Fear and Loathing in Hollywood: Looking at Terry Gilliam through a Wide-angle Lens
My work is not realistic in any way, it’s more like cartoons. Distorted. Hyperreal. I don’t think I can ever see the world in a banal way. I am always inventing stuff to highlight reality.
Terry Gilliam (Tapper 2006: 64)
Watching a Gilliam film tends to leave the audience in joyful wonderment, dazed and confused, and out of breath, if not utterly baffled or even angry about what has transpired on screen. Gilliam fills every frame with minute detail, much of it impossible to see in one viewing without the aid of a remote control and a thumb on the pause button. This volume takes a snapshot of the still very-much-in-progress career of Terry Gilliam as we seek to turn a wide-angle lens, now known industry-wide as “The Gilliam’, on this original and influential director (see Cullen 2000). For five decades he has been a cartoonist, animator, comic, film auteur, social critic and, most recently, opera director. While he has never wholly departed from his Monty Python roots, he has forged his own distinct vision. Gilliam creates worlds that are at once familiar and uncanny and he always triumphs the mundane and the ridiculous. His anachronistic and off-kilter vision, his exploration of space – both enormous and claustrophobic – and his particular sense of cluttered mise-en-scène consistently evades our ability to find a stable or common foundation on which to ground a single approach to his films. But Gilliam’s ouvre is more than mere stylised nonsense: his genius is clearly defined by his visual style as it expresses a political and social critique of the world he sees.
When Gilliam makes a movie, he goes to war: against Hollywood caution and convention, against hyper-consumerism and imperial militarism, against narrative vapidity and spoon-fed mediocrity, and against the brutalising notion and cruel vision of the American Dream. His critics have accused him of making elaborate inside jokes, but, while he does want his viewers to ‘work the meanings out for themselves’ and to ‘fill in the gaps’, he makes movies that end in questions and that are ‘messages in bottles for America’ (Christie & Gilliam 2000: 246). These messages are national allegories – dark and daring, colourful and complex – that challenge viewers to reconsider the experience of watching films. From his black-toothed villagers in Jabberwocky (1977) to his Dalí-inspired landscapes in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009), Gilliam’s mise-en-scène confronts audiences with darkness and filth that is alternatively gleefully scatological and profoundly abject. In Gilliam’s eyes, ‘the darkness is what makes the light more beautiful’, and, he says, ‘a problem I see now in the modern world – particularly in America – is the perception of a world without struggle, a world were [sic] all our needs are taken care of ’ (Tapper 2006: 65). Perhaps his most scathing expression of his vision of ‘America as the Rome of the twentieth century’ is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) (McCabe 1999: 183).
Arguably, his political distance as an expatriate ‘gonzo’ filmmaker made possible his biting translation of Hunter S. Thompson’s psychedelic account of the 1971 Mint 400 race into cinematic language.1 While Thompson praised the adaptation as ‘a masterpiece … an eerie trumpet call over a lost battlefield’, critics writing at the end of the Pax Americana frequently missed what the fight was all about in the first place (Smith 1998: 79). Some booed the film at Cannes, some sneered at what they saw as its (and the book’s, presumably) lack of a narrative centre, some giggled and grimaced through the visual rendition of the pharmaceutical adventures of Duke Raoul (Johnny Depp) and Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro), but few read Gilliam’s ‘secondary language embedded in the film that people either grasp or don’t’ (Christie & Gilliam 2000: 256). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas crystallises this tragic past, as gleaned through the lens of a traumatic (or traumatised) present in which the lessons of jingoism, dehumanisation and expenditure on weapons of mass destruction have yet to be learned.2
All of Gilliam’s movies render time as the director sees it, as one elongated moment of overlapping histories and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is his distillation of late twentieth-century American warfare. The grotesque images that bulge through Gilliam’s satiric lens are of politicians adorned in red, white and blue; a tank, Vietcong guerrillas in black pyjamas, Vietnam-era military fatigues, and a small girl firing an M-16: ‘apocalyptic images from everywhere, from the seventies to the present’ (Christie & Gilliam 2000: 252). Yet, as in all of his films, Gilliam refuses the easy moral message and leaves it to us to solve the puzzles, to see the ‘candid reality’ of our imperial muck and a better way to move forward from the ‘worst of our hells’ (McCabe 1999: 253). And if we’re willing, he will show us a way to laugh through our collective pain.
This volume, then, offers critical readings of Gilliam’s films to highlight the authorial style of a director that we unashamedly believe to be a genius, but it is not a work of biography. Three excellent collections of interviews, which many of our contributors have drawn on for this volume – Ian Christie’s Gilliam on Gilliam (2000), David Sterritt and Lucille Rhodes’ Terry Gilliam: Interviews (2004) and Bob McCabe’s Dark Knights and Holy Fools: The Art and Films of Terry Gilliam (1999) – have charted Gilliam’s work and captured some of his own opinions on his life and career. To help us all understand the man behind the lens, these interviews include discussions about his early influences (artistic, cultural, religious and familial), from his animation days with Monty Python (1969) to his later independently- and Hollywood-produced financial successes (Time Bandits [1981] and Twelve Monkeys [1995]), financial disasters (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen [1988], Brothers Grimm [2005], and the as-yet unfinished Don Quixote) as well as critically acclaimed films, such as Brazil (1985) and The Fisher King (1991) and social commentaries such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
What emanates from these interviews is Gilliam’s undeniable passion for his work, his sense of incorrigible humour and his much misunderstood, absolute discipline for his art. Asked by Gregory Solman if he would rather be known as ‘the madman or Merchant-Ivory’, Gilliam replies, ‘I’m happy to be the lunatic’ and notes that it is ‘the film that confuses people’ (Solman 2004: 188). Because of his affinity for narrative confusion, his chaotic screen worlds are often mistaken as the work of a director who must surely also work in such chaos, and, says Gilliam, people mistake his madness on screen for his method behind it (ibid.).
Numerous volumes on the Monty Python television series also include discussion of Gilliam’s animation.3 Books on single films tend to focus on the drama of Gilliam’s various spats with Hollywood, such as Jack Mathews’ The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Studios (1998), or Gilliam’s production dilemmas, such as Andrew Yule’s Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam & The Munchausen Saga (1991) and Bob McCabe’s Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm & Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood (2006). Gilliam is quite familiar with such problems as the film Lost in La Mancha: The Unmaking of Don Quixote (Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe 2002) documents well. Peter Marks’ Terry Gilliam (2010) offers an illuminating critical and textual analysis of Gilliam’s work up to 2005 and highlights his peculiar geographical position in film history.
As an American – who now also carries a British passport and has, since 1967, lived in the UK – working ostensibly as a British filmmaker, Gilliam, not surprisingly, defies categorisation even in terms of his national status. However, notable sources such as Marks and Manchester University Press consider Gilliam as British, as does the British Film Institute, which placed Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) and Brazil in their ‘100 Favourite British Films of the 20th Century’ (see Marks 2010: 2). Marks also highlights the difficulty of reading Gilliam as an auteur, noting that the director sees the process of filmmaking as a ‘learning process’ for himself and that the team effort is as important as the director’s single vision. However, Gilliam understands that he operates as a ‘filter that lets certain ideas through and stops others. That’s my function’, though he generously notes that ‘half the things that end up in the film I would never have thought of myself ’ (Marks 2010: 7). We problematise this notion in our book, too, as scholars grapple with the hybridisation of Gilliam as auteur and collaborator.
Such hybridity can be seen as recently as his May 2011 venture with the English National Opera which gave him the opportunity to direct Hector Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust at the London Coliseum. ‘I suppose an opera is a sweep’, remarks the director, ‘an arc of character and ideas, and in that case, half of my films have been operas’ (Christiansen 2011). Gilliam’s breathtaking embellishment of Berlioz’s opera ricochets the audience through the first half of Germany’s twentieth century from the rise of fascism after Versailles: via projected animation and distorted film images from Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), newsreel from the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the Nuremberg rallies, and live-action portrayals of the execution of the pogroms and the mass graves of the concentration camps. Gilliam observes in the programme notes that theatre staging does not allow the creative control of the close-up to direct the eye of the viewer; nevertheless, the set design of the opera matches its composer’s refusal to ‘play by the rules’ (Christiansen 2011). Gilliam’s incarnation starts with a moment of waiting as a bald man, seemingly dressing for dinner, talks to the audience – immediately breaking the artifice of theatre – and asks whether the image of the ideal man can ever be reached. He is of course, the devil, Mephistopheles, his elegant suit complete with bowler hat reminiscent of the devil, Mr. Nick (Tom Waits), in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasuss, another of Gilliam’s narratives exploring the question of the morality of man. The bowler-hatted baddie is an iconic trope of Gilliam, found in Brazil and ‘The Crimson Permanent Assurance’ in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) and many Monty Python sketches including ‘The Ministry of Silly Walks’. The bowler hat represents Gilliam’s frustration with all things bureaucratic and stifling.
Like Faust, philosopher Dr. Parnassus has sold his soul for the promise of immortality, only to see his loved ones suffer for this hubris. This philosophical question in Faust is prompted by the projected image of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man‘ (c. 1487), an image whose proportions enable a perfect relationship to geometrical space and whose image is in turn made bawdy and then bastardised by the finale of the opera where a straight-jacketed Faust is crucified upside down upon a Nazi swastika placed within a circle on a square board and lowered into the depths of hell. Does the audience have their answer at this point? Can there be an ideal man? The spectacle, clearly influenced by German Expressionism and Riefenstahl’s visual style, follows the aesthetic principles that originated in Gilliam’s comics and Monty Python animation: pastiche, collage and the ‘squaring of the circle’, here that is literally imposing the rigidity of the swastika over the ‘beautiful and round forms’ of German Romanticism (Seckerson 2011: 8).
In true Gilliam style, the audience is left perplexed and not a little shocked by the final scenes of his first opera, which challenges audience expectations of what opera is and does. Ghosts of World War I soldiers arise from their battleground, reminiscent of Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (1919) and tapping in, again, to a much-returned-to theme for Gilliam. The full horrors of the Holocaust are impossible to fully represent of course, but the brilliantly lit, glowing white body of Marguerite laying in the centre of a pile of exterminated bodies, while the ash falls like snow around her, is a shocking way in which to ‘save’ her from hell. The black curtain falls on the last impossible visual – the glowing corpse of redemption – and the audience sits in silence, unsure of what happens next, until the first tentative clap begins. Left with Gilliam’s typical cinematic finale, which evades simple interpretation, the audience bursts into sustained applause.
When Edward Seckerson interviewed Gilliam for the opera programme, he asked about Faust as a character. Gilliam replied, ‘he is somebody who is trying to create order out of chaos’ (ibid.). In one sense this is where Gilliam positions himself as a filmmaker. He creates chaotic worlds for his characters to make sense of, and, though they rarely do, the audience can find some sense of their own world by sharing the chaos of the characters for their screen time and unravelling the complexities of the realities found there. Similarly, with The Damnation of Faust, the chaos caused by powerful men is impossible to tame and is writ large and fantastical for the audience by the director.
Like the bricolage formation of his latest artistic piece, Gilliam’s first project mixed the reactionary and the revolutionary to announce his emergence as a director of a particular style, as Anna Froula argues in chapter one of this volume, ‘Steampunked: The Animated Aesthetics of Terry Gilliam in Jabberwocky and Beyond’. Here Froula examines Gilliam’s influence on and adoption of the steampunk aesthetic by examining his animation and his live-action film, especially his first solo-directed film, Jabberwocky. In chapter two, ‘Grail Tales: The Preoccupations of Terry Gilliam’, Tony Hood provides a detailed overview of Gilliam’s artistic quest to create myriad worlds and his bid to try to have power over them. He argues that it is a full exploitation of this creative licence to control that characterises the fantastic and diverse territories that Gilliam constructs. In chapter three, ‘“And Now For Something Completely Different”: Pythonic Arthuriana and the Matter of Britain’, Jim Holte charts the romantic and mythical legends that are taken up in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and later in the Python team’s Spamalot (2005). He explores how the fascination with Britain’s mythical and historical past is made mad – yet strangely comprehensible – by the Python team.
Keith James Hamel in chapter four, ‘The Baron, the King, and Terry Gilliam’s Approach to “the Fantastic”’, explores the narrative of fantasy through an engagement with Todorov and his theorisation of the concept. Using The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Fisher King as key texts, Hamel interrogates the notion of fantasy and suggests ways in which Gilliam frustrates the formula with his particular autuerist twist. In chapter five, “The Subversion of Happy Endings in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil’, Jeffrey Melton and Eric Sterling discuss Gilliam’s focus on dreams and their ability to enable characters to escape from the tedium and/or trauma of their modern lives. The characters battle, they state, with ‘both inner demons and the outer world in troubled efforts to save (or find) their humanity’. In Brazil the dream is the ultimate escape from the horrific circumstances in which Sam Lowry finds himself.
Such dreams or nightmares are also explored by Jacqueline Furby in chapter six, “The Fissure King: Terry Gilliam’s Psychotic Fantasy Worlds’. Here Furby examines the ‘film’s central concern with fantasy storytelling and the mental condition of psychosis’ to explore Gilliam’s construction of narrative around Parry as he comes to terms with the traumatic loss of his wife. Trauma in Twelve Monkeys is also discussed by Gerry Canavan in chapter seven: ‘“You can’t change anything”: Freedom and Control in Twelve Monkeys’ employs the notion of the biopolitical to understand the central themes of regulation, imprisonment and control. Twelve Monkeys exemplifies Gilliam’s anger at outrageous bureaucracy and oppression, to which he often returns in his films. In chapter eight, ‘“It shall be a nation”: Terry Gilliam’s Exploration of National Identity, Between Rationalism and Imagination’, Ofir Haivry discusses The Brothers Grimm and its play with national and cultural identity. Haivry suggests that fantasy – such as that of the Grimm Brothers, and indeed, Gilliam – is adept at exploring the excesses of the political dimensions of nationalism in terms of both images and ideas and address the significance and the consequences of conflict, as they relate to national identity.
Kathryn A. Laity tackles one of Gilliam’s least critically successful films, Tideland, and considers some of the reasons for its unpopularity. In chapter nine, ‘“Won’t somebody please think of the children?”: The Case for Terry Gilliam’s Tideland’, Laity discusses the film’s narrative focus on the notion of the monstrousness that can surround a child but that many instead read as engaging with a child that is monstrous. Its horror genre style takes the director away from his more quirky fantasy approach to the dark side of life, even as in true Gilliam style there are still moments of absurdity and humour that undercut the difficult subject matter of the narrative. In chapter ten, ‘Divorced from Reality: Time Bandits in Search of Fulfillment’, Jeff Birkenstein approaches his analysis of Time Bandits from an autobiographical stance and discusses the ways in which Gilliam treats the child in his films with a respect and tolerance that he very often does not give to adults. Birkenstein argues that in Time Bandits Kevin’s quest to understand what family really is takes him to fantastical places that Gilliam skillfully negotiates for both child and adult audience; experiencing the film from both perspectives has enabled Birkenstein to understand some of his own ghosts and fantasies from the past.
Finally, in chapter eleven, ‘Celebrity Trauma: The Death of Heath Ledger and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus’, Karen Randell explores Gilliam’s last major film to date and its traumatic journey to screen following the death of Heath Ledger during production. She suggests that the narrative structure of the film contains a significant gap caused by the loss of the star that is not fully recuperated through the performances of the three ‘behind the mirror’ actors: Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. Ledger’s spectre is writ large throughout the film and adds a melancholic air to the tone of what is already a dark and deeply philosophical film.
In an exclusive interview for this volume, Gilliam admits, he is ‘just a prisoner of my own limitations … There’s obviously some little creature inside of me that only wants to do what it wants to do … I don’t have a choice.’ With typical modesty Gilliam describes his fantasy visions as something beyond his artistic control, beyond his conscious construction but to which he must adhere, even as it has meant a lifetime of frustration, fighting the Hollywood machine.
There is a growing body of work on ‘Terry Gilliam Cinema’, and we join a collective of scholars, industry practitioners and film critics who admire his complexity and vision. The Cinema of Terry Gilliam: It’s a Mad World enters this discussion by offering a collection of critical essays that engage in multiple approaches to reading his films. In Dark Knights and Holy Fools, Gilliam comments, ‘you can write about them all you want but movies are basically there to be seen’ (McCabe 1999: 5) and reminds us that very soon, maybe now, we need to put down the pen, turn off the computer, and go watch a Terry Gilliam film… or opera… or animation, or…
1 See Where Buffalo Roam (Art Linson, 1980) for another approach to the life of journalist Hunter S. Thompson.
2 See, for example, Ebert (1998); Gleiberman (1998); Holden (1998); McCarthy (1998); Tobias (2011).
3 See, for example, Monty Python (1999, 2006, 2007); Monty Python and McCabe (2005).
Works Cited
Christie, Ian and Terry Gilliam (2000) Gilliam on Gilliam. London: Faber.
Marks, Peter (2010) Terry Gilliam. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mathews, Jack (1998) The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v Universal Studies. New York: Applause.
McCabe, Bob (1999) Dark Knights and Holy Fools: The Art and Films of Terry Gilliam. New York: Universe.
——(2006) Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm & Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood. London: HarperCollins.
Monty Python (1999) Monty Python’s Big Red Book. London: Meuthen.
——(2006) The Very Best of Monty Python. London: Meuthen
——(2007) The Brand New ‘Monty Python’ Papperbok. London: Meuthen.
Monty Python and Bob McCabe (2005) The Python’s Autobiography. London: Orien.
Seckerson, Edward (2011) ‘A Mischievous Showman’, The Damnation of Faust [programme]. London: English National Opera, 8–13.
Smith, Giles (1998) ‘War Games: Terry Gilliam Goes Gonzo With Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, The New Yorker, 74, 74–9.
Solman, Gregory (2004) ‘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, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 184–207.
Sterritt, David and Lucille Rhodes (2004) Terry Gilliam: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press.
Tapper, Michael (2006) ‘Beyond the Banal Surface of Reality: Terry Gilliam Interview’, Film International, 4, 1, 60–9.
Yule, Andrew (1991) Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam & The Munchausen Saga. New York: Applause.