Brazil restaurant scene
example · film: Brazil ·
retold in 8 talks
In Terry Gilliam's Brazil, rich patrons are served a plate of mud with a photo of a steak, illustrating how love now functions: consuming a 'piece of shit' while fantasizing about the exquisite reality.
≤2000talks it is told in, per year2026
As told 8
“What they get when they are served food is a plate what is on the plate is just a shit-like like just something like like a piece of shit formless piece of mud and then a photo of the of the exquisite steak”
“That's our sex more and more. You just need woman or the body as that piece of shit so that you can fantasize about the image.”
“They get a plate on which there is just a kind of a dog shit heap... And above this, it's a beautiful color image telling you what you are really eating.”
What it carries
one story, many jobs: the ideas this anecdote is deployed to argue, one tally mark per use (an idea page shows the same relation from the other end, as its shelf of stories)
Its cast and sources
populated by
Terry Gilliam5Salvador Allende2Alejandro González Iñárritu2Ivan Pavlov2Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer2Daphne du Maurier2Anwar Congo2Henry Kissinger2
alongside works
Every retelling 8
In Terry Gilliam's Brazil, rich patrons are served a plate of mud with a photo of a steak, illustrating how love now functions: consuming a 'piece of shit' while fantasizing about the exquisite reality., illustrating masturbating with a real partner
In Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, diners receive physically a piece of anonymous grey slop, accompanied by a beautiful photograph of what the dish 'really is'. Žižek reads this as the structure of contemporary sex: the actual body is the inert physical prop while one fantasizes about the image above it., illustrating masturbatory sex,deconstructionist hedonism
In Brazil, rich diners receive an unappetizing mash on a plate accompanied by a beautiful colour photo of what they are 'really' eating; the fantasy image, not the real food, constitutes the experience., illustrating fantasy,objet petit a,male heterosexual fantasy of women
In Terry Gilliam's Brazil, restaurant diners receive a grey indistinct lump on their plate but a dazzling color photo of the dish mounted above it; the waiter insists the hero make a free choice among identical lumps to sustain the appearance that the symbolic image matters., illustrating alienation vs. separation,desire is the desire of the Other,ideology of free choice
Gilliam's film depicts a society that is authoritarian yet permits consumerism, sexuality, and promiscuity, Žižek's figure for what Russia, Italy, and other states are approaching., illustrating permissive capitalism,new authoritarianism
Žižek cites the film Brazil as the first depiction of the new form of authority: not old-style terror but a farcical authoritarian structure personified by Berlusconi, 'Groucho Marx in power', a regime that doesn't directly terrorize but maintains all authoritarian structures., illustrating capitalism with Asian values,post-ideological authoritarianism,fascism-populism