Brazil

I really enjoyed the film Brazil, and while it strayed from the humans vs technology centric past films we've watched, I really liked the satirical view of Brazil. I related this film very much to Children of Men, and both films seemed to have an underlying parallelism. Brazil's was of a much more pointed nature. Everything done in this movie had an underlining double meaning, and one scene in particular occurred in the first fifteen minutes.

This scene begins in a Ministry office, with a low-level worker "supervising" a machine working on identifying terrorists. While the mistake made during this scene would be the basis for this movie's entire plot, the dialogue that occurred before the fateful fly drop is what I want to focus on.

Like much of the dialogue in Brazil, the action is occurring while a voice-over discussing other events is playing. The worker is sitting at his desk, attempting to read the newspaper, at the same time a fly is buzzing around his office. While this is happening, a Minister is talking to a television anchor about the terrorist threat in the country. The minister is convincing the public that these terrorists are a minor threat, even calling their success "beginner's luck". All the while, this fly is flying around the room, escaping the worker's attempts to kill it. It's almost comical the links this worker goes through to kill the fly, risking breaking his neck by stacking a chair on a filing cabinet on his desk to finally kill said fly. It's ironic the way these two events are occurring at the same time; a seemingly harmless terrorist group is resisting the government at every turn, while a fly is avoiding a newspaper swat. One can almost relate the two groups together, especially since the fly's death caused such a disastrous end for Mr. Buttle, much like the terrorist organization caused the demise of Brazil's main character.

Although this scene is ultimately a very small one in Brazil, it still demonstrates a greater theme that is very interesting when explored throughout the entire film; noticing the double meaning and parallelism.