Culture post of the day: Form 27B
The Wikipedia article on the 1985 movie Brazil says:
Brazil is a 1985 film directed by Terry Gilliam. … John Scalzi’s Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies describes the film as a “dystopian satire”.
The film centers on Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a young man trying to find a woman who appears in his dreams while he is working in a mind-numbing job and living a life in a small apartment, set in a dystopian world in which there is an over-reliance on poorly maintained (and rather whimsical) machines. Brazil’s bureaucratic, totalitarian government is reminiscent of the government depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, except that it has a buffoonish, slap-stick quality, and lacks any kind of figurehead.
Jack Mathews, movie critic and author of The Battle of Brazil (1987), characterized the film as “satirizing the bureaucratic, largely dysfunctional industrial world that had been driving [Gilliam] crazy all his life.” Though a success in Europe, the film flopped upon initial release in North America, even with the extra publicity of the fight with the studio. It has since become an important cult film.
It is a world where freedom, as we remember it, is a forgotten concept. But everything is well regulated, perhaps too well regulated. And despite appearances, it is not safe. “The film often mentions an ambiguous form called 27B-Stroke-6. 27B was the number of George Orwell‘s apartment in London.” There’s actually a G20 Pro-Capitalist Counter-protest, whose tagline is “We don’t want your charity; we don’t need your chains” scheduled for today.
Date: Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Time: 11:00am – 5:00pm
Location: April 1st – Outside the Bank of England (The Museum portion of it – outside Bank station)
City/Town: London, United Kingdom
Does life imitate art, or is it the other way around?
YouTube Direkt
“Suspicion breeds confidence.”
Brazil… talk about a bug in the system!
I love that film!
That crazy shoe-hat… the whole thing is inspired!
I have always identified with the renegade air conditioning repairman.
Perhaps the best scene is where they cut a hole in the ceiling and drop in to arrest a man, give his wife a recepit for him, and then depart. The two workmen who come to patch the hole unwrap a plug designed for that purpose and plop it in the hole, only to have it fall clean through. “Rats!” they exclaim, “They went back to metric again!”
President Obama announced today that Starling’s blog will be renamed
“The Business of America Was Business”
“We have no interest in writing Starling’s Blog for him”
the President said,
but we inherited this problem, and it is our responsibility to the American people to see to it that the title and content be brought in line with the new realities of the Twentyfirst Century.“
President Obama claims he likes Indonesia. In fact, I think it’s his model society. Suharto-ism is on the March in Washington. Soon they will control everything, putting their political cronies in charge. Soon corporate America will be lead by those who suck up and excrete down.
Perhaps we should use the honorary title Boss for the just plain folks down in Washington. Mr. Boss Congressman. Mr. Boss President. Boss Rahm. Boss Barack. Boss First Lady. Boss News Anchor. Boss third assistant to the deputy undersecretary of the person who controls the “chop.”
To Pay for our Debts
ht – Sinless
It was Hermann Goring who said, “Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.” He never reached Brazil, but some of his pals reached Argentina.
Actually, dystopias — like that depicted in Brazil — have something to recommend them:
The voter can’t be shafted by the people she elects to higher office. She can never be disappointed, only pleasantly surprised, if by a remote chance the politician accidentally does something constructive, positive, helpful, or good.
Jamie Irons
I thought the show usefully reduced abstract concepts such as securitization into concrete situations involving human agents.
For example, Stan tried to return his father’s loan-financed margarita machine and had to visit bankers who had securitized the debt and no longer much cared whether his father would pay or not, nor could they return the machine even if they wanted to.
Moral hazard and incompetence become easier to recognize when we can use our hard-wired empathy circuits, so this seems like a place where art can be especially useful.
The formula would be:
Instantiate abstractions into specific concrete examples, thereby improving our intuitions of the concepts.
Rob Zahra
(see “To Pay for Our Debts”)
People actually pay money to see this? What do they do hand you a tab of Orange Sunshine with your ticket?
Lost In An Energy Wilderness
Energy Policy:
The House approves a Senate-passed omnibus bill that puts 2 million more acres of energy-rich land off-limits.
We need a government that leads us out of the energy wilderness and not into it.
Resistance is Futile, Habu, you will receive an injection.
“The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters and intends to be the master”
- Ayn Rand
Meet The New Boss
The U.S. government dictating a major corporation’s merger partner and who its CEO should be was unimaginable a year ago. Has industry sold America’s free-market soul for bailout money?
A president of the United States orders the chief executive officer of General Motors to resign. The same president is further ordering Chrysler to merge with Fiat, the Italian firm specializing in flimsy cardboard boxes on wheels.
This new reality should send a chill down the spines of all Americans. The federal government has begun to run U.S. companies.
President Obama said Monday,
“my team will be working closely with GM to produce a better business plan.”
—
Who is in a better position to know the answers to these questions?
Rick Wagoner, the GM CEO for nine years and former GM chief financial officer who has been with the automaker since the late 1970s, even running one of its foreign affiliates in Brazil, and who holds a Harvard Business School MBA?
Or President Obama, a former community activist from the south side of Chicago with a great rhetorical gift?
The president answered that question this week by ordering Wagoner’s firing.
Imagine if it were not GM, but your own small business employing a handful of people.
How would you like the country’s highest-ranking elected officeholder telling you that he and “my team” know better than you about cleaning up your balance sheets and competing against your rivals?
How would you like being ordered by the government to fire the person you hired as manager of your company?
Does an entity that is itself $11 trillion (and climbing) in debt have any right to criticize a private business for owing tens of billions, let alone to claim it can do better running that business?
12. Doug:
Resistance is Futile, Habu, you will receive an injection.
Well, will it hurt? Do I get a lollipop afterwards?
That’s not a prison style injection you’re speaking about is it, cause if it is I’ll just toe the mark ASAP.
Now I am afraid. Let me clarify. I originally misspoke. It’s the best movie ever made. Ain’t no mountain high enough to keep me from viewing it.
15. Doug:
Meet The New Boss
Doug, how do we address the NEW ONE? Führer or il Duce?
I always felt that it was cuddly Michael Palin as the torturer which gave Brazil its chilling edge.
Brazil is so not cool, so Twentieth Century, so… yesterday.
(as is Ford)
This Must be in Error!
Rick Wagoner Ran GM Brazil!
Special Report South of the equator, Ford and GM prosper
hdgreene/5; re 0 being an Indonesiafile, his SoT Geithner has deep roots there (Summers less so, but extensive) growing up in-country in a family representing Ford Foundation, but also 0′s new AfPak envoy Holbrooke and 0′s new NSC Director Dennis Blair played major roles in the late 90′s East Timor Rebellion. If you do any reading on their activities, expect to get a few chills as thousands of East Timorese, in a coda of what is accused by East Timor of having been a peace-broker double-dealt expedient resume-pad, got almost nonchalantly ground up after the Federals made the truce agreement.
i wonder if all those folks south of the Equator realize they’re walking around upside down.
Success will mean little if U.S. plans fail
SÃO BERNARDO DO CAMPO, Brazil
– Silvio Illi would seem to have little to worry about as he walks the line at Ford Motor Co.’s São Bernardo plant outside São Paulo.
He manages a factory that — even running at full capacity — can barely keep up with demand for its cars and trucks. Better still, Ford is investing heavily in Illi’s plant as it prepares to begin production of a new model.
But Illi cannot help but be concerned about what is going on half a world away in Dearborn. He knows Ford is struggling to save its North American automotive business.
He knows the company has mortgaged everything to finance its turnaround plan.
And while the success of a similar restructuring effort in Brazil gives him hope, Illi knows the efforts he and his team have made to revive Ford’s South American business will not matter much if the plan fails in the United States.
—
“I know what they are facing,” Ponti said, adding that he hopes Ford’s problems in North America will not force the company to close its operations in Argentina.
“We worry about that here.”
Nor are employees of Ford and GM the only ones concerned about the fate of U.S. automakers in South America. Dealers are also anxious to see both companies’ restructuring efforts succeed.
Ernesto Geraldi owns a number of automotive dealerships in São Paulo, including several Ford stores.
“It’s logical to be worried,” he said. “(But) I’m sure that Ford and GM are so strong, so famous, so important — they are going to choose good plans to make the turnaround.”
—
Sorry, Ernesto, you lose.
The Messiah has Spoken.
I knew you had the goods on Holbrooke, Buddy, but I couldn’t remember the details.
TonyB,
Agreed, Michael Palin is terrifying. Excellent acting.
Contrast to 1984 where O’Brien and the state are using torture in a perverse but genuine love for Winston. They are really trying to cure him of mental illness. And contextually, we realize, in the environment Winston is in, he’s actually sick and *needs* to be cured, because resisting the state is suicidal. Eventually of course his cure will be made permanent.
But in Brazil the state has no love for the citizen, and the banality of the torture makes it worse. They’re not trying to accomplish anything by torture, they’re just checking off a box on a list of things to do to a prisoner.
Bill Ayers represents the 1984 strain of INGSOC. You know the Weather Underground even wrote papers about how they were going to put people like us in camps.
Brazil is every liberal-left public employee, union member, or coatholding rumpswab. Incompetence, misfeasance and malfeasance that merely create evil by the aggregation of absurdity, self-seeking and self-dealing instead of by design. See pretty much every bloated urban government, from London to Boston, from New York to Chicago, Seattle to San Diego.
Brazil has always been on my top list. The trailer is understandably designed to get the mob into the theaters so it does not fully display the growing sense of horror that the film portrays. In one way the dystopia of Brazil is worse than that of Nineteen Eighty Four because it is closer to reality. As we discussed in the prior thread the overriding feature of government bureaucracy is its growing incompetence. At least with the intellectual O’Brien you could grasp at some level with a belief that you could communicate with the person destroying you. In the world of Brazil you are consumed by a monster as mindless and pitiless as some cold blooded creature in a monster movie from the 1950′s.
…and Roger Hedgecock was once Mayor of San Diego,
must be his fault!
Damn Conservative!
Almost from the moment Obama took office, I have been reminded of Brazil. In the film, the only people who are powerful are the government and the ultra-rich, who seem to be in confluence with each other. A thuggish socialist dytopia. Sound familiar?
The morphing of the main character’s mother – a ‘cougar’ in the ‘older woman trying to be young and scoring young men’ sense of the word – through bizarre skin treatments and surgeries into a simulacrum of his dream girl, but predatory and without love, is nearly as chilling as Michael Palin’s cheerful torture of the protagonist.
And just as timely.
I would say rent this one, and you should, but you can get a Reader’s Digest version by watching the MSM nightly news.
Dystopia.
The Ting Tings – Shut Up And Let Me Go
This commercial interruption brought to you by our very own Teresita.
he’s a bad player, doug. check him out as a Credit Suisse First Boston employee between stints in gov’t –he took the fifth in at least one Credit Suisse First Boston scandal investigation, and as wretchard discovered was on the AIG board during its “Bankrupt America” derivs buildup. Somehow he showed up in Tbilisi the day after the Russian Army halted its advance. What for? No one knows. He brokered the deal that saved Kofi Annan from his just oil-for-food deserts, by installing SDoros boy Michael Malloch Brown as Annan’s chief of staff at UN. Annan then looked the other way, if you remember, while a month-long document shredding operation went round the clock in the next office, just ahead of the creeping subpoenas. The guy is everywhere there’s a stink.
Now of course, he’s the FREAKING ENVOY to PAKISTAN and AFGHANISTAN. oh, hell, i’m going for a walk. can’t stand myself sometimes.
Matt Labash inquires why the wife says she hates herself:
Wife Replies,
“I’m Becoming You!”
—
Miller says he knew his Marriage was in trouble when he got in bed and his wife was in a Sharkcage.
I love the way this 1985 film anticipated people watching YouTube in their cubicles.
Wr,
Movie “Brazil” has been in my classics list since it came out. Shades of things running my way.
I _raise_ your “life imitates art” by one and call:
“History may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.” — Mark Twain
Onward and forward to the past, repeat my friends, until Adonai slaps the retart button.
Doug,
Purely in the interest of science, is anyone keeping track of how many personalities or sock puppets Teresita has?
We are so over run by Filipina lesbians that I am surprised they have not formed their own liberation front. True that the US Navy did not always offer the finest examples of post adolescent manhood but if this was a fair sample of what women from that country think then the native population there would be imploding faster than Russia’s.
Maybe we could write a stage play based on some of our more colorful characters meeting someplace. Fortunately I am dull enough to be lampoon proof.
31. buddy larsen:
“The guy is everywhere there’s a stink.”
Great work Buddy. What in the hell did the American electorate do in November? Without a doubt after less than three months on the job it’s safe to say, as so many have, we are in deep shit.
We have got to neuter this guy in the mid terms or we will be sunk. He’ll have embolden so many that wish us ill, and I’m talking now of the Soviets and the Chinese that we will be inviting the coup de grace.
I’ll wager Soros has bet the house on shorting the dollar. Unfortunately it’s probably the smart bet.
And the one person who might have helped us out in ’12, Gen. Patraeus took himself out of the game on Fox last night. Someone needs to talk to him.
For me, the best part came after Robert De Niro (the insurgent repair guy) re-rigged Pryce’s plumbing. The result was that when the two Central Service repairmen — two guys portraying a wonderful mix of Labor Party ethos (blue collar thugishness and bureaucratic officiousness) — don their environmental suits to ‘fix things,’ the suits fill with apartment waste. Re-cycling at its very best.
Teresita, haven’t seen that one for quite some time; did I miss something recent?
It is a bummer that we will never see Gilliams Man of La Mancha. But alas, it was a bridge too far.
…aan impossible dream
Lifeof:
Suprised you have not heard of the FLLF
They are quite intimidating when they confront you in the flesh.
So to speak.
The Mystery is,
What is their Ultimate Goal?
Or can Nonprocreationists even be said to have ultimate goals?
A Puzzle Within a Conundrum.
—
YouTube – New G20 Police Brutality exposed -
An unfunded demonstration by supporters of capitalism.
While so many of the anti-capitalist demonstraters are being funded by government & quangos.
That was a very nice thing to say, Neil Craig!
“Kemosabe was dead of a ruptured heart before he hit the floor. Gone down and out with both guns blazing. Soul intact.”
the truly sad part of all this is the insanity of all this, the boss/president taking over business, other minions deciding how much people can be paid, the unbelieviably fascist and socialist nature of it all is being denied by people I expected to see all this more clearly.
only a few have been clear eyed, newt gingrich woke up the other night, so did a couple others.
mostly they are still saying things like oooh noo thier just more like european democrats now….
re #43 and #45: what a language is English, that a same thought can be held in it, in such variety of form.