I have to say, "Brazil" is a sci-fi that makes people brainy. A lot of metaphors and irony fill the film, but its mainstay is obvious: a fierce mockery of the authoritarian social system. However, what is terrifying is that the autocratic society shown in the film is an autocratic society without dictators: everyone is a participant in it, relying on the system to manage the irrationality that has existed since the primitive society. Did they succeed or fail? Director Gilliam told us "humorously": it failed. In Gilliam's own words: "In this system, everyone has innocent faces, but they are all involved in bloody things." So the monsters in the dreams of the protagonist Sam Lowry are covered by masks with baby smiling faces. Himself, so Sam finally found out that the typewriter samurai he had been fighting with was himself. In this kind of authoritarian society, what is most needed is little clerks with no thoughts and ideas, who put them in a lot of messy and worthless information and use them as machines. This reminds me that as early as the early 20th century, American engineer Frederick Taylor initiated a "scientific management movement". The main content is: the first priority of management is to find out the "best steps" to accomplish a certain task, and promote it. And Guangzhi. In Taylor's view, anything that has nothing to do with work must be eliminated from it. This is exactly a manifestation of the mechanization of human industrial society. And mechanization is exactly the same as institutionalization. Sam is an extreme product born under this system, a super fantasy maniac. Excessive fantasy is equivalent to escaping from reality. That's why the heroine Jill would say to Sam, "Be realistic!" However, the ruthless system eventually squeezed this precious fantasy to completely non-existent. In the end, mankind lost the most basic humanity and became a cage under the system created by itself. It turned out that it was just going around in circles. This is actually the "survival paradox of modern society" that Gilliam wants to map.
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