PicoBlog

My own work as an illustrator and storyteller has been influenced in copious amounts by the surreal humor of Monty Python and various projects that followed in their wake — in particular, the early work of Terry Gilliam. From his humble beginnings making cut-out animation for Python to his journey into live-action fantasy epics, Gilliam served as a model for me in my college years, when I began moving cut-outs around myself with 16mm film and dreaming of a career in the film industry myself. Though my own trajectory has mainly come around to making books, I still come back often to films by Gilliam that encompass a trajectory of wonder through the eyes of a child.

Terry Gilliam’s “Imagination Trilogy” from the 1980s consists of TIME BANDITS (1981), BRAZIL (1985), and THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN (1988) — though it may not have been a conscious mission from the get-go, all three films deal with the theme of a central character escaping an adult world of violence, indifference, tyranny and/or consumerism through a journey into imagination and fantasy, first through the eyes of a child (Kevin in Time Bandits), secondly through the eyes of a middle-aged adult (Sam Lowry in Brazil), and thirdly through the eyes of an old man (Baron Munchausen himself).

The “fourth film in the trilogy” serves as a prelude of sorts in 1977’s JABBERWOCKY, Gilliam’s first directorial solo project, which explores a similar theme through the eyes of Michael Palin’s character Dennis, a cooper’s apprentice in a town besieged by the monstrous Jabberwock. There are obvious nods to Lewis Carroll as the inspiration for the title, but the story is an original tale set in a plague-infested medieval world. Gilliam’s tone as a filmmaker finds its foundation here, presenting us with a very harsh world of filth, squalor, and chaos in full volume across every frame - and what I love about this one is Michael Palin's wonderful performance of a simple man who is thrust into the middle of it all and simply trying to do some good in the world. He holds the film together as a dim and naive everyman who wants nothing more than to marry the girl next door and live a quiet life. Not so much an escape into fantasy, but an escape nonetheless from a cruel world he doesn’t fit in to.

The shots in this film are glorious, and the actors are national treasures of dry British humor, especially Max Wall and his brilliant King Bruno the Questionable. In typical Python-esque fashion, there is no happy ending for Dennis and things don’t end the way he had hoped. The bleak irony of the ending echoes similar final acts from HOLY GRAIL and LIFE OF BRIAN, and anticipates the loose threads to come in TIME BANDITS and BRAZIL. Overall, JABBERWOCKY itself is like a “bridge of death” for Gilliam in his career, an attempt to leave Python, the Holy Grail, and medieval times behind and move forward into his own ambitions for grander things.

The beginnings of grander things came about in TIME BANDITS, co-written by Palin and starring a cameo by John Cleese as Robin Hood, but outside of the middle ages sequence we are now entering a world that is fully Gilliam.

I never saw this film as a kid, although I had heard about it and seen images from it. This is a pity, as it might have had a big impact on me. It would take a few decades for it to sink in and become a new favorite for me as a “grown-up.” In fact, I’ve made it an annual tradition the past few years to watch it at midnight on New Years’ Eve as a way to set each year off with the right tone, both artistically and philosophically.

Every frame of the film is a joy and wonder of absurdist delight, full of insanity and hilarious characters with brilliant dialogue. But what I love most about it is the profound themes of wisdom that hold up underneath its veneer of visual invention and comedy. Most of what passes as comedy or fantasy these days is “so mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence” — whereas TIME BANDITS is a smart story with a lot to say about the “pure concentrated evil” of greed, consumption, and the folly of war & terrorism simply imploding in on itself.

Evil, played and personified with glee by the late David Warner, is not defeated in the end by a hero with a gun or a sword, or even by fantasy or childlike wonder. He simply explodes as a result of his own hubris, and then we are graced by the arrival of the “Supreme Being,” God himself, portrayed by the wonderfully stoic Ralph Richardson.

My favorite moment of dialogue in the film is near the end, after Evil is destroyed and the time bandits are ordered by the Supreme Being to pick up the bits and pieces of “pure concentrated evil that could turn them all into hermit crabs” left behind by the self-imposed explosion.

The child Kevin (Craig Warnock), rather than being given a hero’s heavenly reward or permanent escape into fantasy, is given a great commission here by the Supreme Being himself. Earlier in the film, Kevin is given a chance to be adopted by the King Agamemnon (played with whimsical grace by Sean Connery) and live permanently in ancient Greece rather than go back to living with his indifferent parents who care more about buying the latest kitchen gadgets than actually being parents. But rather than run away from his problems or hum-drum existence in a cruel world where nobody understands him, Kevin’s ultimate mission is to stay, to return home and “carry on the fight” against a world of evil, madness, consumption and stupidity. Evil, after all, “turned out rather well.” The stakes are real.

For artists and storytellers, this “fighting” can be done through the Supreme Being’s other mandate: “Back to Creation.” Create art. Write stories. Make things that don’t lie about the evils of the world, but instead expose them for the folly that they are. This makes TIME BANDITS a guidebook for writers and artists of all stripes, and it’s why I started the practice of starting off each new year on the right foot, a resolution to fight well through creativity.

Of course, in typical Gilliam fashion, Kevin returns home to a burning house, and to parents who are more concerned with saving the toaster than their own son. They find inside their toaster the last scrap of concentrated evil, and Kevin warns them, “Mum! Dad! Don’t touch it! It’s evil!” Of course they don’t listen, and Kevin is orphaned, left behind to fight the world alone.

It’s King Agamemnon himself, in the guise of a fire fighter, who rescues Kevin and leaves him there to carry on the fight, but it’s suggested he may be out there as a guardian angel to root him on.

But this rooting on may be in vain, for through the trajectory of the Imagination Trilogy, Kevin grows up, symbolically speaking, to become Sam Lowry (played by Jonathan Pryce) of BRAZIL. He is now stuck in a world where a love for toasters, progress, technology and ducts over love for creativity or for neighbors has won — and his only escape is through his dreams.

Because there is no happy ending in BRAZIL’s universe, dreams are the only refuge Sam has — and he literally has to become insane, lost in a catatonic dream state of his own, to escape. It’s the only way he can carry on the fight, for the world has made it impossible for him to win the battle. The Most Fabulous Object in the Universe has taken over. Even Harry Tuttle (Robert DeNiro), Lowry’s savior who is on his side and “all in this together” is literally consumed by paperwork. (or does he spirit away to fight another day? Hard to say…)

There are hardly any children in BRAZIL. When they do appear, they are either traumatized victims or strange deviants, playing tough gang games in the street or asking Santa Claus for their own credit card. There is no childlike wonder, innocence, or hope to point the way forward, except within the scene where Sam woops for joy as his lady love drives her truck away from the city towards the countryside. There is a glimmer of delight that awakens in his heart in that moment — even if it’s all for naught.

I don’t gain as much inspiration or draw as much philosophy to live by from BRAZIL, compared to the other films. It’s also much more of a poetic brain-puzzler with less of a straight-forward narrative, leaving you to wonder what is real and what is fantasy in Sam’s mind. All things considered it’s my least personal favorite of all of them, but I still love it for its visuals and its dark comedy, and for its characters and brilliant dialogue. By itself, it’s a science-fiction classic and a wonder to behold as a film — but what’s most important to me personally is how the bleakness of its message carries through to the thematic resonance of all three (or four) films as a whole.

Equally interesting to note is how the re-casting of actors sometimes carries over into subsequent films in Gilliam’s trilogy with symbolic resonance. Jonathan Pryce goes from being the hero of BRAZIL to the villain of BARON MUNCHAUSEN. In BRAZIL there are visual symbols of duality, mirrors and screens surrounding Sam Lowry — he is portrayed as a double image in a mirror at one point as he is torn between chasing his love interest Jill on one side and obliging his mother’s plastic-surgery-obsessed companion on another — a tug of war between a world he wants to escape to and a world he despises.

Does the image of Sam Lowry, through Pryce, split into two Lowrys? One left behind in BRAZIL strapped to his chair to dream his dreamy dreams as a hero, and the other becoming villainous & pompous Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson in MUNCHAUSEN, the voice of reason who accuses the Baron of “not getting far on hot air and fantasy” and even becomes his would-be assassin?

Moving from TIME BANDITS to BRAZIL and now to MUNCHAUSEN, the character of Kevin shifts symbolically from child to adult to elderly adult. The Baron is also a dual character, morphing through the film from a young idealistic hero to a burned-out cynical and tired old man, worn out by the realities of progress, logic, and reason.

But while the simultaneously old/middle-aged Baron becomes the central tragic figure of the story, we also come full circle to the childlike perspective through the character of Sally Salt, played with exquisite brilliance by young Canadian treasure and future-Oscar-winning director Sarah Polley.

One of my favorite sequences in the film, encompassing much of its heart, comes when Sally is consoling an exasperated Baron who has given up on his life of adventure.

Sally : Are you all right?

Baron Munchausen : Am I dead?

Sally : No.

Baron : Blast!

Sally : Who are you really? Baron Munchausen isn't real, he's only in stories.

Baron : Go away! I'm trying to die!

Sally : Why?

Baron : Because I'm tired of the world and the world is evidently tired of me.

Sally : But why? Why?

Baron : Why, why, why! Because it's all logic and reason now. Science, progress, laws of hydraulics, laws of social dynamics, laws of this, that, and the other. No place for three-legged cyclops in the South Seas…

(Sally’s face lights up with wonder and imagination.)

No place for cucumber trees and oceans of wine. No place for me.

Sally : What happened in the story?

Baron : What?

Sally : In the sultan’s palace. Did you escape? Were you killed?

Baron : I don’t know. It was all a long time ago. Who cares?

Sally : I do.

While Horatio Jackson’s voice of reason presents a threat to the Baron in one sense, Sally provides an alternative voice of reason, one that nags and prods and pushes him forward to save the town from the tyranny of the Turks. She becomes the heart of the film, a proper companion for Kevin and his love for adventure and finding creative solutions to get themselves out of a bind.

But as in BRAZIL, the question in MUNCHAUSEN lingers — what is real, and what is only a story, a fantasy in the mind of a supposed lunatic? Confronted by the final suggestion by Horatio that telling tales of adventure and fantasy is futile when the enemy is at the gates, the Baron declares…

Joined on all sides by his companions, his brothers-in-arms, and by Sally herself, the Baron defies the voices of reason that threaten to silence him. They push forth to carry on the fight.

Upon opening the gates, our heroes discover an empty battlefield, bereft of any Turks, any enemy, any toasters or ducts. Evil may have turned out rather well, but imagination has won, and emerges not only as victory, but as truth.

Sally responds, “It wasn’t just a story, was it?”

Funnily enough, there’s a moment near the end of the Imagination Trilogy’s prelude JABBERWOCKY when Neil Innes’ palace guard shouts out, under command of King Bruno the Questionable, “Open the Gates!”

Did the time bandits find a time hole in the map and suggest to Gilliam that he put this line into the film, knowing full well it would have so much significance in a future film he would make nearly 10 years later?

The visual splendor inherent in BARON MUNCHAUSEN has made its way into inspiring my own work, in more ways than one. For my own poetry collection Let There Be Owls Everywhere I wrote an epic 4-act poem called “The Hunt for the Horrible Hickle-Snort” which was mostly a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark, but the main character of Captain Binkle was given a Munchausen-esque quality.

Likewise, my love for dirigibles and balloons owes more than a little debt to MUNCHAUSEN, as expressed in another poem “The Great Epic Quest of Professor Stitch-Wicket” in my first book Gnomes of the Cheese Forest and Other Poems.

The sequence of poems in Gnomes of the Cheese Forest follows a similar thematic thread which was inspired immensely by Gilliam’s Imagination Trilogy. When writing poems for my book, what started as a random collection of ideas was deliberately put into a sequence which only comes to light if read in order, from cover to cover. The poems begin in a world of pure fantasy, telling of monsters, strange creatures, and gnomes that sing cheese into existence. But in the story of Professor Stitch-Wicket, the natural world of forests, birds, and creatures beomes consumed by cities, civilization and progress. The monsters and fantasy creatures try to inhabit the real world, but find it a strange and difficult world to live in. They are reduced to being door-to-door salesmen, tragic figures and nightmares lurking in corners to frighten children, lashing out at a suburban & sterile world that no longer has any place for them. Before too long, the poems become only about childhood itself in the real world, devoid of any real fantasy. The only fantastic animal figures that truly exist are animatronic creations in a pizza restaurant. Some children may still use their imagination on the playground or battling mythical beasts, while others find themselves lonely, abandoned by friends and selling slugs and rotten fruit on the sidewalk. A few of the poems become dark, bereft of joy in a very dark, unforgiving world, and as people grow up, they give up (retreating to “The Place Behind the Rain”) on trying to enlighten people with stories and hope.

But the book ends with “The Boy Who Looked Up,” the story of a boy named Sebastian J. Thrupp who continually cranes his neck towards the sky — and his head gets stuck that way. This has a curious effect on the people in his small town, and eventually they all begin looking up just like him, their necks locked in place and gazing in wonder at whatever they see. As this happens, easter eggs are hidden in the illustrations and begin bringing back hints of the forgotten creatures from previous pages. Through the eyes of a child, a world full of stories, hot air and fantasy begins to come back into focus. The gates are starting to open.

Though the world may threaten to dumb us down into a mindless existence of jabberwockies, paperwork and progress, it’s the holy fools, the lovers, the dreamers, the child and the artist who lead us and remind us of the power of story, of imagination and inspiration from a Supreme Being to redeem us and inspire us to carry on the fight.

Return the map, and open the gates.

POSTSCRIPT

True Story: After I spent my afternoon writing this post and publishing it, I immediately afterwards took my 13-year-old son and his friend to see THE SUPER MARIO BROTHERS MOVIE. The second line of dialogue in the film is Bowser approaching a castle and saying, “Open the Gates.” I’m not making this up. Later in the film there was also a scene of characters trapped in hanging cages (like in Time Bandits) and being swallowed by a giant fish (like in Munchausen).

It wasn’t just a story, was it?

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