“It’s only a state of mind.”

Though Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) may be an homage to Fellini and Orwell, and an astute critique of society’s path towards the future; it is, incidentally, also a jarring depiction of how invasive society is in human relationships.

Since Gilliam fought tooth and nail with his producer over the film’s ending, both a ‘depressing’ director’s cut and a Hollywood-finish “Love Conquers All” edition of the film are in circulation. Forever on the side of artistic expression, and since it was predominantly recommended over the other, I watched the director’s cut, asking myself: who doesn’t enjoy some sadism at the end of a film?

Brazil is set “somewhere in the 20th century,” in a retro-futuristic society in which the government is an expansive, convoluted, paper-pushing bureaucracy that is a labyrinth of inefficiency. After a literal bug in the bureaucratic machine mixes up the last name of terrorist/rogue heating technician Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro) with civilian/shoe-repairman Harry Buttle, Buttle is wrongly arrested and killed, much to the dismay of the bureaucrat who finds the source of error and must correct it. That bureaucrat happens to be Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce), positioned well in the bureaucracy partly due to merit and partly due to family connections, who finds the Tuttle/Buttle error in the paperwork and takes personal responsibility in correcting it. Likewise, Buttle’s upstairs neighbor Jill Layton (Kim Greist) witnesses Buttle’s unjust abduction and arrest, and seeks to confront the government. But navigating the monstrous bureaucracy is somewhat counterintuitive, the realization unfortunately fueling Sam’s increasing resentment towards reality and aspiration towards a romanticized life.

The surrealist nature that pervades the film stems from Sam Lowry’s affinity for his fantastical dreamworld over his humdrum reality, progressively welding both realms into one. The film opens into a dream sequence as Sam soars through the clouds as an angel decked in face paint and a silver breastplate towards his dream girl: a beautiful woman with flowing blond hair, encased in ethereal white cloth. But as Sam’s reality is engulfed by the government bureaucracy with heightened frustration, conflict invades his dreams; he finds himself battling samurais, golems, and baby-faced monsters that cage his ideal woman and threaten to steal her away forever. This romanticized life as the savior-angel is juxtaposed against his clumsy real-life pursuit of Jill, a stranger who resembles the woman from his dreams. But Jill, the woman of his reality, cannot be of a starker contrast to the one he fantasizes about: she has a butch hair-cut, drives a truck, wears a jumpsuit, smokes cigarettes, and is fiercely independent.

Where the woman of his dreams is hyper-feminine, the woman of his reality is independent, brazen, and somewhat masculine. In his dreams, he portrays himself as hyper-masculine, whereas in reality, he is dependent, cautious, and somewhat effeminate. In both situations Sam and Jill complement each other, thus assuming an Anima/Animus relationship.

In the beginning dream sequences, the gender roles are fairly storybook-esque:  Sam is literally the knight in shining armor and Jill is the damsel in distress. For me, it specifically evoked the image of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss that illustrates the romance yet the inescapable power discrepancy between a male god and a female mortal. Contrastingly in the ending dream sequences, the gender roles swap as dream merges with the grit of reality. As Sam flees from the government, he falls through the black door of death seemingly into Jill’s truck. As they drive through a picturesque landscape away from the city, Sam nuzzles against Jill’s shoulder; she responds protectively and drives both of them towards safety. Sam has finally become the damsel in distress and Jill, the knight in shining armor. Reality seems to have crept in under the guise of a dream: Sam is his diffident self and Jill is brazenly confident as usual. Sure, Sam may still have his dreamland, but it is no longer the sanctuary from reality it once was, no longer the untouched Eden he could recede into; society has irreversibly corrupted his ideal world.

Though the last dream sequence seems a little too finite, in no way does it spoil the ending. Honestly the last ten minutes will blow your mind, for if this movie teaches you anything, it’s that you can’t anticipate what comes next; this film is wholly unpredictable. Brazil definitely goes down in my top ten films of all time. So, watch it! Please? Pryce gives a sympathetic portrayal as a man losing his innocent perception of his government and consequently the innocence of his dreams. De Niro ninjas his way on and off screen as the ‘terrorist’ or, better yet, the heating technician who went rogue to avoid paperwork. And Michael Palin wonderfully adds to the film’s dark humor as Sam’s best friend Jack Lint, the bureaucracy’s morally amibiguous interrogator. Brazil is visually beautiful and intellectually haunting, its theme song sure to gnaw at your brain until watched again.

“What’s your name?”

“The phantom lady.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“I know that– I’m a funny lady.”

The film Breakfast On Pluto is 128 minutes, and I’d have to say it is the first film I’ve viewed in a long time in which each and every minute is aptly used and purposeful. Breakfast On Pluto is a film adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s novel of the same name which recounts a young transwoman’s search for her biological mother against the backdrop of tumultuous 1970′s Northern Ireland and London. The main character, Patrick “Kitten” Braden, conceived from a priest’s fling with his housekeeper,  is abandoned to a fanatically Catholic foster mother. Struggling with her identity throughout childhood and adolescence, Kitten rebels against the staunch social climate in various ways, be it cross-dressing, writing scandalous in-class essays, taking home-economics, or even bejeweling her Catholic school uniform. But her hometown is unrelenting, so Kitten leaves for London in search of her biological mother who has been internally glorified as a movie star, an idolized escape from the religious fanaticism of Kitten’s foster family and the IRA’s militancy that has engulfed her childhood friendships. Leaving home, Kitten’s journey of self-discovery is nothing short of fantastical. She finds love in curious places and people, including a musician, a magician, an officer, and friends, though she ultimately seeks love and acceptance from her elusive mother, nicknamed “the phantom lady.”

I found this film beautiful not only as a biography of Kitten, a transwoman, but also of Northern Ireland as fate intrinsically binds her to the workings of the IRA’s rebel forces.  At its core, this film illustrates the construction of a personal identity, from self-discovery to love to self-acceptance. At times Breakfast On Pluto is optimistic, lighthearted and humorous, and at other times, vulnerable, confused and devastatingly poignant; its power increased tenfold by its chapter-like storytelling and phenomenal soundtrack…not to mention top-notch acting by both starring and supporting roles (Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea, etc…)!

My only critique of the film would be its trepidation in exploring Kitten’s sexuality. Firstly, her film nickname is a somewhat censored version of her literary nickname “Pussy.” Furthermore, in her relations throughout the film, sexual interactions don’t extend beyond intimate hugging. As par for the course in most media, it is okay to parade around characters of an array of sexual orientations as long as they are seemingly desexualized; PDA is wholly unacceptable! Fortunately, there are films that give characters of various orientations free-range to explore their sexuality on-screen; the first that comes to mind is The Crying Game due to the Neil Jordan and Stephen Rea connection to both films.

Nevertheless, I highly recommend Breakfast On Pluto for anyone looking for a film that is not only about a transsexual’s self-discovery, but explores a universal sentiment of learning to love and accept oneself while finding others to do just the same. Kitten’s life exemplifies that though “the course of true love never did run smooth”, no one said it couldn’t be fantastic.

In the new industrial society, a growing class of women were no longer economic companions to their husbands. Many domestic roles that once determined the survival of the household (food cultivation and production of fabrics, medicines, basic furnishings, etc.) were outsourced to factories and industrial farms, effectively rendering home-bound women invalids. These women were no longer producers but consumers. And these women questioned the validity of this arrangement in which they were excluded from both their Atlas-like traditional role and the male-dominated industrial workforce; it seemed that the Caucasian, middle-class woman existed in limbo, purposeless.

And so many of the women confined to this new gender role succumbed to an illness aptly described as hysteria. It seemed that by achieving the gender expectation of being an invalid, one felt unfulfilled in being a human; a paradox that eroded women both mentally and emotionally to the point of paralyzing illness.

Unfortunately, male experts and physicians, self-proclaimed experts on women at the time, seized this opportunity to validate the role of women as invalids by calling upon, horrifyingly enough, biology. They argued that women are inherently sick for they possess both a brain and a uterus. The brain, the seat of rational thought, may be found in both men and women, but the uterus, primitive and irrational, is something unique to womankind; therefore, it must be the controlling organ in the female body, so all female abnormalities and regularities can be attributed to it. How is it possible for the resolute, rational brain to coexist peacefully with unpredictable wiles of the savage uterus? Obviously it cannot exist but as a foe. So it’s biologically-sound to deduce that women are naturally sick, for their bodies are in conflict, battlegrounds for the epic war of Brain vs. Uterus. (There was debate over whether it was the uterus or the ovaries that determined the true character of woman, if not an unholy alliance between the two as they combated the brain for dominance.)

The solution for this illness? Well, the brain could not be removed from the battlefield, but a woman could live ‘healthily’ without her reproductive organs if she agreed to forsake her potential for motherhood if not her sexuality; scores of women went under the knife, removing either both ovaries or the clitoris in order to cure themselves of hysteria, nymphomania, masturbation, painful menstruation, disobedience, cursing and other unladylike behaviors. Later, a less drastic solution was invented by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and was popularized in due part for one convenient fact: it was painless.

Dr. S. Weir Mitchell’s solution was the rest cure. It involved the patient laying in a room for approximately six weeks, her only human interaction being with a nurse and doctor who would come to administer regular feedings and massages. Essentially the rest cure depended upon sensory deprivation and a doctor-patient relationship in which the doctor assumed a near godlike authority. Nowadays, techniques of this sort would be comparable with brainwashing, disturbingly similar to Cold War era mind control experiments (MK-ULTRA) which sought to induce amnesia in test subjects, essentially making an individual a blank slate so that a ‘better’ personality could be adopted. The goal of the rest cure was to craft a ‘better’ woman out of a defunct one: to produce a woman who silences her brain in favor of cultivating her reproductive purpose, ending the internal war in favor of the uterus to become a peaceful invalid.

The medicalization of women in industrial society had profound effects on their gender identities: women now had to grapple with the choice of “being” one’s gender or “playing” one’s gender. Simply by possessing a uterus, a woman is a woman, but she is inherently sick with conflict. In order to be a socially acceptable woman, she must play the part of either Brain or Uterus. By being the Brain, the woman can partake in intellectual activities but must be masculinized and desexualized. By being the Uterus, the woman forsakes all intellectual activities, but retains her femininity and sexuality. These new gender expectations situated women between a rock and a hard place as the gender role that society deemed fit for a “proper woman” was in actuality unfit for a human being. So it’s not surprising that the science behind curing hysteria, the woman’s disease, had conversely continued to fuel its expansion as women found themselves in a socially-mandated limbo. 

a/n: Sorry that this long-winded post kind of buried the lead that the title hints at–but I swear it was necessary!!