We must understand that 1984, finished in 1948, and Brazil, that came out in 1985, respond to very different historical experiences. The essential point is not that one marks the go-ahead of the Cold War and the other of the Perestroika; the essential point is that they deal with different problems. What was happening is essentially linked to what Deleuze wrote about in the Postscript on Control Societies (1990).

What is in question is: What escape routes does Brazil offer us? What weapons does it give us? Saying that it deals with a different problem means that the oedipal machinery has changed; and this means that there are new means of controlling desire. As powerful as Big Brother’s machinery was, it will always depend on imminent power, it will always remain extrinsic. Hence, for total control, it will need to turn the subject completely extrinsic. But this renders the whole structure rigid and unstable, as it needs to suppress desire completely, and a single act of desire becomes a political act. Behind the unitary appearance of Nazi-Germany, there was a multiplicity of departments that were fighting each other for dominance. And it is almost as a response to this absolute de-erotization, that the machinery of Brazil turns into a complete erotization of the world. In fact, this might be the decisive difference between authoritarian and capitalist types of rule. This doesn’t mean an overcoming of the oedipal machinery, but rather its adaptation, a response to its instability. The switch from de-erotization to erotization is incredibly simple: instead of an inflation of the ruling father, an inflation of the desired mother.

What is striking in Brazil is the omnipresence of Sam Lowry’s mother, but also her power to pull strings at will, like when she arranged Sam’s promotion. “I simply know everybody,” a verdict of fate indeed. But even more importantly, what is striking is her continuous progression as an object of desire: From her being courted by the bureaucrats at her party to the group of admirers around her in the funeral close to the end of the film. Like the mother in oedipal triangulation, though, she is always occupied, but she’s not being occupied by a singular father, but by a multiplicity of figures — her surgeon, Mr. Helpmann, or anonymous bureaucrats, with no strings attached, a continuous contiguity. So, instead of the singular choice of the ‘classical’ oedipal machinery, in which one object of desire is chosen once and for all, we are now dealing with a seemingly free-flowing desire that does not eroticize one object by de-eroticizing all others, but which is kept busy by eroticising everything. Sam can never ‘possess’ the mother, as the oedipal subjects desires to, but this desire is permanently kept alive, because the mother is always ‘occupied’ only temporarily. He always almost possesses her, and is held in a state of permanent dissatisfaction. Each time he possesses an image of the mother, she escapes him once more, and he needs to continue striving.

This marks the changed careerism of capitalist societies in comparison to authoritarian ones: While the careerism of the latter revolves around an absolute centre, in whose gravitational field one needs to persevere, the first is a never-ending moving-to-the-top whose movement is a value in itself — because the spot of the father is empty, everybody can stand in his place, but only for a little while (the 15 minutes of fame). As Mr. Kurtzmann says: Nobody has ever turned down a promotion. Instead of the endless repetition of the ‘classical’ oedipal, instead of its suppression in the authoritarian post-oedipal, we now have an endless array of contiguous territories. And indeed, Lowry never arrives at the same place twice.

Instead of the singular territory of Big Brother, we have a multiplicity of departments that follow different functions, different aesthetics, different logics. The Department of Records, where Sam Lowry starts, is a centrally organised and centrally controlled open office in which everyone stops working once the authority figure looks away (communism), the lower parts of Information Retrieval are divided into small, closed-off offices in which the authority figure is in permanent motion and acts as a decision maker (market-capitalism), while the upper part of Information Retrieval, with its secretary and bourgeois interior is one door away from the torture chamber — not to mention the upper-class pseudo-aristocratic society of Sam’s mother. There is no unifying picture or territory, the only continuity is the Eros of advancement, whose multiple territories are a sign of novelty and short-term satisfaction.

However, with all its apparent variety, there is still one singular machinery, one singular economy that exercises control. While Big Brother in 1984 had the ambition to take the place of the Absolute, to become an emanation of truth (with its Ministry of Truth), the surplus value that fuels the economy of Brazil is an accumulation of information (note the change to the Ministry of Information). Information itself is given a financial value — if we want to call Brazil prophetic in any way, then it is the prescience of Big Data. But how can information be given a financial value? With what is called Information Retrieval Charges. Every arrestee needs to pay for the whole procedure himself — his arrest, his interrogation, or, rather, torture. That’s what drives one line of the plot: Because Buttle was arrested wrongly, his family is being sent back a refund, namely for the payment of his own murder. A truly perverted economy, as during Sam’s own trial, the government offers him to pay for his procedure — with interests, of course: “Now either you plead guilty to seven of eight of the charges which will help keep costs down within your means or you can borrow a sum to be negotiated from us at a very competitive rate.” The raison d’être of whole system of surveillance is therefore not control in itself, but to find a reason to arrest somebody so to extract money from them. So what we can observe is a conjunction of three machineries: the surveillance machinery that extracts information, the law machinery that justifies the subject’s arrest and produces its guilt, and the financial machinery that turns guilt into debt (in German you’d say: Schuld in Schulden). So we see why desire needs to keep moving within this machinery: for a perpetual accumulation of information as to perpetuate the debt of the subject.

Now, what are the escape routes that are sketched out in Brazil? Let us turn our attention to the actual subject of the case: Sam Lowry. Sam starts out with what Winston Smith desired: intimacy. Indeed, Sam thinks to have found his escape route by the beginning of the film in his act of non-participation, of disinterest, of his free imagination of fantasy. But he’s fallen into the oldest oedipal trap: The damsel in distress he keeps dreaming about is not a fantasy woman, but, as it becomes clear in the bedroom and the funeral scenes, his own mother. In the bedroom scene, where Sam and Jill sleep together in his mother’s bed, she is wearing one of her wigs, which turns out to be the hairdo of the dream woman in the beginning of the film. In the funeral scene, Sam’s mother is shortly played by Kim Greist, who actually portrayed Jill — the two figures overlap. You can’t have a more classical oedipal situation: Sam hunts after Jill who he believes was his dream woman, but in fact he was chasing after the image of his mother. While Sam’s initial act of rebellion consists of a denial of (careerist) desire in lieu of an intimate fantasy, he does not escape the oedipal by it and it becomes more apparent the more his dreams become mingled with his erotic desire.