‘He won’t get far on hot air and fantasy.’ So says Jackson (Jonathan Pryce), the evil civil servant in Terry Gilliam’s film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), as he watches the Baron (John Neville) and his nine-year-old sidekick Sally (Sarah Polley) escape an unnamed walled city in a hot-air balloon made out of women’s underwear. Coincidentally, the Jackson character is rumoured to have been modelled on the studio moguls (such as Sid Sheinberg of Universal) who tried to shape and control Gilliam’s wildly imaginative films to that point – namely Brazil (1985) (see Kael 1989: 103). But Gilliam has gone far on fantasy. If the reviews of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen are any indication, then Gilliam is a maker par excellence of fantasy films. TV film critic Joel Siegel remarked of it, ‘like Time Bandits [1981; Gilliam’s second solo directorial effort], like Brazil, this picture is about imagination and the power of imagination to conquer that drab place we know as reality’ (Yule 1991: 233). Jim Emerson of The Orange County Register wrote, ‘Fantasy achieves nobility in Munchausen’, while Derek Malcolm in the Guardian heralded the movie as ‘one of the greatest fantasies of all time’ (Yule 1991: 235). Similar observations have been made about Gilliam’s other movies, and by all popular accounts Gilliam is one of the foremost film directors of fantasy (see Robley and Wardle 1996). His films often have monsters or mythical characters, they are usually set in exotic or surreal realms, some of them play with notions of identity and time, and all of them contain imaginative and bizarre visuals. But while his films might generally be labelled ‘fantasy’, do they automatically belong to the specific realm of the ‘fantastic’? Two of Gilliam’s mid-career works will be analysed to test this hypothesis, the aforementioned The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and his subsequent film The Fisher King (1991). Using Tzvetan Todorov’s theorisation of the concept as a guide, this chapter posits that Gilliam’s fantasy films complicate Todorov’s narrow definition of the fantastic by playing with some of its conditions and stylistic features but ultimately frustrating it with an autuerist thematic agenda.
In his The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975), Todorov’s criteria for a work to be categorised as fantastic can be condensed to one important passage found in his second chapter. While describing the central tenet of the fantastic, which he labels ‘sustained ambiguity’, he writes, either ‘the person who experiences the event … is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination – and the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality – but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us’ (1975: 25). Opting for the first case places the subject in the world of the uncanny, which provides an extraordinary, shocking or disturbing, albeit rational, explanation for the events (1975: 46). Pursuing the second leads to the realm of the marvellous in which the supernatural is unquestioningly accepted as reality. The true fantastic is the limitable space between these two options, also known as the fleeting moment of uncertainty, but before reaching this uncertainty, three conditions of unequal value must be satisfied:1
First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as ‘poetic’ interpretations. (1975: 33)
Having established the pertinent aspects of this theory, the remainder of this chapter analyses how Gilliam’s notions of fantasy both simulates and surmounts Todorov’s concept of ‘the fantastic’.
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is set, as a title card indicates, in ‘the late 18th century’, which a second card labels, ‘the age of reason’. The film opens as war rages between the Turks and some unnamed European state. Inside the walls of a war-torn city, Henry Salt’s (Bill Patterson) theatre company is clumsily performing ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’, which its poster describes as ‘a tale of incredible truths’. As the ‘Baron’ (played by Salt) narrates his encounter with a monstrous fish and tells of his time in the Sultan’s court, a mysterious figure from the back of the theatre screams, ‘Lies! Lies!’ This old man (Neville), who bears a striking resemblance to Salt’s character both in terms of his costume and his exaggerated aquiline nose, pushes his way on to the stage claiming to be the real Baron Munchausen. There he notices four supporting players in the theatre’s company who he believes to be his gifted lost henchmen: Berthold (Eric Idle), Albrecht (Winston Dennis), Gustavas (Jack Purvis) and Adolphos (Charles McKeown). They, however, believe the Baron to be a loon and maintain that they are just actors. When the theatre licenser and official in charge of conducting the current war, Horatio Jackson, comes backstage to investigate the disruption, the mysterious man claims that only he himself can end the war since he began it. He then goes in front of the theatre audience to reveal how he is the true cause of the war.
As the supposedly-real Baron now narrates his meeting with the Grand Turk, the film seamlessly transitions from the shoddy stage to the regal residence of the Sultan (Peter Jeffrey) by panning, as a character moves left to right across the screen, from the theatre wings in the background to the palatial columns of a new set. Here, a younger-looking Baron bets his head that he can procure within an hour a superior bottle of Tokay from a wine cellar over a thousand miles away. The Sultan accepts the wager and puts up as much of his treasure as ‘the strongest man can carry’. The Baron then sends his servant Berthold, a man who can outrun a bullet and who looks exactly like one of the theatre troupe, to Venice to retrieve the wine. Berthold makes it back just in time, and the Baron then uses his servant Albrecht, a man with enormous strength who was also onstage prior, to carry away everything in the Sultan’s treasury. Recognising the folly of his figurative language, the Sultan orders the Baron stopped, but another henchman/actor from the earlier play, Gustavas, who has the power to blow down buildings, bowls over the Sultan’s soldiers with his breath. The Sultan then orders cannon fire, and, as the explosions go off around the Baron outside the palace, explosions presently occur in the theatre while the now older Baron remarks to the audience: As you can see, the Sultan is still after my head.’
After an encounter with the Angel of Death during the attack, the Baron takes flight in a hot-air balloon in an effort to find his lost henchmen and save the city. Accompanying him is Henry Salt’s daughter, Sally, who stowed away on the ship that is serving as the balloon’s basket. Their first stop is the moon where they encounter the lunar king (Robin Williams) and queen (Valentina Cortese), both with detachable heads. They also find an aged and balding Berthold, but the three of them are forced to flee for their lives when the king discovers that the Baron, made younger by his present adventure, has a romantic past with his wife. Falling off the moon, the group lands in the volcano of Mount Etna where they meet the god Vulcan (Oliver Reed) and his wife Venus (Uma Thurman). Coincidentally, one of the god’s servants is a dainty Albrecht. Once again, the Baron’s amorous ways with the lady lead to spousal jealousy and expulsion. Upon being thrown out by Vulcan, the now group of four lands in the South Seas where they are swallowed by a huge monster fish. Inside its belly they find a wheezy Gustavas, and a near blind Adolphos. Using ‘a modicum of snuff’, a line delivered earlier in the film by Salt as the Baron, the entire group of six is sneezed out of the fish and find themselves back in the bay of the city. With the Turks preparing to storm the gates, the Baron plans a counterattack, but Sally points out that his servants are too tired and too old to help. To keep his promise to save the city, the Baron then decides to offer his head to the Sultan, hoping that this will motivate ‘his troops’. His plan is a success, and his henchmen regain their lost powers and defeat the Turks. The city gives the victors a heroes’ parade, but as he waves to the crowd the Baron is shot and killed by Jackson. Everyone mourns, but the Baron, suddenly on stage in the theatre, reveals to the audience that this was ‘only one of the many occasions on which [he] met [his] death’. Jackson rushes into the theatre to arrest the Baron on the trumped-up charge of telling lies while the enemy is at the gates, but to counter, the Baron orders anyone who will listen to open the gates. The two go back and forth as the Baron marches to the city’s gates while Jackson promises to shoot anyone who would commit treason by listening to the Baron. The crowd nevertheless sides with the Baron who opens the gates to show everyone that the Sultan’s army has indeed been defeated. He then rides off and fades into nothingness against an artificial-looking horizon.
This lengthy plot summary only touches upon the many complexities of the film’s narrative. Was it all just a theatrical play, or did the Baron and Sally really go to the three exotic locales and then defeat the Turks with the help of the henchmen? If it all was play, when did it start (before or after the Baron enters the theatre)? If their journey was real, when did that start (before or after the Baron sets out to find his servants)? How can characters be both supporting players in the play and the Baron’s servants in his adventures? Two female players also reappear: one as the queen of the moon and the other as the goddess Venus. How can the Baron and his henchmen appear young and vibrant in one setting and then old and frail in another? The manner in which Gilliam structures his narrative makes it impossible to answer these questions with much certainty.
So it would seem that this film has the essential element of ambiguity to qualify it as belonging to Todorov’s fantastic. Or does it? First, does the viewer hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events depicted? The film begins with the viewer vacillating as to whether or not the mysterious play crasher is the legendary Baron Munchausen (fantasy/supernatural) or just a delirious old fool (logical/natural). However, after the Angel of Death (who resembles a statue perched on one of the city’s walls) visits him, the viewer is more likely to see this man as the fabled Baron. And when pressed by Sally as to who he ‘really is’, the Baron announces that he is the antithesis of the rational, natural world: ‘It’s all logic and reason now. Science. Progress. Tsk, tsk. Laws of hydraulics. Laws of social dynamics. Laws of this, that and the other. No place for three-legged Cyclops in the South Seas. No place for cucumber trees and oceans of wine. No place for me.’ In his monologue the Baron tells the viewer that he sees himself as existing outside the modern world and coming from a place that the viewer understands as only existing in fairy tales. The Baron then performs a supernatural act by flying to the Turkish camp and back on a pair of cannonballs. Aiding the supernatural explanation is his wild adventure to save the city, which, Todorov would argue, puts this film outside the uncertainty required for the fantastic and into the realm of the pure marvelous, a state that justifies its supernatural elements via certain character or narrative tropes.
Todorov identifies four such categories, three of which are present in the film.2 The first is the hyperbolic marvellous in which ‘phenomena are superior to those that are familiar to us’ (1975: 54). Running fast or being a good marksman are in themselves not remarkable feats, but being able to outrun a bullet or being able to hit something from five hundred miles away make Berthold and his cronies’ abilities appear superhuman. Next, the settings for the Baron’s adventures qualify as the exotic marvellous. Even though the viewer knows that the moon and the South Seas do exist, he or she is generally ignorant of what one might find there which makes it easier to accept lunar royalty with detachable heads or a leviathan that can swallow a boat whole. Finally, the hot-air balloon made of women’s underwear or the Vulcan’s prototype weapon link the film to Todorov’s categorisation of the instrumental marvellous. Here, ‘gadgets [or] technological developments unrealized in the period described [are], after all, quite possible’ (1975: 56). Even though The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is set in the eighteenth century, it is not hard to imagine the underwear balloon as a modern-day blimp or the weapon that ‘kills the enemy … all of them gone for good’ (according to Vulcan) as a nuclear warhead. Thus, most of the film provides the viewer with supernatural explanations for the phenomena presented that might cause her or him to accept this reality as valid rather than question those moments that should cause hesitation; this goes against Todorov’s first condition of the fantastic.
The film fares a bit better with a character experiencing hesitation, but it is far from perfect. Gilliam typically uses a character like Sally, with whom the viewer is meant to identify, to balance out the seemingly-delusional main character whose credibility the viewer tends to doubt. These latter characters are Gilliam’s ‘visionaries’, and their actions and/or dialogue make them seem either crazy or naïve, thus placing the viewer in a position in which it is difficult (though not impossible) to identify with them. Gilliam’s solution is to include a secondary character, a ‘materializer’ figure, who comes to believe in the alternative reality of the visionary, in this case, the Baron. He sees, without a doubt, his special servants in the players on stage, he speaks of his implausible adventures with the utmost sincerity, and he defies all known logic and reason by his belief in and reliance on the impossible. However, it is Sally, as the visionary, who gives credibility to the action by believing in the wild things the Baron says and does.
Though her childlike innocence allows her to play along with most of the Baron’s stories and plan to save the city, she does hesitate at various points in the film. First, after the Baron’s tale about starting the war, she finds him backstage and asks, ‘Who are you really?’, which suggests that she does not totally believe that he is indeed the real Baron Munchausen. Then, as they are sailing to the moon, the Baron tells Sally about the king and queen with detachable heads and asks her, ‘You do believe me don’t you?’ Sally demonstrates hesitation by responding: ‘I am doing my best.’ Finally, after the Baron has gathered all his henchmen and is planning his attack on the Turks, Sally shows doubt by telling him, ‘This isn’t going to work. They’re [the servants] old and tired. Don’t you see?’ These moments of uncertainty suggest that the film’s narrative ultimately depends on Sally believing in the Baron, and, given that the viewer is meant to identify with her, if she accepts the Baron’s tales as true, then viewer hesitation is all but eliminated. For this condition of the fantastic, Sally does show that she believes in the Baron. First, after he flies across the battlefield on a cannonball, Sally looks at him and says, ‘You really are Baron Munchausen’ (paradoxically, the Baron looks dejected and shakes his head ‘no’). Then, after opening the gates to show that the Turks have been defeated, Sally asks the Baron, ‘It wasn’t just a story, was it?’ (and, with the same look as before, the Baron shakes his head ‘no’). So for the majority of the film Sally has her reservations, but the fact that she ultimately decides to accept the marvellous explanation of events again moves this film from Todorov’s notion of the fantastic.
Todorov’s third condition for the fantastic requires the reader to reject poetic or allegorical interpretations of the text. It is possible to read this film, and most of Gilliam’s other works, as allegory, although not overly blatant. To do so requires introducing another character type: ‘the technocrat’. This figure, antithetical to the visionary, wholeheartedly subscribes to the benefits of social modernity, which is an intellectual movement that began with the Enlightenment and posits that the source of all human misery is ignorance (especially superstition), and that only knowledge, reason and science can destroy this ignorance and help improve the human condition (see Hollinger 1994: 2). Although this argument is beyond the scope of this chapter, Gilliam regularly uses concepts associated with fantasy to challenge the world’s dependence on the dogmas of modernity. The visionary and the technocrat are the allegorical figures that repeatedly fight this symbolic war between imagination and logic in Gilliam’s films.
In The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Jackson, the civil servant, plays the role of the technocrat. His first line of dialogue in the film establishes his philosophy. Looking at a treaty from the Turks he says, ‘No, the Sultan’s demands are still not sufficiently rational. The only lasting peace is one based on reason and scientific principle.’ In the same scene he orders the execution of a heroic officer (Sting) who saved the lives of ten soldiers and claims that it is bad to have such ‘emotional’ (as opposed to reasonable) people running around. Towards the end of the film, during negotiations with the Sultan, Jackson proposes that they ‘concentrate on reaching a rational, sensible, and civilized agreement which will guarantee a world fit for progress, science and…’ At this point the Baron enters the Sultan’s tent and says, ‘But not for Baron Munchausen!’ The Baron accuses Jackson of being ‘the rational man’, and asks, ‘How many people have perished in your logical little war?’ During the Baron’s victory parade, Jackson shoots the Baron from behind the statue of the Angel of Death, which bluntly symbolises the logic of modernity, ‘killing’ any need for fantasy, not to mention the obvious visual connection between the man of reason and another allegorical figure, ‘Death’. Beyond the symbolic figures themselves, Gilliam likely structured his narrative so that the viewer could understand it as all taking place ‘on stage’, the site of many medieval plays using allegorical modes of representation. So, once more, Gilliam’s film thwarts a condition for the fantastic.
Yet while the film falls short of the three conditions of Todorov’s fantastic, it does rather well in terms of the two stylistic devices that he claims are necessary to create ambiguity in a fantastic text. The first of these is the imperfect tense. Grammatically speaking, the imperfect tense is used to indicate that an action started in the past but is still ongoing or incomplete in the present. But Todorov is more interested in this device’s effect, which he claims suggests that something ‘is possible, but as a general rule unlikely’ (1975: 38). When the Baron and Sally set off to find the Baron’s servants, the viewer believes that she is witnessing the narrative events in the present tense. However, when the story returns to the stage, the Baron announces: ‘And that was only one of the many occasions on which I met my death.’ ‘Was’ and ‘met’ are verbs in the past tense, which might indicate that what the viewer just witnessed was not happening in the present as watched, but rather could have been an event from a long time ago. The Baron’s adventures seem to fuse the past and the present into a new concept of time. In fact, Todorov sees, in the imperfect tense, the fantastic text as able to keep the reader in both the realm of reality and the world of the marvellous at the same time (ibid.). The fact that the Baron’s appearance shifts from old to young to old again reinforces this notion. It is as if Gilliam is telling a story that is presently happening, but while it is happening it is narrated in the past tense with the future known at certain intervals (the viewer knows, for example, that the Baron will use snuff to escape the monster fish because he or she witnessed this event in Salt’s performance earlier in the film). This film, along with several others by Gilliam, challenges the viewer’s understanding of narrative time as strictly chronological – chronological often becomes ‘chrono-illogical’ to Gilliam.
Todorov’s second literary device is ‘modalization [sic]’, which, he maintains, refers to certain words or expressions that indicate uncertainty concerning the accuracy of an utterance. But how does one recognise concepts such as ‘seems’, or ‘perhaps’, or ‘it is doubtful’ in cinematic terms? To do so, viewers must look for clues in the film that suggest that things might not be as they seem. One example occurs right after cannon fire interrupts the Baron’s story about his wager with the Sultan. The Baron is trying to stop the players on stage from fleeing, but when he calls to the one he believes to be Berthold, the actor says to him, ‘The name’s Desmond, mate. We’re actors, not figures of your imagination. Now get a grip.’ Yet, as he delivers the last line, he jumps twice before running off stage. On the surface it looks like he is just stomping to make a point, but in fact this act is the same one that Berthold performs as he ‘winds’ himself up like a cartoon character by running in place to build up speed in his legs before exploding off to his destination. So while this character claims to be Desmond, his actions make him seem to be Berthold. Gilliam also uses cinematic elements, such as mise-en-scène, cinematography and sound, to suggest the uncertainty inherent in modalisation. During the moon sequence, Gilliam presents a gala ceremony in which the Baron and Sally ‘sail’ (on sand) into the King of the Moon’s domain. Even though no people are present at this parade, Gilliam includes a cheering crowd and festive music on the soundtrack to simulate a big to-do surrounding their arrival. Furthermore, as the two wave to the unseen crowd, Gilliam shows them passing two-dimensional, pastel-coloured structures (or rather these structures, some on different planes, passing them) to make it seem as if their boat is moving forward. In fact, when Gilliam changes from the shot/reverse-shot pattern to an overhead shot of the boat, it is evident that the Baron and Sally didn’t sail anywhere. Instead they are confined within a rectangle composed of two-dimensional buildings. What looked like an extravagant march up main street turned out to be nothing but an illusion.
If Todorov’s conditions rule it out, but his stylistic devices qualify it, where does this leave The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as a film of the fantastic? The most appropriate place seems to be slightly right of Todorov’s imaginary frontier for the fantastic, or in the sub-genre known as the fantastic-marvellous. However, Gilliam’s film reverses the terms for Todorov’s conception of this case. Typically, in the fantastic-marvellous, the story’s events create the required ambiguity for the fantastic until the last moment when the narrative clearly adopts the existence of the supernatural. This film tips to the side of the supernatural early on with regard to the first condition for the fantastic with its superhuman characters, exotic locales and imaginary tools. However, the ending of the film, notably when the Baron vanishes in the final shot, tilts the film away from the pure marvellous and back toward the fantastic. It questions whether there really ever was a Baron and his adventures, or whether this is all the product of Sally’s imagination as she watched her father perform the role of the Baron. Does the ending of the film occur in the same reality as the beginning? The Baron’s disappearance, as well as the artificiality of the horizon against which he disappears, causes the viewer to hesitate and to ponder the Baron’s true existence as well as the validity of the tale just seen. By including such an ending, Gilliam places his film in the realm of the fantastic-marvellous.
Gilliam’s next film is not as imaginatively complex as this one, perhaps with good reason. Given the troubled production history of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, it is likely that the film took a psychological toll and after it; Gilliam ‘announced that he was tired of defending his own ideas and was ready to direct someone else’s work’ (Drucker 1991: 50).3 The resulting project is The Fisher King, which is set in present-day Manhattan, has reality-based main characters, and seems to be outside the bounds of Gilliam’s typical fantasy fare. Yet, as Gilliam acknowledged in an interview with Bob McCabe, he approached the film ‘like a fairy tale’, and, as Elizabeth Drucker concludes in her review, ‘Even with its many contributors, The Fisher King is very much a “Terry Gilliam Film”’ (ie, a fantasy) (1991: 51).
The film tells the story of two broken individuals who end up helping each other find redemption. Jack (Jeff Bridges) is a former shock deejay whose rants against society inspire a man to gun down patrons in a trendy bar, while Parry (Robin Williams) is a potentially delusional, homeless history professor who is obsessed with finding the Holy Grail. When Jack learns that Parry’s wife was a victim of the aforementioned shooting, he attempts to help Parry overcome his repressed demons (manifested in the form of an ominous Red Knight surrounded by fire) in order to win the love of a mousy girl named Lydia (Amanda Plummer). After Jack and his on-again/off-again girlfriend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl) arrange a date between him and Lydia, Parry is ‘wounded’ by the Red Knight and ends up in a catatonic state brought on by a flashback to the night his wife was shot. When Parry doesn’t wake up, Jack attempts to retrieve the object to which Parry devoted his life, which he believed was kept in a millionaire’s library on Fifth Avenue. Jack breaks in and steals ‘the Grail’, which turns out to be a trophy from 1932, and puts it in Parry’s hands. That night, Parry magically awakens and comes to terms with his wife’s murder.
The Fisher King contains sustained ambiguity, but unlike The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the hesitation concerns character and not narrative events. Commenting on the characters, Gilliam has said: ‘I love the fact that there is this ambivalence. All myths, if they are dealt with properly, are never as clean-cut as we tend to see them. One side, if you twist it enough, becomes the other’ (Drucker 1991: 50). The particular myth in this film is the tale of the Fisher King, which Parry narrates to Jack halfway through the film (paraphrased below):
It begins with the king as a boy, who had to spend the night in the forest to prove his courage. While there he had a vision of the Holy Grail surrounded by fire. A voice told the boy that he was to be keeper of the Grail, so that it might heal the hearts of men. But the boy was blinded by a life of power and glory. Feeling like God, he reached for the Grail, but it vanished, burning the boy’s hand. As he grew older, the wound on his hand grew deeper and even life lost its reason. He couldn’t love or be loved, and he began to die. One day a fool wandered into the castle and saw this man in pain; being simpleminded he didn’t see that it was the king. He asked the king, ‘What ails you, friend?’ The king replied, ‘I am thirsty. I need some water to cool my throat.’ The fool reached down beside the king’s bed and picked up a cup and filled it with water. As the king drank, he felt his wound heal and realized that the cup was the Grail. He asked the fool, ‘How could you find that which my brightest and bravest could not?’ The fool replied, ‘I don’t know. I only knew that you were thirsty.’
This story informs the film’s larger narrative, but which character is the king and which the fool? Paradoxically, the answer is ‘both’. Both Jack and Parry fulfill the role of king because they both need healing. Jack is haunted by the feeling that his radio tirade led to the nightclub massacre (ironically, the viewer keeps hearing the words, ‘Well forgive me!’ coming from a TV sitcom in which Jack was supposed to star before the tragedy). Conversely, Parry needs to put his wife’s death behind him and learn to love again. Each time he recalls his past love, a vision of the menacing Red Knight appears. Similarly, they also both play the fool helping the other overcome his wound. Jack fulfills Parry’s quest for the Grail (even if it is only an award that looks like the Grail), and helps him woo Lydia. Meanwhile, Parry teaches Jack about the goodness inside himself, which frees him from his guilt. However, character ambiguity is not synonymous with the ambiguity to which Todorov referred as essential for the fantastic text. That ambiguity is caused when one is forced to explain a phenomenal event in the story as either an illusion of the senses or as the product of reality controlled by unknown laws. The Fisher King’s character ambiguity is not that problematic. The narrative events of the film remain the same (ie, they do not waver between a natural or supernatural explanation), regardless of whether or not one views Jack or Parry as the king and the other as the fool or each as both.
Nearly all of the phenomenal events of the film can be explained by the psychological trauma that Parry experienced when his wife was shot. Right after Jack hears about the ‘little people’ (imaginary fat fairies who told Parry to embark on his Grail quest), Gilliam includes a scene between Jack and the superintendent of the building in which Parry once lived. The superintendent tells Jack about the ‘accident’, which allows the viewer to understand Parry’s visions of pixies as the result of some repressed psychosis. Also, Gilliam suggests that the Red Knight is a product of Parry’s unconscious mind when the viewer at last sees the threatening foe at the end of Parry’s date with Lydia. Here, Gilliam uses parallel editing to clearly link the Red Knight to the man who shot Parry’s wife. However, Jack sees a representation of the Red Knight in a stained-glass window of the ‘castle’ he ‘storms’ or breaches to find the ‘Grail’, thus troubling the idea that the Knight exists only in Parry’s unconscious, even if only as a picture come-to-life. Both of these examples more or less provide a rational explanation for the supernatural elements, namely ‘madness’ or ‘strange coincidence’, which Todorov would argue places the film in the realm of the uncanny and not the fantastic.
Yet the fact that Parry emerges from his catatonia shortly after Jack brings him the ‘Grail’ does provide the film with a degree of the fantastic. Is the timing of Parry’s awakening mere coincidence or is it tied to Jack’s chivalrous act? Furthermore, if it is the latter case, is it just simple belief in the Grail that made Parry better, or does the Cup indeed have magical powers? By not providing answers to these questions in its final scenes, Gilliam allows the film to tread the waters of the fantastic-uncanny; although, like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King reverses Todorov’s definition of this sub-genre. As characterised, the supernatural events of the fantasticuncanny receive a rational explanation at the end (1975: 44). In this case, Parry’s supernatural recovery complicates the uncanny, but nonetheless rational, elements of the film. However, this ending is far from the purely fantastic. For one thing, neither character ponders the cause of Parry’s extraordinary recovery, which complicates Todorov’s second condition of the fantastic (character hesitation fostering reader/viewer hesitation).
Todorov’s third condition (rejecting allegorical interpretations) also problematises The Fisher King’s candidacy as a fantastic text. While not as symbolic as the earlier film, it’s take on the homeless could be read allegorically as another critique of social modernity. During the Grand Central Station sequence, Gilliam diverts from Parry inconspicuously following Lydia in order to focus on a homeless man in a wheelchair (Tom Waits). This man tells Jack that the homeless are society’s ‘moral traffic lights’. Allowing such an inconsequential character (in terms of the film’s narrative) to offer such a profound political statement is significant. It is as if Gilliam is directly challenging the viewer to ask in this instance, ‘How can this indeed be an ‘Enlightened” world when people are left to live in such a decrepit state just to remind the rest of the population of how lucky they are?’ Such a philosophy mocks the reasoning and logic of social modernity. Given all its instances of, and references to, the homeless – from the bum knocking on the window of Jack’s limo in the second scene of the film, to the proposed sitcom titled ‘Home Free’ about ‘happy homeless people’ that is pitched to Jack and his agent – it is hard to imagine that Gilliam intends his representation of homelessness to remain purely literal. Instead, as in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Gilliam seems to be using the concept of ‘homelessness’ to once again challenge a world dominated by reason, logic, science and technology.
As these two films demonstrate, Gilliam begins in the marvellous or the uncanny and ends near the line of the fantastic; but, ultimately, it is this critique of social modernity that keeps his fantasy films from truly being Todorovian fantastic texts. From Time Bandits through Twelve Monkeys (1996) to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), Gilliam’s films toe the line of sustained ambiguity well enough to be considered part of the fantastic (are the events real or are they merely illusion?), but ultimately Gilliam uses this ambiguity to challenge the world’s dependence on logic and reason. Furthermore, the ambiguity is typically secondary to his film’s visuals. As Gilliam himself once said in an interview, ‘In the end I always sort of … just go for visual spectacle and the things that excite me’ (Behar 1995). In this respect, his work follows Jochen Schulte-Sasse’s splitting of fantasy into the duel concepts of ‘imagination’ and ‘fancy’. According to Schulte-Sasse, fantasy can be used to compensate for the shortcomings of existing realities or to produce new ones (1987: 29). This first instance comprises ‘imagination’, which Gilliam’s films demonstrate through their attack on reason and logic (ie, ‘existing reality’), while the latter encompasses ‘fancy’, which is the escapism factor associated with Gilliam’s visuals (ie, ‘producing a new reality’). Gilliam’s signature themes thus resemble the words of Marcel Schneider who wrote in his La Littérature Fantastique en France (1964), ‘The fantastic explores inner space; it sides with the imagination, the anxiety of existence, and the hope of salvation’ (Todorov 1975: 36). Coincidentally, as if expecting a case to be made for Gilliam as a director of the fantastic, Todorov rejects this definition by saying that this is a theme that could be applied to texts which are not fantastic at all (ibid.). But Gilliam obviously does not need Todorov’s approval to make it as a fantasy auteur: with his perfect blend of imagination (themes deconstructing the dogmas of modernity) and fancy (proposing a new way to see and understand the world), Terry Gilliam has indeed gotten far on ‘hot air and fantasy’.
Notes
1 Todorov represents the relationship between these terms in the following sketch with ‘fantasy in its pure state represented here by the median line separating the fantastic-uncanny from the fantastic-marvelous … a frontier line between two adjacent realms’ (1975: 44). Uncanny > Fantastic-uncanny > Fantastic-marvellous > Marvellous.
2 Seemingly missing is the ‘Scientific Marvellous,’ which Todorov also calls ‘science fiction’ (1975: 56), but David Morgan has labelled Munchausen an ‘eighteenth-century sci-fi’(1988: 240).
3 For the troubled production history, see Bob McCabe’s chapter, ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ (1999: 130–43).
Works Cited
Drucker, Elizabeth (1991) ‘The Fisher King: Terry Gilliam Melds the Modern and the Mythical’, American Film, 16, 50–1.
Hollinger, Robert (1994) Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: A Thematic Approach. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kael, Pauline (1989) ‘Too Hip by Half ’, The New Yorker, 3 April, 103–5.
McCabe, Bob (1999) Dark Knights and Holy Fools: The Art and Films of Terry Gilliam. New York: Universe Publishing.
Morgan, David (1988) ‘The Mad Adventures of Terry Gilliam’, Sight and Sound, 57, 4, 238–42.
Robley, Les Paul and Paul Wardle (1996) ‘Hollywood Maverick: Terry Gilliam, A Career Profile of One of the Cinema’s Premier Fantasists’, Cinefantastique, 27, 6, 24–37.
Schulte-Sasse, Jochen (1987) ‘Imagination and Modernity: Or the Taming of the Human Mind’, Cultural Critique, 5, 23–48.
Todorov, Tzvetan (1975) The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Yule, Andrew (1991) Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam & The Munchausen Saga. New York: Applause.