TERRY GILLIAM
CHAOS CAPTURED ON CAMERA PROVOKES THE IMAGINATION
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
The sequence of images on film produces a rich aesthetic intended to provoke the imagination in a uniquely individualistic manner.
In this way, filmmaker Terry Gilliam thereby enables people to see their personal truth about their inner life within society.
Everyone enjoys freedom by hiding the private self behind a public mask, but this hiding self simultaneously reveals the perversion of truth that exists in reality for the production run.
Gilliam has in the creative process become behind the camera a magician in filmmaking.
The character portraits detail how people exist behind the façade society has created for them to hide behind. By masking the characters, perhaps this time in a medieval knight’s armor or next time in a futuristic time travel suit made from the recycled scraps found on an abandoned industrial site, the audience self identifies with the eccentric individualism that appears through exaggerated and ritualistic repetition just short of caricature.
The filmmaker uses magic mirrors in the editing room to draw attention to the perversion of social institutions as opposed to attacking the institutions and celebrating vice and the hatred that so often leads to violence.
In Time Bandits (1981) the magician makes the characters disappear back and forth into time after a medieval horseman and his costumed horse come crashing out of the bedroom closet just before bedtime.
When the young boy tricks his father into believing that nothing is going on, Gilliam embarks on the first of many film adventures in which the audience is taken through the mish mash of the collective consciousness to discover what they may or might not have in common with the filmmaker.
A band of dwarves takes the boy along through time on a serious of treasure hunts, but they glaringly omit to tell him that they are also hiding from a warlock who is hunting them in the future.
In a way, the narrative follows a series of rapid fire adventure nightmares that must finish before breakfast next morning.
Gilliam earned celebrated credits on the Monty Python’s Flying Circus Television Series (1969-1974) as an animator and recuring supporting character actor. The Flying Circus is a series of satiric sketches that unmask just about every aspect of the inner society of conservative England.
Gilliam then went on to direct Monty Python films with the episodic television show’s writers, cast and characters, except in a feature film length narrative format. Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin as well as Carol Cleveland join Gilliam under his direction for the first of three franchise film, Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975).
Gilliam finds success with recasting actors, and continues to recast actors through his feature films, such Ian Holm, Katherine Helmond, Verne Troyer, Michael Jeter, Jeff Bridges, Heath Ledger and Christopher Plummer.
In Brazil (1985) Ian Holm plays a department head in the Ministry of Information with Jonathan Pryce playing his minion, Sam Lowry. Kim Greist is the love interest. And Robert De Niro plays the subversive, Harry Tuttle.
Gilliam finally gets a Hollywood size budget for the film after having to previously limit his magic within the confines of low budget independent productions.
Brazil highlights government dysfunction behind the otherwise sterile, infallible public façade.
Government is unable to care for everything and everyone, but the ministries are also unwilling to accept that fact and give up control to private operators.
Tuttle runs an off-the-grid public works crew, while Lowry comes to fantasize about escape after a typographical error in the Ministry of Information misidentifies a common citizen. The typo, caused by a bug falling into the typewriter, has grave consequences for the idea being reinforced in society of the infallibility of government.
Gilliam uses dark lighting and industrial designed sets as well as close cropped camera shots to focus attention on the inner workings of an institution that is under and ought to be under attack from subversive forces, like the maintenance crew run by Tuttle.
This myopic design of the scenes underscores the alienation people truly feel by seldomly showing characters in social settings.
Greist’s femme fatal character wants to help correct the error, but for doing so, Jill falls under the suspicion of government enforcement officers as possibly being a subversive. Once labeled a subversive, Jill takes the idea on like a mantra.
When Jill and Sam finally meet up though, all the truth in the world cannot beat out love.
Gilliam continues to have difficulty finding financing for projects because his films attract only a small market niche that offers fewer returns for the big studio budgets. But the director of the marginalized characters operating on the fringes of society finds critical acclaim and financial success with a story about the homeless in New York City.
Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams costar in the Fisher King (1991). Bridges takes the success from the role and creates other eccentric characters in leading roles, such as in the Big Lebowski (1998), eventually winning an Oscar for the lead in the Cinderella story about a washed up country singer, Crazy Heart (2009).
Williams plays, Perry, a homeless person who finds a way to rationalize life on the street after suffering a traumatic brain injury that involves post-traumatic stress and debilitating flash backs at the most inopportune times.
Gilliam infuses into the narrative medieval themes inside a modern cosmopolitan city with the tragic humor of Williams, as a mentally challenged homeless person, and the tragic drama of Bridges as a guilt ridden radio talk show host.
Again, scenes are shot on sets with industrial design and otherwise close cropped so as to minimize modern facadism while focusing instead on the real struggle of people trying to make real connections in a big, lonely city.
Amanda Plummer plays the eccentric love interest. Lydia may be more unusual than the homeless people, but Gilliam shows that the emotional match with Perry seems to gradually, but inevitably make both of their lonely, eccentric characters rational.
The storylines always seem compelled by near chaos, but the characters figure out a way to survive and make the life given to them work out.
Gilliam must still shop his projects around Hollywood for a few years until casting Bruce Willis, Madeline Stowe, Christopher Plummer and Brad Pitt in the apocalyptic carnival, Twelve Monkeys (1995).
This time around the institutions have clearly failed the world with a mutating virus having forced the surviving civilization underground. After centuries pass, the underground survivors hope for a second chance on the surface of the Earth by sending a ‘prisoner volunteer’ back in time to stop the devastating chain of events that decimated the population.
A lot of the filmmaker’s art looks like a lot of silly nonsense – perhaps more elaborate comedy sketches for the very different medium of feature film production. But Gilliam’s inner subterranean worlds are really about individuals breaking away from institutions to find freedom through play.
Bruce Willis creates the ‘prisoner volunteer’ James Cole sent back in time by the current authority of the institution to investigate and ultimately correct the apocalyptic error.
Cole shows extreme joy and delight in the little freedoms he experiences along the way, such as listening to the car radio and breathing in fresh air. Society can often be counterproductive. So, Cole’s freedom is frequently short lived, even involving experiences much worse than incarceration for different reasons in another time.
Time is everything though, with Cole seemingly on an existential assembly line travelling back and forth from the present to the past in a big hurry before everything becomes too much too late.
The narrative becomes more complicated as the magician gives Cole flash backs and/or flash forwards, while Madeline Stowe’s character has this theory about recuring historical figures that no one believes.
On another level, the storyline is about the marginalization of the mentally ill and who is perceived to be mentally ill by the institutions and who really is mentally ill in a cast of characters full of eccentrics holding true to an idea no one else really believes.
The sets and props are based on a “found-art approach” that enables the production crew to bring back in front of the camera whatever they may find, like the mental health hospital is actually a penitentiary.
In Brazil, the protagonist has become so marginalized as to fantasize about escape. And the world that had been intended to be a totalitarian dreamscape falls apart through the volume of repetition from the simplest of accidents.
A recuring theme through the magician’s art projects is that the world fills with tragedy despite the rules and hierarchy meant to keep everything together. The arbitrary repetition of which creates a lot of absurdity.
Gilliam’s best time at play is at an amusement park, the best of which was Disneyland in California near his childhood home where the rules that maintained order in the park also allowed visitors a sense of freedom in play.
And so, the approach to storytelling is not to do all the work by adding up bits and pieces in a tidy sum that can be quantified by an accountant. Instead, Gilliam opens the park gates every morning by creating questions, but then holds back on the story so that people find their own answers, just as in the real world where people are left alone for the better part of the day to discover the truth for themselves.
Nothing observed during the day officially adds up, but people find themselves back home at the end of it all, nonetheless.
A lot of scenes in the films become playful nonsense. The further sequences of scenes reveal something else again, perhaps something more sophisticated behind the meaning of play that people learn to appreciate on their own through their imagination and the emotional rising the story brings to the fore.
The chaos on set is an intentional symbol of the distortion that occurs when art attempts to depict reality. The truth often falls sideways through the subjective view of the artist. Gilliam then enables the audience to bring everything back into focus.
In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) Gilliam adapts the Hunter S. Thompson novel to the screen, casting Johnny Depp as Raoul Duke and Benicio Del Toro as Dr. Gonzo.
The characters embark on a road trip through the American dreamland like entering an amusement park for adults on drugs during the Hippie era.
Gilliam captures the double distortion of reality that occurs when the senses begin to misfire from the overuse of drugs, and from having to somehow depict that distortion for the audience.
Even the drug addicts have their rituals though. The journalist must gather enough material to complete the story otherwise he will become lost. And the lawyer must advise in a way that controls outcomes.
Gestures, words, the use of objects and even just saying hello take on an exaggerated form not just by the actions of the drug induced characters but the actions of the homeless and the mentally ill as well.
The magician holds the chaotic reality together on a thin tether, generally reliant on everyone following predictable, ritualistic behavior.
Characters define themselves in class, rank and status. But the magician takes everything away by exposing the perversions that too frequently occur. And the audience pieces the inner world all together with their own perspective on the rules.
Gilliam is still scowling at the injustice of not being allowed to become an Eagle Scout even with 53 merit badges when he gives all his ideas away in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009).
Christopher Plummer plays the head of a traveling theater company driving about from town to town in what is essentially a magical amusement park ride. Lily Cole, Heath Ledger and Andrew Garfield costar as the fictitious players involved in revealing theatre magic for movie magic depicted on film by the real magician.
The characters use curtains, mirrors and trap doors to disappear from the stage but continue on like their scene sequences have been manipulating in the editing room for a much better adventure.
As in all Gilliam film projects, the meaning of life becomes wrapped up in the struggle of good and evil and just how much nonsense people will tolerate before bolting from the stage altogether.
Gilliam on Gilliam, edited by Ian Christie, London, Faber and Faber, 1999.
Gilliamesque, by Terry Gilliam, Edinburgh, Canongate Books Ltd, 2015.
“The Satirist and Society”, by R. C. Elliott, Comedy: Meaning and Form, edited by Robert W. Corrigan, San Francisco, Chandler Publishing Company, 1965.