I actually thought about blogging this before someone else did. Glenn Greenwald beat me to it. The best film of 1985. and one of my favorites, is “Brazil,” Terry Gilliam’s mind-blowing, darkly comedic take on life in the late 20th Century. In the phrase made famous by the Bush administration, no one could have anticipated that Gilliam’s satire would become reality just 16 years later. In retrospect, I now see this is Terry Gilliam’s world, and we just live in it. It’s a place where freedom has been forfeited for a false promise of protection from terrorist attacks.

Terry Gilliam: Have people forgotten I made Brazil? George W. [Bush], [Dick] Cheney, and company haven’t. I’m thinking of suing them for the illegal and unauthorized remake of Brazil.

The film’s story takes place not in any particular country, but in a British-inflected dystopia that combines familiar elements of George Orwell’s 1984 with Marx Brothers-style insanity. The protagonist is Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), a mid-level bureaucrat in the Ministry of Information who, like all bureaucrats, wants nothing more than to keep a low profile and escape responsibility for the societal chaos which the government is inadvertently causing, with the best of intentions and the worst heavy-handed methods. The actual plot often takes a back seat the the inspired writing (by Charles McKeown, Tom Stoppard, and Terry Gilliam), acting and art direction as we explore Sam Lowry’s strange world. Which bears disturbing similarities to our own, such as:

• Rampant consumerism, and the elevation of meaningless considerations of status and vanity over personal happiness and well-being.
• There is an open-ended war on terror (in its 13th year in the film) in which the sheer ineptitude and brutality of the government appears to be the main reason for the ongoing violence.
• Government surveillance is widespread, but incompetently managed.
• People are being arrested by mistake and secretly tortured, sometimes to death, because the official paperwork says they are terrorists.
  (I’m usually turned off by torture, but in “Brazil” it’s not explicit– and Michael Palin(!) brilliantly plays Jack, the friendly government torturer)
• Euphemisms dominate public policy. Torture is conducted by an organization known as “Information Retrieval.” A dead man appears in the official records as “dormanted.”
• Security is promoted as the highest value. Posters urge citizens to “Be Safe: Be Suspicious” and “Don’t suspect a friend, report him.”

Hapless bureaucrat Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) awaits torture. “Don’t fight it son! Confess quickly, or you’ll jeopardize your credit rating,” the guard tells him.

“Brazil” offers one ray of hope, in the form of Archibald ‘Harry’ Tuttle (Robert DeNiro) with a great catch phrase: “Listen, kid, we’re all in it together.” He’s the last free man, the last one who cares and has compassion, and he’s smart enough to run circles around the overextended bureaucracy. Everyone else seems helpless.

Getting back to the here and now, today Glenn Greenwald offers a long post on the Obama administration’s 180-degree reversal on the abuse of the state secrets privilege. In a nutshell, Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration’s unprecedented policy. Which says that if the government breaks the law in secret, the courts can’t do anything about it because that would reveal the secret! We’re living in Terry Gilliam’s world– and we’re all in it together.