It is not easy, you see, to be precise about the location of the world of the imagination … But if I believe (and I do) that the imagined world is, must be, connected to the observable one, then I should be able, should I not, to locate it, to say how you get there from here … These reflections have been prompted by Terry Gilliam’s magnificent new film of future totalitarianism, Brazil. Because the more highly imagined a piece of work, the more ticklish this problem of location becomes … At the most obvious level, the film is set in Dystopia, Utopia’s dark opposite, the worst of possible worlds … As N.F. Simpson revealed in One Way Pendulum, the world of the imagination is a place into which the long arm of the law is unable to reach. This idea – the opposition of imagination to reality, which is also of course the opposition of art to politics – is of great importance, because it reminds us that we are not helpless, that to dream is to have power. And I suggest that the true location of Brazil is the other great tradition of art, the one in which techniques of comedy, metaphor, heightened imagery, fantasy, and so on are used to break down our conventional, habit-dulled certainties about what the world is and has to be … It is also relevant that Terry Gilliam is a migrant. “America bombards you with dreams and deprives you of your own,” he says, and Brazil is about that, too: the struggle between private, personal dreams (flying, love) and the great mass-produced fantasies (eternal youth, material wealth, power) … Brazil is the product of that odd thing, the migrant sensibility, whose development I believe to be one of the central themes of this century of displaced persons. To be a migrant is, perhaps, to be the only species of human being free of the shackles of nationalism (to say nothing of its ugly sister, patriotism). It is a burdensome freedom … And if I am to conclude with the simple (but also, perhaps, not so simple) observation that the location of Brazil is the cinema itself, because in the cinema the dream is the norm, then I should add that this cinematic Brazil is a land of make-believe of which all of us who have, for whatever reason, lost a country and ended up elsewhere are the true citizens. Like Terry Gilliam, I am a Brazilian.

Salman Rushdie, The Location of Brazil, “American Film”, September 1985