Who should be responsible for the death of Mr. Buttle? This question bothers me since the beginning of this movie. However, I cannot find the any person who should be blamed for that. The police are just doing their job, which is arrest Mr. Buttle according to the form they received. They should not be blamed. The typist kills a fly, which falls into the printer and leads the mistake on the form. Yes, he made some mistake, but he should not be blamed because he is completely ignorant about this typo and the consequence of it. The government departments in this movie seem to be responsible for the death of Mr. Buttle. Although several people in these department realize the typo in the form, none of them point that out to save him. Saving him is not their obligation. On the other hand, everyone seems somehow related to Mr. Buttle's death. The typist trusts too much to the printer, and failed to check what happened when the fly fell into the printer. The police trust so much to the form that they even didn't do any investigation. They officers in the government trust too much to their system, so that they don't think there could be something wrong from system. Everyone just trusts too much to the cold machines, to the forms and to the regulations. They leave no room for mistake.
In human history, we invited and developed a lot things, such as machines, politic systems and cultures. I believe most of them are brought up to serve people, so that they can live easier. However, in Brazil, it is the other way around. People serves forms, they record everything in the forms to keep everything in order. They label everything even themselves with letter and numbers. They try to eliminate the influence Mr. Buttle's death in order to make their system looks perfect. This fanaticism and insanity to the social system in this film is the reason of Mr. Buttle's death. It is just ridiculous.
In the movie they say that Mr. Buttle died while being interrogated by jack, who was unaware that he had a heart problem. I think that the blame lies with everyone in the government on this one. Nobody bothered to ensure that they had captured the correct man, and as a result and innocent man lost his life.
ReplyDeleteYou are exactly correct. In this film the humans have "evolved" into serving the machines that they have created rather than the machines serving the humans... There is even a sense of disgust present in the amount of paperwork required to take a single action "for the system." Ironically, as Sam attempts to further distance himself from the system (by means of his reoccurring dream state which ultimately invades his reality in the form of insanity) he falls in lust with his dream girl, who then appears in a much different form in reality. As he tries to gain access to her information he takes a job that further integrates himself into the system he despises so much, and in doing so he loses yet another aspect of his human individuality - In his job under Kurtzmann he still has a name, but once he take the job at Information Retrieval his name is systematically replaced by badge number for identification... I don't think our current reality is too far from this point. Sure, the film has overly dramatized things, but we can find many parallels between this fantasy and our reality...
ReplyDelete