‘I’d cut carrots and serve the catering on a Gilliam film … I really love the guy.’
Heath Ledger (DVD commentary 2010)
‘It was awful shooting after Heath died … It was madness … Each day, it was really hard to keep going. It was: What are we doing? At times it felt like we were just going through the motions, because we just had to keep moving forward, looking to see where it went, hoping it would shape itself.’
Terry Gilliam (Biskard 2009: 135)
Our first view of Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) is a shocking sight, as his character, Tony Liar, wearing a brilliant white suit and lit with an angelic glow in the midnight gloom of a stormy London sky, hangs from the rafters of Blackfriars Bridge with a rope around his neck. This image is one of daring distaste – the now-dead star plays the potentially dead Tony Liar. As Peter Biskard comments, ‘in the light of his [Ledger’s] subsequent death, it takes your breath away’ (2009: 86).1 With his head tipped back and his mouth hanging open, this uncanny figure places the audience in the uncomfortable position of being able to ‘see’ the image of death as portrayed by Ledger, a scene too uncomfortably near the truth. Rain falls as Anton (Andrew Garfield), wearing his mercury wings and proving that his mythical incarnation can indeed reach into the underworld, albeit of London, pulls Ledger over the bridge. A wet and bedraggled Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) shouts from the roof of his neo-Victorian carriage, ‘why are you fishing dead people out the river? … for the love of God, he’s dead!’ This line not only announces the character of Tony and shows Parnassus to be the cantankerous old man that he is but also alerts the audience to the reality of Ledger’s demise outside of the film.
Thus the relationship between star and character is established and explored within the film’s fragmented narrative, which places Ledger as Tony in front of the mirror in the ‘real time’ of twenty-first-century London and his three co-stars as Tony behind the mirror in the unconstructed time of fantasy. As Anton pulls Tony to the pavement and hits him in the chest, a brass rod shoots out of his mouth and the prone body heaves forward and breathes: a wish-fulfilment moment for the audience and a poignant reminder of the real loss of Ledger. From this moment on the character of Tony acts as a doppelgänger for Ledger and an embodiment of the life returning to a now-dead star whose loss, the audience will know, left a real and narrative gap to be filled in order for the film to continue its shooting schedule.
The death of Heath Ledger on 22 January 2008 placed the production of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in turmoil. This tragic setback left Gilliam with the rather unpalatable dilemma of cancelling the movie or shooting with another actor. In this chapter I consider the narrative structure of the movie, given Gilliam’s decision to continue to shoot with the addition of three well-known actors to replace Ledger: Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. Notions of fantasy and trauma are explored to unravel the complexity of a plot, which asks its audience to enter the imaginary world of Parnassus and to accept what one sees there as a truth, to, as Gilliam puts it, ‘look at the world in a slightly different way’ (2008: 5). I also take up this concept of a world askew in considering the reception of the film and the ways in which the image of Heath Ledger functions as a central focus in the discourse around the film’s promotion and exhibition. Thus, I analyse the film within the context of a cultural and narrative trauma associated with loss, celebrity and performance. Ledger’s ‘stand-ins’ not only play homage to his acting prowess but also problematise the tragic truth of his disappearance from the film, because when his character enters the other side of the mirror, Ledger is truly not there.
The film is a ‘fantastical morality tale set in the present day’ (Gillam 2008: 2). It tells the story of an Imaginarium, a travelling show in which the ancient Doctor Parnassus guides members of the audience to enjoy an ‘irresistible opportunity to choose between light and joy or darkness and gloom’ (ibid.). The film is set a few days before the sixteenth birthday of Parnassus’s daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole). Unbeknownst to her, centuries before, Parnassus made a deal with the Devil (Mr Nick, played by Tom Waits) when he traded his immortality for her life. When Mr Nick returns to claim his prize Parnassus secures a new deal: whoever first seduces five souls will win her. In his desire to keep his daughter safe, Parnassus promises her hand in marriage to any man who can help him win. This film’s tale of the foolishness of men takes its audience behind the mirror into the whimsical world of the imagination of the Imaginarium’s paying audience where the surreal goings-on propel a story that is both amusing and chilling. Its fantasy landscape, though, is always undercut by the off-screen trauma and reality of the death of Heath Ledger.
In ‘Traumatic Memories’, Bessell A. Van der Kolk states that ‘clinical experience teaches us that traumatized individuals often suffer from a combination of vivid recall for some elements of the trauma, and amnesia for others’ (1997: 248). The structure of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus relies on memory – the audience needs to remember not only what has gone before in terms of plot progression but also who has gone before in terms of the performance of Tony. The return from Ledger to his stand-ins produces a neurotic return to a memory of death, the constant memory of the loss of Ledger. Yet this return also makes him a constant presence in the film, regardless of who is playing homage to him behind the mirror: the narrative form asks us to have selective amnesia about the actor playing Tony. While we are required to remember the narrative thread in order to understand the emerging plot, we are encouraged through the artifice of the mirror to re-imagine the face of the actor as Ledger.
However, every time Ledger as Tony enters the mirror he takes on a different face – Depp as Tony/Law as Tony/Farrell as Tony – which produces a twisted version of the once whole man. Ledger’s reappearance in front of the mirror again functions as a neurotic memory for the audience, a repeated motif in the film of the returning (dead) man. For the audience, this acts as wish fulfilment might, which according to Freud in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, works by taking a subconscious trigger and distorting it to engage with the unconscious impulses that drive our hopes and dreams. So the complete body of Heath Ledger is returned again and again to the twenty-first century. However, Freud’s argument fails to take into account the importance of recent conflicts in the waking life of the patient. As W. H. R. Rivers points out in his work on the subconscious, dreams are ‘attempts to solve in sleep conflicts which are disturbing in real life’ (1923: v). The neurotic return of a memory or dream is suggestive of the difficulty of assimilation, a traumatic image that cannot be fully understood. In The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus the structure of the film engages its audience in just such an unassimilated trauma, thus creating a neurotic loop in its insistent reproduction of the distorted image of Tony behind the mirror only to return him whole as Heath Ledger in front of it again.
The film has another layer to its fantasy narrative, too. Although the film is set in the present, Gilliam locates its mise-en-scène in the late nineteenth century so that it is ‘more like Dickens’ than Gordon Brown’s version of London (Biskard 2009: 85). He produces, through the construction of the Imaginarium wagon and pop-up theatre, yet another steampunk version of the modern world, a recurring motif for Gilliam as Anna Froula notes in chapter one of this volume. The film’s satirical view of the need for an archaic entertainment and escape from the realities of twenty-first-century Britain positions the film – made during Gordon’s Brown’s lacklustre time as Prime Minister – as a commentary on the suffering economy, rising unemployment figures and the general anomie of the population. As Allan Hunter comments, Gilliam’s London is ‘a despairing old man’s vision of a world that needs a little magic and hope more than ever’ (2009). Even the wealthy middle class, as epitomised by the women who enter the Imaginarium in the gilded shopping mall, are in need of emotional and spiritual sustenance not found in their couture clothes and expensive jewellery. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, then, takes its audience on a somewhat melancholic journey constructed by aesthetic and philosophical bricolage.
Melancholia is a loss that cannot be assimilated into consciousness. It is an emotional lacuna associated with something lost. Unlike mourning, which is an active, painful and cathartic outpouring of grief, melancholia presents itself as an immovable longing for something to be restored. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Sigmund Freud remarks that
melancholia … borrows some of its features from mourning … It is on one hand, like mourning, a reaction to the real loss of a loved object; but over and above this, it is marked by a determinant which is absent in normal mourning, or which, if it is present, transforms the latter into pathological mourning. (1995: 587)
This pathology presents itself as a constant longing for normality to be restored and can be interpreted within the fractured narrative form and plot-line of the film – from the loss of faith in oneself for Parnassus to the transformation (and loss) of Tony/Ledger’s image behind the mirror and his re-emergence in front of it. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus never quite succeeds as film-as-mourning because the anxiety around the disappearance of the actor’s body is never truly resolved.
As Biskard notes, the film’s preoccupations move to and fro between the artistic and self-referential to the sardonic and political:
Stuffed with … satire, philosophical musings, puns and jokes, throwaway allusions both mundane and arcane, fleeting references to Gilliam’s previous pictures as well as classics such as The Seventh Seal and La Strada, not to mention a handful of Big Ideas – including the nature of narrative, the relation of the artist to the audience, artifice to truth – all of which get turned over and ruminated upon. (2009: 85)
Like all of Gilliam’s films we are not in one landscape for very long. The film moves between worlds, real and imagined, and between narratives of philosophy – in particular the hubris of men – and the function of charity, celebrity and fame in the twenty-first century. It is no accident that the name of entrepreneur (charity) crook Tony Liar bears a striking resemblance to the British ex-Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Gilliam admits that ‘both [writer Charles McKeown] and I were obsessed with Tony Blair at the time, and that’s why he’s called Tony. It’s all about the hypocrisy that’s out there’ (Biskard 2009: 87). Satire here takes on a second traumatic turn here as the character of Tony Liar stands in for all the disappointments and unpopular decisions made by Blair, particularly for loyal supporters of the Labour Party.2 In particular the third incarnation of Tony by Colin Farrell is a dark, celebrity critique that suggests the worlds created by publicity and hubris are shallow, transient and ultimately corrupt.
It is somewhat disconcerting to consider the film’s production (2007–8) and release (2009) and to view the imaginary, constructed, glitzy world of paparazzi and fame that Liar has built and that literally comes crashing down around his ears in light of Tony Blair’s activities after he resigned as Prime Minister in 2007. His career as a consultant for Tony Blair Associates saw him ‘tour the world’, while he also offered his services to the academic lecture circuit in the United States, became a rumoured potential First President of the European Council, and actively promoted the work of his three charities: the Tony Blair Sports Foundation, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative. In aligning Tony Liar with Tony Blair, Gilliam crafts a character assassination – around celebrity status and political power – that suggests his fantasy worlds ought to be taken very seriously indeed.
The film premiered at Cannes on 22 May 2009, to a standing ovation, but reviews were mixed. The film received much negative criticism, perhaps the most severe from Ramin Setoodeh, who suggests that ‘an unfinished work is much more fraught, especially when it’s a total stinker’ (2009). He comments more abruptly:
That’s not completely true of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, also known as The Film Heath Ledger Was Making When He Died. Still, watching it, you feel like a dinner guest who has to pretend to like his best friend’s bland cooking … But the best way to honour the dead may be to allow their last work to stay just as they left it – unfinished. (2009)
Commenting on Ledger’s performance in the film, Anthony Lane suggests that it ‘should not be mistaken for his [Heath Ledger’s] finest hour: we see his larking, but not the undertones of frailty that tugged at Brokeback Mountain’ (2009). These reviews suggest, though, that there is an awkward respect around the reception of this film for Ledger as an actor, but not for the film or even Gilliam.
Those who liked it focused on the director as creator of yet another fantasy world. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said the film is ‘a work as exceptional and unusual as its title … the director’s best, most entertaining film for years’ (quoted in Biskard 2009: 135). Charles McGrath enthusiastically exclaims The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasuss to be ‘Gilliam’s first wholly original project since the [sic] Time Bandits’ and that his ‘phantasmagorical world … is a cinematic representation of the inside of Terry Gilliam’s teeming brain’ (2009). The majority of the reviews focused on the presence and absence of Heath Ledger; for instance Manohla Dargis states the film is ‘a weird … not entirely successful experiment. Mr Ledger’s death understandably haunts the movie, shadowing its every gaudy and hyperventilated scene to alternatively distracting and depressing effect’ (2009). Stuart Klawans commented that ‘the trick [of having three actors] does nothing to diminish the film’s exuberance – but it does lend gravity to the supernaturalism. Dr. Parnassus is one fantasy that’s been visibly marked by death’ (2009). Thus the reviews echo the melancholy of the film; the once bright star, Ledger, is lost and although his image can be (re-)viewed over and over his wholeness can never be restored.
This pathology of loss can also be identified in the ‘story’ of Ledger’s death. Tabloid headlines and magazine articles directly after his death charted his ambivalent relationship to drugs and ‘partying’ while at the same time heralding his immense love for his daughter, Matilda, and his despair at the break-up of his relationship with Michelle Williams (see Anon. 2008a; Anon. 2008b; Anon. 2008c). Never missing from the reports or articles is the mention of the loss of such a promising and hard-working young actor. People’s leading article on 4 February 2008 – just two weeks after his death – ran for a full eight pages, and included photographs of all his major film roles and Academy Award-winning appearances as well as images of Ledger the family man (see Tresniowski et al. 2008). The article focuses on the loss to his family (‘Michelle is devastated’), and Hollywood’s loss of a rising star; it also included detailed information and speculation about Ledger’s growing levels of anxiety caused by his impending divorce and the strain of work. This line, for instance – ‘an intense, restless man known for his partying and wild streak as for his sweetness and sensitivity, Ledger had been having problems sleeping’ – suggests the accidental circumstances of his death and the pressures leading to it. This example of the article’s rhetoric is typical of the discourse around his death of confusion, loss, anxiety and disappointment.
The mourning for Ledger directly after his death includes an extraordinary lament for the lack of hindsight of everyone around him, including the press themselves. People includes in its article eleven examples of prophetic commentary on his lifestyle and state of mind and health in the weeks before his death, including his disclosure to a Los Angeles Times reporter that ‘Ambien barely worked for him’. Ledger had said, ‘last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night … I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted and my mind was still going’ (2008: 58). There is an overwhelming tone of regret and loss at Ledger’s death, as if, perhaps, someone could have done something. Gilliam, too, in an interview with Vanity Fair tries to make sense of his loss when he says, ‘I wish I had the answer. It really bothers me that I can’t make sense out of it. There was nothing grand or dramatic about it. It just happened. It’s still a big mystery’ (Biskard 2009: 132). Commenting on Ledger’s health during the last weeks of the shoot, he describes how the actor worked through what was clearly a difficult time for him after the break-up of his relationship:
One day, he showed up with a terrible cough, shivering. He was clearly bloody sick … We called a doctor, who said, ‘This is the beginning of pneumonia. You need antibiotics. Go home and rest.’ He said, ‘No way. I’m not going to go home, because I can’t sleep … I’d rather stay here and work … He looked awful, because of lack of sleep and just the shit he was going through with the lawyers.’ (Ibid.)
Here Gilliam suggests – in an attempt to understand – that Ledger himself was suffering from a loss that he was trying to compensate for with his craft. The actor was shooting in London, Matilda was in Sweden with her mother (where she was working), and, according to Gilliam, Ledger ‘put [everything] into the work, because that was the joy; what he loved to do. The words were just pouring out. It was like he was channelling’ (ibid.). What these reports and articles do is construct a sense of melancholy around his loss. These are not obituaries; instead, they read as records of confusion, self-blame and affection from an industry and fan-base that fails to assimilate the trauma of its loss.3
Ledger’s absence from the production necessitated what Gilliam describes as the ‘rescue’ of the film by ‘three heroes, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell’, whose ‘incredible act of generosity and love’ was a ‘beautiful and rare moment in our industry’ (Gilliam 2008: 19). The involvement of the three actors enabled a more defined separation of character and performance both in front of and behind the mirror. Gilliam states that the narrative of the Imaginarium lent itself to creating new worlds and so ‘every time Tony … goes through the mirror, he becomes a different aspect of himself ‘ (2008: 19). These three actors bring different aspects of performance and intertextuality, too, of course. In 2008 Johnny Depp was most well-known for playing eccentric, fantasy figures – Jack Sparrow (2003, 2006, 2007), Willie Wonka (2005) and Sweeney Todd (2007) – but in 1998 he had made Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Gilliam and was so committed to working with him again that he worked his one-and-a-half day break from playing John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s Public Enemy (2009) in order to enable the first incarnation of Tony behind the mirror.
Jude Law had played a variety of British cads and romantic leads and had starred in the first completely green screen, live-action fantasy, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), and Colin Farrell was hot from his role as a traumatised hit man, Ray, in Martin McDonagh’s unique gangster film In Bruges (2008). It is hard to resist reading these past performance traits into their performances of Tony as the storyline becomes darker and more sinister. The pre-advertising for the film and the publicity around the death of Ledger ensure that the audience is clear about the necessary change of actors and their identities, and thus it contains no surprises for the audience once Tony goes through the mirror. The issue, though, is whether the audience is ready to lose Ledger yet. Will he come back? The first transition to Tony-behind-the-mirror happens after he has been rescued from the bridge and wants to help the theatre troupe make money.
The notion of the freak show is writ large as Tony re-aligns the troupe to appeal to the masses (an early clue to his exploitative tendencies not yet realised). He is dressed in his white suit, gold paint on his face, with a re-dressed stage, including a reclining Anton dressed in drag (reminiscent of Mrs Gumby in Monty Python’s Flying Circus), a fan-carrying dwarf Percy (Verne Troyer) in turban and black face, and a practically naked Valentina. Placing the Imaginarium in a glittering Victorian mall, Tony asks the shopping women, ‘Do you dream? Or more importantly, what price would you put on your dreams?’ Here he evokes the notion that to dream and to enter the mirror are similar exercises in fantasy and wish fulfilment. He is wearing a theatrical bird mask – but it is clearly Ledger. The mask complicates the image for the audience – we are asked to consider his body, his performance style, his hairline and his voice to ascertain whether this is still Ledger. The effect of this is to elevate the performance of Ledger to spectacle. All narrative is lost in the moment of recognition as the audience concentrates their efforts on ascertaining whether this is actually the lost star – and this has real currency as we are never sure when the last view of him will be. This creates a fractured viewing position for the audience who must disrupt the flow of narrative continuity to interpret who is the actor behind the mask.
When Tony succeeds in tantalising the first wealthy woman behind the mirror with promises of inner happiness, he follows after her not understanding the rules of the Imaginarium (one soul at a time). Here we see a fantasy land fit for Carrie Bradshaw, shoes as far as the eye can see. The woman runs from shoe to shoe, ecstatic with her fantasy world whose mise-en-scène is also reminiscent of the colourful world of Tim Burton’s chocolate factory (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2005). She asks Tony, ‘Who are you dear?’ It is a simple question and one that answers to the truth of the metadiegetic absence of Ledger. As she lifts the bird mask we see that the actor is now Johnny Depp – he stares at his face in the mirror, staring through it directly at us, a key moment of recognition and confusion for the character and the audience. He dances her around in a Valentino-styled tango on tall lily pads as they rise up above the ground. Here the audience experiences an uncanny moment as the figure of Tony rises above the camera and in long shot, his figure, hairline, pony tail and white suit show Depp to be deceptively like Ledger in physique, thus playing to audience confusion and toying with the experience of loss.
Tony guides her towards a small river and a waiting gondola. As he does so, toy boats sail past displaying pictures of Rudolph Valentino (reviving the motif of the tango), James Dean and Princess Diana; the woman gasps, ‘All these people, they’re all dead’, to which Tony replies, ‘Yes, but immortal, nevertheless; they won’t get old, or fat, they won’t get sick or feeble, they are beyond fear, because they are forever young, they’re gods, and you can join them.’ Here Gilliam plays with the deceit within the narrative that enables the character to change faces behind the mirror and quadruples the film-as-mourning potential for the audience, whilst also playing homage to both Ledger and other young legends whose short lives made them style icons and mourned celebrities. This self-referentiality breaks the illusion of fantasy and reminds the audience of the importance of memory in their construction of the narrative.
This melancholic tribute moment is undercut as Gilliam’s sense of the ridiculous comes into play when an animated Cobra complete with Mr Nick’s devil’s head rises up to threaten the soul of the woman. Tony/Depp leaves her (and us) with one comment: ‘remember, nothing’s permanent, not even death’, and he is catapulted backward out of the mirror onto the stage. Ledger appears again in a crumpled heap onstage on the ‘real-life’ side of the mirror – death is not a permanent state, so far, for the on-screen Ledger. In terms of loss and mourning, this continues a vacillating emotional journey for the audience.
The next transition of Ledger happens after a farcical chase between Russian gangsters and Tony from the shopping mall back into the mirror. Here, the audience begins to understand that Tony may have a dark past, and, as he enters into the mirror first – to escape this history – his fantasy begins to play out. A woman’s voice can be heard saying, ‘You, too, can be rich and famous’, as front pages of Fortune Magazine and USA Today – with cover images of Jude Law as Tony – flash past the audience, who first sees the new Tony mediated through the image of the tabloid press. This is the first suggestion of Tony as celebrity, but the link to the tabloid obsession with Hollywood – including to these four central actors – places this second Tony-behind-the-mirror story within the realms of social commentary as the narrative takes a slide into the world of the self-promoting charity celebrity.
The landscape is one of picture-book paradise, like a Grant Wood painting of pastel field and sky with enormous ladders that reach beyond the clouds. There is joyfulness about the surreal nature of this dream-like landscape as Tony starts to climb one of the ladders, and the voice-over asserts, ‘It will be you; it can be you; it is you’, thus playing on the actor’s identity as well as alluding to the self-help assertiveness training that endorses positive thinking for positive results.4 As Tony climbs higher he removes the bird mask – in close-up – revealing the second stand-in for Ledger, Jude Law. All the positive thinking in the world can’t bring Ledger back. Again, it is the audience who is invited to look first at this new incarnation. Like the horror of the unmasking of the phantom of the opera in Lon Chaney’s characterisation in 1925, the audience is witness to the artifice of make-up and performance. Tony grins as he leaps across the landscape on the two uprights of the ladder, as if on giant stilts, and the ludicrousness of the situation is highlighted by his manic laugh at foiling his Russian enemies, but Law isn’t foiling us. The landscape begins to crumble and dark clouds loom ahead. The mise-en-scène transforms into a Salvador Dali-esque nightmare landscape as Tony falls from the broken ladder, suggesting that this duplicity cannot be kept up forever.
Upon landing, he is captured and held forcefully by the gangsters who stare at his face; one says, ‘that’s not him, I told you, that’s not him!’ But they wipe off the gold face paint to reveal red markings on his forehead that identify him as Tony. They prepare to hang him (again). This cry of ‘that’s not him’ echoes the loss of Ledger; it is indeed ‘not him’. After a moment of Gilliam’s Pythonesque madness (a giant animated head of a policeman appears from beneath the earth, a spoof performance of the Secret Policeman’s Ball, and an exploding Russian mother), Anton appears in the desolate landscape still dressed as a woman and carrying tabloid newspapers containing accusations of Tony as a charity fraud.5 He asks angrily, ‘Who are you?’ Like the moment of change from Ledger to Depp (‘Who are you, dear?’), the character of Tony as Law needs to be re-dedicated once more. This repetition ensures that audiences are not lured into feeling secure about the incarnations of Tony, and, indeed, Ledger’s final performance is close.
A distressed Anton continues to shout, ‘You stole their money!’, and we start to understand the back-story of Tony: his status as hero and ‘saviour of Tibet’ and his charity work with children. He reduces Anton to tears as he convincingly argues for his innocence and describes how the Russian gangsters laundered money through the charity. There is something ‘believable’ in the performance of Law here as the lovable English rogue, an echo of cockney scoundrel Alfie (2004) for the audience, but Anton does not believe him, and there is a challenge to any notion that Tony is a good character. The dark set begins to crumble as Anton’s fantasy challenges that of Tony’s, and he disappears again through the mirror back to the ‘real world’, still shouting, ‘I needed the money!’ This line bleeds into the next scene, and over the image of Ledger this edit collapses the two actors into one Tony for the briefest of moments as sound and image coalesce. The spiralling downfall of Tony is enhanced by the changing actor as the different facets of his personality are exposed. Could we really imagine the weirdly Willy Wonka-esaque Depp as a charity swindler? Jude Law provides a step towards uncovering the trickster Tony. Is this darker than we want to remember Ledger?
With the transition of Tony to Colin Farrell, we see a very different version of the larky lad that Ledger gave us in the shopping mall or the sweet, tango-dancing Depp. Here he is dark and brooding, predatory and manipulative, as he seduces a very willing Valentina (he takes her into his fantasy) in the gondola and smirks, ‘You’re a very naughty girl.’ Ignoring Mr Nick’s ploy to take both of their souls, Tony’s fantasy continues as he stands at the top of a red-carpeted staircase, surrounded by paparazzi. He has Valentina join him, glamorous in high heels and a bright red figure-hugging dress. It is a familiar scene from any celebrity or political event. Instructing her to ‘smile for the camera, sweetheart’, he has an orphaned child on his hip as they pose before the flashing lights below. Tony announces sadly that there is ‘so much suffering … it’s been a big year for the foundation’. The sardonic overtones here provide social commentary about the fragility of celebrity as the images change more rapidly within the Imaginarium and Tony struggles to keep the illusion alive. He appears on a stage in a glittering ballroom packed with guests. Anton appears as a small child and can be heard calling, ‘You’re disgraced!’ and ‘Arrested last week selling organs of third world children!’ Tony’s world literally begins to crumble around him as his fraudulent life is exposed: staircases fall, glass shatters and Valentina can be seen running to escape through exploding glass, recalling Scotty’s (James Stewart) dream in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) where petals of Carlotta’s bouquet explode outward in psychedelic spirals.
This evocation of Vertigo’s traumatic dream sequence disrupts the narrative and, in so doing, begs the question, whose trauma is this now? In whose fantasy are we caught up? Valentina appears in Tony’s fantasy but the Imaginarium can only be accessed if Doctor Parnassus is in a trance. Here, we view Parnassus’s nightmare as the devil, Mr Nick, appears and starts to tango with Valentina, spinning her through the glass until he presents her with two mirrors from which to choose her escape. She is dangerously close to becoming the fifth soul, and Parnassus will lose his child forever. This is a significant move from one fantasy to the other because Tony loses control of his destiny from this point. He now is pursued by the mob and hung – for the third and final time – from the dark and looming tree at the top of a giant staircase. Parnassus regains control of his mind and the fantasy (and the Imaginarium) as he tricks Tony into using the wrong tube and watches as the man drops to his death. Parnassus displays here an angry drive for retribution that has not been evident in the narrative before. The threat of the loss of his child is more than he can bear and Tony must be punished for the threat that he posed to her survival.
Driven by melancholia – a loss that cannot be assimilated into consciousness – Parnassus becomes (self-)destructive and focused as he looks for meaning and tries to make sense of his early life decisions, his consequent life, and the consequences that follow. In ‘The Ego and the Id’ Freud reminds us that in melancholia, ‘we find that the excessively strong super-ego … rages against the ego with merciless violence’ (1995: 654). In re-gaining control of the fantasy within the Imaginarium, Parnassus ‘defends against the tyrant’ that threatens his ego. The death of Tony signifies a moment of action for Parnassus but it does not regain his lost child. At the end of the film, Parnassus is seen with Percy selling paper theatre versions of the Imaginarium. A small boy asks Parnassus, ‘Does it have a happy ending?’ He looks forlornly at Percy who says, ‘Sorry, we can’t guarantee that.’ This line underscores the melancholia of loss, the realities of life, the conceit of Hollywood and the failure of celebrity to bridge the gap; the lack of a catharsis leaves the audience in a melancholic frame of mind and still searching for understanding.
Another reason, perhaps, why Gilliam films require another viewing, as Mark Kermode suggests in his Radio 5 Live review of the film, is that, ‘Frankly, Gilliam is one of the only directors making cinema [who’s] innovative [and] working in a way that encourages audiences to view the film again’. Re-viewing The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus enables an unravelling of the complex narrative, but it also increases the sense of melancholia for a viewer or fan feeling the loss of Heath Ledger. Gilliam’s film places the star central to the narrative even with his actual loss from the set because of the three star actors’ referential relationship to Ledger. Their acting styles remain idiosyncratically their own, but make-up and costume allude to the lost star even as his character moves further and further away from the Ledger performance. When Farrell-as-Tony is finally hung, we are left wondering if he did not just get punished for not being Ledger-as-Tony. Can there be resolution in such retribution?
Heath Ledger’s status as a rising star of significant potential is clearly demarcated then by his replacement within The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus by not one but three A-list actors and whose presence is felt within the performances of those actors as they play out the multiple personalities of one man, as character and actor. Gilliam comments in his production notes for the film, ‘Heath seemed to be with us the whole way … his energy, his brilliance, his ideas … are the reasons that this is truly a film from Heath Ledger and friends’ (2009: 20). The film’s pre-promotion, implicit through the articles around Ledger’s death and explicit through its pre-advertising, reviews and Gilliam’s interviews produce an over-awareness of the death of Heath Ledger and add a burden to the film of memorial and mourning that was not originally intended. Such pre-promotion also foregrounds the anxious life of the star, his divorce and his prescription drug habit that would not have been at the forefront of publicity had he survived the shoot and appeared at the premiere. Writing about stardom, Richard deCordova suggests that there is a fascination with revealing ‘a concealed truth … that resided behind or beyond’ the surface of the star so that ‘transgression, betrayal, restlessness and loss entered the dramatic framework’ of the star persona (1990: 140). This, as Sean Redmond and Su Holmes suggest, offers the reader and follower of stars and celebrities to understand that ‘the glory of public visibility can leave its subjects wanting’ (2006: 289). However, as Ledger-as-Tony wryly reminds us in his last delivered line of the film: ‘Don’t believe what you read in the newspapers; especially the mirror.’6
Notes
1 Gilliam is referencing the mysterious demise of Roberto Calvi, ‘God’s Banker’, a figure at the centre of the Vatican bank scandal of 1982 – alluded to in The Godfather, Part III (1990) – who was found hanging from the same bridge.
2 For instance, introducing and then raising University tuition fees, the slow but pervasive privatisation of the British health care system and, not least of all, the invasion of Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and the collusion in the incarceration and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
3 For the record, the circumstances of Ledger´s death are confirmed as an accidental overdose of a mixture of painkillers, anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills. Vanity Fair quotes a spokeswoman from the New York City medical examiner saying, ‘It’s the combination of the drugs that caused the problem, not necessarily too much of any particular drug’ (quoted in Biskard 2009: 132).
4 This presents another Tony – Tony Robbins – who promotes self-assertion techniques and life coaching (see www.tonyrobbins.com).
5 The Secret Policeman’s Ball was a live comedy charity performance for Amnesty International, played in the UK and originating in 1976. Including the Monty Python team and other leading British comedians, it included a scene of transvestite policemen singing and dancing. The charity event spawned many spin-offs using the original title until 2008.
6 There is an intended pun by Gilliam here, as The Daily Mirror – coined ‘The Mirror’ in the UK – is a popular tabloid newspaper.
Works Cited
Anon. (2008a) ‘Truly Tragic end to a promising career’, Variety, 23 January (from Heath Ledger clipping file, by kind permission of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, CA.).
——(2008b) ‘Too-brief career filled with risk’, Hollywood Reporter, 23 January (from Heath Ledger clipping file, by kind permission of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, CA.).
——(2008c) ‘Parnassus is shut down’, Hollywood Reporter, 25 January (from Heath Ledger clipping file, by kind permission of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, CA.).
Biskard, Peter (2009) ‘The Last’, Vanity Fair, 588, August, 82–135.
Dargis, Manohla (2009) ‘The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnasuss’, New York Times, 25 December (from Heath Ledger clipping file, by kind permission of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, CA.).
deCordova, Richard (1990) Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
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——(1995b [1917]) ‘Melancholia and Mourning’, in Peter Gay (ed.) The Freud Reader, London: Vintage, 584–89.
——(1995c [1923]) ‘The Ego and the Id’, in Peter Gay (ed.) The Freud Reader, London: Vintage, 628–58.
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Klawans, Stuart (2009) ‘The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus’, The Nation, 25 January (from Heath Ledger clipping file, by kind permission of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, CA.).
Lane, Anthony (2009) ‘The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnasuss’, New Yorker, 21 December (from Heath Ledger clipping file, by kind permission of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, CA). Klawans, Stuart (2009) The Nation. 25 January.
Redmond, Sean and Su Holmes (eds) (2006) Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture. London, Routledge.
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Setoodeh, Ramin (2009) ‘‘The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnasuss’, Newsweek, 14 December (from Heath Ledger clipping file, by kind permission of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, CA).
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