This week, we examined  Terry Gilliam's film, Brazil, yet another dystopic film that attempts to mount a critique of aspects of our own culture (bureaucracy, capitalism, simulacra, and the loss of connection with the suffering of others) from within a mass-market product. The film also served as an exemplification of the ideas of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault.

ALTHUSSER, IDEOLOGY AND THE ISAs

The first day was spent discussing other examples from the course that exemplify Althusser's understanding of ideology and ISAs:

    The idea that ideology is material and only manifests itself through actions; by going through the motions of ideology, we come to believe. Perhaps the best example from the course is Buffy, "Once More, With Feeling" and the dance sequence "Going through the Motions," which, as we've discussed, also explores Judith Butler analogous understanding of performativity.

    The idea that we are always-already subjects, that interpellation into ideology occurs even before we are born, is exemplified by the various examples in the course in which characters learn that their identity is, in fact, being manipulated by hegemonic forces: Thomas Anderson in the Matrix; Dawn in Buffy, Rachael and Deckard in Blade Runner.

    The relation between ISAs and the SA is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that Buffy's psychology teacher is, at the same time, the leader of a secret government agency. One might also give the Matrix as an example: anyone plugged into the Matrix can at any moment become an Agent, can become a representative of the repressive state apparatus (SA). Each person jacked into the matrix also functions as a battery literally (em)powering the system.

    The idea that ideology wishes us to choose freely our own subjection is exemplified in the Metacortex scene of the Matrix in which Neo's boss asks him to choose between order or dismissal.

MADNESS AND THE POSTMODERN CONDITION

OPENING SEQUENCE

We then turned to the first sequence of Brazil to see how it ties in to our discussions so far. Here's what you said: I suggested that the series of screens and windows in the opening exemplifies postmodernism's depthlessness, its inundation by kitsch commercialism (thus supporting Fredric Jameson's argument), although, as others of you pointed out, what we are seeing is a self-conscious kitsch in the film, which is to say camp. Kali Walbring pointed out how the jingle that playing at the start of the sequence exemplifies capitalism's (and the superego's) control of humanity by way of enjoyment (like the Coke campaign that commands us to "Enjoy!"): "we do the work, you do the pleasure." The ubiquitous ducts of the film function as a metaphor for bureaucratic and government control (encroaching into ever more private spaces in our lives, much like the blimp’s search lights in Blade Runner). You also pointed out that the selling of "new" ducts exemplifies the kitschiness of mass-market culture, since they amount to repainted versions of the same old ducts. Linda Hutcheon in our reading from two weeks ago pointed out that the opening's opposition between specificity (8:49 p.m.) and vagueness ("somewhere in the 20th century) exemplifies the film's self-consciousness about the illusion of film and the fact that the movie is, in fact, a pointed critique of our present. You pointed out the various ways that the opening plays with the usual establishment of a film’s diegesis, playing with both time and space (e.g., the film has nothing to do with the place, Brazil). The fact that the whole film is set at Christmas further underscores its critique of kitsch, as Kali Walbring pointed out. Sarah Nixon explored the extreme self-reflexivity of the opening, including not only the mise-en-abyme television screen but the additional framing from the plate glass window.

MICHEL FOUCAULT AND AND FACELESSNESS OF THE BUREAUCRAT

SIMULACRA AND THE SOCIETY OF ADVERTISING

Later in the film we are given a similar exemplification of Baudrillard's simulacrum, the substitution of "the signs of the real for the real." I am referring to the sequence in which we find a model for "Shangrila Towers" literally supplant the real. In the sequence, we are continually made to experience precisely the collapse of any difference between model and reality. The advertisement behind the model ("Shangrila Towers") functions like the advertisement next to the food in the earlier sequence: the ideality of the simulacrum is there to make you forget the gross materiality of what is before you (goop, urban wasteland).

BUREAUCRACY'S SEPARATION FROM THE SUFFERING OF OTHERS

I pointed out that a student in a past version of the class, Sam Patacsil, brilliantly suggested that, if the film is, in fact, a long subjective treatment, the scene with the stenographer is also significant because at this point Sam could be said to come close to his own real torture. What he sees on the stenographer's page are, arguably, his own cries. Indeed, Jack's questions to him in the scene that follows are the same ones that would be asked of him in the torture chamber ("How much do you know about this?"; "What does B58-732 mean to you?"; "Who else knows?").

POSTMODERNITY AND POSTMODERNISM

Finally, we added to our ongoing list of things that constitute postmodernity (postmodern society) and postmodernism (postmodern art and theory).

POSTMODERNITY: Carceral Society, the breakdown of the distinction between fiction/desire/dream and the real; commodification (e.g., fast food, kitsch), simulacrum, pastiche, facelessness (through bureaucratization and specialization), refusal to accept responsibility for one's own actions, mediatization, multinational capitalism.

POSTMODERNISM: there's no escaping ideology, working from within, self-reflexivity, critique, parody/camp, and the breakdown of the distinction between high and low.