The future according to 1985

I know I'm supposed to appreciate Terry Gilliam's Brazil as a cult classic, but its dithering final 20-40 minutes only made me crabby. Mostly because it reminded me of how easy it is to screw up absurdism when it strays too far from satire.

For all that, its prescience--case in point: the War! On! Terror!--was sometimes chilling. Also, I couldn't help but notice the flat-panel monitors. Particularly how they were attached to typewriters like the one Grandpa bought second hand from the local newspaper when Mom went off to college (a few months before Ed Sullivan rolled out the carpet for The Beatles). Then again, the waterfall of continuous-feed paper streaming in column after column down the wall of the Head of Information Retrieval was more than a bit reminiscent of The Matrix's fountain-spill of green characters.

It's a slippery thing, the future. (Just ask the nameless narrator in William Gibson's short story "The Gernsback Continuum.") In theory, the future's supposed to be the child of How-You-Know-It's-Supposed-to-Work and What-You're-Doing-to-Make-It-That-Way. But, sometime in the night, something else sneaks through the bedroom door and begets the actual future.