Terry Gilliam 9781526125514

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Terry Gilliam

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british film

MAKERs

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Brian McFarlane, Neil Sinyard  series editors

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Allen Eyles, Philip French, Sue Harper, Tim Pulleine, Jeffrey Richards, Tom Ryall series advisers

british film MAKERs

already published Anthony Asquith  tom ryall Roy Ward Baker  geoff mayer Sydney Box  andrew spicer Jack Clayton  neil sinyard Lance Comfort  brian mcfarlane Terence Davies  wendy everett Terence Fisher  peter hutchings Launder and Gilliat  bruce babington Derek Jarman  rowland wymer Mike Leigh  tony whitehead Joseph Losey  colin gardner Carol Reed  peter william evans Michael Reeves  benjamin halligan Karel Reisz  colin gardner J. Lee Thompson  steve chibnall

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Terry Gilliam

british film MAKERs

Peter Marks

Manchester University Press manchester

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Copyright © Peter Marks 2009 The right of Peter Marks to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7ja, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn 978 0 7190 7032 7 hardback First published 2009 18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10  09    

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or ­appropriate.

Typeset in Scala with Meta display by Koinonia, Manchester

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Contents

list of plates series editors’ foreword acknowledgements   1 Introduction

page  vii ix x 1

  2 Something completely different

17

  3 Monsters and gods

42

  4 Time and meaning

63

  5 Dreams, fantasies and nightmares

84

  6 Pasts, presents and futures in America

131

  7 Transatlantic Gonzo

174

  8 Fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies

202

filmography bibliography index

254 262 268

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List of plates

1 Becoming animated: Terry Gilliam reconfigured as Conrad Poos and His Dancing Teeth in And Now for Something Completely Different (1971). Python (Monty) Pictures

page 125

2 Gilliam suffering the fatal heart attack that saves the Knights of the Round Table from the Black Beast of Arrrghhh in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974). Python (Monty) Pictures

125

3 Medieval Economic Rationalism: Wat Dabney (Jerrold Wells) explains to Dennis Cooper (Michael Palin) the golden economic opportunity opened up by cutting off one’s foot and becoming a beggar in Jabberwocky (1977). Python Films

126

4

Crucifixion Party organiser Nissus Wettus (Michael Palin) tries to make sense of the impenetrably scatological ravings of a mad jailer (Terry Gilliam) while the jailer’s stuttering assistant (Eric Idle) looks on dimly in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). HandMade Films

126

5

Watched by Wally (Jack Purvis) and Randall (David Rappaport), Kevin (Craig Warnock) challenges the Supreme Being (unseen here, but played by Ralph Richardson) to explain why people have to die needlessly to fulfil the Supreme Being’s plan. The reply, ‘I think it has something to do with Free Will’ fails to convince him in Time Bandits (1981). HandMade Films 127

6 Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) as the dynamic and romantic hero of his own dreams in Brazil (1985). Embassy International Pictures

127

7

128

The real Baron Munchausen (John Neville, foreground) lambasts the actors misrepresenting him on stage (Alison Steadman, Uma Thurman, Valentina Cortese, Eric Idle, Winston Dennis) in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989). Prominent Features

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viii  list of plates 8 Parry (Robin Williams) brought low by his nemesis, the Red Knight, on the streets of New York in The Fisher King (1991). Columbia Pictures

128

9 Under the all-seeing eye of the video ball, and on the verge of mental collapse, James Cole (Bruce Willis) undergoes interrogation in Twelve Monkeys (1996). Universal Pictures

129

10

‘Get In’: with his delusional driving companion Dr Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) having promised that ‘We’re not like the others’, a chemically invigorated Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) offers a hitch-hiker (Tobey Maguire) the trip of his life in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Rhino Films

129

11

The forceful rationalist Wilhelm Grimm (Matt Damon) and the pen-wielding fantasist Jacob Grimm (Heath Ledger) pretend to consider how best to confront the Mill Witch in The Brothers Grimm (2005). Miramax Films

130

12

Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho: the highly imaginative Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), the heads of her doll companions on her fingertips, stands outside the house where her dead father (Jeff Bridges) will be gutted and preserved in varnish in Tideland (2005). Capri Films 130

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Series editors’ foreword

The aim of this series is to present in lively, authoritative volumes a guide to those film-makers who have made British cinema a rewarding but still under-researched branch of world cinema. The intention is to provide books that are up-to-date in terms of information and critical approach, but not bound to any one theoretical methodology. Though all books in the series will have certain elements in common – comprehensive filmographies, annotated bibliographies, appropriate illustration – the actual critical tools employed will be the responsibility of the individual authors. Nevertheless, an important recurring element will be a concern for how the oeuvre of each film-maker does or does not fit certain critical and industrial contexts, as well as for the wider social contexts that helped to shape not just that particular film-maker but the course of British cinema at large. Although the series is director-orientated, the editors believe that reference to a variety of stances and contexts is more likely to reconceptualise and reappraise the phenomenon of British cinema as a complex, shifting field of production. All the texts in the series will engage in detailed discussion of major works of the film-makers involved, but they all consider as well the importance of other key collaborators, of studio organisation, of audience reception, of recurring themes and structures: all those other aspects that go towards the construction of a national cinema. The series explores and charts a field that is more than ripe for serious excavation. The acknowledged leaders of the field will be reappraised; just as important, though, will be the bringing to light of those who have not so far received any serious attention. They are all part of the very rich texture of British cinema, and it will be the work of this series to give them all their due.

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Acknowledgements

This book has benefited from the assistance and support of other people, many of whom can never know how much they helped. I thank Professor Neil Sinyard and Matthew Frost for their congenial encouragement at the start of this adventure and at various points along the way. Matthew’s good grace, timely advice, and prudent use of encouragement and coercion was always appreciated, even if my cavalier attitude to deadlines suggested otherwise. I also acknowledge the institutional help provided by the University of Sydney in the form of financial assistance: an Arts Faculty Seed Funding Grant in 2003 helped in the germination process; a Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences Writing Fellowship in 2005 provided that precious resource, free time. A late injection of funds from the School of Literature and Arts and Media pushed the manuscript over the line. Phil Stubbs gets a special thank you for his intelligent, incisive and constructively critical reading of the manuscript. His encyclopaedic knowledge of things Gilliam has improved the finished product immensely; its remaining faults are all my own work. Thanks also to friends who allowed me to discuss ideas, anxieties and frustrations or provided emotional and material succour at key moments. In no particular order: Dr David Kelly, Eugene Chan, Professor Helen Fulton, Craig Helm and Fiona Williams, Dr Melinda Harvey, Richard Marks, and the inimitable Ella Marks. My faithful, true and long-suffering companion along the way has been Jo Watson. Without her, this book would not exist. Ta. This book is dedicated to my parents, Sharon and Bob Marks, who taught me how to laugh.

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Introduction

1

An illuminating book could be written on the films Terry Gilliam has not made. We might take this as a positive claim about the films this imaginative director has still to make; negatively, it could introduce a list of films Gilliam has failed to realise. The positive reading would emphasise that when he qualified as a British pensioner in 2005, Gilliam had two films ready for release: the big budget fantasy The Brothers Grimm and the smaller and edgier Tideland. The vitality of these very different films declared his continuing creativity. But Grimm and Tideland exposed the seven-year gap since his previous completed film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). In between lay the ruins of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a cherished project he had worked on for years. Gilliam hoped that Quixote would help promote a European-based film industry independent of Hollywood. Instead, it collapsed in 2001 only a week into production, the victim of biblical floods, a hospitalised leading man, under-funding and NATO jets. These miseries are recounted briefly later, but they were recorded in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary Lost in La Mancha (2002). This charted in cruelly hilarious detail Quixote’s disintegration, itself attracting critical acclaim and awards. Quixote seems a strong candidate for the ‘unrealised’ list, but in fact in the wake of The Brothers Grimm and Tideland Gilliam strove to revive the project. Along with other stalled work, it might best be classified as not realised yet. Concentrating on the often-dramatic narratives surrounding the making of individual films threatens to distract attention from a critical examination of the works themselves. Gilliam ultimately must be judged on the films that make it to the screen, not on the entertaining agonies that retard or distort the process of their making. Excluding the larger forces and processes that have informed those films, though, misrepresents Gilliam’s career as a British filmmaker. Considering this broader context raises tantalising questions, not least whether, as a native son

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2  terry gilliam of Minnesota, he is a British filmmaker at all. His classification has to be argued for rather than merely assumed. At times the argument has become quite rancorous, as in 2000, when Gilliam and Don Quixote drew the wrath of the London Evening Standard’s influential film critic, Alexander Walker, who claimed that both director and film were insufficiently British. Don Quixote had received a £2 million award from the National Lottery in Britain as part of a budget deal that included French and German money. Walker suggested that Gilliam was representative of Americans who grab British money to make ­disastrous ‘Euro­ puddings’. Gilliam fired back that he travelled on a British passport, had married in England, fathered children there and lived and worked there for thirty-three years. These facts hardly made him the transatlantic carpetbagger Walker insinuated. Gilliam’s nationality is more complex and more interesting than he suggests in rebutting Walker. For while in 2000 he was a British citizen, he only became one in 1988, during the filming of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989), an earlier expedition into the precarious world of European filmmaking. By 1988 Gilliam had lived in Britain for two decades, establishing himself as a central force in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the most inventive and celebrated comedy troupe in British television. His work with Python assured him a revered place in the history of that medium in Britain. And the Python films, And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), The Holy Grail (1974), Life of Brian (1979) and The Meaning of Life (1983), along with his own, Jabberwocky (1977), Time Bandits (1981) and Brazil (1985), show him moving successfully into the British film industry. Each of these works can be categorised without difficulty as British films, and Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Brazil were included in the British Film Institute’s ‘100 Favourite British Films of the 20th Century’.1 The Encyclopedia of British Film (2003) even classifies Gilliam’s European collaboration, Baron Munchausen (1988), as British.2 Through almost all of this Gilliam was not a British citizen. Before he was a British filmmaker in a way that might satisfy passport authorities and Alexander Walker, then, Gilliam undeniably was a British film maker. Paradoxically, having taken out British citizenship, in addition to his American citizenship, Gilliam’s post-Munchausen films, The Fisher King (1991), Twelve Monkeys (1996) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, were his most ‘American’ works, embedded in American culture, peopled by American actors and made for American studios. What might seem a surprising relocation from Europe had pragmatic motives, for the troubled production of Munchausen caused him to try his luck in the American system. He did not, however, abandon Britain or Europe, as Quixote

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introduction  3 shows, but that film’s demise, and several years of frustrated projects, forced him back to Hollywood and The Brothers Grimm. Grimm again proved the American studio system largely antagonistic to his sensibility. Tideland, by contrast, a British-Canadian production, supplied Gilliam with artistic freedom and challenge, and even though it is set in America, it qualifies as a British film. As if to tie up loose national threads, by 2006 Gilliam had renounced his American citizenship, making him solely a British filmmaker for the first time in his thirty-year career. Gilliam’s complex interaction with Britain and America explains his ambiguous place in accounts of American and British film. Roger Wilmut’s From Fringe to Flying Circus (1980),3 an account of British stage television and film comedy, registers his contribution, as does Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors (1991). There, Peter Greenaway speaks of admiring Gilliam and fellow Python Terry Jones for their anarchy and irreverence,4 while Derek Jarman puts ‘glorious Terry Gilliam’s Brazil’ on a very short list of British 1970s and 1980s films he would keep.5 By contrast, the collection’s editors place Gilliam in a group of American directors ‘such as Joseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick … or Richard Lester [who] have spent much of their careers in Britain making often quite British films from their own American perspective’.6 The British Cinema Book (2001) places Gilliam in a ‘visionary sector’ comprising the ‘maverick talents of Terry Gilliam (Brazil), Nic Roeg (Eureka), Derek Jarman (Caravaggio), Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives) and Peter Greenaway (The Belly of an Architect)’.7 Gilliam’s American work in the 1990s, however, determines that he does appear in British Cinema of the 90s (2000).8 The Companion to British and Irish Cinema (1996) lists Gilliam as an ‘American/British director’, along with Losey and Lester; Kubrick is labelled ‘American’.9 The Encyclopedia of British Film gives Gilliam an entry, but ignores the ‘American’ films of the 1990s.10 Yet histories of recent American films rarely mention him.11 These appearances and absences reveal a critical element of his work, hinted at in his claim that Brazil takes place on the border between Belfast and Los Angeles. This subversive blurring of boundaries operates on more than geographical terms, for Gilliam’s films consistently interweave historical periods, cinematic and literary genres, high art and comics, realms of madness, fantasy and sanity, as well as comedy, the grotesque, utopias, satire and horror. This defining element of intersecting diversity captivates and challenges many audiences, even as it confuses or disconcerts others. For all the idiosyncrasies of his British and American traces, Losey, Lester and Kubrick indicate that Gilliam’s complicated relationship to Britishness is not unique. Losey is the subject of Colin Gardner’s study

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4  terry gilliam in this series, so it could be argued that the case for American-born filmmakers has been made already. But Gardner notes that most film followers are surprised to find that the director of quintessentially British films as The Servant and The Go-Between is not British by birth.12 Gilliam’s films are less obviously ‘British’ in terms of content or tone, but Gardner’s examination of Losey supplies useful connections and contrasts. Gardner recounts that Losey was forced from the United States by 1950s blacklisting, and that Losey suffered the effects of exile through his subsequent time in Britain and Europe. Gardner sees Losey as indelibly marked by displacement, employing Edward Said’s view of the exile as ‘outside habitual order’, ‘nomadic, decentred, contrapuntal’.13 Said gives the exile aesthetic attributes: ‘Wilfulness, exaggeration, overstatement: these are characteristic styles of being an exile, methods for compelling the world to accept your vision.’14 Much of this can be applied to Gilliam, and he also left America for broadly political reasons. But his dissatisfaction in the 1960s mirrored the views of many of his generation, and he left America on his own terms, rather than under political pressure. Gilliam could and did return to make films in America. In Said’s terms he was a critical expatriate rather than an exile.15 But Gilliam’s defence against Alexander Walker illustrates that he saw himself as more than an expatriate. There are important distinctions between Gilliam and Losey, not least how Losey’s training in theatre and Gilliam’s in cartooning fed into their respective directing styles.16 And while Losey relocated in Europe to revive his career, Gilliam continued being a cartoonist and illustrator when he arrived in Britain. The point is not to establish a hierarchy of oppression, but to indicate that Gilliam’s move was not determined by the exigencies of filmmaking. Indeed, had he stayed in America, he might never have become a filmmaker at all. We can make a preliminary case for Gilliam as a British filmmaker, but comparing Gilliam’s work to the unimpeachably ‘British’ films of Losey raises the contextual question of whether Gilliam makes British films. The Encyclopedia of British Film thinks so, listing all his films up to and including Baron Munchausen (and his work with Python) as British. For the encyclopedia, though, Munchausen marks the outer limits of Gilliam’s cinematic Britishness. Twelve Monkeys, although labelled a ‘Pythonesque satire’, is designated American, while The Fisher King and Fear and Loathing, clearly not encoded with the essential Britishness of Python, get no mention. This cropped entry could be written off as British parochialism, but it provides a starting point for considering Gilliam’s films in the narrative of British filmmaking. The ­Encyclopedia itself draws on the BFI Film and Television Handbook 1999, which ­distinguishes six ‘UK Film Categories’:

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introduction  5 Category A: Films where the cultural and financial impetus is from the UK and the majority of the personnel are British. Category B: Majority UK Co-Productions. Films in which, though there are foreign partners, there is a UK cultural content and a significant amount of British finance and personnel. Category C: Minority UK Co-Productions. Foreign (non US films) in which there is a small UK involvement in finance or personnel. Category D: American films with a UK creative and/or minor financial involvement. Category D1: American financed or part financed films made in the UK. Most films have a British cultural content. Category D2: American films with some UK financial involvement.17

By necessity, the categories are loose, but they reflect (especially through Category D) the symbiotic and sometimes parasitic relationship between the British and American industries. Applying these categories to Gilliam’s films reveals a predominance of films in Category A (the Monty Python films; Jabberwocky and Time Bandits) and Category C (Baron Munchausen). While Brazil fits the D1 classification, Category D is more difficult, Gilliam’s presence as director seeming to qualify American films such as The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing and The Brothers Grimm as having ‘creative involvement’ from the UK. Such involvement only increases if Gilliam’s role as co-writer (with Englishman Tony Grisoni) on Fear and Loathing and (uncredited) on The Brothers Grimm is included. One could add the creative input from key British crew members on those films, including editors Lesley Walker and Mick Audsley, and director of photography Roger Pratt, who collectively have contributed to an array of indisputably British films: Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and Prick Up Your Ears (Audsley), Mona Lisa and High Hopes (Pratt), Letter To Breshnev and Emma (Walker). Tideland was financed with British and Canadian money, produced by Englishman Jeremy Thomas, co-written with Grisoni, and edited by Walker. The crew was mostly Canadian, Italian Nicola Pecorini was cinematographer, and the financial backing of the film meant that it was shot in Canada. Tideland defies the supposed trend towards Americanisation in Gilliam’s 1990s films. And if The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is made, it will qualify as a Category C British film. Applying BFI standards challenges the notion that Gilliam morphed from a director resident in Britain making British films to an Americanborn director increasingly making American films. In fact, his films register something important about British filmmaking generally, for they are part of the transatlantic negotiation that has taken place at least

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6  terry gilliam since Alfred Hitchcock departed for Hollywood. And not just with filmmakers; the British film industry has long lived in the shadow of ‘American domination’.18 Gilliam’s relatively eccentric career supplies one small subplot in a much larger and mainly fraught narrative of British cinema in general. Robert Murphy’s introduction to The British Cinema Book provides a devastating overview of that story: ‘Apart from a brief upsurge of interest between 1942 and 1947, British cinema has been disparaged and despised for most of its existence.’19 The introduction to the second edition, gloomily subtitled British Cinema Saved – British Cinema Doomed, includes two quotations, the first from cinematographer Brian Tufano: ‘I believe one of the problems of British cinema is that it never found its own voice – it was lost somewhere between Europe and Hollywood.’20 The second comes from Gilbert Adair and Nick James who argue that [b]y comparison with the half-dozen indisputably great national cinemas (i.e. the French, American, Japanese, Italian, German and Scandinavian), our domestic product has always been, except for a brief flurry at the turn of the last [i.e. nineteenth] century, relatively minor. [original emphasis]21

Working in British cinema, it seems, counts as a mixed blessing. Historical studies show British cinema struggling to maintain its viability. Ernest Betts, whose account ends the year And Now for Something Completely Different was released, argues that ‘What our directors have always lacked is continuity of output, so that they can neither develop their ideas with certainty nor plan ahead. All is sweat, gamble and frustration. Nothing settles down, no roots are struck, the future of the industry is next Monday.’22 The grim state of the British film industry continued well into the 1970s, underlined by film historians neglecting the period. Surveying ‘ten decades of British Film’, Gilbert Adair and Nick Roddick distinguish between ‘The British Tradition’, which ends in the 1960s with the whimper of Bond films and ‘the tuppence coloured shockers of Ken Russell’, and the bang of ‘The British Revival’ that begins with Chariots of Fire in 1981.23 This erases films of the 1970s, when three Python films and Gilliam’s Jabberwocky were made. Nor is this dismissal unique, Pamela Church Gibson and Andrew Hill noting that ‘there seems to be an unspoken consensus that British cinema of the 70s should be bypassed or relegated to footnotes’.24 Gilliam’s career as filmmaker begins in this largely ignored decade. By the 1980s, as Nick James comments,25 Gilliam can be placed among the British visionaries and mavericks, but the British environment failed to improve. Alexander Walker judges that between 1984 and 2000

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a once thriving, respected and socially relevant entertainment industry was turned into a chaos of competitive and incompatible elements; once great film corporations crashed, new saviours came forward regularly, only to collapse under the weight of their own ambitions; stars, directors and writers and other creative people continually promised renewal of the talent bank or redemption of the idea of a national cinema, but seldom delivered on their promises.26

Walker’s book is subtitled The Decline and Fall of Almost Everybody in the British Film Industry 1984–2000. Brazil apart, in this unpropitious period Gilliam made all his films outside Britain. These bleak assessments of the British film industry since the 1980s provide some context for assessing Gilliam’s films. Naturally, not all British filmmakers since the 1970s have endured the Dickensian state of affairs conjured up by critics and historians. The following chapters show that in fact Gilliam sometimes enjoyed a remarkable degree of financial support and creative freedom, especially with films linked to Monty Python. But problems with individual works, recorded in a small library of books and films, coupled with Gilliam’s nonconformist reputation, naturally raise the spectre of that romantic figure, the embattled but triumphantly creative auteur. Any study of a director, almost by default, suggests some form of coherent development that reflects, or emanates from, an individual vision. The heroic quotient only rises if the director faces institutional restrictions. As Dudley Andrew notes, ‘auteur theory values the personality of the director precisely because of the barriers to its expression’.27 Gilliam has his own complex sense of what auteurism means. He repeatedly insists on films being a learning process for him, involving an endless apprenticeship, rather than an eventually attained mastery. His first experience of directing a feature film was a collaboration with another newcomer, Terry Jones, on Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Speaking about Baron Munchausen, made a decade later, he claims that ‘I keep trying to demystify the whole auteur approach to films, although I think I’m probably more of an auteur than most’. Explaining this contradictory statement, he notes that, while many people contribute to his films, they can be seen as Gilliam films because ‘I’m the filter that lets certain ideas through and stops other. That’s my function; I have an idea of what the film’s supposed to be, but half the things that end up in the film I would never have thought of myself.’28 So, while he often instigates his films and often co-writes them, he encourages input from cast and crew. On Baron Munchausen this led to problems, with many Italian members of the crew (some of whom had worked with Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini) expecting a dominating maestro

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8  terry gilliam

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rather than a responsive filter. Gilliam’s less heroic role requires a more measured consideration of the auteur, and the vicissitudes of his career caution against any simplified auteurist reading of his work. His preference for collaboration, improvisation and ‘filtering’ subvert tendencies towards the magisterial. He has even claimed that films don’t need directors to be made. I think that they need somebody who pretends to be the director so that they [film crew] can all go and blame them for everything and not get the answers they need so they get on and do their job as best they can. Films can be made that way. The director is more of a myth than anything else and I’m happy to be part of that mythology.29

In The Eloquence of the Vulgar Colin MacCabe warns against ‘producing, on the one hand, an author autonomously creating meanings in a sphere anterior to their specific articulation, and, on the other, an audience imposing whatever meaning it chooses on a text’.30 This accords with Gilliam’s attitude to audiences, from whom he demands interactive engagement. He stresses that viewers make up their own minds, registering and considering possibilities and ambiguities: You have to leave space for people’s imaginations to do the work. When I make a film, I lay things out but don’t always show how they relate. I juxtapose things and the mind has to make the connections. It’s not that I want to confuse the audience, like it’s a puzzle to be solved. I try to make the audience work at it and do their bit, and if it succeeds then everyone comes out with their own film. I know the story I’m trying to tell, but the one they come away with may be a different one, which is fine and dandy because they’ve become part of the film-making process. [original emphasis]31

This crucial negotiation between audience and film undermines the filmmaker’s authority, and Gilliam’s acknowledgement that audiences might be confused indicates that the complicated interweave of narratives, themes and visual motifs in his films can threaten to overload the viewer with information and stimulation. He understands that works such as Brazil, Twelve Monkeys and Tideland cannot easily be understood on the first viewing, that they are direct and conscious challenges to the passive viewer. There are dangers, for Gilliam’s critics see confusion rather than complexity, with ravishing images and breathtaking set pieces that do not cohere into fully integrated or sustained films. Timothy Corrigan explores another aspect of auteurism, explaining that it also functions as ‘a commercial strategy for organising the ­audience, as a critical concept bound to distributing and marketing aims that identify and address the potential cult status of an auteur’.32 Gilliam

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introduction  9 certainly rates as a cult director, to the point of having an informed and informative website devoted to him.33 And despite occasional box-office flops, Gilliam’s name carries commercial weight. Bob McCabe records that in the tense and prolonged negotiations that took place in the postproduction phase of The Brothers Grimm, Gilliam initially refused to have the words ‘A Film By Terry Gilliam’ included in the film’s advertising. Producer Bob Weinstein, understanding the drawing power of Gilliam’s name, insisted on their inclusion, and Gilliam accepted what he called ‘a parenting issue’ with the film: ‘no matter how difficult the birth, my name goes on it’.34 Gilliam remains committed to a particular and personal vision for his films, but his approach also downplays his authority over their meaning, instead encouraging audiences to acts of creative interpretation. Nick James indicates that Gilliam’s maverick status has much to do with him working in the ‘visionary sector’. His films largely ignore the dominant heritage and realist modes of British films, instead exposing reality to the various worlds of the imagination. They consequently prompt their protagonists (and their audiences) to new ways of understanding everyday existence. Gilliam’s general approach fits into a larger conception and critique of realism. Robert Stam, examining the connections between conventional realism and what he calls ‘reflexive alternatives’ in both literature and cinema, observes that the valorization of realism is often linked to the idea that magic and the fantastic have been superseded by Enlightenment Reason … Magic and romance become devalued as anachronistic vestiges or prior modes of consciousness to be ‘surmounted’ by the more evolved and rational modes of Enlightened Modernity. Fantasy and magic, in this view, are vestiges of a past better left behind.35

Gilliam’s regular use of anachronism to upset standard conceptions of reality and rationalism supplies one defining signature in his films. In Time Bandits, a modern English boy travels back in time to mythical Macedonia, while in The Fisher King a medieval knight plunges through the streets of contemporary New York. These and many other instances underline the significance for Gilliam of pre-rationalist modes of consciousness. As he reveals in discussing The Holy Grail, the mentality of the medieval world with its blend of reality and fantasy always intrigued him. This inclination towards the lessons earlier civilisations might teach is fused with a more fundamental distrust of mechanistic and oppressive rationality. Gilliam values the magic, fantasy and romance that Stam sees rationalism devaluing, and his films depict and champion those elements.

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10  terry gilliam Placing Gilliam in the category of cinematic fantasist does some preliminary critical work, but crudely homogenises the diversity of his output. One way of marking this range comes from understanding that Gilliam employs an extraordinary variety of genres: medieval comedy; children’s historical adventure; dystopian satire; the fantastic voyage; science fiction; Gonzo Journalism; fairy tale; and gothic horror. Each genre rejects or reworks the norms of realism, but in distinct ways, so that the impossible tales of Baron Munchausen differ substantially from the time travelling of James Cole in Twelve Monkeys or the protective fantasies of Jeliza-Rose in Tideland. Certainly the narrative of a journey to other worlds or metaphysical realms runs through nearly all his films, but, again, Kevin’s morally instructive adventures in Time Bandits are different from Sam Lowry’s largely self-serving flights of fancy in Brazil, or the drug-fuelled roller-coaster ride of Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing. We need to recognise the multitude of fantastic worlds possible, and their distinctive negotiations with reality. With Gilliam, these worlds are not discrete, with the real and the fantastic colliding with and informing each other, adding a crucial interactive dimension. Like genres themselves, such worlds are hybrids, able to contain and combine the sublime and the grotesque, comedy and gothic horror, romance and history, fantasy and totalitarian nightmare. Hybridity can perplex audiences. Ian Christie notes that questions of genre have ‘bedevilled Gilliam’s critical reputation’. He judges that there seems no easy answer to the query to what genre do Gilliam’s most personal and passionate films belong? Peopled by Monty Python regulars as well as ‘real’ actors, Time Bandits, Brazil and Munchausen mix elements of Python undergrad revue humour with an appeal to the mythopoeic that would normally be considered serious. Yet their tone is rarely that: it is scatological, surreal, symbolic – and often silly. But silly isn’t pejorative in the Gilliam universe; it evokes a tradition of playful nonsense that includes Disney, Carroll, Hoffmann, and for that matter, Shakespeare.36

This study argues the centrality of hybridity to Gilliam’s films. The uncertainty generates the conditions for characters to break free from the dominant and domineering forces of rationality, prompting audiences to undergo similarly transformative processes. This fits with Steve Neale’s view that ‘Negotiating the balance between different regimes of verisimilitude plays a key role in the relations established between spectators, genres and individual films. In markedly non-verisimili­tudinous genres these relations can be particularly complex – and particularly fragile.’37 Gilliam draws primarily from ‘non-verisimilitudinous genres’, creating fragile and complex relations between audience and genre. This

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is part of Gilliam’s strategy to open up the liberating power of magic and fantasy. Steve Neale argues that the predominant ideology of realism means that, unless marked as high art, many avowedly non-realist genres are viewed as frivolously escapist, as ‘mere fantasy’, and thus as suitable only for children, or for ‘mindless’, ‘irresponsible’ adults.38 Consequently, adults who find themselves viewing examples of these genres have often to disown their enjoyment by maintaining that such genres – and such pleasures – are not really for them, but for children, teenagers, others less ‘responsible’ (less ‘adult’) than they are themselves.39

For Gilliam, though, the child’s perspective should to be valued, its loss mourned. One motivation for Time Bandits, he reveals, was the desire to write a film intelligent enough for children and exciting enough for adults, and in works such as Time Bandits, Baron Munchausen, Twelve Monkeys, The Brothers Grimm and Tideland, the child’s perspective gets privileged over the compromised adult sensibility. What might be considered childish, adolescent or ‘irresponsible’ genres (fairy tales, fanta­­sies, science fiction, Hunter S. Thompson’s Gonzo Journalism) are employed emphatically for their capacity to unsettle, enchant and unfetter rationally dominated adults. Gilliam repeatedly declares that children instinctively and creatively respond to the fantasy elements in his films, and laments that adults are not always as imaginative. Within the films themselves, characters unable to respond to fantasy face tough sanctions. In Time Bandits, the essentially brain-dead parents of the resourceful young hero Kevin get unsentimentally blown to pieces at the film’s end. For Gilliam, the unimaginative life seems not worth living. Considering genre in Gilliam’s films reveals that, despite the fact that he is usually recognised for his visual gifts, most of his films have been adaptations of literary texts. Adaptation signals another form of productive intersection, and Gilliam usually takes motifs or elements from larger texts and expands or reworks them. Jabberwocky incorporates elements from the short poem in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There and forges an extended tale of monsters and market forces. Baron Munchausen builds on some tales from the original texts, constructing a complex examination of fantasy, representation and mortality. These adaptations create provocative intertexts with their source material, something that applies even in films he did not write. Twelve Monkeys, written by David Peoples and Janet Peoples, was ‘inspired’ by Chris Marker’s La Jetée, while The Brothers Grimm (whose original script was written by Ehren Kruger) incorporates a variety of excerpts from classic fairy tales. Robert Stam, drawing from

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12  terry gilliam Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential arguments about the general hybridity of texts, and Gerard Genette’s notion of ‘transtextuality’, proposes that the ‘trope of adaptation as a “reading” of the source novel, one which is inevitably partially personal, conjectural … suggests that just as any literary text can generate an infinity of readings, so any novel can generate any number of adaptations. An adaptation is thus less a resuscitation of an originary word than a turn in an ongoing dialogical process.’40 This dialogical process becomes even more complex if, as so often in Gilliam’s films, genres are spliced together and the real is infused with the fantastic. Not that all Gilliam films are equally complex, generically hybrid or ‘fanciful’. Ironically, Jabberwocky, set in the Dark Ages and inhabited by a monster plucked from a nonsense poem, is one of his more ‘realistic’ works. But the inherent intertextuality of all his films merits attention. Before dealing with these works in more depth and detail, it is helpful to interleave the text of Gilliam’s biography. This account will be brief and highly selective, but supplies context and themes explored later in greater depth. Gilliam was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1940. The family soon moved to nearby Medicine Lake, a small rural village of dirt roads and swamps that doubled as playgrounds. Gilliam enjoyed what he describes as a Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn childhood. Fantasy and adventure literature, as well as comics, nourished his imagination, and he quickly discovered his ability as an artist and illustrator. Bolstering the freedom of country living was the strong sense of community, something he later associated with the interpersonal world of the film crew. Another contributing factor to the firm societal ties in Medicine Lake was religion, something that Gilliam later rebelled against, but grew up practising. His early years were ‘a fantastic world – the innocent America that Spielberg keeps trying to put into his movies, but only knows from movies he’s seen and from Norman Rockwell’s illustrations’.41 The family had no television until it relocated to Los Angeles in 1951, its only mass media input coming from radio. Gilliam lauds the benefits to his imagination of not watching television when young, for with radio ‘you’re exercising your creative and imaginative muscles’, whereas ‘with TV it’s all done for you, it’s all served up’.42 His idyllic world was uprooted when the family moved several thousand miles from the rural isolation of Medicine Lake the new suburban landscape of Panorama City in Los Angeles. Where Medicine Lake evoked Rockwell, Gilliam’s references for Panorama City are Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands. The former charts the destruction of California’s Edenic orange groves to make way for corrupt and lucrative real estate ventures, the latter presents the garish

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introduction  13 outcome of this process embodied in a cloned postwar suburbia. Suburban California in the 1950s naturally introduced Gilliam to the world of movies, allowing him to escape to other worlds. Movie-going also exposed him to animation, particular favourites being Snow White and Pinocchio. The opening of Disneyland in 1955 reinforced the otherworldliness of Disney’s magical kingdom, as well as providing him with the closest approximation of the castles that had dotted his childhood reading. Only the real castles he saw hitch-hiking in Europe a decade later would supersede them. Gilliam’s adult reading of Disney animation emphasises two aspects relevant to his own work: the Disney studio’s ‘craftsmanship’ (a recurring and invariably positive term for him), and the high quality of the animated images that resulted from this skill. Given his own visual abilities and the often fantastic worlds conjured up in his films, the exacting standards set by Walt Disney himself provided a benchmark and a challenge to other filmmakers, whether working in animation or not. Gilliam also praises the way that works such as Snow White and Pinocchio ‘were as frightening as they should be. Fairy tales should confront real fears. They’re part of growing up.’43 On television, the comedian Ernie Kovacs’s show opened a world of subversive possibilities, Gilliam recalling it as ‘the first time I had bumped into surrealism or surrealistic comedy’. He recalls a commercial Kovacs performed in which two gunfighters are ‘having a big shoot out and one of them falls down dead and the other one goes to the bar, lights a cigar, and a thousand holes of smoke come out of him’.44 The fact that a cigar company sponsored Kovacs’s show only added to the commercial’s comic anarchy. Kovacs’s surrealism was personally liberating: ‘It freed me, because up to that point everything was so literal, and suddenly there were these incredible leaps showing that a thing didn’t have to be what it was. That’s the key to surrealism for me: it’s a moment when you make that leap and realise that nothing is just what it seems.’45 Gilliam went to university at Occidental College, a small California college. Initially, he took a political science major, worked unhappily on the Chevrolet production line one holiday, and converted the college’s literary magazine into a humour magazine, Fang.46 He sent copies of Fang to the legendary comic writer Harvey Kurtzman, in New York.47 Kurtzman had worked on the cult magazine MAD (a Gilliam favourite) before setting up a more sophisticated satirical magazine for adults called Help! While praising Fang, Kurtzman discouraged Gilliam from trying his luck as a cartoonist in New York, but Gilliam went on the off chance in 1962, arriving just as Help! assistant-editor Charles Alverson was leaving. Gilliam took his place. He recalls Help!, which he worked on for the next three years, as ‘this amazing focus for people because it

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14  terry gilliam was before National Lampoon was created, so all the guys who became the great underground artists, Bob Crumb, Gilbert Sheldon, Jay Lynch, all these guys had their stuff in Help!’48 But Help! provided Gilliam with contact of a lasting and consequential kind. John Cleese was touring the United States in 1964 with the Cambridge Circus, a comedy troupe in the mould of the classic Beyond the Fringe group. Cleese worked with Gilliam on ‘Christopher’s Punctured Romance’, one of Help!’s fumettis (a comic narrative told with photographs) in which a repressed man falls in love with a child’s doll. Cleese would prove a vital link when Gilliam later moved to Britain. But this would not happen before a hitch-hiking tour of Europe, which got Gilliam ‘out of that cocoon of America and American thinking’,49 a spell working for a Los Angeles advertising agency, and the experience of seeing Californian police bashing anti-war protestors. Gilliam recalls that a visit to Disneyland made him realise he had to leave the United States. Refused entrance because his and his companions’ long hair violated the theme park’s ‘grooming policy’, Gilliam noticed ‘barbed wire along the top of the fence. Disneyland had become a kind of concentration camp.’50 His then girlfriend wanted to return to her native England, so in 1967 Gilliam arrived in London, the most significant border crossing of his career. Gilliam’s life, then, has its intertextual and international elements, and the general sense of interaction underpins the approach this study takes to his films. They bring together British, European and American influences, and are formed and informed by the film industries and cultures of these nations and regions. Gilliam’s work productively interweaves sources and references from the cinema, television, radio, art, cartooning and literature. It brings together and sometimes forces together various forms of reality and fantasy, exploring the intersections between these supposedly separate realms. Beyond the remarkably varied material, we can read Gilliam’s collaborative approach to filmmaking and his desire to provoke audiences to their own interpretations as other forms of intertextual practice that connect the making of his films to their reception. Applying that spirit, this study adopts no single theoretical perspective, but draws from an array of theoretical and interpretative sources and approaches. In doing so it adds other texts to an already colourful weave.

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Notes 1 Life of Brian was placed 28th, Brazil 54th. 2 Gilliam entry in Brian McFarlane (ed.), The Encyclopedia of British Film (London, Methuen, 2003), p. 253. 3 Roger Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus: Celebrating a Unique Generation of Comedy 1960–1980 (London, Eyre Methuen, 1980). 4 Peter Greenaway in Jonathan Hacker and David Price (eds), Take Ten: Contem­ porary British Film Directors (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 211. 5 Derek Jarman, in ibid., p. 259. Jarman’s other choices are the Terence Davies trilogy, Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers, Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital and ‘possibly Bill Douglas’s trilogy’. 6 Hacker and Price (eds), Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors, p. 19. 7 Nick James, ‘They Think It’s All Over: British Cinema’s US Surrender’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, 2nd edition (London, BFI, 2001), pp.  301–9, pp. 306–7. 8 Robert Murphy (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s (London, BFI Publishing, 2000). 9 John Caughie, The Companion to British and Irish Cinema (London, Cassell and British Film Institute, 1996), p. 42. 10 McFarlane (ed.), The Encyclopedia of British Film, p. 253. 11 Gilliam is not mentioned in Jim Hiller (ed.), American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader (London, BFI Publishing, 2001); Jon Lewis (ed.), The End of Cinema As We Know It: American Cinema in the Nineties (New York, New York University Press, 2001); Chris Holmund and Justin Wyatt (eds), Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream (London, ­Routledge, 2005). 12 Colin Gardner, Joseph Losey (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004), p.  1. 13 Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London, Granta, 2000), p. 186. 14 Ibid., p. 182. 15 Ibid., p. 181. 16 I thank Phil Stubbs for this point. 17 McFarlane (ed.), The Enyclopedia of British Film, p. xi. 18 Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford, Clarendon, 1995), pp. 9–13. See Jim Leach, British Film (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004). 19 Robert Murphy, ‘Introduction to the First Edition’, in Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, p. xi. 20 Ibid., p. 1. The original source is Saul Metzstein, ‘Grit and Polish’, Sight and Sound, May 2001, p. 12. 21 Murphy, ‘Introduction to the First Edition’, in Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, p. 5. The original source is Independent on Sunday, Culture Section, 12 November 2000, p. 1. 22 Ernest Betts, The Film Business: A History of British Cinema 1896–1972 (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1973), p. 317. 23 Gilbert Adair and Nick Roddick, A Night at the Pictures: Ten Decades of British Film (Bromley, Columbus Books, 1985), p. 72. 24 Pamela Church Gibson and Andrew Hill, ‘“Tutte e marchio!”: Excess, Masquerade and Performativity in 70s Cinema’, in Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, pp.  263–9, p. 263. 25 James, ‘They Think It’s All Over’, in Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, p.  307.

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16  terry gilliam 26 Alexander Walker, Icons in the Fire: The Decline and Fall of Almost Everybody in the British Film Industry 1984–2000 (London, Orion, 2004), p. xx. 27 Dudley Andrew, ‘The Unauthorised Auteur Today’, in Robert Stam and Toby Miller (eds), Film and Theory: An Anthology (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000), pp. 20–7, p. 24. 28 Gilliam, in Ian Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam (London, Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 179. 29 www.smart.co.uk/dreams/tgclip.htm. Thanks to Phil Stubbs for this reference. 30 Colin MacCabe, The Eloquence of the Vulgar (London, British Film Institute, 1999), p. 74. 31 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 4. Gilliam reiterates this point on p. 228. 32 Timothy Corrigan, Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 103. 33 Dreams, at www.smart.co.uk/dreams. 34 Gilliam, in Bob McCabe, Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm, and Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood (London, HarperCollins, 2005), p. 291. 35 Robert Stam, Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Oxford, Blackwell, 2005), p. 9. 36 Ian Christie, ‘Introduction: Poems Unlimited’, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p.vii. 37 Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London, Routledge, 2000), p. 35. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., pp. 35–6. 40 Stam, Literature Through Film, p. 4. 41 Gilliam, in Bob McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography By The Pythons (London, Orion, 2003), p. 57. 42 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 58. 43 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 62. 44 Gilliam, in Bob McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools: The Art and Films of Terry Gilliam (New York, Universe Publishing, 1999), p. 12. Also McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, pp. 58–9. 45 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 6. 46 Gilliam would later play Cardinal Fang in Pythons’ ‘Spanish Inquisition’ sketch. 47 Kurtzman’s name, with an added ‘n’, would be given to Sam Lowry’s boss in Brazil. 48 Gilliam, in McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, p. 92. 49 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 101. 50 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 31.

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Something completely different

2

Having moved to Britain, Gilliam tired of his initial work in London as a freelance illustrator. He wanted to break into television, normally a hopeless ambition for a recently arrived American with no television experience. But the mid-to-late 1960s marked an extraordinary period in British television comedy, when an unprecedented range of talented young comic writers and performers were given opportunities to create shows. They were also allowed enormous artistic freedom on the content, structure and tone of these programmes. An essential element was the tradition of Oxford and Cambridge university student revues, in which all the British members of what would eventually become Monty Python’s Flying Circus performed. The most important early figures from this tradition were Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, ­Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, whose 1961 Beyond the Fringe show revolutionised satirical humour in Britain, before transferring successfully to the United States.1 The show hugely impressed undergraduates John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman, who went on to perform either in Cambridge Footlights Club shows or their equivalents at Oxford.2 Elements from such shows made their way, suitably transformed, to the small screen in 1962 with That Was The Week That Was (nicknamed TW3), a topical show that often controversially lampooned current events and notable people. TW3 was openly self-referential, exposing the workings of television production to the audience, and parodying the conventions of ‘serious’ television shows. One of its cast was Timothy Birdsall, whom Roger Wilmut describes as a ‘brilliant cartoonist [who] did quick on-the-spot drawings with somewhat surreal commentaries which were very funny’.3 Once out of university, Cleese and Chapman made contributions to TW3, which paved the way for The Frost Report (1966–67) another anarchic comedy show that included work either as writers or performers for all the British members of Python (though not as yet as a team). Wilmut constructs a marvellously

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18  terry gilliam complex diagram charting connections between dozens of performers and shows (on stage, television, film and radio) as well as records and magazines over a 20-year period. The British members of Python make contributions as writers and performers to TW3 (Cleese and Chapman), I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again (Idle, Cleese and Chapman), Marty (Cleese, Chapman, Palin and Jones), The Late Show (Palin and Jones), At Last the 1948 Show (Idle, Cleese and Chapman), The Complete and Utter History of Britain (Jones and Palin) and Do Not Adjust Your Set (Palin, Jones and Idle). Here, Gilliam makes his first appearance. Gilliam had contacted Cleese, playing on their brief collaboration on Help!, and Cleese in turn introduced Gilliam to producer Humphrey Barclay, another Cambridge alumnus. A cartoonist himself, Barclay was impressed by Gilliam’s work, judging it ‘very grotesque’ but intriguing.4 Having used Timothy Birdsall on TW3, Barclay got Gilliam a job drawing guests on another show he produced, We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, fronted by wit and raconteur Frank Muir. Through this show, quite by accident, Gilliam made the leap from cartoonist to animator. Tapes of terrible punning links between records made by disk jockey Jimmy Young seemed potential comic material, but no one could find a way to use them. Despite having no experience, Gilliam offered to make an animated film with the links. ‘I had £400 and two weeks to do it in, so I could do what I do – cut-outs. So I got pictures of Jimmy Young, cut his head out and drew other bits and pieces and started moving the mouth around.’5 Gilliam had seen an underground film by Stan van der Beek called Death Breath in New York in the early 1960s and borrowed his technique from it.6 ‘And I did this thing and it went out on television and it’s the power of television because 10 million people saw it. Nobody had ever seen anything on tv like it and I was an animator. Just like that.’7 Barclay also provided Gilliam with an introduction to another show he was producing, Do Not Adjust Your Set. Begun in 1967, Do Not Adjust Your Set was a comedy show originally intended for children and broadcast in the early evening. Largely scripted by later Pythons Palin, Jones and Idle, the show did not patronise children, and its sophisticated writing and performance created an adult cult following, including Cleese and Chapman.8 Barclay wanted Gilliam’s cartoons on the show, something Palin and Jones resisted, and he also bought some skits Gilliam had written. Gilliam recalls that Barclay ‘forced them on Mike, Terry and Eric, much to their chagrin, and they didn’t even do one of them well, which pissed me off’.9 Michael Palin remembers that after initially being put out by Barclay’s overtures on behalf of Gilliam (‘Americans – what do they know about this kind of humour?’) he changed his mind once Gilliam produced his first animation and ‘we knew this man was

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exceptional’. By the second series Gilliam’s animations were appearing on the show, among them ‘Elephants’, a piece both iconoclastic in itself and a major inspiration for the eventual structure and tone of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Roger Wilmut describes the piece in its bizarre detail: A man who ignores a sign saying ‘Beware of the Elephants’ is crushed by a falling elephant; his head, left sticking out of the ground, is kicked around by a football team whose heads gradually join his in bouncing around. These heads now recede until they become mere specks of dirt, part of an advertisement for soap powder presented by an animated Enoch Powell.11 A white sheet, held up by Powell, becomes the scene of gunfire between a fort and a man on a horse; this gunfire perforates the packet of soap powder, which falls like snow – and in fact becomes snow – a snow-covered scene complete with a stagecoach. An outlaw holds up the coach, but on his demand ‘Hands Up!’ he is squashed flat by a huge hand coming out of the coach.12

Wilmut comments that the cartoon ‘threw away all logical thought and progression, and simply ran from one idea to the next in a streamof-consciousness manner’. But to throw away logical thought is not necessarily to abandon thought altogether. The tactic creates alternative and liberating patterns and connections of thought beyond the linear, similar to the surrealist epiphanies Gilliam experienced watching Ernie Kovacs. Indeed, the surrealist link is suggestive, for The First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) declares: The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating to our experience … [That] experience has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage … Under the pretence of civilisation and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly be termed superstition or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices.13

Surrealist leader André Breton proposes that throwing away logical thought opens up the territory of illogical thought, and the more fertile fields of the imagination. His statement that ‘Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be’14 seems in harmony with Gilliam’s general take on the transformative power of the imagination and the need to look at what is emerging rather than what is established. Instructively, the image of the cage is a leitmotif in Gilliam’s films, a clear index of imaginative as well as physical incarceration. And the lampooning of Enoch Powell, whose infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 had inflamed racial tensions in Britain, hints at a small but detectable ­political slant to ‘Elephants’. The Powell reference indicates something

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20  terry gilliam more considered than a mere stream of consciousness. Surreal humour can operate as part of a satirical social critique. Terry Jones singles out ‘Elephants’ as incorporating the stream-ofconsciousness feel he wanted to achieve later with Monty Python’s Flying Circus.15 But there was another more substantial source for what the Pythons themselves would later mock as ‘zany, madcap humour’ – Spike Milligan. The term ‘comic genius’ does not constitute cliché or hyperbole in Milligan’s case, and his influence on half a century of British comedy is immeasurable.16 His brilliant radio series The Goon Show transformed the possibilities for radio comedy in Britain in the 1950s, and he made similarly daring experiments with television comedy in the 1960s with such shows as The World of Beachcomber and his daringly chaotic and disturbingly funny Q series. (The team eventually would choose Milligan’s The Case of The Mukkinese Battle Horn as the support film for Holy Grail.) While Peter Cook, especially, provided a direct and contemporaneous influence for the Pythons, Milligan’s series Q5 loomed over the early efforts of the embryonic Pythons, especially the fact that Milligan discarded the need for sketches to have beginnings and endings, let alone punchlines. Peter Cook had suggested this possibility to Cleese17 but it was Milligan who carried out the threat. He might simply abandon a sketch if he did not think it was working, announcing the fact to the studio audience as he exited the set. Ian MacNaughton directed the Q series, one reason why he was later chosen to direct and produce Monty Python’s Flying Circus and direct And Now for Something Completely Different. For Terry Jones, Milligan’s anarchic approach provided a challenge and a prompt: ‘How can we do that, how can we use that breakthrough Milligan’s got there?’18 ‘Elephants’ provided him with the solution, Jones recognising that it offered a means of dispensing with punchlines and endings by simply connecting one sketch to another via pieces of anarchic animation. The various elements and associations that cohered in Python came together on 11 May 1969, when Cleese and Chapman met Do Not Adjust Your Set’s Palin, Jones, Idle and Gilliam. Cleese had a standing offer from the BBC to create his own show, and within a fortnight of the first meeting the group had been guaranteed a 13-part series. As primarily an animator rather than a writer and performer, Gilliam’s place in the group was somewhat ambiguous, and this rather odd association gets registered in the credits to the first episode where his name does not appear with the others, but only receives an ‘Animations by’ credit. Episode 2 has him elevated to the front line, given a ‘Written and Performed by’ acknowledgement along with the other members. The show’s skit format was reinforced by the fact that the group tended to

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something completely different  21 write in teams, so that Cleese and Chapman collaborated, as did Palin and Jones; Idle primarily wrote on his own. Scripts were then brought to group meetings for critical assessment. The various individuals and teams had been writing and performing for many years and so their standards were high, and forcefully given criticism. Gilliam participated in these group deliberations on the merits of individual pieces, and then was asked to create animations in response to the needs of the particular show. He would be given two sketches and be charged with providing a connecting piece, but between the end of the first and the beginning of the second he was free to improvise. Eric Idle confirms that ‘Gilliam became the glue, he became the link thing. He’s thinking in forms of structure where we’re thinking in terms of material’,19 ironic praise given the criticism of the structural failings of Gilliam’s later films. Because his animations were added in the final stages of a show’s production, and because of the high quality of work he continued to produce, he was not forced to undergo the group scrutiny the other Pythons were made to endure. The actual process of making the cut-up animations also meant that until later series when he had an assistant, he worked alone. Gilliam recognises the enormous freedom his unique position within the group gave him, but also relished the fact that the tight time limits between decisions about his own contributions and their completion forced him to flights of invention within strict boundaries. The creative use of brinkmanship later fed into his approach as a filmmaker, although he would find that external pressure could crush creativity as well as prompt it. Monty Python’s Flying Circus clearly plays the key role in launching Gilliam as a filmmaker. Not only did he begin by co-directing a Python film, but the show’s enduring and global profile also opened doors throughout his post-Python career. To give one of many possible examples, the owner of the location where Tideland was shot in 2004 was a Python fan. The present study concentrates on Gilliam as a filmmaker, so only addresses certain pertinent aspects of one of television’s greatest comedy shows. The first of these is the importance of Gilliam’s animation to the style as well as the structure of the show. His contribution begins almost immediately, for the first episode subversively pre-empts its own opening titles. A tattered and bearded figure (Michael Palin) crawls slowly from the sea and collapses on the shore uttering an exhausted ‘It’s’. Only then do titles proper begin to run over John Cleese’s formal, muted enunciation of the show’s name and John Philip Sousa’s ‘Liberty Bell March’, a theme tune that Gilliam (among others) claims credit for choosing.20 Cartoon flowers curl up on elastic stems and pour forth the words ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’ in circus poster letters,

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22  terry gilliam the rising volume of the Sousa’s jaunty march reinforcing the dated circus atmosphere. The flowers are then shown as part of an arrangement before Gilliam’s images take a radical plunge into the surreal. The flowers are revealed growing from the head of a fat, balding gent in blue jacket and bow tie sitting in yellow liquid. But before we have time to process this unsettling image, a giant foot crushes him. There follows a manic succession of images impossible to make immediate sense of: a sixteenth-century aristocrat bounces a fat woman on the huge head of a bespectacled man. The top of the latter’s skull lifts off as exotic dancers fly upwards. The sexual overtones continue as an image of Cardinal Richelieu observes a steam train passing, on top of which lies a naked woman. The Cardinal lifts his robes to reveal he sits atop an ancient tricycle. Aroused, he heads off in pursuit of the woman. A colourised nineteenth-century still of a couple kissing mutates grotesquely as the female is sucked completely into the mouth of her male companion. A music hall dancer’s head shoots off into the sky, colliding with one of five flying cherubs, who plummet into the tricycling Richelieu beneath. The woman in a painted portrait covers her face, and a mustachioed man has his head inflated until it fills the screen and explodes. The frame reveals a naked showgirl recumbent on a stage, who then covers herself with the show’s title, just as an image of God descends with reproving finger and shaking head. The same foot that eradicated the first figure crushes him as the ‘Liberty Bell March’ reaches its finale.21 The absurdity, or plain silliness, of the sequence undermines any serious attempt to describe it, and all this is packed into 30 seconds, less time than it takes for Palin to emerge from the sea. It seems unlikely that people watching the show would be aware of the cultural provenance of many of these images. The giant foot, for example, is amputated from Bronzino’s sixteenth-century masterpiece Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, the female portrait is Rembrandt’s allegorical painting of his wife, Saskia (as Flora), and that of Richelieu is by Philippe de Champaigne. But the sources are less important than the rapid intersplicing with material from mass and popular culture. Various music hall images are used (appropriate for a flying circus), while the kissing couple is taken from Edison’s 1896 romantic short, The Kiss. There is also an anachronistic array of photographs, airbrushed figures and images that might have been taken from Victorian magazines or posters. The sheer volume of material in itself threatens to overwhelm the viewer, but the pace and apparent arbitrariness with which these images collide or are integrated gives the titles their crazy vivacity. With his eventual films, Gilliam would often pack the frame with information, using wide-angle lenses to draw the viewer into highly detailed, if

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something completely different  23 fantastic, worlds. By contrast, his animations are spare, often containing no backgrounds at all, and this adds to their surreal effect, as though they instantly take us to places one remove from reality. As with ‘Elephants’ the speed, variety and density of the piece subvert any attempt to make logical sense of what appears on screen. Viewers are presented with a cultivated but irreverent stream of consciousness, one that is witty, risqué and subversive. Repressed male fantasies recur, as does an antagonism to organised religion and its pious icons, while a grotesque and violent undertone resonates. But the flowers growing from the head of a man also convey a degree of whimsy, and the blending of popular and high culture, different historical periods and styles of animation indicate a vital, humorous imagination that throws disparate elements together for the novel associations they might create. The titles act as gateway to a world that would become known as ‘pythonesque’. Gilliam’s cut-up technique takes the chosen image out of context and places it within a new setting, allowing for absurd and fantastic conjunctions. The initial situation and connotations can still adhere to the image, but the process of recontextualising provokes new connections that propel the narrative forward and connect with other images and narrative threads. At the same time, the cut-up images have a reality of a different order from that of traditionally drawn cartoons, and Gilliam repeatedly toys with the interplay of these levels, or types, of ‘reality’. Because the animations operate as links between sketches, their meaning is modified by their relationship to what precedes and follows them. Gilliam’s contribution was crucial to the shape and tone of Monty Python as a whole. His animations provide structural glue, while their extreme style and content introduce an even more surreal element than the decidedly odd sketches. Relationships between objects, creatures and human characters do not follow the rules of logic, perspective, or causation. The mise-en-scène, devoid of detailed background, separates the creatures in this animation from a contextualising and comforting ‘real’ world. In this spare landscape, the properties of objects unexpectedly change or function counter-intuitively, the accumulation of the fantastic, the weird and the dislocating, challenging viewers to make sense of the images. These pieces incorporate and foreshadow elements now recognised as Gilliam’s trademark style as a director, most obviously the pace at which events take place. Most sequences take only 30 seconds, moving disarmingly from the odd to the bizarre, from the grotesque to the satirical. Paul Wells notes that ‘animation predominantly occurs in the short form, and manages to compress a high degree of narrative information into a limited period of time through processes of condensation’.22

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24  terry gilliam For Wells, the two main methods of condensation are the elliptical cut (which jumps between two events to suggest the passage of time) and comic elision, ‘the construction of a sequence of comic events which operate as a self-determining process informed by the particular timing and relationship of the visual and verbal jokes’.23 Given the absurd and somewhat atemporal environment that Gilliam establishes, the passage of time potentially condensed by elliptical cuts is less significant than comic elision. The material Gilliam brings together presents the audience with a self-determined process, even if an incongruous one. Wells later considers another narrative strategy, that of associative relations, in which apparently impossible relations are created through the fusion of contrary figures and forms, placing formerly disjunct or unrelated elements into new conjunctions. This essentially opens up a narrative dialectic between the two image forms. Very much in the spirit of Eisensteinian montage, the collision or fusion of previously unconnected or undirected images creates new narrative impetus, which is not about overt story-telling (or even ideological critique) but the development of visual dialogues. [original emphasis]24

It is important not to over-interpret short bursts of animation, but Wells’s notions of comic elision, associative relations and the fusion of contrary figures and forms seem readily applicable to Gilliam’s output well beyond the bounds of his Python animation. Gilliam exploits what might otherwise be an obvious limitation to the cut-up technique: that movement must be less flowing than reality, or indeed in the standard cartoon. The stilted motion in itself creates a certain comic tension, for while viewers quickly are aware that the normal laws of physics are in abeyance, they remain uncertain as to how the alternative laws will play out. The technique also carries with it the promise that any image, particularly a human form, is only a scissor slip away from grisly or comic dismemberment, or reconstitution as a grotesque hybrid. This grotesque element was recognised as a signature of Python as a whole, and prompted Monty Python: Complete and Utter History of the Grotesque, one of the earliest works to treat the group’s work seriously. John Thompson compiles a collection of articles and extracts from secondary texts on the grotesque that relate to the approach, style and tone of Python. Some of these will be developed further in subsequent chapters, for Gilliam repeatedly turns to the grotesque as a source of visual and thematic inspiration, but for the moment two excerpts are worth considering. Thompson quotes from the great Victorian cultural theorist John Ruskin, who, writing on the Grotesque Renaissance in

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something completely different  25 Stones of Venice, notes two main kinds of grotesque, the ‘sportive’ and the ‘terrible’, and that these are composed of ‘ludicrous’ and ‘fearful’ elements.25 Gilliam’s Python animations tend towards the ludicrous and sportive rather than ‘terrible’ and ‘fearful’, although the animation in which a man covers his face in shaving foam and then slices off his head with a cut-throat razor qualifies as the latter. The darker elements of the grotesque rise up in his films, as we shall see. The second extract comes from Mikhail Bakhtin’s enormously influential work, Rabelais and His World, in which Bakhtin notes how ‘the principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which grotesque is based’ destroys what he sees as the ‘limited seriousness’ of false truth, ‘and frees the human consciousness, thought and imagination for new potentialities’.26 Bakhtin applies his ideas particularly to the medieval period, and provides ways of ­examining Holy Grail, Jabberwocky and The Fisher King. For now, we need only note the subversive and liberating potential of the grotesque, an aspect Gilliam will return to well beyond his ‘medieval’ films. Gilliam’s cut-up method also utilises what otherwise might be another limitation, that the difficulty of simulating characters speaking fluently privileges the visual over the verbal. This runs counter to much of the show’s comic virtuosity, because the university background of the troupe’s British members meant that Python humour normally involved dextrous or farcical verbal games, confusions and confrontations. Sketches such as ‘Dead Parrot’, ‘Nudge Nudge Wink Wink’, ‘Cheese Shop’ and ‘Spanish Inquisition’, along with dozens of others, predominantly involve wordplay, although bashing a parrot’s head against a shop counter to suggest that it has ceased to be, obviously has its visual component. And John Cleese’s silly walk showed that it was possible for the human form to approximate one of Gilliam’s cut-up figures. But the fact that Python sketches could be transferred easily on to records, or issued as scripts (with inserted references only to Gilliam’s animations)27 and that a recent scholarly treatment of Python largely ignores Gilliam, emphasise the essentially verbal nature of much of Python.28 By contrast, Gilliam’s animated characters, if they speak at all, tend to grunt or squeal subverbally, as with the old lady who trips up the passing double-decker bus, or the haunted figure of Billy Graham who breaks out of jail, or the trench-coated caterpillar who emerges from his bed as a beautiful butterfly. The relative lack of words naturally focuses attention on the creative absurdity of the images, and this concentration magnifies the impact of the animations, reinforcing their importance as a signature of the show as a whole. Indeed, the quality and extensive use of animation in Python gave the show much of its distinctiveness,

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26  terry gilliam setting it apart from earlier shows such as TW3 and The Frost Report, or later rivals such as The Goodies. Gilliam’s visually arresting animations were not the only thing that made Python different, but their sustained inventiveness played a critical role in giving the show its idiosyncratic brilliance. Gilliam only occasionally performed on the show, perhaps most memorably in the ‘Spanish Inquisition’ sketch as Cardinal Fang (a reference, perhaps, to his college magazine) or as the baked bean-gorging son in a family competing to find ‘Britain’s Most Awful Family’. His appearances are rare enough to form part of a running gag in Episode 4, when his character, threatened with being cut from the scene, complains that ‘This is my only line’, and then, when he is heckled, feebly repeats the phrase. An abrupt cut follows. Gilliam is dressed as a Viking, but, despite the distinctive costume, many initial viewers would not have associated him with the other performers in Python who were already relatively established figures on British television. Two series and 24 episodes later he appears on an arts show as an expert on Tchaikovsky, which, the host (Graham Chapman) announces ‘is a bit of a pity, because this is Farming Club’. A bemused Gilliam is escorted from the set, at which point Farming Club begins its special, ‘The Life of Tchaikovsky’. Given the quality of the other performers in Python, his own duties as animator, and the fact that members of the team tended to write characters and sketches for their own performance, Gilliam’s absence from the screen as a performer is understandable. In the fourth, truncated final series, produced without John Cleese, Gilliam plays more roles, including the poet Shelley, whose ‘Ozymandias’ contains the lines, ‘I am Ozymandias, King of Ants, Look on my feelers, termites, and despair.’29 But that episode had no animation, and the opening titles to the fourth series, where a coin rolls automatically into a slot to start the ‘Liberty Bell March’, suggest Gilliam’s declining involvement. His inclination towards the grotesque in terms of performance would find more scope later in memorable cameos in Holy Grail and Life of Brian. By the end of the second series in 1970 Python enjoyed a cult following, and the group formed Python Productions, releasing albums and a book.30 They assumed, however, that the show’s peculiar style and format, with its lineage in British institutions such as The Goon Show and Oxbridge university revues, were unlikely to transfer successfully to American television. Victor Lownes, an American businessman who ran the London Playboy Club, thought otherwise, proposing a compilation film of the best sketches and animation from the first two series to break into the lucrative American market. The result was And Now for Something Completely Different, directed by the television show’s

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something completely different  27 director, Ian MacNaughton. Made on a small budget of £80,000, it was produced by Kettledrum Production, with Lownes taking Executive Producer credit. The film’s failings partly derive from not making allowances for the differences between television and film. On television the time limit of less than 30 minutes placed temporal constraints on the anarchy, fostering a compressed and pressurised mayhem that increased the viewers’ sense of subversion. Simultaneously, the tenuous links between individual skits hinted at some form of thematic coherence over a particular show, even though coherence was parodied in titles such as ‘Whither Canada?’ or ‘Owl Stretching Time’. The film’s extra length diffused that manic intensity, and splicing together largely self-contained sketches created succession without coherence. The show’s subversion derived in part from lampooning television formats and codes, but the transfer from small to large screen undermines that important comic pillar. And Now for Something Completely Different tries something similar, beginning apparently as a public information film on ‘How Not to Be Seen’, one of the more macabre of the television sketches about people being blown up for failing to camouflage themselves. Cleese, behind his announcer’s desk, declaims the film’s title, but after a truncated and more vicious version of Gilliam’s opening television titles, the film abruptly ends. Terry Jones appears in the corner of the screen as if a cinema manager on stage explaining the problem of the film’s unexpectedly short length to the cinema audience. The remaining sketches are presented as filling in the time before the next scheduled show. The television series had used similar disorienting tactics, and in the short term the strategy works again here. But for the most part the film does not acknowledge itself as a film in the same way that the television series was conscious of itself as a television series. The complex and comic relationship between sketches and television format largely gets lost. One of the few self-referential moments occurs in Gilliam’s animation, ‘The Killer Cars’, in which pedestrian-devouring cars are consumed by a giant mutant cat. When the cat itself seems certain to wipe out the city, Gilliam cuts to a monochrome figure reading the story of the cars and the cat in a room whose walls are made of newspaper. In this cheap setting, the static reader (who acknowledges that his lips aren’t moving) tells a fantastic tale of how swarms of giant killer bees and ‘300 million armed horsemen covered in coats of a thousand different colours’ attack the cat ‘in a scene of such spectacular proportions that it could never in your life be seen in a low-budget film like this’. That low budget meant that the film retains production values akin to television. Many of the sets are clearly sets, and while this obvious artificiality worked well on television, suggesting the rather tacky ­artifice

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28  terry gilliam of television itself, on film the switch between sets and locations was more disconcerting than disorienting. The higher production values expected by film audiences meant that for those new to Python the film seemed unpolished. The Pythons’ next film, Holy Grail, would make sustained comedy out of its cheapness, Gilliam as Patsy pointing out, for instance, that Camelot is ‘only a model’. But ­production values are not the only cause of different expectations between film and ­television audiences. On the small screen television, viewers are likely to concentrate on the performers, rather than on the mise-en-scène as a whole. And the ­relative brevity of the television shows means that a static medium shot or two-shot often conveys all the information, setting and mood a comic sketch requires. Superfluous or distracting material, such as wobbling walls or passers-by gawping at the camera in outdoor shots, are barely acknowledged. In film, though, viewers expect more refined and focused framing, with the superfluous omitted. They also expect more variety in shots and more dynamic editing than in ­television. The nature and force of many of the Python sketches, however, which involve two stationary characters arguing over the mortality of a parrot or whether someone’s wife is ‘a goer’, are static and word-based, and do not translate readily into visually energetic pieces. MacNaughton’s maintenance of shot selection and framing more attuned to television than film irritated Gilliam and Terry Jones. Gilliam recalls: ‘It was frustrating because Terry Jones and I were always there wanting to be directing. Ian was lovely but he wasn’t directing in the way we wanted it directed, and we were always saying “Oh come on, Jesus, shoot it this way.” And it didn’t happen. So there was always a certain frustration building up.’31 Gilliam and Jones would channel that frustration, as well as their own (competing) ideas on how to shoot, into Holy Grail. Lownes’s expectation about the potential audience for Python seems undone by the failure of And Now for Something Completely Different, especially by comparison with its success with British audiences. But that audience had been primed by the increasingly acclaimed series. The original shows in Britain were not lauded instantly by a mass of people, and their subversion worked by disrupting rather than confirming viewer expectations. For the show’s established fans And Now for Something Completely Different serves up a ‘greatest hits’ compilation that contradicts the film’s very title. Sketches such as ‘The Lumberjack Song’ and ‘Nudge Nudge’, already memorised by innumerable adolescent boys, were reprised largely unchanged. The Pythons themselves had called attention to the irony of presenting a devoted television audience with a regular dose of ‘zany madcap humour’ by at one point reworking the catchphrase as ‘And now for something completely the same’. For

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something completely different  29 Americans and others being introduced to Python by the film, however, the lack of the television original required them to consider the film on its own merits and in relation to other film comedies. Paradoxically, the ‘best of’ format detracted from the brilliance of individual sketches for this new audience. Each television show had contained strong and weak sketches and animation, with the best moments sometimes flashing more brightly in comparison with the dull. In Something Completely Different, the high general standard of the separate elements potentially dilutes a new audience’s recognition of that quality, as they struggle to reorient themselves from piece to piece. Years later, once the television series had attained cult status on American television as well, tours such as the one captured in the film Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982) would show that Americans could appreciate Python humour, as they sing along lustily with transvestite lumberjacks or roar their approval and recognition of elderly Yorkshiremen outdoing each other in yarns of childhood misery (even if the Yorkshiremen are lifted from At Last the 1948 Show).32 Gilliam’s animations transfer better than many of the great verbal sketches. His use of grotesque or surreal images, abrupt and often absurd dislocations of narrative or logic are engaging as cinema, and the film contains a greater ratio of animation to other sketches than occurred on television. This larger presence bears testament to the visually arresting quality of the animation itself, as well as its undoubted comic strengths. It also reinforces the sense that Gilliam’s work was very much the visual signature for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The move to film, necessitating the recalibration of overall pacing and the sequencing of sketches, also meant that many of Gilliam’s animations were remade for 35 mm film. They were used less as linking devices and more as stand alone works, or as small clumps of two or three animations linked together. So, for example, in a sequence that feeds off the cod Hungarian phrase-book sketch, Gilliam recreates the ­lyrically surreal landscape in which hands rise up out of the ground like tree trunks before growing leaves on their fingers. A cowboy enters, riding a horse also constructed from a hand, and then lassoes another frame, pulling it to centre screen. In it, a man hums as he soaps up his face ready to shave, continuing on until his whole head is enveloped in soap. He then slices his head off with a cut-throat razor. These animations had appeared in slightly different versions in the television series, but their placement together here gives the second piece a more violent resonance than the original. Gilliam adds a grim coda, for as the man thuds heavily to the ground a motel sign announces a fresh vacancy. The move to film, and the different combinations of sketches and

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30  terry gilliam animation selected, offered Gilliam the chance to revise his work slightly for greater comic and visual effect. Later, in the only overtly political piece in the film, he reprises his parody of American Defence as a toothpaste commercial. This shows by way of a set of teeth the parallels between Chinese Communism and tooth decay, and the benefits of using Crelm a toothpaste (read American Defence) with the ‘miracle ingredient’, Fraudulin. Despite the silliness of the illustration, the piece neatly satirises American propaganda, something likely to engage the original target audience of college-age Americans. The political angle is reduced somewhat by the link to the studio emblem of 20th Century Frog and then dispensed with completely as the studio presents Gilliam’s own star turn as an animated figure, Conrad Poos and His Dancing Teeth. While this works well enough on television, in the cinema the full-screen image of Gilliam’s grinning face, tinted hot pink, with piercing eyes that roll about and teeth that move like organ keys in time to a fairground tune, has an almost demonic feel. It is unsettlingly funny. The same holds true for the mutant cat, actually only a photograph of a stretchedout Siamese. Upright, and moving stiffly on its hind paws, the giant cat towers above the London skyline, swallowing cars and buildings whole, almost as convincing a movie monster as the original Godzilla. Gilliam’s future combatant Alexander Walker noted approvingly that, ‘Blown up to billboard dimensions, the marble busts, cardboard dummies and Victorian worthies have a fie-fo-fum menace, more threateningly funny than ever. [Gilliam is] best when he draws blood.’33 He adds perceptively that the relationship of the threatening and the funny, while ‘strange on the face of it’, entails a combination of ‘Childhood (“fie-fo-fum”), the body (“blood”) and a monstrous juxtaposing or collaging of incompatible elements’, that is ‘the realm of the grotesque’.34 But Gilliam is not restricted to the monstrous and the grotesque in the film. The vivid image of Uncle Sam that fills the screen in the ‘American Defence’ piece plays on the visual component of propaganda, the capacity of compelling images and slogans to dominate counter arguments. Large images can also be fashioned into something comically sublime, as when the trench-coated caterpillar man is transformed into a radiant and narcissistic butterfly. Walker’s astute assessment on the impact of size on the big screen also registers that Gilliam’s images employ the whole of the film frame. As the group’s visual artist, he was far more interested in what would be seen on the screen than what would be heard. His animations tap more readily into cinema’s inherent visuality. The disappointment of the group as a whole in the eventual film perhaps derives from the failure to translate successfully ­material from one medium that they knew well and had control over,

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something completely different  31 into another they were still exploring. By the extremely high standards they set on television, Something Completely Different does not do the Pythons justice. Its failure to break the Pythons commercially in the American market had much to do with the film being released before the group had a television presence. By the time the show had achieved cult status in America it had already finished in Britain. Cleese had left the group at the end of series three in 1972, and initially was reluctant to consider a new Python film. But in 1974 the group reformed, certain that after the disappointment of Something Completely Different they did not want MacNaughton to direct their next film. Terry Jones and Gilliam were keen to take control, having long felt that they had the cinematic eye MacNaughton lacked. The group had confidence that it could render its own ideas on screen and so Jones and Gilliam claimed the directors’ chairs. The idea that the film was to be co-directed reveals a combination of idealism and naivety. Choosing two members with no history of feature film directing, the Pythons added a dangerously novel element to the filmmaking process they all were still learning. Not only was the choice risky, but also it was perhaps unique in the history of feature filmmaking. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had proved it possible for individual comedians to write, perform in and direct their own work, but comedy teams as great as the Marx Brothers had left the writing and production of their films to experienced professionals. And they certainly employed only one director at a time. Admittedly, other members of the production crew were highly experienced, but the eventual success of Holy Grail was never inevitable, and the eventual triumph obscures the massive gamble involved in letting two apprentices learn their trade on a feature film. Holy Grail gave Gilliam a tough and highly instructive apprenticeship in filmmaking, but the opportunity only arose because he and Jones were Python members. In other situations his credentials might well have proved insufficient, especially as his substantial achievements as an animator entailed no experience of directing live action, let alone live actors. The situation partly repeated that of Gilliam’s becoming an animator on We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, when he launched himself into an area without a track record. With Holy Grail, becoming a film director was similarly marked by his own enthusiasm, and by the lack of others (Jones apart) willing to take up the challenge. But the decision that Gilliam and Jones would direct had economic implications, established film companies refusing to finance the project. Their caution was understandable, and no doubt went further than concern about the directors. The ever-shrinking British film audience meant

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32  terry gilliam that the American market had long been a necessary target for British films. But Something Completely Different had flopped there, and by 1974 the show had not established itself in American television. Worse, the proposed film consciously moved away from the format of loosely linked and absurdist sketches that had generated the television show’s cult following, to something more coherent, but less obviously comic – the search by knights of King Arthur’s Court for the Holy Grail. The medieval world was devoid of the Gumbys, parrot shops and sexually conflicted lumberjacks that on television gave Monty Python its ­distinctive content and style. Although the medieval epic film was ripe for parody, the prospects of making a successful feature from this ­material were worryingly slim. Few examples exist of the absurdist medieval epic. West End impresario Michael White, producer of such hits as Sleuth and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, solved the funding problem, persuading rock and pop music giants such as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Elton John to put money in. The National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) also contributed roughly half to the modest budget of £229,000. The financial input from the rock world in part speaks to the Pythons’ cult status in British popular culture, but less altruistically it also reflects the reality that huge taxes paid by British rock stars (up to 98%) could be offset by investment in films. The failure to find funding from more established sources also signals the parlous state of British film financing in the 1970s. Despite long-term government attempts to boost the production of British films through a quota system (requiring cinemas to screen a percentage of British films), the Eady levy (a boxoffice tax that funnelled money back to producers in proportion to film revenue) and the NFFC, in the 1970s the production of British films dropped from 98 in 1971 to 48 in 1979. In this troubled environment the Pythons set out to make a featurelength comedy based loosely on literary material from Malory and Chaucer. By extracting funding from the rock world and from the government’s film finance arm, the Pythons escaped some of the industry’s privation. And though the budget for Holy Grail was relatively small, the group benefited from artistic control over the content and look of the film. As with the BBC, this generous creative freedom allowed them to develop their ideas free of external criticism. That a film employing this material as a source of comedy, produced in a slump in British filmmaking, with two apprentice directors was made at all is amazing enough. But Holy Grail proved a durable inter­national hit, delighting a cross-section of the public beyond Pythons’ core fans, including medieval scholars. The seemingly odd choice of historical setting played to long-standing interest in the era by the would-be

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something completely different  33 ­ irectors. Jones’s knowledge of the period, nurtured at university, would d later find form in a respected scholarly work, Chaucer’s Knight (1980).35 In the 1990s Jones would host the BBC Crusades series, a quirky mix of history and his own humour, and would co-write the accompanying book.36 Gilliam, an enthusiast on the period from childhood, retained a fascination with the medieval worldview: ‘There’s something about the whole medieval world where reality and fantasy were so blended … People did believe in devils and demons and ghouls and angels. And they were there. And so, if you believe in them and they’re around in the imagery around you they are acting in the world, they affected things. And that’s a different mentality than what we seem to have today. And it’s always intrigued me.’37 This interest in the possibility of different realms interacting would infuse most of Gilliam’s subsequent films, as would his ability to represent and integrate other-worldly entities into contemporary reality. And the sense that this ancient mentality has been superseded or destroyed by modern rationalism, but retains the capacity to invigorate and recuperate minds crushed by that rationality, is a regular Gilliam concern. Some of this mentality had been artistically represented centuries before in the perverse, fantastic worlds evoked by Hieronymous Bosch and the vivacious social documents of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, artists Gilliam admired and whom he would later also incorporate into his follow-up medieval project, Jabberwocky. The opening shot of Holy Grail draws on this iconography, depicting a death wheel seen through swirling fog. Bruegel’s Death includes such a wheel in depicting the plague, also including a cartload of corpses in its ravished landscape. Holy Grail would reinterpret a similar horror in the ‘Bring Out Your Dead’ scene, brilliantly fusing the macabre and the comic, as corpse collector Idle, responding to a request to take away an ailing geriatric, kills off the old man who has argued frantically that he is ‘feeling much better’. This scene also incorporates a dash of class politics, the collector recognising Arthur as a king because he ‘hasn’t got shit all over him’. The reality depicted by Bruegel incorporates a broad range of social types and remains unafraid of life’s earthier elements, shit among them. He captures the hard, boisterous social life of a long-gone age with a vivacity that prompts the modern viewer to experience another world that is simultaneously familiar and foreign. Gilliam’s subsequent films frequently achieve a similar effect, connecting audiences to other times and places. As well as Malory and Chaucer, Bruegel and Bosch, he and Jones drew from cinematic sources; both were admirers of the Polish director Walerian Borowczyk’s sensuous and surreal films Goto and Blanche.38 Pier Paolo Pasolini proved another important touchstone,

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34  terry gilliam films such as The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron having ‘a great sense of time and place and they were really real. So we set out to do a Pasolini film.’39 And, as a parodic piece, Holy Grail could also reference the standard Hollywood medieval epic, including the relatively recent and immensely popular Camelot (1967), as well as more serious works such as those of Ingmar Bergman, particularly The Seventh Seal, and Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, a reworking of Macbeth.40 Holy Grail became an incorporative text, employing literary, pictorial, historical, comedic and cinematic codes, undercut by the Pythons’ willingness to lampoon those codes and play them off deftly against each other. The film was a group effort in its conception, writing and performance, and the collaborative process proved creatively productive. Originally, it was to be set half in the medieval period, half in the modern, with the knights eventually finding the Grail at Harrods department store. This strategy had worked in such sketches as ‘Njorl’s Saga’, which merged ancient Norse literature with the commercial aspirations of modern-day North Malden. But as the writing progressed, the group realised that the Grail legend itself could provide sufficient material and an admittedly tenuous narrative spine. They worked in their usual teams, with Palin and Jones making the important breakthrough that coconut shells would replace real horses. This set an absurdist tone, provided the first visual joke in the film proper, and triggered a running gag about the coconut-carrying ability of swallows. But the coconut shells, which, as Gilliam recognises, were ‘far funnier’ than real horses, also signalled the film budget restrictions; actual horses were too expensive. The mockBergman titles that open the film, and which stamp it as pythonesque, were the result of running out of money at the end of production. For Gilliam, the need to improvise and find imaginative, offbeat solutions improved the film. Paradoxically, he argues, the Pythons were ‘saved by poverty from the mediocrity to which we aspired!’41 Less involved in the writing of the script or in performance, Gilliam concentrated on the film’s storyboards and design. He was particularly interested in the historical look of the piece, and his attention to miseen-scène gives sequences such as ‘Bring Out Your Dead’, the witch’s village, or the wedding laid waste by Sir Lancelot’s murderous heroism, a historical authenticity that accentuates the absurdity of the action that takes place. With Jones, he toured Britain looking for locations. This latter work fell apart when, two weeks before shooting was due to begin, the National Trust refused the Pythons use of selected castles on the grounds that the film would not treat the historic sites with sufficient respect. Alternatives were found, but the need to adapt quickly to new circumstances was reinforced on the first day of shooting, when the

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something completely different  35 camera broke during the first shot. Unprepared for this possibility, the apprentice directors wasted valuable time by not having a back-up plan. As shooting progressed, a more substantial problem arose, primarily because Gilliam’s sense of the film’s visual appearance collided with the other Pythons’ emphasis on performance. Gilliam admits that at this starting point in his directing career his ‘people skills’ were not sufficiently developed to persuade the other members to follow his vision of what should appear on camera. Gilliam’s primary role as animator on the television series had assured his creative independence, as well as his control over the content and look of the material. He need only deal with cut-out figures and landscapes, after all. His ability to direct performers, however, was unproven, a shortcoming compounded when those performers not only were highly gifted, but also had written the script with their own performance strengths in mind. The tension between Gilliam as director and the other Pythons also derived from his more cinematic feel for what was captured in the frame. On television, the quality of performance, especially when the performers were as good as Palin and Cleese, was sufficiently riveting to cover up any faults in the overall look of a particular sketch. In essence, Gilliam was attempting to make a film, where the others (although Jones less so) were working within the parameters set by television. Eric Idle admits as much, acknowledging that Grail looks a lot better than it would have if we’d just shot it out of our BBC experience, because it’s got a lot of those lovely moments like when that boat appears, which is pure Gilliam, which is beautiful. His visual sense lifted it into an area that makes it a movie. Whereas [Terry Jones’s] comedic sense kept it rooted in what’s funny. So both these elements contribute to its being good.42

The clash between performance and the look of the film resolved itself into a division of labour in which Jones concentrated on directing the actors and Gilliam focused on what was captured in the frame. This move made the learning curves of both directors slightly less steep. The Pythons’ background in television in fact gives the film an exuberant chaos that a more conventionally constructed piece of cinema would not have had. The sketch format is retained, although the Grail quest gives the film a rough narrative shape. The opening scenes, which introduce the castle guards with a huge database of information on swallows, a plague village where bodies are collected for nine pence, anarcho-syndicalist peasants, a mindlessly aggressive Black Knight, and a village that kills a witch because she is made of wood, have little to connect them other than that Arthur (Chapman) and Patsy are passing through searching for knights to join the Round Table. The introduction

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36  terry gilliam of God with his demand that they seek the Holy Grail gives the storyline some impetus, but the narrative then dissolves into the individual tales of Robin (Idle), Galahad (Palin) and Lancelot (Cleese), the Knights Who Say Ni and scenes involving judgemental shrubbers and taunting French guards. The characters then regroup around Tim the Enchanter (Cleese) for a final push towards the Grail. The anachronistic subplot of the slain history professor further dislocates proceedings, while ultimately providing an abrupt, cheap and suitably subversive ending. The very loose structure allows for any number of brilliant set pieces, and the result is a patchwork quilt of inspired lunacy rather than anything approaching a coherent film. This incoherence contributes to the film’s popularity, different viewers being so captivated by particular scenes that those that do not work for them are simply relegated in importance. Where a standard film narrative at least gestures towards continuity, Holy Grail consciously debunks the notion of the well-made film, most clearly in Scene 24, which, Michael Palin’s voice-over informs us, is ‘a smashing scene with some lovely acting in which Arthur discovers a vital clue, and in which there aren’t any swallows, although I think you can hear a starling’. For his verbosity he is shot with an arrow. Where Something Completely Different largely reprises Monty Python sketches, though with slightly higher production values, Holy Grail does make valiant attempts to establish itself as a feature film, particularly, as Idle notes, in the area of design that Gilliam controlled. And yet, just as the television series parodied the conventions and pretensions of the medium, so Holy Grail lampoons the cinematic equivalents before the first action takes place. Dramatic title music, along with Bergmanesque titles, hints at something serious, a mood quickly destroyed by the mock-Swedish subtitles that initially encourage the audience to holiday in Sweden with its beautiful fiords and train system, and then descend into an extended gag about moose. Credit is given to the person who supposedly gave the ‘Large møøse on the left half side of the screen in the third scene from the end … a thorough grounding in Latin, French and O Level Geography’. At this the credits break down completely, and in a reprise of the mock apologies from the BBC that peppered the television shows, the producers announce that they have sacked those responsible for the botched credits. When the credits again collapse into farce, those responsible for the sacking are sacked. A new announcement declares that the credits have been completed ‘in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute’ at which point the credits are shown in cheap and flickering Day-Glo colours with accompanying mariachi music. The animal of choice in this sequence is the llama. Some sort of seriousness then returns with more obviously ‘cinematic’ ­presentation

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something completely different  37 and a title card reading ‘England 932 A.D.’, but the moody fog that swirls around a death wheel and through which insistent approaching hoof beats can be heard, reveals two medieval men, one pretending to ride a horse, the other banging coconut shells together. This combination of cod-erudition, mock-seriousness and plain silliness echoes the television shows, but extends the best elements of those shows into a work that qualifies as a classic film. As well as the chance to direct and help design the film, Holy Grail also gave Gilliam the opportunity to act, his two notable characters being Arthur’s servant, Patsy, and the soothsayer in Scene 24 who reappears as the keeper of the Bridge of Death.43 Apart from revealing the truth that Camelot is only a model, Patsy remains a largely mute and dutiful figure, but his closed-mouth gormlessness hints at the long-suffering position of the servant class. Gilliam’s short stature relative to Graham Chapman’s lanky Arthur, plus the fact that he has to carry a huge load of the king’s possessions, visually captures the class inequalities later exposed by the dissident peasant, Dennis. Scene 24 and that at the Bridge of Death provide Gilliam greater scope to show his skills as a character actor able to portray a plausible grotesque. Gilliam acknowledges that as a performer he was always more comfortable being hidden by a costume, and in these scenes he is almost unrecognisable. He would later develop his line in such figures in Life of Brian, but here he neatly overplays the stock figure of a mad and physically repulsive seer, all leers, rags and puzzles, so that Arthur’s irritation at his bogus riddles seems understandable. He is last seen as a dark silhouette plunging into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. The film contained Gilliam’s animation, but because Holy Grail is more focused on a single set of characters and a relatively coherent narrative, the animation is decidedly less surreal than on television or in Something Completely Different. The first and narratively speaking the most important piece of animation comes with the rendering of God. He gives the aimless knights (fresh from dismissing Camelot as a ‘silly place’) the task of finding the Grail, but his manner is more compelling than the proposed quest. Gilliam uses the face of nineteenth-century cricket legend W.G. Grace for that of God, suitably adorned with a crown, surrounded by golden light and puffy clouds. God is a petulant figure irritated by obsequiousness, rolling his eyes in annoyance, chiding the knights for questioning him, and then departing as the clouds close like theatrical curtains. Gentle ridicule of religious piety then gives way, as the knights dreamily contemplate the ‘blessing from the Lord’, to mock figures from medieval manuscripts. Horns sound to mark the grandeur of the instigated quest, blowing a shepherd from his hillock, before being

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38  terry gilliam revealed as protruding from the buttocks of a line of trumpeters. This approximates the marginalia of actual Gothic texts that often gesture to the grotesque and the profane. Successive Byzantine images of God, the angelic trumpeters and the delicately and ornately rendered title ‘The Quest for the Holy Grail’, held aloft by angels, also point to the artistic treasures of the time. Gilliam later plays with these marginal images less reverentially, as when a line of nuns springboard into a small pool, exposing another nun’s backside, or when the minstrels of Sir Robin are eaten during the winter, provoking ‘much rejoicing’. These animations playfully employ and subvert medieval iconography, adding to the film’s historical authenticity while reinforcing its comic take on piety. Amidst this medieval art there exists the many-eyed Black Beast of Arrrghhh. A dragon-like creature, as befits the tales of knightly derringdo, the Beast’s modern airbrushed styling makes it a farcical anachronism. Its appearance in the Cave of Caerbannog sets up a short chase sequence in which drawings of the knights race through photographic images of caves followed by the jaunty spring of the cartoon-like Beast. Having set up the chase, Gilliam saw no way of bringing it to an obvious resolution, so he improvised a brilliant manoeuvre. Palin’s voice-over explains that ‘escape for Arthur and his knights seemed hopeless, when suddenly, the animator suffered a fatal heart attack’. We cut to Gilliam in his studio painting the cartoon. His body freezes, his arms lock up, his face contorts, and he crashes to the floor. ‘The cartoon peril was no more’, Palin tells us, as the knights cheer weakly and the Beast freezes and then quickly fades to a colourless outline. The unexpected conceptual leap counts as one of Gilliam’s most inspired pieces of animation. We might also read his film ‘death’ as Gilliam’s subconscious desire to end his career as an animator. Although his animation appears in later Python films, it is absent from films he subsequently directed. The transformation of the footage into what became a film classic proved surprisingly difficult. Initial previews were largely unsuccessful, Gilliam recalling that ‘we showed our first cut of the film and people hated it, there were walkouts. I think Graham or Eric walked out. The sound was wrong and there was such expectation and tension in the group, and they thought Terry and I had just completely fucked it up.’44 Part of the problem lay in the drive by Gilliam and Jones for authenticity to the medieval period, which included music played on period instruments. But the music detracted from the comedy, and was replaced by pre-recorded ‘epic’ music used for parodic effect. Palin considers that the initial cut ‘was 20 per cent too strong on authenticity and 20 per cent too weak on jokes’,45 while Idle points to the difficulties of having ‘two exhausted people [Gilliam and Jones] who have just directed this

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something completely different  39 and can’t agree on anything, or trying to deal with one editor who is torn between trying to reassemble and re-cut’.46 The final cut benefited immensely from the group’s long-established dynamic of sharp, informed criticism, and the directors’ ability to rework material. Jones admits that the film finally worked only at the Los Angeles premier. Holy Grail broke Python in America in 1974 just as the television series was gaining momentum. But a major dispute over control arose. Broadcasts on American television had begun on public service stations, but when the major commercial network ABC took up the fourth series of the show in late 1975, it cut and reorganised material to fit its own schedule, adding commercials. Incensed by the mutilation of their work, the Pythons brought a $1 million suit against ABC in America; Gilliam helped argue the group’s position. Although unsuccessful, the legal action eventually gave the Pythons control of their television shows. Robert Hewison considers it ‘important because it revealed the workings of a big corporation, and showed that it was possible to take it on and win’, adding that ‘the corporations had been warned that it was no longer possible to pass off the re-edited and censored work of writers as the real thing’.47 The television shows and Holy Grail quickly established a cult following for the Pythons in America, generating sizeable cultural capital that they would later use to leverage financial capital. Holy Grail’s international success reinforced the sense that the group was the 1970s equivalent of the Beatles. As co-director of such a success, Gilliam accrued a fair degree of kudos, and considers that the group as a whole, while ‘never taken seriously by serious film magazines’, nevertheless was ‘far more adventurous and avant-garde than anything else that was going on’. He adds that ‘Python was British filmmaking in the ’70s’, and, while the statement suffers from a touch of hyperbole, it registers the confidence with which Gilliam could stake his claim to the title of filmmaker.48 A peculiar measure of Holy Grail’s impact comes from the fact that it won praise from medieval scholars. John Aberth labels it ‘the best interpretation of both the history and legend of King Arthur’,49 explaining how well the film utilises and reworks elements of Arthurian legend for comic effect. Aberth even suggests that the Trojan Rabbit refers to a Welsh legend, ‘according to which Britain was founded by Brutus, a refugee from the Trojan Wars’.50 This explains the Trojan element, although not the rabbit. In more general terms, he suggests that the repeated and mysterious appearance of abusive Frenchmen reflects the Anglo-French contest for ‘control over transmission of Arthur’s legend’, and that the film as a whole ‘makes some very perceptive commentary on historians’ efforts to recover the history of King Arthur, and of the

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Middle Ages in general’.51 Aberth argues that the ‘Constitutional Peasants’ scene lampoons the attempt of medieval historians to ‘apply Marxist theory to the Middle Ages’, and that the execution of the Oxbridge historian ‘commences a struggle between the troupe’s efforts to re-create the Middle Ages and the modern world’s officious determination to barge in on their own overrealistic reenactment’.52 Sid Ray contends that The Holy Grail changed everything; not only do medieval films begin regularly to appeal to large audiences, they also became self-consciously self-referential and a site at which filmmakers could both mock and celebrate ‘serious’ medieval film. [The film] engages a vastly different cohort than the one excited by Bergman and Rossellini … [while] the self-referentiality and intertextuality of post-Python medieval films involve the appropriation of aspects of medieval narrative and culture that attract mass audiences.53

Perhaps uniquely in the history of British cinema, Gilliam, having completed one film based in the Middle Ages, decided to direct a second.

Notes 1 Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus, pp. 11–27. 2 See Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus, pp. 29–50, McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, pp. 66–93. Cleese, Chapman and Idle went to Cambridge; Jones and Palin to Oxford. 3 Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus, p. 64. 4 Quoted in ibid., p. 186. 5 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 24. 6 I thank Phil Stubbs for this information. 7 Gilliam, in McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, p. 119. 8 The show also starred Denise Coffey and David Jason. See Robert Ross, Monty Python Encyclopedia (London, B.T. Batsford, 2001), pp. 49–51. 9 Gilliam, in McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, p. 118. 10 Palin, in ibid., p. 118. 11 A controversial Conservative politician. 12 Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus, p. 196. 13 André Breton, from ‘The First Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, et al. (eds), Modernism: An Anthology of Documents and Sources (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 307–11, p. 308. 14 Ibid. (original emphasis). 15 McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, p. 113. 16 Ross gives a useful overview of postwar British radio and television comedy in Monty Python Encyclopedia, pp. 7–10, although Wilmut’s book is more extensive and detailed. 17 McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, p. 118. 18 Jones, in ibid., p. 133. 19 Idle, in ibid.

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something completely different  41 20 See McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, p. 164. Palin remembers Jones and MacNaughton choosing it; Jones remembers floor manager Roger Last. 21 Later shows introduced a splodgy sound effect. 22 Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London, Routledge, 1998), p. 76. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 93. 25 John O. Thompson (ed.), Monty Python: Complete and Utter History of the Grotesque (London, BFI, 1982), p. 7. 26 Ibid., p. 41. 27 See Graham Chapman et al., The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words (Pantheon Books, New York, 1989). 28 Darl Larsen, Monty Python, Shakespeare, and English Renaissance Drama (Jefferson, N.C., McFarland, 2003). 29 The first three seasons had 13 shows each, the fourth series only 6. 30 The albums were Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1970) and Another Monty Python Record (1971); the book was Monty Python’s Big Red Book. 31 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 42. 32 I thank Phil Stubbs for reminding me of this fact. 33 Alexander Walker, review of And Now for Something Completely Different, Evening Standard, 30 September 1971, in Thompson (ed.), Monty Python: Complete and Utter History, p. v. 34 Ibid. 35 Terry Jones, Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980). 36 Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, Crusades (London, BBC Books, 1994). 37 ‘Directors’ Commentary’, Monty Python and the Holy Grail DVD (Columbia Tristar, 2001). 38 Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 58. 39 Gilliam, in McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, p. 259. 40 Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 59. 41 Gilliam, in ibid. 42 Idle, in McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, p. 258. 43 He also plays the Green Knight, slain by the Black Knight, and Sir Gawain, first to be killed by the deadly rabbit. 44 Gilliam, in McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, p. 264. 45 Palin, in ibid. 46 Idle, in ibid., p. 265. 47 Robert Hewison, Monty Python: The Case Against (London, Methuen, 1981), pp.  41–56, p. 56. 48 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 57. 49 John Aberth, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film (London, Routledge, 2003), p. 24. 50 Ibid., p. 25. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 53 Sid Ray, ‘Time Bandits: Contemporary Appropriations’, in Martha. W. Driver and Sid Ray (eds), The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy (Jefferson, N.C., MacFarland, 2004), pp. 147–50, p. 147.

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Monsters and gods

3

In 1976 Gilliam worked briefly on All This and World War II, a project with producer Sandy Lieberson that combined Beatles music, animation, Second World War footage and archival ‘appearances’ by Bob Hope, Adolf Hitler, Eleanor Roosevelt and others. But when Gilliam’s contribution began to waiver, Lieberson asked what else he would like to make.1 Gilliam suggested a film based on Lewis Carroll’s nonsense verse, ‘Jabberwocky’, taken from Through the Looking Glass. Gilliam explains that Lieberson ‘made one phone call to [Holy Grail Executive Producer] John Goldstone, which meant we had the same financing as the Holy Grail’.2 The ease with which funding was gained signalled Holy Grail’s critical and commercial success, and the Pythons’ small industry clout. Indeed, part of the expectation behind the financing was that the projected film would include Python members. Gilliam, though, was trying to establish himself as an independent filmmaker, and Python members in their turn were protective of what went out under the group’s name. Cleese, Chapman and Idle ‘all declined to be involved’ in the proposed film, requesting ‘contractual assurances that the Python name would not be used in connection with the film’.3 Palin and Jones, though, signed to play major and minor roles. Gilliam’s independence came at a price, for he was the least experienced writer in the group. Recognising his shortcomings with dialogue and plot, he enlisted Charles Alverson, whom he had replaced on Help! magazine a decade earlier, as co-writer. The main ideas and images were Gilliam’s, but Alverson made contributions, as well as translating Gilliam’s vision into a filmable text. They would meet, thrash out ideas, and then Alverson would go off to work on the script. Gilliam would collaborate with co-writers throughout his career. The production process proved challenging. The £500,000 budget was more than double that for Holy Grail, allowing more detailed and realistic sets, but it still imposed restraints. Partly shot on location at

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monsters and gods  43 Chepstow and Pembroke castles, Jabberwocky was also filmed at Shepperton Studios using re-dressed sets from the musical Oliver! Gilliam’s concern with the look of the film and the depth of historical detail meant he played an important design role, helping to come up with cost-effective ways of cheating the budget limitations: rooms were made to appear more spacious or decrepit, the eponymous Jabberwock more monstrous. Roy Smith, production designer on Holy Grail, repeated that role in Jabberwocky, as did Director of Photography Terry Bedford and costumiers Hazel Pethig and Charles Knode. Paradoxically, given Gilliam’s desire to go beyond what Python had done, to move away from comedy towards a more complex representation of medieval life, this continuity helped his first solo venture. His concern for what would appear on screen meant that, despite having collaborated on the script, he relied heavily on storyboards he had drawn. Gilliam comments that ‘the storyboard to me is like writing’, adding that in the act of drawing ‘I’m changing my ideas of what I’m doing. And it’s really magical when I get going.’4 This creative use of storyboards had drawbacks, Gilliam admitting that his inclination towards grotesque, distorted figures means that they are not properly proportioned. Gilliam’s uncertainties about himself as a director meant that he felt he ‘was quite rigid on the studio floor, trying to get them doing it the way I had drawn it’.5 With Holy Grail, this insistence on what was visually arresting over what was physically comfortable had led to a minor cast revolt. With Jabberwocky, the majority of the cast were seasoned stage, film and television actors, and so potentially more amenable to directorial control. As well as Jones and Palin, the cast included an impressive assortment of Britain’s comic and character actors. Max Wall was a legendary musichall figure (his funny walk inspiring Cleese), even if his film career was lamentably limited. John Le Mesurier, Harry H. Corbett and Warren Mitchell had starred respectively in Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son and Till Death Do Us Part, three of British television’s greatest comedies. Bernard Bresslaw was a staple from Carry On films, while John Bird had been part of television’s satirical nursery, which had also nurtured the Pythons. The cast’s polished talents meant that Gilliam was less called upon to direct how a role might be played. This must have been a welcome relief, but it also fitted Gilliam’s inclination to group effort: ‘If you have all this talent’, he recalls of Jabberwocky, ‘whether it’s actors or designers, then you want to use it to go beyond your finite vision.’6 If The Holy Grail had exposed Gilliam’s limitations in relating to performers, Jabberwocky redressed the balance. Gilliam allowed, for example, Wall and Le Mesurier to develop distinctly gay inflections in the bond between their characters, King Bruno and his assistant, Passelewe.

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44  terry gilliam The poem ‘Jabberwocky’ seems a quirky and inherently problematic choice for adaptation to the screen. Comprising only 28 lines, it has little by way of plot, and has a high quotient of nonsensical words direct from Carroll’s idiosyncratic and fertile brain. But it did have elements Gilliam could use in tackling unfinished business with the Middle Ages: ‘There were a lot of things I’d wanted to do in Holy Grail but hadn’t been able to, and I didn’t want to be tied to just doing comedy all the time. I wanted to deal with the whole world – adventure, suspense, romance, textures, smells, atmosphere.’7 While there seems insufficient substance in ‘Jabberwocky’ for such an ambitious project, there is adventure in its scanty narrative, and, from the opening quatrain, atmosphere in abundance: ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves And the mome raths outgrabe.

Alice stumbles across the text, but because ‘Jabberwocky’ is printed in mirror language she can’t read it. Even when she can, she finds it largely incomprehensible: ‘It seems very pretty … but it’s rather hard to understand!’ (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are!’8

The opposite seems true of Gilliam, who claims that ‘right from the first lines’ he ‘could see a world already – with characters, textures, shapes and colours. It’s all there in those words and it came out as a medieval world, even though it didn’t have to take that form.’9 The medieval world is not intrinsic to the atmosphere or meaning of the poem. The great Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer’s 1971 short animated version, for example, uses disturbing images of inanimate objects come to life, and children’s toys enact cycles of regeneration and death. The poem intentionally evades any one reading, as Carroll makes clear by having the pompous Humpty Dumpty decode some of the ‘hard words’ for Alice, before declaring: ‘When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’10 Readers are meant to reject Humpty’s linguistic determinism, abhorring the imposition of limits on an exhilaratingly open text. This rejection of imposed authority seems an aspect of nonsense generally, Susan Stewart explaining that once nonsense gets invoked ‘hierarchies of relevance are flattened, inverted and manipulated in a gesture that questions the idea of hierarchy itself – a gesture that celebrates an arbitrary and impermanent hierarchy’.11

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monsters and gods  45 As the Pythons, Spike Milligan and Carroll understood, nonsense is subversive and liberating. Much of the poem is heard at stages in Jabberwocky, usually conveyed through a one-man puppet theatre, the medieval equivalent of tele­ vision. But Carroll’s poem only activated ideas for the eventual film. Having taken inspiration from one classic text, Gilliam chose to interweave it with a classic literary form, the fairy tale. In a comment that reaches back to his childhood and forward nearly thirty years to The Brothers Grimm, he states that ‘I was trying to make a real Grimm’s fairy tale, which are very bloody.’12 Gilliam reworked the traditional fairy tale narrative, so that the storyline would precipitate ‘a collision of fairytales’.13 The tale of the poor boy going off to seek his fortune clashes with that of the princess imprisoned in a tower who wants to be rescued by a handsome, heroic prince. In Jabberwocky, the dull poor boy, Dennis Cooper (Palin), is a craven character dreaming small dreams of economic advancement. Gilliam saw him as ‘like a guy somewhere in the Midwest who aspires to own a used-car lot’.14 He wins the hand of Princess Daisy (Deborah Fallender) despite really wanting Griselda Fishfinger (Annette Badland), his homely, stupid and openly dismissive neighbour. The delusional Daisy, reared on a diet of fairy tales, ­mistakenly thinks Dennis is the prince she has been primed to believe will rescue her. At film’s end, they are both trapped with the wrong mate, she unknowingly, he all too aware that success has deprived him of Griselda. As they ride off into the sunset in a horse-drawn carriage, the audience recognises the damage to Dennis by this narrative pile-up of fairy tales. While employing a traditional literary form, then, Gilliam refashions it for satirical effect. Fantasy can be a trap as well as an escape from reality. The fairy tale framework offers a relatively straightforward narrative. In a small village in a land terrorised by the hideous Jabberwock, lives Dennis Cooper and his father (Paul Curran), a cooper or barrel-maker who, as a proud craftsman, deplores his son’s blinkered economic sensibility. Dennis loves Griselda, the local fishmonger’s daughter. When Dennis’s father, on his deathbed, disowns his son, the young man sets off in fairy tale fashion to the big city, to seek his fortune and prove himself worthy of Griselda. The city is ruled over by the aged and enfeebled Bruno the Questionable (Wall), aided by his loyal counsellor, Passelewe (Le Mesurier). Bruno is the last in a played-out line of rulers, his castle a dark, dusty, crumbling husk. He is also father to Princess Daisy, who lives in one of the castle’s towers awaiting her prince, ‘just like all the books say to do’. The merchants of the city, meanwhile, members of a rising and manipulative class keen to improve its fortunes, recognise

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46  terry gilliam that the Jabberwock threat has kept commodity prices high. The church also sees the monster as terrifying the populace into piety. But Bruno, eager to re-establish the ancient grandeur of his family and provide a prince for Daisy, proposes a chivalric tournament to rid the land of the beast. By chance, Dennis becomes squire to the knight who wins the tournament, a figure whose helmet is adorned with a red herring. The merchants, keen to protect their profits, hire the powerful Black Knight to kill off the king’s champion, which he does with a massive axe blow that essentially slices his foe in two. He and his henchmen then turn their attentions to the bumbling Dennis, who is saved by the reappearance of the Jabberwock. The Black Knight mortally wounds the monster, but is killed himself by the stricken beast. Dennis appears certain to be its next victim, but as it lunges towards him it skewers itself on the sword he raises feebly in self-defence. Despite these less than heroic deeds, he returns triumphantly with the beast’s head to the city, expecting to claim a fortune, and thus Griselda, as his prize. Instead, his fairy tale crashes into that of Daisy, King Bruno forcing Dennis to marry her on pain of death, with the dubious compensation of being gifted half of Bruno’s decrepit kingdom. Dennis will not live happily ever after. Jack Zipes argues that folk and fairy tales reflect a broad context that can be used for critical social comment, and explains that these tales ‘ferret out deeprooted wishes, needs, and wants and demonstrate how they can be realized’, adding that ‘within the tales lies the hope of self-transformation and a better world’.15 And yet transformation remains only a potential, not a given. Dennis and Daisy are denied the fairy tale endings they desire, Daisy being punished for her deluded faith in unworldly fantasies, Dennis for his paltry ambitions. Placing his fairy tale in the medieval period allowed Gilliam to indulge his love of the subversive grotesque. Mikhail Bakhtin, in his seminal work, Rabelais and His World, distinguishes medieval and Renaissance grotesque from the later Romantic version: the medieval type is social, bodily and regenerative, while the Romantic version tends towards individual isolation and fear. The difference is played out in terms of laughter, for whereas medieval and Renaissance grotesque laughter consisted of ‘joyful and triumphant hilarity’, in the Romantic manifestation ‘laughter was cut down to cold humor, irony, sarcasm’, reducing its ‘positive regenerating power’.16 By returning to the carnivalesque medieval world, and by incorporating fairy tales and Carroll’s nineteenth-century nonsense, Gilliam could engage different but potentially interactive forms of subversion and regeneration. Texts that challenge hierarchies, destroy restrictive seriousness and suggest transformative possibilities could be integrated with social codes that

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monsters and gods  47 c­ elebrate the physicality of the body, the magical realm of the metaphysical, the rich mayhem of social life, and the satirical and restorative power of laughter. Conceptually and cinematically, Jabberwocky marks a substantial advance over The Holy Grail. The earlier film had revelled in its rough edges, with comic impact its primary goal; it succeeded tremendously. But there were few close-ups, for example, the argument being that comedy works best with medium shots more redolent of television. Much of the dialogue was delivered straight to camera, Terry Jones feeling that this gave the comedy more intensity. Jabberwocky has serious aims, even as it uses comedy to make some of its points. It opens in an idyllic natural world, serenaded by a chirruping flute and symbolised by a green butterfly sitting peacefully on a leaf in a pristine forest. The first lines of ‘Jabberwocky’ flow through this arcadian setting, the words ‘all mimsy were the borogoves’ reinforcing a whimsical tranquillity. But the whimsical never completely frees itself from the menacing. With the words ‘the mome raths outgrabe’, the butterfly is crushed, not by the Jabberwock, but by another monstrous interloper – a poacher (Jones). He oozes medieval seediness; under a ludicrously extended animal fur hat, he whistles contentedly as he clears his traps and fills up a writhing bag of captured animals. But the soundtrack and tracking shots ­indicate that he too is being hunted, his death proving a gruesome affair. Turning to camera, he sees the Jabberwock, and in a crane shot is hauled high into the trees, his eyes bulging in terror, his screams and frantic ­writhings caught in vivid close-up, before being returned to the ground, his face a terrified mask. The camera pans up the dead man’s blackened arm, quickly revealing his body stripped of most of its flesh, only the head remaining intact atop a skeleton still steaming from the ferocity of the attack. On his nose sits a green butterfly, emblem of nature’s triumph over the intruding human. The scene bears hallmarks of Holy Grail, in the general period and subject matter, the fact that Jones plays the poacher, and the gleefully grotesque rendering of his death. But this opening also indicates Gilliam’s sense of cinematic possibilities. Tracking and crane shots simulate the monster’s movement, and close-ups of Jones, both as he prowls the forest and as he is taken up by the Jabberwock, generate menace and tension primarily by visual means. The comedy derives from grotesquerie rather than absurdity. We only see the monster’s catastrophic effect, its absence from the screen adding to the crafted sense of horror. A brief cut away to startled birds reinforces the creature’s ghastly unnaturalness. Apart from ‘Jabberwocky’’s opening stanza, and some background music, the mood is achieved visually, a break

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48  terry gilliam from the more verbal world of Python. This privileging of the visual continues as blood lightly splashes the title, extending the brutality of the opening shot and melding into a second framing device, the use of art as historical shorthand. Sections of the panel ‘Hell’, from Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, depicting horrendous human suffering, are spliced with Bruegel’s similarly unsettling The Triumph of Death. Gilliam’s use of roughly contemporaneous art reinforces the historical moment, as well as the gloomy psychological and social mood. Simultaneously, a voice-over dispenses with Lewis Carroll in order to introduce a broader social history: ‘It is the middle of the Dark Ages; ages darker than anyone had expected.’ As with Python films, simplistic labels for long and complex historical eras are lampooned as reductive. Nevertheless, the words develop the dark vision, Bruegel’s Tower of Babel replacing Bosch as the voice-over tells of a ‘horrendous monster’ forcing ‘the helpless survivors to seek refuge behind the walls of the great city’. Another Bruegel replaces this, a seemingly bucolic image, as the social narrative changes direction: ‘But, out in the forest, in isolated pockets still untouched by the ravages of the monster, life and business goes on, as usual.’ The camera tracks across Bruegel’s panorama of meadows and a river to a small cottage, not lingering on the structure in the foreground that gives the painting its grimly ironic title, The Merry Way to the Gallows. We are some distance from Holy Grail’s mock-Swedish credits and coconut shells. Gilliam uses this economical, visually engaging approach to sketch in the broad social concerns of the film, the key distinction in the commentary being the separation of ‘business’ from ‘life’. The socio-economic transformation of society from a craft-based system to a market economy is high among the film’s interests. While this is not normally the source of comedy, the ‘Constitutional Peasants’ sketch in Holy Grail provides a model, furnishing a hilarious analysis of the medieval power structure from the point of view of a modern anarcho-syndicalist. Jabberwocky also mixes pre-modern social history with modern references to mechanisation and the wizened imagination of the mercantile world. The butt of this satire in both films, coincidentally, is a character called Dennis, played by Palin. As the radicalised provocateur in Holy Grail, Dennis had railed against ‘the violence inherent in the system’ and tried unsuccessfully to rouse peasants to revolution. But the Dennis of Jabberwocky revels in stocktaking and the application of time-and-motion principles. We initially hear him off-camera taking an inventory of stock while his father painstakingly fashions a cask. Asked what he is doing, Dennis appears witlessly, announcing, ‘Stocktaking, father’, adding that ‘it never hurts to keep an accurate up-to-the-moment account of your stock.’ The

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monsters and gods  49 arrival of the wily fishmonger, Mr Fishfinger (Mitchell), draws Dennis away from the world of the artisan to new economic opportunities created by the monster. With much of the population fearfully trapped within the city walls, food prices are sky-rocketing, and Fishfinger needs cheap containers to transport his goods. Dennis sees the economic prospects, but his father drives the merchant off, understanding that Fishfinger wants cheap, temporary bags, not more expensive barrels.17 Jabberwocky registers the impact of new economic and social practices and structures. With Dennis as the representative of these changes, and the film’s protagonist, Gilliam maintains a critical focus on the impact of economic rationalism. This interest in the rich texture of medieval life marks off Jabberwocky as more a social satire than Holy Grail, which mixed satirical elements into an absurdist comedy. With Jabberwocky the emphasis is reversed. Its satirical impetus ensures the film is no mere period piece, Gilliam using the historical setting to make telling connections to contemporary society. Dennis’s suspiciously modern delight in industrial efficiency, mass-produced goods and inventories creates clear parallels with the world of the film’s audience. The merchants’ corrupt manipulation of the market provides another link, as does the disappearance of crafted goods in the face of cheap alternatives. The unexpected death of Dennis’s father creates the trigger for Dennis to pursue his dreams of success in the city; he must endure Mr Cooper’s deathbed speech, one that crystallises the father’s loathing for the economic ideas that Dennis champions. The expectations Gilliam sets up in framing Mr Cooper compound the vehemence of the attack, for we initially see the old man bathed in a soft mix of golden light and deep shadow, laid out on his bed surrounded by neighbours and friends. This replaces Bruegel and Bosch with the more dramatically sympathetic composition, colour and lighting reminiscent of the sixteenth-century Italian artist, Caravaggio. That initial mood is strikingly at odds with Mr Cooper’s verbal aggression, which is all the more powerful for the disjunction. His dying words disinherit his severely embarrassed son, damning Dennis and his kind, and establishing the film’s underlying social critique. The initial rural setting provides a counterpoint to Dennis’s later adventures in the city. The Fishfingers live in a tumble-down hovel, sustained by vegetables whose peelings they hurl through the window into the adjacent pond. While Dennis makes hopeful protestations of love, Griselda (nicknamed ‘Greasy’) scratches her rump nonchalantly as she eats a potato. She will later throw an unwanted rotten potato through the window, something the lovesick Dennis gratefully claims as a lover’s keepsake. The Fishfingers also allow for some ­historically

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50  terry gilliam grounded toilet humour, initially when Griselda’s brother nearly urinates on Dennis, and soon after when the head of Mr Fishfinger appears through the window of the toilet, his arse protruding massively as he casually discusses economic prospects with his putative son-in-law. These images recreate the easy sociability of Bruegel, with its unembarrassed depiction of bodily functions. And yet the contrasts with modern life do not eradicate the connections. The Fishfingers are desperate for their daughter to trade up to a better class of suitor than Dennis, while he dreams of one day going to the magical big city run by merchants. The city provides the site for a more extended picture of medieval life, and before Dennis arrives Gilliam sketches in the two forces competing for power: the moribund aristocracy and the energetic and corrupt merchants. Jabberwocky also draws on Mervyn Peake’s gothic fantasy novel Gormenghast, one of a celebrated trilogy that recounts the terminal decline of an aristocratic family. Peake, a brilliant novelist, artist, writer of nonsense verse and illustrator (including Lewis Carroll’s Alice books) creates Titus Groan as the 77th earl of Gormenghast, heir ‘to a crumbling summit: to a sea of nettles: to an empire of red dust: to rituals’ footprints ankle-deep in stone’.18 Gilliam admits that ‘Jabberwocky was, in a sense, my attempt to do Gormenghast’, and the dust-filled environs of Bruno’s castle approximate the crumbling kingdom depicted by Peake.19 Where the rural world comprises light-filled earthiness, the ancient castle is cavernous, dark and dust-ridden. Gilliam mostly uses only candlelight or natural light and extreme camera angles to underscore the massive size of rooms and their deathly emptiness. Figures dissolve in the dust and the darkness. A meal between Bruno and Passelewe at a huge candelit table is shot from high above, so that two floors above the diners a servant can be seen scrubbing the floor, emphasising the empty grandeur and unstoppable decay. Bruno suspects that he is being poisoned, until his food-taster informs him that the odd flavour is falling plaster from the ‘eleventh, no, the twelfth century’. Ancient history has an ancient history, encoded in the castle’s crumbling walls and roofs. Bruno’s own robes are a tatty patchwork that threaten to smother him in dusty cloth, and Wall plays the part without teeth, so that Bruno’s face exhibits an antic decrepitude. When he decides to hold a tournament in order to find a champion who can defeat the Jabberwock, he tells Daisy that he will build her a ‘beautiful bridal suite in the lovely West Tower’, which promptly disintegrates before them. Architecturally and symbolically, the monarchy is a crumbling relic. Yet the city outside the castle, and the merchants who control it, are models of vigour, the streets crammed and energetic. The establishing shots of the city overflow with the day-to-day activities of medieval life,

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monsters and gods  51 Gilliam packing the frames with detail superfluous to purely comic purposes. There is comedy here, as with a man selling fast-food rats on a stick, but such touches are ancillary to the main purpose of rendering the richness and vivacity of daily life. People lean out of windows, buy and sell, frolic and rush about to unknown meetings, adding nothing to the plot, but contributing immensely to the atmosphere. This realism also allows sustained satirical comparisons with modern society. A key target of this satire are the merchants who first appear on their way to see Bruno, riding in sedan chairs that correspond to modern limousines. Held aloft by their bearers, they discuss market fluctuations and economic predictions. But underlying antagonisms and competitiveness force them to ‘accelerate’ their sedan chairs in a ludicrous race that mercilessly exploits their bearers while exposing their mutual hatreds and fundamental duplicity. Under-cranking the film briefly at this point recreates the frenetic pace of a silent movie car chase. But when they reach the castle the hyperextended introduction of King Bruno by a herald (Bird), with references to such forbears as ‘Otto the Bent, conqueror of Freedonia’ (an allusion to the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup) frustratingly prohibits them from taking their seats. Within the castle wall their energies are stymied, their pretensions mocked and they are ripe for repeated satirising. The city Dennis arrives in is a lively, complex and venal place. As the imposing guards at the city gates tell those queuing to enter, nobody gets in without money or possessions. One deluded fool (a Gilliam cameo) thinks that the rocks he holds are diamonds, but is roughly turned away. Dennis naively thinks that good ideas and enthusiasm will be sufficient, but he too gets rejected. Only the discovery of Griselda’s discarded potato gives him temporary bargaining power. When he explains that the potato is a memento from his sweetheart, one guard blubbers, ‘Gosh, she must really love you. I’ve got a sort of sticky feeling inside me just thinking about it. You sure are a lucky guy.’ The combination of emotional hyperbole and verbal anachronism gives this response a flash of pythonesque absurdity that plays off the more general social satire. Dennis is denied access, but not before dropping his pants in front of the queuing applicants while the guards assess the quality of his legs. Later, gathering firewood, he comes across the deranged diamond miner who, in a reprise of the opening scene, is ravaged by the Jabberwock and reduced to a steaming pile of bones. Jabberwocky thus kills off both co-directors of Holy Grail in a horrendous fashion. We next see Dennis asleep outside the city walls, before a guard urinates on his face from on high, but this rude awakening provides his key to the city. Alerted to the early morning ablutions of the guards, he enters by a

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52  terry gilliam side door left open while a squatting, bare-arsed guard relieves himself behind a bush. Once inside the walls, Dennis is mesmerised by the craft guild signs that display on the still empty streets the vibrant economic world to which he aspires. Another anachronism signals the start of the business day, the town crier checking his hourglass before announcing ‘rush hour’, at which point a jump cut thrusts Dennis into the centre of a bustling mass of medieval urban activity, and he is literally knocked over by the pace of city life. But the city contains grim denizens and teaches harsh lessons. One of its new arrivals is master cooper Wat Dabney (Jerrold Wells), a hero to Dennis’s father on account of his supposed invention of the ‘inverted firkin’.20 But, as Dabney explains to Dennis in a scene that emphasises Jabberwocky’s serious treatment of social history, the control of the guilds means that he cannot find work as a cooper. Insurmountable economic forces have necessitated a grotesque remedy, for Dabney has cut off his right foot with a carving knife, and gone begging in the street. Ever the optimist, he sits smiling behind the bloody knife and foot that prove his bona fides, accepting with cheery civility the coins dropped into his cup. Realising that Dennis is trapped in the same dilemma, he suggests that Dennis hack off his own foot so they can team up. Dennis’s horrified escape leaves him genuinely mystified, and he declares with wideeyed disbelief: ‘Well, what a golden opportunity he’s missing.’ A group of religious fanatics provides further gruesome instruction, their cries for repentance and their brutal self-mortification rendered as comically dangerous ravings. After their brief initial entrance, they return later, capturing Dennis and threatening to hurl him flaming from a catapult over the city wall as a sacrifice to the monster. The extended litany their leader (Graham Crowden) gives of the horrific pains Dennis will suffer provokes envy among his followers, and another fanatic happily substitutes himself. As his fiery body lands in the fields beyond the city we hear his blissful cry: ‘Nice.’ This is certainly funny, but where in Life of Brian such manic creatures are integrated into the complexities and themes of the plot, in Jabberwocky, as in Holy Grail, they remain comparatively tangential to the film’s satirical force. Dabney, by contrast, enjoys far less screen time, but his fleeting appearance later, happily displaying his second amputated foot, fits into the larger concerns of the film. A more substantial and consequential subplot centres round a loudmouthed and randy squire. The tournament Bruno organises brings knights and their servants to the city to engage in the grisly spectator sport of their day. Chasing a random turnip as it rolls through the streets, the starving Dennis collides with a squire (Corbett) called Ethel on his way to an armour repair shop. This meeting sets up one of

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monsters and gods  53 the great set pieces in the film. The workshop approximates a modern day car repairer, its owner (Brian Glover) proudly lauding the quality of the workmanship while customers complain about the service. As a student of industrial efficiency, Dennis realises that the antiquated production line needs upgrading, and suggests a slight adjustment that would substantially increase productivity. But his tiny proposal upsets the delicate balance of the ancient system, setting off a calamitous chain reaction that completely destroys the workshop. Economic innovation has its victims. Having brought on the collapse of a thriving business, Dennis and the squire repair to a nearby tavern, the Queen’s Haemorrhoids, where a busty wench lustily plucking a chicken catches the squire’s eye. She is the tavern-keeper’s wife, so the squire recruits the naive Dennis in a scheme to trap the keeper in the tavern cellar, while he takes the wife upstairs. Gilliam’s references here seem to be films such as Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales and Decameron, with their tales of alcohol, lusty deceit, cuckolding and grim or comic resolutions. Initially, the squire has his way; even better, the tavern keeper is imprisoned. But having bribed his way out of jail, the tavern keeper returns home to his wife. Little knowing that the post-coital squire hides under his bed, he launches himself on to it and his wife. The bed collapses, an oozing puddle of blood charting the squire’s crushing demise. The footless Dabney, the flaming religious fanatic and the squashed squire are individualised examples of the more general brutality of medieval life the film portrays. So, when Bruno decides on the tournament to find a monster killer, he naturally rejects Passelewe’s idea of a mock event with blunted lances as something without glory or honour, ‘a bunch of buffoons playing pillow fights’. Bruno reminisces that ‘it’s years since we heard the clash of sword against shield, the clash of mightily armoured knights crashing to the ground, the spurt of blood as the dagger is thrust into unprotected groin’. His barely concealed bloodlust gets fully satisfied, knights being eliminated in extravagant cascades of blood that increasingly cake the faces of the royal party. Princes Daisy clearly enjoys the wanton slaughter as eagerly as her father and the attendant crowds. Only Passelewe criticises this, suggesting that the tournament will kill off all the knights, and that a different selection process is required. A game of hide-and-seek ultimately decides the winner. This absurd end to the horrific proceedings fits with Philip Thomson’s sense that the grotesque as a mode generates a confusion ‘between a sense of the comic and something – revulsion, horror, fear – which is incompatible with the comic’.21 Jabberwocky repeatedly employs that confusion between horror and comedy for satirical effect, exposing the brutality barely hidden beneath society’s surface. The repeated allu-

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54  terry gilliam sions to the modern world underscore the fact that the film’s targets are never limited to the medieval world. The Jabberwock itself might represent a form of trans-historical or universal terror, but it also needed to exist on screen. In Holy Grail the many-eyed monster had been an animation, but that was not an option in Jabberwocky. Gilliam initially created the beast as a frightening presence by implication, through a combination of high camera angles and movement that tracks the potential victims. Their increasingly worried looks and the background music build up an atmosphere of threat that is resolved in the attack. We see the terrified reaction of the poacher rather than the beast, and the grimly humorous death of the diamond hoarder adds comic relief. Both instances succeed by using cinematic techniques to suggest rather than merely show, but eventually the beast of the film’s title needed to appear. Gilliam’s starting point came from the classic nineteenth-century illustrations in the Alice books by Sir John Tenniel, and the eventual creature bears a family resemblance to Tenniel’s original. But the transfer from sketchbook to screen was constrained and determined by the budget, which did not allow for more than a man in a monster suit. This required a certain amount of improvisation and innovation, so that in order for the Jabberwock’s legs to function like monsters’ legs, for example, the actor inside the suit was actually facing backwards. Its great head on the serpentine neck was manipulated puppet-like from a crane above. The result, at the time of the film’s initial release, was fairly convincing and compelling (the slightly rubbery feet notwithstanding). But the problem of representing the fantastic on film opens up larger questions that play through many of Gilliam’s subsequent films. For Tzvetan Todorov, a person who experiences some inexplicable event hesitates between two possible solutions: that it is a product of the ­imagination or that it is reality controlled by unknown laws; ‘the fantastic occupies the duration of that uncertainty’.22 This point has a negative value in terms of Jabberwocky, reinforcing Gilliam’s sense that monsters were integrated into the medieval mindset. For the characters, then, the Jabberwock is wholly explainable. But a modern audience will likely judge the Jabberwock on technical grounds, as whether it seems visually plausible. Viewed from the world of CGI, the monster seems less credible than it did when it first appeared. Gilliam might well counter that the gap between perception and plausibility should be filled in by the imagination. Given its nineteenth-century origins, the Jabberwock is scarcely a specifically medieval figure, although it might be a product of medievalism, the revival of interest in the period that took hold in that century.

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monsters and gods  55 But Gilliam’s sense that the medieval world was attuned to metaphysical and perhaps monstrous realms that the modern world tends to ignore or reject is worth remembering. The Jabberwock fits into the underlying fairy tale scheme, while the way the clergy use it to instil pious fear or the merchant class to keep up commodity prices also makes it a powerful agent for social satire. Its death also offers the chance to parody the heroic myths attending dragon slaying. True, the Black Knight inflicts a mortal wound, but the pathetic and grovelling Dennis completes the killing while desperately trying to defend himself. Even fairy tale characters usually perform actual acts of bravery to deserve living happily ever after. The arbitrary nature of success in this society seems reflected in the fact that as a result of great good fortune, rather than courage, strength or wit, Dennis returns to the city a hero, and can claim the princess and half the kingdom as his prize. The Jabberwock’s death exemplifies a larger pattern of distorted social values that ruin Mr Cooper and Wat Dabney, while nurturing a mendacious merchant class and rewarding the undeserving Dennis. Yet the fact that he wins Princess Daisy rather than Griselda Fishfinger operates as a form of punishment or judgement; the fairy tale ending of a newly married couple driving into the sunset in horse-drawn carriage is rich with irony. Gilliam visually accentuates this disjunction between the myth and the reality by colourising the final frames artificially and ending on an illustrated iris shot that, like a trap, finally snaps shut. Having finished his first shoot as sole director, Gilliam faced the problem of editing. With Python he had complete control over the editing of his own animations, and with Holy Grail he and Jones had involved themselves in the editing process. But Jabberwocky’s editor Mike Bradsell was unused to a ‘director who was in the editing room every minute’. While Bradsell was faced with a novel situation, Gilliam was also learning a central lesson about filmmaking: The director shoots the movie and the editor assembles and cuts it together; they look at it and comments are made; then the editor goes back and does the next cut and the director is brought in again. I was shocked: I always thought directors were real hands-on people, but apparently not. I just wanted to be part of every frame … Over the years I’ve got better … [but] I still find I have to restrain myself.23

Gilliam was keen that the films he usually also co-wrote bore his influence at the post-production stage, and his contract usually specified that he retained control over the final cut. But as early as Brazil he would find that studio executives could also hanker after editorial power. Jabberwocky has its flaws, the most noticeable of which is pacing, which flags at times, especially in the tournament scenes. While ­visually

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56  terry gilliam arresting on their own, they do not build cumulatively to anything more than reiterations of gory deaths. This seems meant to emphasise the meaty physicality neglected in romantic treatments of the period, but repetition dissipates the point’s force. A similar problem in pacing arises in the last half-hour when Dennis and the Black Knight leave the city to fight the monster. Two narrative lines have to be worked through ahead of the monster’s slaying, and while these are necessary, they retard the film’s momentum. The first involves the reintroduction of the Fishfingers, shown being robbed on their way to the city. The time given over to this scene slows progress towards the monster’s killing. And the need for the Black Knight to kill the knight of the red herring, attack Dennis, and then be killed, also takes up considerable screen time. While these scenes create dramatic images, the film’s narrative momentum slows. Once Dennis returns to the city Jabberwocky’s pace picks up quickly and the last sequence revives the film’s general vigour. Jabberwocky’s complexity also created problems for audiences. Drawing from Carroll, Bruegel, Pasolini and others, and incorporating elements of social document, social satire, evocative nonsense, slapstick comedy, distorted fairy tale, the grotesque and the monster film, Jabberwocky did not play safe. Its relative critical and commercial failure had something to do with its own shortcomings, something to do with the challenges it presented its audience, and with expectations that it would be pythonesque. But Jabberwocky offered Gilliam the chance to represent the intricacies of medieval society, celebrate its vital humanity, offer a comically inflected critique of his own world, and learn his craft. He would later note with pride that John Boorman supposedly showed the film to his crew fourteen times while making Excalibur. This was a sign, Gilliam felt, that ‘we captured something very successfully’.24 Jabberwocky’s lack of box-office business did not weaken Gilliam’s appetite for directing, but his next work involved collaborating on the Pythons’ most artistically complete and commercially successful venture, Life of Brian. An off-the-cuff remark by Eric Idle in 1975 that the Pythons’ follow up to Holy Grail would be Jesus Christ – Lust for Glory became the basis for group discussions on a new film. It evolved from a spoof biography of the forgotten thirteenth disciple, Brian, to the eventual subtle, complex satire on religious and political orthodoxy. As with other Python projects, the script went through several drafts and meetings, the most successful on Barbados early in 1978, where the group had decamped to rewrite and polish the script. This trip had immense flow-on effects for the Pythons, for Gilliam’s next film, and for independent British film production in the 1980s. For also on the island was Barry Spikings, Managing Director of EMI, a major player in

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monsters and gods  57 the British industry. Attempting to expand beyond the restrictive realm of British films, EMI began co-financing American films, Spikings and Michael Deeley (who ran EMI’s Los Angeles office) securing deals on such films as The Deer Hunter and Convoy. EMI still retained a major interest in both film production and distribution in the UK, and had done well out of Holy Grail.25 Spikings, hearing of the Python project while on Barbados, expressed interest to John Goldstone, Executive Producer on Holy Grail and Jabberwocky. Having read the script Spikings agreed to put up £2 million for the film (Deeley also loved the screenplay). This was nearly ten times what the Pythons had received for The Holy Grail, and four times Gilliam’s budget for Jabberwocky. EMI also agreed that the Pythons would retain final cut and artistic control over the film, the first time the company had accepted these conditions. James Park contends that ‘So unencouraging was the climate for young directors in Britain at this time that [the great producer] Michael Balcon remarked in 1977: “You don’t need talent to get work these days; you need a miracle.”’26 Once again the Pythons seemingly had triumphed over harsh reality, securing the funding for their film while maintaining creative autonomy. Days before shooting was due to commence in Tunisia, though, EMI boss Lord Delfont read the script approved months before. Disturbed by the prospect of upsetting the Christian community, he withdrew finance. With the cast and crew on the verge of flying out for the film’s location shooting, this decision should have spelt disaster. Perhaps Life of Brian’s subject matter proved significant, for a miracle arrived in the form of former Beatle, George Harrison. Long a Python fan, Harrison was also a friend of Eric Idle. Idle contacted Harrison, who agreed to finance the film, something Idle notes ‘was totally unheard of. It was a spectacular move for somebody to say, “I will pay $4 million for this movie”, it was really unheard of, that’s like $40 million now [2003], a huge sum of money, and without which Life of Brian would not have been made.’27 With his business manager Denis O’Brien, Harrison would set up HandMade Films, which later produced Gilliam’s next solo film, Time Bandits. Gilliam would design the company logo. The eventual financial and critical success of Life of Brian and Time Bandits enticed Harrison and O’Brien to maintain the company, which over the following decade helped make or support critically lauded British films including A Private Function (1984), Mona Lisa (1986) and Withnail and I (1987). Park situates HandMade in a conceptual model of the British film industry based not on large corporations but on ‘small packets of energy and inspiration’, alongside independents such as Palace Pictures and Virgin Films.28

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58  terry gilliam Life of Brian targets manipulation by religious and political orthodoxies, and the general population’s gullibility and desire to follow leaders. Their eventual focus is Brian, a contemporary of Jesus (whose path he occasionally crosses) who becomes entangled in the petty political machinations of revolutionary parties attempting to overthrow imperial Rome. He joins the Judean People’s Front (not their arch enemies, the People’s Front of Judea) in order to pursue the beautiful but credulous activist, Judith. Caught painting anti-Roman graffiti, he gets a painful lesson in Latin grammar, and is later captured when the group attempts to kidnap Pontius Pilate’s wife. He escapes when his guards cannot contain themselves as Pilate lauds his friend, Biggus Dickus. In the ensuing chase, Brian gets plucked into the sky by an alien rocket ship, which engages in an intergalactic battle, then crashes back to earth. Gullible citizens later mistake him for the long-awaited Messiah, and then split immediately into antagonistic sects worshipping his sandal or his gourd. Forced to come up with a sermon by devoted but unwanted followers, he urges the potentially revolutionary idea that people should think for themselves. They slavishly repeat his words not to slavishly repeat his words. Captured again by the Romans, he is crucified with a small bunch of miscreants, who collectively sing the ludicrously upbeat ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ in one of film comedy’s great endings. Despite its huge success, in terms of Gilliam’s career as a filmmaker Life of Brian was a step backwards from Jabberwocky. As in other accounts of Gilliam as filmmaker, it receives relatively brief treatment here.29 Having enjoyed the control of directing his own film, and after the problems with Holy Grail, Gilliam turned down Terry Jones’s offer that they co-direct Brian. Instead, he concentrated on overseeing design and providing animation, as well as contributing to the script and taking small acting roles, most notably as a firebrand preacher and a deranged jailor. Because Brian has a more coherent and focused script than any other Python effort, Gilliam was not required to supply linking animation, but contributes a sustained and brilliant parody of biblical epics in the opening titles. He also creates the space chase sequence, the most generically dislocating moment of the film. Even his design work proved less than satisfying, because ‘the director wasn’t me and sometimes Terry had ideas that drove me crazy, since I have a better eye. So, after a while I became the “Resigner” … when I was getting really pissed off.’30 As Gilliam saw it, Jones still had not broken away from the television approach to filming that entailed relatively static cameras, medium shots, and more consideration of performance than visuals. He adds that ‘I don’t think John [Cleese] or Graham [Chapman]

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monsters and gods  59 thought in filmic terms really. I think they just wanted to get out there, say the lines, be funny and be as comfortable as possible while doing it.’31 An example of this comes in the scene when the Roman soldier forces Brian to correct the Latin he has painted on the walls and write up the correct formulation 100 times. As Gilliam explains, this required a day-for-night shot, but Cleese had rehearsed the scene in a way that required him facing the opposite direction to the proposed shot: ‘So we end up with a day-for-night sequence where you can’t see people’s faces, because they are against a light sky, and the shot has to be printed down until they’re almost black. It’s still a wonderfully funny scene, but I think it would have been better with a bit more control over those things.’32 While Brian as a comedy is a brilliant and sustained piece of work, for Gilliam the filmmaking experience was less successful, and the shooting process ‘wasn’t the best of times’.33 Gilliam does lay claim to the more cinematic external shots of Bethlehem that open the film, which he shot while Jones was performing other duties. He also directed some scenes where Jones was playing Brian’s shrewish mother. But Jones made most of the decisions on camera placement and location.34 Gilliam had control over the opening credits, and these co-opt and parody the iconography and pomposity of Hollywood biblical epics, as in the monstrous slabs of rock that spell out the names of the Python members, or the grand scale of the monuments and buildings that overwhelm the puny extras who are seen creating them. Visual gags include catacombs reworked as apartment windows, outside which hang washing lines whose clothes spell out the name of performers, or the Mick Jaggerish tongue that flops from the mouth of a stone lion. Naturally, this grotesque image has its companions, most notably the trumpeters who blow from the decapitated heads they hold in their own hands, a variation on the arse-blowing trumpeters from Holy Grail, or the rising lotus plant that pushes through the mouth of a grotto face.35 Gilliam borrows from Roman and Renaissance icons, adding modern elements, as in the shabby billboard that credits the film’s producer, John Goldstone. The interweaving of historical and artistic moments and styles creates an arresting and dynamic whole that contains subtle allusions. Brian hurtles through the air on the giant head of the Roman emperor Constantine, history’s most important Christian convert. Brian’s tiny size relative to Constantine registers the power of institutions like the Roman Catholic Church over individuals, while the fact that Constantine’s head literally knocks down pillars of the Roman Empire has historical validity. Audiences are more likely to enjoy the cartoonish destruction than muse over Christian history as these credits run, but, as ever, Gilliam promotes a complex interplay of images rather

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60  terry gilliam than mere variety. The visual intertextuality continues through to the finale, when the ascending lotus plant (symbol of Eastern mysticism) opens to reveal a Renaissance angel, who, like the ancient Greek figure Icarus, flies too close to the God-like sun, and plummets screaming to earth. Over all this runs the anthemic theme song, ‘Brian’, itself a hybrid of Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger and melodramatically presented biography, which is plausible and ridiculous. This song works with the images to insinuate epic grandeur while mocking it. Gilliam’s other major visual contribution was the alien chase scene. Brian, pursued by Roman soldiers, climbs a topless tower and then falls, apparently, to his death. To this point, the film has remained roughly within the historical and cultural boundaries of the biblical epic, but as Brian falls he is claimed by a passing alien spaceship. The subsequent chase is a small masterpiece of parody, absurdity and cheap special effects. It detonates the rules of narrative logic, and in a film notable for its stylistic and generic consistency (in terms of Python), it rips the film into a parallel universe that marries the mannerisms of Star Wars with the crummy effects of early Dr Who. A brief reaction shot from a first-century Judean indicates a small element of surprise at the amazing entrance of alien creatures, but the break is more generic than historical. As the craft accelerates into space the music changes from comic chase music to the portentous string orchestration beloved of space epics. The inside of the ship that captures Brian presents something less majestic. The craft is a cramped, jumbled low-tech collection of lights, wires, pipes and controls (including a steering-wheel) piloted by two of the most unconvincing aliens in cinema history. Patently fake, made of grey rubbery material, expressively rouged lips and a single eyeball, and clearly held by an unseen operator, the aliens evoke Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space.36 But where Wood seemed unaware of how preposterous his film looked, Gilliam clearly revels in the opportunity to play with the conventions of science-fiction films and special effects, using a motorbike to simulate the craft’s motor, and exploding cigars and foam polystyrene to simulate an asteroid. Gilliam proudly recalls the praise George Lucas gave him for the spaceship sequence, adding that he had been ‘determined to do special effects as a cottage industry in Merrie England, just to show them [directors such as Lucas and Steven Spielberg] that you could do it for a couple of fivers instead of millions’. One result of this was the Peerless Camera Company, which Gilliam supported financially with money from Holy Grail, and which remains a major European player in the area of film special effects, including such hits as Aliens, Braveheart, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and all Gilliam’s subsequent films. ‘Now [1999]

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monsters and gods  61 we’ve got everything’, Gilliam notes, ‘but originally we were trying to compete with [Lucas’s] Industrial Light and Magic with only a fraction of the resources.’37 The relationship between resources and imagination continues as a refrain throughout Gilliam’s career, and touches on a point made by Joel Black, who compares the quality and thematic and philosophical impact of the special effects in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 against more recent and more technically advanced films such as those by Lucas: ‘we are now [2002] in a position to recognise that the unavailability of digital effects served as an imaginative, visionary spur to Kubrick and his associates that is sadly lacking in most filmmaking – especially futuristic filmmaking – today’.38 This assessment also applies to Gilliam, even though in the case of Brian his aims were to foreground and celebrate the cheapness of the effects. He had done something similar in Holy Grail as Patsy, revealing Camelot as a fake. Life of Brian is no fake, and marks the high point of the Pythons’ achievements on film. Even though Gilliam’s experience of its production was not entirely positive, his contributions help make it one of the great modern screen comedies. But Jabberwocky had given Gilliam a sense of possibilities beyond Python, terrain he wanted to explore on his own.

Notes 1 All This and World War II (1976) was directed by Susan Winslow. 2 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 65. 3 McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 66. 4 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 67. 5 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 68. 6 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 69. 7 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 65. 8 Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, ed. Martin Gardiner (London, Penguin, 2001), p. 156. 9 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 73. 10 Carroll, The Annotated Alice, p. 224. 11 Susan Stewart, ‘Nonsense: Aspects on Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature’, in Thompson (ed.), Monty Python: Complete and Utter History, pp. 31–2. 12 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 69. 13 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 65. 14 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 66. 15 Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (London, Heinemann, 1979), p. ix. 16 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1968), p. 38. 17 Later, Dennis learns that Fishfinger bought bags from Wat the Mercer. 18 Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1968), p. 5. 19 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 75. 20 A firkin is a small cask.

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62  terry gilliam 21 Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London, Methuen, 1972), p. 7. 22 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. R.  Howard (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 25. 23 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 76. 24 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 68. 25 See Alexander Walker, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties (London, Harrap, 1985), pp. 192–204. 26 Balcon, quoted in James Park, British Cinema: The Lights that Failed (London, B.T. Batsford, 1990), p. 129. 27 Eric Idle, in Robert Sellers, Always Look on The Bright Side of Life (London, John Blake, 2003), pp. 2–3. 28 Park, British Cinema, p. 155. 29 Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, gives the film scant attention (pp. 81–4) centring on Gilliam’s criticism of the way the film was shot, and pp. 97–8 on how the spacecraft scene was realised. In McCabe’s Dark Knights and Holy Fools the film rates eight pages (pp. 77–85) but half of these are taken up with photographs. 30 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 81. 31 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 82. 32 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, pp. 82–3. 33 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 81. 34 See McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 78, Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, pp. 82–4. 35 The term ‘grotesque’ originally comes from this artistic source. 36 Plan 9 (1959) regularly has been voted the worst movie of all time. 37 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, pp. 98–9. 38 Joel Black, The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative (New York, Routledge, 2002), p. 208.

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Time and meaning

4

Jabberwocky still bore the markings of Python, but signalled a conscious move away from the tone and focus of the group. Life of Brian, brilliant as it was, marked Gilliam’s temporary return to the fold. It also established the group as among the success stories of British films in a difficult decade. Its commercial success generated pressure to make a followup, especially once HandMade Films’ financial advisor, Denis O’Brien, became their manager. Gilliam, though, was keen to develop two very different projects: The Ministry and Theseus and the Minotaur, a proposal that would resurface several times in his career. Frustrated by his failure to generate interest in The Ministry, an early title for Brazil, but keen to maintain this filmmaking momentum, Gilliam set out to write a film with general appeal. Over a weekend he came up with the basic concepts and characters of Time Bandits, a treatment he pitched theatrically to Denis O’Brien. O’Brien was won over by the performance, but initially was unable to raise finance for the project from outside sources. HandMade decided to finance the film itself, a move that involved O’Brien and George Harrison mortgaging the building that housed HandMade.1 Harrison would later declare in the Sunday Times that ‘If I can help someone like Gilliam, with his eccentricities which border on genius, I will’, before adding the cautionary rider, ‘subject to Denis putting it on a realistic basis so that we don’t go bankrupt inside six months’.2 For Alexander Walker, the mixture of Harrison’s generosity, O’Brien’s financial skills and the pair’s feel for ‘the often comic complexities of the English class system’ made HandMade Films ‘an eccentric outfit’ in the struggling British environment.3 James Park reads HandMade as less obsessed with making British films than making imaginative ones. Indeed, he thinks Time Bandits exemplifies the imaginative group and challenges the circumscribed nationalism of most British films.4 Along with other ‘mini-majors’ such as Virgin Films and Palace Pictures, HandMade Films provided necessary relief in the local

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64  terry gilliam industry where former British film giants such as Rank, Associated Communications Corporation (ACC) and EMI were withdrawing from financing or production.5 But the initial successes of these and larger production houses such as Goldcrest, which burst into prominence with the Oscar winning Gandhi (1982) and The Killing Fields (1984), underline the fact that they could not sustain a sequence of substantial losses. Within a few years of its heady victories, Goldcrest had fallen, victim to a run of commercially disastrous films geared towards the international market, including Revolution (1985) and The Mission (1986). Virgin had been distributor for the definitive punk rock film, Julian Temple’s The Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle (1979), before moving into production on polished works such as Another Country (1984) and 1984 (1984). But its co-financing with Goldcrest of Temple’s disappointing Absolute Beginners (1986) stifled its longer-term interest in film financing. Palace moved from distribution to production, also having a hand in Absolute Beginners. As John Hill records, it ‘survived the financial debacle’, but ‘[its] reprieve was destined to be shortlived’.6 Hill charts Palace’s move into film production, a trajectory that ended in the early 1990s when the returns on various projects ‘proved poor, the company lacked the resources to cover its losses, and faced a growing mountain of debt’.7 For a long time HandMade Films avoided overreaching itself. Only when it aimed at the American market, with the high-profile flop Shanghai Surprise (1986), or largely forgotten works such as Powwow Highway (1988), did HandMade’s touch fail.8 The initially close relationship between the Python group and HandMade also dissolved, but that was for the future. By late 1979 Gilliam had O’Brien’s verbal backing for Time Bandits. While Time Bandits had the go-ahead, it did not have a script. Gilliam’s partnership with Charles Alverson had broken down in the early stages of The Ministry, and he turned instead to fellow Python Michael Palin. Even before Python, Palin had written primarily with Terry Jones, and they were adept at atmospheric and character-driven material. After Python, for example, they had devised the lovingly crafted parody of British boys’ own stories, Ripping Yarns, in which Palin had starred. His feel for history was integral to the time-travelling aspect of the project, and he knew the importance of detail and texture in fleshing out the reality of other times and places. Ripping Yarns had shown that he could also fashion coherent narratives drawn from hackneyed stories, and create plausible but eccentric characters and dialogue. Fashioning the Time Bandits script brought Palin and Gilliam together for the first time as a writing team. As Bob McCabe explains, the original treatment contains many of the elements of the eventual film, with the addition of

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time and meaning  65 a scene set in the future that was abandoned.9 Palin’s work was crucial in realising Gilliam’s original and highly visual ideas, and he recalls the process as one in which he

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probably helped [Gilliam] in suggesting areas of history where the boy should end up, then Terry would leave me to go and flesh out scenes, usually entrusting me to create the characters. But what actually happened to them, how they went through walls and all that, that was Terry’s side.10

As with Jabberwocky, Gilliam enjoyed the luxury of working with a stellar cast. Or, the apparent luxury; any director, let alone one on his second solo project, needed subtle skills to mould the talents of a British stage titan such as Ralph Richardson (who plays the Supreme Being), or a film star of Sean Connery’s formidable reputation. Connery’s participation resulted from a joking reference in the script, which called for Agamemnon to remove his helmet, revealing ‘none other than Sean Connery, or an actor of equal but cheaper stature’.11 By chance, O’Brien played golf with Connery, who accepted the part and thus added to the film’s lustre, his deft performance also adding to its overall depth. To these were added some of Britain’s finest actors: Ian Holm (Napoleon), David Warner (Evil), Jim Broadbent (a gameshow host) and Peter Vaughan (an ogre). American stars Katherine Helmond (an ogress) and Shelley Duvall (Pansy), as well as Palin (Vincent) and the formidable Cleese (Robin Hood) also appeared. The film’s narrative structure determined that one main actor presided over an episode, with the protagonist, a young boy named Kevin, and the Time Bandits, a group of cantankerous dwarfs, providing continuity. The bandits themselves were experienced stage and screen actors, among them David Rappaport (Randall), Kenny Baker (Fidgit) and Jack Purvis (Wally), the last of whom would act in Brazil and Baron Munchausen. But the key role of Kevin went to Craig Warnock, who had come to the auditions only to accompany his brother. Despite his unplanned selection, Warnock gives a remarkable performance for an inexperienced actor required to show the intelligence, creativity, morality and courage that Gilliam and Palin clearly felt a child could encompass. The film traces the adventures of Kevin, an inquisitive 11-year-old who lives in nondescript British suburbia with his parents. While they are slaves to gadget fetishism and cretinous television game shows that ritually humiliate their contestants (and, by association, their viewers), Kevin’s room is an imaginative haven of books, toys, images and drawings. He is awoken one night by the fantastic and terrifying form of a knight on horseback crashing into his bedroom through the doors of

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66  terry gilliam his wardrobe. The following evening a group of six dwarfs, the Time Bandits of the title, arrive via the wardrobe through what Kevin comes to understand as a time hole. They have a map that indicates holes in the fabric of the universe. Chased by the Supreme Being, their former boss and the rightful owner of the map, the Bandits flee with Kevin in tow through a receding bedroom wall that exposes another time hole, and using the map to uncover these holes they venture though time and space. The bandits boastfully see themselves as international robbers, and work on the premise that they will evade capture by escaping to another time and place. Kevin goes with them as they go back through history to the time of Napoleon, Robin Hood, Agamemnon and, after a brief stint on the Titanic, to the Time of Legends. All the while they are being tracked by the figure of Evil, a megalomaniac who lives in the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness with a clutch of grotesque buffoons. He wants the map stolen by the Time Bandits so that he can gain control of the universe and destroy his nemesis, the Supreme Being. Evil entices the Bandits to the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness where he grabs the map and threatens to kill them and Kevin. Kevin persuades the Bandits to search for help, and they return with armed forces from various moments in history. These, however, are easily destroyed by Evil and all seems lost, until the Supreme Being arrives, destroys Evil, and reclaims his map. The chastened Time Bandits are told to clean up the pieces of charred Evil, but they miss one piece. Kevin is left alone with this smoking piece of Evil, and wakes to find his own home ablaze. A fireman saves him, but his parents pick up a fragment of Evil and are blown to pieces. The film ends with Kevin saddened by his orphaned state, but with his imagination invigorated by his adventures. This synopsis indicates a fundamental shift in content and point of view from Jabberwocky. Time Bandits marks the first of several films (including Baron Munchausen and Tideland) that feature children as protagonists or as critical observers of the actions and failings of adults; Time Bandits is the most child-oriented. This approach fits in with Gilliam’s take on the crucial differences between children and adults, for although children ‘have less experience than adults they are no less intelligent. Their minds are just as active – more so, in fact, because they haven’t been limited and defined yet. To them, wonderful things can happen.’12 In Time Bandits, Kevin’s imaginative curiosity and mental agility are shown early, when he quizzes his uninterested father about ancient Greece. His source is a history book, and Kevin’s active love of reading suggests his broad interests, especially compared with his parents’ addiction to television. Where his mind is open and flexible, their sensibilities have been cropped to the dimensions of the

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time and meaning  67 t­ elevision screen. They devour shows such as ‘Your Money or Your Life’, in which contestants compete for a Moderna kitchen, one that can cook a complete meal in 15 minutes. Kevin’s parents represent the adult world that has traded its own imaginative energy for passive consumption, his father consoling his mother that their hedge trimmer is a match for the ­neighbour’s kitchen that can transform a block of ice to beef ­bourguignon in eight seconds. Little wonder, then, that they are ­unsentimentally annihilated at film’s end. Kevin’s imagination sets up an important dynamic between the worlds of children and adults, and determines much of the narrative content and direction. Most of the historical and mythical elements that become sites for his adventures are to be found on the walls, floor and bookshelves of his bedroom: the medieval knight occurs as an image on his bedroom wall, and the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness’s architecture is made from an assembly of toy bricks. Since Kevin’s adventures are bracketed by sleep, it may be tempting to treat them simply as a vivid dream. But the Time Bandits, the Supreme Being and Evil do not fit this scheme, and it might be that they do inhabit another realm that has collided with Kevin’s reality. More than just the wish fulfilment of a young boy, the adventures raise moral and philosophical questions about materialism, theft, the nature of good and evil, the qualities of leadership and courage, the reason why God permits death, as well as the relationships between reality, myth, magic and the metaphysical world. If this makes Time Bandits seem overtly philosophical, the film’s triumph comes through dealing with these weighty issues from Kevin’s perspective. Gilliam validates the child’s natural inquisitiveness and ability to accept the realm of the fantastic and learn from it. Kevin’s adventures test out his capacities for moral discrimination, resourcefulness, and courage, and his success comes when the Supreme Being deems him worthy at film’s end to carry on the fight against Evil. Part of Kevin’s education comes through realising the inadequacies of adults. His self-centred parents are the first manifestation of this deficiency, their dowdy suburban home filled with plastic furniture, a modern update of Dennis Cooper’s medieval dreams of domesticity. But the Time Bandits themselves hardly function as alternative role models. Gilliam first thought that one child might prove insufficient to carry the weight of ideas he wanted to incorporate, and so introduced the dwarfs to reinforce the child’s perspective. Ultimately, the Time Bandits act more as contrast to Kevin than as ballast, and while their manic energy is somewhat childlike, their materialism and duplicity are depressingly adult. Similar failings deflate Napoleon, the first hero they encounter on their travels through time and space. As if to build a thematic

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68  terry gilliam bridge between the dwarfs and the little general, Napoleon is obsessed by the height of comparable figures in history such as Charlemagne and Genghis Khan, delighting in the fact that he is taller than them. Surrounded by extremely tall generals after his victory at the Battle of Castiglione, Napoleon frustrates them by watching a Punch and Judy show, gleeful at the sight of ‘little people hitting each other’. Partly for reasons of size he bonds with the Time Bandits, not realising that they intend to rob him of booty won in the battle. Adult vanity meets adult greed, belittling both the Bandits and Napoleon in Kevin’s eyes. The child’s perspective might be innocent, but it is not a moral blank slate. Gilliam uses Kevin’s youthfulness for social satire. The boy’s perspective allows him to critically scrutinise the deeds of adults and the world they create and control. All fall short: Robin Hood is a supercilious twit surrounded by thugs; the passengers on the Titanic are confected poseurs; an ogre is a mewling oaf, his wife a sugar-coated cannibal; the inhabitants of the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness are either cretins or delusional and wantonly destructive, and the Supreme Being is a combination of a callous manipulator and fussy headmaster. The exception is King Agamemnon, whom we first see fighting a bull-headed warrior (possibly a sly allusion to the stalled Theseus and the Minotaur project). Agamemnon falls, and seems on the point of losing when Kevin tumbles though a time hole, landing on him. The jolt revives Agamemnon in time for him to kill the warrior, and as a result of Kevin’s efforts he is asked back to Agamemnon’s palace. At the beginning of this adventure Kevin has separated from the Time Bandits, who have taken another time portal, so his initial dealings with Agamemnon are not complicated by their chaotic presence. For the only time in the film, a hero proves himself equal to the myth, as well as being a beloved ruler and a wise and generous host for Kevin. Importantly, he loves performing and watching magic. Obviously superior in all ways to Kevin’s real father, Agamemnon proposes himself as a surrogate parent by asking Kevin to stay, something the boy accepts delightedly. But the Time Bandits destroy this idyll when they catch up with Kevin, carrying out what they see as a rescue and what he sees as forced kidnapping. To reinforce the calamity, the time portal through which they thrust themselves and the reluctant Kevin drops them on the deck of the Titanic. Kevin breaks free from the Time Bandits, part of a necessary process of maturation brought about by the set of adventures. The short Titanic episode marks a vital stage in this process, for Kevin comes to understand the Bandits not as high-spirited rogues, but as selfish materialists. His ideal is the splendid world of ancient Greece, theirs the decks of a doomed luxury liner. After the ship sinks, the Bandits come under the

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time and meaning  69 influence of Evil, who transports them to the Time of Legends. Kevin’s ingenuity allows them all to overcome an ogre and a giant, but the Bandits are drawn greedily towards the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, where they are offered the same Moderna kitchen from ‘Your Money or Your Life’. Kevin’s parents also appear as lucky winners on the show, his dad beckoning sinisterly for him to claim a prize. Kevin recognises the diabolical connotations of the game show’s title and the trap set. But the Time Bandits race manically towards the goods, handing over the map in return. Only then does Evil reveal himself as the figure behind the illusory game show host, with Kevin’s parents as his oafish assistants. Thrown into cages suspended in space, the Bandits finally utilise their courage and talents to escape and then battle with Evil. But Kevin is by now their leader, and he presents the overt challenge to Evil. Initially, Evil defeats him, but although it requires the Supreme Being to destroy malevolence, the claim that Kevin is now ready to carry on the fight against Evil himself is a vindication of his inventiveness and moral growth. Time Bandits seems to function simply as the cinematic version of a Bildungsroman, a novel of development. But the episodic plot signals something larger, shifting between realms of reality, history, myth, fantasy and the supernatural. These manoeuvres entail generic changes with attendant representational codes. The shifts between reality and history, or history and myth, repeatedly unsettle the film’s protagonists and its audience. Time Bandits requires a degree of interpretive flexibility to integrate apparently disparate episodes into a coherent, or at least comprehensible, whole. This interpretive work registers afresh the quality of the child’s receptive and inventive imagination. As represented in Time Bandits, this child’s imagination is not merely a sponge for information or alluring images; instead, it allows Kevin to actively create his own fantasy worlds and characters, providing him with the requisite knowledge to function successfully in novel situations. This eclectic database sets him apart from the substantially more limited awareness of most adults. The interpretive skills he continues to develop enable him to assess the new worlds he enters, rather than accepting appearances, and portray him as an inquisitive and active agent. He is a very different character from Jabberwocky’s dull and unadventurous Dennis Cooper, and substantially more engaging. Gilliam employed and subverted genre in the earlier film, colliding fairy tales within a relatively coherent and causally determined narrative. The narrative of Time Bandits is far more fragmented, with potentially no obvious link between the different episodes. Part of the fragmentation came from the type of changes, compromises or improvisations that

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70  terry gilliam recur in Gilliam’s career. He admits that editor Julian Doyle suggested the idea of the Supreme Being chasing the Bandits to generate narrative dynamism and provide a logical destination for the adventures. The original treatment had a sequence set in the future that never made it to the script. In the original, the characters move from the giant’s head in the Time of Legends to the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness via the cave of the Spider Women. But with that scene dropped for reasons of economy, a narrative gap opened up. Gilliam solved this with the invisible barrier that conceals the Fortress and is broken during an argument between the Time Bandits. Thus the Fortress literally appears out of nowhere, and the narrative continues. An even more problematic situation arose with the ending, which was meant to have Agamemnon and his soldiers return to defeat Evil. Agamemnon would be killed in the battle, but Evil would be defeated. But by the time the battle was to be shot, Sean Connery was unable to return to Britain to work, for tax reasons. Gilliam tells Ian Christie he ‘remembered Sean saying it would be great if he could come back at the end. We had already shot the boy being dragged out of bed with the fire in his room, so why not make Sean the fireman who saves Kevin?’ With Connery back in Britain briefly, Gilliam arranged for him to put on a fireman’s suit, put Kevin ‘down and say “Are you all right?” and walk out of shot. Then he climbed into the fire-engine cab and winked. At that point I didn’t know what the scene was going to be exactly, but two months later we worked out what to do and shot the rest of it, with someone doubling for Sean in the wide shots. In the finished film, when the boy is pulled out of bed, you can hear a very bad impersonation by me of Sean saying something like, “Come on lad.”’13 Seeing the film’s narrative as a product of Kevin’s inventive but unstructured imagination to a certain point solves the puzzle of the narrative’s disrupted trajectory, but this undercuts the determining role played by the Time Bandits and by Evil as he manoeuvres Kevin and the Bandits ever closer to the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. Ultimately, the audience and Kevin discover that the Supreme Being has been determining the plot all along in order to test out his creation and its creatures. This revelation better explains the educative process that Kevin undergoes, but the more important point is the effect of the disruptions. Moving radically from one location to another, and from everyday existence to other worlds, grants Kevin and the audience a sense of reality as multidimensional, capable of incorporating or tapping into different realms and states of being. The shifts are not random movements, for they reveal new, enlightening knowledge. The consequent awareness roughly echoes Gilliam’s views on people living in medieval

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time and meaning  71 times, who inhabit a world in which the metaphysical and the fantastic are ­integrated into a holistic and far richer sense of reality than their modern counterparts experience. In both instances, something magical gets lost in the development away from an ancient, magical and childlike openness towards the grim restrictions of adult or contemporary rationality. Time Bandits offers modern audiences the experience of liberating and illuminating otherness. Kevin’s destinations are different from the quotidian reality he normally inhabits and substantially different from each other. The initial intrusions foreshadow this, the knight coming from a moment in history, the Time Bandits then emerging from the supernatural or ­spiritual world (depending on how we read the Supreme Being). So, while Kevin has a picture of the knight on his wall, he has no equivalent image of the Time Bandits. Their plan to use the time map to commit robberies through history affords some form of continuity, but ­Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Castiglione and the sinking of the Titanic are events with a higher degree of historical validity than the existence of either Robin Hood or Agamemnon. Robin might be seen as a potentially historical character transformed by ballads, tales and films into a quasi-mythological figure; Agamemnon, though, remains primarily a figure from Homer’s epic, The Iliad. As if to underline the movement not just through time but to different dimensions, the Time Traveller in H.G. Wells’s seminal novella, The Time Machine, never moves in space from his starting point in late nineteenth-century London. The map the Bandits have stolen, by contrast, allows them to move through the fabric of a universe created by the Supreme Being, which presumably could include imaginary worlds as well. The shift from the icebergladen seas surrounding the Titanic to the Time of Legends takes place not by way of the map, but through the agency of Evil, who pulls them into a new dimension. Where before they had moved through opening and closing doors in the universe, in this case they are pulled backwards into a new domain, the radical nature of the transformation being signalled by their black suits being turned white. The various relocations mark off such distinct domains that they can usefully be seen as approximating different genres, brought together under the capacious generic umbrella of ‘children’s film’. As with Jabberwocky, the script draws from an array of literary and cinematic sources, The Wizard of Oz (with its inflated Supreme Being and the narrative of a child’s journey of discovery) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs being obvious candidates. Evil, though, is a far more malevolent figure than Oz (even if his fiendishness is comically over-wrought at times), while the Bandits are plausibly complex characters compared

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72  terry gilliam with Disney’s two-dimensional cartoon dwarfs. Clearly, historical and mythical literature underpins the episodes with Napoleon, Robin Hood and Agamemnon, although the iconography for these could come as easily from any number of films or books. Interestingly, although C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe might seem a clear point of reference, given that knights and Time Bandits appear from Kevin’s wardrobe, Gilliam claims never to have read Lewis. In fact Kevin never enters the wardrobe, and his first adventure is not to a fantasy land equivalent to Narnia, but to a Napoleonic battle. He eventually journeys to the Time of Legends with its fairy tale ogres and giants, once again characters with long literary and cinematic lineages. Gilliam acknowledges that the giant with the boat on his head reworks both the huge genie from The Thief of Baghdad and an illustration by Brian Froud, a leading artist specialising in pictures of fairies. Time Bandits, then, greatly extends the intertextual range Gilliam had made use of in Jabberwocky, reflecting to some degree the differences between the minds of the films’ protagonists. Where the world of Dennis Cooper is circumscribed by his dullness, Kevin’s eclectic and exploratory mind encompasses and engages with a far more varied and challenging array of environments. We might see Kevin’s trajectory as a journey from ­contemporary reality to a recognisable historical moment and then increasingly away from reality into quasi-myth (Robin Hood), genuine myth (Agamemnon), legend and then a metaphysical world in which Good and Evil struggle for supremacy. The Titanic episode unsettles this neat narrative model, but even so it is possible to detect a relatively logical form of progression, especially if we accept the idea of Kevin’s moral and creative development over the course of his adventures. The variety of places, times and dimensions to which he journeys complicates the question of Time Bandits in terms of fantasy. Tzvetan Todorov argues that ‘the fantastic’ can be defined in terms of the relationship between ‘the marvellous’ and ‘the uncanny’, and that the ‘fantastic’ occupies the duration of protagonists’ uncertainty. ‘The person who experiences the event’, Todorov claims, ‘must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination – and the laws of the world remain as they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality – but that that reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.’ For Todorov, the fantastic ‘is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event’.14 In Time Bandits, however, Kevin experiences such hesitations across a spectrum from history to legend. The relative ease with which he comes to terms

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time and meaning  73 with very different circumstances, and his ability to quickly decode novel situations, cope with crises, make moral decisions, and repeatedly act successfully in increasingly unreal settings, are striking, even if these are not quite ‘fantastic’ in Todorov’s terms. We can compare him to the bumbling and corrupt adults such as his eradicated parents. Todorov argues that the fantastic might be experienced by the protagonist but must be engendered in the reader (or, in this case, the viewer), and this proposition focuses attention back on the audience, both adult and child. We might expect that children watching Time Bandits will more readily suspend disbelief than will adults, but Gilliam’s remark that he wanted the film to be intelligent enough for children and entertaining enough for adults indicates an attempt to provide adults with an experience of something they might have lost or suppressed. These different worlds carry attendant generic markers. The opening credits, of a time map being opened, followed by black squares (what we retrospectively come to understand as time holes) falling towards earth, suggest science fiction.15 But the shot’s destination in a suburban household with a slightly heightened reality institutes the film’s underlying satirical line. Jabberwocky’s design had emphasised an earthy rusticity lifted from Bruegel, but Time Bandits replaces the natural with the artificial, and robust activity with worthless, malfunctioning and pacifying gadgetry. Kevin’s parents and the house they inhabit seem cut from slightly out-of-date design magazines, their conversation a buzz of carping and mindless chitchat, with an occasional admonishing word at him. Their lack of interest in him contrasts to their concern over laboursaving devices, and their clear-plastic covered lounge suite reflects a fear of tactile sensation (no bums on seats) and of decay. King Bruno’s castle gives way to cramped and garish suburbia grimly oriented towards the television. In Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, televisions are channels for state or commercial propaganda. This might seem hypocritical given Gilliam’s history, but Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a form of antitelevision, its parodies and absurdities a reaction against the inanities of the medium. Time Bandits concentrates on commercialism, the television holding out glittering, hollow images of Moderna kitchens, which stupefy Kevin’s parents. The reprise of this scenario in the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness re-emphasises the social critique evoked from the film’s beginning. Upstairs, Kevin’s bedroom signifies his position as the inquisitive agent in a world of dulled consumers. Once the location moves both in time and space to eighteenthcentury Europe, though, Gilliam adopts a more vivacious palette and more dynamic pacing. The initial frenetic encounter between Kevin, still in his pyjamas but uncertain where he is, and Napoleon’s horsemen

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74  terry gilliam on the outskirts of Castiglione, neatly encapsulates a mutual incomprehension, a Todorovian uncertainty. This is soon resolved, once he understands that he has not entered the realm of the fantastic, but has travelled back in time. That discovery takes place in daylight in the open fields surrounding the town, but Kevin and the Time Bandits only really engage with the new ‘reality’ when they venture by boat into the nighttime world of Castiglione. Jabberwocky registered Gilliam’s inclination towards historical detail and authenticity and in Time Bandits large-scale sets shot from below reinforce a sense of historical veracity. The literal and figurative darkness of the recently conquered town is represented through domineering architecture, looming archways and inky shadows, evoking the moody buildings etched by the eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Piranesi. Were Time Bandits simply aimed at children, such detail would be superfluous, and in the case of the firing squad that cuts down a group of citizens, might seem unnecessarily violent. But fairy tales often manufacture intense fear, or depict gruesome death, and Gilliam regularly depicts violence as unpalatably damaging. The encounter with Napoleon introduces an idea he examines more substantially in Baron Munchausen – the power of artistic representation to cast light upon reality. In Jabberwocky, the puppet theatre had provided an ongoing account of Lewis Carroll’s poem, but in Time Bandits a Punch and Judy show performs more substantial work. Napoleon’s enjoyment of the show seems to humanise him, but also reveals his psychoses, his manic laughter at ‘little people hitting each other’ being a testament to interlaced obsessions with size and violence. Once the puppeteer has been shot, the terrified theatre-owner desperately assuages the tiny dictator with bizarre theatrical acts, all of which are rejected as being ‘too tall’. Only the much shorter Time Bandits, singing and performing a riotous rendition of ‘Me and My Shadow’, mollify him. But Napoleon’s enjoyment of violence cuts him down to size in Kevin’s eyes. The theatre reveals more about him than the battlefield, and in the following scene we see him as a drunken plunderer among the cluttered loot of victory. For Kevin, the romantic portraits of history are superseded by squalid reality. The Time Bandits learn a lesson in the next episode when they venture to the Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood, another of Kevin’s heroes. Kevin immediately recognises from his reading that they have arrived in the Middle Ages. Gilliam reprises some of the tone and mood of Jabberwocky, Sherwood Forest being depicted as pristine, a tantalising combination of lush greens and natural light. But Robin’s camp is a jumble of rough medieval activity and filth, its inhabitants a crude assortment of riff-raff (one merry man seems unable to stop picking his nose). Crowding figures

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time and meaning  75 haphazardly together, Gilliam emphasises the shambolic reality behind the myth, and by shooting from the perspective of the Bandits he destroys their pretence that they enjoy equal status with the towering Merry Men. Robin’s arrival reinforces this, Cleese’s telescopic height emphasising his haughty indifference to the newcomers (Cleese modelled his performance on a member of the English nobility). Rather than the dashing figure of folklore and film, Gilliam presents Robin as cruelly patronising and disingenuous, sly enough to relieve the Bandits of their freshly stolen booty and duplicitous enough to deride them as ‘awful people’ once they have gone. Here, a gap opens up between an adult audience’s realisation of Gilliam’s satirical portrait of Robin, and Kevin’s continued belief that Robin remains a hero. And this disjunction between the film’s protagonist and its audience widens with the ­uncovering of Evil’s hidden surveillance of Kevin and the Time Bandits. The shift from the quasi-myth of Robin Hood to the supernatural world of Evil and his cohorts invokes another generic change and with it another representational leap. Evil’s lair is a dark and rather formless world of outdated machinery, his costume a cut-price H.R. Giger outfit (Alien had appeared in 1979), his sidekicks a collection of grotesques whose rudimentary intelligence make them prey to his psychopathic bursts of spleen. In addition to being physical misfits they wear clear plastic coverings strangely reminiscent of the furniture in Kevin’s home. Evil, played by David Warner as a petulant and pompous tyrant, dreams of a world where, courtesy of the time map, he can find out about digital watches, video-cassette recordings, car telephones and computers, knowledge he believes will make him the Supreme Being. As if to confirm the poverty of his ambitions, one of his idiotic minions stutters, ‘I can hardly wait for the dawn of the new technological age.’ This love of gadgetry links him to Kevin’s parents, while his meagre aspirations echo those of Dennis Cooper. And yet his powers are sufficient to destroy his helpers wantonly and to put into the minds of the Time Bandits the idea that his Fortress hides ‘the most fabulous object in the world’. Against Kevin’s exasperated question, ‘Why do you always have to go after money?’, the Bandits embark on the quest for the Fortress and the unspecified object, while Kevin enters the very different, and for him utopian, world of ancient Greece. While Napoleon and Robin Hood prove tarnished heroes, the mythical figure of Agamemnon exceeds Kevin’s expectations. Once again, Kevin’s reading has primed his mind to assimilate his new environment, but whereas the previous worlds were rough, crowded and muddled, Agamemnon’s kingdom radiates vitality and colour. The episode opens with a panning shot over a dry but impressive landscape, and in this

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76  terry gilliam section several extended shots of the topography underscore the harmony and balance of the idyllic setting. Initially, though, Agamemnon battles for his life, and is saved by Kevin, who unwittingly revives the fallen hero by landing on him through a time hole. Agamemnon then kills his foe, returning with Kevin on horseback to the city. If Castiglione was shrouded in darkness, Agamemnon’s kingdom is light-filled, vivid and spacious, its people happy, its skies an invigorating, endless blue. Where Napoleon was petty and paranoid, and Robin Hood haughty, Agamemnon is a fair and respected leader, though one firm enough to have three men summarily executed; even in a model state, the exercise of power can be brutal. His love of magic and theatre more than compensates for this toughness. He initially charms Kevin with a magic trick, which he claims to value over the Trojan War mural that excites the boy. Having established his love of illusion and mystery, Agamemnon puts on a brilliant celebratory entertainment to welcome Kevin to what will be his new home. Dazzling performers and dancers delight the crowd with startling shape changes and deft manoeuvres. Napoleon’s responses to the theatre had uncovered his repressions and limitations, but Agamemnon, like Kevin, relishes these performances. Only Kevin realises that some of the performers are Time Bandits, out to rob Agamemnon and kidnap him, and he struggles against their attempts to drag him from paradise. Agamemnon’s ready acceptance of illusion means that he also accepts the Time Bandits as legitimate performers, and their disappearance along with Kevin as part of the magic of the show. By the time he will realise the truth, the troupe are already falling towards the deck of the Titanic. To this point, the worlds traversed have been those that Kevin might have chosen himself, had he possession of the time map. But from the Titanic episode, in which he is a highly reluctant participant, until the film’s final battle, he is folded either into the Time Bandits’ plans, or into the schemes of Evil. Crucially, only the audience understands this narrative complication, and this opens up a form of interpretive distance between Kevin and audience. What Kevin accepts as the ­relatively ­plausible Time of Legends, the audience (especially, perhaps, the adult part of the audience) recognises as more obviously unreal. And, in keeping with the generic shifts that characterise the film as a whole, this section utilises a new set of representational codes. Where the worlds of Napoleon, Robin Hood and Agamemnon, different as they are, were fleshed out with period detail, the Time of Legends is substantially more insubstantial, more nebulous. Initially, the Bandits and Kevin bob about in an unknown and landless expanse of water until an ogre’s ship appears through a haze. This accentuates their distance

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time and meaning  77 from concrete reality, as does the first shot of the ogre, a close-up of a giant, inhuman hand. But here the film plays with the comic possibilities of the grotesque, for while the ogre appears immense and hideous, he is afflicted with a bad back, while his flesh-loving wife is also a dutiful and somewhat fussy helpmate. In fact they are not as large as they first appear, for in the Time of Legends perspectives are deceptive. This truth is reiterated, in the reverse manner, with the eventual discovery that the ogre’s ship sits atop the head of a subterranean giant, who emerges from the water and then crushes a tiny family of unspecified species. The Time of Legends operates on different principles and representational values from those of reality. Here, Kevin’s ingenuity and flexibility come into play, as he begins making important decisions. He fools the ogre, first by fixing his back and then by hurling him off the ship, and his knowledge of the effects of sleeping potions allows him to anaesthetise the giant. But his leading role in helping the Bandits does not free him from them as they search for the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. They discover it by chance in an elegantly simple, dramatic and cost-effective manner, a hurled skull smashing an invisible barrier that exposes the black, towering presence of the Fortress. Kevin recognises it as a trap, but the blindly acquisitive Bandits race towards the facade. A brief sequence done with tiny models that allows a full long shot from high above the group (a regular sign of oppressive power in Gilliam’s films) takes them into the Fortress itself, where they are captured and caged. This motif recurs with variations in Brazil, Baron Munchausen and Twelve Monkeys, always as an index of inhuman domination. In this case the dire circumstances allow the Bandits to redeem themselves, by using courage and ingenuity to break free. Once the group escapes, the film enters a more nightmarish phase, as monstrous creatures pursue them around the Fortress, and Evil easily and viciously parries their assault. The internal part of the Fortress is figured as a dark, ramshackle collection of architecture, some of it matching features of Kevin’s bedroom, but also containing more generic balconies and columns, one of which falls and kills Fidgit, the most endearing of the Bandits. This drives his best friend Wally into a rage against Evil, who seems on the verge of destroying them all when, out of nowhere, the Supreme Being arrives and incinerates him. Although the dramatic high point seems past, the arrival of the petty and evasive Supreme Being prompts new and weighty philosophical questions, especially for a film aimed partly at children. Played by Ralph Richardson with a hilarious sense of the tediousness of creating and running the universe, the Supreme Being acknowledges that he has allowed the Time Bandits to borrow the map in order to test out his

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78  terry gilliam creation, Evil. While the Bandits grovel before him, Kevin, appalled by the ethical implications, asks why people had to die to test the Supreme Being’s handiwork. The Supreme Being’s answer, ‘Well you might as well ask why do we have Evil?’ causes the Time Bandits’ leader, Randall, to snivel that they couldn’t possibly ask such a question; but Kevin does just that. His forthrightness slightly flummoxes the Supreme Being, who momentarily disappears behind a column before returning with the throwaway explanation, ‘I think it has something to do with Free Will.’ Amidst the physical and moral chaos of the Fortress this tentative answer seems all that is possible. In any case, the Supreme Being admits he must return to Creation in case people think he has lost control again, ‘and put it all down to evolution’. But not before he has demoted the Time Bandits to the Undergrowth Department and cut their salaries by 19%, ‘backdated to the Beginning of Time’. Time Bandits’ Supreme Being bears some relationship to the God of Holy Grail, dismissive of the reverence in which he is held. But there is something whimsical and endearing about Richardson’s performance, so that, while he realises he should do something ‘extrovert and vengeful’ to punish the Bandits, he admits to being too tired. When praised by Randall for his generosity, he replies, ‘Well, I am the nice one.’ As well as a wonderfully judged comic performance, the actual character of the Supreme Being, with his glib answers and bouts of pique, functions as a flawed, very human deity. He provides Kevin with some answers, but leaves important questions for the boy himself to decide. Kevin’s eventual return to suburbia resituates both him and the viewer in the here and now of the recognisable contemporary world, but one now vigorous with imaginative possibilities and new philosophical insights. Adventuring with the Bandits has awakened him to the reality of Evil, to the follies and shortcomings of some of his heroes, and to the limitations of adults generally. It cultivated Kevin’s resources of intelligence, creativity and courage, allowed him to ask thoughtful and piercing philosophical questions, as well as experience a world as idyllic as any he had read about. In the more general sense, his adventures validate the world of the active imagination over that of passive consumption. While the loss of his parents is somewhat unsettling, the film ends with Kevin fortified for new adventures. Fantasy in Time Bandits is not an escape from reality, but a means of tapping into the realms that rationality has neglected, or replaced with a world mediated by the commercial media, ideology and tradition. Kevin emerges from his adventures substantially more developed as an individual and with a social purpose. Where Dennis Cooper is trapped in the wrong fairy tale, Kevin inhabits an enriched and enriching reality.

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time and meaning  79 The post-production phase threw up challenging problems. HandMade’s Denis O’Brien wanted to add new songs by his boss and the film’s co-financer, George Harrison; Gilliam’s response was to threaten to drive a nail through the film. And marketing Time Bandits proved even more difficult than Jabberwocky. O’Brien’s idea to play on the Python associations was resisted strongly by Gilliam, but the film’s multi-generic content and conscious appeal to both children and adults created promotional difficulties. For the British market O’Brien’s emphasis on the Python connections meant that the film did not reach much of its target audience of children, and it did poorly at the box office. In America O’Brien changed tack, exploiting the film’s broader charms, and the film was a massive hit there. Gilliam claims that it was ‘the most successful independent film ever made until A Fish Called Wanda – that bastard Cleese!’16 Its success has wider implications, James Park arguing that its achievement in America undermines the argument that a national film industry in Britain must be a nationalistic film industry. He compares Time Bandits to Chariots of Fire, released in the same year to great nationalist fanfare. As noted, Adair and Roddick see Chariots as signalling the ‘British Revival’ in film after the calamities of the 1970s. Park acknowledges the symbolic importance of the film, but declares: ‘How irrelevant [that] film’s Britishness was to its international success was evident in the parallel success of Time Bandits in the American market.’ For Park, Time Bandits succeeds because of its inventiveness, not its Britishness. And he takes this comparison further, judging that the ‘ping-pong debate, encouraged by Chariots of Fire, about what sort of view of Britain the nation’s films should present, meant that the invitation to fantasy offered by Time Bandits was largely ignored’.17 He notes that ‘what was indicated by the concurrent success of Time Bandits, Chariots of Fire and … Gandhi (1982) was the hunger of the US market for films aimed at the older age group than the American majors seem able to satisfy’.18 Of the three, only Time Bandits was also likely to enthral an audience of children. Between Life of Brian in 1979 and Time Bandits in 1981, the Pythons gave four live concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. HandMade’s Denis O’Brien (at this time also their manager) assured them of a lucrative payout of $1 million for the short run.19 While the shows themselves, a mixture of live recreations of famous skits and Gilliam’s animations played on to large screens, were hugely successful, the financial arrangements collapsed.20 The performances had been taped, luckily, and the Pythons recouped some of the promised money by releasing Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl in 1982. The film succeeds as an account of Python at the height of its popularity in

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80  terry gilliam America, but the darker subplot is captured in Gilliam’s poster of the name ‘Monty Python’ being forced down into a hand-turned grinder, out of which oozes the word ‘Hollywood’ in sausage meat. Brian’s success had created pressure to make a new film, a pressure Hollywood Bowl slightly relieved, but John Cleese recalls that O’Brien had told them ‘and this remains to this day the single most misleading bit of information I have ever been given – “If you guys make another film almost straight away, you’ll never have to work again in your lives.”’21 The difficulties with O’Brien led to a split with HandMade Films, so that the resulting film, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, was made by Universal.22 This marked a step by the Pythons into the world of American production, a loss bemoaned by Alexander Walker.23 Although a patchy work, Meaning of Life won the Special Jury Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival. And its success would gain Gilliam the financial momentum needed for the film he had been trying to make for years – Brazil. Ironically, given the triumph at Cannes, The Meaning of Life signals the break-up of the Pythons as a troupe. After several failed attempts to generate new ideas for a film, Eric Idle’s suggested title at least provided a structure within which to work. But there is a sense in the completed work (again directed by Terry Jones) of a title in search of a film, the sketch-based format never cohering in the manner of Brian or even Holy Grail. The early idea for a Seven Ages of Man series never eventuates, and although there are brilliant individual moments the parts are greater than the whole. Gilliam by this time was uninterested in animation, but was called upon to do the opening credits. These are typically inventive, with God presented as a perplexed Creator choosing a spherical Earth over a cuboid alternative. The credits run through established Gilliam concerns: the horrors of bureaucracy (represented by a wall of filing cabinets), the mass production of a Disneyfied consciousness, the corrosive power of television. In the film itself he also plays a variety of small parts, most grotesquely the Jewish Rastafarian (with what looks like a Hitler moustache) who has his liver removed while still alive, in an extremely noisy and gruesome operation carried out in his living room. But, symbolically enough, Gilliam’s greatest contribution to The Meaning of Life is The Crimson Permanent Assurance, which precedes the film proper. The Crimson Permanent originally was meant to fit into the Seven Ages structure as the ‘Age of Accountancy’, and was conceived as a piece of animation. But Gilliam reworked the idea as a live-action sequence that eventually required its own crew and cast. The work grew from an initial 6 minutes to 16 minutes, double the length of the other sequences, and at one point might have been as long as 23 minutes.24

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time and meaning  81 Because Gilliam was working separately from the main shoot, the rest of the Pythons had little idea of how the piece was developing, and were annoyed by what they saw as its excessive length and cost.25 Gilliam admits that for the first time ‘I went over budget because there was no budget on it’, adding that ‘it was really frustrating not knowing what we could or couldn’t do, and I didn’t like my first experience of working without parameters’.26 Worse still, when the sequence was included in the first previews, its slower pace and different style of humour did not fit the rest of the film, and Gilliam suggested that it be placed before the film as a ‘Special Feature Presentation’. There it worked, and the characters from Crimson Permanent later briefly invade the actual film, a less radical version of the intrusion of aliens in Brian. The plot, which Gilliam wrote on his own (the only time he has done so as a filmmaker) is relatively simple: an old British family firm, having fallen on hard times due to the ‘ruinous monetarist policy’ of 1983, is taken over by the Very Big Corporation of America. But its geriatric workers, who strain ‘under the yoke of their oppressive new corporate management’, revolt against their masters, turning their Victorian building into a fantastic pirate ship that breaks free of its moorings and heads to the big city. The buccaneer accountants board the glass skyscraper of their corporate executives, turf them out, and, having laid waste to the world’s financial institutions, sail ‘off into the ledgers of history … or, so it would have been’, a voice-over informs us, ‘had certain modern theories concerning the shape of the world not proved to be disastrously wrong’. The social critique is deftly handled, but it is the manner in which the piece is realised that contributes most to Crimson Permanent’s achievement. Universal put up $8 million for Meaning of Life, and this larger budget allowed Gilliam the freedom to take great care over the look of his contribution. He was given his own sound stage and crew (including Roger Pratt, who would work as Director of Photography on Brazil, The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys) and the 16-minute version that precedes Meaning of Life retains very high production values. Indeed, producer John Goldstone suggests that it was ‘so grand in itself that it didn’t fit within the scale of the rest of the film’.27 In its own right Crimson Permanent creates and sustains a more measured atmosphere that reinforces its political warning of a kinder, more humane world being overtaken by corporate values. The film constructs a world sufficiently detailed and coherent to warrant audience empathy, the hard-working accountants being re-imagined at one point as Roman galley slaves. The relatively slow pace of the early section builds a sense of oppression endured for too long, especially given the advanced age of the workers when compared to their young, suited and inhumane bosses. Gilliam

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82  terry gilliam had explored the dangers of economic rationalism in Jabberwocky, and Brazil later would chart the inhumanity of systems. Crimson Permanent works these elements into a more conventional and gentler comic film that blends the pirate movie, the Britishness of Ealing comedies, and the musical, as the liberated workers seemingly sail off into the sunset singing about the joys of exploring the nicely punning ‘wide Accountant Sea’. At this point the ship sails off the edge of the world, the equivalent of the painted Bronzino foot, reminding the audience that they are watching a Python film after all. Gilliam had teamed up with producer Arnon Milchan in his efforts to realise Brazil, which had been on hold since 1979. At Cannes the pair used the success of Meaning of Life and Crimson Permanent to drum up finance for the proposed project. Milchan had recently produced Martin Scorsese’s quirkily satirical King of Comedy (1983) with Jerry Lewis and Robert De Niro, and his reputation as a ‘buccaneer’ producer melded with Gilliam’s own subversive tendencies. Milchan admired Gilliam’s talents as a filmmaker, and was enchanted by Gilliam’s energetically theatrical pitch for his proposed film. He was also impressed by the prospect that the noted playwright Tom Stoppard might contribute to the script, which had gone through several versions and co-scriptwriters since Gilliam’s initial idea. The completed film would mark a significant maturing of Gilliam as a filmmaker, being more sophisticated visually, having a more complex narrative, and offering greater intellectual challenges than his earlier works. But as well as these advances, Brazil entailed a move away from the relatively protective environment that had allowed the various Python and Python-related projects to flourish. Within this realm, the members of the group had retained a high degree of control over what they produced. Outside it, Gilliam would face a far less responsive industry audience, one that from his position was at times antagonistic to the point of oppression. Some of Brazil’s content seemed replicated in the troubled tale of its production.

Notes 1 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 88. 2 Reported in Sellers, Always Look, p. 89. 3 Walker, Icons in the Fire, pp. 11–12. 4 Park, British Cinema. 5 Walker, National Heroes, p. 251. For the British ‘mini-majors’ see pp. 250–5. 6 John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 44. 7 Ibid., p. 45. 8 See Sellers, Always Look.

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time and meaning  83 9 McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, pp. 88–9. 10 Palin, in ibid., p. 90. 11 Palin, in ibid. 12 Gilliam, David Sterritt interview ‘Laughs and Deep Themes’ originally in ­Christian Science Monitor, 7 January 1982). In David Sterritt and Lucille Rhodes (eds), Terry Gilliam: Interviews (Jackson, Miss., University of Mississippi Press, 2004), pp.  16–19, p. 17. 13 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 102. 14 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 25. 15 Time Bandits was nominated for a 1982 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. 16 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 106. 17 Park, British Cinema, p. 144. 18 Ibid., p. 146. 19 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 102. 20 David Morgan diplomatically records: ‘Denis O’Brien ended his tenure as the Pythons’ manager shortly after.’ David Morgan, Monty Python Speaks! (London, Fourth Estate, 1999), p. 210. 21 Cleese, in Morgan, Monty Python Speaks!, p. 223. 22 For an account of the break see Sellers, Always Look, pp. 71–95, or McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, pp. 309–11. 23 Walker, National Heroes, p. 253. 24 John Cleese suggests this length in Morgan, Monty Python Speaks!, p. 219. 25 See Morgan, Monty Python Speaks! pp. 218–20, and McCabe (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography, pp. 317–23. 26 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 108. 27 John Goldstone, in Morgan, Monty Python Speaks!, p. 219.

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Dreams, fantasies and nightmares

5

Jabberwocky completed business left over from The Holy Grail, and Time Bandits satisfied the need to produce an intelligent piece of popular entertainment from a child’s perspective while Gilliam searched for support for Brazil. That film registers a conscious break from the gravitational pull of Python, and moves forcefully into the adult world of acidic social satire. Gilliam’s initial idea had come to him during the shooting of Jabberwocky, when, on a beach at the grim Welsh mining town of Port Talbot, he later recalled, The sun was setting, the sky was beautiful and the waves were beautiful. I just saw an image of a guy sitting by the radio playing … a Latin love song and it just got me. The idea of someone living in a place so dark and dank and depressing, then this music you’ve never heard turns up on a radio station. You’re off at that point. I think it’s the result of having worked in advertising and coming to England and finding bureaucrats everywhere. All those frustrations of modern life that were slowly building up.1

The resulting film works these utopian and dystopian elements into an intricate whole, incorporating aspects of the grotesque and the fantastic from earlier films, but fusing them with a more sustained satirical attack on modern society’s foibles. Brazil’s targets are many: the patho­­ logy of bureaucracy, the emptiness of consumerism, the absurdities of technology, narcissism and what Gilliam terms the ‘California disease’ of cosmetic surgery, the manipulation of language, the violence underpinning orthodoxy, the institutional crushing of imagination, and the compensations and dangers of escapism. Ironically, many of these forces would play a part in the fraught tussles that engulfed the film after the completion of shooting. Recognising Brazil as a mixture of dystopian and utopian satire supplies a useful way of dealing with the complex concerns it raises, and the manner in which these concerns are examined. Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent explain the division of the broad category of

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  85 utopias into ‘Eutopia or positive utopia’, which depicts a society ‘considerably better than the society that the reader lived’, and the ‘Dystopia or negative utopia – a utopia that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society the reader now lived’.2 These definitions hold true for films. Claeys and Sargent also distinguish the ‘Utopian satire’, defining it as ‘a criticism of an existing society’.3 They place these subgenres under the umbrella term ‘social dreaming’, one that resonates with Ruth Levitas’s argument in The Concept of Utopia, that to limit utopias ‘to the question “what may I hope?” denies the important question, “What may I dream?”’4 Levitas, developing the ideas of the utopian theorist Ernst Bloch,5 wants the term ‘utopia’ in the positive sense to retain a vital element of imaginative projection, so that utopias can extend the possibility of social dreaming well beyond what is almost attainable now. Brazil initially is replete with utopian dreams, but as its protagonist Sam Lowry gains a better understanding of the dystopian reality, his dreams increasingly take on the dystopian tenor of that environment. The utopian theorist Darko Suvin argues that ‘Historically and psychologically, dystopia is unthinkable without, and as a rule is mingled with, satire’.6 Brazil clearly draws upon and mixes aspects of the dystopia and satire, fashioning a fantastic but still plausible alternative world that reflects critically on contemporary life. Understanding the film as a dystopia also provides a means of explaining and exploring Brazil’s ability to confuse and disorient its audience (not to mention some of its characters). Darko Suvin provides one of the most influential accounts of the productive effects of disorientation in science fiction and dystopias. He designates a group of works ‘whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’.7 This imaginative framework or other world, what Suvin calls ‘the novum’, produces a form of cognitive estrangement that disorients readers or viewers. The consequence of the process is that new thoughts are liberated, and, with them, new possibilities. Fredric Jameson, from a slightly different perspective, but still working within the overarching realm of utopian texts, suggests that such works are objects ‘of meditation … whose function is to provoke a fruitful bewilderment and to jar the mind into some heightened but unconceptualisable consciousness of its own powers, functions, aims and structural limits’.8 Gilliam himself at various points offers a less theorised but similar perspective, declaring that ‘there’s so much detail in Brazil [the audience] gets distracted’, adding that ‘I make it harder to spot what information is vital. The result is that you see the

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86  terry gilliam film again and again and discover things; it’s a real world there and, as in life, it’s not always easy to judge where the real story is.’ The different uses of ‘real’ here should be registered, for Brazil hardly depicts a real (in the sense of realistic) world, whatever the real or actual story might be. And the narrative itself might contain conscious gaps, for Gilliam also declares that ‘raising questions, instead of giving answers, is what I want to do in film. You don’t cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s.’9 This refusal to provide simple and comforting answers, compounded by the mass of detail contained within each frame of the film and the fragmented narrative that resists easy piecing together on a first screening, contributes to destabilising the audience’s viewpoint. The resulting ‘novum’ creates the productive and liberating estrangement that Brazil generates. The chance for social critique should be obvious. Tom Moylan has argued that the utopia supplies a ‘manifesto of otherness’, a means of considering alternatives.10 It might seem that dystopias, by contrast, foreclose on alternatives, but Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini more recently have drawn attention to the ways that what they term ‘critical dystopias’ are part of ‘a deeper and more totalizing agenda in the dystopian form insofar as the text is built around the construction of a narrative of the hegemonic order and a counter narrative of resistance’.11 The dystopia, they contend, generates a ‘critical encounter that ensues when the citizen [in such a text] confronts, or is confronted by, the contradictions of the society’.12 Certainly these formulations relate to Brazil, for the actions of Sam Lowry launch him on a path to greater awareness and ultimate rejection of the contradictions apparent below the surface of his society. And even if we question his motives for resisting, the film demonstrates graphically how resistance is brutally crushed in such an environment. Baccolini and Moylan make two other points about critical dystopias that we can apply to Brazil, arguing that ‘the typical dystopian text is an exercise in a politically charged form of hybrid textuality’.13 This study argues that all Gilliam’s films are exercises in hybrid textuality, but the dystopian form taken up in Brazil makes this his most overtly political work. Second, Baccolini and Moylan contend that critical dystopias ‘allow both [audiences] and protagonists to hope by resisting closure: the ambiguous, open endings of these novels maintain the utopian impulse within the work [original emphasis]’.14 This is a more contentious claim, depending on whether the individual viewer thinks there is an open ending. It is plausible to believe that Sam’s identity has simply been eradicated at the end of the film, and that Brazil charts the impossibility of rebellion. Gilliam’s sense that audiences must construct their own readings allows for this possibility, as well as others.

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  87 Gilliam began work in the late 1970s on what initially was called The Ministry of Torture or Brazil or How I Learned to Live With the System SO FAR.15 The failure of early drafts to generate studio interest led him to make Time Bandits. Brazil was a very different beast, a darker dystopian future world in which a government apparatchik, Sam Lowry, rebels against the system in order to win Jill Layton, but ultimately is captured by the state and is either lobotomised, tortured or driven into madness. Sam works happily enough as a functionary in the Department of Records division of the Ministry of Information, although in his dreams he is an Icarus-like superhero who swoops through clouds in search of his dream girl. But Sam’s comfortable fantasy world is disrupted when an innocent man, Archibald Buttle, is mistaken for supposed terrorist, Harry Tuttle, and is then arrested and tortured to death. This error, literally the result of a bug in the system, generates a bureaucratic panic, for in the world of Brazil those tortured have to pay for the cost of their suffering. Once the error has been discovered, Buttle’s wife is due a refund. Sam goes to deliver this, thinking he is doing a humane deed, but while there (as Mrs Buttle’s despair forces him to realise the ghastliness of the system) he sees Jill, a real approximation of his dream girl. She in turn is trying to find out about the Buttle error, and this causes her to become a suspected terrorist. In his efforts to meet her, Sam also attempts to protect Jill from what he increasingly recognises as a totalitarian world, causing him to work against the system that has fostered him. This puts him at odds with his mother, who, while engaged in an endless battle to retain her youth via plastic surgery, also plots her son’s rise through the bureaucratic ranks. She wants him to take the career path of Jack Lint, a friend and former colleague of Sam’s whose career in the Ministry is blossoming. Sam, meanwhile, has come into contact with the actual Harry Tuttle, a freelance heating engineer who comes to repair Sam’s central heating illicitly. Working outside the bureaucratic mesh of the government-run Central Services, Tuttle is marked as a subversive, but Sam recognises him as a free spirit and a role model. Emboldened by Tuttle, he too tries to subvert the system, and for a period seems to succeed, meeting and wooing Jill. But their brief liaison comes to a grim end: she is killed, while he is tortured by none other than Jack Lint. As the torture begins, Tuttle and other freedom fighters rescue Sam and blow up the Ministry of Information. On the run, it seems that Sam finally escapes to a bucolic utopia with Jill, but this happy ending is revealed as a fantasy of the lobotomised Sam, whom Jack Lint and Ministry of Information chief Eugene Helpmann finally leave in the torturer’s chair, as he hums the song, ‘Brazil’.

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88  terry gilliam This plot seems to bear obvious affinities with George Orwell’s ­ ineteen Eighty-Four; indeed one working title for the film was 1984½. N But Gilliam admits to not having read Orwell’s classic text, feeling, like many others, that he had absorbed it in some form of cultural osmosis. The working title alluded to his idol Federico Fellini’s 8½, and Franz Kafka was more a determining figure in the film’s conception than Orwell. The eventual script, though, was an extended work-in-progress over several years and with several collaborators. Gilliam produced an 89-page treatment that sketches in much of the general plot, the main characters, and ideas, including the use of an authoritarian and bureaucratised state, dream sequences and a dream girl, mistaken arrest, Mrs Lowry’s plastic surgery, Central Services and Harry Tuttle, and an apparent escape to a rural paradise that turns out to be a dream. Although this draft contained evocative images (including a landscape covered with moving eyeballs, a massive stone ship and a huge wall of filing cabinets in which people were filed)16 it had little dialogue. Needing to develop these ideas, Gilliam first called in Charles Alverson, whom he had worked with on Jabberwocky. The screenplay they created (now called Brazil) added more information about the government and the bureaucracy, including absurdities such as the 27B/6 form needed to mend central heating, and the tragic misreading of Harry Tuttle’s name. But when the collaborative relationship with Alverson soured, Gilliam turned to Charles McKeown, whom he had met on Life of Brian. The two reworked the ideas of the film, adding interesting and bizarre (though unused) touches, such as terrorists who have all had plastic surgery and look like either Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe. More daringly, this version contains a very postmodern ‘happy ending’. On the verge of Sam’s torture a voice-over announces that, since the audience probably prefers an upbeat ending to a depressing finale, the film will supply the former. This proposed ending throws criticism back on the audience, the implication being that such audiences turn a blind eye to the grim reality of repression, thus guaranteeing its triumph.17 Given the eventual controversy over the film’s actual ending, this rejected idea seems prescient. Gilliam still was not satisfied, but a friend’s suggestion that acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard be brought in to collaborate on the dormant script fired his enthusiasm. As he joked with Ian Christie: ‘Suddenly, I thought it would be great – his visual skills and my wordsmithing.’18 Stoppard was a bold choice: a writer renowned for philosophical playfulness and exhilarating verbal wit, he was one of Britain’s pre-eminent playwrights. Works such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1996), The Real Inspector Hound (1968), and Travesties (1974)

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  89 exhibit his dexterity with dialogue, his interest in the fluid relationships between artifice and reality, and his sense of the dense but interconnected chaos of existence. His plays are also very funny. Stoppard had adapted them and written other work for television, and had a growing and ­impressive presence as a screenwriter, including Joseph Losey’s The Romantic Englishwoman (1975), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair (1978) and Otto Preminger’s The Human Factor (1979). Stoppard was struck by the creative vitality of Gilliam’s concepts, but realised that the images, compelling as they were, and the loosely sketched plot, were insufficient in themselves. He saw his job as providing greater narrative structure, dialogue, and the humour that the images intimated but did not fully realise. Stoppard’s skills in all these facets of writing were well known and much lauded, and he produced four drafts for Brazil. Narrative coherence and thematic resonance were greatly improved, for example, by his linking the false arrest of a character Stoppard named Buttle with the supposed terrorist Tuttle as the result of a computer typing error. Stoppard also strengthened the structure of the film and fleshed out the characters and their relationships with dialogue, sometimes of a distinctly Stoppardian flavour. One example is the exchange between Jack Lint and Sam at the Ministry of Information. When Jack tells Sam that he is the father of triplets, not twins, as Sam has thought, Sam replies, ‘How time flies.’19 Gilliam missed Stoppard’s trademark verbal joke, the scriptwriter suggesting plausibly that the filmmaker was more focused on the look of the film rather than the verbal minutiae. Gilliam appreciated the improvements Stoppard made to the film’s structure and texture, but felt that the playwright’s gift for the intellectually clever had in some ways misrepresented the characters’ natures. Stoppard had, for instance, turned Jack Lint into a bastard, while for Gilliam Jack’s ominous aspect was that he was a good family man who happens to be a torturer. Stoppard’s status placed him on a different level from that of ­Gilliam’s previous collaborators: Alverson, McKeown, Palin and the other Pythons. These had all been friends and colleagues, willing to accept Gilliam’s contribution to the writing process. Stoppard, though, worked alone, no doubt rightly confident in his ability to fashion a screenplay from material supplied by others. Gilliam, by contrast, employed productive co-operation as a modus operandi. Importantly, too, Brazil, incomplete though it was when Stoppard was engaged, was very much Gilliam’s project, and he felt proprietorial over the ultimate shape of the script. While recognising his own difficulties with dialogue and structure, Gilliam was still sure of his ability to rewrite the work of others quickly and successfully. He realised, though, that the subtlety

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90  terry gilliam and complexity of Stoppard’s ideas were ‘difficult to rewrite, because if you pulled one line out, the whole structure would come apart’.20 In order to regain control of the material, Gilliam brought back Charles McKeown, and they reworked Stoppard’s reworking. All three eventually would receive screen credit for a script that won the Los Angeles Critics Award for Best Screenplay and an Oscar nomination.21 This process reveals that although Gilliam was willing to work with others such as Alverson, Palin, Stoppard and McKeown to help develop and refine his ideas, he still expected to retain control over the final result. On the level of scriptwriting, this distribution of power was accepted, but Brazil was to show Gilliam that large studios exercised overall power in a far less co-operative manner. At this point, however, no studio was willing to finance the improved project. Milchan hawked the revamped Brazil fruitlessly around Hollywood studios. Twentieth Century Fox showed some interest, but only if Gilliam directed their premier project, the science fiction thriller Enemy Mine.22 Gilliam declined the offer, which piqued the studio’s interest in the project he rejected it for, his own Brazil. But it was The Meaning of Life’s success in Cannes that created a buzz Gilliam and Milchan used to coax Fox and Universal executives attending the festival into a bidding war for distribution rights. Universal promised $9 million for American rights, Fox $6 million for the rest of the world rights. Universal’s Bob Rehme later declared that Time Bandits’ box office made the deal a sound economic proposition, even if the script struck him as that of an art house film. But by the time Brazil was finished Rehme had moved to Paramount, replaced by Frank Price, an executive less susceptible to the film’s charms. To this point, Gilliam and the other Pythons had survived marvellously in the financially straitened British film industry, partly as a result of amenable relationships with British production companies. Indeed, the success of their collective output from Holy Grail (1974) to Time Bandits (1981) was probably unique in the British film industry of the period. And, again unusually, they had done so by maintaining a high degree of independence over the content of their films. The American-backed Meaning of Life was less artistically fulfilling, but still allowed the group to retain control. Brazil would break this pattern, forcing Gilliam to fight what journalist Jack Mathews labels The Battle of Brazil.23 Still, after more than half a decade of development, frustration and delay, Gilliam was able, with American backing, to embark on the film that brought together many of his most fervently held views on the contemporary world. The fifty-fourth favourite British film of the twentieth century24 fits into Category D1 of the BFI’s classification of British films: ‘American

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  91 financed or part-financed films made in the UK. Most films have a British cultural content.’ But this transatlantic connection was even more substantial, Gilliam suggesting for instance that the film is situated on the metaphorical border between Belfast and Los Angeles. He also signals the film’s international generic blending, claiming that it might be described as Walter Mitty meets Franz Kafka, or Frank Capra meets Franz Kafka.25 Intriguingly, only the Belfast reference is British (and problematically so). And the very title of the film shifts focus from the hyper-real Britain that Sam seems at times to inhabit to the idyllic world of romance conjured up by a cheesy song. That song underscores how Brazil depicts less a place than a state of mind, an attitude, a utopian destination, and a potentially rebellious cry against repressive authority. Borrowings from various historical periods are also evident, and early on the ambiguous title cards, ‘8:49 p.m.’ and then ‘Somewhere in the 20th Century’ appear, emphasising the integration of elements from the past and (given that the film was released in 1985) the future. This broad historical sweep is registered through fashion, architecture, culture and technology, so that giant samurai fight Icarus-like figures, huge skyscrapers explode into virgin countryside, and ludicrously outdated technology underpins what is at times a slightly futuristic totalitarian world. If the general tenor of the film and the majority of characters are British, the strong American presence in the cast, the allusions to Walter Mitty and Frank Capra, as well as the hints of Kafka, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and (via the samurai that Sam fights in his dreams) Akira Kurosawa, all indicate Brazil’s rich integration of sources. The long lead time from original idea to the making of the film had consequences for the film’s casting. Gilliam had written the role of Sam Lowry for noted British stage and film actor Jonathan Pryce. Gilliam had envisaged Sam as in his early twenties, but by 1983 Pryce was in his late thirties, and had to convince Gilliam that Sam might as easily be 33 as 23. Pryce’s persuasiveness and qualities prevailed over the auditions of younger actors such as Aidan Quinn, Rupert Everett and Tom Cruise. Consequently, Sam is a more mature character, but also one who by virtue of his age has had more time to become a complicit functionary in the oppressive system he chooses to ignore. Pryce’s less glamorous appearance also extends the film’s satirical boundaries, making Sam more of an Everyman figure than he would have been had the more photogenic and youthful Quinn, Everett or Cruise been chosen. Milchan’s belated but essential role in supporting the development and negotiating the finances of the film paid off in another vital way. He used his association with Robert De Niro to secure the actor for the

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92  terry gilliam relatively small but pivotal role of Harry Tuttle. A model of forceful, illicit action, Tuttle’s virtuous autonomy alerts Sam to the injustice of his pursuit by the state. Extending his comic repertoire beyond King of Comedy’s obsessive Rupert Pupkin, while maintaining the macho presence from films such as The Deer Hunter, De Niro gives a beautifully modulated performance that locks together themes of systemic oppression and independence with the pervading mood of comic satire. Gilliam’s work on Time Bandits, while he tried to instigate Brazil, allowed him to recruit from that film Ian Holm, Katherine Helmond, Jim Broadbent, Jack Purvis and Peter Vaughan to play respectively the important roles of Sam’s insipid boss Mr Kurtzmann, Mrs Lowry, her plastic surgeon Dr Jaffe, his rival Dr Chapman, and Eugene Helpmann.26 Michael Palin, the bumbling star of Jabberwocky, who co-wrote Time Bandits as well as playing the wimpish Vincent, was chosen against type as the treacherous and vicious Jack Lint. For the central dual role of Jill Layton, Sam’s dream girl and her real-world double, Gilliam tested a succession of established film actors before deciding on the basis of instinct and a compelling screen test that relative newcomer, American Kim Griest, should get the part. In his previous films he had worked primarily with well-seasoned and in some cases iconic stage and screen actors. Craig Warnock, star of Time Bandits, was the obvious exception, but he had proved a persuasive Kevin. The choice of Griest, however, proved problematic, for in Gilliam’s mind once shooting began she was unable to recapture the qualities that won her the part, nor sustain her performance to his satisfaction. This upset the film’s equilibrium, for Gilliam had envisioned Jill as half of an entity completed by Sam. Jill was meant to have a more substantial back-story and more consequential actions within the narrative. In the event, the part of Jill was cropped and reconstituted as shooting progressed, and she becomes more a catalyst for Sam’s actions than the active agent Gilliam had planned. While indicating his innate capacity for improvising, the misjudgement with Griest points to the obvious dangers involved in gambling on relatively unknown actors; not that Gilliam abandoned the approach. He was keenly involved in the design of the film, which again quotes from a variety of cultural and historical references. It creates and sustains a noir-ish atmosphere, the dark shadows and 1940s costumes many of the main characters wear generating a retro feel replicated in the massive cityscape that reaches back to Lang’s Metropolis. The grand scale of the exteriors of these buildings is sometimes repeated in their interiors, as in the Ministry of Information lobby, but more often the insides of buildings are cramped and shambolic, as in the Department of Records where Sam works, or the humble home of the Buttles. Here

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  93 we first see in place the massive and intrusive heating ducts that course violently through many of the buildings. Gilliam lifted the idea from images of beautiful Victorian buildings that had been aesthetically ruined by the introduction of ducts. In Brazil they serve as emblems of the crudities of modern design, and suggest the invasion of private space by government departments, a generic marker for many dystopias. Treated as status items, they are also part of the society’s pointless consumerism. But the fact that they regularly fail uncovers the incompetence of the ruling regime, a shortcoming compounded by the excessive bureaucracy needed to get the systems repaired. This is true even in high-tech apartments like that occupied by Sam Lowry, where the supposedly space-age devices regularly malfunction, but where the workings of the system are kept symbolically hidden behind shiny modern panels. In this cocoon, Sam initially can ignore the grim workings of the totalitarian structure he helps maintain, but once he starts to ask questions and rebel, his private space is destroyed. Not surprisingly, his fantasy lets him escape to a rural setting, but the reality is that Sam ends up not in a utopian paradise that Gilliam briefly conjures up, but in the cavernous torture room that has also been hidden by the glossy facade of the Ministry of Information. Gilliam had initially intended the torture room to be small and antiseptic, but when he found the huge empty cooling tower of a power station, the idea that Sam should be destroyed in this massive setting proved gripping. As a consequence, the film ends with the lone individual swallowed up by a structure that exemplifies the massive and inhuman power of the state. Brazil begins whimsically, with someone or something swooping through clouds serving to emphasise the ambiguous environment the audience has entered, even before we see any of the characters. Or at least that is what happens in the American and director’s cut versions, for there is more than one Brazil.27 Simultaneously, the film’s theme tune, a slightly unsettling cross of overly lush romanticism and chintzy lyrics about two lovers meeting again some day ‘in old Brazil’, overlies the image. This mood of languorous escape is destroyed by the eruption of a Central Services ad into the dreamy vision. The viewer’s enjoyment of one state of being amidst the natural clouds gets overturned crudely by the forceful intrusion of the mediated and consumerist world of heating-duct commercials. But this materialist world of standardised mass production (a uniformity leavened only with the ‘designer colours’ on offer) itself is exploded literally by a blast that ­shatters a shop selling televisions on which the commercial is being played. The explosion annihilates an innocent passer-by; in Brazil, despite the underlying comedy, victims suffer. Again, the viewer struggles to find a ­foundation

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94  terry gilliam under these violently intersecting worlds. Trumpeted by a horrific chorus of horns, the title Brazil, in gaudy advertising neon, quickly gives way to an overturned television set on which the government spokesman, Ministry of Information chief Mr Helpmann, blames the blast on terrorists. Helpmann descends into very hoary, very English sports metaphors, accusing the terrorists of ‘not playing the game’, and praising the government for ‘hitting them for six’. But the inappropriateness of these terms creates scepticism in the film’s audience about the forces really determining the reality they have witnessed. The film repeatedly calls on its viewers to doubt the veracity of what they see and hear, and in a more abstract sense to question the grounds on which they and the characters stand. Brazil, we find, does not occupy a fixed or discoverable space. Gilliam creates an underlying element of uncertainty from the outset, and throughout the film worlds and realms collide, intersect, or dissolve into each other. Reality is shown to be illusory, highly mediated or manufactured, constructed to fit crushing and often mindless bureaucratic processes, or to conceal the vicious underlying or overarching structures and mechanisms of power. The arrest of Archibald Buttle, for example, involves government forces invading through the roof, windows and door (the private family space itself a porous entity). The brutality of the arrest is masked by a rash of bureaucratic forms that must be signed, and that transform Buttle into a document we immediately see appearing in another context, the Ministry of Information Records Department. The boundaries between various real and unreal states are permeable, instantly capable of being exposed as fraudulent or deceptive. We see this theme represented in (or through) the walls in Brazil. These are rarely fixed or solid, so that heating ducts pierce them; Sam’s pristine apartment hides a riot of pipes that eventually overrun the place. Later, he finds that the desk in his new office is half-shared with a similarly insignificant functionary in the next room. The fight for the desk instigates a brief, vicious turf war, underlining the way in which personal space, and with it, personal identity, remains under threat in Brazil. If walls are porous, so too is the narrative, for the opening moves briskly from the flight through the clouds to the Central Services commercial, the explosion, Helpmann’s speech, the computer glitch that misspells Tuttle as Buttle, Buttle’s violent arrest, the realisation of the error by Records Department chief Mr Kurtzmann, and his call for Sam Lowry, whom we then discover as the heroic figure soaring through the clouds we saw earlier. Sam finds and kisses his dream girl, just as Mr Kurtzmann’s phone call snaps him from his reverie to the grim workaday world of the bureaucratic flunkey. The world of dreams is no more

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  95 secure than the walls of his apartment. The audience takes all this in within the first ten minutes. More obviously than with his earlier films, in Brazil the variety of the information we are asked to process, and the speed at which it is presented, generates real problems for comprehension. Gilliam’s view that his films need to be seen more than once for their complexities and subtleties to be understood can be seen to start from Brazil. This rapid progression of scenes has specific and more general implications. In terms of Brazil itself, the opening ensures that we first understand the protagonist as a fantasist in a ghastly world of false arrests and government propaganda that we realise he functions to maintain. Thus our initial sense of Sam contradicts his own more selfserving view. Because of this scepticism we might read his pursuit and protection of Jill as less a rebellious and heroic act against the state than a selfish attempt to realise his dreams. In utopian terms, Sam’s dreams are narcissistic, for the improvements Sam desires are not social but personal. True, in his fantasy at the end of the film, the Ministry of Information is destroyed, but his actions as opposed to his dreams are all predicated on saving Jill for himself, rather than on transforming society. Had Sam succeeded, he and Jill would have escaped, but the dystopian world would have remained unchanged. Yet, if Sam is somehow deficient, the film as a dystopia requires the audience to consider the ways in which, and the extent to which, the world it depicts is considerably worse than contemporary reality. By extension, this consideration calls upon the audience to address its own complicity in the world beyond the film’s boundaries. Sam is a means to social critique, not an end in himself. Since his dreams, initially at least, are so obviously an escape from reality, the whole notion of escapism is put under scrutiny. Is escapism a necessary oasis in the desert of reality? Or is it part of a more extensive failure to address the horrors of reality, especially when the impact of those horrors is hidden from you? Is escapism a creative act or a moral failure? And has the Sam who sits in the torturer’s chair humming ‘Brazil’ at the end of the film escaped into his own happy realm with his dream girl Jill, thus defying the state and in a sense defeating it? Or is he simply an empty vessel channelling a mindless song, no longer a threat to an entrenched totalitarian regime, and thus a symbol of the impossibility, and even the undesirability, of escapism? Brazil poses these disturbing questions, and in the spirit of creating Jameson’s ‘fruitful bewilderment’, supplies no definitive answer. The more general implications of the opening minutes of Brazil have to do with what come to be seen as Gilliam signatures: his tendency to pack the frame with information, and his use of visual distortion,

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96  terry gilliam some of it derived from his use of odd camera angles or wide-angle lenses. The two aspects overlap, of course, but both are evident in Brazil far more than in his previous works, and indicate that he was gaining increasing control over the medium and that he was using the medium to metaphorically get inside the frame. Viewers consequently also feel that they are to some degree within the worlds depicted. For many this is invigorating, but others find it disorienting. The intersection or collision of spaces and realms, and the intersplicing of scenes, change the relationship between foreground and background both visually and conceptually. In his earlier films, Gilliam had paid particular attention to background detail, but in Brazil the demarcation between background and foreground is dissolved, or rendered ambiguous. What at one point appears an irrelevant backdrop can quickly be transformed into a significant element, while the apparent foreground can in an instant be revealed as secondary. Or the mood and trajectory of one scene can be overturned immediately by the next, which sometimes crashes into it. So, for example, the abrupt shift from Sam’s luxurious dreams to his depleted reality transforms him from hero to apparatchik, and calls into question the relationship between these two states of existence. In many of Gilliam’s subsequent films, the grounds on which characters and the audience stand are equally fertile but equally shifting, and the things that they and we see are compelling, but not necessarily real. The resulting productive bewilderment energises all Gilliam’s films, encouraging or forcing his audience to consider attentively, intelligently and creatively whatever is presented. These uncertainties extend the film’s satirical boundaries: ‘Somewhere in the 20th Century’ potentially is Everywhere, especially in those ‘advanced’ civilisations signed up to the materialist, technocratic and bureaucratic nightmare that the film works to represent and analyse, and from which Sam Lowry tries to escape. But Sam himself is an ambiguous figure, whose efforts occasionally can be read as heroic. In the course of his adventures he certainly develops a fuller understanding of the ghastly nature of the society to which he has become adapted, yet, except in his fantasies, more energy goes into pursuing a girl seen in a vision than into political subversion. Within the contest between public and individual benefit, Sam’s ambivalence resolves itself in favour of himself and a proxy of his dream girl. The practical deficiencies of this strategy result in her being shot dead as a result of his romantic pursuit, while under torture he either escapes into a happy madness or into a rather less idealistic vegetative state. While Sam and his actions are Brazil’s focal point, as a dystopia the film necessarily places emphasis on topos, the place or society within

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  97 which he functions. This broader social assessment and critique has a variety of targets, but three stand out: economic rationalism and materialism; bureaucracy; power. These are interlinked in a variety of ways so that, for example, the first explosion, supposedly the work of violent terrorists, blows up a stack of televisions advertising Central Services ducts. Indeed, two later explosions occur at a high-class restaurant and a department store. The attacks might suggest simply an assault on consumerism, and there is a clear, sustained and highly negative depiction of the mindless excesses and endless idiocies of materialism. But the economic element apparent in these attacks has a much wider implication, for the 13-year terrorist campaign, which Helpmann describes as ‘beginner’s luck’, has led to government counter-measures based on the constant arrest and interrogation of suspected terrorists. A vital element in this process is that, innocent or guilty, those arrested have to pay for their interrogation by the euphemistically named ‘Information Retrieval’ section of the Ministry of Information. We find in the early Helpmann interview that the revenue from these interrogations has become a vital part of the gross domestic product. The suspicion arises that the government is itself setting off the explosions in order to maintain the bureaucratic rationale for torture, and with it the income that accrues. The economic rationalism that Gilliam had attacked in Jabberwocky and Crimson Permanent Assurance has an even more sinister presence in Brazil, part of a dystopian crossover with bureaucracy and the violent use of power. We see in this the elements of Franz Kafka that Gilliam drew on when conceiving the film. The relationship between economics, bureaucracy and power is invoked from early on when Sam, as the most competent bureaucrat, visits Mrs Buttle to give her the refund that is meant to recompense her for her dead husband. Mr Buttle has already been converted into a form and then into a cheque, and while Sam, as a unquestioning operative, feels that this is a reasonable solution to an admittedly tragic circumstance, her imploring question, ‘What have you done with his body?’ exposes to him the dehumanising power of bureaucracy. But he must learn more in order to begin to rebel, and he does this by finding that Jill has been marked as a terrorist. To protect her, he transfers from the Records section to Information Retrieval in order to delete her file, and thus save her from Buttle’s fate. This move brings him into closer proximity to Jack Lint, whose successful career has required him to become a torturer. In a bleakly revealing sequence, Sam waits outside one of the interrogation rooms while an interrogation takes place, a stenographer blithely typing up the desperate and horrific pleas of the accused as he undergoes torture. Sam finds that the bloody-coated operative

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98  terry gilliam performing the task is Jack, but at this point he is still using his bureaucratic connections and acumen to save Jill, believing that deleting her from the files will put her beyond the reach of the state. He is wrong, though, and his subsequent arrest drags him fully into the vortex of bureaucracy, economics and power. Carried aloft on a conveyor in the same mailbag straitjacket that had been used on Buttle, he finds that the main concern of his captors is whether he can pay for his upcoming torture. And when he is finally strapped into the torturer’s chair, one of the guards implores him to confess quickly so as not to jeopardise his credit rating. But this piece of black humour cannot hide the reality that the table next to the chair is littered with the torturer’s power tools and probes, or that the torturer is Jack. As Jack edges a particularly intrusive probe towards Sam’s nose it appears that he himself is shot, as Harry Tuttle and a small group of subversives rescue Sam and blow up the Ministry. Files fall from the destroyed building in a liberating cascade. These same files, though, soon will attach themselves to Tuttle, and he literally disappears under them. This nightmarish image perhaps alerts the audience that what they are seeing is Sam’s fantasy rather than reality, and the ­eventual revelation that Sam has never left the torturer’s chair reinforces the triumph of bureaucracy and state-sanctioned violence over the individual. There are counter-currents to this dystopian negativity, particularly in Harry Tuttle, who works outside the law as a freelance heating engineer because he cannot stand the bureaucratic paperwork, particularly the 27B/6 form that is required to carry out repairs on the always-deficient technology. As the most heroic and subversive figure in the film, Tuttle inspires Sam to defy the system, embodied in the Central Services duo of Spoor (Bob Hoskins) and Dowser (Derrick O’Connor), a vicious but incompetent pair of functionaries who threaten Sam, but cannot act without a 27B/6. In an unusual blend of political subversion and toilet humour, they eventually are destroyed when Tuttle swaps the pipe feeding air into their all-encompassing repair suits with one carrying human waste. But Tuttle also introduces a far subtler, if less tangible element of resistance, for as he repairs Sam’s cental heating, he hums the tune ‘Brazil’. In the American version of the film this song is played at the beginning as Sam swoops through the clouds, an exotic if cheesy anthem to a love that will be reignited some day. Even in the European version the song performs several interlinked functions, so that, for example, it works as a marker of Sam’s escape from bleak reality. This recreates Gilliam’s initial revelation at Port Talbot, and in these cases the tune plays over the action in a lush string arrangement. Since the lyrics speak of undying love, it also works as theme tune for Sam and Jill’s

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  99 brief but passionate romance. And when they seem to escape to their rural idyll, the tune triumphantly signals their apparent victory over the state. In the Records Department, by contrast, it connotes bustling activity or, slowed down to a leaden plod, the dull grind of office work. These examples are all non-diegetic, part of the film’s soundtrack, but Tuttle’s humming introduces it into the action of the film. Because of his status as a subversive hero, and his aside to Sam that ‘we’re all in this together’, the song ‘Brazil’ comes to represent for Sam a rebellious secret underground. As he drives to the Buttle household, the song plays on the radio, and he takes it up as his own rebellious theme tune. And it is this tune that he hums at the film’s end, strapped into a torturer’s chair, perhaps driven mad by Jack Lint’s ghastly ministrations. As the camera moves in close, this humming, barely audible to begin with, swells in volume, and then in a long shot, as Jack and Eugene Helpmann leave the vast arena of the torture chamber, Sam can be seen in the far distance, a tiny figure now starting to sing the song’s words. That distance and the haunting violin that slowly begins to accompany him suggests that this singing is non-diegetic. Where the opening rendition of ‘Brazil’ evoked a chintzy romanticism, here it creates an elegiac mood that is simultaneously defiant, as though Sam might have won out after all by escaping in madness to a utopian world. As the credits roll his singing is overwhelmed by a raucous musical rendition that brings to mind the carnival tradition of the real Brazil, an oddly celebratory end given that we still see Sam away in the distance. How we hear the song in part determines how we read the end and therefore the argument of the film. Does Sam’s singing register his escape? Even if it does, is this a triumph for him or for the system? The varied and subtle ways in which Gilliam employs the song in different contexts indicates how much Brazil functions as an integrated and sophisticated work. It signals his development beyond the far funnier but cinematically more rudimentary films of Python, as well as beyond his own apprentice works. For example, Sam’s torture begins with a close-up of the restraining bag being removed from his head. The wide-angle lens distorts Sam’s features, and as an encasing head piece is placed over him and we see his horrified response, the camera tracks rapidly back to reveal the gigantic dimensions of the ominously grey, concrete torture chamber, in which he has instantly become an insignificant and very vulnerable figure. We then see Sam and his guards in close-up as he is strapped into the chair, the visual distortions adding to the perverse request to confess to save his credit rating. As the guards move away (the lens exaggerating their size and the speed of their departure) we are given Sam’s point of view as he spies the

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100  terry gilliam torturer’s implements, among them a power drill, cut-throat razor and some indefinable but clearly painful instruments. Sam’s eyes then move to another indefinable but very dangerous looking machine, before we then revert to a close-up of his terrified and despairing face. A distant sound catches his attention, and in a long shot from his point of view we see the torturer enter the room. But the more disturbing feature is Sam’s forced and erratic breathing that plays over the image, neatly emphasising his terror as the white-coated figure moves ever closer. A tracking shot that follows behind the torturer indicates that he is wearing some form of mask, but its form is only revealed when he hesitates and turns, showing the mask’s grotesque, chubby face. The hesitation signals that the torturer is Jack, who has only now recognised Sam in the chair, and as he moves, more slowly now, towards the chair, Sam also recognises him. The camera then presents a two-shot of Sam pleading desperately from the chair while Jack in his perverse mask clumsily grasps after a suitable tool. Gilliam creates an intense sense of menace and terror in this interchange, so that Sam’s ‘Jack, I’m frightened’, is as horrifying and pathetic as it is convincing. But Jack, having briefly lifted off the mask to castigate Sam for jeopardising his own career, quickly returns to what he calls ‘a professional relationship’ between the torturer and the tortured. As Jack closes in, the image alternates between close-ups of Sam and Jack, before Jack’s mask is replaced by a close-up of the probe moving inexorably forward. We then see what might well be Sam’s last coherent view, Jack’s mask in extreme close-up, before a shot rings out and pierces the mask, spraying blood back on Sam. This deft use of camera lenses, angles and movement, sounds effects, montage, the cavernous set and, of course, the compelling performances of Pryce and Palin, dramatically capture the horror of the situation. Its sophistication as cinema outdoes Gilliam’s previous efforts. In hindsight, what follows that scene is Sam’s fantasy of escape, but this extended sequence, either a bravura combination of images and thematic concerns, or, for the film’s critics, an excessive mishmash, creates something like the cognitive estrangement that Suvin sees as indicative of dystopian and utopian works. Having apparently been rescued by Tuttle and his fellow rebels, Sam escapes the Ministry of Information (the breakout incorporating a brief allusion to Battleship Potemkin), but when Tuttle is swallowed up by paperwork, Sam must flee on his own. This takes him first to the funeral of Mrs Lowry’s friend, Mrs Terrain (Barbara Hicks), who has died undergoing acid treatment to invigorate her looks. There he hallucinates that his mother is Jill, before he falls through the empty casket (Mrs Terrain’s rotten remains having spilled out in the funeral parlour) and continues to run, this time

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  101 from figures from his nightmares, including Mrs Buttle. Clambering to the top of a pile of heating pipes and ducts, he then falls through a door into a room, which he comes to realise is part of a mobile home being transported by Jill to the countryside. Her truck speeds past a seemingly endless line of billboards and then into the countryside, where she and Sam travel on to a blissful life. Their home and truck now happily parked in rural setting, the camera pulls back slowly while the romantic strains of ‘Brazil’ are heard. Only then do jarring strings destroy the utopian ideal, Jack and Helpmann looming monstrously into view, Helpmann ambiguously noting, ‘He’s got away from us, Jack.’ Until this moment it might have been possible that Sam had escaped, even if the rapid and disorienting succession of images suggest cognitive estrangement both for the protagonist and for the audience. But if Sam is still trapped in a chair, the audience must try to interpret the assemblage. Having set up the conditions for productive estrangement, Brazil provides no easy resolution. The undoubted complexities and difficulties of the film did much to instigate the post-production ‘Battle of Brazil’. Jack Mathews’s definitive account of the conflict runs to over 170 pages, but this study can only touch upon salient points.28 One of these is what Mathews calls Gilliam’s independence creed in his arrangements with Milchan: ‘Final cut. No producer interference. Total creative freedom.’29 A second is the great irony that Gilliam was in business with Universal Pictures, which Mathews describes as ‘the most corporate, the most like the passionless bureaucratic environment that Gilliam created for the movie’.30 A third is that Gilliam’s initial cut was 142 minutes, longer than the usual contracted time of between 95 and 125 minutes. When Gilliam previewed this version to executives from Universal (which owned American rights) and Fox (which owned rights in Europe and the rest of the world), the Fox representatives were happy with the result. But Universal’s executives were not, concerned not only about the length of the film but also about its dark content and downbeat ending, all of which they thought would limit the film as a commercial proposition. What became known as the ‘European version’ was accepted by Fox and released in February 1985. Universal, however asked for cuts and a reworking of the ending to reflect a more upbeat romantic finale in which Jill and Sam escape. Universal executive Sid Sheinberg took a special interest in reworking the film, having done so before on Ridley Scott’s Legend,31 suggesting, in Mathews’ terms, that it ‘needed a new ending. It was inaccessible as it was; people didn’t know where reality ended and fantasy began.’32 Preview surveys in America produced less than ecstatic responses, but since that had been the case with other

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102  terry gilliam films by Gilliam and Python, and because Gilliam had not aimed the film at a mass audience, these did not perplex him. They did, however, perplex Universal. Gilliam made several cuts to bring it closer to the time limit Universal found acceptable, but since this did not change the tone of the film, nor its ending, Sheinberg still refused to release it. Immensely frustrated by the delays, Gilliam suggested that Sheinberg release his version, but that it should be titled Sid Sheinberg’s Brazil. In fact, a 94-minute version of Brazil that was edited for syndicated television does conform to Sheinberg’s recommendations, and ends with Sam as the hero sweeping Jill off into the air, in an image stolen from his early fantasies. Gilliam calls this the ‘Love Conquers All’ version.33 Attempting to end the stand-off, Gilliam famously placed a full-page ad in Variety in the form of a highly charged question: Dear Sid Sheinberg When are you going to release my film, ‘Brazil’? Terry Gilliam

There followed a series of clandestine screenings of Gilliam’s 131-minute ‘American version’ at several campuses in California (which Universal tried to have stopped, arguing that they had exclusive rights to the film in the United States). Gilliam then appeared on CBS television with the normally media-shy Robert De Niro to argue for the release of the film, and Sheinberg countered with an offer (not taken up) to sell the film to Milchan. But the breakthrough came in December 1985 when members of the Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association were shown the film in secret screenings. At their annual awards ceremony Brazil won the prize for Best Screenplay, Best Film and Best Director, a substantial achievement for a film not officially released at the time.34 As a result of this embarrassing success, Universal released Brazil, although with little studio backing it had a limited American run. Still, it won Supporting Actor (Ian Holm) and production design awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics, as well the Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. The ‘European version’ won BAFTAs for Production Design and Visual Effects. By this time there was a 142-minute version of the film produced for the Criterion laserdisc edition, which incorporates elements from both the American and European versions. This was labelled, as if to ward off any later interference, ‘The Final Cut’. Disputatious and enervating as it was to be, the post-production Battle of Brazil established the foundations of a quasi-mythical figure, the inspired and almost dangerously protective auteur, defending his artistic creation against the vulgar commercialism of (in this instance) Universal Studios. The image had both positive and ­negative ­consequences, for,

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  103 while it proved Gilliam as a feisty (and in this case successful) David battling corporate Goliaths, it also made other ­American studios wary of him. Goliath might be vanquished, but he had powerful allies. Casting Gilliam as hero naturally results in Sheinberg fulfilling the villain’s role, but from Sheinberg’s perspective the roles are reversed. His suggestions on how to make more ‘accessible’ what Gilliam recognised as a difficult and confronting film were offered, he argues, in order to ensure the success of a film he professed to like. The vital question was how that success might be measured. Clearly, Gilliam and Sheinberg used very different yardsticks. In a broad sense, Sheinberg was merely symbolic of the American studio system, which was antagonistic to the adventurous and potentially non-commercial films Gilliam wanted to make. True, Universal had backed The Meaning of Life but, on the back of Life of Brian’s success and the Pythons’ global cult following, that was merely a sensible economic decision. One might cynically note that even a relatively disappointing Python film was still able to make money. Gilliam’s natural wariness of the American system, exacerbated by the conflict over Brazil, perhaps not surprisingly made him turn his eyes back towards Europe. Unfortunately, though, while he won the Battle of Brazil, his next film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen would require him to wage war again, against internal and external forces. In this case, his opponents primarily would be Europeans. Gilliam still travelled on an American passport, although he had lived in Britain for nearly two decades. Ironically, becoming a British citizen during the making of Munchausen would precede a decade in which his completed films were all made in America. Whereas the greatest conflicts on Brazil occurred in the post-production stage, with Munchausen the problems were built into its very foundations, in the pre-production stage, and continued through its tumultuous shoot and beyond. Once again the making of a Gilliam film resulted in a book about the making of the film, in this case Andrew Yule’s Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam and the Munchausen Saga.35 Yule’s main title neatly fuses the reality of production difficulties with a more ethereal sense of something magical under threat. What eventually appeared on the screen was the result of large and often highly contested compromises, last-minute improvisation, seemingly insurmountable financial pressures, competing egos both in front of and behind the camera, and huge artistic endeavour and creativity. The same might be said of many films, of course, but Munchausen seemed to draw problems magnetically to itself. Yule notes that the respected Line Producer David Tomblin, who had worked on such massive under­ takings as Superman, Gandhi, A Bridge Too Far and The Return of the

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104  terry gilliam Jedi, considers Munchausen the most difficult project in his forty years of filmmaking.36 Tomblin would become the film’s sixth First Assistant Director, and would receive special thanks for his efforts in the credits, being lauded as ‘Man of the Match’. A blizzard of incidents and circumstances almost overwhelmed the ambitious project, which used European and American money, an international cast and crew and was shot both at the iconic Cinecittà studio in Rome and on location in Spain. This international sweep sometimes generated language or cultural problems. The original budget of $23 million patently was insufficient to realise Gilliam’s original vision, and costs possibly blew out to more than double the projected amount.37 Financial irregularities, legal challenges and creative differences compounded a production that Gilliam bluntly admits ‘basically was a disaster’.38 At certain points it seemed certain that the shoot would be, or even had been, terminated. Gilliam several times seemed likely to quit and the prospect of alternative directors was considered.39 A small army of production staff departed. The script went through savage redrafts to satisfy the pragmatic and economic concerns of its financiers, usually against a defiant Gilliam, and ambitious designs were abandoned due to pressures of cost, time or practicality.40 Gilliam and the film’s producer, the flamboyant and often elusive German Thomas Schuhly, rarely communicated after the first few weeks of shooting. Brazil had been a tough trial in which Gilliam ultimately had triumphed, but he reveals that ‘after Munchausen I thought, “Fuck, I can’t stand making movies.”’41 Brazil’s producer Arnon Milchan initially was keen to work on Munchausen, but then withdrew, having introduced Gilliam to Schuhly, who had contributed to the film version of The Name of the Rose.42 Schuhly was based at the Cinecittà studios, aesthetic home of Federico Fellini, and therefore a talismanic site for Gilliam. Schuhly claimed that what was obviously going to be a visually stunning and therefore expensive film could be made in Italy for 40% less than in Britain, so that what might be a $40 million picture could be produced for $25 million. Gilliam and Schuhly teamed up with independent producer Jake Eberts and raised some of the money from distribution deals in Italy and Germany, as well as in the United States. But the only practical sources for the bulk of the funding were American studios. In the course of this exercise Gilliam found out that Milchan had received $150,000 from 20th Century-Fox to develop the project, something Gilliam knew nothing about. The studio wanted its money back, and Milchan successfully claimed it from the ‘production entity’ Gilliam and associates had set up at the start of the project. Eventually, and after protracted negotiations, Columbia Pictures agreed to finance the

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  105 film, despite a variety of initial reservations from the studio’s head, Englishman David Puttnam.43 Film Finances agreed to act as completion guarantor. By the middle of 1987 production began at Cinecittà, and Schuhly secured a number of top-line Italians to work on the film, including production designer Dante Ferretti, who had worked on The Name of the Rose among many other films including Pasolini’s Decameron and Canterbury Tales, two of Gilliam’s inspirations for Holy Grail and Jabberwocky. The legendary Giuseppe Rotunno, who had worked with Fellini, Visconti and a host of the world’s premier directors, was cinematographer. But these very positive elements were offset by the fact that Schuhly’s claims about his ability to put a production together were not always matched by his actions. And Schuhly’s budget estimates were unrealistic. Gilliam claims that ‘the first budget came in at $60 million and Thomas [Schuhly] fired the guy. The next came in at $40 million and he was fired too. The next one came in at $30 million, same thing. The last one came in at $23.5 million and he was the guy who got the job.’44 Gilliam admits his mistake in letting ‘things slide because of Thomas’s energy’, adding ‘it was a sloppiness I would pay for later’.45 The first First Assistant Director, Don French, resigned before shooting began due to disputes with Schuhly, and the original shooting date of 7 September was delayed due to a lack of finished costumes, props and sets. So was the rescheduled date. These delays complicated planned location-shooting in Spain and the tight schedule in Rome. The cast and much of the crew were forced to wait, creating further tensions and misapprehensions. Soon after, David Puttnam resigned from Columbia, and his successors were even less favourably inclined to a film that was already eating greedily into its budget without a frame having been shot. Yule takes nearly 250 pages to narrate the story of what is by turns an epic, a tragedy, coal-black comedy and whimsical farce. As in the case of Brazil, this study can only rehearse the major details.46 Even before shooting had begun, Schuhly admitted to the head of Film Finances that he could not ‘“complete the picture according to the script”, citing [two major] sequences as primary candidates for amputation’.47 Six weeks into the 21-week shoot, Gilliam declares, ‘all the money was gone’,48 and by November 1987, Film Finances had closed down production and threatened to replace Gilliam.49 In order to save the film, major cuts in design and characters were proposed, so that a sequence on the moon was chopped from hundreds of characters down to two. Sean Connery, who was due to play the King of the Moon, pulled out as a result. Happily, Eric Idle’s friend Robin Williams, who had visited the set while on holiday, replaced him. But Williams’s addition to the cast was

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106  terry gilliam one of the few bright spots. Location shooting in Spain proved hugely problematic, and the fact that some of the film was shot there seemed to create a tension with staff at Cinecittà. Someone claiming the rights to remake an earlier Munchausen film threatened to sue, as did the descendant of the real Baron who felt the film would blemish the family name.50 Gilliam’s method of directing was alien to Giuseppe Rotunno’s approach, something Gilliam jokingly puts down to the ‘difference between Catholic and Protestant filmmaking’. The Italians, used to maestros such as Fellini and Pasolini, ‘wanted to do Catholic filmmaking where I was God, [cinematographer Rotunno] was the Pope, [designer Dante Ferretti] would be a cardinal at best, and all this filtered down’. By contrast, Gilliam’s ‘Protestant’ approach allowed that ‘everybody can speak directly to God’.51 His problems with Rotunno were compounded by a more general and symbolic difficulty, that many of the international crew did not speak the same language sufficiently well to communicate easily. Even the post-production back in England proved difficult, Bob McCabe summarising this by noting that Munchausen, ‘on course for a final budget of $46.34 million, twice its original amount – was mired in so many financial bogs (at one point Cinecittà refused to release the negative until bills were paid), that the whole aura of disaster followed the film back home’.52 And when initial previews drew less than ecstatic responses, Columbia committed only the minimum amount obliged by the contract to promote the film.53 Munchausen did poorly at the box office. The catalyst for what became a traumatic process was substantially more positive. George Harrison had Théophile Gautier’s French edition of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, first published in 1862 with illustrations by Gustave Doré,54 and showed it to Gilliam in 1979. Gilliam’s friend and long-term musical collaborator Ray Cooper gave him a copy of Munchausen as a present, adding the challenge that only he ‘could turn this into a movie’.55 The original text, written by Rudolph Erich Raspe and published in 1785, had a dubious birth. A real Baron Hieronymous Karl Friedrich von Munchausen (1720–97) had existed, a German officer who had fought in the Russian service against the Turks and had afterwards retired to his estate, where he told what were clearly fantastic tales of his adventures. Raspe, a gifted if rather devious character, had met the Baron and, years later, living desperately in London, wrote down stories Munchausen had told, publishing them as Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Europe [sic]. This first edition later was subject to various additions not written by Raspe, as publishers tried to cash in on the great success of the original. The incredible tales of trips to the moon, or falling through the centre of the earth, of meetings

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  107 with extraordinary, ­mythical or famous people, or with creatures whom the Baron ­inevitably and easily bested, became an enduring classic of European literature. Doré’s finely crafted drawings, by turns dark, comic and satirical, give the fantastic stories a quasi-­realistic grounding, at least so far as the Baron on horseback at the bottom of the sea, menaced by giant fish and crustacea, can be quasi-realistic. And the illustrations brought to life the ­voluptuousness of a Turkish Sultan’s harem, the magic of the Baron hauling himself and his horse Bucephalus up from the sea on his own pigtail, or flying through the sky on a cannonball; the King of the Moon on a three-headed bird; Munchausen’s servant Berthold racing at lightning speed across the ground, or a monstrous fish that swallows the Baron. These and other images made their way largely unadulterated into the eventual film. In another illustration Bucephalus has been sliced in half by a falling portcullis. Doré depicts the front of the horse being held upright by the Baron, its innards on display, while the back half is manoeuvred into place by the vet, into whose face the horse farts forcefully. At David Puttnam’s insistence, this was one of several scenes excised from the script. The text Gilliam chose to adapt with the help of Charles McKeown in 1985, then, was not Raspe’s original work, but a hybrid of text and image, in which the brilliance and imaginative vivacity of Doré’s illustrations outshines the engaging impossibilities of the fairly utilitarian prose. Whereas Lewis Carroll’s playful reinvention of language gives his poem ‘Jabberwocky’ its inimitable appeal, with Munchausen the content enchants rather than the prose style. And Doré’s brilliant images provide the heightened aesthetic complement to the Baron’s words, building a bridge between Gilliam’s predominantly visual interests and the tales as a whole. The individual stories themselves, marvellous as they are, provide only a loosely connected narrative, offering potential adaptors scope to select the most compelling yarns without the need to follow or indeed to create an overarching story line. Gilliam and McKeown, however, made two important adjustments to the original text, the first of which is a key framing device. The Baron originally told his tales in the first person, but in the film, initially at least, the Henry Salt and Son theatrical company is recreating the tales on the late eighteenthcentury stage of the Theatre Royal. And that theatre exists in a city under siege from the Turkish Sultan the Baron had tricked out of his fortune years before. The second significant and related change was to make the Baron (John Neville) an old man, rather than the vital and vigorous hero of the tales. In the film, a now-aged Baron appears at the theatre decrying the ways in which he and his tales have been lampooned on stage. This mise-en-abyme prompts a variety of fascinating ques-

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108  terry gilliam tions about the reality of the tales, the reality of the Baron, the reality of the theatrical representation of him and the tales, and the reality of the world beyond the theatre. The film initially also moves back and forth between the stage and backstage, exploring the chaotic process of adapting the Baron’s tales for the theatre. This comic depiction establishes connections between the world of the late eighteenth-century theatre and that of modern filmmaking, and the frenetic and heroic efforts of Henry Salt and his associates to realise their dreams on stage echo those of Gilliam and his associates to realise their dreams on film. Perhaps ominously, given the parallels, the fate of the Theatre Royal is in the hands of the ultra-rationalist public servant, the ‘Right Ordinary’ Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce), who closes it down, and the Turks, who fire cannonballs at it. In a broader sense, Munchausen and Jackson symbolise that central concern in Gilliam’s films, the clash between the liberating power of the imagination and the limitations and destructiveness of Reason. In this film, at least, imagination triumphs majestically, and Alexander Walker judged the completed work a ‘marvellous film’ that ‘meticulously and lavishly’ creates a ‘magical universe’. Time magazine’s Richard Corliss also lauded it as ‘a lavish fairy tale for bright children of all ages!’56 Sadly, the magic Walker and Corliss detected did not translate into box-office receipts, but the fact that Munchausen made it to the screen at all was something of a miracle. The transformation of the Baron to an old man sets up a central thematic thread, for as much as he rails against the way the theatre has misrepresented him, he is weary and uncertain whether or not he or his tales have any place in his contemporary world. He is haunted by the notion of his own mortality, and the allegorical figure of Death pursues him throughout the film. Several times, as Munchausen seems on the brink of despair or defeatism, Death appears and tries to extract his imaginative spark, a power symbolised as a glowing force within the Baron. Munchausen literally embodies the fantastic, and his demise would necessarily see its demise. The great counterforce in the film to Death and the death of fantasy is Henry Salt’s young daughter Sally (Sarah Polley), one of the central additions Gilliam and McKeown introduce through the device of the theatre. Sally comes to believe in Munchausen’s magical essence, and she recognises its significance for the survival of all the characters. When Munchausen himself seems prepared at times to give up the ghost, in several senses, Sally cajoles and abuses him back to action. When Death hovers over the Baron, she bravely drives it away. Sally provides the crucial connection between the world of the theatre and the world of pure fantasy. Marginalised at the beginning of proceedings by being both young and a girl, she struggles to

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  109 establish herself and her take on the terminally destructive adult world. As Kevin does in Time Bandits, Sally provides the child’s ­perspective on the developmental and restorative powers of the ­imagination. And like Kevin, by the end of the film she has proved herself a hero, having helped saved the theatre, the city, and Munchausen. Sally’s approach and actions fit into a broader context that we could investigate by taking issue with Richard Corliss’s view that Munchausen is a ‘lavish fairy tale’. Generically speaking, the film, like the book, belongs to the subgenre of the imaginary voyage, one that harks back through Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels at least as far as Sinbad. This might seem an academic discrimination, but it bears both on general questions of adaptation itself and on the particular adaptive moves Gilliam and McKeown make with the original tales. As Robert Stam recognises: ‘Filmic adaptations of novels invariably superimpose a double set of generic conventions, one drawn from the generic intertext of the source novel itself, and the other consisting of those genres engaged by the translating medium of film. The art of filmic adaptation consists in choosing which generic conventions are transposable into the new medium, and which need to be discarded, supplemented, transcoded, or replaced.’57 The film takes up such essential elements of the fantastic voyage as monstrous creatures, incredible feats and marvellous settings that stretch the credulity of the reader or viewer, engendering a sense of wonder in the face of the unknown. Mary Baine Campbell argues in her exhaustive study of travel writing from the mid-sixteenth century to the eighteenth century that in the ‘age of discovery, invention, venture capital, conquest … the active rather than the contemplative virtues were in the ascendance. Increasingly, wonder was suspect, inconvenient, needed to be put in its (eventually aesthetic) place.’58 When The Adventures of Baron Munchausen the film first appeared in print, the imaginary voyage could provide a challenge to the increasing dominance of science and rationalism. Munchausen makes similar challenges to the modern world. Campbell argues that for strict rationalists, perhaps particularly economic rationalists, wonder ‘has no use value. As a result, wonder is a form of perception now mostly associated with innocence: with children, the uneducated (that is, the poor), women, lunatics, and nonWestern cultures. And of course artists.’59 This argument recalls that of Steve Neale, mentioned in the opening chapter, that non-realist genres are deemed as suitable only for children or mindless, irresponsible adults. But in Munchausen (as in Time Bandits) an inquisitive child who retains a sense of wonder provides an animating spirit that rejects the restrictions of Reason. Sally’s ‘childishness’ will eventually save wonder itself.

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110  terry gilliam For all these subtleties and complexities, the film’s plot is relatively straightforward. The time, we are told, in a series of trademark joke title cards is ‘Late 18th Century’, ‘The Age of Reason’, ‘Wednesday’. An unspecified European coastal city lies under siege from the Turks. As the city suffers the bombardment that will precede its overthrow, the plucky if decidedly amateurish drama group, Henry Salt and Son, performs adventures from the fantastic tales of Baron Munchausen to an attentive, if somewhat raucous, audience. The real Baron then appears, arguing that his tales are not the absurd fictions being lampooned on stage, but true accounts of his adventures. Indeed, he claims to have started the turmoil with the Turks by tricking the Sultan out of his wealth, using the astonishing speed of his servant Berthold to retrieve a fine bottle of wine, the amazing strength of his servant Albrecht to carry off all the Sultan’s treasure, and the incredible powers of his servants Gustavus (who can hear across hundreds of miles and blow hurricane force winds) and Adolphus (gifted with extraordinary sight) to defeat the Turkish ruler. Munchausen believes that only he can save the town, by finding his long lost servants and using their powers to defeat the enemy. Most dismiss his bombast, most importantly the local administrator, Horatio Jackson, an entrenched rationalist who ridicules Munchausen as a fantasist. Only Sally Salt believes the Baron might be telling the truth and she steals away on the balloon made of women’s knickers that he uses to fly to the moon. There he rescues his equally ancient servant Berthold (Eric Idle) from imprisonment by the King of the Moon (Robin Williams). The three escape from the furious King who believes (not without cause) that the Baron intends to seduce the Queen of the Moon (Valentina Cortese). They fall through space into Mount Etna, home of the god Vulcan (Oliver Reed) and his beautiful bride, Venus (Uma Thurman). Albrecht (Winston Dennis) has become a feminised maid, and now values the quiet life. But Munchausen infuriates Vulcan by dancing too romantically with his beloved Venus, and Vulcan hurls Munchausen, Berthold, Albrecht and Sally into a whirlpool. They fall through the earth to the other side of the world, and are then swallowed by a monstrous fish. Inside the fish, though, Munchausen finds Gustavus (Jack Purvis) and Adolphus (Charles McKeown), as well as his horse Bucephalus, and they escape the fish, return to the city and drive off the Turk. Having saved the inhabitants, the film ends with Munchausen leaving triumphantly, his horse rearing up on the horizon, before he magically disappears. These, then, are the bare bones of the narrative, and they allow for Gilliam to adapt some of the Baron’s fantastic tales into stunning visual sequences. But these tales fit within the larger framework of

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  111 the film’s interest in the vivifying power of fantasy and the permeable walls between reality and fantasy, neither of which the textual versions of Munchausen consider. The tales themselves stand out in the film by virtue of their visual splendour and fantastic qualities (so that, for example, the King and Queen of the Moon are at times disembodied heads, while a small flotilla rests inside the belly of the monstrous fish). But their real value lies in the way they can, and indeed should, be integrated back into the sensibilities of the characters within the film and the audience watching the film. Indeed, Munchausen simultaneously supplies the argument for the necessity of fantasy and the fantasies themselves. In Jabberwocky Gilliam examined the place of the grotesque and the monstrous in the mental landscape of medieval people, the fact that supernatural forces were accepted as part of reality. Kevin’s parents are blown apart in Time Bandits partly because of their failure to move beyond the realm of consumerism to the wider and richer worlds of the imagination that Kevin himself explores. Sam Lowry’s fantasies are critically analysed in terms of their narcissism and escapism, but even if we judge these negatively, he at least inhabits a more stimulating world than those around him. In Munchausen, by constructing the framework of the theatre around the tales themselves, Gilliam and McKeown create a form of transitional space between the worlds of fantasy and reality. The most popular modern form of that space or interface is the cinema screen. Both stage and screen exist in larger contexts, however, and appropriately enough given the conflicts that determined as well as retarded its completion, Munchausen begins during a battle, with the two sides temporarily at rest. The establishing shot rather deceptively depicts a sensuously curved bay, a clear sky, ships in the harbour and tents in the distance, and, as the camera pulls back to a long shot, a watchtower in which an exotically dressed watchman languidly smokes a pipe. Over this serene and captivating panorama the title cards that locate the scene on Wednesday in the late eighteenth century mock the Age of Reason’s obsessive classification. The idyllic setting replicates the pristine forest at the beginning of Jabberwocky and the decorous clouds in Brazil, and, as with them, the ideal cannot last. Cannons explode into life, the abrupt resumption of conflict immediately destroying the lighthearted references of the titles, and uncovering the Age of Reason’s darker side. Gilliam creates a gruesomely energetic account of the effect of violence inside the city, especially on innocent civilians, the camera tracking through the wounded, the dead and the traumatised survivors in the debris. A family cowers in the empty overturned shell of a horse’s head, which has toppled from a grand statue of a figure we

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112  terry gilliam later come to recognise as that of Baron Munchausen. Here, the headless statue suggests the absence of any of war’s romantic associations. The statue’s base is swathed in notices, mostly proclamations from the People’s Committee on the dire state of the town’s situation, the need for sacrifice, and the penalties for cannibalism. Amidst these bureaucratic fliers a small poster advertises that at the Theatre Royal Henry Salt and Son Players is performing ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’, ‘A Tale of incredible Truths, Resurrected and Performed for the first time in thirty years’. This poster is undergoing revision, a small girl (later revealed as Sally Salt) replacing the word ‘Son’ with ‘Daughter’. As she graphically establishes her identity, the camera cranes back and abruptly up to a building overlooking the carnage. There stands the allegorical figure of Death carved in stone, a skeletal and horrendous form with scythe and hourglass. Its shadow falls ominously over the young girl, a threat to her youth and to the imaginative world of the theatre to which she is linked. The Theatre Royal provides a space where fantasy can be presented, while also serving as a refuge from the murderous reality of the besieged town that surrounds the audience. The first image inside the theatre proper appropriately comes from backstage, the external image of Sally being replaced by an internal shot of the groaning gearwheels, pulleys and ropes that haul aloft a golden sun on stage. The contrast between the beauty of the gilded image visible on stage and the industrial mechanisms required to manufacture the illusion gets developed throughout this sequence, attempts to create on-stage magic being intercut with the chaotic, almost slapstick efforts of those behind and beneath the scenery to maintain the theatrical illusion. For the actors, who also double as production assistants for Salt and Son, any aesthetic ideals or hopes have already been destroyed by the actuality of production. The theatre functions as a frenetic creative platform on which the company’s dreams of mesmerising a receptive audience are dragged roughly to earth. Bickering between the company’s members, blatant upstaging and a general resentment of their lot ensure that the show goes on, but only haltingly. Henry Salt himself, a wonderfully and comically hammy performance from Bill Paterson, as producer, director and the company’s version of Baron Munchausen, provides a manic and almost irrepressible energy without which the production would never take place. But his commitment to the transformative magic of the theatre blinds him to the dire situation of the company itself, and while his theatrical heart is in the right place, hyperbole and melodrama are his default modes. Despite the company’s fevered efforts, props fail and cues are missed. Only occasionally does the audience gasp in wonder, as when,

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  113 in a beautifully rendered coup de theâtre, a giant fish swallows the Baron. But, like the critics they are, the audience more readily focuses on the show’s many failings, howling at the foul-ups, or mercilessly heckling the cast and the performance. This backstage representation of the eighteenth-century theatrical experience is clearly meant to approximate its cinematic equivalent, for in both arenas triumph and disaster, ethereal talent and material failings play their part in the fragile magic of the performing arts. The depiction here can be compared briefly but usefully to earlier representations of the theatre in Jabberwocky and Time Bandits. Lewis Carroll’s poem is performed in an anachronistic Punch and Judy show, the staging providing a link between the real world of medieval town life and the monstrous beast who terrorises it. The depiction of the crowd attending dutifully to the mobile theatre reinforces the sense of a worldview that comfortably integrates different realms into a totalising reality. In Time Bandits the Punch and Judy theatre is reprised after the Battle of Castiglione, but also reworked. While at first Napoleon’s enjoyment of the show seems to humanise him, it also reveals his psychoses. Later, in the Agamemnon sequence, Gilliam provides a far more positive and entertaining piece of theatre, established by the king’s magic tricks and his love of illusion and mystery. The lavish celebratory feast he puts on in Kevin’s honour includes dazzling performers and dancers, who delight and mesmerise the crowd with their skill. Napoleon’s responses uncover his repressions and limitations, but Agamemnon, like Kevin, relishes the performances, even if the boy realises eventually that the performers are the Time Bandits. Given the right circumstances, then, theatre (like cinema) has the power to enchant and to transport an audience away from everyday reality. The Theatre Royal, however, is imperilled by reality, for as well as the destructive bombardment that threatens to eradicate the entire city from the outside, powerful local pressures are being exerted. The theatre is subject to economic and bureaucratic control by Horatio Jackson. His power to close the theatre as well as to organise wars marks him as someone whose rationality and lack of aesthetic sensibility can destroy creativity. In one of his earliest and most revealing acts, Jackson sentences to death an officer who has destroyed six enemy cannon and saved ten men, declaring that the man’s heroic behaviour ‘is damaging for the ordinary soldiers and citizens who are leading normal, simple, unexceptional lives’. He adds: ‘Things are difficult enough without these emotional people rocking the boat.’ This speech neatly exemplifies what for Gilliam seems a repugnant attitude, one to be fought against. Yet the fact that the officer (played with a cool nobility by Sting) gets executed

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114  terry gilliam displays the real and destructive impact those like Jackson have on ‘emotional people’. When the real Munchausen arrives on stage, Jackson ridicules his claim that only he (not Jackson) can end the war because he began it. Jackson counters haughtily: ‘I’m afraid, sir, you have a rather weak grasp of reality’, to which the Baron replies in a telling rejection of the logic and rationalism for which Jackson stands: ‘Your “reality,” sir, is lies and balderdash, and I’m delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever.’ As in Brazil, the bureaucratic mindset is the mortal foe of the creative imagination. But the real Baron’s arrival at the theatre fundamentally complicates and undercuts the attempt by Henry Salt and his company to represent him on stage. In fact, the film audience rather than the theatre audience first sees the real Baron, if only as a monstrous shadow, half Punch, half Nosferatu, muttering as he moves towards a poster for the show hanging outside the theatre. His first appearance outside the theatre establishes his existence as a ‘real’ character, though just a silhouette in the doorway, a poor man’s version of Ethan Edwards from The Searchers. Only when he enters the theatre, raucously crying ‘Lies! Lies! You scoundrel’, and halting the production on stage, does he start to become a three-dimensional character. He denounces the Theatre Royal production of his tales as a ‘travesty’, an ‘insult’ and an ‘indignity’, and Henry Salt as an ‘impostor’. Which, of course, he is, but only if the Baron really exists. At this point in the script he is actually labelled merely ‘Old Man’, and while the film audience, having already seen Salt’s Baron, makes the connection between actor, poster and the real Baron, those on stage and in the theatre are at first nonplussed by what they see merely as a disruptive intruder or, as Salt labels him, ‘a cretinous old fool’, spoiling their entertainment. Worse still, against Salt’s entreaty, ‘You can’t come up here! We’re presenting a performance’, Munchausen mounts the stage, destroying any vestigial sense of the gap between the stage and reality. The Baron wants to destroy the fantasy of the stage performance and assert his existence: ‘You present me as if I were a ridiculous fiction! … a joke! I won’t have it!’ Emphasising his reality, he accidentally, if symbolically, cuts off the rubber Munchausean nose of Henry Salt with his sword. What follows (once the curtains are closed and the booing audience is excluded) is a physical and ontological tussle between the Baron and those on stage who are playing characters from his tales. The real Baron, trying to prove his own reality, confuses actors playing his former servants with the servants themselves. The actors fiercely deny their parallel identities, but when Munchausen later relates the tales, the same actors (Idle, Purvis, Dennis and McKeown) play his servants, and two female

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  115 members of Salt’s troupe (Cortese and Thurman) play the Queen of the Moon and Venus. The theatre offers a portal to pure fantasy, but requires a sublime fantasist to bring it fully ‘to life’. Salt’s stage representation of Munchausen’s tales provokes more laughter than wonder, but once the Baron himself takes over the role of storyteller, having assured the theatre audience that his forgotten tales are true, the gap between wonder and reality disappears. The real Baron takes up the tale of how he precipitated the conflict with the Sultan from where Henry Salt’s Baron had been interrupted. The actor playing the Sultan (Peter Jeffrey) returns, moving nervously downstage as the Baron recounts his visit to the Sultan. As he does so, the camera pans past the ‘Sultan’ (in the background other members of the company stand off-stage) into what the film audience expects will be the Theatre Royal audience. Instead, they and the actor enter the real harem, where he functions, rather than acts, as the real Sultan. The rather tawdry effects of eighteenth-century theatre are now replaced by an opulent and more fully realised environment that draws on Doré’s illustrations and the sumptuous settings of Hollywood epics. Significantly, Munchausen is now thirty years younger, the age he would have been when the original events supposedly took place. And just as he is now a vital and charismatic individual, his servants, who sit outside the Sultan’s palace, are also young, and gifted with fantastic (and youthful) powers of exceptional speed, strength, sight and hearing. This temporal dimension plays no part in the original text, but through it the film inaugurates the theme of the life-giving properties of the fantastic. When the old Baron later goes in search of his servants, they too will be old, tired, set in their ways and deprived of their powers. But, for the moment, and under the spell of the Baron’s recounting of events from the past, all are young. The Sultan’s harem, while still potentially a stage set, is a brilliant assemblage of odalisques, columns, eunuchs, a sleeping tiger, a small pool, an enormous naked fat woman seen lounging in a hammock (an image taken from Doré) and other signs of Oriental sumptuousness. Where the camera angles and positions for the theatrical performance had been simple and largely static medium or long shots, the Baron’s tale is told using an array of close-ups, over-the-shoulder shots, tracking shots and the like, registering it as more ‘real’ in terms of cinematic codes. Within this realm, the Sultan, for all his outrageous wealth, still acts within the laws of plausibility, and so happily accepts Munchausen’s amazing challenge that the Baron can procure a bottle of the finest Tokay within the hour from the imperial cellar in Vienna, a thousand miles away, or have his head cut off. The Baron then calls down to

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116  terry gilliam Berthold, sitting outside playing cards with the other servants, from a window high up in the wall of the Sultan’s massive palace. This exterior shot goes well beyond the possibilities of the previous stage set, yet still retains a certain artificial quality, a sign that we remain within the Baron’s tale. Berthold, with a message for the Austrian empress to secure the wine, unshackles himself from the ball and chains that have held his prodigiously powerful legs in check, and, after working himself up to speed in cartoonish fashion (his legs are a blur, but he stays in one spot) accelerates out of the palace in the manner the script describes as ‘like the Road Runner’.60 While the Sultan and the Baron wait for Berthold’s return, the former gives a rather perverse performance of ‘The Torturer’s Apprentice’, a short opera he has composed (with words by Eric Idle) played on an instrument that combines the elements of an organ and a torture chamber, its innards being crammed with prisoners who shriek in tune as they are poked and pierced by spikes activated from the keyboard. The scene evokes a Python sketch in which Terry Jones ‘played’ tunes on a mouse organ by pounding mice with mallets. It replaces one involving a chess game using life-sized pieces (including elephants for rooks) that was dropped to trim expenses.61 As time runs out for the Baron, he energises his servants into finding Berthold, whom Gustavus hears sleeping 900 miles away under a tree, and whom Adolphus awakens by shooting an apple from a tree that falls on Berthold’s head. These amazing feats, coupled with Berthold’s rapid return to the palace, saving the Baron from beheading just at the moment the executioner’s axe has cut through Munchausen’s pigtail, maintain the blend of cartoon and Arabian Nights fantasy. And this continues as the Sultan, accepting that he has lost the bet, allows Munchausen to take from his treasury all that the strongest man can carry. Here Albrecht’s enormous strength comes into play, for he is able to carry away all the Sultan’s wealth, an impossible bundle of booty being strapped to his back. When the Sultan hears what has happened, he slices off the head of his treasurer (who still manages a wink) and then orders his men to capture Munchausen and his servants. Gustavus’s ability to blow great winds seems likely to drive the Sultan’s men off, but as cannons fire in the story, they also pound the Theatre Royal, whose walls collapse under the bombardment. Back on stage in the present (and therefore old again) the Baron proudly explains that the mesmerising events he has just told are the reason for the Sultan’s enmity. He also promises more tales. But the audience and the actors in the theatre are more concerned about saving their lives than hearing more fantastic stories, and he is ignored. As a consequence, when Sally searches the ruins of the theatre, she finds

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  117 Munchausen lying on the floor, with Death, now an animate figure, kneeling above him and attempting to take his glowing essence. She drives Death away, but finds that the Baron in fact wants to die, ‘because the world is evidently tired of me’. When she asks why, he replies bitterly: ‘Because it’s all logic and reason now … Science … Progress … The laws of hydraulics … The laws of social dynamics, the laws of this, that and the other … No place for three-legged Cyclopses from the South Seas … No place for cucumber trees … or oceans of wine … No place for me.’ But Sally insists that she wants to hear more, and she also cries out against the exploding shells and destruction that science, progress and the laws of hydraulics have wrought. These central ideas are not part of the original tales, but are introduced and developed through the device of the theatre and Henry Salt’s theatre company, as well as the relationships established between the real world, the theatre and Munchausen’s stories. While the Baron himself clearly is important, Sally’s belief in him is vital. She receives almost immediate proof that he is the man he claims to be when he inadvertently fires himself off on a mortar shell towards the Turkish camp, and returns on a Turkish cannonball (passing the flying and frustrated figure of Death as he does so). And she proposes that he can save the city,62 accompanying him on his voyage to find his extraordinary companions. This involves a fair degree of courage and resilience, as when, on their voyage to the moon in a boat held aloft by the balloon made of knickers, it appears that a violent storm will destroy them both (Death swoops in briefly but fruitlessly at this point). She also keeps the Baron focused on the task at hand, particularly in those moments when the beautiful Queen of the Moon or Venus distract his eye, or when he loses heart and wants to rest. More than once she saves him from his own morbid desire to die. The simple narrative ploy of having the Baron travel to fantastic places in order to find his servants ensures that the plot does not divert attention from the magic of these realms; the narrative is far more straightforward than that of Brazil. Occasionally, Sally’s questions about the situation of the besieged town cause the Baron to give a sanguine assurance, immediately undermined by a cut to the dire reality, but for the most part the series of adventures to the moon, Mount Etna and the other side of the world are discrete. In Time Bandits the time map provided the chart to other worlds, while in Munchausen the connections are made through fantastic links, such as falling from the moon straight into the volcanic mountain, or being hurled from Mount Etna through the centre of the earth, or being disgorged from the belly of a huge fish back to the embattled town. The first of these adventures, a trip to the moon, projects the Baron and Sally far from their reality. It

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118  terry gilliam even transcends the amazing (but still supposedly real) world of the Turkish Sultan. The journey itself is a tumultuous voyage to a different dimension that the audience first sees as a star-filled sky. But in this realm of illusion the stars begin to move oddly, and we come to realise that what had seemed to be the sky is actually the reflection of stars on to the surface of the sea, through which the boat carrying the Baron and Sally slowly drifts. Even after the boat reaches the sand with its two passengers, it carries on through the sands towards a large metropolis. The Baron acknowledges the cheers of the moon’s inhabitants as the boat passes through the streets of the city. But while we hear the cheers, and the Baron certainly responds to them, what we see is a series of beautiful but two-dimensional facades that move as though part of a welcoming crowd. This suitably fantastic scenario in fact is one of the brilliantly ­inventive ways in which the initial script was reworked drastically to cut costs and so revive a film on which shooting had been suspended by Film Finances. The original screenplay called for a fully populated moon whose 50-foot inhabitants are plagued by memory loss as a result of their heads regularly falling off. One of these, the Prime Minister of the Moon (to have been played by Michael Palin), is imprisoned when, drunk at a banquet, his head falls off into a punch bowl. At the same lavish banquet, meant to have been one of the great set pieces of the film, the Baron infuriates the King by flirting with the Queen and chasing a grape into her mountainous cleavage. These and other delights were abandoned,63 but the far cheaper compromise, which involved pasting and colouring the drawings of the sets, and moving them about to create a sense of a moving crowd, works wonderfully. Where the original King to be played by Connery was rather muddle-headed but still regal, his replacement Robin Williams’s manic flights of verbal fancy emphasise a Cartesian conflict between the low, carnal instincts of the body and the ethereal and intellectual pretensions of the mind. By contrast, Valentina Cortese’s Queen is a more controlled but still highly sensuous creature, whose Italian accent provides Williams the licence to play the King in his own phoney Italian, with the overt physicality and sexuality of the Italian male stereotype. Williams at this point in his career was just becoming a star, and his management requested that he go uncredited, for fear that the film’s advertising might elevate his startling cameo into something more substantial. The King of the Moon thus appears in the credits next to the nickname Williams gives himself in the film, Ray D. Tutto, a rough phonetic equivalent of the Italian for ‘King of Everything’. Williams’s comically deluded and quasi-philosophical shtick maintains an atmosphere of magical unworldliness that the tangibly fake sets and

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  119 floating heads complement. This continues when the Baron, Sally and the recovered Berthold make their escape by climbing down a lock of the Queen’s hair looped over the end of a fantasy moon, very much in the way depicted by Doré. Around them swirl animated stars in their zodiacal configurations, creating mesmerising images that only end when the Baron detaches the top of the lock of hair from the moon in order to allow Berthold to splice it to the bottom. In another cartoonish moment the three of them hover briefly before plunging through space into the top of Mount Etna. They land unharmed, due, the Baron explains, to warm air rising from the volcano breaking their fall. The laws of physics, logic and thermal updrafts have been left far behind. The trip to the moon entails a substantial shift away from reality, which can also be seen in generic terms. And these generic distinctions continue in the realm of fantasy, for the world inside Mount Etna combines and contrasts characters and environments very different from those of the moon or Sally’s home town: the grim industrial north of England, ruled over by the god Vulcan, and the beauties of the Italian Renaissance, presided over by his wife, the goddess Venus. As so often in Gilliam’s films, the juxtaposition or interweaving of anachronistic periods serves a satirical purpose, here initially foregrounding the class conflict between the crude capitalism of Vulcan and his radicalised workforce of Cyclopses. The narrative rationale for this section, Munchausen finding his servant Albrecht, remains very subsidiary to the rich and detailed evocation of place, firstly Vulcan’s dark, satanic factory, into which the Baron, Sally and Berthold fall. This hellish environment, concocted of darkness, smoke, noise and riotous workers who reject Vulcan’s offer of a 2½% wage increase, takes some of its cue from Doré’s illustration of workers at a forge, but Gilliam adds substantially to this foundation by delivering a short class in industrial politics. Vulcan judges that he can outlast the go-slows of his workers, because, as he shouts at them, being a god he has ‘all the time in the universe here, lads! All the time, me!’ Implausibly, his men are also constructing an intercontinental ballistic missile that can kill all the enemy and ‘all their wives and all their children and all their sheep and cattle, and cats and dogs’. All concerned unquestionably accept this bizarre swerve into modern international relations, condemning the missile in a wonderful use of the timeless setting in which they all find themselves. Vulcan’s bluff and bluster, captured by Oliver Reed in a hugely exaggerated but very funny parody of the northern industrial magnate, hides more genteel pretensions, as he leads the others into his dining room, where he serves them from a delicate teapot. And he is completely undermined, and in a sense, unmanned, by the arrival of Venus. Her

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120  terry gilliam entrance, hauled up in a shell from a small pond by two cherubs, clearly references Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and Thurman’s youthful sensuality, in only her second film role, overwhelms the male characters (Sally being considerably less enchanted). Vulcan becomes painfully obsequious, creating unwanted diamonds out of coal, but the rejuvenated Munchausen equally succumbs to her allure, dancing with her in the air in a staggeringly beautiful ballroom. Berthold’s own feeble dancing briefly diverts Vulcan’s jealousy (signalled by cartoon-like steam coming out of his ears) but Sally is desperate to get back to the town and so reveals to Vulcan that Munchausen is kissing his wife. In a violent rage Vulcan hurls them into a vortex, but, as he turns his rage towards his ‘floozy’ of a wife, she calms him by suggesting that her apparent interest in the Baron was done to excite her husband. In small details like this deft account of marital politics, Munchausen displays sophistication beyond the norm for fantasy films. After industrial England and Renaissance Italy, the switch in location and mood to the South Seas also prompts a different generic subset of the fantastic voyage, being swallowed by a giant fish. The textual Munchausen had this adventure, but Gilliam mentions that he was also trying to make a live action Disney cartoon, and the links to Pinocchio are obvious. But where that tale centres on a puppet needing to grow up and become a real boy, this section of Gilliam’s Munchausen deals with mortality. In the belly of the fish, a dour and decrepit place after Mount Etna, filled with wrecked hulks and lost sailors (including Gilliam playing an accordion), Munchausen finds his remaining servants, Gustavus and Adolphus. Now old and without their youthful powers, they believe that they are already dead or at least that death is close at hand and inevitable. This is literally the case, for Sally notices that when the depressed and exhausted Baron sits down to play a game of cards with his servants, the dealer is Death. Yet again she destroys the hideous creature, regenerating Munchausen so that he uses snuff to make the fish expel them all through its blowhole. Naturally, they land just near the besieged town, but as the Baron sets out his plans to defeat the Turk, Sally informs him that his servants are now too old to perform the amazing feats he still requires of them. Munchausen has been revivified by his adventures, but his servants have not. Having said that he would gather his friends and save the town, the Baron responds that, as an honourable man who has not fulfilled a pledge, he must surrender to the Sultan. As he leaves his companions he prompts them: ‘If you want to see Baron Munchausen again, you’d better do something about it.’ What Munchausen finds in the Sultan’s tent is not merely the Sultan but Horatio Jackson, negotiating a surrender of the Turks as part of the

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dreams, fantasies and nightmares  121 diplomatic rules of war. Munchausen bravely challenges him: ‘So, Mr. Jackson, still the “rational” man, eh? How many people have perished in your logical little war?’ Jackson’s reply neatly sums up the unbridgeable gap between them: ‘There are certain rules, sir, to the proper conduct of living. We cannot fly to the moon. We cannot defy death. We must face the facts, not the folly of fantasists like you, who don’t live in the real world, and who consequently come to a very sticky end.’ Munchausen, of course, is the living repudiation of this ideology, and so must be put to death. On the verge of his execution, his companions, provoked by his challenge, rediscover their courage, their great powers and their selfbelief. Slowly, comically but inevitably they overpower the Turks and send Jackson scattering. As the citizens of the town realise that they have been saved, they cheer Munchausen and his companions back into the town in a carnivalesque celebration that might have provided a suitably uplifting end to the normal fantastic tale. But Baron Munchausen is anything but normal, and, as the triumphant group accepts the plaudits of the crowd, the camera cranes back and up to the top of the building where the statue of Death stands. This repeat of the early shot has a notable modification, for hiding behind the stone figure is Horatio Jackson, aiming a rifle. He fires the shot that mortally wounds the Baron, but, before he can savour his victory, the statue of Death changes into its animate form, its hideousness shocking even him. As the Baron lies injured in the town square, Death appears in the disguise of a doctor, and despite Sally’s best efforts, steals the Baron’s glowing essence. The mournful funeral of the Baron that follows threatens to destroy the generic codes of fantasy, the camera slowly panning over the sombrely dressed members of Henry Salt’s company, faces all distraught at their loss. The camera focuses on the body of Munchausen as his cask is lowered, but the tone of the ceremony is confused by the Baron’s voice breezily informing us that that ‘was only one of the many occasions on which I met my death, an experience which I don’t hesitate strongly to recommend’. As he speaks these words the camera again pans over Henry Salt’s company, but while they are still emotionally bereft, their clothes signal that we are back on stage at the Theatre Royal and that the Baron has just completed the tale he began back at the Sultan’s palace. The revelation that the Baron’s shooting by Jackson was merely another chapter in his fantastic adventures proves in the most direct way the enchanting power of the imagination to suspend disbelief. More than this, his claims that his stories are true means that the Sultan has been defeated, even though nothing seemingly has happened in the real world while he has been telling his tale. But while his declaration that ‘from that time forth everyone, who had a talent for it, lived happily

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122  terry gilliam ever after’ cheers up the theatre audience, Horatio Jackson returns to refute his nonsense and call for the Baron’s arrest. Munchausen defiantly asks that the gates be opened and this sets up a complete clash of sensibilities: if Munchausen is correct, the Sultan and his army will have been destroyed, but if the rational Jackson is correct, the Turks will pour through the open gates and overrun the town. In this film the eponymous Baron is right, and the townsfolk, liberated both from their enemy and the restrictive shackles of rationalism, celebrate their new-found liberty. Baron Munchausen perhaps provides the distillation of ideas that course powerfully through many Gilliam films, most notably that the world that rejects or denigrates fantasy invites its own imaginative death. Creativity regularly supplies a necessary vitality and freedom for both the individual and society at large, especially in a world dominated by rationality and materialism. The character of the Baron embodies these anti-rational, highly subversive forces, which is why he poses a threat to convention and decorum. Given Gilliam’s predilection for seeing himself as his main character, Munchausen might well be seen as his doppelgänger. But the Baron’s ability to cheat death regularly over the several centuries since his stories first appeared place him in another dimension from Gilliam. A better parallel might be the inspired, despairing but tenacious director of the Theatre Royal; there is a large pinch of Gilliam in Henry Salt. And at the end of the film, no matter what its tribulations, the theatre company survives as the space in which fantasists like Munchausen, and lesser mortals like Salt, can still mesmerise and transport audiences. Better still, in a small but highly significant move, Salt shows Sally the new theatre flier that advertises the work of Henry Salt and Daughter. Her strength and belief in the realm of fantasy will be folded into an improved theatrical mix. Munchausen magically disappears at the end, a sign of how he and his tales transcend materiality. Salt and his company survive on the plane of reality, in a world of tough audiences, compromises, failures, huge effort and occasional triumphs. In terms of production and economics Baron Munchausen was a disaster, but as Andrew Yule argues, the film did surprisingly well at the box office given its less than enthusiastic promotion by Columbia and the disastrous press that attended its making. Gilliam recognises that the film had aesthetic failings, commenting that: ‘If I were to criticise it we were excessive on every level.’64 But in a different context he gives a more measured and more poignant judgement, suggesting that ‘What is on the screen is the lack of things – things we could have done better, things that might’ve helped the story – that we didn’t get.’65

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Notes 1 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 112. 2 Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (eds), The Utopian Reader (New York, New York University Press, 1999), pp. 1–2. 3 Ibid. 4 Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1990), p. 34. 5 See, for example, Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986). 6 Darko Suvin, ‘Theses on Dystopia 2001’, in Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (eds), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (New York, Routledge, 2003), pp. 187–201, p. 190. 7 Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 7–8. Suvin concentrates on literature in this text. ‘Theses on Dystopia 2001’ extends his general arguments to film. 8 Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971–1986. Volume 2: The Syntax of History (London, Routledge, 1988), pp. 87–8. 9 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 145. 10 Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York, Methuen, 1986), p. 37. 11 Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, ‘Dystopias and Histories’, in Baccolini and Moylan (eds), Dark Horizons, pp. 1–12, p. 5. 12 Ibid., p. 6. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 7. 15 Much of what follows draws from the ‘Script Development’ section of disc 51.2 in the excellent Criterion DVD set. 16 This image appeared in the opening animation in Meaning of Life. 17 Charlie Kaufmann would actually do something similar two decades later with the ending of Adaptation. 18 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 111. 19 Tom Stoppard, interviewed in ‘The Screenwriters’ video in the ‘Script Development’ section of Criterion’s Brazil DVD, disc 51.2. 20 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 112. 21 Witness was the 1986 Academy Award winner for Screenplay Written Directly for Screen, in an eclectic field that also included Back to the Future and The Purple Rose of Cairo. 22 Enemy Mine was directed by Wolfgang Petersen. 23 Jack Mathews, The Battle of Brazil (New York, Applause, 1998). 24 According to the 1999 BFI poll of the ‘100 Best British Films’. 25 McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 112. 26 The name Kurtzmann [sic] is a tribute to Help!’s Harvey Kurtzman. 27 The original European version begins with the ‘8:49 p.m.’ and ‘Somewhere in the 20th Century’ title cards. 28 Mathews, The Battle of Brazil. 29 Ibid., p. 32. 30 Ibid., p. 22. 31 Ibid., pp. 82–3. 32 Ibid., p. 74. 33 Gilliam wanted this version presented in the Criterion Collection, although on another disc and with David Morgan’s astute comparative analysis, so that viewers could witness the damage that might have been done had he succumbed to ­Sheinberg’s entreaties.

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124  terry gilliam 34 See Mathews, The Battle of Brazil, pp. 116–26. 35 Andrew Yule, Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam and the Munchausen Saga (New York, Applause, 1991). 36 Ibid., p. 194. 37 Ibid., p. 240. 38 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 162. 39 Yule, Losing the Light, p. 234. 40 Deleted scenes are included in Charles McKeown and Terry Gilliam, The ­Adventures of Baron Munchausen: The Screenplay (New York, Applause Books, 1989), pp. 133–58. 41 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 136. 42 Questions about the degree of his contribution are noted in Yule, Losing the Light, pp. 4–11. 43 Ibid., pp. 16–26. 44 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 133. 45 Gilliam, ibid., p. 8. 46 See also McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, pp. 130–43; David Morgan, ‘The Mad Adventures of Terry Gilliam’, in Sterritt and Rhodes (eds), Terry Gilliam, pp.  36–45; Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, pp. 152–85. 47 Yule, Losing the Light, p. 69. 48 McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 136. 49 Yule, Losing the Light, p. 130. 50 Ibid., pp. 140–2 and pp. 214–15 deal with the film rights issue, p. 228 with that of the family name. 51 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 140. 52 Ibid., p. 139. 53 Yule, Losing the Light, p. 222. 54 This account draws heavily on the introduction to Rudolph Erich Raspe, The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Doylestown, Penn., Wildside Press, 2001), pp. 5–26. 55 Yule, Losing The Light, pp. iii–iv. 56 Ibid., pp. 233, 238. 57 Stam, Literature Through Film, p. 6. 58 Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (London, Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 4. 59 Ibid., p. 5. 60 McKeown and Gilliam, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, p. 26. 61 Ibid., pp. 134–7. 62 Ibid., p. 46; she actually suggests he finds his servants, but this is cut from the film itself. 63 Ibid., pp. 138–49. 64 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 143. 65 Gilliam, in ibid.

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1  Becoming animated: Terry Gilliam reconfigured as Conrad Poos and His Dancing Teeth in And Now for Something Completely Different (1971).

2  Gilliam suffering the fatal heart attack that saves the Knights of the Round Table from the Black Beast of Arrrghhh in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974).

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3  Medieval Economic Rationalism: Wat Dabney (Jerrold Wells) explains to Dennis Cooper (Michael Palin) the golden economic opportunity opened up by cutting off one’s foot and becoming a beggar in Jabberwocky (1977).

4  Crucifixion Party organiser Nissus Wettus (Michael Palin) tries to make sense of the impenetrably scatological ravings of a mad jailer (Terry Gilliam) while the jailer’s stuttering assistant (Eric Idle) looks on dimly in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979).

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5  Watched by Wally (Jack Purvis) and Randall (David Rappaport), Kevin (Craig Warnock) challenges the Supreme Being (unseen here, but played by Ralph Richardson) to explain why people have to die needlessly to fulfil the Supreme Being’s plan. The reply, ‘I think it has something to do with Free Will’ fails to convince him in Time Bandits (1981).

6  Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) as the dynamic and romantic hero of his own dreams in Brazil (1985).

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7  The real Baron Munchausen (John Neville, foreground) lambasts the actors mis­repre­ senting him on stage (Alison Steadman, Uma Thurman, Valentina Cortese, Eric Idle, Winston Dennis) in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989).

8  Parry (Robin Williams) brought low by his nemesis, the Red Knight, on the streets of New York in The Fisher King (1991).

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9  Under the all-seeing eye of the video ball, and on the verge of mental collapse, James Cole (Bruce Willis) undergoes interrogation in Twelve Monkeys (1996).

10  ‘Get In’: with his delusional driving companion Dr Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) having ­promised that ‘We’re not like the others’, a chemically invigorated Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) offers a hitch-hiker (Tobey Maguire) the trip of his life in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).

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11  The forceful rationalist Wilhelm Grimm (Matt Damon) and the pen-wielding fantasist Jacob Grimm (Heath Ledger) pretend to consider how best to confront the Mill Witch in The Brothers Grimm (2005).

12  Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho: the highly imaginative Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), the heads of her doll companions on her fingertips, stands outside the house where her dead father (Jeff Bridges) will be gutted and preserved in varnish in Tideland (2005).

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Pasts, presents and futures in America

6

If Brazil spawned the potent figure of Terry Gilliam the triumphant auteur, Baron Munchausen seeded the equally mythical creature, Gilliam the self-indulgent fantasist. This label was not of itself sufficient to scupper his career as a filmmaker, but Munchausen came burdened with a far more toxic label: ‘financial flop’. Coupled with a mixed critical ­reception, it marked a retreat from the high ground of Brazil. The ­difficulties of making the film in Italy and Spain also challenged Gilliam’s hope of creating substantial, independent-minded films within the European film industry context. He contemplated giving up filmmaking. Producer Joel Silver, the force behind box-office successes such as 48 Hours, Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, offered a reprieve, asking Gilliam to direct the graphic novel Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ classic comic book series about conflicted superheroes who exist in an alternative version of America’s history.1 Gilliam was drawn to Watchmen, with its dark overtones and caustic take on American dreams, as well as its ambitious scope, making it for him ‘the War and Peace of comic books’.2 Dissatisfied with the Sam Hamm screenplay sent by Silver, he and Charles McKeown wrote their own.3 But even Silver could not secure the necessary $40 million budget and the project collapsed, compounding Gilliam’s depression. Silver did, nonetheless, make a pivotal contribution to Gilliam’s career, advising him to work in the Hollywood system, something Gilliam was more amenable to after Munchausen. The result would be two of Gilliam’s most successful films, critically and commercially: The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys. It says much for Gilliam’s aesthetic breadth, ingenuity and flexibility that he could realise these two very different projects, one a romantic comedy set in New York with distinctly medieval overtones, the other a futuristic dystopia in which lions and bears rule the streets of Baltimore. In a move he jokes was ‘the beginning of the end of my virginity’,4 he joined Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of Hollywood’s most

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132  terry gilliam powerful agencies for actors and directors. Gilliam instructed his new agent, Jack Rapke, that ‘I only wanted to do my own scripts’, this declaration of independence soon sabotaged because, as he acknowledges, ‘I wasn’t actually producing anything’.5 CAA sent him the screenplay for The Addams Family, a melange of jokes and special effects he quickly rejected as ‘crap’.6 In the same package was The Fisher King, by the largely unsung Richard LaGravenese,7 who had rewritten the script over a number of years, retaining the premise of a selfish man required to perform a selfless act to redeem himself. This redemption draws on the pagan myth of the Fisher King, a figure famously analysed by scholar Jessie Weston in her influential 1919 study, From Ritual to Romance. Weston devotes a chapter to the links between the Holy Grail and the even more ancient fertility myth of the Fisher King.8 Cataloguing various iterations of the tale, including by twelfth-century French writer Chrétien de Troyes, she notes the crucial link between the vitality of the land and the health of its king. When the king is old or wounded, the land is blighted, and it and he can only be restored if a questing figure comes to his aid. T.S.  Eliot had incorporated some of these ideas into his landmark poem The Wasteland (1922), a complex depiction of the sterility of modern life. John Boorman works similar themes together in his film, Excalibur (1981). In Boorman’s epic telling, the land is barren and Arthur mortally ill until the knight Sir Perceval (called Parsifal in some traditions) brings him the Grail. When Arthur drinks from it his powers are restored, and with it the physical and moral vitality of the land. Boorman’s highly romanticised version contrasts markedly with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but, as we saw earlier, a connection to Gilliam does exist, Boorman having used Jabberwocky as a prompt for his own work. LaGravenese’s screenplay meshed with Gilliam’s own medieval interests and previous films. The writer’s key source, though, was not Weston, Eliot nor Boorman, let alone Monty Python, but Jungian analyst Robert Johnson’s He: Understanding Masculine Psychology. Johnson suggests that ‘the myth of Parsifal’s search for the Holy Grail’ provides the necessary ‘prescription for our modern day’,9 one that can heal the cultural sickness within the contemporary psyche. In the film itself a manuscript is found at one point titled ‘The Fisher King: A Mythic Journey for Modern Man’, written by Henry Sagan. Johnson draws primarily on Jung’s notion of archetypes and underlying cultural myths, basing his reading of the myth on de Troyes’ version, and arguing that ‘the winds of the twelfth century have become the whirlwinds of the twentieth century’.10 Johnson’s text provides LaGravenese with thematic, symbolic and narrative elements, including the eponymous king and

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pasts, presents and futures in america  133 an apparently innocent fool named Parsifal, who is also a great knight in the making. Parsifal comes to the king’s aid, has to fight a powerful and malevolent Red Knight, which Johnson describes as ‘the shadow side of masculinity’, and goes in search of the Holy Grail.11 Its rescue from the Chapel Perilous causes the subsequent healing of the king and the restoration of the land. As the book’s title baldly declares, Johnson focuses on male psychology, but this does not mean that He is bereft of shes. Drawing from the Grail myth and Jungian psychology, Johnson discusses figures such as fair or mute damsels held in towers, and vivifying females, elucidating the Jungian view that there are six basic relationships between men and the feminine world. One of these is with his fair maiden, ‘who gives meaning and colour to [his] life. Dr Jung named that quality the anima, she who animates and brings life.’12 ­LaGravenese updates and substantially upgrades these emblematic females, fashioning them into plausible and self-motivated characters capable of surviving in the film’s contemporary New York setting and interacting positively with the modern equivalents of Parsifal and the Fisher King. Despite these significant females, however, the relationship between male figures remains central. LaGravenese rejigs certain elements of the Johnsonian model, so that the roles of Fisher King and Parsifal are to an extent interchangeable: both are suffering figures healed by the Holy Grail, and both at times play the role of assistant to the other’s fallen figure. This modification enriches the emotional balance and psychological richness of the film, and fits within the parameters of the Fisher King myth. Jessie Weston had noted that in some versions of the Fisher King myth ‘There are not one, but two disabled kings’,13 and this holds true for The Fisher King. Taking crucial ingredients from medieval and older mythologies, the screenplay resituates them and reworks them for modern America. This intersection of time frames and of substantially different ways of interpreting the world (one closed, rational and materialistic, the other more metaphysical, historically oriented and creative) resonates with Gilliam’s previous films. LaGravenese takes the intersection further than a quirky and diverting device for comic anachronisms, as the Pythons had done so brilliantly in The Holy Grail, for while The Fisher King is one of the few films in which a medieval knight charges through New York’s streets and the woods of Central Park, he is only the most arresting emblem of the broader medieval mindset that Gilliam explored in Jabberwocky. Bringing that culture into modern New York, LaGravenese deploys Johnson’s idea that the Fisher King myth might remedy the spiritual malaise of America. The noted medieval scholar Tom Shippey would later praise this element of the completed film, arguing that:

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The surprising claim that The Fisher King makes and, I think, proves is that the old motifs of myth and romance work, move and persuade audiences who have no previous knowledge of them, because they are, if not true, then in a deep way needed: if they are not present in the imaginative diet, then you will get scurvy of the soul, and all the sitcoms in the world won’t cure you.14

One can imagine Gilliam concurring, and this might explain his willingness to direct the script within the American studio system. The Fisher King could seem Gilliam’s capitulation to the cultural dominance of America and the American film industry, but in fact it allows him the opportunity to subvert that dominance from within. By putting New York under the scrutiny of the older and culturally richer European world he champions, The Fisher King offers a diagnosis of the soul’s scurvy. The screenplay, then, casts a critical eye over the egotism and vacuous materialism of contemporary America, depicting and denouncing that society as a sterile wasteland, lorded over by indulgent, vicious, morally corrupt and emotionally unaware elites. The social fabric is rent, discrepancies between economic and cultural classes abound, and the ­structures and processes of the city create alienated individuals, enclaves and subgroups, mutually fearful and antagonistic. Within this toxic environment, the innocent and the good suffer physical and psychological torment, not to mention economic deprivation, while the rest of society mindlessly enjoys excess, denying or ignoring communal interaction – a blighted land, indeed. These sentiments in different ways inflect Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, Baron Munchausen and Brazil, especially. But The Fisher King was no mere attack upon a sick society, for in adopting and adapting the Grail and Fisher King myths it proposes a remedy: that mutual respect and selflessness might restore the land and its people to vitality. It does so by incorporating the magical, the mythical and the imaginative elements that the medieval world, or something like it, can supply. As well as the arresting themes, Gilliam recognised that ‘The writing was absolutely wonderful; it was funny, with great characters, and seemed to come from the same mental state that I was in. I knew these people, but they were written more wittily than I could have done.’15 For the first time since becoming a filmmaker, he was willing to direct someone else’s script. He also decided to make the completed film as true to that script as possible, rather than modify it to suit to his own vision. As Bob McCabe notes, though, the script that Gilliam first received was itself an amalgam of revisions, and Gilliam was able to convince LaGravenese to ‘reinstate … earlier, darker versions of the tale.’16 Even so, the completed film would be less ‘A Terry Gilliam Film’

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pasts, presents and futures in america  135 than any of his earlier efforts, his own role being more director than multi-tasking filmmaker. As another sign of his willingness to adopt a new approach with Fisher King, he was also ready to abandon the storyboards that had been a feature of his own creative process, relying more on the actors to create plausible characters. Inevitably, the film would bind him to the economic and aesthetic imperatives of an American studio, which would mean working with a largely American cast and crew. More significantly still, directing The Fisher King would require him to relinquish the final cut option that he had fought vigorously for in his previous films. These projected changes in approach evidence a degree of modesty in the wake of Munchausen. But that film in fact contributed to his securing the director’s chair. Robin Williams’s uncredited cameo in Munchausen established an important personal connection between the two men. Williams had become a major star on the back of similarly energetic, Oscar-nominated performances in Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society, as well as more measured work in the respected Awakenings. He was a powerful force in Hollywood, and was pencilled in for the role of the eccentric Parry, the modern day Parsifal. ‘When I read The Fisher King’, Williams recalls, ‘they mentioned Terry. He was the only person to do it. It had all the hallmarks of the things he had done. The idea of Quixote in Manhattan, and there’s so many gothic elements to New York that he fit perfectly.’17 Williams’s respect for Gilliam swayed producers Debra Hill and Lynda Obst, who admitted that Gilliam’s reputation as ‘someone whose images ruled the narrative, as opposed to characters ruling the narrative, as opposed even, to narrative ruling the narrative’ made him a risky proposition for a studio. The ­reputation itself is disputable, but in studio terms Obst and the more experienced Hill were themselves something of a gamble as producers. As Obst notes, Columbia Tri-Star ‘saw the idea of two girls [as producers] and Terry Gilliam as one of the most frightening propositions they had ever encountered’.18 The Fisher King charts the fall from grace of high-flying radio shock jock Jack Lucas (Jeff Bridges). Jack humiliates an unassertive regular caller, Edwin, for professing to love a beautiful yuppie who frequents a classy New York bar. Jack’s calculatedly vicious dismissal of Edwin, and his throwaway remark that yuppies must be destroyed, prompts the ridiculed figure to assert himself later by entering the bar and killing seven of its patrons, before turning the shotgun on himself. Jack, seemingly on the verge of a breakthrough move into a television sitcom, On the Radio, sees a report of the slaying on the television, and is traumatised by his culpability. The narrative then jumps forward three years, with Jack now

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136  terry gilliam psychologically wounded, wallowing in alcoholic self-pity, and living off the earthy and resilient Anne (Mercedes Ruehl). She owns a vibrantly shabby video store that they live above, far removed from his former hip and luxurious apartment; Gilliam likens it to a ‘peasant cottage in the forest’.19 There, amidst the common folk he had once broadcast to but despised, Jack indulges in crude misanthropy, suggesting to a woman wanting a ‘Chevy-Chasey-Goldie-Hawny kinda thing’ that she watch Ordinary Peepholes, a ‘big-titty-spread-cheeky kinda thing’. But his hatred of the public, combined with self-loathing, is worsened by the success of On the Radio, which has made a big star of its leading man, Ben Starr (Harry Shearer), and a national catchphrase of his repeated exhortation, ‘Well, forgive me!’ Questioned by Anne on why they constantly watch a show Jack detests, he fires back: ‘Because it makes me feel good to see how not funny it is. How America doesn’t know the first thing about funny, which makes it easier not being a famous funny t.v. celebrity because that would mean I’m not really talented.’ Her reply, ‘You are a sick fuck, you know that’, provides a brutal but truthful diagnosis of his state of being. Later, when Jack is on the verge of committing suicide beneath Brooklyn Bridge, young thugs start to assault him, but Parry, a vagrant lunatic, leads a gang of homeless men and saves him. Parry is more than he seems, his name signalling him as the modern equivalent of the mythical Parsifal. Jack later finds out that Parry’s real name is Henry Sagan, a former history professor at Hunter College whose wife had been one of Edwin’s victims. Sagan witnessed the brutal shooting and has suffered a psychological breakdown. Knowing the Fisher King myth (he is the writer of the ‘Mythic Journey for Modern Man’ paper) Sagan has adopted the persona of Parry as a defence and a recovery strategy. He believes that Jack has been sent to help him retrieve the Holy Grail and so restore his blighted life. Although Parry understands and can explain the Grail’s rejuvenating power, only Jack, by overcoming his innate egotism and belief that ‘there is no magic’, can perform the brave and selfless act that will gain the Grail and so repair Parry. Parry’s life among the homeless, the mad and the outcast seems to Jack insane and horrific, but in his oddly magical basement hideout Parry introduces the notion of the redemptive Holy Grail to Jack, as well as his sense that he is a ‘knight on a special quest’ to find it, and his realisation that he needs Jack’s help. Jack strongly rejects his entreaties, and finding out later about his own part in Sagan’s mental breakdown only deepens Jack’s self-absorption. Sitting half-naked and symbolically exposed amidst his radio memorabilia, he laments to Anne that he feels ‘really cursed’, and wishes there was ‘some way I could pay the fine and go

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pasts, presents and futures in america  137 home’. Mistaking a moral problem for an economic one, he attempts to assuage his guilt by offering Parry money, but Parry’s disregard for material comfort only draws Jack further into his fantasy world, especially his love for the plain, put-upon Lydia, and his fear of the Red Knight, a malevolent figure (invisible to Jack) who terrorises him. Later still, as they lie at night in Central Park, Parry tells Jack the myth of the Fisher King, a tale that not only explains the cause of Jack’s psychological despair, but also points a way of rescuing and rejuvenating them both. This pivotal scene, played out in what is represented as the natural world of Central Park after dark, fuses the narratives and the destinies of Jack and Parry. Responding to the tale’s subtext of aid and renewal, Jack arranges a dinner for himself, Anne, Parry and Lydia, the success of which invigorates them all. Had the film finished at this point it might have satisfied the generic codes of the standard romantic comedy, having successfully brought together two quirky but essentially lovable couples, with the Fisher King myth a diverting transformative force. But LaGravenese’s characters are not emblematic cut-outs from a medieval tale. Parry, having successfully wooed Lydia, immediately experiences his most damaging psychotic attack from the Red Knight. Running madly through the streets, he returns to Brooklyn Bridge, where he is beaten into a coma by the same thugs who attacked Jack. Jack, unaware of this, and sure that he has paid the moral fine for Parry’s injuries, prepares to return to his radio show, glibly telling his manager that he had had ‘personal problems to work out and I have’, and that now ‘I know more’. His recovery, though, entails cruelly discarding Anne in an exchange that exposes his ignorance and egotism. Only then does he find out about Parry’s injuries, but his selfishness prevails and he returns to his old job. At a meeting to discuss a possible role in a television sitcom, he is appalled to find it will be about ‘three wacky homeless characters’ who love the freedom and adventure homelessness supposedly brings. Storming out of the meeting, he visits the mute and immobile Parry, now bedridden in an asylum. Forced to voice his own thoughts and feelings, and maddened by Parry’s inability to provide comfort, he gives an extended soliloquy. This moves from hollow bragging (‘Everything’s going great.’) through denial (‘I’m not responsible. I don’t feel guilty.’) then refusal (‘I’m not going to risk my life to get some fucking cup for some fucking vegetable.’) to selflessness (‘If I do this it’s because I want to do this for you. That’s all. For you.’) Jack will retrieve the modern equivalent of the Grail from a Manhattan mansion, restoring Parry and himself to mental and personal health, and repairing the damaged relationships with Lydia and Anne. Rather than superficial and narcissistic pop psychology about personal issues,

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138  terry gilliam the film employs medieval myth to propose a deeper personal regeneration through the performing of unselfish acts for others. The strong themes and plotline of the script were carried, as Gilliam acknowledged, by great characters. Perhaps because his previous films had begun as images and abstract ideas, or had used fantasy genres, or because of his self-admitted shortcomings with dialogue, the figures in Gilliam’s previous films had tended to be two-dimensional. But LaGravenese had created four plausible and very different characters, each heavily laden with emotional baggage. The film’s defining sentiment and narrative thrust depended on the developing and troubled interactions between these damaged figures. For a filmmaker not known for his ability to extract realistic performances from actors, this might have posed a challenge. But Gilliam had developed substantially as a director of actors since his previous Grail film with Monty Python. The Fisher King required strong but balanced casting and performances, especially given Robin Williams’s electric genius as an improviser, and the tendency of his personal dynamism to steal scenes, potentially undermining an ensemble piece. Gilliam chose Jeff Bridges for the vital anchoring role of Jack Lucas after seeing him on an inflight screening of The Fabulous Baker Boys, but had to convince Bridges himself that he was right for the part. Mercedes Ruehl’s intelligence and her knowledge of the Fisher King myth (she had taken an MA course on the subject) as well as her suitability for the role of the earthy but thoughtful Anne won her the part. Amanda Plummer’s ability to switch instantly from the beautiful and beatific to the geeky and vulnerable made her perfect for the role of Lydia, who turns from an ugly duckling into, if not a beautiful swan, then at least, a beautiful duck.20 Integrating these very different talents required a change of approach by Gilliam, especially given his desire to shoot LaGravenese’s script faithfully: ‘In the past I’d always worked out everything in advance; this time I wanted the actors to lead, to be pushing the film forward.’21 Granting the actors freedom to construct their own characters and negotiate the interpersonal relationships not only generated a collegial feel for the shoot, but also brought out subtle and compelling performances from all the main actors. As well as a predominantly American cast for the first time in his career, the film’s setting and its studio backing naturally entailed a largely American production and design crew, an obvious and radical change from Baron Munchausen. But there was still a British presence, including cinematographer Roger Pratt, who had shot Brazil, and Lesley Walker, editor of such British classics of the 1980s as Cry Freedom, Letter to Brezhnev and Shirley Valentine, and, in Gilliam’s words, ‘the Thelma Schoonmaker of England’.22 As well as having, for Gilliam, the editing

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pasts, presents and futures in america  139 prowess of Martin Scorsese’s long-time collaborator, Walker was also a female editor, something he particularly looked for because he ‘wanted a more emotional touch to the film’.23 The editing was done in Britain and, as usual, Peerless Camera Company worked on opticals and visual effects. Python’s Prominent Features provided post-production assistance. Despite these British elements, the bulk of the crew was American. Or, rather, the bulk of both crews, because, while much of the film was shot in New York, for financial reasons some interior work was done in Los Angeles with a different crew. Among the New York figures was the legendary production designer Mel Bourne, a fixture in most Woody Allen films, and an authority on the visual depiction of Allen’s home town. Gilliam reveals he did not want design to ‘dominate the film’, another change from films such as Brazil and Munchausen. He suggests the problem was that ‘designers like designing and my job here was to hold back from too much design so that it didn’t overpower the film’.24 Given the problems with the crew on Munchausen in terms of chains of command, Gilliam no doubt keenly observed the production dynamics, especially since he had never directed in the United States. He notes that New York crews ‘are spiky and tough’, but that their respectful attitude did not help him: ‘I only know how to work in a reactive, collaborative way, so it took three weeks before the New York crew was relaxed enough for a dialogue – you get the impression that American directors must all be fascist dictators.’25 He suspects the American crews ‘assumed that here was a real auteur who worked out every detail in advance’, clearly at odds with his interactive and improvisational method of operating. ‘English crews’, he adds, ‘are much bolshier.’26 The contemporary New York setting marked Gilliam’s first feature film depiction of America, and his most sustained treatment of the modern world.27 At the same time, however, the screenplay integrates a very different sensibility into the nation’s most iconic city. Gilliam presents New York as a compilation of architectural styles, and private and social spaces, and the film moves from the enclosed and highly mediated world of Jack’s radio booth or his stretch limo through to the natural and surprisingly inviting expanses of Central Park. Gilliam takes many of the great set pieces of New York’s landscape (Brooklyn Bridge, Fifth Avenue, Grand Central Station, and Central Park) and visually reinvents them, so that the majestic bridge with its connotations of connection and achievement becomes the site for a drunk’s botched suicide and subsequent rescue, or a mansion on the great capitalist avenue doubles as the repository of medieval magic. But the film begins not with these relatively expansive areas, but in the dark interior of Jack’s radio booth. Gilliam had used cage imagery in Time Bandits, Brazil and Baron Munchausen

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140  terry gilliam as signs of innocence, beauty or powerlessness trapped, but here, as the camera cranes up above Jack’s blackened booth, the cube functions as both a fortress from which he launches his attacks upon hapless callers, and a prison he unknowingly inhabits. Jack is never fully visible in this opening scene, being represented by a set of static or moving shadows shot from various angles, often with the camera circling, swooping or drawing back. At other moments extreme close-ups of his lips render him both sensual and monstrous, a figure verbally dominant but visually indistinct. This first representation establishes Jack as a fractured or incomplete character, intellectually sharp (he completes the sentences of his callers, taunts them, employs their inadequacies for entertainment) but malicious, superior and emotionally vacuous – ‘a pig’, as the most forceful interlocutor comments before hanging up. His supposed empathy for mass American society is a sham, for he exploits and mocks rather than supports the populace. And the arrogant assurance in this opening hides the underlying irony that Jack Lucas is not a creative force in media but a media creation. As he soon finds out, those the media gods create they can also destroy. Jack’s clothes, a combination of black shades, full-length coat, dark shirt and pants and black cowboy boots, make up a costume, that of a cool media figure, a powerful but constructed image that shields him from those around him and promotes a false, comforting identity. This image fits the plush hollowness of the limo in which he and manager Lou Rosen (David Hyde Pierce, pre-Frasier, but Niles Crane-like) travel to the audition for On The Radio, a sitcom about a radio personality that he hopes will transform him from mere radio celebrity to a television star. For the egotistical Jack, this move involves an upgrading of his personality; as he brags to his trophy girlfriend in his apartment, he is thinking of changing the title of his projected autobiography to ‘Jack Lucas: The Face Behind The Voice’, or ‘simply, “Jack”’. The apartment itself, razor sharp and ultra hip, with panoramic views of similarly sterile buildings, functions as another expensive but soulless cage. And later, we see him alone in it, naked in the bath, normally an opportunity to view the reality concealed by the mask. But this will not occur until the end of the film. In this early scene, we hear Jack speaking before we see him, and when we do see him we recognise that his words come from the script of On the Radio. His face is adorned by a garish blue mud facepack, another mask. His repeated practising of the show’s catchphrase, ‘Well, forgive me!’ carries a powerful proleptic charge, for true forgiveness will be something Jack later comes to crave. In the bath, though, his slight changes of emphasis operate within the boundary of sarcastic inflections. The phrases’s eventual adoption by the general public once

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pasts, presents and futures in america  141 the show becomes a hit discloses the degree to which Jack is a reflection of the zeitgeist, not its manipulator. On mastering the phrase, his belief that ‘I have this, I really have this’ registers his certainty that what he has is worth the having. Edwin’s murderous actions in the bar destroy those superficial hopes and the manufactured identity they hide. The very medium he expected to conquer annihilates his superficial dreams. The next showing of On the Radio the audience sees three years later prompts Jack to his suicidal trek to Brooklyn Bridge, and his meeting with Parry. Our first view of Parry is also visually occluded. As thugs begin to beat Jack, Parry appears magically in silhouette, speaking the words of the knight he believes himself to be: ‘Hold varlet, or feel the sting of my shaft!’ He emerges in the garb of a shabbily eccentric bum. In the Fisher King legend, Parsifal’s innocence is coupled with humble origins, the outward sign of which is the homespun garment he wears. Naturally, in the chivalric world of knights this sets him apart, and only the completion of worthy tasks rids him of those clothes. Parry naturally wears simple and tattered clothes fashioned from society’s cast-offs. His homespun garment is an old blanket, and he wears a hunter’s cap with earflaps. Later the inside of those flaps are shown coloured an emblematic red, signifying suffering and passion. In this initial encounter Jack’s own torn coat and general dishevelment create a sartorial link, simultaneously emphasising Jack’s fall from the hip fashions he had enjoyed as a media celebrity. But Parry’s underground shelter (symbolic of his spiritual death), while as shabby as his clothes, also functions as a shrine to his wife and speaks of a pre-modern mindset in which beauty and purity are venerated and valued. Against the literal and figurative darkness of New York, the dozens of candles illuminating this otherwise grim space represent a flickering possibility of the spiritual or the metaphysical. Jack’s equivalent connection to another realm, though he does not know it, is Pinocchio, one of Gilliam’s contributions to the script. In a film laden with religious and medieval iconography, Pinocchio seems bizarrely out of place. But the story of the transformation of a wooden toy into a real boy parallels Jack’s initial emotional paralysis as well as his ability to deceive himself (Parry pulls out his nose, Pinocchio-like, at one point, when Jack lies about Anne). Later, with Parry hospitalised, Pinocchio signifies how Parry’s suspended animation can only be ended by Jack’s retrieval of the Grail, a transformative act that will (and does) invigorate the comatose figure. Jack must learn how to love someone other than himself to become fully human; while Parry must transcend his tragic past if he too is to become ‘a real live boy’, or his adult manifestation, Henry Sagan. Jack first receives the toy from a rich

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142  terry gilliam but innocent young boy as he stumbles drunkenly down the street after walking out on Anne. The boy calls him ‘Mr Bum’, a title that strips away his status and identity and presages a later connection to Parry. And it is with Pinocchio that Jack has his first serious, if self-pitying, conversation, examining his life in terms of Nietzsche’s distinction between the great men and the mass of humanity, the ‘bungled and the botched’. This rare coupling of the German philosopher and the Italian puppet prompts Jack to place himself among the botched, where previously he had seen himself among the potentially great. In deference to Pinocchio, Jack’s ramblings also elevate Walt Disney to the realm of the great men, setting him provocatively against Adolf Hitler. The Nietzschean perspective provides a counterweight to Parry’s medievalism. In a telling passage from The Antichrist, Nietzsche proffers two rhetorical questions: What is good? Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.   What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases – that resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency … The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it. [original emphasis]28

For Nietzsche, such people are disposable. Before the catastrophe of Edwin, Jack revels in the sense of increasing power, even if this only means moving from radio to television. His girlfriend understands the paltry reality, sarcastically stating, ‘Jack, it’s a sitcom. You’re not defining pi’, but Jack initially pulses with deluded self-belief. The film repudiates this pseudo-Nietzschean approach, so that the power Jack taps into as a media celebrity proves wholly inadequate for the personal tasks that confront him. These will include the need to deny power, and to offer true charity to the botched, rather than contemplate their annihilation. The power Jack thinks he possesses as a celebrity actually separates him from reality, and is symbolised by the forceful rap tune, ‘The Power’, that plays in his moments of greatest self-confidence. Its insistent refrain, ‘I’ve got the power’, with its driving beat and electronic edge, advertises Jack’s success, energy and command in Nietzschean terms, as well as providing a more general musical signature for the potent narcissism of the period. Only by rejecting the false power generated by individualism and materialism can he save himself, through the brave and selfless act of bringing back the very anti-Nietzschean Grail. Talking at Pinocchio gives Jack a chance to begin his self-assessment. In his egotistical state this amounts only to a change of autobiography title, from the self-congratulatory Jack to

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pasts, presents and futures in america  143 the self-pitying Jack Lucas: It’s No Fucking Picnic. The nascent partnership with Pinocchio then takes a macabre turn when Jack straps the puppet to his concrete boots as he attempts suicide, but once Parry has saved them both, Pinocchio becomes a talisman for the two damaged men, being carried along and passed between them as they come to empathise with each other. When Jack first leaves Parry he also leaves Pinocchio, but Parry returns the favour later. Once Parry is hospitalised, Jack brings Pinocchio along in the hope that it will provide a lifeline back to reality. But in this instance even the puppet fails to provide Parry with easy comfort or the hoped-for jolt out of his stasis. Indeed, Pinocchio’s inanimate state at this point cruelly parallels that of Parry. Nevertheless, he makes a triumphant return at the finale, being placed strategically between the two men as they lie on the grass in Central Park, his painted clothes offsetting their liberated nakedness, his woodenness now a happy contrast to their own reanimation. Given the Fisher King myth that links the land’s infertility to the king’s illness, Central Park clearly has certain symbolic functions, although on a day-to-day level it operates as the lair of muggers. For Parry, the Park hides the menace of the Red Knight, whom he sees soon after visiting the Fifth Avenue mansion of billionaire Langdon Carmichael, where the Holy Grail is kept. The incredulous Jack cannot see the Knight, but chases Parry as he recklessly pursues his nemesis through the wooded regions of the park. For the audience, the combination of slow-motion images of the Knight, flaming and plunging through the trees, alongside Parry’s manic pursuit, his motley clothing and staccato running commentary create the sense of an anachronistic and enchanted forest far removed from contemporary New York. Jack’s desperate efforts to keep up physically and metaphysically play comically against this magical environment, juxtaposing Parry’s sense of the truth of his experience and Jack’s equal certainty that they remain embedded in a modern American reality that cannot encompass Holy Grails and Red Knights. In this case, Jack’s reading wins out: the Red Knight disappears. But in transforming Central Park from a muggers’ hideout to a medieval forest, Gilliam alerts viewers to a potentially miraculous realm in the midst of the everyday world. One important consequence of the failed pursuit of the Red Knight is that Parry and Jack come across a homeless cabaret singer (Michael Jeter) who has been mugged on the bridle path. They find him half-covered in dirt, pleading to be trampled to death by a debutante on horseback. For Parry, this provides an opportunity to fulfil his duties as Parsifal, while Jack, eager to escape any charitable impulse, pretends to believe that the singer might want to stay put. ‘Oh yeah, sure’, replies the quickly reactivated singer, ‘I just

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144  terry gilliam love bleeding in horseshit. How very Gandhi-esque of you.’ Rather than leave him, they take him to hospital, Jack’s first approximation of a selfless act. For him, as for the singer, Central Park suggests the potential for rebirth. By contrast, the reception area of the hospital resembles bedlam, a virtual madhouse or dumping ground for the poor, outcast and ill. Only the bizarre arrival of pizzas leavens the atmosphere. But the situation of the hospital extends the sickness of society well beyond individuals such as Parry and Jack, while Jack’s dealings with the singer reveal him as more humane than at any previous moment. The subsequent sequence in Grand Central Station is one of the most memorable in the film. Like Central Park, Grand Central Station can be an unhappy and chaotic intersection of jaded and alienated individuals, the epitome of dehumanised society. Parry comes daily to track the commuting Lydia, and in his enchanted vision the station is turned briefly into a ballroom. Commuters dance with each other for a few magical minutes. The script had called for something starker, the moving crowd suddenly stopping to listen to a homeless woman singing, a scene that connects more obviously to the previous one in the hospital. As LaGravenese recalls, Jack sees the swathe of disparate people ‘and for a moment he feels part of a community. Then I realised that having Jack feel a part of community at that point was too early for the character, so focussing on Parry and allowing the audience to get inside his world was absolutely the right idea, and it elevated it without dialogue and with this wonderful imagery.’29 These components inevitably uncover Gilliam’s hand in the filmed scene, an idea that came to him spontaneously while scouting locations. But his desire to stay true to the script meant that it took a month for him to be convinced to do it his way.30 The actual filming of the scene was a fraught logistical exercise because the crew was only given one night for shooting. Gilliam found that most of the actors hired to dance could not waltz, and that the acoustics in the station were so bad that nobody could hear the musical beat. Although the shoot was supposed to finish at 5 a.m., the various hold-ups (including having to teach the cast to waltz) meant that in ‘the last shot of Robin [Williams] – when he’s looking for Lydia – those are real commuters plus the crew, and trains were arriving nonstop’.31 For Gilliam, the panic caused by this pressurised shooting fits into a more general philosophy of filmmaking: ‘Quite often in my films there’s a huge idea that really needs longer to do it properly, but we do it anyway and, even though it isn’t perfect, it ends up having great life and vitality.’32 The willingness to sacrifice perfection for vitality, while courting disaster at the production stage and derision by critics, acts as one of Gilliam’s invigorating trademarks.

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pasts, presents and futures in america  145 Having recognised Parry’s sincere but unrequited love, Jack organises a four-handed date in a Chinese restaurant for Parry, Lydia, Anne and himself, taking the film beyond the damaged male world of the Fisher King myth. The film’s sexual politics partly derive from Johnson’s He, and place the film, on its release, in the context of late 1980s and early 1990s American sexual politics. In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (1991), published the same year The Fisher King was released, Susan Faludi argues that men, set on the back foot by feminism, have tried to stymie the movement by exaggerating the gains made, and by organising an oppositional men’s movement. A key text is Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990), which argued for the retrieval by men of the ‘beast within’. The title of Bly’s book comes from a Grimm tale in which a forest-dwelling hairy man called Iron John gives a young man ‘masculine’ powers and gifts that allow him to reach maturity and marry a princess.33 Bly argues that proximity to feminism’s powerful women had created the phenomenon of the ‘soft male’, a dispirited figure drained of ‘masculine’ energy. Men need hardening up at all-male retreats in the wilderness, where ancient rites are enacted.34 For Faludi, the underlying motivation for these and similar activities was ‘power – how to wrest it from women and how to mobilise it for men’.35 Johnson cites Bly in the ‘Suggested Reading’ for He,36 and some film critics connected Bly and the film. So too did Esquire magazine, which featured an image of Jeff Bridges as Jack Lucas on its October 1991 Special Issue, ‘Wild Men and Wimps’.37 Certainly the first nocturnal scene in Central Park where a naked Parry jumps about yelling ‘free up the little guy, let him dangle in the breeze’ echoes wilderness retreats, and Williams’s natural hairiness might suggest the wild man of the Grimm tale. But this reading argues guilt by association, erasing the older, more sustained Fisher King motif that underpins the film. The Grimm tale ‘Iron John’ bears virtually no resemblance to the more profound and illuminating story of the Fisher King, and plays no part in the film’s narrative. Parry’s leaping and shouting in Central Park provide more a parody of wilderness retreats than their validation, and Jack’s dismissal of him at this point hardly signals male bonding at a primal level. That said, the roles of Anne and Lydia clearly are subsidiary to those of Jack and Parry, and their prime role is to assist the men overcome psychological wounds. Lydia is the more peripheral, but her painful shyness reflects a woman damaged by contemporary life. Her personality is registered sartorially, the straitened frumpiness of her clothes providing a cocoon of muted colours in which she hides. She is, nonetheless, drawn to Anne’s colourful and expressively painted nails when they meet at the video shop, where Lydia has been lured in order to set

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146  terry gilliam up a date with Parry. Her laboured decision to have Anne paint her nails uncovers her desire for transformation, the taking off of her protective beret marking a small metamorphosis in itself. The date at the restaurant slowly and comically releases her from the bondage of her shyness. The subsequent walk back from the restaurant allows her to enjoy the possibility of romance with Parry, but her emotional wound is deep. She explicates this as they near her house, projecting an upcoming sexual encounter and its crushing aftermath: ‘In the morning you’ll awake and you’ll be distant. And then we’ll exchange numbers and then you’ll leave and never call. And I’ll go to work and I’ll feel so good for the first hour and then ever so slowly I’ll turn into a piece of dirt.’ She flees, unwilling to repeat her bitter experience. Were The Fisher King simply about emblematic women assisting emblematic men, Lydia would not have been so subtly complex and substantial. Her suffering, touchingly evoked by Amanda Plummer, results from selfish men and hollow couplings indicative of an individualistic society concerned with personal pleasure over interpersonal relationships. Women have not stifled naturally wilderness-loving men into softness, as the Robert Bly model would insist, but have themselves been brutalised by male selfishness. Pursuing Lydia to her doorstep, Parry professes his love for the flawed and vulnerable person he knows her to be. He is not a ‘soft man’, admitting that he has ‘a hard-on for you the size of Florida’. But, like the mythical Parsifal, he forgoes the opportunity for sex, his chastity signalling his sincerity. Lydia accepts him with a joyous, ‘You’re real, aren’t you’, unwittingly referencing the final transformation of Pinocchio. Immediately after they part, though, he is savagely beaten, causing Anne to lament at the hospital, ‘Poor Lydia. She finally finds a prince and he falls into a coma.’ But Lydia has by now transcended the world of fairy tales, and we next see her in the asylum checking that Parry has received the colourful sheets she has brought to humanise his institutional surroundings. In her final appearance, her flowing dress and purposeful stride proclaim a confident and vigorous woman, another beneficiary of the rejuvenating myth. Anne needs no rejuvenation, and as her name suggests, she functions more as the life-invigorating anima figure proposed by Jung. She is grounded, exotic and active, her bold clothes often playing on associations with gypsies, passion, animals and primeval nature. Sexually active and personally sympathetic, she alternates between Jack’s lover, comforter and analyst. But while she provides a supportive environment as he withdraws from the world in the wake of Edwin’s shooting spree, her perceptive criticism of his self-pity and misanthropy repeatedly forces him to confront himself. Her pained reactions to his cruel

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pasts, presents and futures in america  147 dismissals of her intelligence or generosity reflect far less on her deficiencies than on his own. Robert Johnson notes Jung’s belief ‘that every educated person has one superior function of the four functions of feeling, thinking, sensing and intuiting’.38 Jack is the intellectual manqué, one with ‘too many thoughts’, as Anne recognises. His arrogant dismissal of her, ‘It’s important to think Anne, it’s what separates us from lentils and people who read Love Song’ (the book she is reading at the time), is another shallow put-down, but it also proves her point. And she is no fool, knowing the story of the Holy Grail, something of which Jack was ignorant before meeting Parry. Like Parry, she accepts its power to heal. A resilience born of experience sustains Anne against Jack’s attacks, although there is something slightly masochistic in her determination to protect and animate him. Simultaneously, her vulnerability and decency contrast with Jack’s self-defeating cynicism. In a short but telling scene we see her dressed romantically at the dinner table, vigorously berating Jack for his lack of commitment, particularly towards ‘a woman my age’. Her passionate assertion that she is ‘a person’ and ‘that this is kid’s stuff. You come you go and all I do is cook like a jerk’ is shown as wasted, the camera slowly pulling back to show her alone, talking to the empty place Jack should have been occupying. Her wine glass, raised in a mock toast, casts a large Grail-shaped shadow on the wall, signalling her need for the succour Jack selfishly withholds. She collapses into tears with a desperate ‘You son of a bitch’, reflecting the corrosive effect of this neglect. But her devotion can only sustain him; Jack can truly be saved by the act of selflessly rescuing the Holy Grail for Parry. Jack’s reductive sense of his relationship with Anne means that once he feels that the moral fine to Parry has been paid, she can be brutally discarded. The morning after the restaurant meal, Jack on the phone in the foreground discusses with his old agent his working through of ‘personal issues’. Anne emerges in the background from the bedroom in red lingerie and flowered kimono, wrapping herself seductively around a pole. In an apartment bathed in the warm glow of the sun, garlanded with flowered curtains and flashes of red and blue that reference the passionate colour scheme of the Chinese restaurant, Anne’s seductive powers fail. Jack plans to escape and return to the high-gloss world of media celebrity. Mouthing platitudes about knowing more now and needing space, he refuses her direct request to say that he loves her. Dispensing with the hypocritical manoeuvres of the modern break-up, she responds: ‘If you are going to hurt me, hurt me now. Not some long drawn out bullshit that takes months of my life because you don’t have the balls.’ He throws her loyalty back at her, asking why she had stayed

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148  terry gilliam with him, to which she replies with crushed sincerity, ‘Because I love you.’ And when, after she has collapsed sobbing, he tries to comfort her, she breaks free, denying him an easy end to their relationship: ‘You don’t get to be nice. I’m not going to play some stupid game with you where we act like we’re friends so that you can walk out and feel good about yourself. I’m not a modern woman. If this is over, let’s just call it over.’ His failure to reply denounces him. Only the phone call telling him that Parry has been hospitalised breaks the silence. Jack’s hollow boast later to Parry in the asylum that, having returned to his previous life, he now has a ‘cable talkshow. With incredible equity, I might add. Gorgeous girlfriend’ crudely links the commercial and the emotional. Anne has been forgotten, a further sign that within the terms of the Fisher King motif, Jack is still ill. Only after saving the Grail and Parry does he return to her, flowers in hand like a supplicant, telling her meekly that he loves her. She tosses aside the flowers he has used as a form of iconic protection, and when he openly admits to loving her, she slaps him hard, calls him a ‘son of a bitch’, and pulls him into a passionate kiss among falling porn videos. Each of her acts provides an antidote to sentimentality, and the fact that she controls the sequence of events indicates her as a determining agent. While the film focuses on the relationship between Jack and Parry, the damaged or threatened ones between Lydia and Parry and Anne and Jack must also be healed to underscore the theme of rejuvenation through selflessness. When Jack first visits Parry in the asylum, the austere uniformity of white dominates the clothing of both patients and staff. The walls too are an institutional white, although some drapes and bed clothing are coloured a more humane pink. Parry, in brilliant contrast to those around him, wears pyjamas patterned with watermelons and bright shapes, and sleeps on vivid sheets, courtesy of Lydia. But the vivacious colours and patterns mock his physical and emotional paralysis. Jack recognises reluctantly that only rescuing the Grail can expunge his culpability. To do so he adopts a slightly more fashion-conscious version of Parry’s motley costume, drawn from Parry’s own wardrobe, to perform the task Parry cannot complete. Clothes maketh the myth. Jack’s rescue of the Grail from billionaire Langdon Carmichael’s mansion extends the Fisher King motif, for the Grail-like cup the boy Carmichael had received for his work at the Christmas pageant during the Depression in 1932 registers his moment of charity. Now immensely rich, but old and alone, his attempted drug-induced suicide emphasises the distinction between material wealth and happiness. Carmichael too is an ailing Fisher King, so that when Jack sets off the alarm in his mansion after retrieving the Grail, he rescues the sick billionaire as well as Parry. Once the Grail

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pasts, presents and futures in america  149 has been retrieved and placed in Parry’s hands, raising him from his comatose state, his pyjamas come to symbolise his childlike simplicity, antic spirit, and the ability to activate the magic in others, as he conducts his fellow inmates in a stirring rendition of the song ‘How About You’. First sung when Parry rescues Jack, ‘(I Like New York in June) How About You’, it makes specific reference to the New York and America of another era, of Gershwin tunes, ‘potato chips, moon light and motor trips’39 marking it as a reminder of seemingly simpler, sunnier times. The tune, suitably romanticised with strings and a smooth saxophone lead, becomes a non-diegetic bridge when Jack finally returns to Anne. As the camera tracks to the door, ‘How About You’ sets the background mood for their eventual reconciliation. This ending might have worked successfully in a standard romance. In fact, though, the studio had wanted the film to end at the preceding scene, where Parry and Lydia are united in the asylum and Jack conducts the inmates in ‘How About You’. But Gilliam argued for a rapprochement between Jack and Anne, something he had promised Mercedes Ruehl. Within the logic of the mythical reinvigoration of the land, the film’s thematic scheme also required the uniting of modern equivalents of the Parsifal and Fisher King in something like a natural setting. Given the earlier scene in which Parry had explained the tale to Jack, Central Park fulfilled that function. Both men lie naked at night, reinforcing the notion of rebirth, with Pinocchio offering an effectively simple sign of boys coming to life and growing up. Gilliam shot the naked men ending without necessarily expecting to use it, but declares that when he saw ‘the first assembly, I was completely won over … Just for fun, we added a fourth ending, with fireworks and a big Hollywood finale. There were those who criticize us for this, these multiple endings, but I know they work for me. End of conversation.’40 That final finale, in which New York’s skyline is lit building by colourful building, topped by a fireworks display that then traces out THE END in the sky, harks back to the fantasy endings of Jabberwocky and Baron Munchausen, signalling that, for all its tough take on the reality of contemporary New York, a space remains for the miraculous. The various endings extended the film to 138 minutes, well beyond the 120 minutes the studio thought desirable. Given the disputes length had caused with both Brazil and Baron Munchausen, this might have created substantial problems. Preview screenings, though, returned good audience response numbers, numbers that were not improved when Gilliam cut out four minutes or so. Ultimately, the film in its entirety was a critical and commercial success, topping the American box office for three weeks and earning a swathe of award nominations and wins. Mercedes

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150  terry gilliam Ruehl won the Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role as well as a Golden Globe, and Los Angeles Film Critics and the Boston Society of Film Critics awards. Robin Williams also won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar, as were Richard LaGravenese for Original Screenplay, Mel Bourne and Cindy Carr for Art Direction, and George Fenton for Music. Amanda Plummer was nominated for a BAFTA with LaGravenese, who was also nominated for a Writers Guild of America prize for the screenplay. Gilliam too garnered prizes and nominations, being beaten for Best Director by James Cameron and Terminator 2: Judgement Day at the relatively obscure Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Film, USA awards, and being nominated for a more prestigious Golden Globe. But he did win the Silver Lion at the more prestigious Venice Film Festival. Gilliam joked that The Fisher King was his ‘selling out’ film. If so, it also showed that he could make a studio-based commercial hit on budget and schedule, one that retained enough individuality to set it apart from the mainstream. The film had another distinction: few filmmakers are involved in hits based on the legend of the Holy Grail; The Fisher King made Gilliam perhaps the only individual to have performed the feat twice. Those whom the cinematic gods wish to destroy they first allow to triumph at the box office. The Fisher King could have marked the turning point in Gilliam’s career, the redemptive moment in which (to change the metaphor) the prodigal son returns home to the loving embrace of his family. But Gilliam had broken many of his own rules in making that film (filming someone else’s script, working in the American studio system, relinquishing final cut control) and logically would have to keep doing so in order to continue on this path. This inevitably meant remaining a director for hire, the person who realised the visions of others, rather than an originator of visions. The fact that Gilliam’s next film after The Fisher King in 1991 was not released until Christmas 1995 might indicate his chaste disdain for the temptations of Hollywood, but, as Bob McCabe records, Gilliam was not as chivalric as Parry: [Gilliam] bought into all that Hollywood had to offer. He could make the films he always wanted to make. ‘I was like the kid in the candy store: “I want this one, oh no, shit, I want that one.” Having gone to Hollywood, played the game, won the game, and then said “Now I want to do this”, I thought I understood the rules.’41

McCabe adds laconically that Gilliam’s ‘next projects proved otherwise’. McCabe’s list comprises six projects that collapsed or failed to keep Gilliam’s attention in the candy store between 1991 and 1994. The reasons why none of these was made cover a broad and illuminating range: with A Scanner Darkly (1991) lack of development money for the

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pasts, presents and futures in america  151 script was to blame, while in the case of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1991) Gilliam transferred his interest to another film, A Tale of Two Cities (1993). That project fell through when its major star, Mel Gibson, withdrew to direct Braveheart, and the replacement, Liam Neeson, proved insufficiently radiant to attract the necessary finance. Looney Tunes (1994), in which a man turns into a cartoon, was abandoned, and Quasimodo (1994) was made redundant by Disney’s animated The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Gilliam’s hopes of making a film about the brilliant physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla dissolved for the lack of a suitable script.42 In a move that foreshadowed later events, he also worked on a script for Don Quixote, using the illustrations by Gustave Doré, the artist who had sparked his interest in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.43 While working on these projects Gilliam was also collaborating with Fisher King scriptwriter Richard LaGravenese on a more personal venture, The Defective Detective, one that would occupy some of his time and energy through much of the decade. The storyline involves a burntout cop who has a nervous breakdown and escapes to a child’s fantasy world that he protects with his life, and the film returns to many ideas Gilliam had attempted to use in earlier films. But the process of scriptwriting begun in 1991 continued for months that ultimately turned into years. Paramount chairman Brandon Tartikoff at one point backed the project, but when he left his replacement, Sherry Lansing, wanted the script developed further. By 1993 Gilliam was desperate to receive Paramount funding, but they did not think he could make the film for the $25 million budget. ‘The worst thing about development hell’, he declared, ‘is that nobody says no: you’re living in hope the whole time. You want to do it and they string you along.’44 He set the project aside in 1994 to work on first A Tale of Two Cities, and then Twelve Monkeys. The success of the latter film revived his hopes for The Defective Detective and an early version of the script he looked at over Christmas 1996 proved ‘fantastic. We were only a few steps away from a really good script, but we’d spent months in the wrong place; and it was disturbing to discover how influenced I’d been when I thought I wasn’t influenceable.’45 At one stage Nick Nolte was interested in the lead role, as (later) was Nicholas Cage, but by 1997 Gilliam had to set the project aside to direct Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Bruce Willis’s interest in the fate of The Defective Detective in 1999 proved no less effective in resuscitating the project, but Gilliam came to think that it might be one of his ‘films that are never meant to be made’.46 The film he did make, like The Fisher King, was not Gilliam’s original idea. The script of Twelve Monkeys was the product of respected screen-

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152  terry gilliam writers David Peoples (co-writer of the acclaimed Blade Runner and sole writer of Unforgiven) and his wife and occasional collaborator, Janet Peoples.47 As with The Fisher King, Gilliam was impressed with the quality of the writing, and the way the dense, highly intelligent and constantly shifting story did not fit any particular genre or mould, blending science fiction, thriller, mystery and romance together into a provocative whole. Perhaps as a result of this ambiguity, Universal’s budget of $29 million provided less money than Gilliam needed, reflecting the studio’s uncertainty as to what kind of film it was financing. This was ironic given that the film’s producer Charles Roven argues that Gilliam’s ambitious vision can only be financed by the studio system.48 Universal and Sid Sheinberg (who was still running the studio) had been the adversaries in the ‘Battle of Brazil’, so their backing indicated something of a rapprochement. The financial shortfall, requiring the film’s stars to work for less than their usual fees, as well as cost-cutting on sets and designs, coupled with the combination of complex script and a short shooting schedule, would lead Gilliam to describe Twelve Monkeys as ‘the most unenjoyable filmmaking experience I’ve ever had’.49 And this from the bloodied survivor of Baron Munchausen. But the resulting film would not only become a box-office hit and garner a number of awards and nominations, but would also allow Gilliam to claim plausibly that he had beaten the odds and made a European art house film in the heart of the American studio system. The screenwriters based Twelve Monkeys on ideas and motifs in La Jetée (1962), a haunting meditation on time, memory and desire by French filmmaker Chris Marker. Marker, one of cinema’s most uncompromising and idiosyncratic talents, envisages a future devastated by a Third World War where the survivors live underground. Space travel is ruled out, so the leaders decide the only chance of survival lies in sending emissaries into the future for help. Recognising the disorienting con­sequences of time travel, after some horrendous failed attempts they try to condition a man whose vivid memories of the past suggest his ability to live in another time. La Jetée opens with the man’s boyhood memory of a mesmeric woman at Orly airport on the observation deck or jetty that gives the film its title. He also recalls a man being killed. As the experiments continue, the man perhaps returns to this earlier time and the woman, although this time as an adult. An eerie relationship blossoms, one underscored by the uncertainty over whether their interaction is reality or a dream. With the experiment deemed a success, the man is then sent to the future, where he is given a small power plant that allows production back in his own time to be restarted. Despite his efforts in saving his civilisation, he realises that he has been used

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pasts, presents and futures in america  153 merely as a tool by his leaders, and waits to be killed. Instead, people from the future return and offer him the chance to live with them. But his desire for the remembered woman proves stronger and he asks to be transported back to the Orly jetty. As he runs towards her there, though, he notices that a man from his own future has tracked him back through time, a man sent to kill him. In a revelation he comes to understand that the man he had seen killed there as a child was himself, that the moment he had been granted to see back then was his own death. The philosophical subtleties and complexities make the narrative a beguiling construction, but what immediately strikes the viewer, and what makes the film such an arresting and original piece of cinema, is the manner of its telling. In a film lasting only 29 minutes Marker employs a sequence of still, austere and beautiful black and white images of people and places to relate the events of the plot, overlaying these static images with sound effects, music, song and a narrator who recounts the narrative. The film labels itself ‘un photo-roman’ (literally a photo-novel) and La Jetée very powerfully challenges the definition of what makes a film, and the way parts relate to each other to form a totality. As if to emphasise this playful intermingling of media, a textual version, labelled a ‘ciné-roman’, was later produced.50 Both repeatedly use ambiguity, heightened or perplexing imagery, narrative gaps and conundrums, and the play between the implied photo-realism of black and white stills and the bizarre but compelling storyline, to unsettle expectations, and to provoke reflection on the nature of film and text. The script for Twelve Monkeys had less revolutionary aspirations. ­Utilising many of the narrative elements of the film, as well as some of its philosophical, emotional and cinematic underpinnings, David and Janet Peoples did not insistently call into question the limitations, ­expectations and rules of the filmic game as had Marker. Rather, they skilfully rework elements from La Jetée into a complicated and ­intellectually alert piece of mass entertainment. Twelve Monkeys locates itself invitingly on the mysterious distant shore of mainstream cinema. The completed film carries the tag, ‘Inspired by Chris Marker’s La Jetée’, thus paying due respect to the initiating genius of Marker. In fact, the words ‘inspired by’ at first were vetoed by the Writers Guild, which favoured the more conventional forms such as ‘based on’.51 But the phrase indicates that Twelve Monkeys is more than just a straight adaptation of the original. And La Jetée itself has an inter­textual link, for in his travels to the past the unnamed protagonist and his female companion come across the trunk of an ancient tree, sliced and displayed to ­indicate its great age. The woman mentions an English name the man doesn’t understand, but the cinema audience might make the ­connective leap to Alfred Hitchcock

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154  terry gilliam and one of the famous scenes in Vertigo where the woman pretending to be Carlotta Valdes traces on a sequoia trunk her life and death. In the textual version of La Jetée, Hitchcock’s name is asterisked at this point, suggesting that the connection is not entirely obvious, but Twelve Monkeys takes this reference and expands it significantly. Its main character, James Cole (Bruce Willis), dies wearing make-up and clothes put on while watching Vertigo, his lover Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) having transformed herself, like Vertigo’s Judy Barton, into the object of his obsessive dream. The question of adaptation is only complicated by the fact that, while La Jetée influenced the screenwriters, and while some post-Twelve Monkeys editions of Marker’s film label it ‘the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s futuristic adventure Twelve Monkeys’, Gilliam chose not to see the film. A similar distance separated Gilliam from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the case of Brazil, but there Gilliam had been part of the scriptwriting team and felt as though he knew the book without reading it. Twelve Monkeys bears considerably more resemblance to La Jetée than does Brazil to Nineteen Eighty-Four, but its script makes significant developments and changes to the original film. Recognising these differences in no way detracts from the amazing and lasting power of Marker’s work, but does signal the intertextual complexities Gilliam’s film utilises and explores. Twelve Monkeys begins enigmatically with a boy at an airport witnessing the shooting of a man (whose identity remains hidden) and the man’s death in the arms of a woman. The scene then shifts abruptly to the film’s present, where James Cole is a prisoner in the dystopian world of 2035. He has perhaps just dreamt the opening vignette. Humans live underground as the result of a virus that swept the planet in 1997, killing five billion people. Forced to ‘volunteer’ for a dangerous mission to the surface of the planet, Cole makes observations, takes samples, and sees a poster for the group the Twelve Monkeys, bearing the triumphant slogan ‘We Did It’. This suggests that the group released the virus in an act of environmental terrorism. Cole is sent back to 1996 by time machine in order to locate a sample of the pure virus so that a scientist from 2035 can be sent back to study it. That scientist will then return to 2035 and help produce an antidote that will allow humans to return to the earth’s surface. An error sends Cole back to Baltimore in 1990, where he is arrested, his protestations that he has come back from the future suggesting to police that he is mentally unhinged. Psychiatrist Kathryn Railly sympathetically attends to him, but his insistence on a mission that is incomprehensible to his assessors, along with his mistaken belief that he is in 1996, leads to him being placed in a mental institution. He meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), an occasionally inspired

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pasts, presents and futures in america  155 but ­seriously unstable patient. Goines helps Cole briefly escape, but once Cole is recaptured, scientists from his own time transport him back to 2035. His mission seems largely unsuccessful, but his meeting with Goines establishes a link to the Twelve Monkeys group in 1996, which by then Goines will have formed and will lead. Piecing together this information with what is already known further implicates the Twelve Monkeys group as the source of the released virus. The scientists who control the time machine and the project to produce an antidote decide to send Cole back once again to find this group and the virus. Again, he gets sent back to the wrong time, finding himself in the French trenches in the First World War, where he briefly meets José, a fellow inmate from 2035, who has also been sent back in time. José has been gassed and Cole himself gets shot in the leg before being transported to Baltimore in 1996. There, Kathryn Railly gives a lecture titled ‘Madness and Apocalyptic Visions’, dismissing figures through history who have claimed to have a vision of an apocalyptic future as suffering from psychologically understandable delusions. One of the instances she cites is that of a 1917 soldier, who had prophesied a major epidemic in 1996, something the lecture audience laughs off as ludicrous. The photograph of the soldier on a stretcher in the trenches she uses as a slide is that of José. While signing books after the lecture, an oddly insistent figure suggests that the excesses of the human race are destroying the planet, but his message is overwhelmed in the hubbub. The stillwounded Cole abducts Railly and forces her to drive to Philadelphia, home of the Twelve Monkeys group. On their travels he recounts his dream of the man and woman at the airport to her, and names her as the woman, something she writes off as displacement. He also notes in passing that a boy supposedly trapped down a well, a story filling the media, will be found hiding in a barn. Discovering evidence of the Twelve Monkeys in Philadelphia, Cole tries to locate their headquarters, but a wrong turn leads to him and Railly being set upon by thugs. Cole kills one or both of them, making him a murderer as well as a kidnapper. When he does find idealistic youths connected to Jeffrey Goines, they tell him that Goines, dismissing them as ‘ineffectual liberal jerkoffs’, first established the Twelve Monkeys as an environmental guerrilla group, but now sides with his father, the Nobel Prize-winning virologist and animal experimenter Dr Goines (Christopher Plummer). For Railly, this information undercuts Cole’s belief in the apocalyptic near future and his own role: ‘You’re not going to save the world. You’re delusional. You’ve made all this up out of bits and pieces in your head.’ But emerging feelings for him undermine her scepticism, and as she takes the bullet from his leg, an incipient romance flickers into life.

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156  terry gilliam Cole goes to the Goines mansion in search of Jeffrey, still hoping to locate the pure virus. But their meeting is wildly unsuccessful, partly because of Jeffrey’s psychosis, partly because they are talking at crosspurposes. Jeffrey seems not to know about the virus, but Cole, certain that he is bluffing, also comes to believe that he (Cole) might have given Jeffrey the idea of releasing the virus while in the mental institution back in 1990. Traumatised by this possibility, Cole questions his own sanity, fusing this with his growing love for the time to which he has returned: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if I was crazy. Then the world would be okay. I wouldn’t have to work underground. I could live here.’ On the verge of being captured, and with Railly urging him to give himself up, he again disappears through time. Now free, she explains to a sceptical police detective who has been chasing Cole for murder and kidnapping that Cole is ‘sick. He needs help.’ But her certainty is rocked when she finds out that the boy has been found alive in the barn, as Cole had predicted. He, meanwhile, is overawed by an idyllic landscape into which the group of scientists from 2035 abruptly emerge singing ‘Blueberry Hill’. He comes to understand that he is strapped to a hospital trolley beneath a huge painting, and that the scientists are not only praising his work, but offering him a pardon. Unclear what is real or fantasy, he retorts: ‘You’re in my mind. I’m insane.’ Railly is experiencing a similar uncertainty about Cole and the validity of his claims. When her boss Dr Fletcher (Frank Gorshin) reminds her that she is ‘a rational person’, a trained psychiatrist who knows ‘the difference between what’s real and what’s not’, she counters that psychiatry is ‘the latest religion. We decide who is crazy or not. I’m in trouble here. I’m losing my faith.’ Amidst this radical uncertainty Cole comes to realise that he wants to return to the past permanently, ‘to see the sky. And the ocean. Breathe the air. To be with her.’ He volunteers to go back to 1996 to locate the virus. Railly, on her part, has discovered that the bullet she has taken from Cole’s leg comes from the First World War. Remembering the image of José she had used in her lecture she returns to it to find that it also includes Cole, evidence proving his time-travel claims and therefore the truth of his apocalyptic prediction. She questions Dr Goines about security for his virology work. He dismissively rejects her queries, but, worried by his son’s mental state, he tells his assistant Dr Peters (David Morse) to ‘beef up’ security. The audience recognises Dr Peters as the insistent man at Railly’s lecture, and comes to understand that he will release the virus to punish humanity for its environmental excesses. Railly, now certain that Cole has been telling the truth, tracks the Twelve Monkeys group which, under Jeffrey Goines’s manic guidance, is planning a secret operation. Cole returns from the future, but

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pasts, presents and futures in america  157 rather than help Railly, insists that he is ‘mentally divergent’ and wants to turn himself in. In a dramatic reversal, she tries to convince him in a seedy hotel that he is sane, using the existence of the bullet taken from his leg as proof. Mentally and emotionally exhausted, he pleads: ‘I want the future to be unknown. I want this to be the present. I want to stay here in this time with you.’ To prove that he does not want to return to 2035 he knocks out his own teeth, believing that they contain tracking devices which allow those in the future to keep him under surveillance. The two comprehend that since Cole’s predictions will take place and that the events of 1996 cannot be changed, they are doomed, so they decide to escape for a fleeting taste of love in Florida. Hiding from the police, still pursuing Cole for murder, kidnap and assault, they take refuge in a cinema showing a 24-hour Alfred ­Hitchcock marathon. Railly disguises them with clothes and fake hair. While watching the films Cole starts to make connections between their situation and ­Vertigo’s depiction of obsession, delusion and people who seem to inhabit two time zones. When Railly changes the colour of her hair to blonde, as Judy Barton does in Vertigo, he recognises her as the blonde woman from his initial dream of the shooting, declaring ‘It was always you.’ While Cole and Railly plan their escape, the Twelve Monkeys group captures Dr Goines and, seemingly with sinister motives, takes him to the Philadelphia Zoo. But as the two lovers head towards the airport they find that Goines simply has been placed in a cage as part of a publicity stunt that also includes setting the zoo animals free. Cole’s predictions pointed to the Twelve Monkeys as the source of the virus, but the revelation that they are anarchic pranksters rather than biological terrorists causes Railly hopefully to ‘think it’s going to be all right’. Once they reach the airport, though, Cole’s foreboding returns when he recognises the place: ‘This is my dream. I was here as a kid. I think you were here, too.’ The audience sees Cole as a boy entering the airport. Dr Peters is also there, checking in for the trip on which he will release the deadly virus around the world. Cole contacts the scientists of 2035 telling them to forget about the Twelve Monkeys as the source of the virus, that ‘someone else did it’. He also tells them that he has completed his mission and is not coming back to 2035. He gets told that he is not permitted to stay, and that various figures from the future have been sent either to bring him back or to kill him. One of these is José, who gives Cole a gun so that he can kill the carrier of the virus. Railly has recognised Peters from her lecture and from a newspaper photograph of him and Dr Goines, and realises that he is the virus-carrier. But when she and Cole pursue him as he flees through check-in, police who have

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158  terry gilliam been searching for Cole gun him down. Railly rushes to his aid as the boy Cole looks on, as in the opening dream. She then turns to the boy and recognises him affectionately as the young Cole. Dr Peters, having escaped Cole, takes his seat on the plane, confident that he will now be able to wipe out humanity. But the passenger beside him who suggests that humans ‘are the next endangered species’ is one of the scientists sent back from the future. She introduces herself wryly: ‘Jones is my name. I’m in insurance.’ The implications of this line of work are lost on Peters, but the audience understands that Cole’s mission has succeeded, allowing those in 2035 to locate the virus in its pure form and find an antidote. But the film finishes not on this relatively upbeat note but with the boy Cole and his parents in the airport car park as he looks up at the plane flying overhead with Jones, Peters and the virus on board. No matter what the scientist and her colleagues do in 2035, five billion people will still be killed in 1997, Kathryn Railly among them. The boy Cole will suffer that trauma and the horrific descent into a dystopian world he is destined to experience, along with the haunting image of a woman he was briefly able to love. The adult Cole’s present is that dystopian world of material deprivation and totalitarian control. We first see him there, caged, a powerless and exploitable figure. He is a criminal under the dominant political system, and the cold brutality of that regime calls into question his status as a deviant. Indeed his criminal history of violence, anti-social sex, insolence, ­defiance and disregard of authority hardly mark him out as a reprobate beyond rehabilitation. In a broader sense, though, the whole of society lies caged beneath the planet, for if the subterranean habitat provides protection, it also manifests oppressive inhumanity. As he marches to his first meeting with the scientific elite, a voice over the intercom system alludes to a Permanent Emergency Code that enforces restrictions on behaviour and privacy. He carries a barcode on his neck that records his history of violence, the standard charge sheet of the dystopian rebel. Even in the world of the 1990s he has been under constant surveillance by his controllers, perhaps through tracking devices, certainly by other figures sent back to monitor him. As a prisoner, he is dispensable, and therefore able to be ‘volunteered’ for the perilous initial journey to the earth’s surface, a frozen world dominated by insects and animals. Like the dystopian world of Brazil, that of Twelve Monkeys has inherent and substantial limitations and flaws, not least the crude mistreatment of its discontents and the fact that this realm exists literally beneath that of animals and insects. Just as significantly, the intellectual rulers are revealed several times as bunglers, as largely ignorant figures stumbling haphazardly after information, which they

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pasts, presents and futures in america  159 then misinterpret. And despite the impressive ability to transport people back through time, the process itself regularly misfires, so that Cole initially ends up in 1990 rather than in 1996. As the disembodied voice that repeatedly speaks to Cole tells him, ‘Science ain’t an exact science with these clowns.’ Malfunctioning technology determines Cole’s world as much as it did for Sam and Buttle in Brazil. Only on his return to 2035 does the first time-travel mistake get revealed, at which the ­scientist who made the error castigates him for botching his mission. They then send him back ‘to the third quarter of 1996, right on the money’, but Cole instead finds himself sent back to the French trenches of 1917, where he also finds an equally distraught José. The past, doomed as it is, appears utopian by comparison. Science fiction and utopias often privilege the future as the temporal space in which current concerns and problems are things of the past. For Cole, though, the qualities that mark the world of 1996 as infinitely preferable to his own are predominantly intangible: clean air and a lack of germs, freedom, the possibility of love, and music that he hears over the radio. Fats Domino’s rendition of ‘Blueberry Hill’, with its lament for ‘love’s sweet melody’, and Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’, romantically evoking skies of blue, babies and pretty coloured rainbows, speak of a life of simple pleasures and emotions, something impossible in the world of 2035. And also difficult in 1996 as well, for both songs are nostalgic throwbacks to the 1950s and 1960s, before Cole himself was even born.52 They too are anachronisms, torn from their temporal origins, existing in another time. The key difference is that they follow the forward path of time’s arrow, where he violates that principle. But his misrecognition that ‘Blueberry Hill’ and ‘What a Wonderful World’ are contemporary songs in 1996 reflects how the film offers a complex sense of history, one that requires sophisticated interpretive skills. These skills are challenged by the time-travel element, a staple of science fiction from at least as far back as H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Time travel had been a key aspect in Time Bandits, but in that film it was a relatively straightforward narrative device that allowed for some basic comparisons between different historical periods.53 Twelve Monkeys treats the subject more seriously, depicting and analysing the problems and conundrums it throws up. One of these is that a time traveller cannot change the past, so that the pandemic that struck in 1996 cannot be reversed. A second is that the surface of the earth in 2035 is itself in a time loop, the absence of humans having allowed the animals to rule the planet as they did before humans. Just as importantly for Cole, his claim to know the future, because he comes from it, is treated as a sign of madness. But for all its agonies, time travel has acutely

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160  terry gilliam ­ ositive aspects, allowing him to escape his dystopian present, fall in p love and live in a world he mistakenly believes to be utopian. Interpretation and the possibility of misinterpretation are central concerns in Twelve Monkeys, and paradoxically, one of the keenest interpreters of society, and one who challenges Cole’s utopian reading of the 1990s, is also one of its more insane citizens, Jeffrey Goines. Where Cole’s antagonism to authority is largely visceral, marked by violence and anti-social sex, Goines has a subversive but thoughtful take on social control. As he spells out to Cole when the latter is first institutionalised, ‘You’re here because of the system.’ In fact Cole is the victim of two linked subsystems; the police who arrested him for anti-social behaviour and the psychiatric establishment who take his professed foreknowledge as a sign of madness. But Goines fits this awareness into a broader vision of the connection between political or social forms of power and the economic underpinnings of modern consumer culture. In a high-octane lecture prompted by viewing cartoons and ads on the asylum television, Goines declares: ‘Television. It’s all right there. Look. Listen. Kneel. Pray. The commercials. We’re not productive anymore. No one needs to make things anymore. It’s all automated. What are we for?’ The implications for identity and purpose raised by the question might be traced back through earlier Gilliam films: the narcissism, materialism and wounding viciousness of Jack in The Fisher King, the endless upgrading of ducts, faces and bodies in Brazil, the gadget fetishism of Kevin’s parents in Time Bandits, the conflict between Dennis’s grimly unimaginative economic rationalism and his father’s craft-based ethic in Jabberwocky. What is the purpose of humans if they are simply abstract figures in an economic equation? Jeffrey Goines provides the orthodox answer: ‘Buy a lot of stuff, you’re a good citizen. But if you don’t buy a lot of stuff, if you don’t, what are you then, I ask you? You’re mentally ill, Jim.’ Cole at this point simply wants to establish his temporal and ontological co-ordinates so that he can escape incarceration and continue his mission. Having not experienced the consumer world since his almost forgotten time as a child, he largely ignores Goines’s manic but perceptive analysis. Indeed, Cole later falls under the spell of commercials, thinking on the drive from Baltimore to Philadelphia that one in which an announcer sends ‘a special message for you’ about the joys of Florida Keys literally is a personalised address. Railly laughingly mocks his naivety, but once she recognises the imminence of the deadly virus, she too succumbs to the escapist fantasy over the apocalyptic reality. Cartoons, television advertisements and programmes offer truths for those like Jeffrey who can decode them, rather than simply

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pasts, presents and futures in america  161 passively receive them. Seeing a shot of laboratory animals undergoing experiments on television, he makes the telling connection, ‘we’re all monkeys’, a reading that also holds true for Cole in his present, and, as we later see, the monkeys experimented on by Goines’s virologist father. The later screening of the Marx Brothers film Monkey Business provides a slogan, ‘no more monkey business’, against credit cards and consumerism, as well as offering a diverting form of chaos that Goines fuels in order to free Cole. Whatever his undoubted psychological problems, Jeffrey is sane enough to contemplate escape for himself and others, most obviously in his most successful and uplifting act, the freeing of animals from the Philadelphia Zoo. The fact that he places his own father in a cage as part of the publicity stunt attending the liberation embodies a simple but pointed reversal of status and power. The obvious delight Cole and Railly take from the release of the animals into the skies and along the freeways of Philadelphia reinforces the positive nature of Jeffrey’s achievement. Ironically they are trapped in traffic while flamingos, elephants and tigers roam free. But in thinking that the release of the animals indicates that the viral catastrophe will not occur, the pair misread the signs. The obvious complexities of Twelve Monkeys’ concepts and narrative, along with the paradoxes, misunderstandings and deceptions that occur, place the viewer under as much interpretive pressure as the characters. Perhaps more so, because the audience must also take into account, decipher and assess the very different ways the characters read their circumstances, and the motivations, and even the sanity, of others. Twelve Monkeys is a complex intertextual work, its title drawn from Frank Baum’s The Magic of Oz, its many literary references collected from such texts and writers as Omar Khayyám and The Rubáiyat, the Book of Revelations, Virgil’s Aeneid, Hesiod, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The source texts mostly remain undisclosed, part of the question the film as a whole raises about the act of recognising, decoding and interpreting puzzles, signs and information. Films such as Monkey Business, Vertigo and La Jetée can be added to the mix, along with popular songs, historical periods, academic lectures, psychiatric assessments and dreams that might be real. Gilliam states that for him ‘the film is very much about the twentieth century’s inundation of information and about deciphering what among all the noise and imagery is useful and important in our life’.54 Characters such as Cole, Railly and the scientists from 2035 realise that they are putting pieces of a puzzle together, and many of their conflicts or suspicions result from different interpretations of the same material. The opposition of different readings moves the film away from the individual deciphering of puzzles to a position

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where the readings of others change the way that Cole and Railly interpret events. Ultimately, they come to recognise that they too have at times misread and misinterpreted textual and visual signs. The magnetic pull of this problem-solving process begins before the action, or even the title, starts. The blank, silent screen of the cinema readily fills with information typed sequentially in glowing green capitals, as though on a computer screen: ‘… 5 BILLION PEOPLE WILL DIE FROM A DEADLY VIRUS IN 1997 … … THE SURVIVORS WILL ABANDON THE SURFACE OF THE PLANET … … ONCE AGAIN THE ANIMALS WILL RULE THE WORLD … ’

The form this information takes and the manner of its presentation seem to indicate raw data, although of course the initial audiences for the film would have treated the year 1997 as a near future event, a projection. But the inverted commas bookending this ‘information’ signal it as quotation rather than as fact, and the immediate sourcing of these words undermines their truth-value: Excerpts from interview with clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic April 12, 1990 – Baltimore County Hospital.

Again, manner and form are important clues to help the viewer interpret these lines: they are presented in white typeface appropriate for a hospital report, projecting a sober certainty. The clarifying note that the opening information was taken from a clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic largely undermines the information contained in the glowing green capitals. Had the green letters appeared on their own, they would have been accepted readily enough as the basis for a futuristic adventure. But the juxtaposition of the second, authoritative text seriously calls into question their validity, especially since that second text comes from the historical reality the audience has experienced. The hospital report, then, acts to interpret the information about viruses and in a way that largely dismisses the first message and its messenger. Indeed, the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia rests in part on these words. Within the film, though, the ‘predictions’ all come true, because they are part of already-lived history. Even before we see any characters or action, then, the captions set up an interactive but tense relationship between fact and interpretation, enacted here through the process of reading. Cinema, of course, is considerably more visual than textual, but the model of textual interpretation (with the inherent possibility of other interpretations and arguments over interpretation) provides a useful way of considering the complexity, ambiguity and deceit built into the visual aspects of

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pasts, presents and futures in america  163 the film. These uncertainties are immediately initiated by the credits, which begin with a procession of black monkey silhouettes against a red background, spiralling ever smaller towards a central black hole. The circular pattern and absent centre suggest an eyeball, but one confused by the feverish red of the moving monkeys. Credits in luminous pink trail westwards across the screen, coming briefly into focus, while the repetitious theme tune, dominated by a jauntily sinister piano accordion, along with vague indications of a human voice heard over an intercom, works to compound the optical illusion. These circular and lateral movements are then abandoned as the film’s title and the logo of what we will come to recognise as the logo of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys increase in size and troubled human voices grow in volume. As we pass through the ‘O’ of the word ‘Monkey’, something reminiscent of the title sequence in Brazil, we see in extreme close-up the eyes of a boy. Simultaneously, the muffled sound of a gunshot is heard. As the boy’s widened eyes dart back and forth in an effort to take in the events before him (events we do not see at this point) the extended ‘No!!!’ of a howling woman registers some form of tragedy. Only then do we see, from behind, a man with a gun falling to the floor and a woman racing towards him. He tumbles to the floor, and we see the boy looking in a medium shot, a protective hand on his shoulder. The woman, having caught up with the fallen man, kneels above him and he lifts a bloodied hand to her head, caressing her blonde hair. The camera moves in to the boy’s saddened face, focusing increasingly on his eyes. An abrupt cut reveals another set of eyes, that of a man asleep. As with the preceding pieces of text, the manner of depiction is as important as the visual information seemingly being transmitted. The close-up of young eyes implicitly suggests innocence, one violated by the sounds of gunshot and scream. But the noises of gunshot and scream are muffled and distorted, and, when the camera depicts the action the boy is watching, the image is over-lit and presented in slow motion. The voice of the intercom indicates the location as an airport, but it is presented at normal speed, glaringly at odds with the sloweddown rush of the woman along the corridor. The man’s inelegant fall is shot from behind in such a way as to conceal his face, because the boy’s view is blocked. Mournful violins emphasise the melancholy mood. The medium shot of the boy viewing these events now also is over-lit, compounding the eerie quality. Where the shot of the man falling and the woman running was presumably taken from the position of the boy, the close-up of the man’s bloody hand reaching up to the woman’s hair cannot be an objective record of what the boy sees. The close-ups, extreme lighting and slow-motion action might then be understood as

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164  terry gilliam the boy’s subjective registering of events under extreme circumstances. But the shots of the boy himself are from an objective position. And while his face conveys sadness it does not indicate comprehension; the boy may well have seen the events depicted, but he has not necessarily understood their true meaning. The visual and aural distortions further challenge the immediate reality of what has been shown, and the switch from the boy’s eyes to those of the sleeping man’s strongly hint that these opening images are either a dream or a memory, the mapping of one set of eyes on to another implying that the boy and man are one. The yoking of identity across time-frames gets reinforced aurally, airport information about a flight boarding rendered in the same voice that proclaims the prison number of the sleeping man in shot: ‘Flight now ready for boarding at Inmate Number 87645: Cole, James’. The man’s face, seen in shadowy but realistic light, has a crystalline hardness of the present against the over-lit image of the past. The act of seeing, like the act of reading, is introduced here as complex, ambiguous and potentially confusing, both for the characters and for the audience. As ever, Gilliam regularly uses wide-angle lenses to pack as much information in the frame as possible, requiring active engagement in order to assess the validity and relative value of the often confusing or consciously ambiguous things that appear. This unrelenting uncertainty provokes a productive bewilderment that prompts regular reassessments by the audience of the complicated narrative structure, of how complex characters understand and misunderstand circumstances, and of the film’s genre, given that it incorporates dystopia, science fiction, mystery, romance and action films. Viewing, then, does not necessarily entail knowing, for the interpretation of actions, signs, causes, motivations and mental states remains in different ways, and to different degrees, partial. Partial in the sense of being incomplete, based on available knowledge that itself may be false or inadequate, and partial in the sense of being biased, so that interpretations function primarily to fit into a preordained narrative or set of expectations that the film goes on to upend or complicate. This holds true for the audience and many of the characters, most especially for James Cole, who not only engages most of our visual and interpretive attention, but whose mission entails collecting information so that others can make sense of it. Caught in a hermeneutic circle, Cole must interpret information in light of what he knows, or thinks he knows, in order to understand the truth or value of new data. His dilemma is similar, but not identical, to that of the audience. In the opening scenes in the airport, for example, the audience uses certain cinematic codes (film speed, point of view, montage, lighting,

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pasts, presents and futures in america  165 use of sound effects and music) to construct plausible interpretations of a confusing body of information; these are unlikely to be identical across the audience. Most will translate the codes into an understanding that the images are a dream or a flashback. Given their expectations of cinematic narrative, they are likely to assume that the meaning of the original images will become clearer as the narrative develops, and so will look for clues that help solve the puzzle. Cole’s dream appears to have those same cinematic qualities, and in the course of carrying out his mission he increasingly comes to interpret those haunting images. The same raw information, replayed and processed in the light of greater knowledge, generates fuller understanding for Cole. But viewers will likely take a different interpretive route. We see Kathryn Railly before he does, for instance, attending a lecture in 1990, then hearing of his arrest, and, as an authoritative psychiatrist, visiting him in jail. While his first sense of her is warped by sedatives and despair, we may make the connection between her and the woman in the dream, even if we do not recognise Cole (who we only see as shaven-headed) as the man with the flowing locks gunned down at the airport. Later, when Cole tries to convince the panel of Baltimore psychiatrists in 1990 that he is not crazy, their reactions (which we see, but he does not) cast serious doubt on his sanity, even if Railly’s less dismissive expression suggests sympathy for him, though not belief in his claims. The audience knows from a caption what Cole only hears from Railly: that the year is 1990, not 1996, as he had been told to expect. He struggles to integrate this time travel error into his understanding of the situation, but his insistence first that it is 1996, and then that both 1990 and 1996 are the past, mark him as delusional for the psychiatrists, Railly included. His is a world of mysterious signs in which he as interpreter oscillates between madness and sanity, order and chaos. But her more humane take on his apparent ravings puts her at odds with the blunt certainty of her colleagues, whose professional expertise traps them in limited and false preconceptions. She, at least, has the capacity to adjust her thinking, and though Cole at this point cannot distinguish her from the other figures in white coats, the audience does, and so integrates her sceptical intelligence into their own efforts to make sense of events. Cole’s painful struggle to put together pieces of a great puzzle into some coherent image is different from that of Railly, who uses her logical training to make sense of the pieces. Initially, she falls back on the tenets of psychology, tenets that offer a plausible reading of the inner workings of the intriguing but disturbing puzzle Cole presents. She comes to understand the shortcomings of her position, but only because she has the flexibility of mind to question her suppositions, and to let go of the

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power and authority deriving from her professional status. Over time, she comes to think more creatively, embodying the recurring struggle in Gilliam’s films between the rational and the imaginative. We first see her not giving a lecture but listening to one, by a poet who quotes from The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám: Yesterday This Day’s Madness did prepare; Tomorrow’s Silence, Triumph, or Despair: Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why: Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

Railly has no way of knowing the pertinence of this quatrain to the events about to unfold, and in fact she misses these spoken lines, being distracted by the call on her mobile that brings news of Cole’s initial arrest. Potentially receptive to Khayyám’s poetic wisdom, she fails in this instance to integrate it into her thinking. Cole’s story, by contrast, seems so outlandish and confused that she can classify it easily within her professional frame of reference as the delusions of a mad man. Art offers an answer, but at this point science prevails. The uncovering of evidence that begins to support Cole’s reading of events (the existence of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, the discovery of the boy in the barn) causes her to question her faith in the ‘new religion’ of psychology, placing that branch of knowledge closer to belief than to reason. The later ballistics report that reveals the bullet she extracted from Cole’s leg was fired prior to 1920 paradoxically provides scientific confirmation of Cole’s bizarre tales of time travel. Railly makes the imaginative connection from that bullet to the photograph of José in 1917, one that includes a figure she had missed earlier: Cole. She does not abandon reason as a result of this revelation, for reason and evidence have allowed her to understand what at first seemed irrational. Ironically, when she next meets Cole he believes (or wants to believe) himself mad, so that she has to convince him of his sanity. But once she accepts the horrendous implications of what must occur, she performs her most creative act, abandoning her professional persona, and reinventing herself as a new figure who will ‘smell the roses’ with Cole. The transformation by way of wigs, make-up and clothing seems to reprise James Stewart’s make-over of Kim Novak in Vertigo, placing Railly in the subordinate position of manipulated object. In this instance, though, Railly is not conforming to the model of a dead woman, with all the attendant psychological baggage. She is the imaginative agent here, transforming Cole as well as herself into the Florida Keys holidaymakers they desperately want to be, however briefly. Unlike Vertigo, Cole’s dream is not the determining and obsessional cause of her make-over, but simply the record of her actions. She rejects the

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pasts, presents and futures in america  167 strictures of her professional identity and future as a rational scientist. Instead, in line with the poetic advice of Khayyám for those who know not why they go, nor where, she drinks. Or attempts to drink: much of the airport scene’s emotional resonance comes from the realisation that her hopes, like Cole’s, will inevitably, and infinitely, be denied. Railly apart, Twelve Monkeys generally questions the certainties and motivations of science and scientists. The work of virologists provides the means to wipe out the human population of the planet, but scientists from the future potentially can create a cure. Yet this beneficial role requires (or perhaps enables) those in 2035 to play a central role in the oppression of those such as Cole, whom they basically use as experimental animals. A sign of this is the hamster in the wheel glimpsed when Cole takes a blood sample from his arm. This authoritarian role creates a definite link to their scientific brethren of the 1990s, the psychiatrists whose assessment of an individual’s sanity gives them enormous control over the lives of benign people. As Jeffrey Goines realises, the patients are no better than the experimental monkeys they see on television, and he means his phrase ‘we’re all monkeys’ to apply outside the confines of the institution. Scientists in both eras, then, are part of the regimes of power and punishment. In terms of pure research, Dr Goines’s work foregrounds another danger from science, an egotism that seemingly denies ethical and safety concerns. He touches on this at the banquet in his honour, his self-congratulatory speech making references to the revolutionary if fictional figures of Prometheus and Victor Frankenstein, both of whom in some way steal fire from the gods, and are punished for their transgression.55 Goines’s casual dismissal of the dangers associated with scientific advance projects the hubris that traditionally leads to tragedy. In fact, his apparent role as mad scientist is another of the plot’s deceptions. The true mad scientist emerges as Dr Peters, whose reasonable concern for the horrendous environmental damage done by humans prompts him metaphorically to incinerate the earth’s human population with the Promethean fire created by Goines. Twelve Monkeys depicts the precursor and the aftermath to that horrendous event. Where the first of his American-based films used New York as the setting for the confrontation between the medieval and the modern, Philadelphia and Baltimore became the sites for the near-destruction and potential resurrection of the human race. These once great and historically important cities now carry in their architecture a sense of energy gone elsewhere, and so hint at a world either on the brink of collapse or as a post-apocalyptic place. Especially with the first snow-covered view of Philadelphia in 2035, ruled over by bears and lions, Gilliam presents a view of the city as fresh as that of New

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168  terry gilliam York in The Fisher King. He comments that ‘I think I started doing what Antonioni did when he came to England when he made Blow Up. Suddenly I’m a foreigner looking at America again. But I’m a weird foreigner.’56 As frustrating as the budget restrictions might have been, they did prompt the productive improvisation that plays a leading role in the design and look of Gilliam’s films. Rather than building a complete set for the future underground world, Gilliam and his designers were forced to scout for locations mostly in and around Baltimore and Philadelphia, finding some derelict power stations that would serve as the underground space of 2035. These huge industrial locations are the site of a subterranean world roughly assembled from available materials, the remnants of a society once grand, but now scavenging for survival. Unlike the technologically advanced underground world rendered in Alexander Korda’s Things To Come (1936), in Twelve Monkeys the subterranean connotes the subhuman. The general idea of salvage fed into the design of the film, Set Decorator Crispian Sallis incorporating found objects into the spaces and costumes in a version of Gilliam’s ‘tripping over things’ philosophy from The Fisher King.57 As Gilliam explains, sets designed and built from the ground up would have lost the sense of a real past that has been lost, with all the rough edges and compromises that history imprints almost invisibly upon its objects.58 He had used an existing cooling tower from a power station to memorable effect in Brazil, and in Twelve Monkeys the underground surroundings reiterate the overwhelming mood of a society held together tenuously, employing force heavily to impose order on potential chaos. In the world of 2035 a small intellectual elite oversees an authoritarian police force that administers rough justice to large numbers of caged individuals. The dominant metallic, industrial environment, which buttresses the sense of inhumane treatment and toughly enforced hierarchies, maps on to the world of prisons and mental institutions in the 1990s. An early penitentiary served as the site for the mental hospital where Cole meets Jeffrey Goines, its circular form marking architecturally the notion of being under constant surveillance. Gilliam felt that the three corridors in the main room symbolically reproduce Cole’s split consciousness. The sense that 2035 is a world of retrieved parts fed into other elements of design, most notably the time machine that transports Cole only occasionally to the correct time. These errors underline the technological deficiencies of the future world, and the intellectual shortcomings of the scientists operating the contraption. The look and action of the machine proved the benefit of imaginative improvisation, for the script created no great sense of what such an apparatus would look like. Gilliam utilised a circular opening in one

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pasts, presents and futures in america  169 of the power station’s machines as a time portal, and surrounded Cole in a large clear-plastic cocoon which points to the precariousness of the ­technology that so regularly misfires. Another ‘invention’ was the spherical video eyeball that malevolently scrutinises Cole in 2035, an improvised piece that registers the surveillance-determined world of the future. With its many screens, recording and transmitting a bewildering variety of images, it also suggests the array of perspectives and interpretations that the film depicts and assesses. In addition to the complexities of the plot and the need to construct a plausible dystopia, Gilliam had to deal with the fact that the main character was played by a bona fide film star, Bruce Willis. Gilliam considered Jeff Bridges or Nick Nolte for the role of Cole, but, on a relatively risky film by their standards, Universal wanted the more bankable Bruce Willis. Gilliam had met Willis during the shooting of The Fisher King and Gilliam understood that the actor wanted to break out of the action hero mould in which he had profitably cast himself. Gilliam persuaded him to forgo some of the trappings of superstardom, part of a process of stripping away the action hero persona. He drew up a list of trademark tics Willis had to abandon so that James Cole and not John McClane from Die Hard appeared on screen, a process Willis mostly honoured.59 The role of Cole offered Willis the chance to combine intelligence, romance and tenacity in a plausibly complex character, who, without fundamentally undermining his macho credentials, still generates a sense of vulnerability. For once, audiences get a chance to pity a character played by Willis. The other major male role, that of Jeffrey Goines, was taken by the rapidly rising star Brad Pitt. A confusion of mannerisms, his eyes permanently at odds with each other, Pitt exudes an immensely disturbing energy, swinging wildly between the comic and the certifiable. Both actors were playing against type, Willis by portraying a defenceless, often confused and despairing character, Pitt by not relying on his looks to sustain audience interest. But Madeleine Stowe’s Kathryn Railly, the rational ballast to these crazed male extremes, anchors the film. Gilliam had tested Stowe for a potential role in A Tale of Two Cities, and recognised that her intelligence and ingeniously understated acting skills made her perfect for the intellectual, resourceful and compassionate psychiatrist. In La Jetée, the equivalent female character is the largely passive object of the protagonist’s obsession. Railly, by significant contrast, is physically active, mentally sceptical, passionate and humane, an independent and highly capable figure able to lecture on ancient myth, work in the prison system, convince Cole of his sanity when he desperately wants to be mad, knock him to the ground with a well-placed boot, and work

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170  terry gilliam through the temporal paradoxes that conceal the mystery of the virus and its dispersal. Gilliam adopted a co-operative, interactive approach to Willis and Pitt especially, one that involved letting the actors dictate much of the characterisation. ‘It’s not about directing them and guiding them and giving them all the ideas’, he notes. ‘What you do is that you try to make it a comfortable experience so that they feel self-confident in taking chances and supplying new thoughts.’60 He used a similar tactic in The Fisher King, the absence of extensive storyboarding in both films opening up dramatic spaces in which actors are free to explore. This attitude also registers Gilliam’s growing confidence in his own capacity to instigate and respond to ideas on the level of performance, to gauge what is and is not working dramatically, rather than simply translate detailed visual images on to film. Pitt acknowledges the liberty that the approach provided for him, declaring Gilliam a director ‘without ego’,61 a statement others, including Gilliam, would contest.62 The film’s complexity created certain post-production difficulties. These are recorded in The Hamster Factor (1997), a film documentary about the making of Twelve Monkeys that Gilliam commissioned, selecting Philadelphia film school graduates Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton to capture the filmmaking process.63 The film’s title refers to a thematically important hamster on a wheel, barely glimpsed in the film, that in the larger sense signifies Gilliam’s attempts to realise his quirky but exacting vision. The plot complications, multiplied because of the time travel element, required British editor Mick Audsley to balance the need for clarity with the need for a certain concealing of information, and his diary of the editing process recorded his anxiety that ‘it is in the nature of this movie that the set-up of information is complex and rather slow, in order for the conflict and resolution, i.e. the second half, to work and pay off. Will the movie engage the audience quickly enough?’64 At the first preview screening Audsley notes that ‘Terry and I feel that it has played well, with the audience attentive and positive: perhaps we are in good shape. The focus group soon reveals we are not. I am shocked and somewhat confused. It did play well, I felt it.’65 Audience surveys suggested they felt that the romantic subplot between Cole and Railly was unconvincing, and this too required readjusting. But as The Hamster Factor shows, Gilliam’s inveterate disdain for such studio manipulation (justified by the fact that Time Bandits, for instance, got poor previews) is vindicated by the eventual and substantial success of the film. Twelve Monkeys topped the box office in the United States and other countries, making nearly $170 million worldwide, remarkable for a challenging film with European art house inflections. Among a swag of nominations and awards, Brad Pitt would win a Golden Globe and

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be nominated for an Oscar for his performance, and Gilliam would be nominated for a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. He would win the award for Best Director at the 1997 Empire Awards, organised by the British film magazine, but in a sign of how his ‘American’ films had altered perceptions of him in Britain, the Best British Director award went to Danny Boyle for Trainspotting.

Notes 1 Watchmen was later issued in graphic novel format (New York, D.C. Comics, 1987). 2 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 190. 3 Hamm had written the screenplay for Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). 4 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 192. 5 Gilliam, in ibid. 6 Gilliam, in ibid. 7 LaGravenese is only credited with the screenplay of Rude Awakening (1989) before The Fisher King. 8 Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (New York, Doubleday Anchor, 1957), pp.  113–36. 9 Robert A. Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology (New York, Harper and Row, 1989), p. ix. 10 Ibid., p. 13. 11 Ibid., p. 24. 12 Ibid., p. 50. 13 Weston, From Ritual to Romance, p. 117. 14 Tom Shippey, Times Literary Supplement, 22 November 1991. 15 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 193. 16 McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 148. 17 Robin Williams, in ibid., p. 149. 18 Lynda Obst, in ibid. 19 Terry Gilliam, ‘Gilliam, Gotham, God’, interview with David Morgan, 1991, in Sterritt and Rhodes (eds), Terry Gilliam, pp. 52–64, p. 63. 20 See McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, pp. 149–51, and Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, pp. 196–202. 21 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 203. 22 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 212. 23 Gilliam, in ibid. 24 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 209. 25 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 204. 26 Gilliam, in ibid. 27 Time Bandits begins and ends in the present, but spends most of its time in an array of elsewheres. 28 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and the anti-Christ (Baltimore, Penguin, 1968), p. 163. 29 Richard LaGravenese, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 152. 30 Gilliam, in ibid., pp. 152–3. 31 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 206. 32 Gilliam, in ibid.

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172  terry gilliam 33 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, ‘Iron John’, Selected Tales (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 253–60. 34 Robert Bly, Iron John (Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1990). 35 Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women (London, Chatto and Windus, 1992), p. 345. 36 Johnson, He, p. 89. 37 See for example, Pat Dowell’s review of The Fisher King in Cineaste, 1991, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 46–7, and Angela Stukator, ‘“Soft Males”, “Flying Boys”, and “White Knights”: New Masculinity in The Fisher King’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 1997, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 214–21. Stukator notes the Esquire issue. 38 Johnson, He, p. 14. 39 Written by Ralph Freed and Burton Lane, it was originally performed in the Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland film Babes on Broadway (1941). 40 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 213. 41 McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 158. 42 McCabe’s Dark Knights and Holy Fools records these projects in greater detail, pp.  158–9. See also Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, pp. 216–21. 43 Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 219. 44 Gilliam, in ibid. 45 Gilliam, in ibid. 46 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 187. 47 The Peoples had collaborated with Jon Else on The Day After Trinity (1981), a documentary about the nuclear physicist and father of the atom bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. On the banner advertising Kathryn Railly’s lecture on ‘Madness and Apocalyptic Visions’, Jon Else’s name appears as one of the previous speakers. 48 Charles Roven, in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (directors), The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys (Atlas Entertainment, Low Key Productions, MCA Home Video, Poo Poo Pictures, 1997). 49 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 165. 50 Chris Marker, La Jetée (London, Zone Books, 1992). 51 In the DVD commentary on Twelve Monkeys, Gilliam and Charles Roven tell how David and Janet Peoples had to lobby the Writers Guild to let this form of words appear on the credits. 52 Fats Domino recorded ‘Blueberry Hill’ in 1956, but it had in fact been a hit for Glenn Miller in 1940. Armstrong recorded ‘What a Wonderful World’ in 1968. 53 Phil Hardy (ed.), Science Fiction: The Aurum Film Encyclopedia (London, Aurum Press, 1995), pp. 371–2. 54 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 228. 55 Hesiod tells us that the Titan Prometheus stole a spark of fire from the God, Zeus. The full title of Mary Shelley’s classic is Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. 56 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 166. 57 Crispian Sallis, The Hamster Factor. 58 Gilliam, DVD commentary to Twelve Monkeys. 59 Gilliam notes in the DVD commentary that at one point when Willis was preparing to shoot scenes from Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995) he lapsed back into the style of John McClane. These scenes were later reshot. 60 Gilliam, DVD commentary. 61 Brad Pitt, in the television documentary, The Directors: The Films of Terry Gilliam (Anchor Bay Entertainment 2004). 62 Describing his efforts with The Defective Detective in the wake of The Fisher King, Gilliam admits that his ‘ego, an ugly little thing, has to show it’s got a few ideas that are totally its own, and they’ve got to be shown to be good and earth-shattering and world-changing’. Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 217.

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63 See n. 48. 64 Mick Audsley, in Duncan Petrie (ed.), Inside Stories: Diaries of British Film-makers at Work (London, BFI, 1996), pp. 139–66, p. 140. Lesley Walker, the editor of The Fisher King and a friend of Audsley, recommended him to Gilliam when she was unavailable. 65 Ibid., p. 142 (original emphasis).

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Transatlantic Gonzo

7

Twelve Monkeys marks the commercial high point of Gilliam’s association with American studios; not, of course, that he could have known that in the aftermath of the film’s critical and box-office triumph. In fact, his next film, also made in America and based on American content, was offered to him, seemingly a sign that his career in the United States was flourishing. Gilliam had been working on the long-term project Theseus and the Minotaur with a new collaborator, the English screenwriter Tony Grisoni, when in a holiday break he got the chance to direct a film already well advanced in planning, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Based on Hunter. S. Thompson’s classic of Gonzo Journalism,1 which was first published in two articles for Rolling Stone magazine by ‘Raoul Duke’ (Thompson’s fictional alter ego), Fear and Loathing recounts the manic, drink and drug-enhanced adventures of Duke and his threehundred-pound Samoan attorney, Dr Gonzo, as they lay waste to Las Vegas and themselves.2 Alex Cox, the director of alternative hits Sid and Nancy and Repo Man, had been signed on as director, with Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro playing Duke and Gonzo. But Cox’s creative differences with producer Laila Nabulsi, Depp and Del Toro, as well as with Hunter S. Thompson himself, created unresolvable tensions. Cox, who with Tod Davies adapted Thompson’s book for the screen, attempted to supply his own reading of some key material, including Duke’s eloquent and elegiac ‘wave speech’, in which Duke claims that the high water mark of the 1960s revolution can, metaphorically, be seen. Johnny Depp, who had befriended Thompson, described Cox’s reworking of this crucial passage as ‘off: it was wrong’,3 and Cox’s failure to work collaboratively with the cast and producer led to him leaving the production. Depp picked Gilliam when given the choice by Nabulsi to select a replacement, endorsing Nabulsi’s own decision of ten years earlier, when she had asked Gilliam to direct the film. Then, Gilliam declined,

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transatlantic gonzo  175 but the material itself had long interested him, and the chance to pick up quickly after the completion of Twelve Monkeys broke the pattern of long gaps between his films. Provided he and Grisoni could write the script, he would agree. This made him something more than the director for hire that he had been on The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys. Although he was adapting a literary masterpiece, with the highly protective audience that cult classics generate, he would have greater control over the form and feel of the film than on his previous two films. His acceptance tied up some narrative loose ends: if Laila Nabulsi and Johnny Depp thought he should direct the film, so too did his friend Ralph Steadman, who provided the original illustrations for Thompson’s Rolling Stone articles and the subsequent book. Tony Grisoni’s involvement also carried a subplot, for at one stage he offered to help Alex Cox on his script. These portents augured well for the venture, although the book’s subtitle, A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, hinted that the ride might be troubled. The toughest struggle began after shooting was completed. The fact that the film was up and running alleviated some of the frustrations that had dogged many of his films, but the relatively low budget of $19 million ($10 million less than for Twelve Monkeys) and a shooting schedule of only 48 days (stretched to 55 days in the event) required what Gilliam described as ‘something fast and Gonzo – Gonzo filmmaking is what we wanted to do. That’s why the idea of a low budget and a short schedule was important.’ But he adds that the ‘worst thing was when I started doing it, I realised that I wasn’t as young as I used to be, and I don’t have the energy I used to have when we did the earlier things, but we still got through it.’4 After largely dispensing with storyboards for Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys, Gilliam returned to them on Fear and Loathing, perhaps because, having co-written the script, he felt he had more control over the film, perhaps also because the tight schedule required a rapid production momentum. The small budget meant cost-cutting, so that, for example, a key track in the book, the Rolling Stones’s ‘Sympathy For the Devil’, which plays constantly as Duke and Gonzo first head to Las Vegas, had to be dropped when the cost of securing rights proved too high. Frictions with the small American production company, Rhino Films, added to the pressure, but Gilliam had several regular collaborators on board. Lesley Walker returned as editor, while long-time associate Ray Cooper supervised the music, a central feature in any evocation of the 1960s, and an important component of the book. A new figure joined the film crew, the Italian cinematographer Nicola Pecorini. Pecorini had established himself as one of the world’s foremost steadicam operators, and had worked with

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176  terry gilliam such luminaries as Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul Schrader and the Taviani Brothers, but this was his debut as the principal cinematographer. The guerrilla approach Gilliam chose to adopt and the frenetic style and pace of the film itself would benefit from Pecorini’s active camera, and he would become Gilliam’s regular cinematographer. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas purports to give a first-person account of the journey to Las Vegas by sports reporter Duke, on assignment to cover the Mint 400 motorbike race, along with his companion Dr Gonzo. Barely conscious from the consumption of industrial quantities of drugs and alcohol, Duke lamely attempts to report on the race, before the two try to gatecrash a Debbie Reynolds concert, and visit the Circus-Circus Casino on ether, a drug that ‘makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel’.5 Both subsequently descend into advanced states of drug-induced paranoia, Gonzo attempting to kill himself by having a tape recorder playing Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ (a psychedelic homage to Lewis Carroll’s classic tale) hurled into the bath of water in which he is sitting. Duke, meanwhile, tries to piece together memories of their Saturday excursion from scribbled notes on cocktail napkins that merely reveal his dislocation from reality, and possibly sanity: ‘Get the Ford man, demand a Bronco for race-observation purposes … photos? … Lacerda/call … why not a helicopter? … Get on the phone, lean on the fuckers … heavy yelling [sic]’.6 Gonzo later leaves Duke to his fate, but then returns as they attend the National District Attorney’s Drug Convention. This event necessitates a change of hotel and car (both of which have been trashed), and occupies a sizeable portion of the book’s second half. But the mayhem also includes Gonzo’s dalliance with a young artist who only paints portraits of Barbara Streisand, a manic return to Circus-Circus, the terrorising of a waitress in a café with a knife, and their separate eventual escapes from a city that Duke describes as ‘not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.’7 This précis only hints at the rich complexity of the book’s skewed and skewering depiction of the American Dream, the phantasm that Duke and Gonzo at certain moments claim to be searching for. As much as it records the incredible escapades of two roguish anti-heroes, the book also lays claim to being an incisive critique of contem­porary America, specifically the ‘brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, 1971’.8 Thompson aims to outrage and amuse with vivid images of comic depravity, but also to analyse and violently satirise American culture’s hypocrisies and absurdities. Las Vegas supplies what Duke claims at one point to be the ‘main nerve’ of the American Dream, to which Gonzo replies, ‘I know … That’s what gives me the Fear.’9 Duke compares this brutal ­contemporary

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transatlantic gonzo  177 reality to San Francisco in the mid-1960s, describing those years as ‘a very special time and place to be part of’.10 In an extended evocation of this lost past, the so-called ‘wave speech’, one whose romantic imagery sits rather oddly with the intense and unforgiving tone of so much of the book, Duke recalls his sense that the youth of the 1960s were riding the crest of psychedelia, love and peace. As with Twelve Monkeys, the dystopian present gets compared unfavourably to a recent utopian past, partly explaining the relentless attack upon contemporary America, and the grim and compromised future that the speech suggests awaits the nation’s compliant citizens. Each of Gilliam’s ‘American’ films of the 1990s provides a critique of the homeland he abandoned in the mid1960s, and all to some degree reflect and reinforce the attitudes that propelled his departure. The anarchic verve of Thompson’s attack bears the most obvious affinity with the tone, form and imagery of Gilliam’s major and most personal film of the 1980s, Brazil. That film, remember, supposedly was located not far away from Thompson’s San Francisco, on the metaphorical border between Belfast and Los Angeles. The basic premise of a journey to discover the essential America connects Fear and Loathing to Denis Hopper’s classic counterculture statement Easy Rider (1969) and Jack Kerouac’s equally iconic novel On the Road (1957). Each repudiates the American Dream, as epitomised by the nineteenth-century dime novels of Horatio Alger, which celebrate the triumph over adversity of poor, honest, hard-working boys. Fear and Loathing repeatedly holds up Alger for ridicule and indeed ends with Duke seeing himself as ‘a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger … A Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident’,11 words that are also spoken in the film. On the Road, Easy Rider and Fear and Loathing present caustic accounts of the banality and corruption of this mythic America, as seen from the perspective of men12 who consciously function outside the normal or tolerated codes of middle America. Their individualistic words and deeds threaten the false and stultifying selfimage of mainstream American culture, offering liberating alternatives, or sometimes simply a one-finger salute. Fear and Loathing is the most aggressive of the three in terms of the tone and content of the portrait it paints (literally, given Steadman’s savage illustrations). In part the greater intensity of its critique comes from the fact that, unlike Kerouac and Hopper, whose characters primarily stay on the road, with all the connotations of liberty and possibility, Thompson ventures straight into Las Vegas, the lurid and pulsating symbol of American corruption and excess.13 Fear and Loathing’s power and cult status as literature derive as much from its bravura style and anarchic form as from its extreme content,

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178  terry gilliam though clearly these are related. Thompson later explained that what he labelled Gonzo Journalism ‘is a style of “reporting” based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism – and the best journalists have always known this. Which is not to say that Fiction is necessarily “more true” than Journalism – or vice versa – but that both “fiction” and “journalism” are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only different means to the same end.’14 But if Thompson defers to Faulkner on questions of veracity, his prose style owes less to the baroque cadences of the Nobel Prize winner than to the jazz-inspired rhythms and tones of Jack Kerouac. Thompson’s slightly convoluted explanation of Gonzo Journalism gestures to the more rhetorically inflected arguments of Tom Wolfe, who in the early 1970s claimed that journalism was now ‘literature’s main event’,15 and that journalists might now ‘use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream of consciousness … to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally.’16 Robert Boynton comments that ‘We read Wolfe for the imaginative distortion he brings to reality, not the reality itself’,17 summing up the basic principles of New Journalism by noting that it ‘proceeds scene by scene, much as in a movie; incorporates varying points of view, rather than telling a story solely from the perspective of the narrator; and pays close attention to status details about the appearance and behaviour of its characters’.18 The cinematic quality he attributes to New Journalism is worth noting, but the obvious distinction between Fear and Loathing and these principles is that Thompson’s text filters through the substantially warped consciousness of Duke.19 Thompson in fact criticises Wolfe precisely for being ‘too crusty to participate in his stories’, something Duke does with verve.20 If Duke is not an autobiographical figure, he bears an undeniable family resemblance to Thompson. But how to translate on to the screen a voice that not only records events but provides the very texture of the narrative itself? In Baron Munchausen, Gilliam and Charles McKeown created the framing device of the theatre and its audience, with the older Munchausen supposedly telling tales from his fantastic past. Munchausen’s voice quickly gives way to its visual realisation. But the style and rhythm of Fear and Loathing suggests something happening in the present, or the recently experienced past. Gilliam and Grisoni opt for a high degree of voiceover to maintain the flavour and tone of Duke’s legendary speeches. Mostly these narrations are examples of ironic or satirical comment on events, or explanations of freakishly high or low points in Duke’s emotional or psychological well-being. The exceptions come with more general historical, political or cultural insights, as with the ‘wave

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transatlantic gonzo  179 speech’, or Duke’s critical take on the teachings of Timothy Leary. These suggest a degree of objective analysis of an era rather than purely the thoughts of the moment, and Depp adopts a more measured voice that indicates nostalgia for the past, while holding the shortcomings and naivety of that era up for scrutiny. Amidst the mayhem of the actions and circumstances, these reflections provide moments of personal and social insight, their clarity and perceptive intelligence lifting the book and the film above being merely the verbal or visual records of excess. The voice-over also ties together a narrative that has little in the way of coherence or even rationale. And, especially in commenting on events as they happen, the voice-over maintains the connections and distinctions between what is being told or considered from Duke’s perspective, and what the audience sees. In the film, Duke’s subjective account of what goes on, and why, regularly conflicts with what viewers see or comprehend. As well as this inherent subjectivity, Fear and Loathing as literary text also comes with built-in reflexivity, in part because of Thompson’s ambivalent take on journalism’s claim to report the facts. In the book he uses italics in declaring that the reporter’s primary responsibility is to ‘cover the story’, as if exposing the words as cliché, something hollowed out and valueless. Duke immediately supplies the inevitable challenge to this hypocrisy, questioning his assignment to cover the Mint 400 motorbike race: But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo ­journalism.21

Commenting on the genesis of Fear and Loathing, Thompson gives this account of what Gonzo Journalism should be in its purist form: My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication – without editing. That way, I felt, the eye and mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective and necessarily interpretive – but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the fullframe negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting … no editing. [original emphasis]22

The key elements here are subjectivity, the recording incidents in real time, and the abandoning of revisions or editing. Thompson’s concept is not original, Christopher Isherwood, for example, using a similar approach and metaphor in the opening of his Goodbye to Berlin (1939),

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180  terry gilliam where the daily lives of 1930s Berliners come under his gaze: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’23 But Isherwood later abandons this diary form for a more conventional narrative, still retaining his own name for the text’s first person narrator. Thompson acknowledges that maintaining the ideals of Gonzo Journalism is ‘a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a straight/crazy journalism’.24 He considers the text a ‘failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism, the certain truth of which will never be established. That is definite.’ He also comments that Fear and Loathing ‘will have to be chalked up as a frenzied experiment … a victim of its own conceptual schizophrenia, caught and crippled in that vain, academic limbo between “journalism” and “fiction”’.25 Gilliam’s own cinematic practice regularly involves experimentation, failed, frenzied and successful, but Thompson’s honest assessment of the completed text’s shortcomings hints at the difficulties of recreating his literary experiment on screen. Thompson’s ideal of being a recording camera conspicuously leaves out Raoul Duke, through whom the action is not only reported but also commented upon. Where Christopher Isherwood named his recording and transmitting device Christopher Isherwood, Thompson creates Raoul Duke as a compelling anti-hero and as a decoy, a character the author cannily uses for playful deception and self-mythologising.26 Duke had appeared in Thompson’s earlier Hell’s Angels (1966), and the idea that he existed seemed confirmed by the article titled ‘Police Chief: The Indispensable Magazine of Law Enforcement’ published under Duke’s byline in Scanlan’s Monthly. This followed Thompson’s own ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’, usually recognised as the first piece of Gonzo Journalism.27 Duke’s ‘Memo From the Sports Desk; The So-Called “Jesus Freak” Scare’ for Rolling Stone preceded the first of the two articles that make up ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, which also bore the name ‘Raoul Duke’. The connections and distinctions between Thompson and Duke are consciously muddied, but the voice of Duke is the one the reader hears. Admittedly, Duke, were he real, might openly admit to being the most unreliable of first-person narrators, but such a narrator he most definitely is. How to convey on film that idiosyncratic voice, and the phenomenally subjective story it tells? To add to the complications in adapting the book, Fear and Loathing came with its own visual accompaniment, the grotesque illustrations of Steadman. Steadman’s work evokes the bleakly satirical post-First World War images of Georg Grosz, the nightmarish visions of Diego Velazquez, and Francis Bacon’s sense of the human body as something

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transatlantic gonzo  181 tormented by its own brutishness, a beastly essence that regularly pierces the veneer of appearances. This combination of satire, nightmare and bestiality also owes something to Hieronymous Bosch, but without the religious overtones that resonate in Bosch’s ghastly visions of hell. Steadman’s eye for the torment and absurdity in everyday existence, coupled with his contempt for those who hold political or social power, energises his drawings, giving them an emotive punch that goes with their discomforting rawness. His illustration of the Mint Hotel bar, for example, visually realises Thompson’s description of a perverse place where ‘a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge.’28 Steadman portrays a ghastly line-up of reptilian and avian hybrids, their eyes hollowed out, jagged jaws agape, dressed in suits and cocktail dresses splattered in the ink-black pool of blood that covers the floor. His drawings can be funny as well as gruesome, displaying the caricaturist’s eye for the telling feature, as in the illustration of participants at the National District Attorney’s Drug Convention, all dressed in matching Bermuda shorts, their blockish crew-cut heads, dead eyes and thickset bodies conveying the barely contained menace of their power. Or in the portrait of the young hitch-hiker with his moronically innocent grin and T-shirt on which Mickey Mouse also wears a T-shirt, adorned with a swastika. Nor does Steadman spare Fear and Loathing’s supposed ‘heroes’: he captures Duke in a Munch-like scream, his eyes and mouth black disks, his hands locked tight to the steering wheel. Gonzo’s suicidal episode in the bath generates the macabre image of a many-eyed figure, hair an explosion of lines, monstrous hand holding a knife above the black water. Gonzo’s later torrential vomit into a toilet while naked, which surprises and horrifies the cleaning woman, seems to graft Francis Bacon on to a British seaside postcard. Doré had supplied the delicately quirky illustrations that excited Gilliam about Baron Munchausen; Steadman offers something far less appetising, but no less appealing, in his rich and uncompromising visual evocation of Thompson’s rich and uncompromising prose; Gonzo Journalism spawned Gonzo art. Steadman’s drawings offer a starting point for the visual feel of the film, but Gilliam realised that although ‘they capture the energy and madness of the whole thing, I knew we couldn’t translate them literally and make them three-dimensional. So I tried not to look at them, except for a few specific images, such as the hitchhiker.’29 With Baron Munchausen, Gilliam and McKeown had taken a number of stories, reworked them through the framing device of Henry Salt’s theatrical company, and transformed the original fantastic tales into emblems of creativity and liberty, as well as the repudiation of crass rationalism. Little of this comes from the original text. With Fear and

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182  terry gilliam Loathing in Las Vegas, though, despite the difficulties posed by the fragmented form and the peculiarities of Duke’s supercharged narration, Gilliam wanted to stay truer to the verbal and visual world mesmerically conjured up by Thompson and Steadman. He comments that ‘what they wrote is like music. They wrote the symphony, and I’m the conductor now with a new group and I actually change the arrangement.’30 Grisoni notes that Gilliam’s initial rule was that they should ‘not write anything’, instead adopting a collage approach in which they essentially cut and pasted usable parts of the text into a relatively coherent whole; a Gonzo book required a Gonzo script. This initial work took them just over a week, but their experiment failed. A further few days of intensive work produced something that could serve as a viable script, but this kept changing in the course of shooting. Editing later provided another more definite form of revision, Gilliam recalling that scenes were cut on the basis that ‘the film has its own momentum and you’ve just got to keep going at certain points’.31 Given the sheer mass of material and the often random connections between sections in the book, clearly not all of it could be used. Thompson himself understood that the book had gone crazy half way through, so that in one chapter the editor supposedly steps in because Duke ‘appears to have broken down completely’, and presents a transcription of taped conversations as the record of events in an all-night diner.32 The book’s episodic nature, stemming from its origins as magazine articles, undercuts any sense of narrative or thematic development, instead presenting an increasing catalogue of excess. For readers able to pick up and put down the book at will, this fragmented structure was less problematic than for a film audience. Gilliam and Grisoni fitted the latter half of the text within the totality of the film by creating a narrative rationale for the irrationality. ‘We came up with a structure that built to a nightmarish search to understand what really happened after Raoul Duke takes “a drug too far”. We made the film darker, more disturbing [than the book]. We turned Gonzo into a pagan devil.’33 Thompson approved of these changes. This solution solved a structural problem, but there remained the question of how to transcribe Duke’s words on to the screen. Gilliam admits that he and Grisoni essentially used the book’s dialogue (not surprising given the hilarious brilliance of Thompson’s writing) and also translated many of Duke’s passages of comment and contextualisation into voice-overs that continue throughout the film. The first and last words that Duke speaks in the film in fact are voice-overs. The former (‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold’) comprise the legendary first line of the book, but given that these are spoken over a black screen, we hear

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Duke before we see him. This might suggest the primacy of the text over the screen, or simply the interplay between the verbal and the visual. But the distinction between telling and showing is blurred rather than clear throughout Fear and Loathing, whether as film or text. Only a few pages after the drugs have taken hold, for example, Duke exhibits definite signs of paranoia, wondering if the hitch-hiker he and Gonzo have picked up will try to turn them in. If so, he speculates, well, we’ll just have to cut off his head and bury him somewhere. Because it goes without saying that we can’t turn him loose. He’ll report us at once to some kind of outback nazi law enforcement agency, and they’ll run us down like dogs.   Jesus! Did I say that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious – watching the road, driving our Great Red Shark along at a hundred and ten or so. There was no sound from the back seat.34

This confusion of speech and thought alerts the reader to the distorted state of Duke’s perceptions. The script has something roughly ­equivalent, Duke’s mouth moving ‘intermittently – sometimes in sync with the words, sometimes not’.35 While this directive, realised on screen, also conveys a blurring of reality and perception, the fact that we see Duke’s mouth moving registers that he is an observed character for much of the film, rather than the guiding consciousness he is in the book. On paper, for example, Duke’s belief, in the opening chapter, that ‘suddenly there was a terrible roar around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats’, while it must be taken sceptically by the reader, goes unchallenged, since his is the presiding voice. In the film, the early computer-generated images of bats projected on to his sunglasses obviously are reflections of his horrid vision, their visual excessiveness indicating them as unreal. When Duke later manically strikes in the air with a fly-swatter, his efforts are viewed from a physical and empathetic distance, so that while Depp’s exaggerated movements give the scene a comic edge, the external view places his actions more readily under external scrutiny. In reality, there are no bats. And yet the film complicates the boundary between reality and hallucination by showing Gonzo’s neck with a large bloody abrasion that might be from a bat attack, and by having a bat-like wing flapping in the road kill their car leaves behind. Where the book gives us Duke’s perspective from the opening words, in the film the first substantial shot from Duke’s point of view does not occur until he and Gonzo reach the Mint Hotel in Las Vegas, when the parking attendant’s head briefly starts to morph into something saurian. These terrifying visions multiply at the reception desk and bar of the Mint Hotel. And in both of these diabolical realms

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184  terry gilliam we see Duke’s own dark vision of the staff and clientele as grotesque hybrids of humans and reptiles. The hallucinatory effect of the acid he takes just before arriving logically explains this perverse deformation, but Duke has been in some form of mind-altered state from the outset. Only the twisted reality of Las Vegas, it appears, is sufficiently bizarre to warrant seeing what Duke actually sees. In extreme moments of disorientation the audience is presented with this perspective, but for the most part Duke is a figure in the frame, not its creator, and this difference distances the film audience from Duke relative to the literary audience, creating more opportunities to critically assess his antics and his analyses. The film at some level demythologises the book; hearing someone telling about vomiting copiously is a different experience from seeing it. Viewers are more likely to groan than readers. Another distancing factor had less to do with the content or perspective of the original text than the simple passing of time; when Gilliam got to make Fear and Loathing it was irreparably a historical text, as temporally distant from the late 1990s as the original had been from the bombing of Hiroshima. He and Grisoni sensibly resisted the idea of updating the film, or of peppering it with stars from the 1960s, which might have made it something of a museum piece. With ‘Sympathy For the Devil’ ruled out, Gilliam chose to begin the film surprisingly with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘My Favourite Things’ from The Sound of Music, sung dreamily by the relentlessly wholesome Lennon Sisters, the songbirds of conservative American culture. Television news footage plays over this saccharine rendition, shots of military helicopters spraying some form of gas and a close-up of a policeman wearing reflective sunglasses being intercut with footage of youthful protesters at anti-war rallies that also target the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Over this, Steadmanesque splashes of red ink suggest bloody clashes between protesters and authorities. This red fluid coagulates into the film’s title before ominously flowing downward as the Lennon Sisters trill ‘these are a few of my favourite things’, hinting at an authoritarian aggression only temporarily repressed. Opening the film with this brief historical and political snippet supplies a context for what follows, both for the audience born after the period in which the book first appeared, and for the failing or erased memories of an older generation. The book’s epigraph, ‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’ from the eighteenth-century writer Dr Johnson, then appears silently over the black screen, emphasising the literary source of the film, and that there is some form of long-established intellectual rationale and precedent for what follows. We then hear the voice of Duke intoning the opening line of the book (‘We were somewhere

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transatlantic gonzo  185 around Barstow’), and then the more appropriate music of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s driving ‘Combination of the Two’, as the Great Red Shark, the totemic car of Thompsonian myth, flashes into view, and away. Recreating the past entails recreating its dynamism, its thrilling speed, its danger. From the outset, the camera chases the action as much as records it, the lurching acceleration or screeching deceleration signalling the car as a force of nature. Indeed when Duke first goes to open the car’s trunk, a low growl can be heard, as though some dark beast lurks within. ‘Combination of the Two’ emphasises the insistent and rapid rhythm, so that what might in many films have been a relatively sedate establishing shot, here becomes a marker of the frenetic pace that invigorates most of the film. Wide-angle lenses necessarily visually distort the images, but Gilliam adds to the overall sense of an unstable reality in this sequence by shooting Duke and Gonzo from a variety of odd positions or distances, moving quickly from wide-angle shots of the desert, through medium shots of Duke driving, to an extreme close-up of his sunglasses on to which are projected the giant CGI bats he thinks he sees. In this environment, given Gonzo Journalism’s attitude, and the intoxicated characters, there can be no objective or correct position from which to view events. In cinematic terms this manifests itself in a series of shots that are loosely, but not logically connected. From the beginning viewers have to fill in gaps, make instant interpretations, reorient themselves to unexplained or ambiguous information, as when a close-up from down below Gonzo’s neck reveals the bloody abrasion. In the original script, this resulted from Gonzo nicking himself while shaving in the moving car, but in the completed film he remains barely conscious at this point, so that Duke’s certainty that bats are attacking them seems a plausible, if comically ghoulish, possibility. The crushed wing left behind as they later career away from the camera seems to confirm the hunch that imagined creatures have infected Gonzo. And this surreal sense of possibilities is reinforced visually by the way Gilliam regularly tilts and arranges angles, shooting from positions and with lenses that in this sequence skew the lines of roads, car bodies and horizons. The horizontal line and the 90-degree angle are strangers to Fear and Loathing. Picking up the hitch-hiker (Tobey Maguire) prompts the first major narrative break in a film that inherently is highly episodic. Duke recounts to the terrified passenger the background to the trip, a phone call in a Los Angeles hotel for him to cover the Mint 400. In contrast to the stark desert through which they drive, the hotel is a jungle of huge plants and vivid pinks and greens meant to suggest a kind of gaudy Eden.

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186  terry gilliam Among the designer-clad denizens of Beverly Hills, the alcohol- and drug-addled Duke and Gonzo cut bizarre figures, as they will in most of the film’s locations. This early instance establishes the floral and florid designs of the time, evoking a variant of the American Dream, one of conspicuous but vapid display and consumption. Duke and Gonzo definitely are keen consumers, but their critical and conspiratorial attitudes put them at odds with the mainstream. At the same time their dismissive treatment of a dwarf who happens to be a hotel employee gives their casual hipness a slightly vicious edge. As they leave the hotel an angel with a flaming sword appears, as if from Genesis, signalling their expulsion from Eden. While they gather the drugs, clothes and car for the trip to Las Vegas, Los Angeles is depicted as a cheery but rather vacuous paradise of Volkswagen vans, palm trees, Hare Krishnas and colourful murals, one of the few dark notes being a fatal car crash. Even an earthly paradise cannot entirely dispel death. The sense that the pair are willing to test the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in a world where so much seems possible is exemplified when Gonzo abuses someone over the phone in one half of the frame, the other half of which is taken up by a large fish in a tank. Later, Duke hires the car that will take them to Las Vegas, treating it with alarming and dangerous disdain, while Gonzo lobs beer into the back seat. Their manic exit leaves the terrified dealer grasping and cursing. But if Los Angeles provides the entrée for the American Dream, Las Vegas is definitely the main course. And where Los Angeles at least made an attempt to recreate something like the natural world, Las Vegas shamelessly offers a glittering fantasy of consumption that conceals a hellish shadow, the grim nightmare of mindless excess. As Duke notes in the book, ‘The only bedrock rule is Don’t Burn the Locals. Beyond that, nobody cares. They would rather not know. If Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow morning, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big.’36 As betokens this corrupt and tacky adult version of Disneyland, Las Vegas is a dizzying succession of fake and mediated surfaces, acts and sensations, a realm of fantasy that overwhelms human desire and undermines any ethical pretensions and gradations. The move from the desert to the city itself involves an abrupt shift from day to night, the establishing shot encompassing a massive array of brightly coloured neon and bulbs, the pulsing electric star above the Mint Hotel a pagan beacon, while crowds swirl and Tom Jones belts out the suggestive ‘She’s A Lady’. Not surprisingly, given the manufactured quality of this environment, which seems to repudiate natural light in favour of a state of permanent night lit by electric bulbs, design was crucial to convey not

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transatlantic gonzo  187 only the feel of the times but also the mood of the film. Much of the time is spent indoors in hotel rooms, casinos and convention centres, a world of coloured lights, mirrors and shadow, gaudy patterns and unreal colours. As Duke notes with a mixture of sarcasm and awe: ‘This was Bob Hope’s turf. Frank Sinatra’s. Spiro Agnew’s. The place fairly reeked of high-grade formica and plastic palm trees. Clearly a high-class refuge for big spenders.’ Scouting locations for the film, Gilliam was struck by the exaggerated carpet patterns of the present-day casinos, and this feeds into the film’s vegetal and psychedelic décor and fashions. These seem alive, and sometimes they are, as when the leaves and vines in the carpet pattern twine up a cowboy’s legs. Accentuating the mesmerising confusion of patterns and colours, the same motif might be seen on a dress, a wall or the floor, as though the conventions of design had been blended to create a nebulous but still tantalising space. And, as Bob McCabe indicates, ‘all rear projection shots were lifted from the old Robert Urich TV show, Vegas’,37 only increasing the artificiality quotient. The overall sense is of a place where the accepted co-ordinates of space and time, let alone the conventions of decorum and morality, do not operate. Little wonder that staff and guests morph into reptiles. Even the outdoors, where the Mint 400 motorcycle race takes place, is an amorphous half-world, hazy with dust and desert sand once the race itself begins. This reality quickly undermines Duke’s ostensible reason for being in Las Vegas, and he realises that the ‘idea of trying to cover this race in any conventional press sense was absurd’. Which is just what his photographer, Lacerda (Craig Bierko), aims to do, racing across the desert in a jeep snapping pictures in the impossible ­atmosphere. Where the Mint Hotel sections of Fear and Loathing approximate monster films or 1960s trip films, the Mint 400 race is reworked as a war film. When Lacerda first makes contact in the room of the Mint Hotel, Duke and Gonzo are sufficiently disoriented by the first taste of Las Vegas nightlife to have turned their suite into a war zone. Television footage of the Vietnam war on television escapes the small screen, so that the shadows of B52s are seen tracking across the walls and the room’s lights create an unnerving ambience of greens and reds, or flash menacingly. Lacerda’s enthusiasm for the assignment turns him briefly in Duke’s eyes into a crazed American soldier in Vietnam, but as Lacerda absorbs the threatening vibrations, he backs way. At the race itself, dust blankets everything and everyone, choppers sound overhead and Lacerda reprises Dennis Hopper’s manic photographer in Apocalypse Now, while testosterone-filled hunting parties appear like figures from The Deer Hunter. Duke’s disdain for all this gets registered in his desire to drink beer, but even this simple subversive pleasure gets overwhelmed by the desert as

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188  terry gilliam his glass of beer turns to a brown sludge. The film abruptly cuts to Duke and Gonzo cruising Las Vegas at night, the sky a brilliant and distorted sea of lights, the sound of Tom Jones singing ‘It’s Not Unusual’ playing ironically in the background. This massive and unexplained shift in location and mood fits into the general anarchic pattern of the film’s narrative. Some form of progression does take place, in that the first half of the film is centred on the Mint Hotel, while the second is based largely on the Flamingo, between which is Duke’s unsuccessful attempt to leave Las Vegas. But within these capacious boundaries, anything goes. There are occasionally motivated moments, but much of the film entails random, spontaneous or nonsensical actions triggered by whatever experience or stimulants throws at them, as in the sequence where they attempt to gatecrash a Debbie Reynolds concert after parking their car on the sidewalk in front of the theatre. Part of the dangerous allure of Las Vegas is that these possibilities are endlessly available, and reinforce the hyper-reality of the place. In the first half of the film the Bazooko Circus, the version of the real Circus-Circus Casino Duke visits in the book, exemplifies this madness. In the original he begins by declaring that the casino ‘is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich’, words also spoken in the film. Having begun hyperbolically, Duke then launches into an extended description of the entertainment: Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego … so you’re down on the main floor playing blackjack, and the stakes are getting high when suddenly you chance to look up, and there, right smack above your head is a halfnaked fourteen-year-old girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silverpainted Polacks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine’s neck … both Polacks seize the animal as they fall straight down towards the crap tables – but they bounce off the net; they separate and spring up towards the roof in three different directions, and just as they’re about to fall again they are grabbed out of the air by three Korean Kittens and trapezed off to one of the balconies [sic].38

The passage conveys the sense of Circus-Circus madness by linking incongruous images and unexplained people in a loosely connected sentence whose rhythms suggest a succession of wild and barely believable actions and visions. The film version perhaps is even more bizarre. The Flying Carazito Brothers are replaced by the Flying Fellinis, whom we first see from below the net, while a drum roll and announcer prepare

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transatlantic gonzo  189 the way. A pair of large snapping scissors swings in and out from the top of the screen, while from the left a trapeze artist holding giant callipers does the same. What seems like a heavily pregnant trapeze artist then swings from the right, the ‘doctor’ with the callipers attempting to deliver the ‘baby’ in mid-air. When this is unsuccessful, the ‘mother’ falls to the net, and as she bounces up another artist with a large hammer hits her in the belly. The baby (a small doll) then flies through the air with its umbilical cord trailing, but this gets snipped by the trapeze artist with the scissors. The baby continues on to the platform where ‘nurses’ present it in what might be a small spaceman’s helmet plastered with an American flag. The rest of the circus is equally disturbing, a confusion of disorienting mirrors, lights, foolish or freakish performers (an orangutang runs a sideshow stall, a dwarf disappears into a magician’s cloak), Duke noting that ‘a drug person can learn to cope with things like seeing their dead grandmother climb up their leg with a knife in her teeth, but nobody should be asked to handle this trip’. The voice-over in this instance acts as a form of bridge between what Duke and Gonzo are experiencing, which we do not see from their position, and what the audience perceives. Something similar happens visually in the next scene as they return to their room along a dark, red corridor shot very much off the horizontal. The wide-angle lens further distorts the lines and depth of the corridor, but while the mise-en-scène gives a sense of the experience, the images are not point-of-view shots, in the same manner of the morphing staff or the carpet that begins to ooze blood. More often, the audience senses what is being experienced without losing a certain distance from it. Were Fear and Loathing simply the record of an extended drug and alcohol trip it might well have stayed at this level of comic or horrific distortion, but the book and the film have satirical intentions. So, soon after the return to the room, and after Gonzo has shown dangerous signs of knife-wielding paranoia, Duke escapes and wanders into the casino, questioning the meaning of the trip and asking rhetorically, ‘Was I just roaming around in a drug frenzy of some kind?’ But his focus shifts as he sees the hollow-eyed gamblers trapped in the tacky surroundings. For if Las Vegas is a city of grotesque glitziness, it also conceals a terrible underlying sadness. ‘Who are these people?’ Duke asks as he meanders through the crowds, ‘Where do they come from? They looked like caricatures of used car dealers from Dallas and sweet Jesus there are a lot of them at 4.30 on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream. The vision of the big winner somehow emerging from the last minute predawn chaos of a stale Las Vegas casino.’ And when he returns to his room, having indulged himself in another brief

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journey into the past to his first transformative experience with LSD, he moves to the window of the Mint Hotel and looks out beyond the curtains, back to the 1960s. He ‘sees’ documentary footage of that idyllic time, while he speaks, quoting verbatim from the book, about a time when it seemed that idealistic youth could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning …   We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave …   So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.39

Gilliam uses a montage of sepia-tinted images from 1960s news items and films of rock concerts and demonstrations to accompany this nostalgic and evocative speech while the Youngbloods’ anthemic ‘Let’s Get Together’ plays gently in the background. It says much for the perceptive depth of Thompson’s text that it can encompass these musings within the general procession of mayhem, and the film similarly manages to carve out a space for this elegiac speech. Admittedly, in the film, Duke next comes to consciousness in a room so trashed that he flees Las Vegas, but for the few minutes of the ‘wave speech’, from a point where Duke sits typing in a dark room, through his movement to the window, to the eventual closing of the curtains that returns him to pensive darkness, the film attains a degree of sublimity that plays off against the prevailing disorder. Duke’s bid for escape from Las Vegas forms the bridge to the second half of the film. Although Fear and Loathing is in part a road movie in which very little time is spent on the road, those instances where Duke and Gonzo or Duke alone career down the road are expressions of exuberance and freedom to place against the constrictions and ghastliness of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Gilliam captures this visually by utilising long shots and a very wide screen to emphasise the emptiness of the desert, its endless blue skies and the daring speed with which the car is driven. In the book the second half (originally the second Rolling Stones article) begins to break up or break down, with a succession of dislocated episodes that justify Thompson’s later admission that the book as a whole and the manner of its telling were ‘a fine idea that went crazy about half the way through’.40 Gilliam and Grisoni retain the hilariously misguided Drug Convention that gives the second half of the book its initial impetus and rationale, but rework the second half around the adrenochrome incident where Gonzo gives Duke a drug

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transatlantic gonzo  191 he describes as making mescaline seem like ginger beer. The massive and rapid descent into a bestial state links to the Dr Johnson quotation that ‘He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man’, but, whereas the drug-taking in the first half of the film carries a comically subversive charge, that from the adrenochrome episode on is more menacing and sociopathic. As soon as he takes the drug Duke beings to screech and gargle, his tongue flicking out like the reptiles’ in the Mint Hotel. But as the drug takes control, the scene becomes far more deranged, with point of view shots of Gonzo morphing into a hideous pagan deity, his back covered in breasts, horns protruding from his head. Meanwhile the bed bucks as though possessed and the camera tilts wildly back and forth, or closes in on Duke’s tiny pupils and sweating head, distorted by camera lenses and yellow lighting that render him barely human. The pace of these sequences is relentless, as Duke tries to regain some control over his recollection of events by replaying the audio tapes he had made of proceedings. But the vocal snippets, interpreted in riotous visual flashbacks, simply amplify the sense of depravity (as Gonzo vomits profusely from cars and into toilets), mania (coconuts are smashed on the bonnet of their car) or menace, most particularly at the North Star Café. There, Gonzo monstrously abuses the waitress (Ellen Barkin) with a knife, humiliating and terrorising her into shaking muteness. Even Duke is embarrassed by this horrific crossing of an ethical line, but Gonzo himself is crudely and triumphantly unfazed by her trauma. This marks the point where, after the excesses of the second half of the film, the audience is likely to be most distant from the protagonists, but the film largely refuses to justify or sanitise their behaviour. The audience must cope with the ghastly as well as the comic extremities of behaviour; to make a beast of yourself, for whatever reason, is beastly. That excess gets transferred to the Flamingo Hotel, where Duke returns after taking Gonzo to the airport in a typically manic ride across deserts and tarmac. Their room now resembles a disaster area, ripped curtains and calf-high water littered with the detritus of several days of uncontrolled consumption and degeneracy. As the camera tracks over the water in the darkened room lit a garish red, a stoned and musing Duke can be seen in front of a wall that has been transformed through unknown substances into a massive, and massively traduced, American flag. That iconic emblem has been desecrated repeatedly through the film (we initially see it in the trunk of the Red Shark next to the drugs, and Duke later inhales ether through a smaller version)41 but here it seems to represent the death of the American Dream, or one version of it. ‘We’re all wired into a survival trip now’, Duke’s voice-over tells the

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192  terry gilliam audience in another extended assessment taken from the book,42 ‘no more of the speed that fuelled the sixties’. While Neil Young’s haunting ‘Expecting to Fly’ with its message of lost love plays in the background, Duke attacks the naivety of Timothy Leary and his followers, ‘those pathetically eager acid freaks’, and their failure to understand ‘the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel’. As these condemnatory words are spoken, the camera slowly rises and turns above the typing Duke, surrounded by electric candles of pseudo-enlightenment, in a move that roughly repeats the opening shot of Jack Lucas in The Fisher King. There, the rising camera reveals Jack trapped in his self-constructed cage, and were Fear and Loathing to end here, with Duke critical of the failures of the 1960s, a similarly grim message might be conveyed. The space around the ever-smaller Duke is a black void, and one might read him and his book as the false light at the end of the tunnel. But the film does not end there. Instead, to the ringing opening chords of the Rolling Stones’s ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, we see Duke, back on the road, making his successful and high-speed escape from Las Vegas. This time the American flag attached to the car’s damaged convertible roof ironically celebrates America’s energy and love of liberty. It trails triumphantly behind Duke’s head as he hurtles in drugged bliss back towards Los Angeles, ‘just another freak in the freak kingdom’, down the road that stretches infinitely ahead. While the film itself ends in a form of ecstasy, the filmmaking process ended in a post-production clash, as might have been expected with an adaptation. The Writers Guild of America (WGA), who oversaw such things as writers’ screen credits, classed Gilliam, the director as well as the co-writer, as a ‘production executive’. Gilliam recognised that the label was wonderfully ironic for a director so often in a pitched battle with studio executives, but WGA rules required that production executives had to prove that they had written substantially more than 60% of the screenplay to receive a screen credit; normally, a screenwriter needs only 33%. Because a production executive was involved, the script automatically went to WGA adjudication. As Gilliam explains in the strategically titled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: NOT the Screenplay by Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni (1997), he and Grisoni also discovered ‘that if we included scenes from the book that were used by writers of an earlier script they were to be credited for those scenes. They got there first. They get the points. It didn’t matter if we used the scenes in a different way, in a different order, for a different purpose.’ He makes the obvious point that many of the previous attempts to adapt Thompson’s book had ‘all chosen the same basic scenes. It’s the nature of the book.’43 But Gilliam

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transatlantic gonzo  193 and Grisoni thought that their tactic of reworking Gonzo as a pagan devil was not only thematically and structurally justifiable, but also unique to their script. The WGA disagreed in a general sense, and decided that the credits would go to the script first accepted by the production company, the one written by Cox and Davies, despite the fact that Gilliam and Grisoni felt that their own script was substantially different. In fact the decision would have been the same even if Cox and Davies had wished to pass up their rights to credit, which (as Gilliam rather bitterly notes) they did not.44 So, while Gilliam and Grisoni had written their own script, which Gilliam subsequently had shot, the initial WGA judgement was that they would receive no credit in the film itself, nor on advertising or publicity. Gilliam felt himself back in the familiar if no less unnerving territory of his literary heroes: ‘Franz Kafka is definitely not alive enough to be writing this madness. Nor is Lewis Carroll. Clearly you have gone insane.’45 Gilliam might have quoted his own work as well, for in Jabberwocky Wat Dabney explains to Dennis Cooper the monopoly powers of guilds; little, it seems, has changed. Ultimately, but only after repeated representations and protests by Gilliam and Grisoni, including Gilliam’s public burning of his WGA card, the Guild allowed their name to appear on the credits. But, as with the bat-teeth marks that tattoo Gonzo’s neck, the traces of the dispute remain indelible, even if the eventual credits give them first billing, attributing the screenplay to ‘Terry Gilliam & Tony Grisoni and Alex Cox & Tod Davies’.46 Gilliam must have hoped that his energetic, intellectually arresting and visually adventurous film of a modern literary classic would find a relatively sizeable and appreciative audience. But the critical response tended largely to the negative, and because of poor marketing and ­scheduling (the filmed opened the same week as the blockbuster ­Godzilla) the film did not gather the American college audience that might have been attracted to its chemical-enriched anarchy. Naturally, the adaptation of any classic is likely to divide fans, especially those works such as Fear and Loathing in which so many of the original audience have a large personal investment. The mere fact of displaying visually the vileness and chaos of Duke and Raoul that in the text is rendered humorous by Thompson’s literary gifts was always likely to alienate the book’s readers, while potentially repelling or confusing those unfamiliar with the text. Another explanation of the film’s commercial failure is that while the gross-out genre in the 1990s had established itself in the Hollywood pantheon, the harder edges and satirical undertones of Fear and Loathing placed it outside the essentially adolescent humour of the norm. Gilliam’s work was a gross-out film for adults that also tried to decipher and critique the hypocrisies of the American, elements

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194  terry gilliam and approaches that these films largely ignore. The most surprising response for Gilliam came at the Cannes Film Festival, where more than a decade earlier he had enjoyed success with The Meaning of Life and Crimson Permanent Assurance. Sections of the crowd booed Fear and Loathing. For Gilliam, the film succeeded, but it did not have the critical impact he had hoped for, nor did it become what he had hoped it would, an enema for 1990s cinema. Gilliam’s next major project, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, would take him far away from the gaudiness of Las Vegas or indeed America, and back to Europe. In hindsight, it is tempting to see this as a preordained move, part of an auteurist filmmaker’s grand plan to turn his back on Hollywood and re-establish himself in Europe. But as with so much of Gilliam’s career, the elements of chance and opportunity were as influential as any motivated plan, his uncertainty at the time as to the direction he would take being captured in two interviews in the late 1990s. Talking with Gregory Solman in 1998, Gilliam declared that he thought he would make his next move in Europe, and that ‘I don’t even want to come back to America at the moment. I am fed up with Hollywood.’ When asked by Solman whether the making of Fear and Loathing was a bad experience, with the implication that this played a factor in his urge to leave Hollywood, he replied No, it was a good experience. But somehow Hollywood is really starting to get to me. It’s almost as if I’ve finished another trilogy. I did Time Bandits, Brazil, and Baron Munchausen, which is a kind of trilogy. Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing is a sort of American trilogy. Now it is time to go back and do a period film in Europe.47

To Ian Christie, however, at roughly the same time, and also reviewing the 1990s, Gilliam offered a slightly different account of his long-term trajectory from the United States to Britain, and then back to America. He also mapped out a different future. ‘I’m sure I did the right thing, originally: getting away from America, coming to England and working completely outside the Hollywood system. But now I’ve allowed myself to put one foot back in, I’m really torn between these two worlds.’ To Christie, he admitted that of the two, the English and European side is ‘flagging, because I’m so determined to prove to Hollywood that the things they don’t believe in are still possible’.48 Taken together, and with the benefits of hindsight, the statements to Solman and Christie are unwittingly poignant. Gilliam would return to Europe and attempt to make a period film in Europe, but The Man Who Killed Don Quixote would be one of his most debilitating experiences. Whether or not he knew it at the time he was interviewed by Gregory Solman, the ‘period film’ back in Europe that Gilliam talked of making

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transatlantic gonzo  195 would in fact involve the resurrection of a long-term project. Like Fear and Loathing, this film would be based on a literary classic, though of a very different type and from a very different place, era and sensibility – Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. A general sense of the book had occupied his mind from the time he describes as his period of PMS: Post-Munchausen Syndrome.49 Trying to generate creative momentum, as various ideas stalled, he asked Munchausen Executive Producer Jake Eberts in 1990 to find finance for the Quixote project. As with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Gilliam had not read the original text, but once he had he realised the enormity of adapting Cervantes’ massive work for the screen. He worked on a script with Charles McKeown, but remained unsatisfied; funding failed to materialise, and the idea lapsed until the completion of Fear and Loathing. Working now with Tony Grisoni, the two revised the main plot of Quixote to include a modern American advertising executive tellingly named Toby Grosini. While making commercials in Spain for a British company, Grosini is transported back to Quixote’s time and gets mistaken by Quixote for Sancho Panza. The abandoned A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court entailed a similar shift from the contemporary to a chivalric past, and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, as the new script was called, provided the opportunity to reconsider the relationships between fantasy, reality and madness, the contrasts between American, British and European culture, and the general crassness of modern consumerism compared to an earlier, more noble time. Crucially, too, the nature of the ­material and its setting meant that funding would likely have to come from outside the American studio system. Gilliam in fact argued that he wanted ­European finance for the film in order to ‘contribute to the construction of a solid film-making base in Europe’, and because he ‘wanted to be free from Hollywood’s influence. What we desperately need is a power base to make movies in Europe that aren’t informed by an American viewpoint.’50 After the production debacle of Munchausen this was a brave declaration, and the difficulties that such a stance created soon became clear. Through 1999, while he scouted locations in Spain and began the casting process, Gilliam had still to secure financial backing for what was shaping as one of the most expensive and ambitious films ever made in Europe solely with European money. At one point a major financier pulled out, and the budget was trimmed from $40 million to less than $32 million. By the middle of 2000, however, a deal had been brokered and preparations for Quixote could proceed. Producer René Cleitman commented that the difficulty of the script and the cost of the project made Don Quixote the hardest film he had to

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196  terry gilliam finance, describing it as ‘a heavy film for European shoulders’.51 Even so, money came from the French-based Pathé Pictures and France’s Canal Plus, as well as from German investment fund KC Medien. Johnny Depp from the United States, Jean Rochefort and Vanessa Paradis from France, plus an array of British actors, including Bill Paterson, Miranda Richardson, Peter Vaughan and Christopher Eccleston had been cast, as well as local Spanish talent. Further emphasising its pan-European quality, Don Quixote also received a £2 million award from the National Lottery in Britain, a fund set up in 1996 to help the perennially struggling British film industry. This subsidy drew the wrath of London Evening Standard film critic Alexander Walker, who was antagonistic in principle to the National Lottery funding of films. In Icons in the Fire, his history of the British film industry from 1984 to 2000, he argues that ‘endless Lottery money was fed into the production machine in financially prodigal but artistically doomed initiatives’,52 devoting two chapters to the Lottery period under the revealing titles ‘Fool’s Gold’ and ‘Thrown Away’. 53 Walker specifically attacked Gilliam in the Evening Standard over the funding of Don Quixote, primarily on the grounds that the filmmaker was insufficiently British, alleging that Gilliam clearly hasn’t been able to raise the money from the Hollywood studios and this is an indication of the way Americans are coming to Europe to grab the money from European funding sources … The result is another Europudding. The question must be asked: is this the best use of public funds?54

Replying in the Evening Standard, Gilliam declared: Far from being an ‘expatriate American’ I am a British citizen and travel on a British passport. I have lived in the UK for 33 years – the majority of my life – and have made British television productions and British films. I am also governor of that most British of film institutions, the BFI.   If I am an example of an American director exploiting British publicfunding bodies, then my advice to Hollywood film-makers is this: come to England, get yourself a British passport, begin your career in British television, get married, have kids, pay British taxes and settle down here. Then wait for 33 years before plundering the limited cash resources and public-funding bodies to make a feature film.55

Gilliam’s spirited reply registers his exasperation at the misrepresentation of his career and his allegiances, but Walker’s acerbic comments do signal how in the 1990s Gilliam’s completed work had been Americanoriented. Don Quixote, both in its content and in the context in which it would be made, promised to re-establish him in Europe, where he had not made a film in over a decade. At the same time, through the

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transatlantic gonzo  197 ­character of Toby Grosini, the film retained a transatlantic connection. It is now part of cinema legend, of course, that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was never made. Cruelly, the documentary about its ‘un-making’, Lost in La Mancha (2002), which records in hilarious and excruciating detail the collapse of the project, won critical acclaim as well as film awards; one of these was the Peter Sellers Award for Best Comedy at the Evening Standard British Film Awards. But this tragi-comic outcome could not be known in the early days of 2000, and Gilliam allowed documentary makers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe freedom to record the filmmaking process. Their The Hamster Factor had explored the making of Twelve Monkeys, and Lost in La Mancha does the same – minus the eventual triumph of the earlier film. While gesturing to more common difficulties in the filmmaking enterprise itself, the film raises uncomfortable parallels with Baron Munchausen (something Gilliam candidly acknowledges). Many of these revolved around the budget, which, while massive by European standards, was half what Gilliam felt was needed for the film he wanted to make. Line Producer José Luis Escolar, who had also worked on Munchausen, suggests that attempting to make ‘a Hollywood film without Hollywood is almost impossible’.56 This seems to validate Chuck Roven’s view that Gilliam’s ideas can only be realised in the American studio setting, but clearly Gilliam was determined to draw inspiration from the qualifier ‘almost impossible’. In reality, Don Quixote’s sheer scope, its complex script and imaginative design generated huge logistical problems that meant the myriad pieces had to be brought together with a great infusion of luck. This commodity quickly deserted the film. The reasons for the film’s collapse are numerous, and Lost in La Mancha provides a vivid record of events, some of which have attained almost mythic status. Many of the problems were apparent in the preproduction phase, and First Assistant Director Phil Patterson, charged with organising much of this stage of the film, candidly states six weeks before production begins that the film is in ‘complete disarray’.57 Because this is a Gilliam film, he adds wryly, this is as it should be, but it becomes increasingly obvious as production looms that key elements are not in place in a film that many participants acknowledge contains no margin for error. Because of the relatively limited budget, the principal actors were working for reduced fees, and this meant that they had to fit Don Quixote into their schedules. As they were scattered across several countries, the necessary script readings and rehearsals were difficult to arrange, and the failure of actors to appear in Spain at the expected times stymied progress. In Lost in La Mancha, Depp and Rochefort are seen reading the script together for what appears to be

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198  terry gilliam the first time only a week before production begins. Sound studios are woefully substandard. The need for the design team to accommodate visually Gilliam’s vivid sense of the film he has had in his head for many years creates further tensions in a shoot almost overwhelmed by anxiety well before shooting starts. As Gilliam himself declares four weeks before shooting: ‘I don’t want to be making a film like this. I’m getting very nervous.’58 The expressions of those around him signal that his feeling is not unique. The problems and tensions increase exponentially once shooting starts. The first location lies next to a NATO bombing range and, although the production has been assured of relative quiet, NATO jets career noisily across the sky. On the second day of shooting a storm of biblical proportions literally washes equipment away in torrents that had not existed minutes before, forcing the crew to wade bravely and desperately into muddy, swirling waters in order to save valuable gear. A day is lost while the location and the unit dry out. As a consequence of the rain, the location that had been chosen for its barrenness starts to bloom, rendering earlier establishing shots redundant. Continuing bad weather creates continuity problems with the shots filmed days before in bright sunlight. NATO planes continue to scream overhead, and days of shooting are abandoned. By day five, Jean Rochefort, who had earlier delayed his arrival because of concerns about the state of his prostate, cannot sit on a horse without excruciating pain. For a character who spends much of his time on horseback, this is a terminal disability. At the end of the disastrous first week of production, the faces of the cast and crew register a general dark sense of finality. At the weekend Rochefort leaves the set for medical treatment in France. Despite assurances that he will return, his health fails to recover and he does not come back to Spain. With its main actor incapacitated, perhaps permanently, the film essentially is doomed from this point, but the crew makes valiant if increasingly hopeless attempts to salvage something from the wreckage. Suggestions are floated that the film be halted for weeks or months so that the unit can be reorganised. As the expectation of Rochefort’s return dims, the prospect of recasting the role of Quixote is canvassed. Phil Patterson threatens to leave. Financial imperatives start to take control, including problems over insurance on the wasted week of shooting, completion guarantees, and the mounting expense of keeping a production unit together that is not producing any footage. Gilliam, meanwhile, confesses that he has no energy to plough on. Patterson does leave, having come to the conclusion that ‘we can’t make the film. Not the film you [Gilliam] want to make.’59 The final backbreaking

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transatlantic gonzo  199 straw comes with confirmation that Rochefort definitely will not return. Consequently, the film that Gilliam had thought about and worked on sporadically for a decade, and with which he had inspired an array of talented actors and crew, grinds to a heartbreaking but grimly inevitable end. The insurers take over the assets (including the script) in an effort to recoup losses that amount to $16 million. Gilliam had survived the disaster of Munchausen, but, despite all the pain that process entailed, at least he had escaped the experience with a film. With Don Quixote there was nothing to show bar a few tantalising outtakes and screen tests. And, of course, Fulton and Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha. Near the end of that film Tony Grisoni makes the telling and heartfelt comment that the ‘most painful thing was to see reality win over Don Quixote. Because it did.’60 As well as the sense of personal failure, the larger narrative seemed to vindicate the arguments of Chuck Roven and Joel Silver that the European film system was not robust nor financially secure enough to make real the films Gilliam saw so vividly in his mind. And yet his next film, The Brothers Grimm, made for an American studio and with almost double the budget of Quixote, would be as traumatic as that uncompleted film, and infinitely more drawn out.

Notes 1 ‘Gonzo’ roughly equates to something highly subjective and manically prankish. 2 The articles appeared in Rolling Stone, issue 95, 11 November 1971 and issue 96, 25 November 1971. Dr Gonzo was a reworking of Thompson’s friend, the Chicano lawyer Oscar Acosta. 3 Johnny Depp, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 174. 4 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 178. 5 Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (London, Flamingo, 1998), p. 45. 6 Ibid., p. 41. 7 Ibid., p. 47. 8 Ibid., p. 23. 9 Ibid., p. 48. 10 Ibid., p. 66. 11 Ibid., p. 204. 12 Sal Paradise and Neal Cassady in On the Road, Billy and Wyatt in Easy Rider. 13 Admittedly, Billy and Wyatt are gunned down at the end of Easy Rider, but their deaths serve to romanticise the lost hopes, the death of an alternative American Dream. 14 Hunter S. Thompson, ‘Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, in Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, Gonzo Papers Volume 1: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2003), pp. 105–11, p. 106 (original emphasis). 15 Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism (New York, Harper and Row, 1973), preface. 16 Ibid., p. 15.

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200  terry gilliam 17 Robert S. Boynton (ed.), The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on their Craft (New York, Vintage Books, 2005), p. xiii. 18 Ibid., p. xvi. 19 In one chapter the editor supposedly steps in and presents a transcription of taped conversations as the record of events in an all-night diner. See Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, pp. 161–8. 20 Thompson, ‘Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing’, p. 108 (original emphasis). 21 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 12 (original emphasis). 22 Thompson, ‘Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing’, p. 106. 23 Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Novels: Mr Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye to Berlin (London, Minerva, 1993), p. 243. 24 Thompson, ‘Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing’, p. 109. 25 Ibid. 26 Duke’s ambiguous and mythic status was only enhanced through Gary Trudeau’s portrait of the cynical gun toting character Duke in his ‘Doonesbury’ comic strip. 27 Hunter S. Thompson, ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’, Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 1–12. This was the first of Thompson’s works illustrated by Ralph Steadman. Raoul Duke, ‘Police Chief: The Indispensable Magazine of Law Enforcement’, Scanlan’s Monthly, September 1970, vol. 1, no. 7, pp. 63–6. Kihm Winship’s bibliography of works by Thompson (and Duke) can be found in Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, pp. 591–7. 28 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 24. 29 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 249. 30 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 175. 31 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 181. 32 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 161. 33 Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: NOT the Screenplay by Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni (New York, Applause, 1997), p. viii. 34 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 5. 35 Gilliam and Grisoni, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 16. 36 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 106. 37 McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 178. 38 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. 46. 39 Ibid., p. 68. 40 Thompson, ‘Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing’, p. 109. 41 Duke wraps himself in one after taking drugs before they set off to Las Vegas. It becomes a room divider in the Mint Hotel, a T-shirt in the acid trip sequence, and appears on the Bazooko Circus ‘baby’, among other instances. 42 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, pp. 178–9. 43 Gilliam and Grisoni, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p. viii. 44 Ibid., p. ix. 45 Ibid., p. vii. 46 For a detailed online comparison of the scripts by David Morgan, see http:// members.aol.com/morgands3/fear/fearcomp.html. I thank Phil Stubbs for this information. 47 Gilliam interview with Gregory Solman, ‘Fear and Loathing in America: Gilliam on the Artist’s Fight or Flight Instinct’, in Sterritt and Rhodes (eds), Terry Gilliam, pp. 184–207, p. 207. 48 Gilliam, in Christie (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, p. 265. 49 McCabe, Dark Knights and Holy Fools, p. 184. 50 Terry Gilliam, reply to Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard, 28 April 2000.

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transatlantic gonzo  201 51 René Cleitman, in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (directors), Lost in La Mancha (2002). 52 Walker, Icons in the Fire , p. xx. 53 Ibid., pp. 246–63 and pp. 264–86. 54 Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard, 2000. 55 Terry Gilliam, London Evening Standard, 28 April 2000. 56 José Luis Escolar, in Fulton and Pepe (directors), Lost in La Mancha. 57 Phil Patterson, in ibid. 58 Gilliam, in ibid. 59 Phil Patterson, in ibid. 60 Grisoni, in ibid.

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Fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies 8

In late 1999, news appeared that, after Don Quixote, Gilliam and Tony Grisoni would adapt Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s cult fantasy Good Omens. Chuck Roven was named as producer, and during 2000 the British company Renaissance Films backed the script development. With the demise of Quixote, Gilliam refocused on Good Omens, and by early 2001 he and Grisoni had come up with a first draft. But they would find it immensely difficult to reduce the collaboration between two of Britain’s most prolific and lauded literary fantasists to a two-hour film. Although Robin Williams and Johnny Depp were secured for the leads, finance proved problematic, given the need for elaborate, indeed apocalyptic images, and the fact that neither of the stars at that point was felt to have sufficient box-office appeal. During 2001, as planning progressed on Good Omens, it was announced that Gilliam would direct Mitch Cullin’s Gothic fairy story, Tideland (2000). He and Grisoni were impressed with Cullin’s work, and wrote a script based on it, but despite Gilliam’s enthusiasm for Good Omens and Tideland, both projects would stall during 2002. To fill the void he shot a Nike commercial for the football World Cup featuring some of the world’s best players in a fantasy tournament held in the hold of a cargo ship. The remix of an obscure Elvis Presley song, ‘A Little Less Conversation’, which accompanied the commercial, went to the top of music charts worldwide, but Gilliam’s own response to the process of making the commercial was less positive. As he told Bob McCabe: ‘We shot 250,000 feet of film, just for a 60-second commercial. That’s a movie.’1 Still, he needed the work. J.K. Rowling wanted Gilliam to direct the ­adaptation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but Warner Brothers, no doubt fearful of flooding the huge potential gold-mine of the Harry Potter series, chose the mainstream talents of Home Alone director Chris Columbus. Gilliam was offered a script based on Ira Berkow’s The Man Who Robbed the Pierre, a true story of a huge hotel robbery, but this too came to nothing. In late

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  203 2002 Twelve Monkeys’ producer Chuck Roven sent him the script for The Brothers Grimm, a comic adventure featuring the eponymous folk-talecollecting brothers as eighteenth-century con-artists. Given Gilliam’s long-time love of Grimm fairy tales, the general topic of the script was tantalising. So, no doubt, was the prospect of work, even if it entailed returning to the Hollywood system. While not normally the focus of filmmakers catering for adult audiences, fairy tales are more than mere children’s stories. Jack Zipes shows how the fairy tale evolved from earthy oral folk tales that represented and explored the morality and concerns of the peasants who told them originally. In the process of transcription from verbal story to written text in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by figures such as Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers, the original peasant emphases and interests were replaced by notions of civility more appropriate to their new bourgeois audience. And yet, both the oral and written tales could still present ‘alternative configurations’ that would ‘contain an emancipatory potential which can never be completely controlled or depleted unless human subjectivity itself is fully computerised and rendered impotent’.2 Gilliam’s films inherently celebrate the emancipatory and deplore the control of subjectivity. Marina Warner argues a similar case from a different perspective, arguing that ‘metamorphosis defines the fairy tale’ rather than fairies themselves, moral functions or happy endings.3 She goes on to note that all the wonders that create the atmosphere of fairy tale disrupt the apprehensible world in order to open spaces for dreaming alternatives. The verb ‘to wonder’ communicates the receptive state of marvelling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire, and as such it defines very well at least two characteristics of the traditional fairy tale: pleasure in the fantastic, curiosity about the real.4

One could apply this formula to almost all Gilliam films. In The Brothers Grimm, the focus is not on children and their perception of fairy tales, but on the ways in which adults accept, reject or modify their opinions of the stories. Elizabeth Dalton explains that the tales were originally intended for adults, not children, and that ever since they were first published in 1812 they have been criticised ‘as inappropriate for children – too frank about sex, too violent too dark’. She adds that the Grimms’ tales ‘are cruder, wilder, more violent, and more fun than the elegant and poignantly beautiful tales of the Grimms’ Danish contemporary Hans Christian Andersen’.5 But later editions of the tales tended to scale down the violence and sexual references, and once they were perceived almost exclusively as comforting stories

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for young ­children, many of the darker stories were dispensed with entirely. Bruno Bettelheim criticises the way that modern stories for children avoid existential problems, although these are crucial for all of us. The child needs most particularly to be given suggestions in symbolic form about how he may deal with these issues and grow safely into maturity. ‘Safe’ stories mention neither death nor ageing, the limits to our existence, nor the wish for eternal life. The fairy tale, by contrast, confronts the child squarely with the basic human predicaments.6

Bettelheim distinguishes between fairy tale and myth by arguing that both answer the eternal questions: What is the world really like? How am I to live in it? How can I truly be myself? The answers given by myths are definite, while the fairy tale is suggestive; its messages may imply solutions, but it never spells them out. Fairy tales leave to the child’s fantasizing whether and how to apply to himself what the story feels about life and human nature.7

In The Brothers Grimm Gilliam is attracted to this darker sense of the fairy tale, understanding it as a suitable genre for mature children and open-minded adults. For these reasons, perhaps, Gilliam had reservations about the tone and content of Ehren Kruger’s script, seeing it basically telling the tale of ‘a couple of contemporary Hollywood guys going into the 19th century and being smart-asses’. For Gilliam, ‘it all seemed to be a compendium of all your favourite moments from all your favourite successful fantasy movies’.8 But MGM was backing the film, and Gilliam felt that he and Grisoni could rework the script, which at this point figured the brothers primarily as con-artists in a caper movie, who use their knowledge of fairy tales and folklore to scam gullible peasants. Gilliam wanted something darker and deeper, so that the tales would become the focal point, not simply the means to an end. MGM agreed to the process of revision, but the alterations would add to the cost of the film, and MGM was keen to keep the budget at $75 million. While a substantial amount, the money was restrictive by comparison to similar special effects-loaded fantasies being made around the same time. Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), for example, had an estimated budget of $140 million, and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) cost $150 million, double that for Grimm. Shooting would take place in the Czech Republic, a favoured location for large-scale fantasy films (Van Helsing and Hellboy were made there) because of the quality of the local artisans, the authenticity and haunting beauty of its locations and the relatively low costs involved. These factors eventually allowed the production

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  205 designer, Guy Hendrix Dyas, to build the entire village of Marbaden set from scratch for $400,000.9 Nicola Pecorini, from Fear and Loathing and Quixote, was taken on as cinematographer, and Lesley Walker was again the editor. But in late February 2003, after months of work on the script and design, and with Heath Ledger and Matt Damon pencilled in for the title roles, MGM withdrew from the project, seemingly bringing yet another Gilliam film to a premature end. Almost immediately, Dimension Films offered to step into the gap. At that time an arm of Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax Films, Dimension had begun as Bob Weinstein’s attempt to distribute and produce more commercially-minded films than Miramax, which had made its name backing edgy or controversial small-scale films. In Down and Dirty Pictures, Peter Biskind recounts in vivid detail the rise of Miramax and the Weinsteins, noting their ‘reputation for brilliance, but also for malice and brutality’.10 Biskind’s chapter covering the success of Dimension in the late 1990s is titled ‘Swimming With Sharks’, and some in the film industry referred to Harvey Weinstein as Harvey Scissorhands.11 These fearsome reputations might have alarmed Gilliam after his experiences on Brazil and Baron Munchausen with Sid Sheinberg and Thomas Schuhly, but Gilliam felt that he was capable of standing his ground. Nevertheless, and in the tradition of the Fulton and Pepe film documentaries, he asked journalist Bob McCabe to record the process of making The Brothers Grimm. McCabe had already produced Dark Knights and Holy Fools, a critical survey of Gilliam’s films up to Fear and Loathing, and would put together The Pythons Autobiography By The Pythons (2003). The book that came from Gilliam’s request, Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm, and Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood (2005), offers a sobering account of the tribulations Gilliam underwent in making The Brothers Grimm.12 Others would also suffer. The Weinsteins were known for the intrusive and aggressive tactics in making sure what they produced bore their signature; Biskind’s chapter on their rise in the industry is titled ‘The Anger Artists’.13 They also had a reputation for tight control of the purse strings, and with the film becoming more complicated and therefore potentially more expensive as ideas developed in the lead-up to shooting, the Weinsteins exerted pressure through Chuck Roven to keep the budget at $75 million. One of the victims of this regime was Robin Williams, who had been scheduled to play the role of an Italian torturer, Cavaldi, but who rejected the relatively small salary offered to him. Hollywood pockets were deeper than those in Europe, but they were not infinite, and the Weinsteins were masters at the tough negotiations that keep costs down.

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206  terry gilliam As shooting approached two key conflicts emerged. First, the role of the trapper, Angelika, whom both the Grimm brothers fall for romantically, required a particularly independent presence, one robust enough to make a credible animal hunter, yet sufficiently spirited to appeal to two very different men. Gilliam was confident that the compelling and quirky English actor Samantha Morton was perfect for the role, but less than two months from the start of shooting Harvey and Bob Weinstein decided that Morton was not physically attractive enough to make a plausible love interest for handsome young stars like Matt Damon and Heath Ledger. A variety of alternatives were tested, against Gilliam’s protests that Morton was the correct choice. Ultimately, he recalls saying to Bob Weinstein: ‘Bob, there’s a problem here, our tastes are different to the point that this isn’t going to be good to anybody. I’m not saying right, wrong, good or bad, I’m just saying different. It’s a terrible start but this is it, the girl’s perfect; I’m not sure that I can make –’ This is the irony, when I said I don’t know if I want to make the movie without her, that was like this huge threat, ‘Oh he’s going to walk off.’ That blew it and they started screaming.14

Ultimately, in the face of the Weinsteins’ intransigence, Gilliam was forced to make a significant compromise only weeks before shooting was to begin. He would describe the way the Weinsteins handled the issue as ‘not only inhuman, but offensive and unforgivable’.15 English actor Lena Headey proved acceptable to the Weinsteins and eventually was cast. A second clash involved Matt Damon, whom the Weinsteins were partial to for the success of his breakthrough film, Good Will Hunting (1997), which Miramax had backed and which made over $200 million. Damon had gone on to establish himself as a bankable star. But a serious point of disagreement came with Damon’s makeup, which included a false nose, rendering him in some eyes like a young Marlon Brando. Not wanting to compromise Damon’s physical appeal as a romantic lead, Harvey Weinstein argued vigorously against the adjusted nose, just as he had done about Nicole Kidman’s nose for the part of Virginia Woolf in The Hours. In the last days before shooting, enormous pressure built on Gilliam to dispense with the false nose, the suggestion being that Gilliam would not suffer major budget cuts if the nose was eliminated. He later told Bob McCabe that his acceptance of this compromise caused him to lose self-respect: ‘That’s when the selfloathing set in. That’s when I thought “Fuck, what have I done?”’16 These and other negatives, including the sense that the Weinsteins’ interventions would continue, undermined his enthusiasm for the project before the start of what clearly would be a complex shoot

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  207 involving complicated special effects and an atmosphere and storyline that could appeal to adults and children. A week into that process, Gilliam confided to Bob McCabe that he did not ‘think this is a Terry Gilliam film. It’s already been compromised a lot.’17 Little over a week after this statement, Bob Weinstein arrived to see footage from the first weeks of shooting. Within another fortnight, the Weinstein brothers decided that the early material was too dark compared to their sense of the film as a romantic comedy, and cinematographer Nicola Pecorini was sacked. Gilliam sent a fax to Bob Weinstein: Once again you have made an arbitrary decision which has harmed the film I am trying to make. From the beginning of this project I have said that our tastes are very different – with each of your acts, from the forcing of Lena Headey on me to the willingness to close the film down because of a make-up on Matt Damon that made him look right for the character of Will Grimm, to the criticism of Peter Stormare’s performance [as Cavaldi] to the present firing of Nicola Pecorini, I am convinced the film in your head is a different one from mine.   In the case of [Pecorini] I think you fired the wrong man – his work was beautiful, dark and magical – exactly what I wanted. Exactly right for the story.18

The Weinsteins threatened to sue if Gilliam resigned, and Newton Thomas Sigel replaced Pecorini, who received a credit for ‘Additional Photography’ on the completed film. Sid Sheinberg’s influence was felt only in post-production on Brazil and Thomas Schulhy was notable by his absence on Baron Munchausen, but the Weinsteins’ forceful and repeated intrusions continued on through the next four months of the shoot and beyond. McCabe documents much of this, against the wishes of the Weinsteins, who tried to buy the publishing rights for the book, possibly to stop its publication. Ultimately, McCabe was forced to leave the set. Ongoing disputes meant that The Brothers Grimm did not premiere for eighteen months after principal shooting was completed. The film begins with a prelude set in the childhood of the Grimm Brothers. Wilhelm Grimm, his mother and sick sister wait for the younger Jacob Grimm, who has taken the family cow to sell in order to pay for a doctor to help the ailing girl. Instead, he returns with ‘magic beans’, as in the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. The film has no pretensions to be a biographical account of the real brothers, who were highly successful academics, but this initial sequence establishes two central themes for the film as a whole: the intermingling of fairy tale with reality, and the distinction between Jake the dreamer (played as an adult by Heath Ledger), who accepts the actuality of a magical realm, and the more pragmatic and rational Will (Matt Damon), openly dismissive of

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208  terry gilliam fairy tales. The main action takes place fifteen years later in Frenchoccupied Germany, with the brothers now using their knowledge of folk tales and superstitions to con the credulous. Having supposedly killed a witch who haunts a mill near the town of Karlstadt, they are captured by an Italian torturer, Cavaldi (Peter Stormare) who works for the French commander, Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce). Delatombe suspects that the Grimms have kidnapped some children in the village of Marbaden in order to defraud the gullible inhabitants. He abhors the hold folk wisdom has over the German peasantry, seeing it as an affront to his own very French rationalism, which he links to his nation’s cultural superiority. Worse, for him, the powers attributed to the supernatural undermine French political control. On pain of death, he forces the Grimms to retrieve the missing children. Overseen by Cavaldi, they go to Marbaden expecting to solve the mystery easily, but Jake especially comes to understand that the forest outside the town is enchanted. A beautiful trapper, Angelika (Lena Headey), also mesmerises him, although he eventually realises that she likes Will. She tells Jake of an ancient tale in which a vain queen (Monica Bellucci) built a tall tower in the forest to protect herself from death, but whose desire for everlasting life has cursed the land. Jake interprets the various weird circumstances as proof of the magic he has only read about in books. Will is dismissive, assuming that a rival group of tricksters with superior resources to the Grimms’ are behind the strange happenings. After a disastrous encounter with the dark forces of the forest, they are taken to Delatombe, who threatens to raze the village and the forest. The Grimms return to Marbaden, and Jake’s knowledge of fairy tales allows him to understand that the Queen’s power is still a force in the forest, and that she is stealing the young girls of the village for their invigorating blood. He enters the tower and is almost seduced by her power, but escapes and helps to return one of the girls. Delatombe now arrives at Marbaden and begins to make good his threats. As he sets fire to the forest (the Grimms are strapped to ladders leaning against the trees) the Queen, having supped on restorative blood, rises and blows out the fire. In a dramatic series of confrontations around the tower, Delatombe is killed, as it seems is Will who succumbs to the Queen’s magic. Jake manages to destroy the tower and the Queen and also is able to break the spell over Will (using Cavaldi’s childhood knowledge of fairy tales), after which all the main characters return to Marbaden for a celebratory feast. A title card invokes the customary ‘and they all lived happily ever after’, but as the ravens that have attended the Queen scatter into the sky, we see that one of them carries a piece of the Queen’s image from a magic mirror in its claw, and the eye of the image blinks. A title

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  209 card reading ‘or maybe not’ appears, reinforcing the possibility that the Queen might one day return. That final challenge to generic expectation fits with other Gilliam films that utilise and undermine conventions, although this example seems more ham-fisted than that in, say, Jabberwocky. At the other end of the film, the title card with the magical words ‘Once upon a time … ’ had fallen victim to a typical Gilliam manoeuvre, being immediately deflated by the appearance of the ‘real’ date, ‘1796’. The shooting script and the first rough cuts of the film originally had a Red Riding Hood scene at the start of the film, drawing the audience into the fairy tale world. But in the extended and often tense attempts to rework the film in post-production to the Weinsteins’ satisfaction, director Steven Soderbergh suggested placing the scenes with the young boys and the magic beans first. Since Grisoni had wanted to introduce the brothers early and provide a context and motivation for their actions as adults, the suggestion was accepted.19 The beans become a marker for belief or scepticism about the power of magic. This larger contextual aspect figures importantly in the film, so that the rural and small town settings repeatedly play the earthy but defeated Germans off against their conquerors, the rationalist and arrogant Napoleonic French, personified in Delatombe. Somewhere in between fall the French-speaking Grimms, able to move easily between the two worlds, but embodying the clash between the belief in folk myth (Jake) and reason (Will). One of the original motivations for the real Grimm brothers was a form of cultural nationalism, so that the tales were meant to represent and transmit something quintessentially German. To collect the tales, then, was an act of cultural preservation. In the context of French domination, the film suggests that such nationalism is a form of resistance, a challenge to French military and cultural power. The French pride themselves on their enlightened rationality, so destroying the Grimms eradicates the Germanic tales and the counter-Enlightenment mentality the tales embody. Or perhaps the pre-Enlightenment mentality, for, as Zipes notes, the fairy stories point back to a long history of belief in realms beyond day-to-day reality. Gilliam had explored the power and longevity of this folk wisdom in Jabberwocky, and in The Fisher King medieval myth has a similarly powerful role. In The Brothers Grimm, fairy tale magic destroys Delatombe, whose name clearly links him to death. The rationalist Will is also forced to recognise powers beyond the explanatory power of reason. The fact that the tales the real Grimms publish after the time frame of the film still enchant children and adults proves the tales’ enduring cultural influence, and perhaps even their cultural necessity.

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210  terry gilliam The opening scenes of the film intercut the real world of the Grimms in ‘French Occupied Germany’ with the significantly more fantastic world of the forest outside the small village of Marbaden. The Czech Republic’s own historically redolent landscape provided many of the locations, as with Karlstadt, the town the Grimms first arrive in. The ‘forest’, though, involved two massive constructed sets, which proved invaluable when shooting started, allowing a degree of control of night and day that would have been impossible to maintain in the real world. While plausible, they also generate an eerily unreal atmosphere as befits the fairy tale magic they contain. In both environments, Gilliam’s trademark use of wide-angle lenses allows for a high level of detail in the brief representation of the town, creating a realistic context in which fantasy can intrude. The establishing scenes in Karlstadt hint at the tense relationship between the French conquerors and the local Germans. They also sketch in the contrasting personalities of the brothers, Will the smooth-talking charmer and womaniser, Jake the more tentative bookworm. Together, though, they are successful tricksters, conning the naive townsfolk that their superior knowledge of folk legends enables them to destroy supernatural forces – at a price. In the first instance, a witch haunting a mill must be killed with a shot through the heart by an arrow containing ‘baby tears’. Dressed in protective armour that is both impressively shiny and ludicrously melodramatic, and employing comically arcane terminology and practices, they kill the fearsome, hideous creature, quickly collecting their fee. Once the miller has gone, the supposedly vanquished witch attacks again, but we find that she in fact is a he, the Grimms’ assistant Hidlick (MacKenzie Crook). Hidlick, along with a hidden accomplice, the buffoonish Bunst (Richard Ridings), has created the convincing charade of the witch and the possessed mill. Her staged death uses costumes, and stagecraft, the eighteenthcentury equivalent of special effects. Frustrated thespians, Hidlick and Bunst yearn for greater recognition (Hidlick wants to be known for the ‘strength of my performance’) but they too are the Grimms’ dupes, for when they demand a doubling of pay to 20% of the fee, Will convinces them that this is the same as one-twentieth of the fee. But if he is the supreme con-artist, Jake is more dubious about the enterprise, wanting to employ their knowledge more benevolently. His brother’s sneering rehearsal of the magic beans episode (they refuse to grow) stymies these temporarily rebellious thoughts. Having established the caper movie element, the scene then switches to the woods outside the village of Marbaden, where a young girl in an iconic red riding-hood and carrying a basket strolls through the dimly lit landscape. Picking flowers, she pricks her finger; trees in the forest

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  211 seem to move. Sensing danger, she begins to run, the camera swooping over branches and around trunks, tracking her increasingly frenzied progress. We never see what is chasing her, but music, pacing, lighting, and her scream as a giant shadow overwhelms her create a sense of something ominous, eerie and powerful. Her red hood hanging high in the trees on the edge of the forest marks her grisly demise. Gilliam had used these basic elements in the early scenes of Jabberwocky, although here the deftly moving camera and other-worldly set give the scene even more potency. Representing the fake witch in horrid detail while leaving the supernatural attack on Red Riding Hood as violent but intangible, the film provokes the audience’s imagination and questions the actuality of what is presented as rational and true. This is familiar Gilliam territory, and the privileging of the fantastic over the real should not surprise. But the gullibility of the Karlstadt population offers a cautionary element, warning against the too-ready acceptance of alluring or comforting nonsense. When the next scene reverts to Karlstadt, and the inn where the Grimms and the townsfolk are celebrating the witch’s vanquishing, Jake nearly spills the beans, so to speak, with his drunken declaration that there is definitely money to be made in witches. Before the raucous crowd has a chance to recognise the implications of the slip, Will’s quick dismissal of it as the words of a drunk man divert attention from reality back to the population’s comforting, if unfounded, perceptions of victory over the supernatural. Harsh reality immediately intrudes in a more substantial way with the entry of the hated French soldiers. Their arrival allows Jake the chance of fairy tale word-play with his aside, ‘Kiss a Froggie and you’ll turn into a prince’, but Will’s pragmatism and quick wit mollify the French. Ever the seducer, he asks attractive twins to go upstairs for what Jake dismissively terms ‘a little huff, a little puff’. The film is filled with these fairy tale references, some obvious and reworked as here, others more hidden in the textual fabric. The audience is encouraged to participate in this game of recognition, something that involves a form of intertextual detective work. As Will and the twins ascend the stairs a sinister figure appears from the shadows: Cavaldi. He later arrests the brothers in an almost cartoonish manner as they are dragged along the floor by ropes tied to their horses, whose rumps are on fire. Stormare’s energetic performance registers Cavaldi immediately as a comic grotesque, and his very broad comic depiction interacts with the surprisingly menacing world of the fairy tale, and the more sombre world of social reality. Throughout, the film interweaves slapstick, romantic comedy, social history, costume drama, the caper movie and fairy tales into a complicated totality that points to the additions Gilliam and Grisoni

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212  terry gilliam made to Kruger’s more frivolous original. But there are still problems with the integration of the various fairy tales into a cohesive whole, and the narrative time taken up to explain and then work through the Delatombe subplot at times retards the progress of the film. The arrest introduces the important nationalist tension between the French and the Germans. Delatombe, as arrogant product of the Enlightenment, dismisses the ancient folk wisdom the Grimms have been exploiting. Children have been disappearing from Marbaden, something Delatombe takes to be the work of the Grimms or others like them, and the tumult this has caused threatens the order the French wish to impose on the Germans. He uses the threat of torture by Cavaldi (who has Bunst and Hidlick ridiculously suspended upside down in chairs above boiling liquid, their heads covered by snails in glass cases) to force the Grimms to go to Marbaden and solve the mystery of the missing ­children. Meanwhile, deep in the forest outside that village, Hans and Greta wander adventurously. A branch weirdly reaches out and whisks away Greta’s scarf, and the now-enchanted piece of cloth draws the chasing girl into a dark cave, the walls of which have mystic markings. The movement of the scarf was computer-generated, one of several magical effects that are somewhat unconvincing, although they added to the cost and technical complexity of the film. As with Red Riding Hood, malevolent sounds and shadows gather, most threateningly the ragged silhouette of a tall woodsman with an axe. Gilliam utilises a forest landscape that can seem beautiful and then dangerously charged with supernatural powers and motivations as the site for the sorts of alternative realm that in Time Bandits and Twelve Monkeys had entailed time travel, or medieval visions in The Fisher King, or flights of fantasy in Baron Munchausen. Each of these other worlds involves its own set of expectations and possibilities, its own dynamic relationship with reality. And each in its turn tests out the ‘reality’ of the real. Grimm reprises the forest setting that in Jabberwocky hid a powerful monster, but invests it with far richer forces that are creative as well as destructive, enchanting as well as repellent. The power of this world of enchantment ultimately destroys the politically dominant French army, while its integration back into the lives of the people of Marbaden restores a crucial element of their cultural lives. As Jake understands, only those who acknowledge fairy tales can comprehend and control their transformative power. Greta, an innocent in the woods, is overpowered by its malevolence. Honking geese on the road to Marbaden signal the return to reality, and herald the arrival of the fantastic carriage containing the Grimms and Cavaldi. Will announces that they have come to rid the village of enchantment, but an old crone retorts, ‘Too late. The old ways have

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  213 returned’, reinforcing the central tension between ancient beliefs and modern ideas. A young child has heard of the ‘famous Brothers Grimm’, as they title themselves in an anachronistic marketing ploy that also sees them labelled ‘Team Grimm’. When Will congratulates the child’s father on his son, the father reveals the boy to be a girl, Sasha. The reason for the confusion becomes clear: only young girls are being stolen in the forest, so Sasha has been dressed as a boy for her protection. Meeting in the local church, the villagers reveal their fears and their understanding that the forest has wicked powers, powers revived, they feel, in response to the French occupation. Will sees the economic opportunity offered by these apprehensions and tensions, and grandly pronounces that ‘salvation is at hand’. But salvation comes at a price, because for Will wonder is a resource to be manufactured and exploited. Despite his confidence, the brothers need a guide in the forest. A trapper thought cursed is suggested (at which point the villagers engage in a hail of superstitious spitting), and the brothers find her to be the beautiful and independent Angelika. Her sisters have also disappeared, while wolves have killed her father, so she understands the power of the forest. Where the villagers are terrified by its force, and Jake has only an intellectual’s conception of it, Angelika respects the magic without succumbing to it. Along with the villagers and Jake she functions on the side of the ledger that believes in the supernatural, in opposition to the rationalists like Will and Delatombe. In Grimm the former group is vindicated, while the latter die (even if only temporarily in Will’s case). At this early point, Will boasts that the brothers will bring back the daughters of the village so that its inhabitants may ‘regain courage and joy’. He assumes that the disappearances are the work of a rival team of con-artists, explaining that ‘nine out of ten times there’s a human perpetrator’. Reason is on his side, of course, but there remains the mysterious tenth time. Once in the forest Will produces a highly fabricated piece of equipment meant to detect mystical presences, pompously declaring: ‘Don’t be afraid. I know this sophisticated technology must seem very strange to you.’ Advanced technology in Gilliam’s films (whether kitchen appliances in Time Bandits, ducts in Brazil or time machines in Twelve Monkeys) is relentlessly pilloried, and even Will becomes embarrassed at the ridiculousness of the device. Angelika heads dismissively deeper into the forest but, as the others follow, in the extreme foreground we see an axe held by the mysterious woodsman who had taken Greta. Ravens swoop overhead, registering that the party is being watched by menacing forces. Jake, with his ever-present notebook, increasingly becomes more receptive to the enchanted atmosphere and the alluring Angelika, telling her that ‘our folk tales tell us of

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214  terry gilliam places just like this’, and that he feels ‘the forest’s ancient power’. When he mentions that to ‘our ancestors this place was sacred’, she recounts the invasion of the Christians who turned sacred ground into ‘territory’. This exchange develops the rival notions of rich ancient magic and a more debased, modern urge to dominate and exploit. Her explanation complicates the relationship between the text and reality. Are the folk tales simply textual relics of a lost past, or do they incorporate old magic that can still be activated? Jake, the intellectual, will eventually make the full transition from understanding the tales as social documents to recognising them as repositories of wisdom and power. Led by Angelika, the group discovers a more substantial locus of magical power, a high but desolate tower in a clearing. With a sense of dread, Jake asks what had happened, and she recounts the history of the place, recalling a Christian king who destroyed the original forest people. But this revelation prompts a flashback to her own childhood, where her father tells her the tower’s story. We see this depicted in a visual shift from the real to the fantastic that recalls Baron Munchausen: the husband of a beautiful but vain and selfish queen is killed by the plague that arrives on their wedding day. While the village burns she attempts to escape the scourge, building a tower with no door, sitting at the window, Rapunzel-like, her long tresses trailing as she sings. But her security is misplaced because the plague is borne on the wind. When her beautiful flesh begins to rot away, Angelika’s father continues, ‘they say you could hear her screams across the ocean’. The story complete, we return to the present of the flashback, where the father assures his daughter that ‘it’s just an old story’, and that ‘Papa is here to protect you.’ In the centre of the forest, far from the rational world of the village or the town, some of the central dynamics of the fairy tale are worked through: the existential questions of ageing and death that Bettelheim argues are missing from safe children’s stories, and the equally troubling questions raised about child-parent relationships in a genre full of wicked stepmothers and neglectful or overly attentive fathers. Simultaneously, the sequence interweaves different forms of narrative from social history, folk tale and memory with the magical reality the characters are experiencing. This rich environment provokes the romantic Jake to begin writing. But these productive forces are competing with equally powerful negative influences: the woodsman who had taken Greta feeds the Grimms’ horses enchanted spiders, while trees move and sprout magically, ravens and countless bugs signalling large malevolent forces. The fairy tale realm encompasses death and life, destruction and creation. Returning to Marbaden, the party brings with it some of that malevolence, specifically the enchanted horse, which later that night ensnares

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  215 and then swallows a small girl, Elsie. This is one of the most disturbing moments in the film, the initial swallowing of Elsie being depicted in a horrific shadow play. Soon after, Jake and Will see her trapped in the throat of the monstrous horse, struggling to break free, before she is swallowed. Gilliam regularly creates grotesque images, but these often come laced with comic overkill. Not in the case of Elsie, where the image successfully evokes horror. The horse races off back to the forest with her, its belly distended and writhing as the girl struggles inside. Angelika, Jake and Will, as well as Cavaldi and his assistants Letorc and Dax follow, but in the night the dark powers of the forest take control. Moving trees and swirling roots unseat the riders, Dax and Letorc enduring grisly deaths. Will tries to reconcile these fantastic actions with his reason, so that when Jake asks insistently, ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’ he replies, ‘I most definitely am not.’ Instead, he tries to fit the bizarre into his established frame of reference, grasping at the notion that other con-men are using more expensive special effects to create the appearance of enchantment. In a neat aside that applies equally to the fantasy film business, he comments: ‘These people are much better funded than we are.’ Meanwhile, Angelika confronts a wolf she thinks might have killed her father. But when she finally gets close enough to stare the ­creature in the face, she realises in horror that it has her father’s eyes, and she comes to understand that it is her father. Later, the wolf will transform itself back into her father, a radical and disturbing change that also involved an enormous technical effort. The wolf had to be convincing enough as an animal while also being capable of transmogrifying into a human. Here the relationship between special effects and funding proved determining, because despite the extended and painstaking efforts of Gilliam and the digital effects supervisor, John Paul Docherty, in postproduction, the wolf never overcomes its computer-generated origins. In Jabberwocky, what now appears a relatively unconvincing monster can be put down to the technical limitations of the time, and accepted for that reason. Life of Brian celebrates the trashiness of the special effects that depict the brief alien abduction and space battle. But with Grimm, the computer-generated wolf seems deficient, particularly in relation to so much of the film that brilliantly and convincingly realises another dimension. This technical shortcoming undermines the wolf’s effectiveness as a key symbol of the potentially harmful father. For Jake, the events in the forest mark a turning point; he accepts what has happened as real, despite Will’s insistence that ‘it’s all magic beans’, and that there is a rational explanation. Cavaldi, though, has seen his assistants killed in particularly violent ways (one has the lower part of his body stripped of flesh in a moment reminiscent of ­Jabberwocky)

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216  terry gilliam and has been unsettled by these occurrences. Given the relatively crude national stereotypes invoked (French as rationalists, German as fantasists), Cavaldi’s Italian origins allow him to exhibit Renaissance-like rationality and a more earthy sense of folk wisdom (along with the sadism born of Catholic inquisitions). When, by contrast, Delatombe in Karlstadt hears of this subversive outbreak of German superstition, he threatens to eradicate the village and the Grimms. But, on the verge of being tortured by Cavaldi, they convince Delatombe that they can restore order, and so return to Marbaden. Will plans to escape, but Jake feels that he now knows the fairy tale that explains the seemingly inexplicable, that of the Queen in the tower who had dreamed of eternal life. This dispute, which runs its course in Angelika’s house, uncovers the simmering divisions in their relationship. Will declares that Jake wishes his life was something out of a book, Jake retorts that Will cares for nothing but himself, and that the world of Marbaden is not his world. Appealing to Angelika, he asserts: ‘You know the story. We’re living it now. It’s alive. It’s real. We’ll find your sisters and bring them back.’ But when Jake replies contemptuously, ‘with what, magic beans?’ they reprise the fight of their childhood. Jake then discovers that ­Angelika has feelings not for him but for Will, and in despair returns to the forest in order to enter the Queen’s tower and so help rescue the girls of Marbaden. Will follows, and they soon are reconciled, so that, with Will’s help, Jake enters the enchanted tower. But the girl, Sasha (whom Will earlier had mistaken for a boy), is then taken, falling into a well after being absorbed by a hideous creature, half mud, half gingerbread man.20 Outside the tower, the CGI forest begins to stir in response to Jake’s intrusion, but once inside he investigates the ancient and cobwebbed Queen’s chamber, which contains the gruesomely withered body of the Queen. She is a marvellously rendered grotesque, her chamber a triumph of design that evokes an atmosphere of powerful magic and perverse decrepitude. Jake’s intellectual and emotional excitement at this rich, withered setting reinforces the sense of its power, although he does not know that the fairy tale Queen is on the verge of reinvigoration. Yet as the brother attuned to the mystical he can decipher markings on the wall that are identical to those Greta had seen in the cave and that explain the otherwise inexplicable disappearance of the girls. As with Kevin in Time Bandits or Cole in Twelve Monkeys, the ability to accept and interpret the mysterious allows vital insights unavailable to rationalists. Down below, the rejuvenating process is advancing: the wolf appears, transmogrifies into the axe-wielding woodsman, and takes Sasha from a pool that connects to the village well, offering her as a sacrifice to the

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  217 Queen. He places her in a crypt and, in yet another fairy tale reference, pricks her finger. Simultaneously, a raven drops a blood pellet into the Queen’s mouth and she begins to revive. Seeing this, Jake calls down to Will, who has been trying to free Sasha from the crypt. This alerts the woodsman, who attacks Will. Jake tries to escape from the tower, but instead runs into a mirror, hearing the apparently youthful Queen ask the fabled question, ‘Am I still the fairest of them all?’ The mirror, naturally enough, provides the emblematic interface between reality and fantasy, but one in this case distorted by magic. While Jake sees, and is entranced by, a beautiful image, the audience sees the hideous truth of the 500-year-old Queen. Only when Will hurls a rock from below is the mirror cracked and the spell temporarily broken. He finds himself in a desperate fight with the woodsman, but on the verge of being killed is saved when Jake cartoonishly leaps from the tower, knocking out the woodsman and rescuing his brother. They return to Marbaden with Sasha, but various antagonistic forces are now unleashed and must play out their struggle. One of these forces is embodied in Delatombe, who arrives at Marbaden, arrests the Grimms, and prepares to execute them by tying them to trees in the forest and setting the brothers and forest alight. He declares that he will vanquish the ‘darkest fears’ of the villagers by burning the forest they believe enchanted, simultaneously ridding himself of the Grimms and their subversive German folk tales. ‘Adieu Grimms, and farewell to your tales. They will not be remembered’, Delatombe sneers, in a rather obvious piece of poor cultural judgement. Angelika frees the brothers, but as they run through the forest they encounter the wolf, who turns back into the woodsman she recognises as her father. When she asks where he has been, another vivid flashback reveals how the Queen had captured him and offered her love for the blood of twelve young village girls. Back in the present, Angelika gives him back his enchanted axe, not heeding Jake’s call that he is trying to kill her. Filial love blinds her to the rather more horrid reality that Jake comprehends from his knowledge of fairy tales, especially those involving wolves or woodsmen. More than simply engaging children’s tales, the stories, as scholars such as Zipes, Warner and Bettelheim explain, are filled with social, psychological and sexual insights. Her father is willing to sacrifice her, as Jake realises from his knowledge of the tale; Angelika will become the twelfth and final girl needed to revive the Queen fully. Even partially rejuvenated, she rises from her bed and blows out the forest fire that threatens her tower. While Delatombe wonders how this is possible, an increasingly unsceptical Cavaldi understands it as a something beyond explanation, a miracle. ­Angelika’s

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218  terry gilliam father, meanwhile, has placed her in the twelfth crypt and for his rewards is lifted into the tower by ravens. As the Grimms attempt to climb the tower, Delatombe and Cavaldi appear, but when the former commands the latter to kill the Grimms Cavaldi refuses, and is immediately shot. Delatombe and Will fight, and when Delatombe is killed, the falling debris falls on the Grimms’ catapult, hurling Jake into the tower. There, the Queen is seducing Angelika’s father, and when Jake tries to kill her with a knife she uses magic to pin him high on the wall, held there by the dagger in his hand. As she drinks the reviving blood Will climbs into the tower, but the Queen pins him to the wall and then forces their hands into a dagger fight to the death as they float high up in the tower. Will recognises that only Jake can end the enchantment and so calls on Jake to stab him, which he reluctantly does. While this does break the spell, the Queen then transfers her affections from Angelika’s father to Will, offering him eternal love and life if he will accept her dominion. When he does, and she plunges her pin through his heart, all seems lost, for he now lives only to serve her. Jake then hears the Queen utter the iconic words, ‘Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all’, and knows that her vain heart requires Will to pronounce her the fairest, and then kiss her. He grabs the enchanted axe and heaves it at the mirror, which shatters. As it collapses, so does the Queen in one of the film’s most complicated but highly successful computer-generated effects. Pieces of her face begin to fall off, as though they were sections of a broken mirror, revealing the ghastly hollow form within. As well as being visually compelling, the effect functions perfectly as an emblem of the Queen’s destructive vanity, and of the thin membrane between reality and fantasy. The cracking mirror also allows Angelika’s father, now free of the Queen’s enchantment, to redeem himself. Realising that she has used him to ensnare his daughters, he grabs the largest piece, and, with Will in pursuit, hurls himself from the tower window in an effort to destroy the mirror and the Queen with it. Both men are killed in the fall. Below, Cavaldi has revived (Delatombe’s bullet having been stopped by the Grimms’ costume armour he has been wearing) and realising the horrors that have passed, calls a curse ‘from the dark heart of my ancestors’ upon the Queen. He then hauls the dead Will away as the tower crumbles to ruins. Jake has survived, in ‘Princess and the Pea’ fashion, by falling in the Queen’s bed stacked with mattresses, but when he comes to, he glumly follows Cavaldi and takes the Queen’s pin from Will’s heart. At this darkest moment Cavaldi remembers from a childhood fairy tale that an evil spell can be broken by a kiss of pure love. Magic powerful enough to destroy can also revive. Jake applies the magic remedy to

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  219 Angelika and she comes back to life, along with all the other girls stolen from the village. He then returns to Will but finds him still dead. Cavaldi suggests another kiss, but, as Jake slowly bends to perform the brotherly act, Will whispers, ‘Not you.’ Ever the con-man, he uses the opportunity to exact a kiss from Angelika, telling her: ‘I just had to know what that was like before the story ended.’ Will’s acknowledgment of the fictional aspect of what has happened gets reinforced as the survivors from the encounters in the forest return to the village. Now that all are safe and the Queen apparently is dead, their return is a triumph, and the once dark and muddy village is now a revived space of ecstatic peasants, warmed by golden sun, who celebrate with dance and music. Contemplating what they might do next, the brothers recognise that while they are ‘men without a country’, ‘enemies of the state’, and ‘without a bean to our name’, they do possess a ‘damn good name’. The marketing possibilities of Team Grimm suggest the economic potential of the tales, something the subsequent centuries have borne out. But the fact that, as the audience knows better than the brothers, their renown will live on well beyond the brothers themselves also signals the way that they are part of the larger cultural narrative of fairy tales. This broader literary context is made manifest as they walk into the village while title cards spell out the immortal words, ‘and they all lived happily ever after’. But the raven soaring off with the Queen’s still active image overturns this comforting ending for the productive uncertainty that characterises most of Gilliam’s films.21 It appears that the forces the Queen represents have only temporarily been defeated. The addition of the title card suggesting ‘well, maybe not’, seems uncharacteristically heavy-handed. By pointing to it so overtly, these words diminish the ambiguity, rather than leaving this unnerving possibility open, but unresolved. As it happens, the end of shooting in November 2003 did not lead to a ‘happily ever after’ ending. The complexities of the narrative, the interweaving of genres with their attendant styles, the post-production work on special effects and the fundamental disagreements between Gilliam and the Weinsteins about the film’s tone, structure and intended audience still had to be negotiated. In the case of the interpersonal relationships, resolutions were impossible. Bob McCabe takes twenty pages to deal with the nightmarish aftermath of shooting, which involved repeated re-editing, the possibility of reshooting certain scenes, failed attempts to bring in other directors to rework the film, and Miramax’s own complicated and increasingly fraught relationship with its powerful owner, Disney. For Gilliam, the continuation of frustration and exhaustion beyond pre-production and production into post-production was

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220  terry gilliam enervating enough. There was also the horrid repetition of the scriptcredit issue with the Writers Guild of America that had arisen on Fear and Loathing. Although Gilliam and Tony Grisoni (especially) had reworked Ehren Kruger’s original script, the Guild was reluctant to give Gilliam credit. He withdrew his name in order that Grisoni get due recognition, but the Guild judged that only Kruger should get the screenplay credit.22 Over the long post-production battles Gilliam grew so estranged from the Weinsteins that, in a move entirely against the tenets of auteurism, he tried to have his signature, the words ‘A Film By Terry Gilliam’, taken off the film’s advertising. Bob Weinstein refused; whatever the problems with the film itself, Gilliam’s name still had pulling power. Ironically, some Gilliam fans would see the film as overly commercial and criticise it on that basis as a sell-out. But Weinstein had a trump card in these negotiations, the fact that Gilliam had already begun preproduction on the much smaller and more personal project, Tideland, one he had put aside to work on Grimm. Weinstein insisted that contractually ­Dimension had first call on Gilliam’s services, and he used the threat of closing down Tideland as leverage. While Gilliam eventually shot ­Tideland in the latter part of 2004, a year after the shooting on Grimm, he ended up completing both projects at roughly the same time in 2005. In spite of all the trauma of its making, Jeremy Thomas, the independent producer behind Tideland, felt that the ravishing images in Grimm signalled a blockbuster, and when Gilliam and Harvey Weinstein showed extracts from it at Cannes in 2005 Weinstein joked that the studio had made a $150 million film for $75 million. As McCabe notes, ‘It’s a good line but for some, it’s a bitter joke.’23 By the point of release in August 2005 the bad press around the film had spoilt its chances, and Miramax was seen to be offloading it and other films in its stable in order to clear the decks for its takeover by Disney. Traditionally fierce promoters of films they either distributed or produced, and able to create successes from such unlikely material as The Crying Game,24 the Weinsteins failed to back the film with their trademark verve. In truth, the film’s narrative was complex to the point of being convoluted, some of the special effects were less than convincing, and many viewers had problems reconciling the hyperactive acting of Peter Stormare and Jonathan Pryce with the rest of the film. Despite this, there are moments of great visual beauty and emotional resonance, with scenes in the forest that evoke a genuine chill, and in the town where the comedy successfully runs from slapstick to clever verbal play. Intriguing uncertainties about what is real or fantastic, and the value and power of imagination or reason, invigorate the film, making it a stimulating if frustrating viewing experience. It is

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  221 possible to argue that Grimm is a prisoner of its own intelligence and striving after complexity, terror and beauty. A simpler film, perhaps the caper film Kruger originally wrote, might have been more successful commercially because it aimed lower intellectually and aesthetically. But such a work would not be a Terry Gilliam film. Gilliam’s own sense of the film itself was that though he regretted a lot of it, ‘there’s a lot I really like’. But where the finished product gave him some joy, the act of production itself was a nightmare. ‘Grimm was absolutely debilitating’, he declared: ‘It was like this endless sickening fall – that’s what it felt like.’25 Given the complex and often heated relationship between the Weinsteins and Gilliam it seems impossible to determine definitively who was most culpable in precipitating the fall; but Gilliam was the most directly affected by it. Part of Grimm’s debilitating effect was that it delayed and at times threatened work on Tideland, the film that Gilliam originally planned to make in 2001. Tideland, Mitch Cullin’s Gothic tale, was provocative enough in its own right. Cullin’s protagonist is an imaginative young girl who alternates between a fantasy world of talking doll-heads and Alice in Wonderland, and a bizarre reality populated by junkie parents, a sexually tormented taxidermist and a mentally damaged man-child. By turns surreal, magical, lyrical and horrifying, the novel was sent to Gilliam by Cullin, and the filmmaker’s ecstatic response would be included on the back cover of the 2003 British paperback edition: ‘Beautifully written. Perfectly paced. Sad. Magical. Funny. Images kept tumbling off the page and into my eyeline – beautifully, clearly, spookily.’26 Tony Grisoni and Gilliam worked on a script, but the confronting and essentially noncommercial material made English producer Jeremy Thomas’s task of securing funding difficult. The project went into limbo through 2002 and much of 2003, while Gilliam prepared and then shot Grimm. By this point Thomas had secured Canadian and British finance for Tideland, bringing Canadian Gabriella Martinelli into a co-production structure. These arrangements made Tideland a Category C British film under the BFI classification, it being a ‘minority UK co-production’, one that was foreign but not American, and ‘in which there is a small UK involvement in finance or personnel’. When Grimm, the American film with the European cultural content, fell into post-production suspension, Gilliam resumed substantive work on Tideland. Its funding sources determined that the film would be shot near Regina, Saskatchewan, a surprisingly adequate double for the Texas farmlands where much of Cullin’s novel is set. But the ongoing problems with completing Grimm proved a major obstacle, so that when Gilliam eventually shot Tideland in the latter half of 2004 he was also working on adjustments to the

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222  terry gilliam earlier film. Where Grimm had run over budget and massively over schedule, Tideland would be delivered on budget and schedule, despite the fact that final post-production work would be carried out on both films almost simultaneously in 2005. The completed Tideland offers a fairly faithful rendition of Cullin’s book, which takes us into the disturbing world of childhood fantasy excavated in The Brothers Grimm. While Grimm had children, as secondary characters, it primarily examined fairy tales from various adult perspectives: acceptance, scepticism, or complete dismissal. Cullin explores similar general territory, but through the first person account of an 11-year-old girl, Jeliza-Rose, who recalls events that take place in what she initially refers to as ‘the back country’. She is there with her musician father, Noah, a ‘guitar-twang icon’ in the 1950s, now an emaciated heroin junkie. They have fled Los Angeles by bus after her junkie mother dies of a methadone overdose. Fat and dissolute, the mother while alive had alternated between calling Jeliza-Rose a ‘shit-critter’, and pronouncements of love for the child she went into withdrawal to have. The girl’s take on her parents’ heroin addiction is dismissively practical: ‘Heroin gave my father neutrality, serving as an antidote for a mind too difficult to manage. For my mother, having lived a short life lacking much meaning at all, heroin offered nothing.’27 Left to her own devices once she has done her chores (massaging her mother’s legs and preparing syringes full of heroin for her parents) the unschooled girl watches television, listens to the radio, eats junk food, and reads her favourite book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. When her hated mother dies of respiratory failure, she remembers skipping ‘around the room whistling the theme from Sesame Street, the happiest song in the world’.28 But Noah fears that he will be blamed for the death. Having dreamt of escape to a quiet life in Denmark, he takes flight with his daughter to What Rocks, the farmhouse in Texas he had bought for his mother. She is long dead, and the house is a deserted and crumbling heap infested with squirrels, but for Jeliza-Rose What Rocks and the surrounding countryside offer the prospect of adventure and freedom. While she investigates the new environs, her father, having taken another hit of heroin, sits mute and largely unmoving in a chair, staring at a map of Denmark he has brought with him. As time passes, he stops breathing, starts to turn purple, his pupils reduce to nothing, and his belly bloats. Jeliza-Rose, used to him sitting ‘in front of the TV for days, statuelike’ before suddenly stirring, believes he is, in his own terms, ‘on vacation’ or ‘playin’ possum’.29 We soon suspect something different, his blue tongue, gassy emissions and empty eyes betraying his macabre state. Jeliza-Rose, meanwhile, explores What Rocks, pursuing a

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  223 ­ ischievous squirrel, and finding a treasure trove of her grandmother’s m possessions, as well as a burnt out, upturned school bus in a field, populated with fireflies who become ‘children of my own creation’.30 The opening chapter of the book, as with the early scenes of the film, presents Jeliza-Rose as a highly imaginative creature, prone to ‘pretending’, delight, ‘wonder’, belief and ‘creation’. But there are darker elements at work, for her reverie in the school bus is destroyed by a nearby train that flashes noisily past, leaving her ‘alone again, screaming, terrified. I bit my bottom lip without thinking, felt the skin crack, and tasted blood as it swam onto my tongue. And everything became quiet.’31 Jeliza-Rose and her father are not alone. She has brought with her four Barbie-doll heads, which, placed on the tips of her fingers, function as surrogate friends and as projections of her own fears and desires. Of the four, her favourite is ‘Classique Benefit Ball Barbie’, a beautiful, confident adventurer who leads the way in Jeliza-Rose’s explorations, encouraging the sometimes frightened girl as well as offering hard-edged assessments of situations, possibilities, the other dolls, and humans. When, for example, the two (along with the more timid doll head, Magic Curl) discover the grandmother’s secret room stuffed with memorabilia, clothes and make-up, Classique dismisses Jeliza-Rose’s belief that her grandmother ‘wanted to be beautiful’ by declaring the grandmother old and ‘ugly with boxes of junk’.32 At times the dolls seem merely to put into words the thoughts Jeliza-Rose is reluctant to say out loud, but they also enjoy a form of independent existence, criticising as well as cajoling her. With Classique, Jeliza-Rose spies a ‘ghost lady’ on the second day at What Rocks, a woman strangely attired in beekeeper’s bonnet who she later learns is named Dell. Dell lives with her brother, Dickens, and their mother in a nearby house ‘hidden among mesquites, like some decrepit witch’s cottage in a fairy tale’.33 After she uncomprehendingly sees Dell perform fellatio and have intercourse with the local delivery man, Jeliza-Rose naively wonders whether Dell might be a blood-sucking vampire. Even so, she finds Dell a dangerously alluring figure, even a possible replacement mother. Dickens, by contrast, is a comically grotesque man-child, the victim of a brain operation meant to cure or control his epilepsy. He is also the long-time sufferer of physical and psychological abuse from Dell, whose powerful and malignant presence he venerates as he simultaneously endures her tyrannical control and punishment. Relief for him comes by escaping to a fantasy world in Lisa, his submarine (in fact merely a wigwam beside the railroad track), in which he explores the bottom of the ocean and hunts the ‘monster shark’ (the train that passes by each evening, the one that had terrified Jeliza-Rose). While Noah decomposes in the farmhouse, having been

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224  terry gilliam dressed in wig and make-up by a daughter ­increasingly certain that he is now dead rather than alive, she develops feelings for Dickens, composed of naive notions of romance and her nascent sexuality. Seeing Dell’s sexual encounter causes her to flee along with ­Classique. They near a rabbit-hole that Jeliza-Rose had earlier likened to that in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Agreeing to Classique’s demand to look down the hole, Jeliza-Rose drops the doll in, and Classique falls, Alice-like, paraphrasing a passage from the book as she plummets.34 Jeliza-Rose later calls on Dickens to help her retrieve the doll, but, when all he finds is dirt, the girl takes this as evidence that Classique is dead. When she then hears the train she associates with the return of a terrifying Bog Man, and that Dickens understands as the monster shark, everything begins to spin: So I shut my eyes. My body became heavy. And I slumped forward. And I don’t recall much after that – except sensing my fall. I was entering the hole, tumbling straight into blackness, disappearing. The earth had swallowed me up.35

Despite the sense of dying, or being buried alive, she wakes in What Rocks to a grisly reality: Dell is a taxidermist, busy downstairs gutting Noah and preserving him in varnish. He had been Dell’s true love when she was young, and she has waited for his return for years. Now, she promises not to let him go, informing the corpse that ‘I’m protecting you, right? And the Rose child, she’s family now, see?’36 Noah emerges from the procedure ‘glistening, coated with varnish, mended and stitched – except for a rabbit-hole where his navel once budded, strands of wire lurking within’.37 Asked by Dell to put something close to her heart inside the hole, Jeliza-Rose tosses in two less favoured dolls, Magic Curl and Fashion Jeans, before Dell sews it up. Later when she goes outside, Jeliza-Rose muses: ‘World full of holes, I thought. Holes everywhere, full of people and things. Squirrels and doll heads and bog men. Things go inside holes and sometimes never come out again for a thousand years. Some houses are like holes too, like tombs.’38 Dell interprets her efforts positively: ‘I keep strangers and Death away’, she tells Jeliza-Rose, ‘so that nothing has to change – not Mother, not dear Noah, not this house, or my house, or even you and me and Dickens.’39 But the transparent pathology of this strategy is exposed when she makes Dickens capture the squirrel who lives in What Rocks so that she can stuff it. And she cannot cope with Jeliza-Rose’s creatively expansive imagination, nor with the girl’s budding if innocent feelings for Dickens. These emotions play ironically off Dell’s sense that she, Jeliza-Rose, Noah and Dickens comprise a family. But the ‘romance’

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  225 that blossoms between Dickens and Jeliza-Rose creates the prospect of change – the young girl even imagines her stomach rumblings as a sign of pregnancy, and that she and Dickens are husband and wife, with a baby imminent. When, later, Dell finds them kissing in her mother’s room (Jeliza-Rose imagining them as a surrogate Dell and Noah) she explodes at their ‘filthy filth!’, causing Dickens to go into epileptic convulsions and Jeliza-Rose to flee back to her own house and the comfort of her preserved father, certain that Dell will destroy her. The girl finally escapes into dreams, to be awoken by a huge explosion. On investigating, she finds out the night train has been derailed, probably by Dickens, who has used dynamite to kill the monster shark of his dark fantasies. Amidst the wreckage Jeliza-Rose sees a distraught Dell looking for him, and although the girl herself also waits for her fantasy husband, we assume that he has been killed in the blast. Instead, among the traumatised passengers, a woman calls to Jeliza-Rose and offers her an orange, a sense of shared trauma and the prospect of maternal comfort in the future. Surprisingly, a narrative that depicts a world of depravity, madness, violence and suffering ends almost serenely. Having survived her mother and Dell, a pair of witches, Jeliza-Rose ultimately finds a fairy godmother. Told from the perspective of the creatively aware child, with ­allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Alice (a touchstone for Gilliam as far back as Jabberwocky) as well as its depiction of the porous boundaries between reality and fantasy, sanity and madness, Tideland held obvious attractions for Gilliam. But the book also takes Gilliam into new territory, the world of Gothic horror, and he claimed that in Tideland, Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho. There are elements of the Gothic in The Brothers Grimm, but that film’s comic undertones relieve the tension, which builds menacingly in Tideland. Gothic horror as a literary genre traditionally starts in England with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), a tale overflowing with anguished and orthodox love, murder, ghosts, imprisonment, terror, living statues and untempered emotion. The genre reached a peak in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) the greatest example from this period. Charles Dickens’s regular ventures into the Gothic realm seem acknowledged in one of Tideland’s principal characters, also called Dickens, while Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and M. Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) show the resilience of Gothic fiction more than a century after its appearance. The numerous adaptations of such texts indicate how the visual and atmospheric intensity of the Gothic transferred easily to film, with Hitchcock’s Psycho, adapted from Robert Bloch’s novel, one of the greatest examples. But

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226  terry gilliam the Gothic has broader historical and cultural dimensions, Fred Botting arguing that such literature ‘appears in the awful obscurity that haunted eighteenth-century rationality and morality’.40 Roger Luckhurst makes a similar point in tracing the history of the term, noting that it ‘came into common use in the eighteenth century to denote the opposite of Western Europe, of civilisation, of reason and order’.41 There are broad connections to Baron Munchausen’s fantastic stories and the Grimms’ fairy stories. But where, say, the Baron’s confections are lightly absurd narratives of travels and adventures that playfully push at the boundaries of reality and credulity, Gothic works are ‘disordered, dark, and labyrinthine’, mixing ‘up the categories of life and death, past and present, reason and fancy, wakefulness and dream’.42 Luckhurst goes on to make the larger social claim that during the nineteenth century ‘As the world was regulated and disenchanted by the routines of industrial life, the Gothic could take on the positive valence of everything that was being lost: passion, belief, spirit, individual eccentricity, craft’.43 One could read this almost as a manifesto of Gilliam’s own views, expressed from Jabberwocky, and on through Time Bandits, Brazil, Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King and The Brothers Grimm. Rather than simply a space in which decadent events take place in ruined castles and mansions, then, the Gothic provides a form of social critique, challenging pieties and conventions by exposing repressed passions lurking beneath and behind social facades. The Gothic novel originates in Britain, but many of these tales are set in, or introduce elements from, the more exotic parts of Europe, providing geographical markers for Gothic’s unsettling ‘otherness’. Gothic also has a place in the American cultural landscape, Leslie Fiedler contending that American Gothic ‘is a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation’.44 On this reading, Gothic’s inherent gloom, decadence and terror are antithetical to essential American myths of progress and self-realisation, the grotesque aspect favoured by Gilliam being at odds with American norms of unity and superficial beauty. Teresa Goddu declares that the American variety is ‘most recognizable as a regional form’, located primarily in the American South. This geographical zone, she argues, serves as the nation’s ‘other’, becoming the repository for everything from which the nation wants to disassociate itself. The benighted South is able to support the irrational impulses of the gothic that the nation as a whole, born of Enlightenment ideals, cannot.45

Cullin locates Tideland primarily in the South, in Texas, but, significantly, the Gothic elements in the book are already manifest in Los Angeles, where Noah introduces Jeliza-Rose to the image of an Iron Age

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  227 man found preserved in a bog in Denmark. This prompts her to dream that ‘the Bog Man materialized in my bedroom and tried suffocating me with a pillow. A noose encircled his neck, drawn at the windpipe, coiling like a snake on his chest.’46 She wakes to find her father looming over her bed, but at this stage fails to make a connection between him and the Bog Man. Instead, she carries the terrifying dream image with her to Texas, where, in more fertile imaginative soil, it can flourish. Cullin’s Los Angeles is sufficiently degenerate, though, to warrant Gothic status, hinting at a broader American cultural decadence. Noah’s fascination with Denmark is less a sign of adventurous or escapist spirit than a morbid fascination with death. He establishes this more sobering sense of Denmark in Los Angeles, telling Jeliza-Rose that her ‘mother is the Norse Queen Gunhild, King Eric’s widow. And King Harold promised to marry her, enticing her to Denmark, and so she went – but on her arrival she got drowned in a bog instead.’47 These associations are even clearer once father and daughter reach Texas, for ‘at the farmhouse, the map wasn’t the only thing that recalled the Bog Man – it was my father’s stoic face, all creased and furrowed, unflinching, as if preserved from antiquity in a jar’.48 Jeliza-Rose’s belief will later be made flesh in a horrifically literal way by Dell’s handiwork. As befits a Gothic figure, Dell has held a life-long obsession with Noah, and his return, especially as a corpse, allows her to satisfy the possessive and obsessive inclinations of her nature by immortalising him in varnish. In American Gothic works such as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or Psycho, the family as a whole is depraved and infertile, its remaining members the last of their line. Sexual perversion is common, whether actual or implicit incest (in Poe and Faulkner), or sexual frustration and confusion manifesting itself in extreme violence (Hitchcock). Dead mothers dominate, their ghosts, corpses or simply their memories continuing to inflict massive psychological damage on their children. The epithet ‘mummy’s boy’ has rarely been as disturbing a label as it is with Norman Bates. The state of depravity finds its symbol in the home, normally a unifying site of family history and continuity, but in these cases always discovered as a mausoleum, an architectural tomb. Tideland conforms to this pattern, even extending it, for in fact it has two corrupt families, those of Jeliza-Rose and Dickens. Both families are on the verge of extinction, and perhaps for this reason their members are drawn to one another, the developing but never actualised sexual relationship between Jeliza-Rose and Dickens part of a familial quest for continuance. Dell’s attempt to consummate in death with Noah what eluded her in life presents this same desire in a decidedly more extreme form.

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228  terry gilliam As with Poe, Faulkner and Hitchcock, all the parents in Tideland end up dead, and the surviving children (Dell included) remain seriously damaged. Tideland contains not two, but three mausoleums, once we include the Los Angeles apartment where Jeliza-Rose’s mother dies. With Poe the House of Usher actually falls, while with Faulkner the Compson residence entraps the surviving (but childless) son, Jason Compson. The Bates home in Psycho remains a hollow and horrific symbol of the family’s dissolution, while in Tideland the house JelizaRose finally abandons still contains the varnished body of her dead father, a contemporary Bog Man waiting to be discovered. The girl’s eventual escape from What Rocks breaks the Gothic pattern of entrapment and fatal decline. Her closest counterpart is Caddie Compson in The Sound and the Fury, who also flees successfully. But Caddie is both older and more aware and motivated – she understands that emotionally, spiritually and psychologically her family is terminally ill, and she also strains under the frustrated incestuous attentions of her three brothers. Jeliza-Rose, by contrast, only escapes Dell’s perverse suggestion that she, Noah, Dell and Dickens are a family because Dickens kills the monster shark. Trapped himself in the circumscribed world of fantasy and Dell’s abuse, Dickens, by blowing up the train, not only symbolically frees himself from the warping influence of his family, but also propels Jeliza-Rose away from that corrupted world into the arms of a new and potentially attentive mother. Were Tideland solely a Gothic horror story these elements might be sufficient, but Maggie Kilgour indicates that part of the genre’s nebulous quality arises from its hybridity, the fact that ‘it cannot be seen in abstraction from the other literary forms from whose graves it rises’.49 Hybridity, as we have seen throughout, is a constant in Gilliam’s work. While the book about the Bog Man that Noah shows to Jeliza-Rose feeds into the darker Gothic weave, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland provides a textual antidote to the prevailing morbidity. That book opens up a magical imaginative space that Jeliza-Rose can inhabit, while also providing her with a reassuring doppelganger in Alice herself. The absurdity of Alice’s adventures parallels the horrors of Jeliza-Rose’s own. If the world is full of holes, many of which are tombs, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland offers a different, dynamic prospect removed from the death associated with Texas and Denmark. Dickens also has an alternative and liberating text in his bedroom, the map of the bottom of the ocean. This provides him with a magical world away from the deprivations of reality, for on the map ‘undiscovered countries existed in the depths, entire cities with people and dogs. There were castles and farms beneath the seas. There were husbands and wives and babies and ghosts.’50 He explores this

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  229 extraordinary realm in his submarine. These two figures (one a child, the other childlike) are innocents who cope with ghastly realities by escaping into fantasies that are protective and liberating. Dickens’s last act provides Jeliza-Rose with an escape route down another rabbit-hole, to that other, safer world. Cullin’s richly suggestive material required a small but talented set of actors able to cope with the vividness and the nuances of characters who at various times are grotesque, enchanted, terrifying and vulnerable. Gilliam had always wanted Jeff Bridges from The Fisher King to play the dissipated Noah, a figure who had to be capable of garnering enough sympathy despite his failings for the audience to comprehend Jeliza-Rose’s enduring love for him. Although Bridges was considerably younger than the 67-year-old character in Cullin’s book, his comparative youth gave Noah a wasted vigour that only emphasises his ravaged existence, while making his paternal intimacy with Jeliza-Rose and his relationships with Jeliza-Rose’s mother and Dell more plausible.51 The physically imposing English actor Janet McTeer plays Dell with a manic intensity drawn from a mix of religious zealotry and repressed sexuality. McTeer also has the allure to evoke, in a flashback scene, the rebellious beauty that had once attracted Noah to her, as well as the capacity to portray the helpless child desperately (and literally) attempting to preserve her dead mother. Jennifer Tilly has a relatively minor role as Jeliza-Rose’s mother, but she creates a vivid and unashamedly sluttish grotesque that seems to channel Bette Davis from What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? through William Burroughs. The film’s location and finance opened the door for local actors, and Gilliam did something he had not done before, choosing Canadian Brendan Fletcher to play Dickens on the basis of an audition tape. But the greatest potential difficulty lay in casting the role of the central character, Jeliza-Rose, an 11-year-old girl who negotiates horrific as well as magical events while tilting on the precarious edge of sexuality. As Gilliam admits: ‘The dangerous thing about making this film was the fact that a little girl, a very little girl about nine or ten years old is in every scene, she is the movie.’52 Canadian Jodelle Ferland, a seasoned veteran of television film who turned ten during the shooting, gives a startlingly mature, sustained and variegated performance of a girl able to survive Gothic horrors and only half-understood passions, while retaining her childlike wonder amidst the maelstrom. The small scale of the film offered a welcome relief after monstrous trials endured on Grimm. The supportive hand of producer Jeremy Thomas also helped, with his faith in Gilliam and the script, and his ability to put together a financial package (including, ironically, money from the UK Film Council Lottery Fund) for what was always going to

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230  terry gilliam be an idiosyncratic film. Thomas admits that he ‘decided right at the beginning that if you’re going to work with Terry you have to want to work with him and make the film he wants to make’, adding, ‘I believe that by giving him a free hand, like a painter, that the end result will be amazing.’53 His attitude provided a massive contrast to what Gilliam saw as the manipulative aggression of the Weinstein Brothers. Thomas had wanted to work with Gilliam for twenty years, during which he had produced an independent and international array of films including Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch and Crash, Phil Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence and Takeshi Kitano’s Brother. The small budget, shooting location and tight schedule meant that experienced Canadian-based talent was hired, all new to Gilliam, but Tideland also allowed him to rehire cinematographer Nicola Pecorini (one of the casualties of The Brothers Grimm), and to work again with Lesley Walker (one of that film’s survivors). Both had worked on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the two films bear some relationship in terms of the relatively small budgets and crews, the speed of shooting, and the vivacity, movement and colour captured on the screen. The parallels between Tideland and Fear and Loathing do not end there. Both films are adaptations of distinctive if very different literary works, told via first-person narratives by eccentric protagonists. But where, in Fear and Loathing, Gilliam and Grisoni retain a high percentage of voiceover as a means of maintaining Duke’s acerbic commentary on people and events, in Tideland the voice-over strategy largely was abandoned. Grisoni explains this by noting that ‘We didn’t want a voice-over where our hero nurses us through the tale’, adding that when ‘you lose the cosiness of the voice-over, you are instantly left with the anxiety of watching this child go through her various trials and tribulations. Will she survive and what’s going to happen next?’54 The result is ­altogether edgier, especially given the girl’s innocence compared to Duke’s conscious and subversive amorality. Drugs, sex and violence hold significantly less menacing associations for a Gonzo journalist than for an 11-year-old girl. For the most part we see Jeliza-Rose, rather than hear her first-person narrative, but Tideland begins, as Fear and Loathing had done, with the voice of the book’s narrator over a black screen. In this case, Jeliza-Rose quotes from the opening section of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice falls down the rabbit-hole, while the theme music, a haunting mix of piano and a music box a young girl might possess, fades in. The quotation, while not exactly the passage in Tideland the book, establishes Alice as a presiding figure in the film, and a slow-motion dive by the camera to the bottom of a vivid blue ocean covered in waving seaweed picks up visually the central motif of a fall into new realms. But a startling change

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  231 of colour as the camera continues its fall transforms the blue seaweed into golden grass. This simultaneously unsettling and enchanting manoeuvre introduces the notion of deceptive appearances and doubled identities that proliferate through the film. Close-ups of grasshoppers establish that we are on grassy plains rather than under water, but this opening shot also establishes the link between the two spaces, both of which are associated with imaginative freedom. The idea of a natural world also anticipates an implicit and important relationship with the unnatural, the Gothic, brightly lit outdoor settings soon to be contrasted with dark interiors, both literal and metaphysical. The sea and the open plains prove to be the spaces where Jeliza-Rose and Dickens can explore, free from the corrupted limitations of their adult relatives. Two doll heads amidst the grass on the tips of Jeliza-Rose’s fingers introduce her as the central character, the slightly ghoulish elements of severed heads interplaying with a young girl happily singing the song composed about her by her father. For copyright reasons the original Barbie names are changed, so that Classique, Fashion Jeans, Cut ’N Style and Magic Curl are made over as Mystique, Baby Blonde, Glitter Girl and Sateen Lips. Wide establishing shots of Jeliza-Rose skipping through luxurious grass create a mood of colourful adventure that is reinforced in the upturned bus as she converses with magical and fairylike fireflies. In the opening chapter of the book she watches ‘them with my lips parted in wonder’ and this is replicated in the film.55 Their flickering, she believes, indicates ‘understanding’, and, as she gives them names, the bus is ‘suddenly populated by children of my own creation’.56 In the book the passing train traumatises her, but Gilliam adjusts the tone of her screaming slightly, so that Jeliza-Rose more readily enjoys the thrill of the terrifying train. Still, the sense of the train’s menace remains. Her scream provokes a cut to a dark nightclub where a leatherjacketed Noah and his band are playing a driving rhythm and bluesy song, ‘Van Gogh in Hollywood’.57 The relationship between this and the opening scene are unclear, but the move indoors, and from children’s adventure to a seedier adult world, initiates a tension between the two spaces, which more mobile camera movement and distorted angles and sounds reinforce. When the growling vocal changes to a wailing guitar solo, the scene changes abruptly again to something more repellent: a fat, ghostly woman in gaudy make-up whose piercing howl and hacking cough offer the first real evidence of the Gothic and the grotesque. We come to recognise this ghastly vision as Jeliza-Rose’s mother, and the setting as the family apartment, a dingy riot of druggy icons and brica-brac (including, in a self-referential joke, ‘Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation’ LP). Gilliam’s use of wide-angle lenses, canted frames

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232  terry gilliam and odd camera angles creates a twisted and oppressive environment that mixes Gothic elements of heavy shadow, decay, detritus and ghostly figures with the faded and tainted world of junkies. Hunter S. ­Thompson’s gilded memories of drug-enriched San Francisco seem far from the degradation depicted here. Relatively long takes help viewers soak up the squalor. But Noah’s dreams of Denmark, symbolised in a model of a Viking longboat lit by candles, hint at other possible worlds and lives. This early scene explicates Jeliza-Rose’s differing relationships with her parents: antagonism to her mother and devotion to her father. In some ways Tideland traces the girl’s search for a mother, given that her birth mother (only ever known by her nickname Queen Gunhild)58 is so patently deficient. A crude, slovenly figure, usually supine and selfabsorbed, she remains trapped in the destructive world of addiction, so that her daughter’s emotional distance from her seems entirely ­justifiable. Jeliza-Rose’s dutiful relationship to her father is more understandable, for even though he too is an addict, his rock band gives him a dark romanticism, and his stories of Denmark prophesy escape. But the relationship between father and daughter provides the first moment of real audience unease, as Jeliza-Rose helps her father shoot up. In the book her first person narration treats preparing syringes as commonplace, and the relatively long takes that document the acts of pre­paration and injection also convey a sense that within this environment these are entirely normal events. But seeing a young child prepare a syringe, offer it to her father, and then casually put the used syringe in her mouth while she helps him collapse into a torpor makes the scene more shocking and provocative in the film than in the book. Seeing the squalid behaviour of Duke and Gonzo in the film of Fear and Loathing detracted from the heroic excesses recorded in the book, but in this case the visual representation of events from outside Jeliza-Rose’s perspective adds to the tale’s Gothic quality, providing visual emblems of the depravity the girl’s unconcerned textual account passes over. When Noah goes to inject himself a shot from below draws attention to the sunglasses that foretell his blacked out state and the large coloured-glass windows of the apartment. Throughout Tideland natural light struggles to enter internal spaces, whether houses, rabbit-holes or sheds where taxidermy take place; the coloured glass of the apartment windows suggests something artistic and simultaneously exclusionary, as though the family’s exotic life admits a little light, but only in distorted form. The mother tries to show her maternal side in the next scene, telling Jeliza-Rose how she had cared for her as a child (even

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  233 though the girl now is massaging the mother’s legs), and here the effusive sunlight signals the overblown quality of her account. Her attempts to squeeze the girl against her breast are met with fierce resistance, and when the daughter grabs some of her mother’s chocolate (another form of succour) she is smacked away and abused as a ‘little bitch’. This toxic relationship gets immediately contrasted with a night shot of Jeliza-Rose reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on her father’s lap. Although in truth he is comatose, the girl clearly finds comfort with him. But he also introduces her (and the audience) to darker material, entering her room late at night with the photograph of the Danish Bog Man. While initially she is relatively inattentive, as he leaves she sees on the wall a malevolent shadow looming behind him, the first true Gothic sign, signalling ghostly doubles, harmful forces, and a macabre connection between the Bog Man, the shadow, and Noah. But the mother in fact becomes Tideland’s first corpse, suffering a ghastly death as her methadone hit takes control. As she thrashes wildly in the dark, yellow-reddish light and lit candles suggest a crypt out of Hammer Horror films. Her gargles, gasps and final, extended and strangled howl render her something less than human, as though she were possessed, so that we are less likely to feel sympathy than horror at her death. When Jeliza-Rose enters, her traumatised father, hiding in the darkest corner of the room, captures her attention. But when the camera focuses again on the dead mother, a set of flashing mirror balls above the bed, coupled with candles and the coloured lights, transforms the room into something more magical, giving the mother a brief transcendent moment. This deft shift from horror to romantic fantasy illustrates how throughout Tideland Gilliam plays different modes against each other, so that the subsequent attempt to give the mother a Danish burial by wrapping her in a blanket with her prized possessions (shoes and chocolate), and then trying to set fire to it, swings between the Gothic, the epic and the blackly comic. Only Jeliza-Rose’s realisation that setting fire to the bed might destroy the whole building stops the descent into tragedy. Jeliza-Rose and Noah’s escape begins, symbolically enough, on a bus in darkness. The daughter reads Alice while the father vainly checks the radio to see if they are being followed. Gilliam marks the movement away from the hellish world of Los Angeles to the potential paradise of Texas with an adroit piece of visual magic: as the bus goes beneath a highway underpass the camera tracks it, panning from a night sky illuminated by a full moon to full daylight by the time the bus emerges at speed from the overpass and hurtles into the distance. A similar shot opens Fear and Loathing, but in Tideland it works less to indicate manic activity than to delineate the crossing of a border, perhaps from ­darkness

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234  terry gilliam to light, from a form of incarceration to freedom, but also, less positively, from the known to the unknown. When Gilliam read Tideland Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World came to his mind. Wyeth’s rural landscapes draw from Pennsylvania and Maine rather than the South, but he suggests similar emotional depths and psychological resonances to those in the book through his depictions of large, empty rural spaces, meagre farmhouses and isolated individuals. In Christina’s World, a girl or young woman lies in the foreground facing away from the viewer and looking towards a distant farmhouse. Wyeth keeps the relationship between the figure and the house intriguingly unspecified, but her slightly ungainly pose and straggling hair suggests some form of distress. Has she fallen? Is she crawling? (In fact the subject was Wyett’s crippled neighbour, Christina Olsen). This and other paintings by Wyeth were used as reference points to give the film a peculiarly Prairie-based American feel, Gilliam suggesting that Wyeth makes you ‘feel the breeze and smell the apple pie. And this is what we wanted to do with the look of this film – to be able to smell the apple pie.’ So the first shots of the landscape around What Rocks are beautiful and spare, the establishing shots notable for the fact that the horizons are horizontal, and that blue sky dominates the huge expanses of golden grass, in glaring contrast with the dark, constricted and distorted spaces of Los Angeles. Again, Gilliam uses longish takes so that the characters and the audience can savour the beauty of the landscape and the sense of hope it provokes. But these positive associations are undermined when they actually enter the farmhouse. Shadow, dust and debris outside hint that What Rocks has seen better days, but the audience does not immediately see inside. Instead, we get a shot from inside as Jeliza-Rose opens the door. Her shocked expression and the wildly canted frame tell us what we might have suspected, for What Rocks is less homestead than hovel. As she explores the house the worrying replication of the Los Angeles apartment becomes clearer. What had seemed at first a rural idyll in fact approximates the standard Gothic mansion: derelict, deserted and possibly haunted. As she opens the door to her own bedroom, the camera tracks back quickly in a trademark Gilliam shot, drawing her deeper into the dilapidation. But having taken stock of the grim surroundings, her imagination begins to fashion her an alternative reality. She takes her mother’s nightgown from her case and the four doll heads, placing them carefully as though they were talismanic objects. Noticing blood from her own bitten lips, she moves anxiously towards a large mirrored wardrobe, both a Gothic site of doubleness, and a more Alice-like entrance into a world of fantasy. Her apparent concern in fact is faked, and the mirror

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  235 provides her with a screen on to which she can project a melodramatic death scene drawn from the soap operas that have filled her days in Los Angeles. Jodelle Ferland’s ability to ham it up plausibly in this scene refigures Jeliza-Rose as creatively self-aware, still young enough to play with dolls, but also able to understand and exploit the performative aspects of identity. She plays both the male soap-opera doctor who assures his patient that ‘You will survive’ and the distraught female patient who cries out breathily ‘Oh doctor! Doctor!’ Gothic tales such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or Psycho often involve characters consciously or unconsciously adopting other personas, often the obverse of their public faces. Jeliza-Rose, by contrast, though she recognises the plasticity of identity (her mother, remember, was only known as Queen Gunhild) is not prey to multiple personalities, but uses them to explore possible roles. One of these is the dutiful daughter, and immediately after her own ‘death scene’ we find her preparing the syringe that ultimately will kill her father, a perverse extension of the medical scenario she has recreated from television. This ‘treatment’ occurs downstairs, replaying visually the equivalent scene in Los Angeles, even to the point of her taking a cigarette from Noah’s hand. But whereas in the city she had been confined to the apartment, at What Rocks she has the afternoon to explore the new world that surrounds her. Eventually she finds the upturned bus, and we recognise this as a return to the film’s first scene. In that narrative loop the audience has come to understand the multi-layered Gothic world of ghosts, corpses, decrepit environments and corrupted families, and to integrate that dark realm with the more creative elements Jeliza-Rose herself brings, a distinctive and invigorating mix of doll heads, soap operas and Alice in Wonderland. Not that her fantasy world is solely positive. When she returns to What Rocks after her excursion to the bus she spies a squirrel who hides in the house, and whose chittering seems almost to imitate speech.59 The world of doubling even extends to animals, and this creature functions as the equivalent of Alice’s rabbit; later still, it presents itself as a doppelganger for Jeliza-Rose herself. The squirrel coaxes the timid girl (who needs Mystique’s coercion) through a small hatch that approximates the rabbit-hole Alice falls down. Her adventurousness allows the girl to find a dark ‘cave’ of her grandmother’s belongings. After a terrifying scare in which a pile of clothes and a wig that might be a person fall heavily from a trunk Jeliza-Rose opens, she quickly finds clothes that enhance her freedom to dress up. In her conversations to this point with Mystique, Jeliza-Rose creates the doll’s voice, but as she looks back at Sateen Lips that doll head takes on a life of its own, briefly acquiring a live human face. The girl screams and appears to wake, so that it remains uncertain

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236  terry gilliam whether she has seen the transformation or simply dreamed it. But the increasing ambiguousness between reality and fantasy signals larger and more problematic confusions ahead. As the film progresses, the doll heads increasingly acquire agency, become able to move, think and speak without Jeliza-Rose’s help. Gilliam exploits their painted expressions to generate tension between the mask-like faces and extreme emotions of fear and horror, while the fact that Glitter Girl’s eyes have been forcibly removed only adds to the ghoulish quality of their bodiless forms. As Time Bandits, Baron Munchausen and Grimm had shown, the world of childhood fantasy can be terrifying as well as wondrous, but the resilience of the young imagination enables children to cope with such material, and create from it. Noah’s listless and eventually lifeless body exposes the fact that adults are less able to invent or renew themselves. Instead, heroin allows him to escape reality, to go ‘on vacation’, to enter the tideland between life and death. Brazil had considered both the positive and negative aspects of escapism, but in that film the audience was privy to Sam Lowry’s dreams and fantasies, so that at least they were able to see and evaluate the visions that so captivated Sam. But Noah’s trips in Tideland are solo adventures, something to which neither we nor the other characters gain access. His passivity and inertia point to stagnation rather than transcendence. Later, when Jeliza-Rose suspects that he is dead, and dresses him up in his mother’s wig, clothes and cosmetics, he mutates into a grotesque clown, his tongue and belly swelled, his dead eyes staring emptily, flies gathering. There seems a conscious reference here to Norman Bates at the end of Psycho, but where the disturbed Norman, disturbingly, is still very much alive, Noah is a dead mannequin, comic rather than terrifying. Whether he is alive or dead remains unclear during the first days at What Rocks. Certainly, on the first evening after his first hit of heroin (which also happens to be his last) he moves dully, but on the following morning he appears dead. The played out batteries of the radio-cassette player symbolically reinforce this assessment for the audience, but experience has taught Jeliza-Rose to expect him to revive. The gap between her perception and that of the audience remains, inviting the uneasy realisation that she is innocently caring for a corpse. The Gothic elements only increase when, soon after, she sees what she takes to be a ghost, a giant figure in black robes singing outside the bus. The audience has seen this creature the previous evening in a brief shot of a monstrous silhouette casting a spell on the house, another instance of the audience knowing or suspecting more than Jeliza-Rose herself. In an effort to placate this supposed spirit, the girl offers up

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  237 her father’s radio-cassette player, a suitable gift for communicating with the dead. But the figure, Dell, proves forcefully alive, even if she masks herself in huge black dresses, hats and mesh. As imposing and powerful as an adult, she is also a lost child, haunted by her own ghosts. Her mother died years before after being attacked by a vicious swarm of her father’s bees. He had left the family and Dell had set fire to the hives, but had lost an eye to a vengeful bee sting. The film gives us access to the troubled history Dell narrates, in two vivid scenes.60 In the first, overlaid on to an extreme close-up of Dell’s dead eye, we see her, as in some pagan ritual, dancing around the flaming beehives wearing a blood-red dress and floral headdress. Simultaneously celebratory and demonic, the startling image of the red dress set off against the luminous blue sky is expressionist in its vitality and passion. This contrasts tellingly with the more nostalgic golden glow of the second vignette, in which Dell’s mother (befitting the Andrew Wyeth setting) holds an iconic apple pie while being stung to death in her own kitchen by a huge swarm of bees. Cullin has Dell tell Jeliza-Rose that ‘Mother’s heart stopped and she never finished the dishes’, a suitably perverse mix of the ghastly and the comic, but Gilliam and Grisoni have her say that ‘Mamma’s heart just stopped and we never ate apple pie again.’61 Given the film’s important theme of maternal succour, and the damaging effect when that succour is absent, this line retains the book’s macabre comedy while adding Wyeth’s haunting depiction of prairie life. The third troubled and deserted child, along with Jeliza-Rose and Dell, is Dell’s brother, Dickens. Where Janet McTeer plays Dell as a very large and frightening witch (an act that covers Dell’s insecurities), Dickens first appears in silhouette through a curtain as some kind of grotesque monster. Brendan Fletcher’s performance as Dickens has a physical intensity and an emotional intricacy that generates both sympathy for, and horror at, his debased state. There are literary connections between Dickens and the idiot Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Charles Laughton’s Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame serves as the most obvious parallel from film. Indeed in an early appearance we see Dickens wearing a scuba-diving mask that deforms his facial features, very much in the fashion of Laughton, while the hood of his jacket works visually as a hump. Dickens’s loping strides as he ‘swims’ through the long grass further signal the association with the deformed bell-ringer, and, like him, Dickens becomes the most surprising of romantic figures. But he is no pale parody, for despite his physical and mental problems, and the oppression he suffers from Dell, he enjoys a rich and invigorating fantasy life as the captain of Lisa, roaming the South Pacific in search of the monster shark. When he first

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238  terry gilliam enters What Rocks, his grotesque form causes Jeliza-Rose to think he is a threatening Bog Man, but their visit to Lisa presents him far more positively as a nautical adventurer. Dell may be trapped in memories of her mother’s gruesome death, and Jeliza-Rose’s parents are themselves also dead, but Dickens’s heroic identity and invented world reject the adults’ morbidity. The power of his imagination is such that when the girl returns to What Rocks after visiting Lisa she imagines the whole house capsizing and sinking into the plains. This replicates a moment in the book, but the actual image of a large farmhouse suddenly tilting at the whim of Jeliza-Rose’s imagination and then, to the sound of creaking timbers, sliding below the surface of the land, is visually astounding. In a film dominated by the dark tones and mood of the Gothic, the magical sequence that follows works as a wondrous and revivifying oasis in a desert of corpses, repression and shadows. Jeliza-Rose’s fantasy world that Gilliam constructs is overtly artificial, reproducing the act of childish creativity: the ocean that seemingly fills What Rocks is a luminous blue, as though magically coloured, and intense light floods through the windows. These elements create a wondrous and liberating space through which slowly drift furniture, syringes, curtains, fish, a probably dead father in a rocking chair, and Mystique. Where these objects are carried on currents, Jeliza-Rose actively swims about, captivated by the product of her imagination. But Mystique throws up a challenge, taunting in the best playground tradition that the girl is in love with Dickens. Riding out this provocation, Jeliza-Rose ‘swims’ out of What Rocks towards her heroic sea captain, who is ‘down in the deep, deep place where dreams are made’. In a stillartificial world in which the seaweed that waves languidly seems made from diaphanous cloth, and Dickens’s scuba drifts slowly down in the foreground, Jeliza-Rose enters deeper emotional waters, signalled by a plastic model of a deep sea diver and the submarine sounds Dickens had made in Lisa. The seaweed now parts like a theatrical curtain to reveal a darker scenario, and the Gothic home where Dell and Dickens live comes into view, before which stands the alarming image of Dell as a one-legged pirate with a hook, whipping a rag-covered Dickens, a prisoner who cries out for mercy. But this more Gothic vision itself is destroyed by the sound of a truck horn, and the images instantly dissolve back into reality: at Dell’s insistence Dickens has been moving pumpkins in front of their house. The truck belongs to the delivery man with whom Dell shortly will have sex. And Jeliza-Rose, hiding in long grass in front of the house, is forced to admit that Dickens is not a sea captain or a prisoner, but, as Mystique notes dismissively, ‘more like a farmer’. Still, the crucial issue of the girl’s emerging sexuality has been raised.

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  239 The fact that Jeliza-Rose’s vision begins in front of What Rocks and ends in front of Dell’s house might suggest problems with narrative continuity, but the form and nature of Cullin’s book, with its many diversions into dream and fantasy amidst the astonishing reality, mean that simple causality or rational sequence is less determining than visual or thematic associations. This allows Gilliam and Grisoni some degree of leeway with what they select and how they piece sections together. So, while in the text Jeliza-Rose thinks she falls down the rabbit-hole after Dickens has failed to find Mystique down there, and they hear the sound of the monster shark, in the film Dell appears at this point, her black robes changed for bright red trousers, shotgun in hand. As she charges forward she propels the girl back in slow motion towards and then down the rabbit-hole. And while in the text Jeliza-Rose blacks out with a sense of falling, in the film we see her magically float backwards towards the hole and then fall into it. Gilliam creates a surreal but still terrifying fall using relatively simple materials: a slow motion shot of her screaming as she falls down a hole from which tree roots protrude, and in which images from What Rocks and her past float around. He consciously avoids an overly slick rendition of the fantastic fall, wanting the images to reflect the young girl’s unsophisticated viewpoint. Visually, the dislocated but suggestively connected images almost mark a return to the Monty Python animations, although here they are more thematically focused. Syringes drift down along with a lantern, a peanut-butter jar and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Baby Blonde and Sateen Lips dive more purposefully down towards her body (prone, covered with a blanket) wondering whether she is dead or alive. Their anxieties are relieved when she breathes amidst the debris at the bottom of the hole, and this recognition prompts an abrupt cut to their faces, in extreme close-up, high above Jeliza-Rose’s body as she lies in her bed. But as she wakes to indistinct voices and noises downstairs, the doll heads warn and plead with her not to go below. As well they might, for Dell and Dickens are carrying out the gruesome task of gutting and varnishing Noah. A director with Gilliam’s reputation for excess might have wallowed in the grisliness of what follows, but in fact the book is more graphic than the film, describing ‘how the tools were used, how the skin was peeled, how the intestines were held. The gristle and tissue cleaned from the nose. The brain spoon made by hammering and shaping a wire tip. The eyeballs snipped from their sockets … My father’s meat scraped and sheared, dumped into buckets’, and so on. In the book Jeliza-Rose questions whether these gruesome images are the product of ‘Imagination or memory?’62 but on film that uncertainty is erased by the actuality

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240  terry gilliam of the visual images. And yet the words are more disturbing than the pictures, even though the images still have ample power to shock. In this makeshift operating theatre, with its rough parallels to Hammer Horror Frankenstein (with Dell as the mad scientist and Dickens as her mangled assistant) natural illumination is excluded, the room being suffused with violet light and dark shadows. But the genuine horror the preservation of Noah’s body produces is kept in check by a judicious refusal to wallow in the body’s innards; we are far from The Meaning of Life’s Mr Creosote here. This restraint maintains the gruesome atmosphere while allowing space for other important aspects: Dickens’s distress at his role in the gut-wrenching proceedings; Jeliza-Rose’s initial collapse and then ready acceptance of her dead father as a varnished shell; Dell’s revelation of her long-standing love for Noah, and the perverse relish with which she welcomes his permanent return. At the same time there is something oddly hilarious as well as macabre in the figure of Noah clad only in a pair of jeans, sitting static in a chair, much as he had done for most of the film. Gilliam has often exploited the comic side of the grotesque and Noah provides a clear opportunity to laugh at death while concurrently recognising the limits of mortality, limits that Dell denies through her taxidermy. Gilliam also gives Dell a religiosity that at best remains implicit in the book. In preserving corpses she gives them a sort of life after death, something Dickens equates with Jesus’s ability to raise the dead.63 The film greatly expands this concept, for after having finished Noah, Dell calls on the others to help ritually cleanse What Rocks, hurling out the house’s detritus and painting the inside walls a pure and Protestant white. The manner of the refurbishment is as startling as the results, for over a montage of shots of Dell, Jeliza-Rose and Dickens happily cleaning and painting, Gilliam overlays what sounds like a Baptist spiritual, ‘Wash Me in the Blood of Jesus’, but which in fact was written by Gilliam, Grisoni and others.64 This surprisingly upbeat introduction of song breaks the prevailing gloomy atmosphere, and briefly threatens to topple the film into zany parody. But the interlude prepares the way for the post-Noah section of the film, where Jeliza-Rose’s sexuality comes more to the fore. The luminous white of the house suggests, in Dell’s terms, a new beginning, but in reality that whiteness symbolises the sterile and static world she wants to maintain. And the quasi-religious feast she prepares, which, along with the talk of them all being a family, makes her ‘mother’ (Noah being seated at the other end of the table as ‘father’), is a form of temptation for the physically and emotionally starved Jeliza-Rose, as well as for Dickens. But Dell is no maternal figure, having already roughly rejected the girl’s attempts to gain phys-

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  241 ical comfort from her after the work on Noah has been completed. The family Dell wants to institute is a deranged fantasy that links her to her dead love, and locks the girl and Dickens into the deathly embrace. In the Gothic world, families normally wither and die. Noah’s new state provides the stage for perhaps the film’s most surreal scene. With Dell and Dickens returned to their house (in a Wyethesque wide shot we see their pick-up leaving), Jeliza-Rose goes upstairs and hears the doll heads she had lobbed into the hole where Noah’s stomach had been, laughing playfully. The audience is taken inside Noah’s hollow form, something she has described as looking like a burrito, another instance of comedy undercutting the gruesome. With light pouring in from above and more gospel music, Noah’s ribcage forms a large cathedral-like space, in which Baby Blonde and Sateen Lips, now with angelic wings attached, fly about intoning, ‘Oh brothers and sisters, she’s been washed in the blood of Jesus.’ The ‘she’ they refer to is the bizarre composite of Mystique’s head atop Jeliza-Rose’s mother’s body, as she sits in a chair that tilts forward and prepares her for an operation. In a close-up we see Mystique’s head, the skull of which then perversely opens out from the centre, while a pulsing brain, held by metal claws, descends. As the doll heads exalt the fact that ‘Jesus has given her a new brain’, a brain drops from the claws into the open skull, the top of which then snaps shut. The weird exuberance of this scene, which seems to combine Frankenstein with Billy Graham in a sacrilegious, horrific and subversively funny cocktail, has no real equivalent in the book, edging instead towards Pythonesque animation. It resists easy interpretation, the constituent parts tantalising the viewer with the possibility of a transcendent or coherent meaning while merely suggesting notions of rebirth, the rehabilitation of the Jeliza-Rose’s mother, and a more general religiosity that the girl might be accepting, but which the film itself criticises. An abrupt cut then takes us outside, where the squirrel Dell loathes gets caught in Dickens’s trap, returning us from fantasy to an equally disturbing reality. For believers, the world may be born again, but death still haunts it. The newborn whiteness of What Rocks retains some semblance of purity or innocence, for in this setting the ‘courtship’ of Jeliza-Rose and Dickens begins in earnest. Typically, it starts bizarrely, with the girl coming down the stairs to see what at first seems to the audience another replay of Psycho: a bewigged figure rocks back and forth in a chair. But the figure is Dickens, still wearing his best clothes from the earlier feast and his sea captain’s hat, a costume that presents him in his most dashing light, the scarred, bristly head, ruined teeth and garbled body language notwithstanding. This scene shows Gilliam’s ability to control

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242  terry gilliam the complex emotional and tonal balance between the developing relationship of two innocents on one side, and the potential threat of sexual catastrophe on the other. For some members of the film audience, the scenes of kissing and petting between Jeliza-Rose and Dickens provoke acute anxiety, prompting them to walk out of screenings. Yet none of her descriptions of these moments in the book register any sense of fear or unease. Rather, they appear on the page as the ingenuous passions of a young and imaginative girl. On the screen, however, the physicality of these scenes with Dickens creates a more unsettling dynamic, especially given the age and size difference of the characters, and the fact that Jeliza-Rose’s later attempts to make herself attractive to Dickens are endearingly childlike and, simultaneously, worryingly sexualised.65 An adult film audience senses dangers to which Jeliza-Rose remains largely immune. At the same time, the audience’s voyeuristic relationship to the action creates unease about their own complicity in what appears on screen. One of the film’s successes in terms of characterisation and atmosphere lies in maintaining this double reading, so that the viewers alternate between anxiety over her naivety and empathy for her feelings. But other signs of censure are more proximate. When they first kiss, a huge simultaneous explosion at the nearby quarry causes Dickens to reel away violently, as though the blast signifies a higher-level disapproval. Later, when he and Jeliza-Rose kiss again in his room in a more obviously sexualised way (from the audience’s point of view, at least) a startling sound from his mother’s room again causes him to fear his mother’s disapproval. These two points mark significant moments in their relationship, which, though neither of them can know it, will free them both from the unhealthy circumstances they are naively trapped within. The blast draws them towards the quarry, from which Dickens has stolen the dynamite he believes will help him bring about ‘the end of the world’. This is his secret, one he promises to show Jeliza-Rose once Dell has gone to town. In the gap between that initial promise and its fulfilment, Jeliza-Rose works through her romantic feelings with her remaining doll, the often-brusque and perceptive Glitter Girl. Glitter Girl sanctions Dickens as a ‘sweet prince’, although she also proposes a certain sexual adventure, asking Jeliza-Rose to kiss her. When the girl refuses, Glitter Girl forces herself into Jeliza-Rose’s mouth, to be immediately spat out. And when the girl’s stomach rumbles, Glitter Girl asks pointedly, ‘what do we have here, then?’ Jeliza-Rose interprets these sounds as a sign of pregnancy from kissing, which prompts Glitter Girl to insist that they tell Dickens, and find out his secret. With the doll head’s endorsement Jeliza-Rose then makes her way to Dickens’s house, dressed in

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  243 makeshift bridal gown and make-up. The book does not mention this attire, but Gilliam exploits the visual possibilities of costume to give Jeliza-Rose an older social identity. Within the Gothic context, brides are often doomed creatures, and even if we accept the girl’s childish love of dressing up, there is something fundamentally disturbing about the canted image of a child bride moving towards an old, eerie house. The unease only intensifies when she then moves towards the shed in which Dell carries out her taxidermy. In the dim light we see that her make-up (gaudy blue eye shadow, mascara and bright red lipstick clumsily put on), although what one might expect from a young girl, in this context is dangerously sexualised. But though her grotesque appearance, the red lighting, stuffed animals, and dark shadows satisfy the visual conventions of Gothic horror, there exists a crucial counterpoint, the squirrel Dickens had captured earlier. Now caged and close to being killed and stuffed, it warns Jeliza-Rose that the same fate awaits her. While she still wants to believe that Dell might replace her own mother, she also has sympathy for the squirrel, whose curiosity and vitality mirrors her own. So she allows Glitter Girl to act as her proxy, and set the squirrel free. Real and metaphysical cages appear in nearly all Gilliam films, and almost always house the dissenter or the innocent. In most cases, these figures escape, with the squirrel’s triumphant ‘I’m free! I’m free. Whoopee’, being the most exuberant exit of all. In this instance, its warning goes unheeded, so that when JelizaRose and Dickens enter his house, her own sense of adventure, mixed with childish notions of romance, draw her on. The film’s audience, slightly distanced compared to the book’s readers, whose information is filtered through Jeliza-Rose’s sensibility, are more likely to recognise the threat to her. Certainly the weird camera angles, haunting music and the visual emblems of death and corruption that pack the house in the form of stuffed animals, dark shadows, and hidden rooms, contribute to the unnerving sense of menace. But Dickens’s room itself, dark and dishevelled though it is, offers a form of imaginative sanctuary. Red, blue, aquamarine and tangerine light permeate the room when seen from different angles, making it a magical and disorienting place, but one in which Dickens, with his dynamite, can dream of killing the monster shark, of calling down ‘the end of the world’, of being a hero. And as such he might be worthy of Jeliza-Rose, whose gentle caress causes him to say that he will do it ‘because you love me’. Dickens’s expression at this amazingly charged moment is pitiable, a poignant combination of fear, hope, love and the expectation of rejection or harsh punishment. It recalls Quasimodo or John Hurt’s Elephant Man, unbelieving that they do not repulse a loved female. But almost instantly

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244  terry gilliam the unsettling ­implications of this unlikely relationship start to develop. Jeliza-Rose, as if in some fairy-tale-cum-soap-opera, lies back on ­Dickens’s bed, promising to be his wife forever. In intense red light he climbs on to the bed, touching the young girl’s stomach, hearing the rumbling and pronouncing the baby asleep. But when he climbs above her in an ambiguous mix of arousal and naivety, she pulls away, asking him about his map of the bottom of the ocean. In a brilliantly modulated piece of acting as he describes this magical realm, Glitter Girl rises behind his head and declares ‘Yuk’, before receiving a harsh flick in the head from Jeliza-Rose. This act suggests that the young girl still has her critical functions and her agency. And she in fact pulls Dickens on to the bed, playing an exhilarating game of dare as they wriggle their tongues at each other. Just then the noise in the next room destroys the moment, and leads them both into the most death-ridden room in the film. The establishing shot for this sequence is massively tilted, Dickens’s head poking in from the background in the upper right-hand part of the room, while in the foreground at bottom left is a picture of his mother that has fallen from the wall. The rest of the frame, essentially, is deep shadow. As the image rights itself and Dickens cleans up the mess, Jeliza-Rose moves slowly but assuredly towards the bed on which the shrivelled corpse of the mother lies, much like the Bog Man photograph Noah had showed her back in Los Angeles. Her familiarity with that photograph and Noah’s own preserved body ensures that despite the horrific form, one that might well repulse the film audience, she conveys no negative emotion. The camera follows her movement and gaze in a matter of fact fashion, and Gilliam avoids using dramatic angles, closeups or emphatic cutting. In fact, for all the perversity of the imagery, much of this scene is played out as though the shrivelled up corpse of a beloved mother on a bed is entirely normal; which, in the abnormal Gothic world, it is. Jeliza-Rose is more animated by finding various items from What Rocks that have been added to a shrine in the room. This leads her to discover photographs showing the young Noah and Dell as a handsome couple, and her recognition of a bizarre correspondence between her and Dickens’s kissing and that of Noah and Dell: ‘They do it like we do it.’ Dell’s unexpected return nullifies the horrid prospect opened up by this parallel, and in a frenzy of disgust and fury Dell chases Jeliza-Rose, catches her, crushes Glitter Girl, and, pushing Dickens to the side, plants the girl on the bed and threatens the destruction of Jeliza-Rose’s alter ego, Mystique, whom Dell had retrieved from the rabbit-hole. When Dickens begins to convulse, Dell goes to his aid, but Jeliza-Rose, fearing Dell is harming him, assails her and is then

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  245 hurled back on to the bed, crushing the skull of the preserved mother, which collapses with a gritty, cracking sound. Fleeting though it is, the front-on image of the ghoulish mother, and then the horrendous sound of her skull being crushed, impresses itself forcefully on the viewer. The manic energy of the scene immediately halts, as Dell and Jeliza-Rose take in the enormity of the act. Another fleeting shot from the side of the crushed skull elicits from Dell a childlike ‘Momma’, and while JelizaRose takes the opportunity to flee, Dell crawls on to the bed, clings to her mother like an infant, and then, horrified at the destruction, desperately tries to replace her mother’s glass eyeball. This once again plays off the comic and the grotesque, our sense of revulsion combining with recognition of the ludicrous situation, as well as the powerful emotions let loose. While Jeliza-Rose’s escape temporarily relieves the threat of Dell, the girl still craves the protection of her own dead parent, believing that Dell will hunt her down. At this moment she is at her most isolated, her mother and father dead, her supposed new ‘family’ now hopelessly estranged. By blowing up the monster shark, Dickens irrevocably forces her away from himself, Dell and her father, and towards the as-yet unknown woman from the train wreck who will become the maternal substitute the girl has searched for throughout. In the aftermath of the blast the last vestiges of her former life fall away: What Rocks is badly damaged; Dell, stripped of her witch’s costume, flashes briefly into view at the wreckage looking for Dickens before disappearing; when Jeliza-Rose thinks she sees her sea captain alive among the debris, the light reveals the figure to be a seriously injured passenger. We infer that Dickens is dead. But the new mother-figure fills the void, and the return of the fireflies, the positive signs of creativity and illumination at the opening of the book and the film, holds out the possibility of renewal and happiness. Gilliam and Grisoni’s script holds true to the main elements of the book’s ending, apart from two subtle but telling changes. In the book, Jeliza-Rose, telling the passenger who offers her comfort about the fireflies, declares, ‘They’re so beautiful … They’re my friends you know. They have names.’ In the film, by contrast, the woman makes the first statement about the beauty of the luminous insects, registering a similar sensibility to the girl. As a consequence, Jeliza-Rose establishes a stronger bond between them by revealing that the fireflies are her friends. The book ends: ‘I brought my head to the woman’s breast, snuggling myself into her, and finished the orange – licking my lips after the last bite, aware of the lingering sweetness of my tongue and the stickiness on my chin – content as the fireflies welcomed the night.’66 Again the film repeats the main points of the action, but

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246  terry gilliam as the camera slowly moves in on Jeliza-Rose’s face as she sucks at the invigorating orange and stares enigmatically up at the fireflies, all the colour and light in the frame rapidly give way to an inky darkness, so that only her two haunted eyeballs remain visible, reflecting the circling fireflies. The disappearing colour and quickly darkening face register perhaps for the first time the traumatic effect on her of the perverse deeds she has witnessed, and the probability that they will haunt her well beyond this night. So, where the book finishes on a relative upbeat, the film’s finale is edgier and suggestively disturbing. Its arresting last image of Jeliza-Rose’s eyeballs, projecting the lights of the fireflies but surrounded by a vast, carbon-black void, lingers well beyond the final fade-out. The maternal passenger may have found a soul mate, but one perhaps more troubled than she realises. Tideland the novel provided Gilliam with fertile, confronting material that Cullin had handled distinctively. Hard drug use, taxidermy performed on humans, psychological abuse and mental impairment, sexual awakening and sexual obsession, corpses and Alice in Wonderland fuse potently on the page, particularly given a pre-pubescent girl as narrator and protagonist. As with Fear and Loathing, Tideland’s cult status held pitfalls as well as attractions, the need to recreate the compelling qualities that attracted readers (including Gilliam) having to be balanced by the need to produce a film that worked on its own terms. With all these dangers, Gilliam fashions a visually striking, selfsustained film that successfully conjures up the complex thematic and atmospheric elements of the book, something Cullin himself recognised and appreciated. But Tideland is undeniably challenging as cinema. Gilliam’s adventurous approach, perhaps the only one available from a filmmaker congenitally antagonistic to the mainstream, meant that Tideland inevitably would alienate some viewers while mesmerising others. This proved to be the case, and even festival audiences were divided. At its Toronto Film Festival premiere, some viewers walked out, even though Mitch Cullin appeared to lend approval. Tideland won the FIPRESCI Prize at the San Sebastian Festival in September 2005, awarded by a panel of international critics, but again a substantial number of the audience walked out. Jeremy Thomas had thought the film a contender for a Palme d’Or at Cannes, but, as Bob McCabe notes, the festival’s committee ‘felt otherwise, rejecting the film’.67 These contentious festival reactions suggested that the film would struggle to gain wide distribution, and this proved to be the case. Completed in mid-2005, Tideland appeared sporadically at a tiny number of festivals later that year, and only opened in Britain in August 2006. American audiences had to wait until October 2006, when the film began at

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  247 r­ elatively few venues. Reviews were mixed, with some critics finding repellent what they erroneously took to be implied paedophilia, while others were shocked by the sight of embalming or mummified corpses. Still others took against what they saw as Gilliam’s inherently excessive approach and style. All this, perhaps, is as it should be. As Fred Botting explains, ‘Gothic signifies the writing of excess’,68 and the same can hold true for the cinematic rendition of Gothic. Along with the negative reactions there were positive reviews that stressed the confronting nature of the original material and the arresting way in which Gilliam had fashioned a dynamic cinema experience. After the disappointment of Grimm and the disaster of Don Quixote, Tideland registered Gilliam’s return as a compelling and courageous director still willing to take risks and make complex and demanding films against the trends and norms of an industry dominated and stifled by commercial imperatives. To make such films, of course, requires the equally independent talents of producers such as Jeremy Thomas, cinematographers like Nicola Pecorini, editors of the calibre of Lesley Walker and scriptwriters such as Tony Grisoni, plus the actors and other crew members who threw themselves into a relatively small, challenging and idiosyncratic film that grabbed the audience so forcefully that some viewers were compelled to leave. For those who stayed, Tideland was intelligent and powerful cinema for adults that offered them the chance to experience the magical and often disturbing world of a young girl’s fantasy among damaged and damaging adults. In the same year that Tideland struggled to gain distribution, let alone recognition, the highest grossing film of the year was another fantasy film, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. This film, a sequel to a film based on a Disneyland theme park ride, made over $1 billion worldwide. Which perhaps says much about the environment in which Gilliam and filmmakers like him try to maintain something approaching an independent film industry. Forty years earlier Gilliam had seen barbed wire on the walls of Disneyland, taking this as a sign that he should leave America. Not in order to become a filmmaker, but simply as a way of rejecting the social norms and strictures to which he felt increasingly antagonistic. Ironically, the allegedly more conservative British environment provided the freedom needed for his creativity to flower. Or, perhaps, the tensions between long-standing British conservatism and emerging or developing new trends offered the possibility for intense, inventive and eventually productive struggles. Beyond these larger social forces, though, there were pieces of unplanned good fortune, most obviously the fact that

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248  terry gilliam his connection with John Cleese from their brief collaboration in New York provided a door into British television via producer and cartoonist Humphrey Barclay, on through Do Not Adjust Your Set, where he met Palin, Idle and Jones, and finally to Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Gilliam might have broken into British television anyway, but only the multitalented brilliance of Python translated into cinematic success; even great comic talents such as Peter Cook primarily stayed trapped within the small screen.69 Through his involvement with Python Gilliam came to establish himself initially as a maker of British films and ultimately on his own as a British filmmaker. But his centrality to the undoubted Python legacy only emphasises the astounding degree to which he has developed as a filmmaker beyond the crushing Bronzino foot, coconut shells, and alien battles over first-century Jerusalem. Gilliam has travelled farthest of the group metaphorically, if not literally (that prize belongs to Palin). That sense of travelling a great metaphorical distance underscores the variety and boldness of the films he has made over the last three decades. From the British medieval world of Jabberwocky to the contemporary America of Tideland, through the dark labyrinth of Brazil and the sumptuous fantasies of Baron Munchausen, Gilliam has chartered a unique course through British, American and European cultures, texts and sensibilities. This variety of itself demolishes the reductive reading of Gilliam merely as a fantasist (as if that term was itself a form of criticism), for his films utilise genres and themes as diverse as science fiction, Gothic horror, nonsense poetry, fairy tales, imaginary travels, medieval myth, Gonzo Journalism and dystopias. The literary element of this not exhaustive list registers the fact that for all the alluring and magical imagery of his films (another aspect sometimes used to criticise him and them) Gilliam’s films have an undiminished and significant verbal component. This textual side of his films reminds us of his role as collaborative screenwriter on many of his projects, realised and still in development. And Gilliam’s gifts as filmmaker also run to animation, set design and occasional performer. Other filmmakers have appeared in their own films, of course, but perhaps only Gilliam would first conceive, and then play, the part of a man who thinks the rocks he holds greedily are diamonds, seconds before he is literally stripped to the bone by a monster from a child’s poem. Despite the obviously fantastic elements at play here, and while none of Gilliam’s films stays entirely in the ‘real’ world or maintains a realist approach throughout, they all comment provocatively and critically on that world. And they do so, paradoxically, by reincorporating the fantastic into the everyday. Gilliam’s view that the medieval world was

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  249 a richer imaginative place in which the fantastic was recognised and incorporated into the daily lives of its people seems replicated in the way his films regularly depict the intersection of different temporal dimensions, genres, and levels of reality. These collisions and interactions call into question the concreteness of the ‘real’, and the standardised and limiting rationality underpinning it. Different types or forms of the nonreal or the unreal aggressively challenge the comforting but corrupting certainties that rationality provides. The representatives of realism such as Dennis Cooper (Jabberwocky), Horatio Jackson (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) or Delatombe (The Brothers Grimm) are depicted as either deluded fools or megalomaniacs, while imaginative dreamers like Kevin (Time Bandits), Baron Munchausen, Parry (The Fisher King) and Jeliza-Rose (Tideland) lead fertile lives that invigorate others. Not that Gilliam’s films are automatic validations of the fantastic: Sam Lowry (Brazil) can be seen, in one interpretation, as the victim of his escapist dreams, while Duke and Dr Gonzo’s experiments with hallucinogens (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) reduce them to dumb beasts, undermining to some degree their sense of themselves as rebels and social critics. The delusions of Noah and Dell, alongside the mangled imagination of Dickens in Tideland, suggest the often-porous boundaries between fantasy and madness. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, if it is realised, will map similar territory, but, as all Gilliam films have done, will do this with his characteristic inflections. As well as travelling across or through conceptual, textual and generic boundaries, Gilliam’s films carry passport stamps from various places of origin in Britain, Europe and North America. These marks are emblematic of the reality that being a British filmmaker does not preclude international adventures; given the often-troubled world of the British film industry, such expeditions are often necessities. The inherent danger, one made concrete in several of Gilliam’s films, is of a clash of different cultural sensibilities or economic imperatives. To date, Gilliam’s three attempts to make films in Europe have been extraordinarily traumatic, and in the case of Don Quixote, unsuccessful. But, as the individual accounts of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Brothers Grimm in this study record, very different forces acted both to hinder and to assist the completion of these projects. The films themselves emerged out of distinct moments in Gilliam’s career as a filmmaker; Munchausen found Gilliam on a critical high after the belated success of Brazil, while The Brothers Grimm was an attempt to regenerate career momentum after seven years without a finished film. Despite the ghastly circumstances of Grimm’s production and the tepid critical response to it, Gilliam still had the drive to co-write and direct

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250  terry gilliam a far more challenging film, Tideland. Of all the films he has made in North America, this was the least favourably received there, with charges that it depicted paedophilia and sanctioned drug-taking, things Gilliam energetically denied. If Gilliam’s sensibility had been at odds with mainstream America in the 1960s, it was still so four decades later. Importantly, while the original novel was written by an American and depicted Americans in America, the film was shot in Canada with British and Canadian finance, American, Canadian and British actors, and an international crew. Viewed positively, this multinational mix demonstrated the pulling power Gilliam’s name still had as a filmmaker, capable of attracting quality contributors such as Jeremy Thomas, Lesley Walker and Jeff Bridges. Despite the rollercoaster ride of his career, including high-profile accounts of films made and not made, very talented people wanted to work with and for Gilliam, to help him realise his artistic vision. And those who had worked with him wanted to do so again. Johnny Depp, having survived the debacle of the first attempt to make Don Quixote, committed himself to tilting at windmills again. We might, however, read the making of Tideland negatively, as indicating that Gilliam might in the future struggle to make anything more than small-budget films outside the boundaries and the resources of the major studios. Gilliam addressed the situation with characteristic directness, appearing in public in New York with a cardboard sign stating: ‘Studio-less Film Maker. Family To Support. Will Direct for Food.’ As he noted on the aptly titled ‘Dreams’, the website devoted to him and his films, the strategy worked; Tideland, which had struggled even to be screened in New York, ‘managed a large enough opening to generate a second and third week in the cinema – but I also made $25. Welcome to the joys and pain of independent filmmaking.’70 At the beginning of 2007 ‘Dreams’ announced that Gilliam had completed a new script with Charles McKeown, the title of which, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, suggested that he had not yet decided to swim back into the mainstream. It remains to be seen whether one or all of Don Quixote, Dr Parnassus and the Defective Detective eventually will find their way to the cinema screen. But while the future is unknowable, the last three decades of Gilliam’s career of filmmaker have generated one of the most distinctive bodies of work. Not all his films have been artistic or commercial successes, and these failings, most obviously in the case of Baron Munchausen and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, can at times be sourced back to Gilliam himself. Both were conscious attempts to make large-scale films beyond the cultural and commercial pull of Hollywood; the problems both encountered and created suggest that

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  251 Gilliam’s continuing aspirations to make films of this type cannot easily be achieved. And the tribulations over The Brothers Grimm seem to reinforce the difficulties of making a substantial studio film in America that does not adulterate itself. Difficult, but not impossible, for the commercial success of Twelve Monkeys and the critical success of Brazil show that even within the studio system provocative films that challenge and enthral can still be made and will still find an audience. Given amenable conditions, which sometimes only exist on the quirky fringes of the industry, films as different and engaging as Jabberwocky, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tideland can be produced. Sometimes, as with Time Bandits, these distinctive films find a mass audience. But at other times Gilliam has been satisfied by the knowledge that, to paraphrase what he said of Munchausen, the films will exist when we are dust. Certainly, without the rich body of work that Gilliam has created, our individual and collective imaginations would be poorer. Simple conclusions cannot easily be drawn from many of them, and because of this they draw us back to enjoy and be invigorated by the challenge and illumination of realms beyond the day-to-day, the rational, the ­standardised. Gilliam’s approach necessarily entails taking risks and improvising, which can sometimes give his films an ­unfinished quality; for his critics this counts as a failing, but for Gilliam and his supporters this aspect signals that stimulating rough edges have not been ground away or varnished over. His attitude inherently and often explicitly privileges imagination over economics, a risky stance to take in a risk-aversive industry grimly driven by financial imper­atives. In plotting this subversive course, Gilliam has endured disasters and enjoyed triumphs; but, whatever the fate of individual films, collectively they have encouraged us to think creatively and intelligently, and to question authority, sophistry, banality and conformity. By celebrating the silly, the beautiful and the magical, they continue to offer us ways of replenishing our imaginations, and generate fresh visions of this world, and the worlds beyond.

Notes 1 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dreams and Nightmares, p. 11. 2 Zipes, Magic Spell, p. 18 (original emphasis). 3 Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London, Chatto and Windus, 1994), pp. xv–xvi. 4 Ibid., pp. xvi. 5 Elizabeth Dalton, ‘Introduction’, in Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, ed. Elizabeth Dalton (New York, Barnes and Noble Books, 2003), pp.  xv–xxxiii, p. xv.

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252  terry gilliam 6 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1991), p. 8. 7 Ibid., p. 45. 8 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dreams and Nightmares, p. 22. 9 Ibid., p. 99. 10 Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (London, Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 3. 11 Ibid., p. 89. 12 See n.1 for publishing details. 13 Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, pp. 59–90. 14 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dreams and Nightmares, p. 52. 15 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 63. 16 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 109. 17 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 120. 18 Gilliam, in ibid., p. 142. 19 Gilliam, Director’s Commentary to The Brothers Grimm DVD. 20 At one point some crew members thought this figure, another computer-generated effect, should have the Weinsteins’ features. See McCabe, Dreams and Nightmares, p. 70. 21 Baron Munchausen and The Fisher King are the notable exceptions. 22 McCabe, Dreams and Nightmares, pp. 279–80. 23 Ibid., p. 293. 24 Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures, pp. 142–7. 25 Gilliam, in McCabe, Dreams and Nightmares, p. 290. 26 Gilliam quoted on the back cover of Mitch Cullin, Tideland (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000). 27 Ibid., p. 36. 28 Ibid., p. 37. 29 Ibid., p. 46. 30 Ibid., p. 13. 31 Ibid., p. 14. 32 Ibid., p. 54. 33 Ibid., p. 96. 34 ‘I’m falling very slowly. The sides of the hole are filled with cupboards and bookshelves’ (p. 118) draws from page 12 in Carroll, The Annotated Alice. 35 Cullin, Tideland, p. 136. 36 Ibid., p. 142. 37 Ibid., p. 143. 38 Ibid., p. 146. 39 Ibid., p. 148. 40 Fred Botting, Gothic (London, Routledge, 1996), p. 1. 41 Roger Luckhurst, ‘Introduction’, in Roger Luckhurst (ed.), Late Victorian Gothic Tales (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. ix–xxxi, p. x. 42 Ibid., p. xi. 43 Ibid. 44 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, Stein and Day, 1982), p. 29. 45 Teresa A. Goddu, ‘Introduction to American Gothic’, in Ken Gelder (ed.), The Horror Reader (London, Routledge, 2000), pp. 265–70, p. 265. 46 Cullin, Tideland, p. 17. 47 Ibid., p. 18. 48 Ibid., p. 17. 49 Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (London, Routledge, 1995), p. 3.

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fairy tales, nightmares and fantasies  253 50 Cullin, Tideland, p. 180. 51 In the book, the mother is forty years younger than Noah. 52 Terry Gilliam, ‘Casting’, in Tideland Production Notes, Tideland website, www. Tidelandthemovie.com/main.html (original emphasis). 53 Jeremy Thomas, ‘The Cameras Turn’, in ibid. 54 Tony Grisoni, ‘From Novel to Screenplay’, in ibid. 55 Cullin, Tideland, p. 12. 56 Ibid., p. 13. 57 Bridges would later release the song on an album of similar material. He sings on this, but does not play guitar, as he does in the film. 58 Queen Gunhilda in the film. 59 I thank Jo Watson for her knowledge of squirrel noises. 60 The script condenses and reorders the book for dramatic impact. 61 Cullin, Tideland, p. 151. In the book she does not die immediately, although she never recovers. 62 Ibid., pp. 142–3. 63 Ibid., p. 172. 64 The two other writers, André Jacquemin and David Howman, had worked on Python films. 65 Some viewers rejected the film on these grounds. 66 Cullin, Tideland, p. 192. 67 McCabe, Dreams and Nightmares, p. 292. 68 Botting, Gothic, p. 1. 69 Dudley Moore, of course, proves the exception, but his box-office success in America was based more on his charisma than on his comic talent. 70 www.smart.co.uk/dreams/tideus2.htm.

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Filmography

Animator, television work ‘Jimmy Young Puns’, ‘The History of the Whoopee Cushion’, ‘Beware the Elephants’ (Animations), for We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, 1968 (London Weekend Television) Animated Sequences for Marty, 1968 (BBC Television) ‘The Christmas Card’ (Animation) for Do Not Adjust Your Stocking, 1968 (Thames Television) Animated Sequences for Do Not Adjust Your Set, 1969 (Thames Television) Titles and Animated Sequences for The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, 1971 (ABC) The Great Gas Gala, 1972 (two commercials for British Gas)

Animator and performer, television Monty Python’s Flying Circus Series One: 5 October 1969 to 11 January 1970 Series Two: 15 September 1970 to 22 December 1970 Series Three: 19 October 1972 to 18 January 1973 Series Four: 31 October 1974 to 5 December 1974 Monty Python in Deutschland (1972) Monty Python Blodeln für Deutschland (1973)

Animator, film Title Sequence for Cry of the Banshee, 1970 (American International Pictures)

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filmography  255 Animator, screenwriter, performer

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And Now for Something Completely Different, 1971, 88 min. Director: Ian MacNaughton Production company: Kettledrum Production/Python (Monty) Pictures Producer: Patricia Casey Screenplay: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin Director of Photography: David Muir Animation: Terry Gilliam Editing: Thom Noble Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Carol Cleveland Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 1979, 93 min. Director: Terry Jones Production company: HandMade Films Producer: John Goldstone Screenplay: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin Director of Photography: Peter Biziou Animation: Terry Gilliam Editing: Julian Doyle Music: Geoffrey Burgon Leading players: Terry Jones (Mandy/Colin/Simon the Holy Man/ Bob Hoskins/saintly passer-by), Graham Chapman (1st Wise Man/ Brian called Brian/Biggus Dickus), Michael Palin (2nd Wise Man/ Mr Big Nose/Francis/Mrs A/ancient prisoner/Pontius Pilate/Roman governor/boring prophet/Eddie/Nissus Wettus), John Cleese (3rd Wise Man/Dirk Weg/Jewish official/Centurion of the Yard/Arthur), Eric Idle (Mr Cheeky/Stan/confused revolutionary/Harry the Haggler/bread-and-stone salesman/culprit woman/intensely dull youth/Otto/jailer’s assistant/Mr Frisbee III), Terry Gilliam (another person further forward/revolutionary/masked commando/bloodand-thunder prophet/Geoffrey/jailer) Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl, 1982, 80 min. Director: Terry Hughes, Ian MacNaughton Production company: HandMade Films Producer: Terry Hughes

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256  filmography

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Screenplay: Monty Python Editing: Julian Doyle Music: John Duprez, Ray Cooper Leading players: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Pamela Stephenson, Carol Cleveland, Neil Innes Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, 1983, 90 min. Director: Terry Jones Special sequence and animation director: Terry Gilliam Production company: Celandine Films/The Monty Python Partnership Producer: John Goldstone Screenplay: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin Director of Photography: Peter Hannan Editing: Julian Doyle Production design: Harry Lange Cast includes: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Carol Cleveland, Simon Jones, Patricia Quinn, Judy Loe, Andrew MacLachlan, Mark Holmes, Valerie ­Whittington, Jennifer Franks

Director The Fisher King, 1991, 137 min. Production company: TriStar Pictures Producer: Debra Hill, Lynda Obst Screenplay: Richard LaGravenese Director of Photography: Roger Pratt Editing: Lesley Walker Production design: Mel Bourne Music: George Fenton Leading players: Robin Williams (Parry), Jeff Bridges (Jack Lucas), Mercedes Ruehl (Anne), Amanda Plummer (Lydia), Adam Bryant (radio engineer), Paul Lombardi (radio engineer), David Hyde Pierce (Lou Rosen), Ted Ross (limo bum), Lara Harris (Sondra), Warren Olney (TV anchorman)

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filmography  257

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Twelve Monkeys, 1995, 129 min. Production company: Polygram Filmed Entertainment/Universal Pictures/Atlas/Classico Producer: Charles Roven Screenplay: David Peoples, Janet Peoples (inspired by the film La Jetée by Chris Marker) Director of Photography: Roger Pratt Editing: Mick Audsley Production design: Jeffrey Beecroft Music: Paul Buckmaster Leading players: Bruce Willis (James Cole), Madeleine Stowe (Kathryn Railly), Brad Pitt (Jeffrey Goines), Christopher Plummer (Dr Goines), Joseph Melito (Young Cole), Jon Seda (José), Michael Chance (Scarface), Vernon Campbell (Tiny), H. Michael Walls (Botanist), Bob Adrian (Geologist), Simon Jones (Zoologist), Carol Florence (Astrophysicist), Bill Raymond (Microbiologist), Ernest Abuba (Engineer), Irma St Paule (Poet), Joey Perillo (Detective Franki) The Brothers Grimm, 2005, 118 min. Production company: Dimension Films Producer: Daniel Bobker, Charles Roven Screenplay: Ehren Kruger Director of Photography: Newton Thomas Sigel Editing: Lesley Walker Production design: Guy Dyas Music: Dario Marinelli Leading players: Matt Damon (Wilhelm Grimm), Heath Ledger (Jacob Grimm), Lena Headey (Angelika), Jonathan Pryce (Delatombe), Peter Stormare (Cavaldi), Monica Bellucci (Mirror Queen), MacKenzie Crook (Hidlick), Richard Ridings (Bunst), Petr Ratimec (Young Will), Barbora Lukesová (Mother Grimm), Anna Rust (Sister Grimm), Jeremy Robson (Young Jacob)

Director, screenplay writer, performer Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1974, 90 min. Directors: Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones Production company: Python (Monty) Pictures

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258  filmography Producer: Mark Forstater Screenplay: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin Director of Photography: Terry Bedford Editing: John Hackney Production design: Roy Smith Animation: Terry Gilliam Music: Neil Innes Leading players: Graham Chapman (King Arthur/Guard of Swamp Castle), John Cleese (Black Knight/Sir Lancelot the Brave/French Knight/Tim the Enchanter), Terry Gilliam (Patsy/Soothsayer), Eric Idle (Sir Robin the-Not-Quite-So-Brave/Concorde/Roger the Shrubber/Brother Maynard), Terry Jones (Bedevere the Wise/ Herbert), Michael Palin (Galahad, Knight of Ni) Jabberwocky, 1977, 101 min. Director: Terry Gilliam Production company: Umbrella Entertainment Producer: Sandy Lieberson Screenplay: Charles Alverson, Terry Gilliam Director of Photography: Terry Bedford Editing: Michael Bradsell Production design: Roy Smith Music: De Wolfe Leading players: Michael Palin (Dennis Cooper), Max Wall (King Bruno the Questionable), Deborah Fallender (Princess), John Le Mesurier (Passelewe), Annette Badland (Griselda Fishfinger), Warren Mitchell (Mr Fishfinger), Brenda Cowling (Mrs Fishfinger) Time Bandits, 1981, 113 min. Director: Terry Gilliam Production company: HandMade Films Producer: Terry Gilliam Screenplay: Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam Director of Photography: Peter Biziou Editing: Julian Doyle Production design: Millie Burns Music: Mike Moran Leading players: Craig Warnock (Kevin), John Cleese (Robin Hood), Jim Broadbent (game show host), Sean Connery (King Agamemnon),

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filmography  259 Shelley Duvall (Pansy), Katherine Helmond (Mrs Ogre), Ian Holm (Napoleon), Michael Palin (Vincent), Ralph Richardson (Supreme Being), Peter Vaughan (Ogre), David Warner (Evil), David Rappaport (Randall), Kenny Baker (Fidgit), Jack Purvis (Wally)

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The Crimson Permanent Assurance (special sequence from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life), 1983, 16 min. Director: Terry Gilliam Production company: The Monty Python Partnership Producer: John Goldstone Screenplay: Terry Gilliam Director of Photography: Roger Pratt Editing: Julian Doyle Production design: John Beard Music: John Duprez Leading players: Sydney Arnold, Ross Davidson, Eric Francis, Russell Kilminster, Peter Merrill, Larry Noble, John Scott Martin, Guy Bertrand, Myrtle Devenish, Matt Frewer Brazil, 1985, 142 min. Director: Terry Gilliam Production company: Brazil Productions Producer: Arnon Milchan Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown Director of Photography: Roger Pratt Editing: Julian Doyle Production design: Norman Garwood Music: Michael Kamen Leading players: Jonathan Pryce (Sam Lowry), Robert De Niro (Archibald ‘Harry’ Tuttle), Katherine Helmond (Mrs Ida Lowry), Ian Holm (Mr Kurtzmann), Bob Hoskins (Spoor), Michael Palin (Jack Lint), Ian Richardson (Mr Warrenn), Peter Vaughan (Mr Eugene Helpmann), Kim Griest (Jill Layton), Jim Broadbent (Dr Jaffe), Jack Purvis (Dr Chapman), Barbara Hicks (Mrs Terrain) The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, 1988, 126 min. Director: Terry Gilliam Production company: Prominent Features/Laura Films Producer: Thomas Schuhly

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260  filmography Screenplay: Charles McKeown, Terry Gilliam Director of Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno Editing: Peter Hollywood Production design: Dante Ferretti Music: Michael Kamen Leading players: John Neville (Baron Munchausen), Bill Paterson (Henry Salt), Sarah Polley (Sally Salt), Eric Idle (Desmond/Berthold), Charles McKeown (Rupert/Adlophus), Winston Dennis (Bill Albrecht), Jack Purvis (Jeremy/Gustavus), Valentina Cortese (Queen Ariadne/ Violet), Uma Thurman (Venus/Rose), Oliver Reed (Vulcan), Jonathan Pryce (Horatio Jackson) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1998, 118 min. Director: Terry Gilliam Production company: Summit Entertainment/Universal Pictures/ Rhino Films/Laila Nabulsi Producer: Laila Nabulsi, Patrick Cassavetti, Stephen Nemeth Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tony Grisoni, Tod Davies, Alex Cox Director of Photography: Nicola Pecorini Editing: Lesley Walker Production design: Alex McDowell Music: Ray Cooper Leading players: Johnny Depp (Raoul Duke), Benicio Del Toro (Dr Gonzo), Christina Ricci (Lucy), Gary Busey (highway patrolman), Ellen Barkin (North Star waitress), Michael Jeter (L. Ron Bumquist), Harry Dean Stanton (judge), Katherine Helmond (reservations clerk), Tobey Maguire (hitch-hiker), Craig Bierko (Lacerda), Cameron Diaz (blonde TV reporter) Tideland, 2005, 122 min. Director: Terry Gilliam Production company: Recorded Picture Company/Capri Films Producer: Gabriella Martinelli, Jeremy Thomas Screenplay: Terry Gilliam, Tony Grisoni (based on the novel by Mitch Cullin) Director of Photography: Nicola Pecorini Editing: Lesley Walker Production design: Jasna Stefanovic Music: Jeff Danna, Michael Danna, John Goodwin, Dave Howman, André Jacquemin

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Leading players: Jodelle Ferland (Jeliza-Rose), Jeff Bridges (Noah), Janet McTeer (Dell), Jennifer Tilly (Queen Gunhilda), Sally Crooks (Dell’s Mother), Alden Adair (Luke), Brendan Fletcher (Dickens), Dylan Taylor (Patrick)

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Bibliography

Aberth, John, A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film, London, Routledge, 2003. Adair, Gilbert, and Nick Roddick, A Night at the Pictures: Ten Decades of British Film, Bromley, Columbus Books, 1985. Andrew, Dudley, ‘The Unauthorised Auteur Today’, in Robert Stam and Toby Miller (eds), Film and Theory: An Anthology, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000. Audsley, Mick, in Duncan Petrie (ed.), Inside Stories: Diaries of British Film-makers at Work, London, BFI, 1996, pp. 139–66. Baccolini, Raffaella, and Tom Moylan, ‘Dystopias and Histories,’ in Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (eds), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, New York, Routledge, 2003, pp. 1–12. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1968. Bettelheim, Bruno, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1991. Betts, Ernest, The Film Business: A History of British Cinema 1896–1972, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1973. Biskind, Peter, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, London, Bloomsbury, 2004. Black, Joel, The Reality Effect: Film Culture and the Graphic Imperative, New York, Routledge, 2002. Bloch, Ernst, The Principle of Hope, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986. Bly, Robert, Iron John, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1990. Botting, Fred, Gothic, London, Routledge, 1996. Boynton, Robert S. (ed.), The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on their Craft, New York, Vintage Books, 2005. Breton, André, from ‘The First Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds), Modernism: An

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bibliography  263 Anthology of Documents and Sources, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998, pp. 307–11. Caughie, John, The Companion to British and Irish Cinema, London, Cassell and BFI, 1996. Campbell, Mary Baine, Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe, London, Cornell University Press, 1999. Carroll, Lewis, The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, ed. Martin Gardiner, London, Penguin, 2001. Cavallaro, Dani, The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear, London, Continuum, 2002. Chapman, Graham, John Cleese, Eric Idle et al., The Complete Monty Python’s Flying Circus: All the Words, Pantheon Books, New York, 1989. Christie, Ian (ed.), Gilliam on Gilliam, London, Faber and Faber, 1999. Claeys, Gregory, and Lyman Tower Sargent (eds), The Utopian Reader, New York, New York University Press, 1999. Corrigan, Timothy, Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1991. Cullin, Mitch, Tideland, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000. Dalton, Elizabeth, ‘Introduction’, in Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, ed. Elizabeth Dalton, New York, Barnes and Noble Books, 2003, pp. xv–xxxiii. Dowell, Pat, ‘review of The Fisher King’, Cineaste, 1991, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 46–7. Driver, Martha W., and Sid Ray (eds), The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, Jefferson, N.C., MacFarland, 2004. Dyja, Eddie (ed.), BFI Film and Television Handbook 1999, London, BFI, 1999. Faludi, Susan, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, London, Chatto and Windus, 1991. Fiedler, Leslie, Love and Death in the American Novel, New York, Stein and Day, 1982. Fulton, Keith, and Louis Pepe (directors), The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys, Atlas Entertainment, Low Key Productions, MCA Home Video, Poo Poo Pictures, 1997. Gardner, Colin, Joseph Losey, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004. Gibson, Pamela Church, and Andrew Hill, ‘“Tutte e marchio!”: Excess, Masquerade and Performativity in 70s Cinema’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (2nd edition), London, BFI, 2001, pp. 263–9. Gilliam, Terry, reply to Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard, 28 April 2000.

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264  bibliography Gilliam, Terry, and Tony Grisoni, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: NOT the Screenplay by Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni, New York, Applause, 1997. Goddu, Teresa A., ‘Introduction to American Gothic’, in Ken Gelder (ed.), The Horror Reader, London, Routledge, 2000, pp. 265–70. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Selected Tales, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005. Hacker, Jonathan, and David Price (eds), Take Ten: Contemporary British Film Directors, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991. Hardy, Phil (ed.), Science Fiction: The Aurum Film Encyclopedia, London, Aurum Press, 1995. Hewison, Andrew , Monty Python: The Case Against, London, Methuen, 1981. Higson, Robert, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain, Oxford, Clarendon, 1995. Hill, John, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999. Hiller, Jim (ed.), American Independent Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader, London, BFI Publishing, 2001. Holmund, Chris, and Justin Wyatt (eds), Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream, London, Routledge, 2005. Isherwood, Christopher The Berlin Novels: Mr Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye to Berlin, London, Minerva, 1993. Jameson, Fredric The Ideologies of Theory. Essays 1971–1986. Volume 2: The Syntax of History, London, Routledge, 1988. Johnson, Robert A., He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, New York, Harper and Row, 1989. Jones, Terry, Chaucer’s Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980. Jones, Terry, and Alan Ereira, Crusades, London, BBC Books, 1994. Kilgour, Maggie, The Rise of the Gothic Novel, London, Routledge, 1995. Larsen, Darl, Monty Python, Shakespeare, and English Renaissance Drama, Jefferson, N.C., McFarland, 2003. Leach, Jim, British Film, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. Levitas, Ruth The Concept of Utopia, Syracuse, Syracuse University Press, 1990. Lewis, Jon (ed.), The End of Cinema As We Know It: American Cinema in the Nineties, New York, New York University Press, 2001. Luckhurst, Roger, ‘Introduction’, in Roger Luckhurst (ed.), Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. ix–xxxi.

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bibliography  265 MacCabe, Colin, The Eloquence of the Vulgar, London, British Film ­Institute, 1999. Marker, Chris, La Jetée, London, Zone Books, 1992. Mathews, Jack, The Battle of Brazil, New York, Applause, 1998. McCabe, Bob, Dark Knights and Holy Fools: The Art and Films of Terry Gilliam, New York, Universe Publishing, 1999. ——, Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm, and Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood, London, HarperCollins, 2005. —— (ed.), The Pythons Autobiography By The Pythons, London, Orion, 2003. McFarlane, Brian (ed.), The Encyclopedia of British Film, London, Methuen BFI, 2003. McKeown, Charles, and Terry Gilliam, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen: The Screenplay, New York, Applause Books, 1989. Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen, New York, D.C. Comics, 1987. Morgan, David, Monty Python Speaks!, London, Fourth Estate, 1999. ——, ‘Gilliam, Gotham, God,’ in David Sterritt and Lucille Rhodes (eds), Terry Gilliam: Interviews, Jackson, Miss., University of ­Mississippi Press, 2004, pp. 52–64. ——, ‘The Mad Adventures of Terry Gilliam’, in David Sterritt and Lucille Rhodes (eds), Terry Gilliam: Interviews, Jackson, Miss., University of Mississippi Press, 2004, pp. 36–45. Moylan, Tom, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination New York, Methuen, 1986. Murphy, Robert (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s, London, BFI, 2000. ——, The British Cinema Book (2nd edition), London, BFI, 2001. Neale, Steve, Genre and Hollywood, London, Routledge, 2000. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols and the anti-Christ, Baltimore, Penguin, 1968. Park, James, British Cinema: The Lights that Failed, London, B.T. ­Batsford, 1990. Peake, Mervyn, Gormenghast, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1968. Raspe, Rudolph Erich, The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Doylestown, Penn., Wildside Press, 2001. Ross, Robert, Monty Python Encyclopedia, London, B.T. Batsford, 2001. Said, Edward, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays, London, Granta, 2000, pp.  173–86. Sellers, Robert, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, London, John Blake, 2003.

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266  bibliography Shippey, Tom, ‘review of The Fisher King’, Times Literary Supplement, 22 November 1991. Solman, Gregory, ‘Fear and Loathing in America: Gilliam on the Artist’s Fight or Flight Instinct,’ in David Sterritt and Lucille Rhodes (eds), Terry Gilliam: Interviews, Jackson, Miss., University of Mississippi Press, 2004, pp. 184–207. Stam, Robert, Literature Through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation, Oxford, Blackwell, 2005. Sterritt, David, and Lucille Rhodes (eds), Terry Gilliam: Interviews, Jackson, Miss., University of Mississippi Press, 2004. Steward, Susan, ‘Nonsense: Aspects on Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature’, in John O. Thompson (ed.), Monty Python: Complete and Utter History of the Grotesque, London, BFE, 1982. Stubbs, Phil (creator and ed.), Dreams: The Terry Gilliam Fanzine, www. smart.co.uk/dreams Stukator, Angela, ‘“Soft Males”, “Flying Boys”, and “White Knights”: New Masculinity in The Fisher King’, Literature/Film Quarterly, 1997, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 214–22. Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1979. ——,‘Theses on Dystopia 2001’, in Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (eds), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, New York, Routledge, 2003, pp. 187–201. Thompson, Hunter S., ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,’ Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970, vol.1, no.4, pp. 1–12. ——, as ‘Raoul Duke’, ‘Police Chief: – The Indispensable Magazine of Law Enforcement’, Scanlan’s Monthly, September 1970, vol.1, no. 7, pp. 63–6. ——, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, London, Flamingo, 1998. ——, ‘Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, in Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, Gonzo Papers Volume 1: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2003, pp.  105–11. Thompson, John O. (ed.), Monty Python: Complete and Utter History of the Grotesque, London, BFI, 1982. Thomson, Philip, The Grotesque, London, Methuen, 1972. Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. R. Howard, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1975. Walker, Alexander, National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties, London, Harrap, 1985.

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bibliography  267 ——, criticism of Don Quixote funding, London Evening Standard, April 2000. ——, Icons in the Fire: The Decline and Fall of Almost Everybody in the British Film Industry 1984–2000, London, Orion, 2004. Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, London, Chatto and Windus, 1994. Wells, Paul, Understanding Animation, London, Routledge, 1998. Weston, Jessie L., From Ritual to Romance, New York, Doubleday Anchor, 1957. Wilmut, Roger, From Fringe to Flying Circus: Celebrating a Unique Generation of Comedy 1960–1980, London, Eyre Methuen, 1980. Winship, Kihm, ‘Bibliography’, in Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt, Gonzo Papers Volume 1: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2003, pp. 591–7. Wolfe, Tom, The New Journalism, New York, Harper and Row, 1973. Yule, Andrew, Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam and the Munchausen Saga, New York, Applause, 1991. Zipes, Jack, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, London, Heinemann, 1979.

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Index

ABC television (US) 39 Aberth, John 39–40 acting 26, 28, 37, 51, 58, 120, 248 Adair, Gilbert 6, 79 adaptation 11–12, 44, 109, 153–4, 192–3, 202, 225, 230 Addams Family, The 132 Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The 2, 4–5, 7, 10–11, 65–6, 74, 77, 103–22, 131, 134, 135, 138–9, 149, 178, 194–5, 197, 199, 205, 207, 212, 214, 226, 236, 248, 249–51 All This and World War II 42 Alverson, Charles 13, 42, 64, 88–90 Andersen, Hans Christian 203 And Now for Something Completely Different 2, 6, 20, 26–32, 36–7 Andrew, Dudley 7 animation 13, 18–30, 37–8, 42, 54–5, 58, 79–80, 239, 241, 248 ‘Elephants’ 19–20, 23 Armstrong, Louis, ‘What a Wonderful World’ 159 Associated Communications Corporation (ACC) 64 At Last The 1948 Show 18, 29 auteur 7–8, 102, 131, 139, 194, 220 Audsley, Mick 5, 170 Baccolini, Rafaella 86

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Bacon, Francis 180–1 Bakhtin, Mikhail 12, 25, 46 Balcon, Michael 57 Barclay, Humphrey 18, 248 Baum, Frank, The Magic of Oz 161 BBC television 20, 32, 33, 35–6 Beatles, The 39, 42 Bedford, Terry 43 Bennett, Alan 17 Bergman, Ingmar 34, 36, 40 The Seventh Seal 34 Bettelheim, Bruno 204, 214, 217 Betts, Ernest 6 Beyond The Fringe 14, 17 Big Brother and the Holding Company, ‘Combination of the Two’ 185 Bird, John 43 Birdsall, Timothy 17–18 Biskind, Peter 205 Black, Joel 61 Bloch, Ernst 85 Bloch, Robert, Psycho 225 Bly, Robert 145–6 Boorman, John, Excalibur 56, 132 Borowczyk, Walerian 33 Bosch, Hieronymous 33, 48–9, 181 Botticelli, Birth of Venus 120 Botting, Fred 226, 247 Bourne, Mel 139, 150 Boyle, Danny, Trainspotting 171 Boynton, Robert, The New New Journalism 178

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index  269 Bradsell, Mike 55 Brazil 2–3, 5, 7–8, 10, 55, 63, 65, 73, 77, 80–2, 84–105, 111, 114, 117, 131, 134, 138–9, 149, 152, 154, 158–60, 163, 168, 177, 194, 205, 207, 213, 226, 236, 248–9, 251 Bresslaw, Bernard 43 Breton, André 19 Bridges, Jeff 138, 145, 169, 229, 250, 253n.57 British Film Institute 2 BFI Film and Television Handbook 1999 4 Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time 22, 82, 248 Brothers Grimm, The 1, 3, 5, 9, 11, 45, 199, 203–22, 225–6, 230, 249, 251 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder 33, 48–50, 56, 73 Burton, Tim, Charlie and the ­Chocolate Factory 204 Edward Scissorhands 12 Cage, Nicholas 151 Cambridge Circus 14 Cambridge Footlights Club 17 Campbell, Mary Baine 109 Canal Plus 196 Caravaggio 49 Carroll, Lewis 10, 44–6, 50, 56, 74, 107, 193, 225 Alice books 11, 44–6, 50, 54, 176, 221–5, 228, 230, 233, 235, 239, 246 ‘Jabberwocky’ 42–5, 47, 107 Chaplin, Charlie 31 Chapman, Graham 17–18, 20–1, 37, 42 Chariots of Fire 6, 79 Chaucer, Geoffrey 32–3 child’s perspective 11, 65–74, 84, 109, 203–4, 229, 236, 243 Christie, Ian 10, 70, 88, 194 Cinecittà Studios, 104–6

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Claeys, Gregory, and Lyman Tower Sargent 84–5 Cleese, John 14, 17–21, 25–7, 31, 35, 42–3, 58–9, 65, 75, 79–80, 248 Cleitman, René 195–6 Columbia Pictures 105–6, 122 Columbia Tri-Star 135 Complete and Utter History of Britain, The 18 Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur, A 151, 195 Connery, Sean 65, 70, 105, 118 Cook, Peter 17, 20, 248 Cooper, Ray 106, 175 Corbett, Harry H. 43 Corliss, Richard 108–9 Corrigan, Timothy 8 Cortese, Valentina 118 Cox, Alex 174–5, 193 Creative Artists Association (CAA) 131–2 Cruise, Tom 91 Crumb, Robert (Bob) 14 Crying Game, The 220 Cullin, Mitch, Tideland 202, 221–30, 234, 237, 239, 246 Dalton, Elizabeth 203 Damon, Matt 205–7 Davies, Tod 174, 193 De Cervantes, Miguel, Don Quixote 151, 195 De Niro, Robert 82, 91–2, 102 Deeley, Michael 57 Deer Hunter, The 187 Defective Detective, The 151 Delfont, Lord Bernard 57 Del Toro, Benicio 174 Depp, Johnny 174–5, 179, 183, 196, 197, 202, 250 De Troyes, Chrétien 132 Dimension Films 205, 220 Disney, Walt 10, 12 Disney animation 13–14, 120 Disney Studios 219–20

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Hunchback of Notre Dame 151 Pinocchio (cartoon) 13, 120 Pinocchio (toy figure in The Fisher King) 141–3, 149 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 13, 71–72 Disneyland 13, 186, 247 Domino, Fats, ‘Blueberry Hill’ 159 Do Not Adjust Your Set 18, 20, 248 Doré, Gustave 106–7, 115, 119, 151, 181 Doyle, Julian 70 Dyas, Guy Hendrix 205 dystopia 10, 84–7, 93–8, 100, 131, 154, 158, 160, 164, 169, 177, 248 Eberts, Jake 104, 195 Edison, Thomas Alva, The Kiss 22 Eisenstein, Sergei, Battleship Potemkin 91, 100 Eliot, T.S., The Wasteland 132 EMI 56–7, 64 Escolar, José Luis 197 Everett, Rupert 91 Faludi, Susan 145 Fang magazine 13 fantasy and the fantastic 1, 3, 9–14, 23, 27, 33, 45–6, 50, 54, 65–74, 78–81, 84–7, 93, 95, 98–102, 106–12, 114–22, 138, 149, 151, 156, 160, 178, 181, 186, 190, 195, 202–5, 210–17, 220–9, 232–41, 247–51, 248 fairy tale 10–13, 45–6, 55–6, 69, 74, 108–9, 146, 202–4, 207, 217–22, 226, 244 Faulkner, William 178 The Sound and the Fury 227–8, 237 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 1–2, 4–5, 10, 151, 174–95, 205, 220, 230, 232–3, 246, 249, 251 see Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: NOT

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the Screenplay by Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni 192 Fellini, Federico 7, 88, 104–6 Ferland, Jodelle 229, 235 Ferretti, Dante 105–6 Fiedler, Leslie 226 Film Finances 105, 118 Fish Called Wanda, A 79 Fisher King, The 2, 4–5, 9, 25, 81, 131–52, 160, 168–71, 175, 192, 194, 209, 212, 226, 229, 249 Fletcher, Brendan 229, 237 French, Don 105 Frost Report, The 17, 25 Froud, Brian 72 Fulton, Keith and Louis Pepe 170, 197, 205 Hamster Factor, The 170, 197, 205 Lost in La Mancha 1, 170, 197, 199, 205 Gardner, Colin 3–4 Gautier, Théophile, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen 106–7, 109, 111, 120, 151, 181, 226 Genette, Gerard 12 Gibson, Mel 151 Gibson, Pamela Church 6 Giger, H.R. 75 Gilbert, Sheldon 14 Goddu, Teresa 226 Godzilla 193 Goldcrest Pictures 63 Goldstone, John 42, 57, 59, 81 Gonzo Journalism 10–11, 174, 178–82, 185, 230, 248 Goodies, The 26 Good Omens 202 Good Will Hunting 206 Goon Show, The 20, 26 Gothic, The 10, 38, 50, 135, 202, 221, 225–38, 241–8 Graham, Billy 25, 241 Greenaway, Peter 3 Griest, Kim 92

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Grisoni, Tony 5, 174–5, 178, 182, 184, 190, 192–3, 195, 199, 202, 204, 209, 211, 220–1, 230, 237, 239–40, 245, 247 Grosz, Georg 180–1 Grotesque, the 3, 10, 18, 23–6, 29–30, 37–8, 43, 46–7, 53, 56, 75, 77, 84, 111, 180, 211, 226, 231, 240, 245 Hammer Horror films 233, 240 HandMade Films 57, 63–4, 80 Harrison, George 57, 63, 79, 106 Headey, Lena 206 Help! magazine 12–13, 18, 42 Hewison, Robert 39 Hill, Andrew 6 Hill, Debra 135 Hill, John 64 Hitchcock, Alfred 6, 154, 157, 227–8 Psycho 225, 227–8, 235, 236, 241 Vertigo 154, 157, 161, 166 Hopper, Dennis, Apocalypse Now 187 Easy Rider 177 Idle, Eric 17–18, 20–1, 33, 35, 36, 38, 42, 56–7, 80, 105, 116, 248 Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, The 250 I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again 18 Isherwood, Christopher, Goodbye To Berlin 179–80 Jabberwocky 2, 6, 11–12, 25, 33, 44–58, 61, 63, 65–6, 69, 71–4, 79, 82, 84, 88, 92, 97, 105, 111, 113, 132–4, 149, 160, 193, 209, 211–12, 215, 225–6, 248–9, 251 James, Nick 6, 9 Jameson, Fredric 85, 95 Jarman, Derek 3 Jefferson Airplane, ‘White Rabbit’ 176 John, Elton 32

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Johnson, Robert, He: Understanding Male Psychology 132–3, 145, 147 Johnson, Dr Samuel 184, 191 Jones, Terry 3, 5, 17–18, 19–21, 27–8, 31–5, 38–9, 42–3, 47, 55, 58–9, 64, 80, 116, 248 Jones, Tom, ‘It’s Not Unusual’ 188 ‘She’s A Lady’ 186 Kafka, Franz 88, 91, 97, 193 KC Medien 196 Keaton, Buster 31 Kerouac, Jack, On the Road 177–8 Khayyám, Omar, The Rubáiyat 161, 166–7 Kilgour, Maggie 228 Knode, Charles 43 Korda, Alexander, Things to Come 168 Kovacs, Ernie 13, 19 Kruger, Ehren 11, 204, 212, 220–1 Kubrick, Stanley 3, 61 Kurosawa, Akira 91 Throne of Blood 34 Kurtzman, Harvey 13 LaGravenese, Richard 132–8, 144, 150–1 Lang, Fritz, Metropolis 91–2 Lansing, Sherry 151 Late Show, The 18 Leary, Timothy 179, 192 Ledger, Heath 205–7 Led Zeppelin 32 Le Mesurier, John 43 Lennon Sisters, The, ‘My Favourite Things’ 184 Lester, Richard 3 Levitas, Ruth 85 Lewis, C.S., The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe 72 Lieberson, Sandy 42 Looney Tunes 151 Los Angeles Film Critics’ Association 102, 150 Losey, Joseph 3–4, 89

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Lownes, Victor 26–8 Lucas, George 60–1 Luckhurst, Roger 226 Lynch, Jay 14 McCabe, Bob 9, 64, 106, 134, 150, 187, 202, 205–7, 219–20, 246 MacCabe, Colin 8 McKeown, Charles 88–90, 107–11, 131, 178, 181, 195, 250 MacNaughton, Ian 20, 26, 28, 31 McTeer, Janet 229, 237 MAD magazine 13 Malory, Thomas 32–3 Man Who Killed Don Quixote, The 1–2, 5, 194–9, 202, 205, 247, 249–50 Man Who Robbed the Pierre, The 202 Marker, Chris 11, 152–4 La Jetée, 11, 152–4, 161, 169 Martinelli, Gabriella 221 Marty 18 Marx Brothers, 31 Duck Soup 51 Monkey Business 161 Mathews, Jack 90, 101 MGM 204–5 Milchan, Arnon 82, 90–1, 101–2, 104 Miller, Jonathan 18 Milligan, Spike 20, 45 Q5 20 Q series 20 World of Beachcomber, The 20 Case of the Mukkinese Battle Horn, The 20 Miramax 205–6, 219–20 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 2, 7, 9, 20, 25–6, 28, 31–40, 42–4, 47–9, 51–2, 54–61, 78, 80, 84, 90, 105, 132, 138, 150 Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl 29, 79–80 Monty Python’s Flying Circus 2, 17, 19–32, 39, 73, 116, 248

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Monty Python’s Life of Brian 2, 26, 37, 52, 56–61, 63, 79–81, 88, 103, 215 Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life 2, 80–2, 90, 103, 194, 204 Crimson Permanent Assurance, The 80–2, 97, 194 Moore, Dudley 17 Morton, Samantha 206 Moylan, Tom 86 Muir, Frank 18 Murphy, Robert 6 Nabulsi, Laila 174–5 National Film Finance Corporation (NFFC) 32 National Lottery 2, 196 Neale, Steve 10–11, 109 Nike, World Cup commercial 202 Nolte, Nick 151, 169 nonsense 10, 12, 42, 44–6, 50, 56, 248 O’Brien, Denis 57, 63–5, 79–80 Obst, Lynda 135 Orwell, George, Nineteen EightyFour 88, 154 Palace Pictures 57, 63–4 Palin, Michael 17–18, 20–2, 34–6, 38, 42–3, 45, 48, 64–5, 89–90, 92, 100, 118, 248 Paramount Pictures 90, 151 Park, James 57, 63, 79 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 7, 33–4, 53, 56, 105, 106 Canterbury Tales, The 34, 53, 105 Decameron, The 34, 53, 105 Paterson, Bill, 112 Pathé Pictures 196 Patterson, Phil 197–8 Peake, Mervin, Gormenghast 50 Pecorini, Nicola 5, 175–6, 205, 207, 230, 247 worked with Bertolucci,

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index  273 Schrader, the Taviani Brothers 176 Peerless Camera Company 60, 139 Peoples, David and Janet Peoples 11, 152–3 Pepe, Louis and Keith Fulton 1, 170, 205 The Hamster Factor 170, 197 Lost in La Mancha 1, 197, 199 Perrault, Charles 203 Pethig, Hazel 43 Pink Floyd 32 Piranesi, Giovanni 74 Pirates of the Caribbean 204 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest 247 Pitt, Brad 169–70 Plummer Amanda 138, 146, 150 Poe, Edgar Allan, The Fall of the House of Usher 227–8 Pratt, Roger 5, 81, 138 Price, Frank 90 Prominent Features 139 Pryce, Jonathan 91, 100, 220 Puttnam, David 105, 107 Python Productions 26 Quasimodo 151 Quinn, Aidan 91 Rank Studios 64 Rapke, Jack 132 Raspe, Rudolph Erich, 106–7 Ray, Sid 40 Reed, Oliver 119 Rehme, Bob 90 Rhino Films 175 Richardson, Ralph 65, 77–8 Ripping Yarns 64 Rochefort, Jean 197–9 Roddick, Nick 6, 79 Rolling Stone magazine 174–5, 180, 190 Rolling Stones, The 175 ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ 192

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‘Sympathy for the Devil’ 175 Rossellini, Roberto 40 Rotunno, Guiseppe 105–6 Roven, Charles (Chuck) 152, 197, 199, 202, 203, 205 Rowling, J.K., Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone 202 Ruehl, Mercedes 138, 149, 150 Ruskin, John, Stones of Venice 24–5 Said, Edward 4 Sallis, Crispian 168 Scanner Darkly, A 150–1 Schuhly, Thomas 104–5, 205 Scorsese, Martin, King of Comedy, The 82 Sheinberg, Syd 101–3, 152, 205, 207 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 161, 167, 225, 241 Shippey, Tom 13–14 Sigel, Newton Thomas 207 Silver, Joel 131, 199 Smith, Roy 43 Soderbergh, Steven 209 Solman, Gregory 194 Sousa, John Philip, ‘Liberty Bell March’ 21 Spielberg, Steven 12, 60 Spikings, Barry 56–7 Stam, Robert 9, 11, 109 Steadman, Ralph 175, 177, 180–2 Stewart, Susan 44 Stevenson, Robert Louis, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 225, 235 Sting 114 Stoker, Bram, Dracula 225 Stoppard, Tom 82, 88–90 Stormare, Peter 207, 211, 220 Stowe, Madeleine 169 surrealism 13, 19 Suvin, Darko 85, 100 Svankmajer, Jan 44 Tartikoff, Brandon 151 Tale of Two Cities, A 151, 169 Tenniel, Sir John 54

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That Was the Week That Was (TW3) 17–18, 25 Theseus and the Minotaur 63, 68, 174 Thief of Baghdad, The 72 Thomas, Jeremy 5, 220–1, 229–30, 246–7, 250 Thompson, Hunter S. 10–11, 174–82, 185, 190, 232 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 174–81, 183–5, 189–90, 193, 195, 232 Thompson, John 24 Thomson, Philip 53 Thurman, Uma 120 Tideland 1, 3, 5, 8, 10–11, 21, 66, 202, 220–51 see Mitch Cullin FIPRESCI Prize, San Sebastian Film Festival 246 Tilly, Jennifer 229 Time Bandits 2, 9–11, 57, 63–79, 84, 87, 90, 92, 109, 111, 113, 117, 134, 139, 159–60, 170, 194, 212–13, 216, 226, 236, 249, 251 Todorov, Tsvetan 54, 72–4 Tomblin, David 103–4 Tufano, Brian 6 Twelve Monkeys 2, 4–5, 8, 10–11, 73, 77, 81, 131, 151–71, 174–5, 177, 194, 197, 203, 212–13, 216, 217, 251 Twentieth Century Fox 90, 101, 104 UK Film Council Lottery Fund 229 Universal Pictures 80–1, 90, 101–3, 152, 169 Urich, Robert, Vegas 187 Van der Beek, Stan 18 Velazquez, Diego 180–1

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Venice Film Festival, Silver Lion 150 Virgil, Aeneid 161 Virgin Films 57, 63–4 Walker, Alexander 2, 4, 6–7, 30, 63, 80, 108, 196 Walker, Lesley 5, 138–9, 175, 205, 230, 250 Wall, Max 43, 50 Walpole, Horace, The Castle of Otranto 225 Warner, David 75 Warner, Marina 203, 217 Warnock, Craig 65, 92 Watchmen 131 Weinstein, Bob 9, 205–9, 219–21, 230 Weinstein, Harvey 205–9, 219–21, 230 Wells, H.G., The Time Machine 71, 159 Wells, Paul 23–4 Weston, Jessie 132–3 White, Michael 32 Williams, Robin 105–6, 118, 135, 138, 145, 150, 202, 205 Willis, Bruce 151, 169–70 Wilmut, Roger, From Fringe To Flying Circus 3, 17, 19 Wizard of Oz, The 71 Writers Guild of America (WGA) 150, 153, 172n.51, 202, 220 Wyeth, Andrew 234, 237, 241 Young, Neil, ‘Expecting to Fly’ 192 Youngbloods, The, ‘Let’s Get Together’ 190 Yule Andrew, Losing The Light 103, 105, 122 Zipes, Jack 46, 203, 209, 217

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