Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) is a comedy set in a nightmarish, fantasized dystopic future where a Kafkaesque, controlling, technocratic bureaucracy has invaded all aspects of daily life in civil society. The reference is to Orwell's Big Brother, the state (bureaucratic) terrorism of the sort Hannah Arendt described as "the banalization of evil," in the style that refers back to Monty Python.

A random chain of events kicked off by the Ministry of Information's (the internal security agency),own error is seen from inside ministry as further evidence of a terrorist conspiracy. A core theme is the desire to escape from an ordered oppressive totalitarian state through terrorism and, primarily, imagination. Humans survive in this world by keeping their real selves bottled up inside as a cocoon, while overtly serving their role as a specific cog in the totalitarian system. A dream trapped inside of a nightmare, as it were undercutr by the desire to escape the limits of the body through technology.

What I found more interesting was the way the strong visual and surreal imagery overwhelms the plot: the use of a powerplant as a torture set, the ducts as tentacles, the backward technology that harken back to the Industrial Revolution (the complicated heating ducts, the huge, pollution-belching factories, the mail tubes that criss-cross the floors of Information Retrieval, the computers as little more than glorified typewriters).