are suspended. This is an event uncannily like the woman’s face, ‘freez[ing] the flow of the action in moments of erotic contemplation’ in Laura Mulvey’s famous conception of sexual spectacle (Mulvey 1989: 14–26). Both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brazil stunningly articulate the fusion of Jameson and Mulvey’s frozen moments. In both films, the woman’s face is the utopic image which does ‘freeze the flow of the action’. Yet in Nineteen Eighty-Four’s case, that old adage that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia comes to mind again. The key ‘hesitant’ image is set up thus. Julia – the active party in the development of the relationship (‘I’m corrupt to the core’, she says as she seduces the passive Winston) – brings to their meetings trinkets and motifs of the lost past, commodities which have been all but rationed out of existence – jam, ‘proper white bread’ and coffee. These made a bleak enough picnic, but the couple are grateful. At their next meeting she betters this, in an extraordinary scene in which, like some grotesque parody of postfeminism, freedom becomes the power to use cosmetics and don a pretty dress. Here, her gift to them both is the repackaged commodity of herself, as first she withdraws behind a screen, and then emerges, a proper woman, in floral print and subtle make-up. For just a moment – a moment which echoes that ‘timeless’ scene of memory collapsing into the present in Vertigo (1958), when Kim Novak’s Judy remakes herself as Madeleine and appears from the bathroom – the film’s time stops, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s history is halted. Femininity in this conventional form is the agent of interruption.
Earlier I mentioned Jameson’s argument, that dystopian images are often the dark renderings of anti-socialists:
from religious arguments about the sinful hubris of an anthropocentric social order all the way to the vivid ‘totalitarian’ dystopias of the contemporary counter-revolutionary tradition (Dostoyevsky, Orwell, etc.), Utopia is a transparent synonym for socialism itself, and the enemies of Utopia sooner or later turn out to be the enemies of socialism. (Jameson 1988: 76–7)
The enemies of utopia are then those who reread utopia as dystopia, by translating its key positive terms (the effacing of sexual difference, for instance) into negatives. This is nowhere clearer than in the moment when Julia masquerades as, and so becomes, a Real Woman, a refeminisation cast by the film as only the latest act in a long line of rebellions, following illegal daytrips, purloined sugar, orgasms and subversive notes passed to Winston. Her makeover may be read as parody or performance, an active self-shaping which self-consciously constructs femininity, controlling it as well as displaying just what a construction it is. That the made-up woman offers Winston a brief glimpse of something better suggests that the film might in part be striking a bold challenge to the normative dogma of natural beauty. When Julia dresses up and makes up, is she fighting the fiction that real beauty must be natural? That this is the couple’s last liaison, and that their arrest soon follows, suggests otherwise. To see such a conventional image of femininity as a bold escape from the strictures of a pseudo-communist state is a little like complimenting Soviet youth on their rebellious desire for Levis and Big Macs. Julia’s is a desperate act which binds forbidden eroticism to sexual nostalgia, sealing arousal in a memory of a more gender-sure time, when Oceana’s grey minions were not consigned to the social and sartorial sameness which effaced sexual difference. Underpinning all this is an insidious gender paranoia, that the result of social egalitarianism is sexual non-difference: it is not the orgasm specifically but its gender in general which is in peril.
By contrast, Brazil’s sexual discourse is both more outrageous and less compromising. Terry Gilliam’s dream girls are rather different, although Kim Griest’s Jill, glimpsed swathed in ethereal gauze in Sam’s dreams, may at first glance seem to be another of the elements of overlap between the two films under discussion here, constituting Brazil’s as well as Sam’s utopic escape. Gilliam lays open a wide range of feminine images to question the mutability of fashion, the malleability of flesh, the demands made of femininity. If Nineteen Eighty-Four accepts the image of escape from ‘oppression’ figured first through Julia’s nakedness, then through her act of dressing up, Brazil sets up femininity as an escape which becomes a trap, as both the best and the worst possible visions. But one act of dressing up has particular significance for how we read the film’s dystopianism.
Nineteen Eighty-Four resists the awkward questions raised by its positive presentation of Julia’s desire for frills and femininity, and perhaps Brazil fares no better in answering the real sexual problems it poses. But what it does do is show how every positive form and image is always grounded in desire, a desire which is itself subject to the strictures of context. Sam’s dream girl is his fantasy – the marked difference between the Jill of his dreams and Jill as she emerges in the ‘real’ world of the narrative, as an overall-clad truck driver, exposes the terms under which Sam desires at all. At first, Jill is only the dream girl who activates and animates Sam’s internal escape-valve. She then appears as a ‘real’ woman, doing an active macho job, refusing to do anything but push forward the narrative. Finally, in her romance with Sam, she succumbs to Sam’s dream and swaps action for spectacle. As the doomed romance proceeds, the pair exchange their respective images of what a ‘dream girl’ is. Sam increasingly falls for the truck driver as long as, in the end, she will drive him to the countryside to escape his urban nightmare (this is his final fantasy). But Jill goes the other way. In an extraordinary scene at Sam’s mother Ida’s flat (Ida Lowry is played by Katherine Helmond), Jill realises his dream, posing for him swathed in gauze in Ida’s blonde wig. The dream comes alive in Sam’s mother’s bed. Jill disappears – from the story itself soon after this, and at this moment when she turns into his mother – and Ida takes her place. Then a little later in the film Ida disappears under the cosmetic knife, and Jill takes her place. In the end, Sam’s mother’s surgery turns her into his lover: Ida reveals that her final reconstruction has turned her into Jill. Gilliam brings this off by switching actresses: we see Ida’s back – recognisable as Sam’s mother – and then she turns around. Dream-girl becomes mother-lover: briefly it is Griest not Helmond who plays Sam’s mother.
If this is Brazil’s version of Julia’s feminine masquerade, it twists the issue in a powerfully oedipal direction. The worst thing of all, Sam’s final nightmare image, is that his mother is his dream girl. It is of course the best thing of all, too, as fulfilled oedipal fantasy briefly presents Sam’s secret desire as the result of some of Brazil’s most dystopian reconstructive practices. Hitherto the film may have focused on the unnaturalness of the surgical manipulation itself as key sign of Brazil’s future-horror. In this final frieze, bodily manipulation becomes the process through which dystopia and utopia collapse into each other. The raw mechanism of the oedipal taboo, sharpening Sam’s terminal panic as the film draws to a close, is laid bare in the wilful unfixity of the woman’s face. That lover can become mother, mother lover, is the best and the worst of all possible desires. When Jill dons the wig, Sam’s dreams take on flesh. When Ida turns around, he is confronted by the dream which can only bring punishment.
Bibliography
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Johnson, Kim ‘Howard’ (1993) Life Before and After Monty Python: The Solo Flights of the Flying Circus, London: Plexus.
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