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Asad Raza writes in 3 Quarks Daily: “There’s a quasi-famous shot I keep remembering in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 movie Brazil. In it, Jonathan Pryce’s character, who has come to realize he lives in a fascist state, drives down an expressway. The walls to either side of the road surface are covered in billboards and advertisements. As Pryce’s car drives away from the viewer, the camera ascends, revealing that just outside the walls, invisible to drivers, lies a grim wasteland. The vivid and friendly billboards hide the truth, which is that the actual world hidden from view by their flimsy walls is barren. It is post-industrially empty–and having stripped it, the state consoles its subjects by substituting pasted-up two-dimensional images advertising island vacations. When the movie opens, Pryce’s Sam Lowry is an obedient, crushed civil servant whose only escape is dreams. Now he, and we, learn that this reality is a façade; the truth is bleaker and wilder.”

Holy crap, we’re living in a Terry Gilliam movie!